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We’d love you to join our conversation about sustainable living, where we share the successes and pitfalls faced by grassroots small business, volunteers and community groups around Australia.

You can contribute by commenting or tipping us off with stories that show how we can balance local community needs with business success and jobs, without the expense to our natural and cultural heritage.

Let’s take control of our own future!

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Transition Town Weekend Workshop: Beyond Oil Dependency

If you’re in Melbourne on the weekend of March 20-21, 2010, Transition Town Maroondah invites you to attend a workshop about creating a local sustainable community beyond oil dependency.

Transition Town Maroondah (TTM) is a grassroots initiative working to make the transition from a fossil-fuel based community to a low carbon one that is more self reliant.

Transition Town Workshop Details

You are invited to come and explore together how life in our communities can be healthier, more connected, more satisfying, and more fun, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and becoming less dependent on our diminishing oil supplies.

You will:

  • see the official Transition Town movie
  • find out what action can be taken
  • learn useful skills
  • meet others
  • share ideas

Venue East Ringwood Community hall, behind Railway Ave …

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Cardboard Citizens In Melbourne: Forum Theatre

Xris Reardon from Third-Way Theatre tells us this 5 day course, April 7-11 at Borderlands in Hawthorn, Melbourne, will cover the foundations in a Forum Play and the structuring a Forum play:

  • plot
  • story
  • character development
  • improvisations
  • the spectator
  • interventions

What Is Forum Theatre?

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It Takes A Village To Raise A Child: Aboriginal Governance

Below is an addition to the Draft National Indigenous Policy received from the Indigenous Stock Exchange (ISX) via their email update system.

Nuclear Family Vs Extended Sharing Family?

J. S Mill’s self enhancing individual ‘who saves for himself and herself and their direct biological family members’ is everywhere today in 2010, quite the contrary to the Aboriginal family tradition ‘based on a sharing and collective decision making structure’.

What Do You Think?

The draft suggests a body that examines ‘what collective structures within mainstream Australian society lend themselves to the development and enhancement of Aboriginal families ie Rumbalara Football and Netball Club’ (Shepparton, Vic).

Don’t we need something that allows interaction between mainstream Australia and Aboriginal Australia so …

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Superbug Concern – Why Is Some Science Ignored?

It has been known for some years that potentially fatal superbugs resistant to all antibiotics are increasing. A reader has put us on to a December ‘09 article in ‘Daily Health’, an e-letter published by the UK Health Sciences Institute, who report on advances in ‘modern, underground medicine’. The article states that:

“The survey of intensive care doctors, published in the infectious disease journal Eurosurveillance, found that half treated at least one patient with an infection that was totally resistant or almost totally resistant to antibiotics during the past six months.

One in five had seen more than three patients and some had seen more than ten patients with the superbugs.

As we’ve noted many times before in this e-letter, the

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Wide Range Of Tourism Research Info Available Online

The following publications are now available on the Tourism Research Australia website, www.ret.gov/tra

Regional Tourism Employment in Australia, 2006-07 to 2008-09

International Visitor Survey (IVS) Produced quarterly, the IVS is Australia’s most comprehensive source of information on international visitors to our country. The IVS annually samples 40,000 departing, short-term international visitors to Australia over the age of 15 years, and information collected includes demographics, expenditure, purpose of visit, activities, transportation and accommodation.

National Visitor Survey (NVS) The NVS is Australia’s primary measure of domestic tourism activity, collecting information on the characteristics and travel patterns of domestic day visitors, domestic overnight visitors and domestic visitors travelling overseas (outbound). The NVS is produced quarterly and includes results from approximately 120,000 interviews …

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