Alternative Interventions

Not all interventions in Aboriginal Australia are inspired by external agents, politics or ideology. Some arise from simple, pragmatic responses to community needs where people and their aspirations are central.

Historian Alan Mayne unravels a story of people, place and relationships. At once both personal and intensely political, this is a journey of ideas into action; intervention through innovation.

In 2010, thirty years after an initial start-up grant of $40,000, an Aboriginal owned science and technology organisation (CAT) was operating with an annual turnover in excess of $20 million and a staff of 130 providing technical services to over 500 remote Aboriginal communities spread across the northern half of Australia. An institution linking people with technology, sustaining livelihoods on country.