Presenting new research in Washington DC, Dr Diane Bretherton and Anouk Ride say evidence indicates when facing a natural disaster most people are cooperative, altruistic and resilient. “If you face a natural disaster, you will most likely turn to your neighbors and your community for help, advice and to help others you see as suffering … Read more →

Presenting new research in Washington DC, Dr Diane Bretherton and Anouk Ride say evidence indicates when facing a natural disaster most people are cooperative, altruistic and resilient.

“If you face a natural disaster, you will most likely turn to your neighbors and your community for help, advice and to help others you see as suffering more than yourself. This is a natural response to survive, to cope psychologically and to rebuild communities. This behavior is far more common than generally assumed by the authorities and media commentators which predict crime, competition and opportunism,” said Dr Diane Bretherton.

The research is featured in a new book, “Community Resilience in Natural Disasters” (Buy “Community Resilience in Natural Disasters” at 20% discount) in which Bretherton and Ride compared interviews in six countries around the world to find out what communities did when faced with a natural disaster and how their behavior changed with the arrival of assistance from aid agencies, government and other organizations.

“We found everywhere community resilience is the usual story and communities tearing themselves apart is the unusual story,” said Anouk Ride. “But the problem is aid agencies, authorities and others who seek to help disaster survivors often take over and disempower local people, actually hurting the very resilience that helped people survive and cope with the disaster in the first place and creating conflict in communities.”

Interviews with survivors of earthquakes in Mexico and Pakistan, tsunamis in Indonesia and Solomon Islands, drought in Kenya, cyclone in Myanmar and the US’s Hurricane Katrina, inform Bretherton and Ride’s conclusions which they say should be instructive for aid agencies, government and the media.

The research was discussed at the American Psychological Association (APA) Convention, attended by around 12,000 psychologists which this year is being held in Washington DC, 4-7 August.

Dr Diane Bretherton is a renowned psychologist presented with an award (the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award) by the APA for outstanding contribution to the field and Anouk Ride is a  Phd candidate, researcher and author of many articles and books on social issues.

A paper by Morgan Brigg, Volke Boege and Anouk Ride was completed entitled ”Working with Local Strengths: Supporting States and Interveners to institutionalise the Responsibility to Protect, Solomon Islands Framework of Engagement”.  The report looks specifically at how local strengths (chiefs, church leaders, women and youth representatives who deal with local peace and order issues) can link up … Read more →

A paper by Morgan Brigg, Volke Boege and Anouk Ride was completed entitled ”Working with Local Strengths: Supporting States and Interveners to institutionalise the Responsibility to Protect, Solomon Islands Framework of Engagement”.  The report looks specifically at how local strengths (chiefs, church leaders, women and youth representatives who deal with local peace and order issues) can link up with government services, police, aid agencies and the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands for peace and order in communities. Findings are based on field research in selection locations in Isabel, Malaita and Guadalcanal provinces and a workshop on which the key findings were drafted collectively with community representatives. The report and framework for working with local strengths was launched by the Deputy Prime Minister in Honiara 22 June 2011. Research was funded by the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

Anouk Ride signed a consultancy contract for media liasion for the PNA, an innovative group of Pacific Islands that sustainably manage and develop the world’s largest purse seine tuna fishery. The contract will commence in May 2011. For details on the PNA see www.pnatuna.com More details about upcoming PNA events and stories will be available … Read more →

Anouk Ride signed a consultancy contract for media liasion for the PNA, an innovative group of Pacific Islands that sustainably manage and develop the world’s largest purse seine tuna fishery. The contract will commence in May 2011.

For details on the PNA see www.pnatuna.com

More details about upcoming PNA events and stories will be available from the PNA website and this site soon.

A paper was presented by Anouk Ride on behalf of the research team including Dr Diane Bretherton and Dr Asha Bedar on the effects of sentimentality on natural disasters (particularly in the case of the Pakistan earthquake) to the Trauma and Sentimentality Symposium recently held by the Public Memory Research Centre of the University of … Read more →

A paper was presented by Anouk Ride on behalf of the research team including Dr Diane Bretherton and Dr Asha Bedar on the effects of sentimentality on natural disasters (particularly in the case of the Pakistan earthquake) to the Trauma and Sentimentality Symposium recently held by the Public Memory Research Centre of the University of Southern Queensland.

