UN-INMA ATHERTON TABLELANDS INMA PROJECT
A
Fifty Year Longitudinal
Community
Wellbeing Action Research Project
Supported
by Total Care Foundation and Australian Wellness Foundation
Written Jan 1994. Last Updated April 2014.
This paper is a
brief-narratives based timeline of
self-evolving sustained community wellbeing action
research commencing in the 1950s and sustained ever since within a Project
in the Atherton Tablelands of beautiful Tropical Far North Queensland,
Australia.
In other Laceweb writings
this form of Action Research has been termed Embodied Transforms Action Research; experiencing difference that makes a difference within one’s body being inherently transforming.
Folk become aware of
feeling and acting in better ways during micro-experiences of moving sensing
feeling thinking and acting. What had been dysfunctionally
integrated is transformed into new
values-guided functionally integrated patterns - embodied knowing
rather than reflective knowing.
The
actions described are evolving mutual-help
based social transforming ways -
including Peacehealing resonant with new forms of social movement focusing on
relating well emerging in South America, SE Asia and elsewhere around the
world.
Peacehealing processes have been
evolving through the Project and its precursors,
and these seem to have resonance with whole-village-to-whole-village relational mediating used for over 250
years in Bougainville.
Laceweb
tends to happen at the margins. This is where transforming tends to happen in
nature.
This paper
also replicates and illustrates the nature of the passing on of news of what works in evolving wellness
in community through Laceweb networks. Typically, the focus is on news of actions that work – the processes used.
Some things may seem simple and trivial and their accumulated effect is
extremely potent.
At times,
precisely where things happened and who were involved is not passed on. The term ‘rumours’ has been used; these are
functional rumours networks. Folk are encouraged to explore things that have
worked for others in their own lives; adapting these ways to your local
context.
UN-INMA
UN-INMA is one of
many inter-connecting and inter-relating Laceweb self-help and mutual-help
groups in the SE Asia Oceania Australasia Region emerging from mutual help wellbeing action in the
Region, especially since the 1960’s and 1970s. UN-Inma became a focus of action
supporting wellness in the Atherton Tablelands.
This action
continues to emerge through folk being self-starters in taking back ability over their lives with others in community,
especially through everyday acts enriching family-friend wellbeing networks.
These folk are taking their own lives
into their own hands, rather than waiting for others to service them.
Dr Neville Yeomans
had written a letter to the International
Journal of Therapeutic Communities in 1980 providing an overview of his
work from the 1950s onwards. This short letter specifically mentions Neville
forming UN-Inma in Far North Queensland. The letter was published in the
International Journal of Therapeutic Communities. Neville completed studies in
biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and law.
A quote from that
letter is reproduced below:
From the Outback
Dear Sir,
Since A. W. Clark and I produced the
monograph ‘Fraser House’ in 1969, I have moved to private practice in Cairns,
North East Australia. This is an isolated area for this country, but is rapidly
becoming an intercultural front door to Melanesia and Asia.
‘Up North’ the therapeutic community
model has extended into humanitarian mutual help for social change.
Two of the small cities in this region
have self-help houses based on Fraser House.
An Aboriginal Alcohol and Drug hostel
is moving in the same direction, as are other bodies.
These are facilitated by a network
called UN-Inma, the second word of which is aboriginal for Oneness.
The events of
this Web Site occurred in places dotted around the following map.
The above photo shows the
hills around Yungaburra near Atherton in Far North Queensland, Australia. The
rainforest covered ridge line in the distance is where the Tableland drop steeply
to the coastal sugarcane fields edging the sea and Great Barrier Reef. This is
an area of great natural beauty.
The term
‘UN-INMA’ connotes Unique Nurturers –
Interpersonal Normative Model Areas – linking nurturing folk who are very
quietly and gently engaging in wellbeing artistry in everyday life – typically,
simple acts in everyday life that contribute to folk being well; acts emerging
during small and larger gatherings, celebrations, festivals, community markets
and other happenings, or as folk go about everyday life.
Folk dotted
through Atherton Tableland are exploring linking networks and communities for
the Region emerging as a model area evolving wellbeing norms – an Interpersonal
Normative Model Area.
Atherton
Tablelands is a happening place; though you may go to the Region and not notice what this paper is talking about,
even while it is happening all around you
in everyday places. One has to learn to notice it.
This is not
about a ‘project’ as commonly known; the term ‘project’ is used in its original sense, from the Latin projectum - something
thrown forth – the noun use of the neuter of projectus - from projicere to stretch out, throw forth, from pro- ‘forward’
plus combining form of iacere (iactus) -
to throw.
The Project is
about a self-organizing phenomenon.
No one organizes it or runs it. There is no entity to belong to or to be a
member of. It is about folk creating
lots of wellbeing possibilities in one area – recognising that life is full of
well possibilities that may be tapped. It is akin to the free energy of
gravity. It’s about creating wellbeing futures for ourselves - and then
supporting each other as opportunities emerge and unfold as happenings. Folk are taking their own initiative in engaging in local wellbeing acts with others.
There are few
decisions ever made. Folk start. A few may share till a sense of action
crystallises and folk know their part in this action. One may use living
systems metaphors to encapsulate what is happening; examples:
o Evolving
o
Fruiting
o
Grafting
o
Growing
o
Healing
o
Renewing
Many of the
happenings outlined here are not known
by those actively engaged in other wellbeing acts in the Project.
Playing with
lots of possibilities and talking about lots of possibilities, and a few
extraordinary happenings tend to emerge. Everything is very loose. Everything
is emergent; given the time and place is right for it – it tends to happen.
INMA acts are a hardly noticed
way of being together with others. There is a playful simultaneity about, so
that all you can have is your
experience of it, and you may hear of something else that happens, or
experience the afterglow of it three or four times removed.
Over the
years, quietly and without much fanfare, many INMA happenings have been
remembered and passed on as stories and formally and informally written up as
file notes, published and unpublished papers, field notes, published and
unpublished books, published and unpublished reports, international and
national conference papers, masters theses, and PhD dissertations. Archival
material is in private archives, in the Mitchell Library in Sydney NSW, and the
National Library in Canberra, Australia.
The
social science concepts ‘connexity’ and ‘Cultural Keyline’ have emerged from
this action research using theorein – pre-theoretical theorising.
Timeline of Action
The following
Timeline of Actions outlines just some of the celebrations, events, festivals,
field days, gatherings, happenings, parties, seminars, markets, workshops and
other things linked to the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project since the 1950s.
