UDK 323.13(94:=96) 
AUTONOMOUS ABORIGINAL COMMUNITIES IN AUSTRALIA: 
BESIEGED BY SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION, HOW CAN THEY MOVE 
FORWARD? 
Adi Wimmer 
Abstract 
Discourses of Australian Aboriginal culture have all too often relied on the "noble savage" trope, 
in Australia as in Europe. There were practical outcomes of such views, most notably the creation 
of over a hundred self-governed indigenous communities in the 1980s, most of them in the Northern 
territories.-'fhe architect of'theplan-was-Nuggett Goombs, a-top Ganberra administrator and advisor to 
Whitlam and Hawke. His idea was to allow Aborigines a "pre-contact" lifestyle and to shield them from 
all evil "white" influences. Neither worked. On the contrary, it has now emerged that the leftist, liberal 
consensus on how to "empower" Aboriginal culture has resulted in the exact opposite, in degradation, 
alcoholism, and sexual violence. This is not only due to passivity in indigenous communities but also 
to a decade-long denial of their dysfunctionality by the white courts, academics, and lawmakers. 
KEVIN RUDD'S APOLOGY AND A SHORT INTRODUCTION 
In November of 2007, the head of the Australian Labor party Kevin Rudd won the 
Australian general elections, ending 11 years of conservative government. On 13th Febru-
ary 2008 he gave a speech to the Australian Parliament and to millions of Australians 
glued to their TV sets in which he uttered the long-awaited "Sorry" to the indigenous 
population. Rudd apologized for two centuries of discrimination, but the focus of his 
apology was pitched to the so-called "Stolen Generations". The occasion was reported 
all over the globe, allowing Rudd to bask in the glory of the moment. His popularity rose 
by 20% over the next two weeks (Weekend Australian, 23 February 2009, p.13). John 
Howard, the PM of the previous 11 years had refused to offer such an apology. 
PM Rudd's speech was welcomed by all except the most churlish members of the 
Aboriginal community. It was welcomed not leastly because it offered a respite from 
months of relentless media attacks on Aboriginal leaders. What was there to criticize 
within the wide field of Aboriginal culture, a culture that in Australia is heavily subsi-
dized and protected, and which in European discourses has been praised to the point of 
glamorizing? The short answer is: Rampant and systemic sexual violence in self-governed 
Aboriginal communities. By systemic one means as part of the operations of a system. 
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It was revealed that in remote communities, a routine of sexual abuses of girls and 
boys by Aboriginal power-men had evolved which went on undetected and unchecked 
for almost 30 years. To quote just one of many reports: the Child Rights Information 
Network (CRIN) reported "horrific levels of sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal com-
munities, including the rape of a baby." Details of the report were: 
At an Aboriginal camp in central Australia, a four-year-old girl drowned while be-
ing raped by a teenager who had been sniffing petrol. In other cases two very young 
children - including a seven-month old baby - were sexually assaulted by adult men 
while their mothers were elsewhere drinking alcohol. Both children needed surgery 
for their injuries. Dr Nanette Rogers, who is a Crown prosecutor in the Northern Ter-
ritory, said that Aboriginal settlements were suffering from tragedy fatigue, where 
monstrous crimes appeared unremarkable. "All child sexual assault in central Australia 
is happening at much higher rates than are currently being reported to police," she 
said. "Horrible offences committed on really small children, it is beyond most people's 
comprehension and range of human experience." (CRIN 2006). 
The Robertson report of 2000 had already stated that in NSW, Aboriginal children 
are twice as likely to be sexually abused as in mainstream society. It also found that 88% 
of child sexual abuse cases are not reported. And this was New South Wales, not the North, 
where the real centres of sexual violence are. Nicholas Rothwell, a journalist with The 
-Australian-and-an expert of many years on-Aboriginal issues, wrote that"fromCape York 
to the Pilbara ( ... ) child abuse is a familiar rite of passage and girls are routinely violated 
before their 13th birthday" (qut. Nowra, 45). 
How could Aboriginal culture deteriorate so badly? Here is what happened and 
why. 
