Narungga Elder, Tauto Sansbury, NAIDOC lifetime achievement winner, died 23 September after a lifetime of campaigning. Among other matters his key concern was to make the criminal justice system just for Aboriginal people. In the early days of the SA Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement Tauto designed its logo, with the motto: 'Justice Without Prejudice'.
Back in 2012, Tauto came to our Josephite SA Reconciliation Circle a few times. None of us could fail to be moved — emotionally and then to action — by the incredible sadness of his personal open letter, written on 13 January 2012: 'And on this day, I attended the funeral of the eighth South Australian Aboriginal person to die — the eight deaths in our small community this year. And it was only Day 13 ...
'Aboriginal people are always at funerals ... Of the eight premature deaths, three were by suicide and another was violent. How can this be considered right for Aboriginal people, in the 21st century, in a first-world country like Australia?'
As Tauto concluded, 'The issue is not going to go away.' Nor indeed have various governments' oppressive legislation and neglect which can lead to such statistics. On the day after Tauto's passing, the Guardian noted that the UN committee on the rights of the child chastised Australia. In Australia, contrary to almost every other nation on the planet, children as young as ten can still be incarcerated. In May 2019 every child in detention in the NT was Indigenous.
In this area of Aboriginal youth justice, as on so many other issues such as protection of country, Tauto Sansbury was a state and national trailblazer
I was first struck by the fittingness of that word at the Point Pearce funeral of another Narungga Elder, Owen (Odie) Karpany, early this year. His son Daniel, a quiet young man and colleague of his exuberant father in the great triumph of their lives, stood at his father's graveside giving tribute: 'Dad was a trailblazer.'
Kym Mavromatis' superb documentary The King's Seal weaves the story of the father and son's improbable campaign all the way to the High Court of Australia over their original prosecution for fishing for abalone. 'My people have been fishing here for thousands of years and now we're being charged for taking our cultural foods because we've got commercialism versus culturism,' they said. 'Everything has been stolen from us and now we can't even go and get a feed.'
"Grace,