Chapter Twelve - Evolving the Laceweb
ORIENTING
This chapter researches the questions:
1.
What is the Laceweb?
a.
What are the Laceweb’s
structure and processes
b.
How are they being evolved and sustained?
c.
Is Cultural Keyline an
aspect of Laceweb action?
d.
What is INMA?
2.
What patterns and integration are there linking
aspects of Fraser House, Fraser House outreach and Laceweb?
Is Cultural Keyline an integrating theme and a model
of engagement?
3.
Are the Laceweb and Inma linked to epochal transition?
This chapter looks at specific action by Neville in Far North Queensland and the Darwin Top End evolving and
supporting the Laceweb Social Movement networks
amongst Indigenous and other Unique People in the Oceania SE Asia Australasia
Region. Neville used the term ‘Unique People’ to include Indigenous people and
oppressed small minorities in the Region. The seminal role of Neville’s
enabling of Aboriginal Human Relations Gatherings in 1971, 1972 and 1973 in
evolving the Movement is discussed. Neville’s evolving of a number of small therapeutic community houses, local-lateral networks and gatherings are
detailed. His involvement in the North Queensland ‘
EVOLVING
THE LACEWEB
Aboriginal
Human Relations Gatherings
In the view of Neville (July 1999) and Terry Widders (Aug 1999), the annual Human Relations Gatherings
Neville and other people enabled in the years 1971-1973 at Armidale
and Grafton in North East New South Wales were a seminal energy in the evolving
of the Laceweb network. Consistent with Fraser House
being a ‘balanced community’, these gatherings were attended by equal numbers
of:
·
Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people
·
Males
and females
·
Under
controlled and over-controlled people
The gatherings were teed up by Dr. Ned Iceton,
a former Doctor with the Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service and a lecturer
at the
During an interview I had with Iceton
in Armidale (July, 1999) he described local
Aboriginal youth Terry Widders’ role as being quite
crucial in these gatherings. Widders knew the
cultural nuances supporting the Aborigines’ opening up during the first of
these Human Relations Gatherings - a milieu that was strange and potentially
very threatening for Aboriginal and Islander attendees at the outset. Terry
started talking about the difficulties he had faced in surviving well and about
his plans for his future. On hearing one of their own speaking in this forum,
other Aboriginal people followed. Neville knew that while the social topography
was diverse, this theme about ‘surviving well’ was a Keypoint
touching the lives of all attendees – Aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike. Soon
attendees were following keylines of discussion. Neville, Widders and Iceton all confirmed Neville’s pivotal enabling role behind
the scenes.
Sociologist Margaret-Ann Franklin (1995, p. 59) makes particular reference to Terry Widders’
contributions to these Gatherings and there consequent ripple-through effects
in the local Aboriginal community. She quotes Terry commenting on the Human
Relations Gatherings:
They
were good for different people in different ways. It intensifies communication,
that’s what it does. It focuses you. You get down to the specifics of social
and cultural communication rather than just, ‘how’s the weather?
Terry’s comments aptly
describe Big Group at Fraser House – relational exchange (1995, p. 59) is both social and intercultural. Additionally,
all involved are personally affected in differing ways.
……purposeful
local group activity, and in which an evolving underpinning is to be provided
by an updated and appropriate set of commonly accepted ideas (worked out
together) about what are the right ideas and right kinds of behaviour towards
each other and the world outside, and the right way to help each other stick to
them after they are worked out.
This quote is resonant
with Fraser House way and Aboriginal traditional sociomedicine
for social cohesion (Cawte 1974; Cawte
2001).
Resonant with Fraser
House, at times, the Human Relations Gathering operated at very intense though ecologically
tight levels. As in Fraser House, Neville ensured that the context-specific
functional aspects of behaviour were supported and that the context-specific non-functional
bits were not supported. Both Neville (July, 1999) and Iceton
(July, 1999) confirmed this. In sorting through big issues and the minutia like
the Big Groups did at Fraser House, each Human Relations Gathering at end was
deemed to be a great success.
A young Aboriginal woman
sent Ned a copy of the diary she kept during the second Armidale
Workshop. This diary was published with her permission in the next issue of the
Human Relations Magazine - excerpts from her diary:
I
feel very mixed up, uneasy, frightened and I try to get myself out of this by
staying in my room while the meeting is on, but I feel that it will only work
in two ways, either (1) I will close up altogether, and go back to my old ways
of joking my way through, or, (2) go and sit in and listen to the discussion
and see how I feel when I have finished there. I decide to go back and sit down
and listen to the rest speak.