2014
Two Sydney
based artists evolve the Yeomans Project that is held at the NSW Art Gallery in
Sydney bringing together, members of the Yeomans extended family and others to
reminisce about PA Yeomans.
Lucas one of
the artists evolving the gallery based Yeomans Project with image of Yeomans
Nevallan farm
The above photo
shows some aspects of Keyline including the hilltop ring dam above the family
home, (half way to the centre on the diagonal from his left hand) with
irrigation channels and link channels to lower dams, contour tree plantings for
wind breaks minimising water evaporation, and Redbank Creek along the bottom of
the Photograph.
Emeritus
Professor Stuart Hill is a speaker at the Gallery.
Emeritus
Professor Stuart Hill
Neville’s half
sister Wendy is featured speaker on one night along with Neville’s brother Alan
and his wife, and Neville’s son Robert. Alan Yeoman has one of the latest
Keyline Ploughs in the exhibition. Also displayed are videos, photos, art work
and original document displays and Keyline based artwork. A quote from PA Yeomans writing:
No artist or
artisan ever has such broad control of the medium through which he expresses
his own character and personality as does the farmer and grazier in the control
he can exercise over his land. The landman can create his own landscape, but
the artist gives only his impression of it. (PA Yeomans, 1958 - Challenge of
Landscape).
Neville’s use
of Cultural Healing Artistry in
extending of his father’s supporting nature thrive into supporting human nature
thrive was introduced to the 55 present at the Yeomans Project at the NSW
Art Gallery by a Laceweb member who linked this work to the UN-Inma Atherton
Tablelands Project and further outreach through the SE Asia Oceania Region.
2013
Laceweb folk
are invited to participate via the Internet in a Global Psychiatric Conference
held in London on the theme ‘Self-help and Mutual Help Wellbeing Ways Supporting
Folk with Mental Strife in Low and Middle Income Communities and Countries.
Experience from the Atherton Tablelands Project and other Laceweb Action
Research informs the content.
Laceweb folk
informed by the Atherton Tableland INMA Project provide support to folk in
Kinglake, Victoria massively affected by the 2009 bushfires.
Understanding
from Laceweb INMA Project field days during 2012 in Yungaburra and Koah on the
Atherton Tablelands inform action research into evolving new soil generating
and food forests in peri-urban areas around Melbourne.
2012
UN-INMA through
Total Care Foundation Inc. and the Keyline Foundation Inc., with behind the
scenes support from EESOS (self-help group) and the Australian Wellness
Association Inc. enables a series of eight wellbeing seminar-field
days-workshops on the Atherton Tablelands; one at Malanda, three at Yungaburra,
and four at Koah (refer map at start of
this web-page). These workshops are towards sustaining wellbeing in all its
forms including bodymind, communal, environmental, familial, habitat,
inter-personal, personal, social, and soil.
One of the Koah workshops combined vital immunity in soil and body while evolving well community.
25 people helped create new soil and
then others arrived and we all helped in preparing and making a feast of life
food – foods that still contain life force that are warmed not cooked. Locals
are linking together in buying home-delivered organic vegetable packed boxes
from a growers co-operative.
Laceweb E-Books are launched at Koah, ‘Coming to One’s Senses – By the
Way’ (Volumes One and Two), and a biography titled ‘Cultural Keyline – The Life
Work of Dr Neville Yeomans’ (Volumes One and Two). The ‘By the Way’ books
contain 130 stories linked to the UN-INMA Project and its precursors, rollout
and outreach, and outlines aspects of the Way being used in wellbeing action.
Complementing the Laceweb website, these six volumes are a significant resource
relating to Laceweb Way.
A series of Wellbeing Networking Gatherings takes place at Geoff Guest
(OAM) and Norma’s Petford Aboriginal Training Farm (refer map at start of this
web page) as well as at Koah and Kuranda - exploring possibilities for further
extending and enriching Wellbeing-Networking between networks in the Atherton Tablelands
Region. Geoff Guest and Alex Dawia’s links into PNG are explored. This
seminar-workshop-field day series is modelled upon, and continues the Ways
emerging through the fifty years of the INMA Project.
Wellbeing Networking takes place informally in everyday life including
during the Mareeba Market and Kuranda Market days. A commitment made at a
workshop to follow up a theme with someone takes place the very next day by
good fortune as they meet up at Mareeba Market - because someone from the workshop
had passed on word at the Market that the person was there sitting and talking
with the Speaker of the Queensland State Parliament at the Speaker’s
‘meet-the-people’ booth.
Alex Dawia arranges for a very experienced peacehealer mediator from
Bougainville to fly down and link with Islander folk in Cairns before flying on
to Melbourne for over two months sharing and co-learning with Laceweb folk in
the networks. This visitor completes Transformational Course in Integral Human Transforming through the
Total Care Foundation Victoria’s Learning Centre for Integral Human
Transforming. Videos Audio tapes and photos are made of the healing exchanges.
The visitor shares healing wellbeing ways that he has been using among warring
factions and parties throughout the Bougainville Conflict and during the
post-conflict era. Others from UN-Inma share healing ways with this person -
ways gathered from healer networks throughout the SE Asia Oceania Austrasia
Region during the past fifty years. The stories told by the visitor are
recorded for potentially creating resources for others to use within
Bougainville, the Atherton Tablelands Inma Project, throughout the Region, and
wider a field. News of the healing exchanges in Melbourne are passed onto
Laceweb folk in the UK linked to The Community of Communities and Enabling
Environments. Bougainville folk consider possibilities for evolving Total Care
Foundation Bougainville. Experiential learning themes and experiences are
written up on the themes:
o Life skills
o Healing Wellness Ways
o Relational Mediating
This material is made available as hints for possible action in
Bougainville in 2014 with discussing going on about this alongside other
rollout among African and other refugee communities in Melbourne, Victoria.
An Example of Longer-Term Communal Wellbeing Action Influencing
2012 Action
During
1970’s-1980’s, Dr Neville Yeomans’ visits Atherton Tablelands linking into
Aboriginal and Islander family and community networks. Neville meets Norma and
Geoff Guest at Petford Aboriginal Training Farm. Geoff and Norma are also very
well known in these INMA networks. A number of Laceweb folk meet Dr Neville
Yeomans in Balmain Sydney in August, 1985 just after he returned from the
States after participating in Sensory Submodality Workshops with Steve and
Connirae Andreas in Boulder Colorado.