This diverse symposium included researchers from many different fields including psychology, sociology, cultural studies and history and elicited many discussions on broadening perspective on trauma and sentimentality. A publication featuring papers from the symposium will be released shortly.

Recent events in Egypt and other parts of the Arab World recall Indonesia’s transition to democracy, spearheaded by student demonstrations and as described in New Internationalist’s edition entitled Indonesia edited by Anouk Ride. Read the full report here: Power of Protest

Recent events in Egypt and other parts of the Arab World recall Indonesia’s transition to democracy, spearheaded by student demonstrations and as described in New Internationalist’s edition entitled Indonesia edited by Anouk Ride.

Read the full report here: Power of Protest

Most recently, I produced a series of factsheets, folders, brochure and a short film were made for the Oceanic Fisheries Management Project, a UNDP-GEF funded project coordinated by the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency and Secretariat of the Pacific Community and also involving conservation organisations WWF and IUCN (see http://www.ffa.int/gef for project details and downloads). … Read more →

Most recently, I produced a series of factsheets, folders, brochure and a short film were made for the Oceanic Fisheries Management Project, a UNDP-GEF funded project coordinated by the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency and Secretariat of the Pacific Community and also involving conservation organisations WWF and IUCN (see http://www.ffa.int/gef for project details and downloads).

These were featured at World Biodiversity Day 2010 and continued to be used as resources for briefings, education and general awareness.

All designs are by Hatamara Graphics, a Fijian based designer, and printing by my preferred printer Discount Printing in Fitzroy, Australia. We also had limited edition sarongs or lavalavas printed from DJ Graphics in Honiara, Solomon Islands for this project.

This work is project managed from ideas to final printed product and delivery. To query and quote for similar project promotional materials, please contact me.

Two boys travel three continents to follow one monk’s dream, in this untold story from Australia’s colonial history. In 1848, the Spanish missionary Rosendo Salvado, founder of New Norcia Monastery in Western Australia, had an idea. He would prove that Aboriginal people could be educated and ‘civilised’, by taking two Nyungar boys to be schooled … Read more →

Two boys travel three continents to follow one monk’s dream, in this untold story from Australia’s colonial history.

In 1848, the Spanish missionary Rosendo Salvado, founder of New Norcia Monastery in Western Australia, had an idea. He would prove that Aboriginal people could be educated and ‘civilised’, by taking two Nyungar boys to be schooled in Europe.

And so it was that Conaci, aged seven, and Dirimera, aged ten, left their tribe to travel by sea to the racially-divided colony of South Africa, Ireland at the beginning of their nationalist uprising, the United Kingdom in the midst of its industrial revolution, France ravaged by civil war and finally entered a monastery in Naples.

The Grand Experiment is a remarkable – and timely – book. It is a colourful detective story of research through libraries and archives across the world, and very much a beginning of the ‘stolen generations’ story.

Author: Anouk Ride

Published by: Hachette Livre Australia (2007)

Buy the book: Currently sold out. Visit the Amazon page to purchase last remaining copies.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia)

Review from national newspaper, The Australian, 21 April 2007:

Removal under vows

A 19th-century experiment by the Catholic Church to train two Aboriginal boys as monks in Europe has inspired a contemporary retelling, writes Rosemary Neill

IT was a simple sketch, shorn of biographical detail, yet it unsettled Anouk Ride for years. Who were the two unsmiling Aboriginal boys? Why were they dressed in sombre monks’ robes? And why was their picture — sketched in the mid-1800s — still on display 150 years later at the New Norcia monastery in Western Australia?

It was 1996 when Ride first saw the image of the boys and for the next decade these questions pursued her halfway across the world as bit by bit she excavated the remarkable story behind the sketch. Her dogged search for answers has resulted in her first book, The Grand Experiment: Two Boys, Two Cultures. As Ride writes, the drawing “changed my life … I knew that this image had an untold significance for Australian history, and somehow for myself”.