NUGGET COOMBS AND ABORIGINAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 
In 1976 the highly respected Labor politician Nugget Coombs came up with a 
plan how to save Aboriginal culture. His plan provided for self-governing communities 
which were to be sealed off from the rest of Australia. No white person would be al-
lowed to enter these communities without first obtaining a permit. In these communities, 
Aborigines would find the conditions to maintain their traditional life-styles, to have 
their own laws and to pursue their own educational needs. The government would assist 
these communities financially. Aboriginal culture would thrive in a political, social and 
legal matrix whose conception was emphatically autonomous and authentic. Coombs 
and his ideas had the full support ofleft-liberal academics as well as most of the Labour 
party rank and file. By the time it was implemented under PM Bob Hawke in the early 
1980s, it had bi-partisan support. 
The idea was already flawed in the 1970s, but in the 21 st Century it has become 
totally untenable. Cell phones, videos and DVDs, the internet (with its easy access to 
pornography and violence) and other technical 'achievements' of the late 20th Century 
have rendered the local basis in these communities obsolete. Traditional culture no 
longer thrives and it is questionable whether it ever did; it is certainly less healthy 
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now than before the referendum of 1967. Literacy amongst present day Aboriginal 
youth is lower than in their parent generation. And above all: these communities, 
sealed off as they were from the media, became dysfunctional in ways that make 
William Golding's dystopic vision in Lord of the Flies appear like a harmless fairy 
tale. Sexual abuse of very young girls has become systemic and substance abuse has 
ravaged most communities. "Viewing pornography is commonplace" (Nowra 37); the 
collective moral fibre has degenerated to a point where the most irresponsible activity 
draws no response. These matters now represent the most powerful public discourse 
in Australia, particularly since an unprecedented government action two years ago, 
the so-called "Intervention". 
On June 21, 2007, PM John Howard and his Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal 
Brough, declared Australia could no longer ignore the shame of sexual abuse against 
children in indigenous communities. They ordered an unprecedented intervention by 
medical teams, the military and federal law into the Northern Territory's Aboriginal 
communities. Prior to this move, there had been a wave of governmental, TV and news-
paper reports all clamouring for action. The most damning was the "The Little Children 
Are Sacred" Report.1 Amongst its major findings was the statement that "Underlying 
the Inquiry's findings was the common view that sexual abuse of Aboriginal children 
is happening largely because of the breakdown of Aboriginal culture and society." The 
first point made in the Inquiry's summing up was that "Child sexual abuse is serious, 
Wide-spread and often unreportea:" - -- - - -- - - - - - - ---- --- -- - - -
Despite unease in some Labor hearts, and despite loud protest from the Labor 
Premier in Darwin, Kevin Rudd (the then leader of the opposition) professed support 
for the intervention. However, how to straighten out the mess that a misguided liberal 
policy has caused, and how to strike the proper balance between local and global culture, 
is yet an unresolved issue. 
GOING BACK TO THE ROOTS: 1967 AND A DEMAND FOR FURTHER 
ACTION 
Australian Aborigines were given full civic rights through a referendum in 1967 
and a subsequent Act of Parliament in 1968. But that new legislation did not all at once 
erase all inequalities. Something had to be done that would go beyond a simple legal 
act. The leading intellectuals, sociologists, historians and artists were all busy drawing 
up plans for a better Aboriginal future. 
The most influential of these was a high-ranking Australian government adminis-
trator and advisor, H.C. 'Nugget' Coombs. In 1968 he became the Director of the newly 
created 'Council for Aboriginal Affairs.' In 1970 he was promoted to the post of chief 
advisor to Gough Whitlam, the head of the Labor Party, who won the general elections 
of 1972- and Coombs had a small share in this victory as he formulated Labor's "Abo-
1 Web reference: http://www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au. A Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal 
Children from Sexual Abuse was established by the Northern Territories government on 8 August 2006. 
Its final report was released June 15, 2007. The purpose of the Inquiry was to find better ways to protect 
Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. 
113 
riginal Policy" paper (Wikipedia). Coombs thought of himself as a dedicated friend of 
Australia's Aboriginality and he became the chief agent of a new policy. 