The final comment in her
diary:
It
was a good week for everyone I talked to, and the next one will be even better.
Further excerpts have been included in Appendix 33. Her
diary is resonant with the diary of the Fraser House resident included in the
back of the Clark and Yeomans’ book on Fraser House (1969). There is the same emotional turmoil and
confusion. She could make little sense of what was happening within her during
that Gathering, though there is a strong sense as the diary proceeds that she
is integrating many aspects of her being - corrective emotional experience
rather than insight.
The Self Organising Rollout for
Bourke
Three people from the Aboriginal communities around Bourke
attended the Human Relations gatherings in Armidale
in 1971 with Professor Max Kamien
a psychiatrist. In Kamien’s book, ‘The Dark People of Bourke - A
study of Planned Social Change’, (1978, p. 48, 49, 55, 57, 69-70, 77-78, 297, 324) he refers to
these Armidale and Grafton gatherings as ‘a
milestone’ in renewal among the Aboriginal people from around Bourke, a remote
town in New South Wales’ (Kamien and Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies 1978, p. 48, 49).
While returning to
Bourke, one of the three had extensive conversations with members of different
Aboriginal communities visited on the way. Upon returning to their own remote
community out in Bourke, and on their own initiative, the three commenced in
their own community similar human relations gatherings to what they had
experienced in Armidale. The Aboriginal person who
had carried out the conversations in the communities on the way back to Bourke
was the key enabler for the local Bourke action (Kamien and Australian Institute
of Aboriginal Studies 1978, p. 48, 49). This is one example of the presence of
nurturers in oppressed communities. It was also in part, an indicator of
Neville’s ability to pass on community healing ways such that others who have
been traumatized may be ready, willing and able to enable gatherings and have
the follow-through to organize and actually hold gatherings with local members
of their community on an ongoing basis.
Local non-aboriginal
teachers in Bourke had their first contact with adult Aboriginals (the
parents of their students) when they attended these Bourke human relations
groups (Kamien and Australian Institute
of Aboriginal Studies 1978, p. 48, 49).
Further Rollout for Armidale
As a follow-on
gathering, Terry Widders enabled two human relations
workshops for Aboriginal youth in Armidale on the
weekends 26-27 June 1970 and 10-11 July, 1971 – another example of a local
nurturer self starting action. He reported on these in Issue No.1, July 1971 of
the Newsletter (Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971a). (An almost
complete set of the Newsletter is held at the National Library in Canberra (Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971b)). This newsletter contained reports of the Human
Relations Gatherings as well as wellbeing related contributions from Indigenous
and resonant people from all over
During 14 - 22 May 1972
a third Human Relations Gathering was held in Armidale
NSW. A group of thirty-four Aborigines from around Bourke journeyed to Armidale and twenty-one actively participated in that
Gathering. The three from Bourke who attended the first gathering came to the
second gathering. Neville, Widders and Iceton again enabled
these gatherings.
Wider Networks
Neville and Terry Widders (Aug 1999) confirmed that networks formed through
these four Gatherings continue to this day. Many Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people who attended the Human Relations Workshops are now playing key enabler roles within
Aboriginal and Islander communities and have gone on to become
key people in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Eddie Mabo’s
attendance at the 1973 Grafton Gathering is noted in Ned Iceton’s
file notes in his archives, and in the Human Relations Newsletters. Eddie Mabo was the Torres Strait Islander who energized the legal
challenges relating to the invalidity of the notion Terra Nullis
that led to the Mabo Decision granting Indigenous
land rights in
After the Grafton Workshop
in 1973, Neville and Terry enabled Human Relations Gatherings of Aborigines in
Alice Springs and Katherine in the
As one example of follow-on from the Human Relations Gatherings,
Terry Widders continues to network through being on
the UN Indigenous Working Group. Neville
said (Dec 1993) that Terry Widders and himself were
two of a very few people who had been granted observer status at meetings of
the Unrepresented Nations and People Organization (UNPO) based in The Hague.
Neville himself had
returned to full time study at the
Evolving
Small Therapeutic Community Houses In Far North
Queensland
In Neville’s second wife
Lien Yeoman’ book, ‘The Green Papaya – New Fruit From
Old Seeds’ Lien wrote in part about her life with Neville. Lien writes about
heading north with Neville in 1972:
At
this time there was a push for a New State of Far North Queensland. Neville saw
this as a good opportunity to test out his ideas (Yeomans and Yeomans
2001, p. 104).
