Culture? An innocent girl is dead.
Let’s have some truth.
One of the reasons why Aboriginal disadvantage is so intractable is that “culture” keeps getting in the way of addressing it. “Culture” means that we can no longer refer to the five-year-old brutally murdered in an Alice Springs town camp by her real name, the name that will be recorded in the death statistics. “Culture” means that we can’t even identify her apparent assailant or his criminal record, even though his name and his record was plastered all over the media, prior to a Tuesday court ruling that, likewise, now can’t even be mentioned.
Other than when it suddenly can no longer be ignored, Australia collectively turns away from the reality of life as it’s lived in much of remote Australia. Our instinctive tendency is to nod politely when the airline steward says we’re landing in Naarm or acknowledges Eora country. And to criticise anyone who questions the need for letting “uncle this” or “aunty that” open a civic occasion, often now with a lengthy claim about “un-ceded” land. Yet the elders to whom we are accustomed to pay respects and the “country” about which we’re glad to be sentimental, as the town camp killing shows, is hardly hospitable when vulnerable children need protection against predators.
Even to ponder the policy implications of this horrific death is frowned upon, because the victim was Aboriginal. From the Prime Minister down, officialdom has brushed away questions about how such a death could have happened on the grounds that local people need time to grieve. Yet when the child’s father was in gaol, and when the child’s mother seems to have been hosting a late night party when she disappeared, and when the local community seems to have been protecting the perpetrator at least initially, refusing to discuss any of this looks less like respecting the bereaved than protecting the complicit.
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