One of the places I did not get to visit while I was in Australia during the year was Murgon, Queensland. Christian Brothers provide educational services up there in the northern part of the state to indigenous people. While I was in Australia the whole situation up in the Northern Territories, in Wadeye to be exact, erupted. It was a big media issue. I was lucky enough to have been in Perth at the time where Holy Spirit Province has invested heavily in raising awareness around the indigenous issue. I attended the Province Day on Indigenous issues in Fremantle at the Edmund Rice Centre. I was on a steep learning curve.

Today, I had an email from Martin Sanders, a Christian Brother, working in Murgon. He and I had met last year at the Kolkata Symposium. Working with indigenous people is ultimately about the rights of people to fulness of life, as the late Colm Keating used to say. It is a human rights issue and it is time that due recognition was given to that dimension of the question. Writing here in Ireland, I am only too well aware of how we in this country pretty much reject a rights-based approach to the question of the Irish Travellers. We all have a long road to travel together on these closely related questions of the Irish Travellers and Australia's First Peoples.