The boys’ story, by turns vivid and poignant, predates yet prefigures the tragedy of the stolen generations, so it seems fitting that The Grand Experiment is released next month, the 10th anniversary of the official stolen generations report, Bringing Them Home. While digging around in monasteries and libraries (some centuries old) in Australia, Spain and Italy, and at Oxford in England, Ride learned that the boys in the drawing were named Conaci and Dirimera, and that they were chosen by Spanish Catholic missionaries to become Australia’s first Benedictine monks. They were from the West Australian Yuet tribe, since thought to have become largely extinct through contact with Western diseases. In 1847, however, Conaci and Dirimera became the first indigenous students at the fledgling New Norcia mission, founded by charismatic Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado. About 130km north of Perth, New Norcia — later implicated in the stolen generations misadventure — still operates as a monastery and its cluster of handsome, Spanish-influenced buildings, hemmed in by wheat fields and eucalypts, has become a tourist attraction in WA.

In 1849, Conaci and Dirimera became the first Aboriginal children to be taken to Europe. This trip, with Salvado — who spoke the Yuet language — as guardian and guide, was effectively a PR exercise to raise money for the Catholic Church. In Europe, the boys were treated like minor celebrities. They met the pope, PiusIX — then in hiding from Italian revolutionaries — and King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies. Within a couple of years Conaci and Dirimera went from roaming the bush and hunting their own food to dining with Italian nobility, studying Latin and Italian, and praying to a new God several times a day.

Over coffee at the State Library of NSW in Sydney, where she conducted some of her research, Ride says she initially thought her book — long-listed for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award last year — “would simply be a story of indigenous children becoming monks, but as it went on it became more extraordinary”. She approached the book without any political agenda, she says, and she hopes it will “illustrate the complexity of what’s happened in our past. At school, for example, I tended to be taught that there were conquerors and victims. Everything is put into this black-and-white scenario where bad intentions equals bad actions equals bad consequences, whereas this clearly is a case, within the context of the time, of somewhat progressive and good intent still having disastrous consequences for the boys involved and for their families.”

The Grand Experiment is a kind of speculative nonfiction in which Ride, a journalist, draws heavily on documentary sources but fills in missing details with her impressions and subjective interpretations of what the boys might have seen, heard or felt. The title refers to Salvado’s plan to educate and convert Aboriginal children, train them as monks and have them preach Catholicism to their own people. (The monks focused on children because indigenous adults showed little interest in being converted.)

This sounds doctrinaire, yet Ride’s portrayal of the Spanish monk is anything but and this is one of her book’s underpinning strengths. She succeeds in humanising all three of her protagonists (Salvado, Conaci and Dirimera). She also paints a delicately balanced picture of the role the monks played in the Yuet people’s lives, contrasting their progressivism with their paternalism; their compassion with their zeal.

Salvado talked up the intellectual prowess of his Aboriginal novices at a time when Americans were still buying and selling slaves. Yet he convinced himself that Conaci and Dirimera left their families and joined the New Norcia mission of their own free will, even though they were just seven and nine at the time. Nor does Ride falsely idealise tribal culture. She notes how, on a trip to Perth, Conaci and Dirimera stayed close to Salvado because without the monk’s protection they risked being seen as intruders and interrogated or killed by local tribes. (They could also be harassed by white authorities for trespassing.)

Ride has mixed feelings about Salvado, who went on to become the bishop of Darwin; she admires his good intentions towards indigenous people but it angered her that he continued “with his grand experiment even when it seemed that failure was inevitable”.

One reads with a sense of quiet devastation how Salvado’s experiment foundered. In 1853, Conaci and Dirimera became ill while studying at the same Italian monastery where Salvado had trained years before. Conaci, a curious, clever boy who had won a medal in Italy for being an outstanding scholar, would never again see his family or the wide-skied landscape in which he had been born. In September 1853, he died from a vaguely diagnosed illness and was buried in a communal monks’ cemetery. He was 13. According to Ride, there are no records to indicate how and when Conaci’s family learned of their son’s death or how they reacted, although we do know his father died the same year.