In preparing a global
order transition model, Neville had been exploring a micro-model of three-level
governance at Fraser House – local, regional and global. Neville saw the
Queensland New State Movement as an energy he could tap into in exploring new
forms of regional governance away from the existing Brisbane based State
Government, and far away from Federal Government in Canberra.
In 1975, to explore
possibilities, Neville, Lien and baby son Quan
travelled up to Cape York in a Kombi Van and they travelled back down to
Mackay, Queensland as there was no psychiatrist in Mackay in those days (Yeomans 1980a; Yeomans 1980b; Yeomans and Yeomans 2001).
Neville bought a house in
Townsville, set it up as a Wellness Centre and attracted many Aboriginal and
Islander clients. Neville ran many groups from this Centre and evolved a
functional matrix called UN-Inma (Yeomans 1980a; Yeomans 1980b). This was the time he was planning the possibility of an
international refugee therapeutic community cum alternative to
criminal/psychiatric incarceration on Palm Island off the coast of Townsville (Yeomans 1980a; Yeomans 1980b). While it did not
proceed, Neville said that organising for the possibility of this facility on
Neville set up an
Aboriginal and Islander Therapeutic Community house modelled on Fraser House in
Mackay. Neville was the key enabler for the Mackay house. The Mackay
Therapeutic House was far from being a typical boarding house. Neville told me
(July 1998) that he had incorporated Fraser House way (as adapted for context)
in that small Mackay therapeutic community house.
Dr. Paul Wilson, a well
known criminologist and former Acting Director of the Australian Institute of
Criminology in Canberra (1986-91), and current Chair of Criminology at Bond
University in Queensland (Bond University 2005) devotes Chapter Six of his book,
‘A life of Crime’ (Wilson 1990, p.79-80), to his personal healing experiences living
within Neville’s Mackay Therapeutic Community house. The quote below from
Paul Wilson (Wilson 1990) writes of this learning how to ‘live well with
others’ in describing his experience of living in Neville’s therapeutic
community.
Neville Yeomans created a community free of doctrinaire principles.
The Mackay setting successfully created a sense of belonging. Most people who
have experienced deep personal distress have lacked, in my opinion, any sense
of residing in a group or clan. They, like I, have lived their lives
constructing walls around themselves, to protect themselves from other people.
In the process, they have lacked the knowledge and experience of living in a
community.
There was nothing magical in the process of
achieving this sense of belongingness..... Our day-to-day activities were
almost mundane. I would wake up in the morning and help whoever was up to get
breakfast ready. Then as people came in to the kitchen, we would talk about all
sorts of things people talk about over breakfasts.
Most importantly, there
were always people around you who you felt cared for you as a human being. This
interconnectedness of person with person was the thread that bound the
community together and gave us a sense of ‘family’ - a unit that many of us had
ignored or not had before.
This passage resonates with the Fraser House milieu,
highlighting the point that everyday-life contexts can provide opportunities
for learning about how to live together. This links to what Neville (Aug 1998)
called, ‘caring and sharing the Aboriginal way’ – ‘home, street and rural
mediation therapy’. It also links to the relating process Neville termed
‘mediation therapy’ (and ‘mediation counselling’) a form of therapy where
‘mediation’ was a descriptor (adjective) of process. Neville referred me
(Dec 1993) to Amelia Renouf’s (1992) essay about the uneasy sixth step in mediating
- that of a form of mediating that is inherently reconstituting and healing
relating. Almost invariably, conventional mediators are not equipped to
engage in this type of process and do not attempt to do so. Neville’s
mediation-therapy requires a fundamentally different set of healing and
therapeutic processes, competencies and abilities compared to those typically
used for mainstream mediation. Neville’s ways have some resonance with Gergen’s ‘relational communicating’ (Gergen 2005).
Neville also used what he called ‘context healing, street
mediation and group story performance’. These draw on Indigenous healing
process, cultural action and cultural healing action (Yeomans and Spencer 1993;
Queensland Community Arts Network 2002). They also draw upon dance, movement and other
forms of artistry. This action also uses natural and evolving contexts as
mediums with healing possibilities.