During 1991,
Laceweb person from the SE Australia visits Neville in Yungaburra, and Neville
takes this person out to Petford to meet Norma and Geoff. Neville also takes
the person around the Atherton Tablelands region linking the person into many
Aboriginal family-friend community wellbeing networks while visiting their
communities in Atherton, Kuranda, Malanda, Mareeba, Mona Mona, Ravenshoe,
Tolga, and other places in the Region.
During 1993, a
Laceweb person’s son on his own initiative travels and stays for ten months
with Neville at Yungaburra and Neville introduces the son to the UN-Inma
Project and to some of the Region’s wellbeing networks.
2012 That
person and son visit Geoff and Norma at Petford Farm with a local enabler and
meet an extended family – an Aboriginal mother, son, daughter, and two
grandchildren who are staying at Petford Farm.
That person and
son hold eight seminar, field days and workshops through the Atherton Tablelands.
A local enabler invites along an Aboriginal Elder to the Koah
seminar/workshops. The Laceweb person had first met this Elder when the Elder
was a youth in 1993 when the Laceweb person and Neville visited the Mona Mona
Community exploring for potential festival sites. The Elder experiences the
processes being explored at the 2012 Koah workshops as well as the communal
wellbeing ambience in being with the other attendees. The Elder is well used to
communal ambience.
A local enabler
has invited the extended Aboriginal family staying with Geoff and Norma to the
Koah workshops and they are all present and meeting all of the other
participants.
The Laceweb
person and son are making a second visit to be with Geoff and Norma on their
property way out in dry rocky country 16 kilometres out of the very small town
of Petford (three houses) – beyond Dimbulah. A local enabler brings along the
Elder and an elder aboriginal woman to Koah to go with the Laceweb person and
son to Petford. Both these aboriginals had known Neville. The elder women is
very good friends with Norma and really enjoys the day sharing news of family
friend networks.
The extended family are back at Geoff and Norma’s. There is also an Aboriginal father
who has come down from the tip of Cape York around 1100 kilometres away. He had
been with Geoff and Norma as a young Adolescent. He has brought news of many of
his friends and their children who have been among over 3,500 youth supported
by Norma and Geoff over the past thirty years. He has also brought a lawn
mower, and he and his children cut all of the lawns around the house at Petford
for Geoff and Norma.
Another two
fellows turn up who have heard that Geoff’s ride-on-mower has broken and they
take the ride-on-mower to pieces to find out what parts they need to fix or
replace. A few weeks early one of these fellows had asked Geoff in Mareeba if
he could borrow Geoff’s four wheel drive vehicle for about half an hour and
Geoff lets him use it. Half an hour later the fellow returns Geoff’s vehicle
with four new tyres.
Another person
is staying with Geoff who has a background in tertiary teaching and is a
qualified vet. He is helping Geoff voluntarily.
There had been
26 people at Geoff and Norma’s place that day. The Laceweb person from SE
Australia observes and records the life transforming processes used by Geoff in
engaging with others as this person has been doing on regular visits since
1992. These processes are available to pass on to others.
Altogether there were over 100 people linked into this wellbeing networking
at very short notice during January 2012, and a number of these were linked
into networking back in the 1970’s, 80s, and 90s. All of these people are
currently sharing news of good things that happened through their own nested
networks.
During engaging with the
Inma Project in Jan 2012 folk are engaging in what has been termed Cultural Healing
Action or Cultural Healing Artistry. All
forms of artistry are embraced for supporting transforming towards wellbeing.
Cultural Healing Action has emerged from Vanuatu and other Pacific Cultures as
well from Australian Aboriginal people and is now spreading through the SE Asia
Oceania Australasia Region. Philippines Educational Theatre Association (PETA)
is one foci of Cultural Healing Action. Contexts are set up where people can
explore aspects of their own wellbeing together with others towards enriching
wellbeing in family and community life. Throughout remote areas of Northern
Australia and the SE Asia Pacific region, indigenous, small minority, and
intercultural people have a long history of using Cultural Healing Action
towards fostering and maintaining all aspects of wellbeing. Many processes have
evolved and are being documented as an integral aspect of the Inma Project.
In Dr Neville Yeomans On Global Reform 1974 paper he
writes of:
a relatively
brief consciousness raising program with the more reformist humanitarian members
of the national community, i.e. largely based on self-selected members of the
helping and caring professions plus equivalent other volunteers. However their
consciousness raising is mainly aimed at realizing the supportive and
protective role they can play nationally, in guaranteeing the survival of the
Inma beyond their own lifetimes, rather than trying to persuade them actually
to join it by migration
In November
2012, consistent with Neville’s On Global Reform Paper Laceweb folk from SE
Australia visited Cairns and the Atherton Tableland to coincide with the Total
Solar Eclipse and held the Total Care Foundation Eclipse Silent Disco
Celebration on the Cairns Esplanade adjacent the swimming pool area. They also
visit Koah, Kuranda, and stayed out at Geoff and Norma’s Healing Farm at
Petford evolving a cold compost and a bush materials vertical vegetable and
herb garden.
Similarly,
Laceweb folk from the South East including a Laceweb person from the Kinglake
Region in Victoria, an area affected by the massive fire storm that devastated
that Region in Feb 2009, visited Cairns and the Atherton Tablelands in
February, 2013. They were linking with folk experienced in Permaculture and a
range of healing ways on innovating properties in Kuranda and Ravenshoe. They
also had a walk over a substantial landholding acquired by a Community Group in
the Atherton Tablelands. They offered this group support towards energising
wellbeing festivals on their property.
2006-2011
With enabling support from self-help groups Connexion, EESOS, Extegrity,
Inma Nelps, Keyline, Family Nexus, Mediation Matters, as well as Nexus Groups,
UN-INMA energises a series of small gatherings in Cairns, and at various places
on the Tablelands on Wellbeing Networking. These gatherings are supported by
the following entities: Australian Wellness Foundation (Inc.), Keyline
Foundation (Inc.), and Total Care Foundation (Inc.).
EESOS and the Keyline Foundation draw upon the Atherton Tablelands INMA
Project in evolving and using Extegrity (see later) an extensive model of
Wellbeing Artistry Action for re-constituting collapsed and collapsing
societies and their way of life and livelihoods following man-made and natural
disasters. This is extended when Laceweb folk, with the support of over fifty
academics, evolve a Aus$380 million model project for the reconstituting of
livelihoods and village wellbeing of a collapsed States modelled on Extegrity
(see later) and the Inma Project and its outreach.
