|
|
Independent Home | News | Sport | Comment | Education | Motoring | Money | Jobs | Travel | Enjoyment
Home
> News
> World
> Australasia
It is an episode that recalls America's Deep South in the 1960s but it happened, allegedly, in Australia this week. Two white farm workers stripped an Aboriginal teenager naked and dragged him through the dirt with a noose around his neck. They hauled him up and down a riverbank, he claims, beat him up and threatened him with a double-barrelled shotgun.
The alleged incident happened in Queensland, where racial tensions were already high following a riot last week on Palm Island. The rampage, in which the police station and the courthouse were petrol bombed, was sparked by the death in custody of an Aboriginal man who suffered internal bleeding after a scuffle with police guards. Palm Island was an ominous reminder of the simmering frustrations of Australia's marginalised black population, and allegations of a Ku Klux Klan-style attack on 16-year-old Alan Boland fuelled fears of more racial violence yesterday. "We call this sadistic torture," said Bert Button, a local Aboriginal leader. "This is KKK-type stuff. It's getting to the stage it is almost open go to maim and kill black fellas."
Tensions are now at boiling point in a nation that, for the most part, chooses to ignore its "Aboriginal problem". Indigenous issues did not figure in October's election, which saw the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, re-elected with an increased majority. Most white Australians are untroubled by the grim statistics of Aboriginal life - that black people die 20 years younger than average, for instance, that they suffer Third World diseases, and are unemployed, imprisoned and murdered at hugely disproportionate rates.
The point may have arrived where politicians and their supporters in Middle Australia are forced to sit up and take notice. The country's original inhabitants are not, by nature, combative. There have been remarkably few disturbances in impoverished and alienated communities that have shared none of the economic rewards of living in one of the world's most prosperous nations.
Over the past year, things have started to change. In February, the Aboriginal ghetto of Redfern in central Sydney witnessed a night of rioting after a boy, Thomas Hickey, died after being flung off his bicycle and impaled on a metal railing. Locals claimed he was being chased by police at the time. An inquest cleared police of any responsibility.
Last week was the turn of Palm Island, a community blighted by years of deprivation and neglect. This time the catalyst was the death in a police cell of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee. An autopsy showed that he died from a ruptured liver and also had four broken ribs. Heavy-handed tactics by police quelling the riot exacerbated frictions.
The alleged incident on the farm at Goondiwindi, in southern Queensland, shocked even cynical observers. According to police, Alan Boland and three others broke into a hut on the farm on Tuesday evening. A worker and his son pursued them; the others escaped, but Alan was caught while swimming across a river. The men allegedly tied his hands and beat him with sticks. He was not seriously hurt, but is being treated in hospital for injuries to his head, chest and upper body, as well as rope burns to his neck.
According to some reports, one of his companions, also a teenager, was tied to a tree and forced to watch his friend being brutalised.
The state premier, Peter Beattie, urged people not to "over-react" and said charges would be laid in relation to the attempted robbery as well as the assault. "Anyone who looks at this objectively would see that as being the law being enforced equally with both black and white," he said. "That's about as fair and even-handed as you can get." The mayor of Goondiwindi, Tom Sullivan, also appealed for calm. "I say to the community, let's see what comes out of this thing, and don't pre-empt things," he said. "People have got to be sensible and calm about these things, and let it go through the normal course of the investigations by police." Two men, aged 44 and 23, were charged last night with assault occasioning actual bodily harm in company. They will appear before magistrates in January.
But in the Aboriginal reserve of Toomelah, where the boy lives, there is anger and disbelief. Locals say he was dragged around in the dirt for almost an hour. Mr Button told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: "We see that this pattern has been going on for years. It's more or less an every-second- day event, not only in Queensland, but other places of Australia, against indigenous people. But these are ones that come to the fore. And then when some Aboriginal persons lose their cool, then they turn around and say that we're the savages, or it's 'blame the victim syndrome' once again."
Such is life for the black underclass in a country where two nations live side by side - a nation of affluent whites, enjoying all the fruits of a place blessed by sunshine and natural resources, and a nation of indigenous blacks, destined to a life of misery, hopelessness and squalor. The latter seek solace in alcohol, drugs and petrol sniffing, and turn their burning resentment upon one another. Violence against women and children is rife in Aboriginal communities.