Neville and Lien travelled North
to
Photo 1. Photo of Neville’s Therapeutic Community House INMA in
This involved two adjoining flats above a drug
support and referral agency (Neville, Dec 1993; Rob Buschkens,
Oct 2003). The Agency continually referred clients to Neville. Three or four
people could stay at Inma. Neville held small therapy
groups all the time at Inma with around 12 people
attending. Aboriginal and Islander people attended. Robert Buschken
from the drug referral centre also regularly sat in on the sessions. Rob was
one of my interviewees. Rob said that he gained considerable skill from
modelling Neville’s behaviour. Rob’s description (Oct, 2003) of Neville’s group
skills was identical to the comments made by my Fraser House interviewees –
that nothing seemed to miss Neville’s attention – that he would pick up on
something that seemed trivial and produce a major change in a person or group –
and that he was so strategic; he was way ahead of everybody. Rob, who has mixed
European and Indonesian parentage, was one of the humane caring intercultural
nurturer types Neville was always on the look out for. Rob began taking the
small groups after Neville left
Photo 2 Rob Buschken – Photo from Buschkens’ family archives
During Neville’s stays
in Mackay, Townsville and
Neville engaged me in
this linking every time I went up to stay with him. For him this linking was a
daily endeavour.
Further
Travels
Both Neville and Lien
described the decade in the Far North from 1972 as the hedonistic period of
their lives, though on all accounts they had great parties in
In 1982, Neville moved
back to
Around 1988, Neville
went north again and bought the house at Yungaburra.
In extending his networks among Aboriginal nurturer women, Neville made a trip
to Weipa and Aurakun and
across through remote Aboriginal communities in
The following flier (and other similar ones) was
sent to UNHRC and other global and national governance agencies and to
Aboriginal and Islander Women’s’ groups throughout remote areas of
No events emerged from
these predate fliers, though evolving of nurturers, enablers and networks were
aided by the energy these fliers and the proposed gatherings created. The
possibility of these 1996 gatherings was discussed by Aboriginal women from
remote regions at the 1994 Small Island Gathering which I attended.
Photo 3. 1995 Flier referring to potential healing gatherings from my records
Neville also handed out
to the Aboriginal and Islander attendees at the June 1994 Small Island
Gathering a pamphlet he had me prepare listing details of six international
conferences on wellbeing related themes occurring in the region in the
following two years. He encouraged them to seek funding to attend. I was not
able to trace any who did follow through with this.
Australia South
Sea
In
the 1980’s, Neville provided support and energised possibilities throughout the
Australian South Sea Islander communities in
Speaking
on the Indigenous Platform at the UN NGO Rio Earth Summit
In June 1992, Neville attended the UN NGO Rio ‘Earth Summit’
in
Following Rio, Neville
and others from the Laceweb Functional Matrix
‘Entreaties’ (note the name reflecting function) engaged in the drafting and
disseminating to his links around the World, wordings of possible treaties that
may be used as resources by adults, adolescents and youth among Indigenous and
Unique People. These were the Unique Healing Treaty (Yeomans 1992a) and the Young Persons Healing Learning Code (Yeomans 1992b) included in this thesis as Appendices 38 and
39. Aboriginal youth and elders signed the Treaty and Code during the 1992
Gathering at Petford Aboriginal Training Farm (Petford Working Group 1992). This is discussed in the following segment.
Aboriginal nurturer Mareja Bin Juda
told me (July 2002) that Aboriginal youth from the Akame
Functional Matrix (‘Akame’ is Islander for
‘grandmother and me’) linked to Neville’s rainforest property on
Geoff
and Norma Guest’s Aboriginal Youth Training Farm
Neville linked with
Geoff and Norma Guest at their Aboriginal Youth Training Farm in Petford, 180 kilometres inland from
Over 2500 youth have
passed through Petford. According to Dr. White of
Gordon Vale (June 2003), before the widening of the Community Development
Employment Program (CDEP) work-for-the-dole scheme in 1986/7, and the further
expansion in 1991/2, Geoff had around seventy five out of every hundred boys
leaving after a stay at Petford going into employment
on cattle stations. Geoff has been awarded the Order of Australian Medal, The
Paul Harris International Rotary Medal, and the Australian Centennial Medal for
his youth work. Geoff, like Neville has strong detractors in the government.
Community Services and Family Services have engaged in concerted action to
close Geoff down citing the same kinds of issues used against Neville in Fraser
House. Geoff is deemed to be ‘unprofessional’. Boys are said to be not
supervised properly, and the place is not ‘organised properly’ (Refer Daffern Report Critique (Friends of Petford 2002)).