Laceweb folk from the South join Alex Dawia and others and have highly
sensitive meetings in Cairns with significant parties involved in Peacehealing
and reconciliation in Bougainville PNG following the ten year conflict and
evolve a recommendations document that was commissioned by one of the parties
and distributed to significant parties.
Dr Rex Haig - psychiatrist with the UK Community of Communities, the
Community Psychiatry body of the UK College of Psychiatry - meets and has
discussions with Alex Dawia, Geoff Guest, and David Cruise, one of the directors
of Down to Earth Victoria (Inc.) and other Laceweb folk in Melbourne, Victoria,
who all brief Rex on the history of the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project.
Dr Haig also briefs the above folk on the resonant role of the Community
of Communities and other resonant bodies in the UK, Europe and wider a-field.
Dr Haig stays in contact with Laceweb folk in sharing news of the rollout of
the Atherton Tablelands Project, which is evolving as a model of global
significance.
2003-2005
Through experience gained and written up with Dr Neville Yeomans in
action researching the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project, a Laceweb person
through UN-INMA is engaged by the Centre for Integrative Development Studies in
Manila, Philippines through non-UN funds auspiced by the UN, to travel through
seven SE Asia countries to find and link up wellbeing natural nurturers among
indigenous and oppressed small minorities. In this role the Laceweb person
finds natural nurturer networks through SE Asia. Experienced gained in action
research with Dr Neville Yeomans is used in finding and linking up natural
nurturers through the Indigenous and small multicultural minority communities
on the Atherton Tablelands. Two hundred and forty people and Forty-Nine Natural
Nurturer Networks through the SE Asia Oceania Australasia Region are found and
formed into a network of networks with links evolving and continuing with
Australian Top End self-help groups and networked networks.
Through the Philippines University
Psychology Department’s Centre for Integrative Development Psychnet[1]
Project, a UN-Inma person engages in Cultural Healing Arts in sharing healing
Ways in Baucau, East Timor using experience gained through the Inma Project.
Through UN-INMA and Extegrity (see below in 1999), Geoff Guest from
Petford and Alex Dawia from Cairns are invited to attend a Wellbeing Gathering
held in the Philippines of 49 wellbeing
healers from eleven countries
organised by SE Asia Emergency Response Network with its Secretariat in the
Centre for Integrative Development Studies in the University of the Philippines
– now an independent institute.
This gathering is co-facilitated by Professor Elisabeth De Castro,
University of the Philippines, Ernie Cloma Philippines Educational Theatre and
a Laceweb person from UN-Inma to evaluate resources developed for the Network
by Laceweb. These resources were for evolving culturally sensitive psychosocial
support in the context of man-made and natural disasters. The resources enabled
the evolving of rapid response teams able to rapidly assess local psychosocial
resources and resilience. University of
the Philippines, Centre for Integrative Development Studies has been working
through UN-INMA. Laceweb folk share their experience of the Atherton Tablelands
INMA Project with the other attendees of this International Wellbeing
Gathering.
Through UN-INMA
and Extegrity (self-help group) - with support from Down to Earth Victoria
(Inc.) - people come to Australia from Cambodia and the Philippines, including
Professor Violetta Bautista – world renowned for her work on resilience in
children under stress, for firsthand briefings on the UN-Inma Project and to
attend gatherings for sharing healing ways and to attend ConFest and
participate in the workshop scene there.
Laceweb person is a speaker at the Asia Pacific Social Psychology
Conference in Manila on the Atherton Tablelands on Laceweb and the UN-Inma
Project.
Laceweb person completes a PhD that has UN-INMA Atherton
Tablelands INMA Project and its local, regional and international outreach as
one of its main themes.
Laceweb people fly in to Cairns Atherton Tablelands Region to be with Geoff Guest
and one of them records Geoff Guest telling healing wellbeing stories that form
a potent aspect of Geoff’s supporting at risk adolescents transforming their
lives. Geoff also takes these Laceweb
people to Kowanyama Aboriginal community up on Cape York and the group
meet up with 12 young men who had all been through Petford and their stories
post-Petford are shared. The group also meet up with a father who had been to
Petford who had also sent his son to Petford to have Geoff and Norma’s
transforming influence.
A Professor at
University of the Philippines, writes a paper called ‘Exploitative Work – Child
Labour’ (2003) that uses UN-INMA’s work in the Laceweb new-form social movement
(Evers, 1985; Ireland, 1998) in the SE Asia Oceania Australasia Region,
including the Atherton Tablelands UN-INMA Project, as a model of Global
Wellbeing Action.
Book Launch in
Brisbane of a collection of over 1,000 poems written by Dr. Neville Yeomans,
two of which, ‘INMA’ and ‘On Where’, are expressly about the Atherton
Tablelands UN-INMA Project and a number of which gives hints of the
transforming Ways used within the Project.
1995-2002
In 2002, a
Laceweb person linked to UN-Inma is invited to participate at an Experts
Meeting auspiced by the Regional Office of a UN Agency in the Region. Through sharing
about the Atherton Tablelands Inma Project and natural nurturer networking in
public places, The Laceweb person is invited to travel through seven SE Asian
countries to link up indigenous and small minority natural nurturers into an
extended network in the Region towards locals supporting grassroots locals in
culturally appropriate ways following manmade and natural disasters.[2]
Over the next 18 months that Laceweb person finds 240 people in 49 networks and
links them together into Psychnet.
In 2000 and
2002, gatherings energised by INMA Nelps and UN-INMA are held in Cairns titled
‘Self-Help & Mutual-help Action Supporting Survivors of Torture and Trauma
in SE Asia, Oceania, and Australasia’. These gatherings are attended by folk
from East Timor, West Papua, as well as PNG mainland & Bougainville.
Aboriginals and Islanders and resonant others from Australasia and overseas
also attend. As well, these Gatherings are used to evolve experiential
resources for training people in psycho-social-emotional response to man-made
and natural disasters, and for supporting the evolving a SE Asia Pacific Self
Help Trauma Support Intercultural Network engaging in mutual-help. Inma Nelps
and UN-INMA support folk at the above gatherings signing the UP & UYP
Treaties.
A Laceweb
person holds different prolonged co-learning healing wellbeing discussions with
a number of Bougainville people who had been caught up in the conflict in
Bougainville and who had travelled down to Cairns..
2001 A Laceweb
person and Professor Stuart Hill from University of Western Sydney (now
Emeritus Professor) visit the Yeomans Keyline farms Nevallan and Yobarnie in
North Richmond, NSW – a precursor to the Inma Project.
