Reporter: Helen Dalley Producer: Paul Steindl
Sunday Programme, Channel 9, 13th June 1999
DARCY TURGEON READING FROM REPORT:
"An examination revealed a multitude of scars on all parts of her body. Her
chest is deeply scared from a broken beer bottle. Her left forearm and upper
arm are extensively scarred from a beer bottle. She also has stab wounds
to her upper thighs and lower abdomen; a nine to 10 inch scar just below
the breast from a knife wound. Her right eyebrow is scarred from punching.
It appears she cannot see out of her left eye due to repeated blows. The
back and top of her head has numerous scars from being hit by metal bars
and broken bottles".
REPORTER: This litany of injuries to an Aboriginal woman from a remote Queensland
community is detailed in a clinician's report after her death. It is sadly
typical of the plight of many women in Aboriginal Australia.
DARCY TURGEON READING FROM REPORT: "To this Aboriginal woman, violence is
part and parcel of her life. She lives in a violent sub-culture where jealousies,
arguments and petty disputes are solved by violence. To her, having someone
hit you with a metal bar or slash you with a broken beer bottle is anything
but extraordinary. It's commonplace."
REPORTER: Domestic violence is going on, night after night. In the very heart
of Australia in Alice Springs, the Aboriginal Night Patrol goes looking for
the bashed and the bloodied. This woman, badly beaten, is taken to hospital
and patched up. But, as is often the case in Aboriginal communities, she
laid no charges against the perpetrator and soon returned to the same domestic
situation. So this horrific assault becomes just another one of the unreported
cases of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.
Overwhelmingly women are the victims. But the violence engulfs the whole
community, with men and women both victims and offenders, with the Night
Patrol either breaking them up ... or patching them up. Some nights it's
a constant stream of bloodshed, abuse and alcohol-fuelled violence ... the
ugly result of a destructive cycle in Alice Springs, where public drunkenness
and alcohol abuse combine with despair and hopelessness to produce a potent,
potentially lethal cocktail.
KEVIN WIRRI, ABBOTT'S CAMP ALICE SPRINGS: Women got killed here too.
REPORTER: Through being beaten up or stabbed?
WIRRI: Stabbed.
ZITA WALLACE, REFUGE WORKER: We had one woman come in with something like
63 stitches across the side of her head where he had taken to her with an
axe.
REPORTER: With an axe?
WALLACE: Yeah, so we get horrendous injuries, broken arms, broken jawbones,
broken ribs. You name it they have it.
VERONICA GOLDER: The biggest problem we got here in Alice Springs is domestic
violence. If our people keep going drinking and carrying on with domestic
violence and alcohol abuse, they're losing our culture.
REPORTER: Alice Springs is not an isolated example. In Aboriginal communities
across the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, the same
tragic picture is unfolding.
DARCY TURGEON, ABORIGINAL POLICY OFFICER, QLD CORRECTIVE SERVICES COMMISSION:
We want to expose the fact that violence in our communities is horrific.
That some of our people are being brutalised, not just by closed fists or
a slap across the face, but um, I've had four members of my own family murdered
in 1995, so it's touched me personally. They were my nieces and godson.
REPORTER: What, murdered by a drunken member of their family?
TURGEON: Murdered by a de facto of their mother's.
KERRIE ARABENA, APUNIPIMA CAPE YORK HEALTH COUNCIL: Men and women are dying.
We've just undertaken some research here at the Health Council during the
period of that research, it was only five months long, there have been seven
deaths in Cape York communities directly resultant from interpersonal violence
and alcohol. Now not only men were the perpetrators of this. There are also
women who've been charged as a result of some of the violence in these
communities. So it's not just men's problem, not just a women's problem,
it's everyone's problem.
REPORTER: Many in Aboriginal communities are now speaking out, proclaiming
an epidemic of domestic or family violence, even community violence. The
evidence is shocking. While domestic violence happens in the wider community,
the figures clearly show an undeniable truth that in Aboriginal communities
it is more prevalent and results in more severe injuries than elsewhere.
