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Can we please stop fawning over the supposed ‘World’s Oldest Living Culture’? It isn’t, and even if it was, what’s to celebrate about a Stone Age culture? Especially now that the same indigenous culture vultures are consumed by hypocritical outrage, now yet another Aboriginal child is dead. Spare me the sanctimonious howling for ‘tribal law’ payback.
Because the same ‘culture’ they’re suddenly so keen to invoke as judge, jury and executioner is the very reason five-year-old Sharon Granites was snatched from her bed on Anzac Day and allegedly murdered. Note the name: the national legacy have, with typical knee-jerk piety to ‘culture’, suddenly taken to calling the child “Kumanjayi Little Baby”. We can’t even speak the most basic facts about a murdered child, because ‘culture’.
For all the faux-cultural virtue-signalling, though, the facts are as grim as they are predictable.
The five-year-old girl allegedly murdered in Alice Springs was the subject of six child protection reports since mid-March and was living in a “dangerous environment”, sources familiar with the case have told the Australian.
Police made the last notification to the Northern Territory’s Department of Children and Families – the government department responsible for child protection – two days before she went missing in Alice Springs on April 25. The report was in relation to an alleged assault on the mother at the Old Timers town camp on April 22.
Yet, despite the persistent reports of a “dangerous environment” for the child, all too common for Aboriginal children, none led to her removal. With typical ambulance-at-the-foot-of-the-cliff alacrity, an embarrassed Territory government has swiftly moved to shift blame and shoot messengers. Three case workers have now been stood down while an internal investigation crawls into action. Business as usual in the Northern Territory’s child ‘protection’ racket.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the case workers were only operating as per their orders, which include that, no matter how obviously appalling the environment Aboriginal kids are living in, they will never, ever, be removed from it. The long shadow of the ‘Stolen Generations’ myth has condemned yet more generations of Aboriginal children to appalling abuse at the hands of their ‘cultural’ elders.
Former PM Tony Abbott was at least been willing to put his money where other politicians’ mouths are. For decades, he dedicated real time out of every year to working in Aboriginal communities: real work, real help, kept up long after the media have scurried off to their next photo opportunity.
One of the reasons Aboriginal disadvantage is so intractable is that “culture” keeps getting in the way of addressing it […]
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.
Meanwhile, none of us are allowed to ask the obvious questions: why was a five-year-old in a town camp at 1.35am? Why was her mother at a late-night party? Why did the community initially protect the suspect?
For all the palaver about ‘sorry business’, the brutal face of ‘culture’ was on full display – again – in Alice Springs this week. When Jefferson Lewis, 47, was finally charged with murder, the very town camps that enabled his crime erupted. Mobs rioted. Then, true to form, the ‘outrage’ dissolved into the usual criminality: looting stores. Just another night in Alice Springs, really.
The excuses are as old as the problem. Welfare turned hunting grounds into sit-down money. No jobs, no school and endless alcohol: the perfect storm for family violence and child abuse.
Welfare payments and community stores have removed the former necessity for Aboriginal people to hunt and gather more or less continuously to survive. And in the absence of the jobs that would be part of any community with a real economic base, people with nothing purposeful to do for long periods almost inevitably gravitate to drinking, gambling and trashy TV – as anyone who can still remember university vacations should, however reluctantly, be ready to concede.
Not for nothing did elders in the 1970s christen unemployment benefits as “sit-down money” and Noel Pearson later describe it as the “poison that’s killing our communities”.
And now the hypocrisy reaches fever pitch. Some in the camps and their urban cheer squad are demanding ‘tribal law’ – payback, spearing, the works – for the alleged killer. Yet the ‘culture’ and tribal law behind the violent payback is the same one that has failed to protect generations of Aboriginal children from exactly this sort of predation. The same culture that shrugs at domestic violence, turns a blind eye to neglect and screams ‘racism’ the moment anyone suggests kids might be safer with school, work and consistent policing instead of sacred sites and sit-down cheques.
Every inquiry, every royal commission and every hand-wringing report says the same thing, yet nothing changes. Because addressing the root causes would require admitting that romanticised ‘culture’ is part of the problem, not the solution.
Children have to go to school, adults have to work and everyone has to be safe. Tribal law won’t deliver that. Neither will more welfare or more ‘culturally appropriate’ excuses. But it’s just so much easier to accuse critics of racism than admit that ‘unceded land’ sentimentality doesn’t keep little girls alive.