2001 Laceweb
people (including one of Sri Lankan background) travel 3,500 kilometres from
Melbourne to Cairns to stay with Geoff Guest and Norma at Petford inland from
Cairns and observing Geoff’s processes while he’s working with young men using
engaging with wild horses as a primary transforming agent; also listening to
and documenting Geoff’s healing storytelling processes.
During 1999, Dr
Neville Yeomans with other Laceweb input write the Extegrity documentation
relating to local and lateral grassroots processes using self-help and mutual
help for re-constituting collapsed or collapsing societies, a reversed
isomorphic reframe of top down processes invariably implemented by the dominant
system – elect a nation government, set up a legal system, court system, and a
police and prison system and look after common folk last. Extegrity way
reverses this - supporting locals in peacehealing while locals are together
reconstituting their way of life together in their place – reconstituting their
way, their values, their culture, and their lore. From this lore emerge local
norms and eventually their law which spreads to re-link local communities and
evolve local governance, and this local-laterally spreads to embrace regional
governance, which further local-laterally spreads in reconstituting global
governance of their society.
Extegrity
(extensive integrity) evolves as a self-help group energy enabling Extegrity
review of action research in the networks of wellbeing networks if locals want
this; Laceweb folk with others in the Region and internationally are providing
support.
Alex Dawia - a
Bougainville person living in Cairns who is founder and director of the
Bougainville Survivors of Torture and Trauma Foundation - is invited to
participate in a Training Seminar in Denmark on Supporting Survivors of Torture
and Trauma.
1998 Alex Dawia
becomes a PhD candidate at James cook University with the theme ‘Therapeutic
Community Wellbeing Processes and Aboriginal Communities’.
1998 – Another
Laceweb person commences a PhD on Dr Neville Yeomans’ including ongoing action
research on precursors to the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project. This Laceweb
person introduced into the Atherton Tablelands Region by Dr Yeomans in 1991.
Alex Dawia is
invited to Israel to provide background to the Atherton Tablelands Inma
Project, and to study their community approaches in working with at-risk youth.
A Laceweb
person meets separately with Professor Alf Clark and Dr Terry O’Neill, in
researching the precursors to the INMA Atherton Tablelands Project.
Professor
Mulligan with Professor Stuart Hill, a world renowned ecologist and social
ecologist, publishes a book ‘Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of
Australian Ecological Thought and Action’ that also explores precursors to the
Atherton Tablelands INMA Project in the work of the Yeomans family relating to their
developing of Keyline, and Neville’s evolving of Cultural Keyline processes
from the 1950s onwards.
During 1999-2002, Follow-On Gatherings to the Small Island Coastal and
Estuarine Gathering Celebration at Lake Tinaroo on the Atherton Tablelands in June
1994 are funded by the Jesse Street Foundation in NSW, and energised and held
by the Self-help Group INMA Nelps. That Gathering Celebration was funded by the
UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Treaties are signed regarding relating
with Unique Peoples and Unique Young Peoples.
A series of gatherings take place in Petford and Cairns on sharing
wellbeing ways energised by Nexus Groups and Inma Nelps (self-help groups).
Experience of
Aboriginal and Islander women in attending the 1992 Gathering at Petford (see
below) inform and energise their engaging with other locals in urban renewal in
Mooroobool and Manunda in Cairns enabled by Akame (self-help group – with the
Islander term ‘Akame’ meaning ‘grandmother and me’); examples of wellbeing
action – firstly, a group of elderly Aboriginal and Islander women carry out a
community safety audit in the early hours of the morning, and secondly, local
at-risk aboriginal and Islander youth devise a rescheduling of bus services in
a report to council. A park that was a hangout for drug takers is transformed
into a delightful child play space and floodlit at night. Group public housing
without a hint of greenery is transformed with full participating of residents
into a resort like atmosphere.
UN-INMA enables
a number of Bougainville people to come to Australia to share in healing
gatherings in the Atherton Tablelands, and to attend ConFest, and have
briefings and sharings of healing ways, including experiential workshops on
Bougainville whole-village to whole-village mediating processes. One of these
is a member of the PNG national parliament representing Bougainville. Another
held a masters degree in psychology from an American university. This Bougainville
whole-village to whole-village mediating processes and many other healing ways
were also real-played with 35 healers by Alex and myself down in Hobart
Tasmania over three days. The woman who
drove me back to the Hobart airport said that she and many of her friends were
massively influenced by Dr Neville Yeomans and Fraser House in the 1960s.
Dr Les Spencer
uses NLP modelling experience in modelling Dr Neville Yeomans and others who
facilitated Big Groups (180 people) at Fraser House. This modelling especially
extended to exploring firstly crowd and audience effects; secondly, the role of
the group leader-facilitator during Big and Small Groups at Fraser House
Therapeutic Community, particularly in drawing Group attention to role-specific
functional-in-context behaviours within the interactions; thirdly, evolving
models of excellence in NLP of Groups, NLP of Social Networks, and NLP of
Community. Dr Spencer experiences using
these audience and crowd processes during over 200 experiential workshops with
between 150-180 folk attending (over 30,000 attendances) and writes up this
experience. These models and processes are rolled out within the Atherton
Tablelands INMA Project and through UN-INMA and other energies through the SE
Asia Oceania Australasia Region.
A Bougainville
person completes his PhD on exploring mutual-help and self-help processes for
reconstituting societies following Conflict. Les Spencer travels to Armidale in
North East NSW to have discussions with this Bougainville person and reads his
PhD in the late afternoon and through the night so as to be able to discuss the
PhD with him before his imminent departure. Les mentors him while sharing ways
of the Inma Project and its precursors. This person then takes these
understandings into supporting integrative reconstituting of Bougainville
cultural life-ways following the Bougainville Conflict.
1994
During a fortnight of intense Networking Action in January 1994 energised
by Mingles (self-help group) and INMA Nelps, many happenings, events and
gatherings take place in the Atherton Tablelands Region including (i) FUNPO
(self-help group) enabling nearly all of the young people of Yungaburra
preparing Dr. Yeomans house at Yungaburra for a New Years Eve party; (ii)
INMA-Nelps staging of that party, (iii) Mingles (self-help group) energising a
three-day dance and party on Neville’s property in the rainforest at Kuranda.