Geoff affirmed to me
many times during 1992 to 2005 that he learned many things from Neville and
that it was Neville that influenced him to become skilled in EEG neurofeedback.
Photo 4 Photo I took in July 2002 - Geoff
Guest giving recognition for good riding to Grand Niece
Photo 5 Photo I took in July 2002 - Geoff
helps with balanced life
Developing
Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Drug and Substance Abuse
Therapeutic Communities Gathering
Through my enabling
action, the ‘Developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Drug Abuse
Therapeutic Communities Gathering’ was funded $67,224 by the National Campaign
Against drug Abuse (
Over Seventy Aboriginal
and Islander healers from Northern Australia, including the offshore
The Keypoint
theme for the Gathering was ‘Exploring Therapeutic Community, Keyline and Permaculture as
Processes for Softening Drug Use’. The Gathering had an open agenda (devised by
Neville) with three themes:
- Exploring Keyline and Permaculture working with Mother Earth as a context
for creating work-based change in at-risk youth
- Experiencing Geoff and Norma Guest’s skills in
running a therapeutic community for 25 (at any one time) at-risk
Aboriginal, Islander and other youth (Petford Working Group
1998).
- Exploring therapeutic community processes and
socio-healing ways.
Consistent with themes
in Cultural Keyline, this threefold theme-based open
agenda links with Keyline, Cultural Keyline and Fraser House.
During the Gathering
many of the troubled youth at Petford assisted in
completing a Keyline survey of Petford
by Neville’s younger brother Ken. A summary of the Petford
Keyline Survey is Appendix 35. Linked to Keyline Neville had me search, find and invite two
Aboriginal Permaculture practitioners (a female and a
male for gender balance) and a non-aboriginal women permaculture
practitioner (for weighting in favour of aborigines and females) to attend and
engage participants in Permaculture. I did this. The
meticulous weighting was typically of Neville in setting up group dynamics.
Aborigines and Islanders
later expressed that key insights into ‘surviving in the dominant culture’ came
from seeing the way some white attendees used ‘scapegoating’,
‘stampeding’ and other group process in a futile attempt to impose fixed
time-bound white agendas on a gathering set up with an open agenda with the
three themes mentioned previously (Petford Working Group 1992). The gathering did continue using a
themes-based open agenda and a Cultural Keyline
framework in the face of white attendee pressure towards imposing top-down
processes. Federal funding was only given (at very short notice and outside the
department’s funding criteria) because the gathering was being organised
consistent with Aboriginal traditional way.
Lake
Tinaroo
Neville also organized
local Aboriginal and Islander women around Atherton to host the Lake Tinaroo Mediation Gathering in November 1993, at
Small Island
Neville was continually
scanning the World for relevant Conferences that he could use by creating the
possibility of having a local small gathering as a preparatory, parallel, or
follow-on conference.
Photo 6 Neville with the Yirrakala Women and
Children – From M. Roberts’ Achives – used
with permission
In 1992, Neville had
noticed that the UN was holding a Small Island Development Conference in the
Ideas are evolving for the gathering of Small Island Coastal and
Estuarine peoples for the coming together as a follow-on Gathering Celebration
to the NGO section of the UN Small Island Development Conference in the
Caribbean and ……
This letter was sent to
many national governments and global governance bodies. Note that this is
resonant with how Neville positioned the Watson’s Bay Festival as a community
based organization (CBO) festival running parallel to the Sydney All Nations
Festival and in preparation for The Captain Cook Celebrations (refer Appendix
26).
A sub-section within a
section of the United Nations Human Rights Commission administering the ‘UN
International Year of Indigenous People’ recognized the grassroots
self-organizing nature of the organic action energizing the proposed ‘Small
Island’ Gathering, as well as the open agenda format. Our letter read like a
trance induction and only contained one long sentence. Neville said that our
letter’s wording was resonant with Jesus’ use of parables; only those of right
heart would comprehend, appreciate, resonate and respond. This small
sub-section of the UN Human Rights Commission agreed to fund the Gathering
thirteen thousand Australian dollars, and all they asked for was some photos, a
report of what happened and the bank details on where to send the money they
wanted to fund.