As H.C. Coombs himself argued in an interview: 
( ... )what we have to do is to accept the fact that Aborigines are different. They do 
have a different way of seeing the world and understanding it, they have a different 
vision of what the place should be like. They are autonomous their - by their nature 
yes a fundamental thing in Aboriginal society that what Judge Blackburn described it 
as a society which is run by laws not by men - or women. And I think that's important, 
they - nobody, no Aboriginal has the right to tell any other Aboriginal what he must do, 
or should do. Autonomy's - autonomy is fundamental to their ways of thinking now, 
I think we have, we might have prepared to spend money on them, we're prepared to 
offer them this and that and educate them and so on, but what we won't do is allow 
them to be different. (Source: www.australianbiography.gov.au/coombs/interview) 
Conducted in 1992. 
Of course Aborigines are "different", but Coombs was not aware what consequences 
his idea of an autonomous life-style in remote areas of the continent would have. The es-
sence of his policy was to allow Aborigines a return to their culture as it had been practiced 
before 1788. Coombs and the politicians he advised believed Aboriginal Australians 
would be better served if they were insulated from the negative impact of 'whitefeller' 
culture. To that end, they were invited to stay in remote areas & to revive their original 
hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They were also advised to abandon domesticated animals, 
farmed crops and a monetary system. 
Whitlam had great faith in Nugget Coombs, but the idea of autonomous Aboriginal 
communities was only realized during Bob Hawke's tenure. Leave them alone, was the 
motto, and they will themselves shape their future. The plan was in a large measure born out 
of shame over what had been done to Aboriginal people over the past 180 years. Coupled 
with that shame was an unrealistic view of the worth and potential of Aboriginal society, 
as Louis Nowra has observed: "At the( .. ) time there was a growing romantisation amongst 
the general population, especially from those on the liberal and left-wing side of politics 
and among New Agers in particular" (2007, 31). Nowra also finds the "idealisation" of 
Aboriginal life "epitomized" in Nugget Coombs (ibid., 32). Similarly 'romantic' views also 
prevail in Europe, as the huge success of Marlo Morgan's novel Mutant Message Down 
Under (1991 2) demonstrates. 
The great flaw in Coombs' plan was that it did not provide for any sustainable 
economic base for these communities. Labor has traditionally held the notion in disdain 
that culture must have an economic basis and had unrealistic hopes that the empower-
ment of 'the local' would somehow deliver the future. And 'the local' was, in this case, 
2 Mutant Message Down Under was on the US best-seller list for 25 weeks. The New-Age author claimed 
she had been on a four-month 'Walkabout' with a hitherto unknown W.A. tribe. That her yarn was all fab-
ricated had to be admitted after representatives of the Nyoongar people staged a sit-in in front of the Los 
Angeles based publisher. The German translation titled Traumfanger sold roughly 100.000 copies and a 
sequel is still in the shops. In 1995 there were plans for a film adaptation, but these came to a halt when once 
again, W.A. Aborigines (under the leadership of Robert Eggington) flew to Hollywood to protest. In a press 
statement, Eggington said Morgan had "taken away the right for Aboriginal people to tell their own story 
as she saturates the American market with a complete fabrication." Websource: http://www.mountainman. 
com.au/news96_5.html (27 Feb 2009) 
114 
an indigenous culture that was still largely unknown to Australians. There were no plans 
for training facilities, for higher education, for literacy programmes - because these 
were, and are, parts of white culture. In white Australia, of course every child has by law 
to go to school between the ages of 6 and 16. This law was considered non-binding for 
Aboriginal communities. "Let them decide whether school is necessary" was an often 
heard view, and there was also the nai"ve notion that a good command of English was 
not necessary if young people had a good command of their own Aboriginal language. 
Both languages, so the politically correct view was, were equally important. Nonsense. 
What job opportunities does a mono-lingual Aboriginal boy or girl have in mainstream 
Australian society? 
How muddled Nugget Coombs was on the issue of education is shown in another 
passage of the interview cited above in which he is asked about education: 
( ... )starting with the education of how they are changing the way in which children, 
from the very beginning, are introduced to the world and to the ... and learn how to 
be Aborigines or to ... and those are - those things are very important and I, yeah so 
that as I say this is one area where, not because of our - I think our policies are almost 
universally wrong in relation to Aborigines. (Ibid.) 