Down to Earth
Victoria, organisers of ConFest, the Conference Festival first held in 1976
with Deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns’ support, send four of their folk
(experienced in Festival site selection and setup) who visit 15 sites owned by
Aboriginal Groups and others on the Atherton Tablelands as potential sites for
the proposed ‘Small Island Coastal and
Estuarine Gathering Celebration’ proposed for June 1994.
DTE (Vic) Inc.
also provide funding for an Aboriginal woman and an Islander woman who are
potential hosts of 1994 Festivals up North to attend the Easter 1994 ConFest at
Tocumwal in NSW to explore ways of evolving and hosting Festivals, as both had
no prior experience of doing that.
.
DTE (Vic) Inc.
also send many thousands of dollars in seed money as well as equipment, when
the UN money from Geneva is late arriving, and the funds and equipment are
returned to DTE after the Gathering Celebration.
Following UN-INMA enabling Action, the UN Human Rights Commission agrees
to provide Aus$15,000 to support the ‘Small Island Coastal and Estuarine
Gathering Celebration. Local Aboriginal and Islander women agree to evolve this
Gathering Celebration and be the hosts. None of them had any experience in
evolving or running a Gathering Celebration which takes place at Barrabadeen
Scout Camp at Lake Tinaroo in June 1994.
Barrabadeen Scout Camp on Lake Tinaroo.
600 folk attend including Islander women from Torres Strait Islands,
Aboriginal women from One Arm Point 200 kilometres North of Broome in Western
Australia, Ceduna in South Australia and other places. The son of Eddie Mabo,
the Torres Strait Islander who was responsible for major land reform
challenging Terra Nullius in Australia, also attends.
Through profound under-standing of local Aboriginal and Islander
networks, a host of the Gathering Celebration – who had travelled down to the
Down to Earth Easter ConFest - hears the stories of a member of the Stolen
Generation who is attending the Gathering Celebration from South Australia, and
reconnects her with her family in the Atherton Tablelands Region after over 30
years of separation. One hundred and ten folk from the Byron Bay - Lismore area
in NSW also attend. These folk had heard about the Gathering from Dr Les
Spencer who expressly stayed in that region for six weeks prior to the
Gathering Celebration inviting people with healing artistry experience to
attend the Gathering Celebration. Dr Spencer had sought funding for a 30 seater
bus and when this funding action failed, around 110 made their own way north and
surprised Les when he met them all one evening doing fire twirling and drumming
on the Cairns Esplanade. This visit by the 110 extends the regular visiting of
healing artistry people from the Byron Bay - Lismore area to the Atherton
Tablelands. As agreed with the UN Human Rights Commission, a Report on the
Gathering Celebration with an Audited Statement of Financial Disbursements
along with a set of Photographs was sent to the Commission shortly after the
Gathering Celebration finished.
The First Nations
people of Canada seek two articles for their magazine, ‘Healing Words’ about
wellbeing action through the Atherton Tablelands Region including the processes
used by Geoff Guest in healing storytelling and softening substance abuse, and
these two articles are published in separate issues of Healing Words and
distributed through all of the indigenous communities through Canada.[3]
Following
Federal Government interest in the 1992 self-help and mutual-help gathering at
Petford in the Atherton Tablelands region (see later) Inma Nelps receives
offers of substantial funding for setting up therapeutic community based
alternatives to psychiatric and criminal incarceration for Aboriginal and
Islanders from the Federal Health Department. This funding offer is not taken
up by the Elders. Rather, Dr Neville Yeomans, Terry Widders, and Dr Les Spencer
prepare a short paper called ‘Government and the Facilitating of Grassroots
Action’.[4]
Dr Les Spencer meets with top government people in Canberra who realise why
their funding is not being accepted.
These
government people acknowledge that while all levels of governments use the
service delivery model, they have little or know knowledge of community
self-help and mutual-help processes outlined in this paper. They further state
that the processes outlined in ‘Government and the Facilitating of Grassroots
Action’[5]
are decades ahead of where the Federal Government (and other levels of
government) were presently at; little has changed in the intervening years.
1993
Neville set his
Yungaburra home up as a base for a self-help group called ‘Mediation Matters’
and runs a series of mediation workshops. Linked to this he organizes local
Aboriginal and Islander women around Atherton to host the Lake Tinaroo
Mediation Gathering in November 1993. This is held at Lake Tinaroo near
Atherton on the Atherton Tablelands. A number of Aboriginal nurturer women come
across 3,159 km from Yirrkala in Northern Territory and other remote
communities in the Top End and participate in co-learning at this Gathering.
Mediation Therapy was a key theme.
Following UN-INMA and
Total Care Foundation enabling, the UN funds Alex Dawia, Bougainville person
living in Cairns as a platform speaker at UN NGO 'Small Island' Conference in the Caribbean in 1994 on the
theme ‘The Small Island Coastal and Estuarine people Gathering Celebration as
an integral aspect of Healing Action in the Atherton Tablelands’.
Neville
arranges for Les to give Marjorie Roberts a lift from Cairns via Gordonvale up
the range through the rainforest to Yungaburra. While in Gordonvale Marjorie
visits her cousin and over a cup of tea they exchange news of over five hundred
people they know – communal networking for social cohesion as an inherent
aspect of life. Marjorie is the one that hosts with other Aboriginal Islander
and small minority women the 1994 Small Island Coastal and Estuarine Peoples
Gathering Celebration funded by the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Professor
Clark, who was the head of the Outside Research Team at Fraser House and who
co-wrote with Neville the book ‘Theory and Evaluation of a Therapeutic
Community’[6] writes
his book ‘Understanding Social Conflict’ and writes that Fraser House and its
Inma and other outreach is still the best model for resolving social conflict
that he has found.[7]
1992
UN-INMA,
Connexion and Inma Nelps set up at Petford a Wellbeing Gathering called
‘Developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Drug and Substance Abuse
Therapeutic Communities’ with over 100 Aboriginal and Islander healers
attending from the Top End. Through UN-INMA enabling action, three Aboriginal
communities fly in to Geoff Guest's Therapeutic Community over 70 Aboriginal
and Islander healers from Northern Australia, including off-shore islands for a
healing sharing gathering. A bus load of women and children are brought to the
Gathering by the Akame self-help group.
As well, two
Aboriginal Permaculture practitioners (a female and a male), and Anglo members
of the Australian Therapeutic Community Association are flown in. The theme for
the gathering is 'Exploring Therapeutic
Community, Keyline and Permaculture as Processes for Softening Drug Use'.