Few Aboriginals manage to lift themselves out of the conditions in which they were born. Among the few to have succeeded is Michael Long, a former Australian Rules footballer who grew up in the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, where power poles are wrapped in barbed wire to prevent suicidal teenagers from climbing up to electrocute themselves. The Tiwis are also notable for having the world's highest rate of kidney disease: 60 times higher than the rest of Australia.
Long, who became a national hero thanks to his sporting prowess, has grown so frustrated about the plight of his fellow Aboriginals that he set out on a 410-mile walk from Melbourne to the national capital, Canberra, to demand a meeting with the Prime Minister.
He walked about half-way before Mr Howard sent a message saying he would meet him and two other Aboriginal leaders, Patrick Dodson and Paul Briggs, at Parliament House today. Long, whose feet are covered in blisters, has described Mr Howard as cold-hearted for refusing to apologise to the "stolen generations" - Aboriginal children taken from their parents under officially sanctioned assimilation policies. He plans to use today's meeting to urge the Prime Minister to put indigenous affairs back on the national agenda and to visit as many indigenous communities as possible. "I believe it would help Mr Howard to better understand the complex problems facing our people," he said.
But the talks are unlikely to yield concrete results. The Prime Minister has already made plain that he has no intention of changing direction on Aboriginal policy. Last year he abolished the popularly elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, replacing it with a government-appointed body, the National Indigenous Council. Long was offered a seat on the council, which will meet for the first time next week. He declined, saying it would not give Aboriginals a real voice.
Australians, meanwhile, are waiting with trepidation to see whether the attack on Alan Boland provokes more eruptions of violence. Mr Button said: "The community feels saddened in what arose, and we're all angry, particularly still with the fresh memory of the thing in our minds about Palm Island.
"We also still got fresh in our minds about the young kid that was impaled on a steel fence paling down at Redfern. And we're reminding the community in general, and also the police, it is not free season on black fellas." Palm Island remains a tinderbox, patrolled by heavily armed police. Mr Doomadgee's funeral, to be held next week, will be the focus of high emotion. Police have been warned to stay away. The results of a second autopsy have yet to be released, but locals are convinced that he died after being beaten up by his guards. One local indigenous leader has threatened "payback" against the police.
The island, usually out of sight and out of mind, has a troubled history. It earned itself the title of the world's most violent place outside a combat zone in the 1988 Guinness World Records. Deaths in custody are a particularly sore issue for Aboriginals; too many of their number have died in prison and police cells in the past. Last Friday night, 300 people vented their fury.
The police tactics only inflamed the situation. Officers armed with stun guns and semi-automatic weapons reportedly stormed houses after the riot, searching for suspects. Locals claim that children as young as nine were forced to lie face down in the dirt at gunpoint. Twenty-one people have been arrested, and are demanding to be allowed out for the funeral.
A local Aboriginal activist, Sam Watson, said: "We have absolutely no confidence in the Australian so-called justice system." Aboriginals are entirely without a voice at national level. The country's only Aboriginal politician, Aden Ridgeway, was voted out of office in the recent election. Mr Ridgeway said this week that the government's policy of treating all Australians equally did not take account of the vast gulf between black and white. "This government is hell-bent on a philosophical view that it's all about equal treatment, without recognising that in many communities they're behind the eight-ball, so equal treatment often means a perpetuation of the same," he said.
Fred Chaney, who co-chairs Reconciliation Australia, also entered the debate, saying he believed the anger felt by many Aboriginals was justified.
Mr Chaney, who was a government minister responsible for Aboriginal affairs in the 1970s, said progress on indigenous issues had gone "off the boil". He said: "We think it's time to set a new agenda in indigenous affairs and, of course, in reconciliation." Boni Robertson, an Aboriginal academic, expressed horror at the episode on the Queensland farm. "This, on top of Palm Island, is really too much," she told The Australian newspaper. "How much more do they think our people can cope with? We are in a crisis, racially, in this country." Aboriginal leaders have announced a national day of action a week tomorrow, in protest at indigenous deaths in custody. Black people make up 20 per cent of jail inmates, despite being only two per cent of the population.
The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Amanda Vanstone, said this week that deaths in custody had fallen by 50 per cent since the 1980s. But she added: "Recent incidents in Palm Island and Redfern remind us all how far we've got to go."