Australia's Enduring Shame

[Violet_Crumble]

by John Pilger
New Statesman
February 19, 2004

Once again, the neat, placid surface of white Australia is disturbed by those who owned and cared for this country and remain its internal exiles. On 15 February, a crowd of Aboriginal youths set fire to a railway station and fought riot police in a run-down area known as The Block, in the Redfern district of Sydney. It is the last redoubt of Australia's original inhabitants in the centre of a city built on land from which their forebears were first evicted 216 years ago.

On a hot Saturday morning, 17-year-old Thomas "TJ" Hickey was impaled on a metal picket fence in circumstances which the police, politicians and journalists say are "in dispute". There is no dispute in The Block. TJ was being chased by police, or at the very least riding his bike as fast as he could to get away from a provocatively cruising police car.

There is no dispute, because every Aboriginal youth in The Block, and in every city and town in Australia, can expect to be harassed incessantly by police; the vast majority are arrested for petty offences and end up in custody. In the Northern Territory, 89 per cent of an average day's prison arrivals are Aborigines, who comprise 2 per cent of the Australian population. Once inside, many die by their own hand, and some are beaten to death. Think of Stephen Lawrence many times over and you get the picture.

White Australians know this. They know, or they ought to know, that the life expectancy of Aboriginal people is one of the lowest in the world, and that their health is the worst in the world. An entirely preventable disease, trachoma, which has been beaten in many third world countries, still blinds black Australians because of untreated cataracts and appalling living conditions. Epidemics of rheumatic fever and gastroenteritis ravage black communities as they did the slums of 19th-century England.


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