Neville’s younger brother Ken also flew in and carried out a Keyline survey of
a large area of Petford with the help of a team of the Petford youth.
Dr. Neville
Yeomans is a Platform speaker at the UN NGO Rio 'Earth Summit' on UN-INMA Healing Action around
Atherton Tablelands. Neville is a main speaker at the indigenous platform, and
perhaps the only non indigenous person invited to speak at that platform.
Neville's is accompanied to the Earth Summit by his son Quan Yeomans, a leading member of the Australian music group, 'Regurgitator'.
In an ABC TV interview with Gabrielle Carey, Quan describes his father's Fraser
House and UN-INMA work and the Rio Earth Summit as major influences on his life
and music.
Following Rio,
the self help group UN-INMA engages in the drafting and disseminating of
wordings of possible treaties that may be used as resources by adults,
adolescents and youth interfacing with, and engaging with Indigenous and Unique
People. Akame and UN-INMA support folk at the 1992 Petford gathering sign the
Unique People (UP) and Unique Young People (UYP) Treaties.[8]
During
1992-1994 Dr Les Spencer makes many trips to engage closely with Dr Neville
Yeomans in action research on the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project.
Dr Spencer
writes up this action research with the support of Dr Andrew Cramb and Dr Dihan
Wijewickrama of the Australian Wellness Association, as well as having
discussions about the INMA action research with Professor Stuart Hill and
Professor Tony Vinson.
1977-91
Dr Yeomans
terms ‘natural nurturers’ those who are naturally good at nurturing others and
he makes many visits to the Atherton Tablelands Region seeking out, evolving
links with, and linking up natural nurturers in the Atherton Tablelands Region.
He especially
uses Yungaburra Market, Kuranda Market and Malanda Market as places to find and
meet natural nurturers and link them with each other.
Dr Neville
Yeomans is continually linking natural nurturers up with each other so that
they begin sharing in friendship networks and passing between themselves news
of healing wellbeing actions that work.
1985-89
Neville is
living in his house in Bondi Junction and forms Healing Sunday where 25 healers
he has linked together invite 25 others each month for 18 months to experience
healing ways. This dispersed healing community grows to over 150 people who are
introduced to the Atherton Tablelands Inma Project.
Dr Yeomans
corner house in Bondi Junction where Healing Sunday was held
Neville linking
with Geoff Guest and Norma at Petford at their Therapeutic Community – Petford
Training Farm; Neville passes on healing ways to Geoff and Norma and the
adolescents at Petford, including the ecological use of NLP, Mediation Therapy
and how to use Bliss Symbols invented by Charles K. Bliss
(1897–1985): some samples below:
Man Woman House Action
Neville
establishing a Healing Wellbeing Centre, Family Mediation Centre called Mediation
Matters, and UN-INMA Centre in his House at Yungaburra.
Photo 28. Old Photo Showing Neville’s Yungaburra House Circa
1931
Neville
establishing therapeutic community Houses in the Cairns Atherton Tablelands
Region.
Dr Yeomans set
up an INMA based in a house in Edgehill in North Cairns.
Photo of Neville’s
Therapeutic Community House INMA in Cairns
Criminologist
Professor Paul Wilson in his book A Life of Crime writes of his supported life
changes while living in one of the Inma therapeutic community houses set up by
Dr Neville Yeomans in Queensland.
Various
folk set up the Keyline Foundation and start a newspaper and begin setting up
an Archive relating to P.A. Yeomans work on evolving Keyline. Neville uses
Keyline as a model for his evolving of Cultural Keyline and applies these
understandings and ways in forming the Inma Project in the Atherton Tablelands.
1983 Laceweb
person commences Behavioural Science degree at Latrobe University
1980 Dr Yeomans is one of
the international editors of the International Therapeutic Communities Journal
when it starts in 1980. The first edition of the International Journal of
Therapeutic Communities contains Dr Neville Yeomans letter titled ‘From the
Outback’. Neville writes:
Since A. W. Clark[9]
and I produced the monograph ‘Fraser House’ in 1969, I
have moved to private practice in Cairns, North East Australia. This is an
isolated area for this country, but is rapidly becoming an intercultural front
door to Melanesia and Asia. ‘Up North’ the therapeutic
community model has extended into humanitarian mutual help for social change.
Two of the small cities in this region have self-help houses based on Fraser
House.
An Aboriginal
Alcohol and Drug hostel is moving in the same direction, as are other bodies.
These are facilitated by a network
called UN-Inma, the second word of
which is aboriginal for Oneness.
1979
Laceweb
person commences the study of the Sociology of Knowledge with Werner Pelz at La
Trobe University for his Social Science Degree; This person commences study
with Terry O’Neill as a para-professional crisis counsellor and has 18 months
experience as a crisis counsellor in the student counselling centre. Terry
O’Neill’s counselling competence was furthered during his experience of working
in Fraser House with Dr Yeomans in the 1960s. The head of the Latrobe
University Sociology Department is Professor Alf Clark whose PhD researched
Fraser House. Clarke co-wrote with Neville the book published in 1969 titled
‘Fraser House – The Theory and Evaluation of a Therapeutic Community’. Clarke,
a lecturer at the University of NSW at the time, was also the head of the
Fraser House outside-research team.
Akame
(self-help group) and a small group of Aboriginal and Islander women energise
small gatherings of Aboriginal and Islander youth on Dr Neville Yeomans Black
Mountain Road rainforest property beside the Barron River in the Kuranda
rainforest.
1972-75
Dr Yeomans
travels through Atherton Tablelands energising the Region as an INMA –
Interpersonal Normative Model Area. Lien, Neville’s wife, a superb Vietnamese
cook, makes feasts and hosts parties for the folk that Neville is linking with
in the Atherton Tablelands Region continuing the tradition of the self-help
group Mingles that Neville, Lien and others energised in Sydney in the
1969-1971 period (refer later).
Lien Yeomans in
her book ‘The Green Papaya’ writes that she and Neville ‘entertained artists
for fun, and social reformers and medical practitioners for favour’.
Neville writes
paper titled, ‘Mental Health and
Social Change’ about the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project.
Neville writes
a paper titled, ‘On Global Reform –
INMA’ about the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project and its possible implications
supporting wellbeing transitions. This paper explores a three phase
transitioning process in viewing the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project and other
Top End INMA’s as small micro-projects:
Involves the
conceiving of a three-stage transition process towards a model of global
futures (T1-T3 ):
Tl = Consciousness-raising in INMAs and national
Arenas
T2 =
Mobilization in Transnational Arenas
T3 =
Transforming action in Global Arenas
T2 has two
subunits:
T2 (a)
commences with the mobilization of extra-Inma supporters nationally.
