Baden Offord, Ocean Shores
Wholeheartedly agree with Dave Rastovich’s spot-on letter regarding the value and benefit of The Echo, that it is a ‘trusted window’ (Letters, 20 January).
Since 1992 I have looked to this community paper as a crucial space for intelligent critique, humour, compassion, agency, analysis, and sanity – an antidote to the nasty noise of the often taken-for-granted bellicose and paranoid culture that more than often than not dominates our lives.
Last week’s bracing editorial about the 2021 Human Rights Watch World Report regarding Australia’s failure on human rights is a good example of how vital The Echo is as a community news resource.
Noting a major human rights failure, Aslan Shand points to ‘the unconscionable destruction and desecration’ of Indigenous cultural heritage.
It made me ask, how else can it be explained that the oldest human art the world has known, created over 46,000 years ago in Juukan Gorge, WA (more than 44,000 years before the Bamiyan Buddhas) can be destroyed by Rio Tinto with complete impunity?
I would like to thank The Echo and its team of journalists; for bearing witness to all that is shocking, ironic, unsettling, questionable, complex, daft, funny, as well as uplifting in the weekly columns and editorials.
Calling to account is an essential and dignified feature of The Echo, whether it is doing so of the government, whacky claims made in pub talks, corporate greed hatched in Sydney offices, nasty political campaigns, or of wicked media giants. The Echo has done, and continues to do, a much-needed job.