Coombs argued that self-governed indigenous communities would have to be given 
some seed money before becoming self-sufficient, but he did not have any idea when that 
point would De reachea. file handouts became habitual, and indigenous cominuniiies -de~ 
pendent on them. "Sit-down money" was the term created for government support because 
the recipients were not required to do anything in return. That would have been considered 
'racist'. So no responsibilities were attached. 3 And the people in those communities were 
content to live a life in idleness, and the speedy consequence was alcohol abuse. 
ALCOHOL ABUSE 
Since the communities were autonomous, no laws to ban alcohol could be passed. 
(A ban on selling alcohol to the indigenous population existed until 1968: it was repealed 
after the 1967 referendum.) The politically correct advisors to the government (academ-
ics, mostly) did not see 'grog' (to use the Australian vernacular) as a problem. They 
lived in denial. I myself have heard the opinion: ''Alcoholism isn't any worse amongst 
Aborigines; it is just that they drink in public and the whites drink at home, so theirs is 
visible and ours is not." Well intentioned, but totally wrong. A whitewash of the real 
dimensions of alcohol abuse. 
First of all, since traditional Aboriginal culture did not know alcohol it is much 
more addictive to them than to us. Secondly, when there is nothing to do, when there 
is pure boredom, addictive drinking is more likely to occur than in a fulfilled working 
life. The CRIN Report mentioned above points at a concrete link between violence and 
alcohol: 
3 In Queensland, unemployment pay to indigenous parents is now tied to the requirement of regular 
school attendance of their children. 
115 
Central Australia has the highest murder rate in Australia, at ten times the national 
average. Alcohol and drug abuse have caused many impoverished native settlements 
to self-destruct. 
An even more serious addiction is petrol sniffing, which has become so frequent 
the government was forced to introduce a type of gasoline in Central Australia that is 
'non-sniffable'. Sniffing petrol damages the brain and addicts die after relatively short 
periods of addiction. The syndrome was given serious treatment in a feature film with 
the title Yolngu Boy (Stephen Johnson, 2001). 
We now know that alcoholism is rampant amongst Aborigines, and deadly. Let me 
refer you to a newspaper report about a community located in Northern Queensland, on the 
West coast of the Cape York peninsula. It is already a community with a limited supply of 
alcohol - limited to weekends. The beer supply boat arrives at 9 in the morning and takes it 
to the local pub as well as to some shops. By 11 the first shouts and fights are heard. By the 
afternoon, comatose figures line the streets. The whole male community is drunk. But this 
isn't the only effect. The men beat their wives and children. As a measure of self-protection 
- this is how the report went on - the wives organize themselves into weekend trips into the 
bush to escape domestic violence. They hide until Monday morning when their husbands' 
drunkenness has worn off (Opinion, 2007). A similar case was reported by Mary Ellen Jordon 
on the Arnhem community ofManingrida, where the 'grog' would be delivered only every 
two weeks. Jordon concluderl her report with the words: "I knew that women w~re bashed, 
raped and assaulted every time grog came into town" (qut. Nowra, 39). 
ABORIGINAL VIOLENCE: A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE 
That none of this made it into the collective awareness of the nation is to a large extent 
due to a conspiracy of silence amongst well-wishing liberals, social workers, and academics. 
You don't play into the hands of the racists, was the unspoken agreement. The first voice 
breaking that silence was that of an anthropologist, and even he had waited for many years 
to "come out"4• He gave a paper at a conference titled "The Politics of Suffering" which 
was published in 2001, but had zero impact in the general population. In it Sutton writes of 
the rapid deterioration of a community which he had known and in which he had repeatedly 
lived since 1970 after a "wet-shop" was opened in 1985. He returned to it in 2000 for a double 
funeral of two people he knew. But there had been many more casualties: 
[E]ight people known to me have died at their own hands, two of them women, six of 
them men. Five of these were young people. From the same community in the same 
period, 13 people known to me have been victims of homicide, 8 of them women, 5 
of them men, and 12 others (9 men and 3 women) have committed homicide. Most 
of these, again, were young people, and most of the homicides occurred in the home 
settlement of both assailant and victim. Of the eight spousal murders in this list, seven 
involved a man killing his female partner, only one a woman killing her husband. In 
almost all cases, assailants and victims were also relatives whose families had been 
linked to one another for generations (2001, p. 125. (Sutton: Web reference, 2001.) 