In November 1993,
Neville arranged for me to get the approval from the Down To Earth Cooperative
(Victoria) (DTE) - the group that puts on ConFest -
to fund the travel and accommodation expenses of three of their members
experienced in the selection, design and set-up of ConFest
Festival sites to come and stay with Neville in Yungaburra
for 10 days over 1993/4 Christmas and the New Year. On Neville’s suggestion,
during 1992 and 1993 I had briefed myself on DTE’s
site selection and site set-up process. I also had been involved a number of
times in ConFest site selection and set-up myself. DTE funded the travel of Kim Cosmos and Ron Fletcher
and partially funded John Gibbins travel costs.
Between them, these three had knowledge about site selection and set-up. I
funded my own way. Neville arranged these three and me to accompany him in
looking at fifteen sites in the Atherton Tablelands region, most of them owned
by local aboriginal communities. These three and I had no idea at the time that
Neville played such a large part in getting ConFest
started and Neville made no mention of his seminal role in evolving ConFest to them.
Photo 7 Photo
I took in July 2002 - Neville’s backroom in Yungaburra where we planned
site visits
Neville, these three
visitors and I had meetings with members of Aboriginal communities at Atherton,
Following Neville’s
suggestion, I obtained DTE funding for Marjorie to attend the Easter 1994 ConFest at Tocumwal in NSW - so
that she may have a sense of how others put on festivals, and so that if she
did decide to become involved in hosting the Atherton Tablelands-based Small
Island Gathering (made possible by the UN offer of funding), she may borrow or
adapt from Tocumwal ConFest
what she felt appropriate to that potential Atherton Tablelands Gathering.
Marjorie and a PNG nurturer, Cecilia Davern attended
that Easter ConFest.
The UNHRC funded Small Island gathering did occur in June
1994 and was hosted by Marjorie and other local Aboriginal and Islander people
with around 500 attendees. DTE provided seed funding when the UNHRC funding was
late in arriving. The gathering site at the Barrabadeen
Scout Camp on
Recall that Neville and his brother Ken and others had energized
the Aquarius Festival around Nimbin, in N.E. NSW. The
region around Nimbin had subsequently become a haven
for ‘alternative’ people (creating locality for evolving cultural locality).
Neville was keen to use cultural healing action at the Small Island Gathering
and at his suggestion, I stayed around the artistic communities around Nimbin in the hills behind Byron Bay for six weeks in April
and May 1994 inviting circus jugglers, musicians, drummers and fire stick
twirlers to travel North over 1,800 kilometres to attend the Small Island
Gathering. I thought I could get funding and told them so. When this fell
through, 90 people from the Nimbin/Byron Bay region
surprised me by arriving at the Gathering after paying their own way or
hitchhiking. These ninety joined with Aboriginal and Islander Women from remote
areas of Australia (Roberts and Widders 1994). This mass journey north further linked the Nimbin alternative people to the alternative people in the
Atherton Tablelands and in remote rainforest coastal regions north of
Photo 8 Indigenous Participants in a
Photo 9
Some of the
Aboriginal and Islander attendees with ConFest people
at the Small Island Gathering - photo from M. Roberts’ archives – used with
permission
A report on the Small Island
Gathering was sent to UNHRC (Roberts and Widders 1994).
Appendix 36 details one fortnight’s Laceweb
action in the Atherton Tablelands over the 1993-1994 New Year period. This was the fortnight when the three DTE visitors
and myself where staying with Neville. The Fortnight started with site visits
interspersed with virtually all of the children of Yungaburra
(over 40) including Aboriginal, Islander and small minority children engaging
in preparing atmospherics for a New Year Party at Neville’s large bungalow
heritage property in Yungaburra.
Photo 10 A photo I
took of Neville’s house in June 2001
The New Years Eve party was held
underneath Neville’s House. The mango tree is on the left of the photo.
Neville made what other people called ‘miracles’ happen regularly.
Similar to Fraser House and Fraser House outreach, notice that in the above Laceweb action Neville set up a series of inter-connected,
inter-related resonant actions and scenarios laden with possibilities and
potential energy that enabled many things to unfold.
