Another Country by Nicolas Rothwell

Author:Nicolas Rothwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781921825460
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2007-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Perfect Trap

DURING THE MID-1990S, I often visited a small desert Aboriginal community on the fringes of the Pitjantjatjara lands. Each night, when darkness fell, the sobbing and moaning began; you heard the sound of blows and cries and dreadful cursing shouts. Then, a few hours later, when all was quiet, a little knock came at the clinic’s metal door and a trembling, bruised, raped teenage girl – a different one each night – would plead for shelter from the storm.

The picture has been the same down the years in much of the Western Desert, where child abuse is a familiar rite of passage and girls are routinely violated before their thirteenth birthday. It is the same across remote Aboriginal Australia to this day, from Cape York to the Pilbara: in one Kimberley town, some months ago, a baby was burned and tortured to death by its parents.

There were shocked meetings and community demands for moral reform. The same week, a young mother left her one-year-old baby in a relative’s care and came back to find the child had been raped. Or take another north Kimberley community and the tale of a four-year-old boy, repeatedly raped last year by a mature man, until he had lost control of his bodily functions. The young victim was taken to Perth for surgery, then returned to his community, where he drifted, his parents nowhere to be found, until nine months later he was savagely raped once more, this time by a twelve-year-old assailant.

These stories could be multiplied a hundred-fold: mutilations, gang rapes, assaults on children. They are the nightmare under- side of life in North and Central Australia. And the situation is fast approaching breakdown, for these violent crimes are on the increase in places such as north-east Arnhem Land, the town camps of the Centre and the desert communities south of Alice Springs. Young bush Aborigines – the same people we expect to maintain their traditions, get jobs and walk the line between two worlds – are more than likely to have been raped, battered or sodom ised. Their constant background is one of sickness, malnutrition, domestic and sexual violence, total unemployment and combined alcohol, petrol, drug and kava abuse.

Many remote communities and fringe camps are becoming increasingly dangerous places, especially if you are young or female, or both. All this has been widely described and reported, yet until now this horror has been systematically swept under the carpet or, at best, acknowledged then ignored. Why? This question is the heart of the present crisis, as grave an ethical crisis as Australia has faced.

But many effective devices are in place to keep the disaster out of view of the general public. It’s easier to talk sweetly of reconciliation than to visit the hot, bleak badlands of the indigenous domain, sheltered as they often are in permit-only zones. A brave cadre of nurses, emergency health workers, welfare officers and women’s counsellors patrol the front-line: they all burn out after a few years and are replaced.

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