4 Personal correspondence. 
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Sutton's paper had no echo either in the media or in policy making. It was social 
workers of indigenous communities who blew the whistle a few years later. In 2004 two 
newspapers, The Australian and The Age began to report on wide-spread sexual abuse 
and rampant alcoholism. The academic establishment as well as Aboriginal leaders im-
mediately closed ranks and denied these allegations. A typical example was the journalist, 
film director and producer Philip Adams, whose achievements in the field of Australian 
political culture are many and great. He averred that "the public outcry" about the vari-
ous cases of violence were "an example of conservatives using the information to pick 
on Aborigines." And more denial came spouting from his pen: "[T]here is just as much 
domestic violence in the general community" (qut. Nowra, 33). But the reports did not 
stop, and in 2006 the lid flew off. More and more social workers came forward and spoke 
to the press about how they had been intimidated by Aboriginal elders NOT to report of 
the abuses or else they would lose their jobs. For many years this threat had worked, but 
now some social workers were so ashamed of their silence that risking their jobs, they 
blew the whistle. And then a veritable tsunami of reporting crashed over Australia. An 
article in The Age quoted a social worker: In this community [which was in central S.A.] 
you will be hard pressed to find a 13-year old girl that has not been raped by her uncle, 
her father, or other relatives. Other reports spoke of systemic domestic violence, violence 
which often enough resulted in the death of a beaten wife - and the perpetrators usually 
came off with very light sentences. 
Meanwhile, Peter Sutton has worked his 2001 essay into a full-length study (MUP 
2009). It provoked controversy in Australia, but also much praise, for instance from Professor 
Marcia Langton (who is the only indigenous person to hold a professorship in Australia, 
at Melbourne University). In her introduction to the book, Langton called Sutton's study 
"a powerful corrective to the romantic, misinformed fabulations about Aborigines as a 
speciaLkind of modern 'noble savage"'. But Sutton did more than buttress his report of 
2001. There are three main points one can discern. The first addresses how racially liberal 
attitudes have actually been more harmful than beneficial to indigenous communities. 
Second, as the book' s subtitle "The Collapse of the liberal Consensus" already reveals, 
he attacks as "totally unscientific mumbo-jumbo" the long-held liberal view that a formal 
treaty, or handing back large tracts of lands, would somehow 'empower' dysfunctional 
communities. Thirdly, and this is the most contentious view, he argues that a number of 
Aboriginal problems, from low life expectancy to sexual violence, are an after-effect "of 
ancient, pre-existent social and cultural factors that have continued ( ... ) into the lives of 
people living today" (qut Neill, 17) 
To provide a better picture, here are a few further reports, starting with one that is 
about Australia's best known interior city, Alice Springs. It has an Aboriginal population 
of appr. 6.000, which is 25% of the population. In 1966 there were 165 cases of Aboriginal 
women getting treatment in the hospitals for injuries resulting from beatings by their partners. 
In 2006 this figure rose to 800 cases, a five-fold increase. According to my computation, 
of the 2.000 Aboriginal women in Alice who are between 18 and 65 years, a full 40% were 
beaten so badly that they needed hospitalization - in one year alone. Alice has a murder 
rate that is 10 times the national average. Alice Springs has an alcohol consumption that is 
70% above the national average (Nowra, p. 7). 
117 
In his Aboriginal Health and History (1993), Dr Ernest Hunter established that in 
the Aboriginal population of the Kimberleys, an indigenous woman was twice as likely to 
be killed by her husband than in the white community. He had known of this fact as early 
as in 1984. 
A case occurred in an Aboriginal community in Araru (Coburg Peninsula) in which a 
27-year old pregnant woman sought protection from her husband and it was denied because 
police were told not to interfere in the affairs of Aborigines. She reported her husband for 
blatant violence 29 times, and the police never arrested the man. A psychologist filed a re-
port to the social workers of the district in which he predicted: this woman will eventually 
be killed. Nothing was done, and one can only marvel at the total passivity of both police 
and judicial systems. On April 25 2005 she was beaten to death, for refusing to bring him a 
glass of water. At the time of the murder, the husband was already on parole for viciously 
beating his wife months earlier. The man received a mild jail sentence of 6 years (qut. 