Some examples:
·
All
the previous festivals he had energized including the Aquarius Festival and ConFest
·
Finding
and linking nurturers in the Atherton Tablelands
·
Having
Marjorie and Narelle sit in on his psychotherapy
·
Linking
with them in linking with other local nurturers
·
Monitoring
global conferences and gatherings
·
Seeding
possibilities of preparatory and/or follow-on gatherings to global conferences
·
Having
me writing letters
·
Not
seeking funds from international and global governance agencies, though
creating possibilities that they may offer it
·
Positioning
this possible gathering as a follow-on gathering to a UN Conference
·
Encouraging
me to be involved in ConFest site set-up
·
Getting
DTE people skilled in site set-up to visit local sites and Aboriginal
communities (one of the sites we visited was used for the UN funded gathering)
·
Linking
with other nurturers in the region as potential support in hosting
·
Grooming
me and encouraging me to ask DTE for the two lots of funding
·
Having
me obtain funding at short notice and having a Laceweb
person travel and link with grassroots people at the Carribean
Small Island Conference
·
Having
me link with Nimbin artists and invite them to attend
the Small Island Gathering
·
Sending
the Aboriginal and PNG women to ConFest
Notice how Neville’s way in linking diverse actions may set
up and enrich possibilities for other things to happen in the future. For
example, being a member of many Cultural Associations in the Sixties, Neville
was able to draw on these connections in evolving the intercultural flavour of
the Watson’s Bay Festival held in 1968. This is a constantly recurring pattern
in Neville’s and Laceweb action. Neville was always
setting up contexts he described as, ‘filled with possibilities’. If one in a
hundred of these ‘possibilities’ generated one or two things of substance, it
was for Neville, ‘a miracle’.
During the 1991-94 period I assisted Neville in drafting and
sending off many letters to the Australian Federal Government, Indigenous
Women’s Groups and United Nations and other Global governance bodies. In a
series of letters to each entity Neville would always address the letter as
been ‘from’ a different functional matrix according to the function of action
being described. We would refer to our previous correspondence from one or more
functional matrices. In this way, Neville would ‘build’ the Laceweb
within the recipients filing system just as he linked functional matrices in
publishing the Human Relations Newsletter in the Seventies, and then let
Aboriginal Women’s groups receive information about this network of functional
matrices.
The
Darwin
In February 1993 Neville shifted to
live in
The women said that
typically, the East Timorese refugees do not at first seek support. However
many did seek support after they found aspects of their life overwhelming.
Neville and others enabled Laceweb action in
As an example of Neville
sensing connexity and potential for emergence, I had
a very excited phone call from Neville from Rapid Creek in
In one long sentence he
said he had found:
1.
a
fully intact, though polluted, urban creek with an urban catchment
area
2.
there
was already a Friends of Rapid Creek action group energizing action to restore
the heavily polluted creek
3.
the
creek was right next to a run-down shopping centre with many empty shops with
unexpired leases
4.
the
shopping centre was the home of one of
5.
an
Aboriginal self help group met just across the street from the shopping centre
Neville finished with,
‘I have been looking for this for ages. Isn’t it perfect?’ My confused replied
was, ‘Perfect for what?’ Neville then went on to say how all of these elements
were fully resonant with Laceweb ways of having local
people healing every aspect of their wellbeing, including environmental
wellbeing. He was working with the leaseholders of the empty shops to see if
permission would be granted for local self-help groups to be able to use the
rooms free of charge. Neville had been talking to every self-help group he
could find in
Neville called the
linking of all of these diverse elements the ‘Rapid Creek Project’. An extract
from Neville’s one page write up of the Rapid Creek Project follows:
Many parallel projects are coming together. They include
practical rehabilitation of flora and fauna by the Friends of Rapid Creek and
active planning by the Darwin City Council and Greening Australia. The more
human nurturing family oriented activities are focused around the
This is where the oldest market in
The complete flier on
the Rapid Creek Project is in Appendix 37.
This flier was sent to
various sections of the United Nations, to various Aboriginal community Women’s
Groups and to many others that Neville referred me to.
I visited Neville in
UNPO
and Other Global Action
Aboriginal and Islander Laceweb people attended the Unrepresented Nations and
People Organization (UNPO) gatherings and participated in UNPO and UN
Indigenous Human Rights working groups. As another example of Neville’s
networking, around 1991 Neville arranged for me to meet Helen Corbett, an
Aboriginal woman who went on to be assistant to the person heading up UNPO.
Helen went on to head that organization. Zuzanka Kutena, who provided enabling support towards having over
2000 Indigenous groups attending the Rio Earth Summit, also supported Helen
Corbett at UNPO.
Nasuven Enares, an Australian
South Sea Islander (whom Neville and I both supported) addressed UNPO and the
UN Indigenous Rights Working Group on the plight of Australian South Sea
Islanders. I understand from Neville that many links among nurturer types
throughout the SE Asia Oceania Australasia Region have evolved through
travelling and working together in UNPO and UN Indigenous Rights Working
Groups.