T2 (b) moves to
the mobilization of transnationals who have completed T1 consciousness raising
in their own continents. That mobilization is of two fundamentally distinct
types:
T2 (b)(i)
mobilization of those who will come to live in, visit, or work in, the Inma.
T2 (b)(ii)
mobilization of those who will guarantee cogent normative, moral and economic
support combined with national and international political protection for its
survival.
By T3, the
effects of T1 and T2 have largely transformed the Inma, which is now a matured
multipurpose world wellbeing transitioning model.
The Atherton
Tablelands INMA Project is currently ahead of where Neville envisioned it would
be, with T2 (b)(i) well under way.
1969-71
1969: Dr.
Neville Yeomans and Professor Alf Clark write a book on the precursors to the
Atherton Tablelands INMA Project. Professor Clark goes on to be
head of the Sociology Department at La Trobe University in the late 1970’s and
through the 1980’s when a Laceweb person was studying Sociology of Knowledge at
La Trobe University.
1969: The Total
Care Foundation is incorporated by Dr Neville Yeomans and members of the
following self-help groups: Chums (Care and Help for Unmarried Mums), Mingles,
Connexion, Inma, Inma Nelps, and Nexus Groups. These self-help groups tap into
the free energy among people who enabled the Watsons Bay Festival in 1968 and
the Paddington Festival in 1969 that spawned the Paddington Bazaar, now an icon
on the Sydney cultural scene. They also energised the Centennial Park Festival
and the Campbelltown Festival that spawned the Aquarius Festival, and the
people that energised all of these Festivals help form the first ConFest
Festival in 1976, as well as the Cooktown Festival in a very remote difficult
to get to area on Cape York in 1978 – attended by Dr Neville Yeomans and Dr Jim
Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister of Australia in the Whitlam Government (and
Acting Prime Minister during Cyclone Tracy Aftermath, and hosted by two
residents of Yungaburra on the Atherton Tablelands, one of whom knew Neville in
his Fraser House days and ends up per chance living opposite Neville in
Yungaburra.
1968: Professor
Alf Clark completes his PhD through University of NSW on Dr Neville Yeomans’
Fraser House, Australia’s first therapeutic community and associated precursors
to the Atherton Tablelands INMA Project.
1963-1966
Emeritus
Professor Tony Vinson and Professor Paul Wilson join with Dr Yeomans in forming
the Psychiatric Research Study Group which is recognised as the pre-eminent
social science research group in Australia at the time with around 160 members
from all of the social sciences including psychiatrists, psychologists,
sociologists, criminologists, social workers, anthropologists, chaplains,
pastors, prison officials, as well as church leaders and business leaders – all
passionately interested in group processes. They met on the grounds of Fraser
House and kept extensive archives.
Dr Terry
O’Neill worked with Dr Neville Yeomans in developing precursors to the Atherton
Tablelands project at Fraser House and went on to head up the Student
Counselling Unit at Latrobe University. Dr O’Neill trained a Laceweb person in
crisis counselling at that University Unit.
1957-62
Dr. Neville Yeomans travels round the world speaking with indigenous
people seeking their views about the best place on Planet Earth to evolve an Inter-people Normative Model Area (INMA) for exploring Global
Futures and the transforming and re-constituting potency of communal nurturing
action for social change. He receives the same answer from every Indigenous person he speaks to. He also receives the same
answer when he raises the same theme with Indigenous people at the Rio NGO
Earth Summit in 1992. The answer is ‘The
Atherton Tablelands and the Darwin Top End in Australia’. Dr Neville
Yeomans summarise these themes in his paper ‘Mental Health and Social Change written
later in 1972. Neville writes in this paper that the reasons given by
Indigenous people in the 1960s are:
It can thus be
considered equally unimportant to both East and West and having little to
contribute. Australia exemplifies many of these widespread change phenomena. It
is in a geographically and historically unique marginal position.
Geographically Asian, it is historically Western. Its history is also of a
peripheral lesser status. Initially a convict settlement, it still remains at a
great distance from the core of Western Civilization. Culturally it is often
considered equivalent to being the peasants of the West. It is considered to
have no real culture, a marked inferiority complex, and little clear identity
BUT - it is
also the only continent not at war with itself. It is one of the most affluent
nations on earth. Situated at the junction of the great civilisations of East
and West it can borrow the best of both. Of all nations it has the least to
lose and most to gain by creating a new synthesis.
Neville also
said that the Region to the immediate North of the Top End holds more than half
of the world’s indigenous people – by number and by groups; therefore the
Australia Top End is ideally located to link into and engage that wisdom.
While on that
world tour Dr Yeomans has a lengthy discourse with the social theorist Talcott
Parsons. In 1998 in Neville’s view, Fraser House and its outreach was evolving
social theory and clinical sociology practice and process that were way ahead
of Parsons work, especially relating to fostering social transforming to
wellbeing.
Neville also
evolved with resonant others the Rapid
Creek Project in Darwin as another INMA.
Neville’s first
INMA was the Fraser House Project in North Ryde Sydney that commenced in 1959
after preparatory action in 1957.
New Social Movements
The Inma
Project is spawning new concepts and processes and theorein (pre-theoretical
theorising) for the evolving of theory and praxis in the social sciences. One
of these is the concept of Cultural Keyline. That the lived-life experience of
the personal, interpersonal, familial, communal and social irregular
multilayered imbricating (as in having irregularly arranged overlapping edges,
as in some forms of slating and roof tiling or unnatural fish scales) depicted
above may be transforming and re-constituting, may be in-comprehensible to
some. In this spawning of novel way, it is perhaps appropriate to reflect on
what Martin Heidegger has written about incomprehension:
To the common comprehension, the incomprehension is never an occasion to
stop and look at its own powers of comprehension, still less to notice their
limitations. To common comprehension, what is incomprehensible remains merely
offensive – proof enough to such comprehension which is convinced it was born
comprehending everything, that it is now being imposed upon with a sham. The
one thing of which sound common sense is least capable is acknowledgement and respect
Heidegger, 1968, 76-77).
For a world
sorely in need of transforming towards wellbeing for all life forms, the
Atherton Tablelands Wellbeing Inma Project continues to emerge as a global
model of significance.
One Fortnight’s Laceweb Action in the
Atherton Tablelands in Jan, 1994