Nowra 40-41) 
In another and well-publicised case of 2002 that I remember very well, a man in a 
community about 300 km from Darwin beat his wife to death for not telling him she intended 
to go to Darwin shopping and for staying away overnight. He beat her with a branch from 
a tree and there were about a dozen witnesses who did not stop the man. The woman died 
in a Darwin hospital from multiple injuries and internal bleeding. Her killer was sent to jail 
for all of 2 years. The judge asked a community elder whether the man would be received 
back into the community when he came out of jail, and this elder said yes, there was sup-
port fore the man. His wife had wronged him, he said. After a public outcry the sentence 
was increased to three years. 
Another man was sentenced to 3 years after beating his wife to death while drunk. He 
showed absolutely no remorse. In court he reported how he had left his wife unconscious 
on the floor after giving her a thrashing and had gone to sleep. He was astonished in the 
morning to find her dead. "I thought she would wake up eventually" he explained to the 
police, "she usually does" (qut. Nowra, 44) 
In VIC where the Abor population is a mere 1 %, 12% of children in state care and 
protection are Aboriginal children. From 1997 to 2000, the rate of removal from abusive 
parents rose by 50%. There are also troubling reports that the rape of boys has risen dra-
matically. A survey conducted in QLD and the NT in 2006 reported that a full 10% of all 
Aboriginal boys had been raped before the age of 16, and a further 15% said anal rape had 
been attempted on them. 33% reported they had been sexually abused in other ways. Women 
in remote communities now refuse to allow their 12 or 13 year old boys to go out into the 
desert with their uncles for the customary initiation or Tjukurrpa rites as so many have told 
them afterwards that they had been pack-raped. 
In W.A., sexual crimes in the Aboriginal community rose tenfold between 1981 and 
2001. In Queensland it was reported that an under-age Aboriginal girl was ten times more 
likely to be raped than a white girl. A spin-off is that sexually transmitted diseases are hor-
rifically frequent in under-age Aboriginal youths, as a result of having become rape victims. 
Syphilis amongst Aborigines in the NT is 65 times the rate of the non-indigenous population. 
In Alice Springs, it was 70 times as high (qut. Nowra, 49). 
Speaking of Alice Springs, in late 2005 four girls aged between 7 and 15 were di-
agnosed with multiple infections, including syphilis. The girls named the men with whom 
118 
they had had sex. The hospital notified the social workers. 7 months later, health workers 
wanted to know what the child-care department had done about the case. They found that 
the department contacted these men only to tell them they needed medical treatment! 
THE MARCH OF CORRUPTION 
The evidence on what lies at the bottom of the malaise is quite clear. Left to themselves, 
the self-governed communities fell under the sway of a powerful elite of corrupt elders. They 
decided on how to use the government funds, and they formed a mafia-like structure which 
killed any community spirit. Little wonder then that in several communities, the women have 
petitioned their state governments to remove the power from the hands of their kinsmen, and 
to restore white administration and white policing. 
Lest I be accused of a one-sided analysis, I must add that the failure of white institu-
tions is equally mind-boggling. So great has been the faith in the laissez faire approach to 
Aboriginal culture that a kind of dogma arose which laid down that any white interference 
would only make matters worse. It is a fine philosophy, but it fails to take into account what 
happens to the weakest members of that culture. What happened in a self-governed com-
munity in April 2006 provides ample illustration. 
