In the same week that saw the moving first speech of Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal woman elected to the House of Representatives, 14 year old Elijah Doughty was found dead, having been hit by a car as he rode a motor bike in bushland near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
The driver of the car was charged with manslaughter and appeared before a Kalgoorlie court the following day. His appearance drew a crowd expressing grief and anger at the boy's death. At some point the crowd became violent, throwing stones and breaking court house windows and damaging some police vehicles. There are also reports of a few police who were injured.
Footage of the scene shows some in the crowd calling for calm, with one young woman putting herself physically between police and protesters. The tension in the crowd is obvious from the footage — and is it any wonder. For Elijah Doughty was an Aboriginal boy. And Aboriginal Australia has experienced too much grief.
In the same news cycle as the tragic death of Elijah Doughty, we learnt of parliamentarians seeking legislative freedom to engage in hate speech through the removal of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Evidence came out at the Inquest into the death in custody of 20-year-old Jayden Bennell that the head of the WA ligature reduction program had never heard of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
More allegations arose about abuse of youth in Queensland detention centres, where most detainees are Indigenous children. In Queensland 17 year olds are incarcerated with adults — to keep them away from the ten and 11 year olds who otherwise occupy our children's prisons.
And where Commonwealth Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion reiterated in parliament that he knew nothing of the abuses of youth — predominantly Aboriginal youth — taking place in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory.
This is the scandalous state of Indigenous affairs in Australia, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their communities literally face a life and death struggle against the state itself. For these are not isolated incidents.
They represent the intrinsic failure of our society to heed the concerns of communities themselves, and to engage with fellow citizens in a dignified and respectful way. Indeed the failure is so grave that state treatment meted out to Indigenous Australians is actively harmful on a large scale.
"I cannot imagine