Ride has visited Conaci’s unmarked grave in Italy and reflects that “it was with a heavy feeling that I realised I could see the burial place that Conaci’s parents and siblings could not have imagined, let alone visited”. Dirimera became depressed after Conaci’s death and eventually returned to WA. He sought refuge in the bush rather than at the mission, but illness continued to plague him and in 1855 he too died, aged 17. Three more Aboriginal children were taken to Europe, Ride says, and all died of Western diseases before the Benedictines gave up their experiment of educating indigenous missionaries abroad. Even though she feels Salvado pushed his experiment too far, she says he “obviously had a great level of affection for the boys”. When she opened the monk’s diary, held in a monastery in Italy, she found it contained locks of hair that had belonged to Conaci and Dirimera.

Ride hopes The Grand Experiment will deepen understanding of our contested past rather than sharpen existing divisions: “For me, part of reconciliation and part of acknowledging what’s happened recently with the stolen generations is acknowledging that complexity; acknowledging that if we’re really going to recognise what happened in our past, then we have to understand the mind-set of people who acted with good intent towards indigenous communities but still got it wrong.” Ride worked on The Grand Experiment on and off for 10 years. “I struggled for a long time to find the right way to tell the story. Initially I was going to write it as a novel. That was disastrous, so I threw it in the bin,” she says with a half-chuckle.

After a peripatetic childhood — her father was an engineering manager who moved around a lot — she majored in journalism at the University of Queensland, following this with a masters degree in international relations. This led to a stint in Britain as editor of the left-leaning New Internationalist magazine, which specialises in aid and development issues. She has led a gypsy life, living in six Australian states as well as the US, Britain and Switzerland. When we meet, she is about to move again, to Melbourne, to study conflict resolution in a PhD program. “Just to make life cheerier,” she jokes. “I’ll basically be studying why some people want to kill each other and other people just have conflict that they resolve in a peaceful manner.”

When Ride first saw the image of Conaci and Dirimera that inspired her book, she had never heard of the stolen generations. Soon after, she signed up as a volunteer with the lobby group, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation. She once interviewed members of the stolen generations, and it shocked her that forced removals had occurred so recently: “All the records were there in the 1870s; the consequences of interfering in indigenous families’ lives, all written down, yet these practices were still taken into the next century, right up until the 1980s. I guess the tragedy, if you like, of Salvado’s experiment was how little was learned.”

Readers of The Grand Experiment will be pleased that one of the boys whose story is featured in the book was honoured by a pilgrimage and ceremony at the site of his unmarked grave. Read details here: http://www.marymackillop.org.au/canonisation/view_newsarticle.cfm?loadref=41&id=432 After publication of the book in 2007, the story generated a lot of interest in Australia, and … Read more →

Readers of The Grand Experiment will be pleased that one of the boys whose story is featured in the book was honoured by a pilgrimage and ceremony at the site of his unmarked grave.

Read details here:
http://www.marymackillop.org.au/canonisation/view_newsarticle.cfm?loadref=41&id=432

After publication of the book in 2007, the story generated a lot of interest in Australia, and now visitors to the Australian Museum can also see the engraving of Conaci and Dirimera and discover more about their lives.

As Bougainville considers opening mining again, community leaders have been vocal in calling for continued involvement in the peace process. As described in a report by Anouk Ride in New Internationalist shortly after the ceasefire, community members must ‘own the peace’ including having a significant role in decision making about the key issues that inflamed … Read more →

As Bougainville considers opening mining again, community leaders have been vocal in calling for continued involvement in the peace process. As described in a report by Anouk Ride in New Internationalist shortly after the ceasefire, community members must ‘own the peace’ including having a significant role in decision making about the key issues that inflamed the conflict.

Read the full report here: The rebel peace

A paper was presented by Dr Diane Bretherton on behalf of the research team including Anouk Ride and Dr Asha Bedar on collective memories and natural disasters (particularly in the case of the Pakistan earthquake) to the International Congress of Applied Psychology recently held by the Australian Psychological Society in Melbourne, Australia. This Congress included … Read more →

A paper was presented by Dr Diane Bretherton on behalf of the research team including Anouk Ride and Dr Asha Bedar on collective memories and natural disasters (particularly in the case of the Pakistan earthquake) to the International Congress of Applied Psychology recently held by the Australian Psychological Society in Melbourne, Australia.

This Congress included eminent keynote speakers and invited symposia organisers, a robust Scientific Program which encompasses applied psychology globally, and a range of workshops.