Aurukun lies on the eastern coast of the Cape York peninsula. A ten-year old 
girl was-gang..: raped by fiine men; six ofwlfol:ll were under tne age oflK Tlie girl was 
described as intellectually retarded. She had been removed from her alcoholic mother 
and was now in the care of white foster parents in Brisbane. But then a relative died 
and the local social workers (ironically called the "Child Safety Office") decided she 
had to attend the funeral in order to maintain links with the family. She was flown 
to Aurukun and given into the temporary care of an aunt. The same evening as she 
was going for a stroll she was set upon and gang raped. Her aunt told her not tell the 
police. So she was raped again, by the same gang. Again she did not tell the police 
(she had been instructed that this would land well-respected boys and men of her own 
family in jail) but she went to two white social workers, both women, asking about 
the symptoms of VD. These women did not report the case to the police either, but 
at least they ordered a medical check-up. The result was the girl had been infected 
with gonorrhea. Even then the case was not reported: one social worker actually 
inquired from the hospital whether gonorrhea could be contracted in a non-sexual 
way! Only after the girl returned to Brisbane was the police informed. In turn, the 
local police in Aurukun were alerted. They hauled all nine men in and got confessions 
from all of them. However, all of them were released back into the community. In 
December 2007 came the trial. The state attorney applied for suspended sentences, 
and the court agreed. So nobody went to jail. This sent a powerful message to the 
community, namely that Aboriginal men were exempt from any responsibility for 
their sexual crimes. 
The case was picked up by The Australian soon afterwards and as a result, both 
Kevin Rudd (the newly elected PM) as well as Queensland Premier Anna Bligh recorded 
their horror about this lenient sentencing. Noel Pearson was interviewed on ABC's "The 
7.30 Report" on December I21h; here is an excerpt from the Report: 
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Pearson, a long-time advocate of law and order and the scrapping of welfare, argued 
that "lenient sentencing" and "passive welfare" had caused a complete breakdown in 
social norms, not just in Aurukun, but throughout Cape York (Allan 2007) 
Aurukun is described as fairly typical. It is a neglected city with no job prospects 
where the moral fibre and the will of its population to take charge of their fate had broken 
down. Outrageous actions no longer drew any response, Pearson argued. But he went 
further than that: 
Pearson outlined an even broader agenda, insisting that courts must stop taking into 
account the historical dispossession and oppression of indigenous people: "In fact, 
part of the whole breakdown, the social and cultural breakdown, that we see in our 
communities is the consequence of courts taking into account the historical and social 
background of Aboriginal offenders." (Ibid.) 
Later Pearson speculated that the only way out might be to remove all children above 
grade four to boarding schools in the major cities in order to remove them from the bad 
influence of their dysfunctional communities. This however immediately conjures up echoes 
of the "Stolen Generation" and so the proposal will almost certainly not be pursued any 
further.5 Pearson does not advocate that these young Aboriginal people should cut all ties 
to their local community and culture, but he does suggest that unless they prioritize proper 
·'white' schooling and a familiarity with standard systems of knowledge they will never 
become active and valuable members of Australian society. 
One question that these cases raise is whether Aboriginal culture has not always been 
mysoginist; Peter Sutton's study arrives at this conclusion. Letters from the early colonists, 
reports such as Arthur Phillip's journal of the First Fleet Colony and by his officer Watkin 
Tench (1793) give strong indications in that direction. 6 And what are we to make of convicted 
rapist Geoff Clark, the ATSIC president between 1999 and 2004? In 2001, Geoff Clark was 
indicted on four independent cases of rape. He used ATSIC money to pay his attorneys, 
managing to delay the court cases. Despite the investigations against him, the ATSIC Board 
re-elected him as Chairman in 2003. Three of the women withdrew their cases on technicali-
ties (they had been reported more than 30 years after the actual rape date.) But the fourth 
case resulted in Clark's conviction. In December 2007 after battling his indictment through 
all court levels, he was found guilty of twice leading a pack-rape of 14-year old Carol Ann 
Stingel in 1971 (Uebergang, 2). Clark's bathetic comment on his conviction was that it "rep-
resents the lowest point in the history of this country" (Wikipedia, entry on Geoff Clark). 
In May 2009 the German journal GEO published an interview with Tom Calma, the 
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimi-
5 In an interview with ABC's "Lateline" presenter Tony Jones (June 3, 2007) Louis Nowra confronted 
the issue of removing children from Aboriginal families - for their own safety: "There's also a - there's 
a secret that nobody really talks about because Aboriginal children are taken from their communities at a 
rate much higher than at the times of assimilation in 1920s, 1930s. So in Victoria 1 per cent of children are 
Aboriginal but 12 per cent are taken from their homes because of the violence and because of the alcohol. 