According to the Crime Research Centre, in Western Australia, Aboriginal
women are more than 45 times more likely to be a victim of domestic violence
than non-Aborigines. And that's only for reported offences. Worse, Aboriginal
women are far more likely to be hospitalised or die from this violence than
non-Aboriginal women.
ALISON WOOLLA, AURUKUN COMMUNITY: There were nights that we hardly slept,
we had to sit with our family group and hear people screaming, running, shouting,
banging, all that stuff. It was just like you were living in a place, in
another world where there's always fighting, killing and shooting. The fear
is who is the next person going to be damaged.
REPORTER: Aboriginal women who live in the more remote communities know the
bleak picture of violence is the same in Queensland too. According to the
Criminal Justice Commission, the average murder rate across Australia is
two in a hundred thousand. But in various Aboriginal communities in Cape
York it is 94 in a hundred thousand, 47 times higher. Assaults in Cape York
communities are twenty times greater than the Queensland average. And in
the Northern Territory, homicide is the leading cause of premature death
in Aboriginal women, beating cancer and heart disease.
REGINA MUNN: It's horrific, it's everywhere. I think, no I know it touches
every Aboriginal family in Australia."
LORIAN HAYES, CHERBOURG COMMUNITY: Someone in the family is a victim and
a perpetrator.
REPORTER: Someone in every Aboriginal family in Australia is a victim and
perpetrator?
HAYES: That's right. And if it's not the immediate family, it might be a
brother or sister or auntie or uncle, but every person in an Aboriginal community
I'd say is touched by domestic violence.
REPORTER: What is the alcohol violence and the domestic violence doing to
Aboriginal culture?
ZITA WALLACE: It's killing it. It's killing our culture.
JUDITH BROWN, CHERBOURG COMMUNITY: It's tearing the families apart. The women
are being stripped of their dignity, the children have no self-esteem, I
mean we've suffered for too long.
REPORTER: Despite the outspokenness of these women, they've seen their sisters
mostly suffer the degradation in silence. Black on black violence, particularly
Aboriginal males against females, has been a taboo subject for too long.
Too sensitive and politically incorrect for much of the media to touch, for
fear of being tagged racist. Too difficult for governments to tackle. And,
until now, too deeply shameful for the Aboriginal community itself to confront,
lest the ugly stereotypes be reinforced and accepted.
ARABENA: I will not buy into a white woman's rape fantasy by saying that
all black men are rapists, they're all drinkers, they're all alcoholics,
they cannot take responsibility for their families. And I'll not get into
the whole argument too, where Aboriginal women are victims, that they actually
want that kind of violence. That it's a natural part of culture. It is not.
It's not. You know an 11 or 12 year old is sexually assaulted in the community.
I would not want that to happen to my daughter or my son for that matter,
and I will not tolerate it in communities.
REPORTER: While land rights and reconciliation dominate Aboriginal issues
and generate much public debate, the devastation and consequences of family
violence in Aboriginal communities has been largely ignored. As Sunday
travelled around central and northern Australia, we encountered many indigenous
women, and men, determined that it should no longer be shrouded in silence.
They're determined that the wider community should understand the depth of
the problem and its damage. And determined to fight for change. If such intense
levels of violence occurred in white communities, they say, there'd be a
hue and cry, followed by a massive amount of resources to rectify the problem.
ARABENA: In our communities the issue is silent, it's conspired, there is
a conspiracy which supports that silence, therefore that's the conspiracy
we have to break. We have to start talking out about this...
REPORTER: Kerrie Arabena and Gregory Phillips are young Aboriginals who number
among the social welfare and health professionals, helping their own people
break the silence and stop the suffering.
GREGORY PHILLIPS, APUNIPIMA: You know, for a long time our community was
so scared about the issue and I think generally a lot of our community still
is scared about how to tackle those problems. I think it's partly because
of the denial and for a long time it was easy to sweep it under the carpet
and hope that it went away.
