And, just like that, the appalling violence endured by Aboriginal Australian women and children is The Current Thing. Leftist Twitter (a tautology, I apologise) has lit up with a wave of pearl-clutching and virtue-signalling wailing unlike any since they were all pasting blue-and-yellow flags next to their pronouns in their profiles.
The left are shocked, shocked to “suddenly” learn that Aboriginal women are orders of magnitude more likely to be the victims of domestic violence than others, and that hundreds have been murdered.
It’s an horrific state of affairs, but excuse me for suspecting that this is all just so much virtue-signalling, faux “outrage”, only because the ABC has finally deigned to take notice.
Because, if the left had cared to listen, they could have been fully informed about this, years ago. But they didn’t want to. In fact, they actively attacked anyone who tried to tell them.
I’ve written about the horrors in remote communities many times over the last few years. I’m not the only one. Nearly a decade ago, Aboriginal academic Anthony Dillon noted that “News about violence in Aboriginal communities is not new”. Last year, a group of remote community women travelled to Canberra to try and draw awareness to the issue — not one journalist from the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald or The Age showed up to listen. Neither did anyone from Labor or the Greens.
Violence in Aboriginal communities is one issue that many do not wish to talk about. Why is that? Is it because it destroys the image we like to hold of Aboriginal people leading peaceful happy lives where they live ‘on country’ and off the land? Is it because we are told Aboriginal people must manage their own affairs and non-Aboriginal people are therefore not allowed to intervene, or even voice an opinion?
Yes, yes, and yes. Most especially the first.
Sadly, there are too many in denial of the truth. Denial does not help.
The first step towards solving this problem of violence is to cease the denial. While some are discussing the violence that plagues some Aboriginal communities, I have observed that far too often in discussions about violence among Aboriginal people a common response is, “Yeah, but violence is in the non-Aboriginal population as well.” This is true. Interestingly, when discussing the problem of diabetes within the Aboriginal community, I have never heard anyone retort, “Yeah, but diabetes is in the non-Aboriginal population as well.” Yes, violence (like diabetes) is present to varying degrees in all communities, but it is undeniable that the rates are far higher in Aboriginal communities.
ABC Australia
Then there is the blame-shifting.
If Aboriginal violence does get discussed, it is often framed as ‘lateral violence’ where it is assumed that present day violence is the result of the white man. Or else the violence is blamed on alcohol which was introduced by the white man. Alcohol, combined with unemployment, has only worsened a problem that has always been there. For people believing that the white man is to blame for the violence, they best read the works of people like Stephanie Jarrett and Peter Sutton who have written on the violence in Aboriginal communities, both pre and post colonisation.
First Nations Telegraph
To read the accounts of early explorers and settlers, or even of William Buckley who lived as one of the Wathaurong for decades, is to be as shocked by the accounts of constant violence as the Twitter left professes to be now. Even sober forensic archaeology is unambiguous: Aboriginal Australia was a very violent place, for women especially.
The women who went in vain to Canberra were lucky, in a way: they were just ignored. Many other Aboriginal women have tried to speak out, and been viciously attacked, often with explicitly racist abuse.
Perhaps even sadder is that when Bess Price has spoken out against the violence, she has been criticised and slandered from within the Aboriginal community.
ABC Australia
For all the “Welcome to Country” ceremonies, ostentatiously “taking the knee”, screaming “racism” and blithering about “the world’s oldest living culture”, the plain fact, demonstrated for years, is that the left did not want to know about the suffering of Aboriginal women.
Until it became The Current Thing, of course.
Never mind: something else will capture their tiny little imaginations next week, and Aboriginal men can go back to belting their womenfolk under a cone of media silence.