Now the trouble is many more should be taken." Web reference: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007 / 
s1864812.htm 
6 For a proper debate on this, see Livio Dobrez' excellent article in Zeitschriftftir Australienstudien 21122 
(2007), pp. 36-45 (Klagenfurt). 
120 
nation Commissioner of the Kevin Rudd government (Albig, 2009). Asked about sexual 
abuse, he downplayed the issue: "the media presented it as if each man there was abusing 
children and was violent towards women", saying that "here and there", sex abuse cases 
may have had happened. He criticized the government for their "paternalistic" attitude 
of intervening rather than "cooperating with the communities." The overwhelming 
evidence however, gathered in about 40 reports, is that violence really is embedded in 
each and every community. Paul Toohey (2009) reports that the NT's "Child Abuse Task 
Force" (CAT) has conducted 842 child-sex investigations since June 2006. CAT has 
made 79 arrests, it has 124 cases under investigation and 41 matters before the court. Sex 
abuses only "here and there"? A recent report in The Australian (Anon., May 28, 2009) 
summarizes the case in these words: "Extent of Aboriginal child abuse 'far worse'". 
Secondly, Calma ignores that real violence against women and children is much more 
"paternalistic" than any governmental policy can be. And thirdly, he failed to admit that 
indigenous rulers had shown no inclination at all to "cooperate" with the government. 
THE WAY FORWARD? 
Things are in flux and it is to be hoped that modern solutions can be found. One 
thing is certain: There is no stone-walling the issue any more. Of course it is hard for 
Australian Aborigines to admit of a cancerous· evil iri their midst; it took German and 
Austrian politicians 25 years or more to admit of their citizens' involvement in the Nazi 
crimes;(Some deny them to this very day.) Enlightened Aborigines now say that they 
have to blend into mainstream society, and this must be done by a heavy emphasis on 
education. They go so far as to say that certain aspects of their traditional culture (for 
example its emphasis that no individual can own land) stand in the way of progress. 
They even raise the question whether there is any future for them on their ancestral 
lands, whether they must not move to where the jobs are. It is no use romanticising the 
past with its emphasis on the alleged strengths of the local: that policy was tried by the 
Labor Party and its chief advisor, and it was a total and unmitigated failure. For our 
part here "up over", we should stop glamorizing an exotic culture as it only encourages 
Aborigines to stay frozen in the past. 
Univesity of Klagenfurt/Celovec, Austria 
WORKS CITED 
Anon., (2009): "Extent of Aboriginal child abuse 'far worse"', The Australian, 28 May, 2. 
Allan, Susan (2007): "Australian media uses Aurukun Aboriginal child rape case to push right-wing 
agenda".http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007 /dec2007 /aur-d21.shtml (World Socialist Website, 
21Dec2007) 
CRIN (2006): "Abuse Rife at Aborigine Camps". Websource: www.crin.org/resources/ nfoDetail. 
asp ?ID=8286&flag=news 
Dobrez, Livio (2008): "Australia's First Fleet Journals and Europe's Last Frontier". Zeitschrift far 
Australienstudien 21122, 36-45. 
121 
Hunter, Ernest (1993). Aboriginal Health and History. Power and Prejudice in Remote Australia. 
Cambridge: CUP. 
Lateline (2007): "Child Abuse rife in Aboriginal Communities: report". ABC program, 15 June. 
Transcript: www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1952877.htm 
Neill, Rosemary (2009): "Untruth by omission". Weekend Australian, Review Section, July 11-12 
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"Opinion" ( 15-16 Dec 2007): "A Brutal Reminder of Real National Shame". The Weekend Australian, 
18. 
Robertson, Boni, ed., (2000): Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence. 
State of Queensland. On-line:http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2000/20.html 
Sutton, Peter (2001): "The politics of suffering: indigenous policy in Australia since the 1970s." 
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Sutton, Peter (2009): The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal con-
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Toohey, Paul (2009): "CAT has teeth and ready to use them". The Weekend Australian, 'Inquirer' 
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Albig, Jorg-Uwe (2009): "Australiens schweres Erbe". Interview with Tom Calma. Hamburg: GEO 
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Uebergang, Kate (2007): "Black leader loses rape-case appeal". Mercury, 12 December. 
122