In 1994, Cecilia Davern the PNG woman who had been funded to attend the Tocumwal ConFest, with other
people hosted the ‘Spirit of the Oceans Gathering Celebration’ in Townsville.
This Gathering was attended by Aborigines and Islanders as well as Pacific
Islander students attending the
In 1993, Neville invited
me to start writing up a timeline of things that had happened in his work. This
evolved into the paper, ‘Community Ways For Healing the World’ (Yeomans and Spencer 1997). On Neville’s suggestion the Laceweb working group was set up and obtained the Laceweb web site in 1997 (Laceweb Working Group 1997). The protocol was that all of Neville’s
writings would be placed on the Website along with other documents and
material, as long as no person or the Laceweb
functional matrices were compromised.
The North American First
Nation Organization, ‘Aboriginal Healing Foundation’ (Aboriginal Healing Foundation 2000; Spencer 2000) has used material from the Laceweb
Homepage on their Website and in their quarterly journal called ‘Healing Words’
distributed around all their communities and placed on the Internet.
New
State Movement Update
While the New State Movement has not resulted in a
Indigenous
People Linked to Confest
During October 1997, at
Neville’s suggestion, a flier about Laceweb
gatherings as well as an invitation was sent to 120 Aboriginal Women’s groups
throughout Australia to attend the New Years ConFest
at Gum Lodge on the Murray at Tocumwal on the NSW
Victoria border over the 1998/98 New Year. Eight elderly Aboriginal women
visited ConFest on their way through to visit their
Family and Friends further West at Dareton. In 1998
three Bougainvillians were partially funded by DTE to
participate in ConFest including Michael Laimo, a member of the PNG government representing
Cultural Healing Action
Neville was very aware
that using all forms of artistry to specifically address cultural dysfunction
emerged from
Neville told me (May
1992) that his longer-term vision for Cultural Healing Action was as a process
fostering the development of Quick Response Healing Teams to resolve local
community and international conflict (Yeomans and Spencer 1993). This action is currently unfolding in the
Region through UN Inma and other functional matrices
evolved by Neville (Yeomans 1980b). In 2002, I was invited to become part of a SE
Asia Psychosocial Emergency Response Network (Psychnet)
(as a person associated with the UN-Inma functional
matrix- refer Appendx 30) evolving Quick Response
Psychosocial Healing Teams and became consultant to that Network (Psychnet 2005b; Psychnet 2005a; Psychnet 2005c). This Psychnet action
research is discussed in Chapter Thirteen.
In describing Cultural
Healing Action, both Neville and Ernie spoke of contexts being set up where
people may use every aspect of their artistic traditions in exploring their own
wellbeing together with others - towards enriching wellbeing in family and
community life. I observed Ernie engaging 43 people in artistry for wellbeing
for five days at Tagaytay in the
Neville described (December, 1993) the way he was adopting
and adapting Cultural Healing Action.
Cultural Healing Action involves actively fostering and
sustaining cultural wellbeing (where ‘culture’ means ‘way of living’). It
fosters people extending their own culture as a balance to other cultures that
may be dominant, elitist and oppressive. As well, it is a movement for
intercultural reconciliation and wellbeing.
Cultural Healing Action provides scope for people to actively explore,
engender and promote themes, values, mood, language, practices, modes of action, arts and other aspects of a way of life
(culture).
Cultural healing action
may run for less than an hour to several days (or weeks). Neville saw the
potential for these new values and behaviours in turn facilitating social
emancipation, intercultural healing, and cultural justice - as well as social
and environmental wellbeing.
Using Ideas from the Laceweb Homepage
Emails are being
received from resonant people round the world giving news of the results they
obtained in using ideas from the Laceweb Homepage. As
an example, an email was received from a teacher at a special needs primary
school in
SUMMARY
All of the varied outreach by Neville discussed in this
chapter has again been resonant with Neville’s poem INMA:
It
believes in an ingathering and a nexus of human persons’ values, feelings,
ideas and actions.
Inma believes in the creativity of this
gathering together and this connexion of persons and values.
This chapter has introduced the Laceweb
and some of its structure and process and detailed some of the ways Neville
used to evolve and sustain it. Some of the parallels with Fraser House and
Fraser House outreach have been discussed along with the seminal role of the
Aboriginal Human Relations Gatherings in 1971, 1972, and 1973, and follow-on
Human Relations Gatherings in