Mourning
A Secret Australia
By John Pilger
17 February, 2007
JohnPilger.com
How many days of mourning have
I attended? Vivid in the memory are wreaths thrown on to Sydney Harbour,
and men in crumpled hats and women in loose frocks standing on foreshores
where their forebears saw the first ships carrying white men. On 14
February, there was a day of mourning for T J Hickey, an Aboriginal
boy who was chased by police three years ago and ended up impaled on
a spiked iron fence in The Block, a ghetto within sight of Sydney's
banks and corporate towers. Commemorative silences were held for "TJ"
and his violent death was likened to Australia's many Aboriginal deaths
in custody, such as that of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island.
Palm Island is one of the
most beautiful on the Great Barrier Reef, yet few outsiders take the
short flight from Townsville. Established in 1918 as a detention camp
for Aboriginal men, women and children convicted of the crimes of homelessness,
rebelliousness and drunkenness, it has changed mostly on the surface.
When I first went there in 1980, an epidemic of gastroenteritis was
deemed life-threatening. Two years later, researchers discovered in
the records of the Queensland Health Department that Aboriginal deaths
from common, infectious diseases were up to 300 times higher than the
white average, and the highest in the world. In the cemetery, overlooking
waves breaking gently on the coral reef, many of the headstones bear
the names of children.
On 26 January last, a date
known as Australia Day by whites celebrating their "settlement"
(Aborigines call it Invasion Day), something very unusual happened.
It was announced that a police sergeant, Chris Hurley, would be charged
with the manslaughter of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In 2004, Hurley arrested
Mulrunji for swearing and drunkenness; once in police custody, Mulrunji
had his liver torn in two.
"These actions of Sergeant
Hurley," said the deputy coroner, "caused the fatal injuries."
However, Queensland's director of public prosecutions decided not to
lay charges. This is standard practice. In 1989, a royal commission
inquired into more than 100 deaths in custody, many of them demonstrably
murder or manslaughter. "I had no conception," wrote the chief
commissioner, Elliott Johnston, "of the degree of . . . abuse of
personal power, utter paternalism, open contempt and total indifference
with which so many Aboriginal people were visited on a day-to-day basis."
So spoke the voice of Australian
liberalism and justice. Of the 339 recommendations made by the royal
commission, not one called for criminal charges. The prosecution of
Sergeant Hurley is the first of its kind, and it happened only because
the Queensland government was virtually dragooned into seeking the independent
opinion of a retired chief justice of New South Wales.
Of all the great Australian
pastimes, silence is currently the most popular. This is largely due
to a fear of speaking out, described in a rare book, Silencing Dissent,
by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison. The authors' fellow Australian
academics and writers say little if anything publicly that might upset
the all-controlling Bushites of John Howard's government and its inspectorate
in the media. Trial by media of Australia's domestic victims, be they
Aboriginal or Muslim, is standard practice. Officially approved platitudes
pass as news and commentary, along with weary stereotypes of much of
humanity, from heroic Aussie cricketers to whingeing Poms and mad mullahs.
True Australian heroes go unrecognised, such as Arthur Murray, a former
Aboriginal union organiser who has fought unremittingly for 25 years
for justice for his son Eddie, killed in police custody, and for all
his people. Few white Australians will have heard of Arthur, whose dignity
and courage evoke a secret history, described by the historian Henry
Reynolds as the "embarrassment of bloodied billabongs" (lakes).
Australian "values"
and national pride are political distractions of the moment in a nation
witlessly at war in Iraq and Afghanistan – a nation with up to
43 per cent youth unemployment at home and, in some places, the majority
of its black youths in custody.
"Australian patriotism,"
says the cultural historian Tony Moore, "should be first and foremost
based on taking the piss, of laughing, not just at one's self but at
the powerful . . ." He calls this "bullshit detection".
Terrific idea, Tony, but I suggest you first run it by Arthur Murray
and the people of The Block and Palm Island; for until we whites give
back to black Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own.
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