Mabo--A Symbol of Struggle by Seán Flood

Author:Seán Flood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sean A Flood
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Without the joint management plan, Daisy Ward’s hopes to preserve culture are dashed. The loss of Patjarr cultural heritage, along with the death of Mr Ward, is a cruel and devastating blow for the Indigenous community, which dishonours all Australians. Charlie Perkins’ aphorism ‘mongrel bastards’ is apt to describe those responsible for his death as well as the Barnett government’s failure to enter a joint management agreement.

On and on it goes. In mid-2014 yet another death in police custody; in Western Australia the death of Miss Dhu, a 22-year old Aboriginal woman jailed for unpaid fines! She died ‘after reportedly begging police for medical attention’.33 The Coronial enquiry into Miss Dhu’s death is hearing evidence that she died because of scorn and neglect. Her anguish and screams of pain were dismissively treated by the police as faking it.34 Would a young white woman be so shamefully treated by police who have a duty of care for their prisoners? The evidence given by Senior Constable Shelly Burgess at the Perth coronial inquest (denied in part by the Sergeant in charge of the cells) was that shortly before Miss Dhu was taken to hospital, where she was dead on arrival, she heard the custody Sergeant whisper words in Miss Dhu’s ear. Accepting that Senior Constable Burgess had no apparent motive or reason to lie on oath the last words Miss Dhu heard, in her short life, were not words of comfort or ‘we love you darling’ from her grandmother, who was denied information and access to her, but cruel cutting words, ‘You will sit this out. You are full of shit.’35 It was reported he had earlier referred to her as ‘a fucking junkie.’ Her death knell for traffic fines. When the police did get around to taking her to hospital they had no right to seek to influence the hospital medical staff with their false opinion she was putting it on.36

The police force are authority figures, especially in regional centres like Port Headland. In the case of Miss Dhu, the attitude of the police could have misled the doctors and nurses so completely the hospital did not even take her temperature.37 The doctor who treated her, Dr Naderi, admitted it was a ‘significant failure’ not to have taken the patient’s temperature.38 Doctors should never be deflected from the exercise of their proper procedures when presented with a patient in pain. All she was given was paracetamol as she was dying of septic shock and returned to a prison cell where she died in agonising pain the next day.

Ms Dhu’s agony, her cries of pain, her desperate calls for help from her jail cell will echo across her country, across the Pilbara and across Australia until the institutional causes of her death are changed and the nation hears her plea for recognition as an equal human entitled to the dignity she was denied; entitled to proper treatment and regard for the pain she was so obviously suffering as she died, a cruel death, in a cage, alone, bereft of family or friends.

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