ARABENA: I think it's been very difficult to talk out before. There has been
lots of women who have tried to talk out who have been pushed out of their
own families or have had to accept more violence as a result of them talking
out. It's just beyond a joke. We have to do something. The option of doing
nothing is no longer an option.
TURGEON: Unless some steps are taken to protect Aboriginal women and children
from this violence, in 50 years' time we'll have some Prime Minister saying,
you know we owe these people an apology because, what's the old saying, when
good men do nothing? We are at the crossroads where something has to be done
to cease this violence against Aboriginal people on communities, because
it just can't go on any longer.
REPORTER: For a woman like Alice Limbiari, the cycle of violence and abuse
at the hands of men, has been her life story. It's a tale that's typical
of many others.
ALICE LIMBIARI, ALICE SPRINGS RESIDENT: My married life was really bad, really
bad.
REPORTER: Can you tell me how bad it was?
LIMBIARI: My husband used to drink, he used to go off with another woman,
he used to come back and beat me up. I used to work at school as a teacher's
aide and, um, yeah he used to come back drunk and beat me up.
REPORTER: Alice tells her intimate, sorry tale without wanting pity. What
she wants is understanding and action. For 20 years she stayed and was battered
by her husband whenever he was drunk.
ALICE: If your husband want to make love with you and you don't want it,
you don't want to make love with him at night, that was really bad for me.
REPORTER: Would he force you, did he rape you?
ALICE: He would force me. When I used to go for conference or meeting to
another place, I'd come back and he'd have a knife on my neck, a knife in
my stomach here.
HAYES: I used to get so frightened I'd hide in the cupboards of an afternoon,
if I thought my partner's coming home. I had such severe facial injuries
I was blind for three months, I'm really grateful I can see today and I still
have little bit of problem seeing in one eye, fractured skull, fractures
in the facial bones.
REPORTER: Lorian Hayes speaks about her time staying with her abusive husband.
That was 25 years ago. But for many women in Aboriginal communities, not
much has changed.
LORIAN: Yeah I did put up with it for eight years. I believed that that was
the wife's role just to just accept what the husband dished out.
CRYING GIRL: I just got up and ran away from my problem instead of my mother
putting me aside and trying to deal with it. I'm not saying I wished I would
have stayed in the relationship, I wish there was someone like youse to...
REPORTER: This woman did leave, but is still overcome with grief at the break-up
of her family, which is such a mainstay in Aboriginal life.
YOUNG WOMAN: I feel I've run away from my boys, that I let them down, about
being a mother.
REPORTER: Unlike the wider community, many Aboriginal women choose to stay
with their abusive partners, partly because there are few other options for
them, partly because they want to keep families together at all costs. They
simply want the violence to stop. But if the abuse doesn't stop, the children
may end up accepting this behaviour as normal, and would then be doomed to
repeat it. This has been Alice Limbiari's experience. Despite being a non-drinker
herself, two of her grown-up sons followed their father's violent example.
They are currently in jail, for assaulting their wives. Worse, they've also
assaulted their own mother.
ALICE: The second one, he assaulted me once. And he was going to do that
again, assault me again second time. I had to run to the police station and
run away to women's shelter. That's when I got a restraining order for him,
from the women's shelter. First time, he punched me and he kicked me on the
face.
REPORTER: So you took out a restraining order against your own son?
ALICE: I didn't want them doing this to me all the time. I had to do something
to stop them.
REPORTER: So you just got sick of it?
ALICE: I just got sick of it, just like I got sick of it for their father.
REPORTER: Alice's story highlights the extent of the problems in some indigenous
families.
ALICE: I got my daughter-in-law's niece. Her niece drinks and she got this
baby, and she get her money and spend all that money on grog and nothing
for the baby, for Kimby, and milk. She want to leave him with us to look
after but we say we got no milk for that baby. You take him, you got milk
for that baby, you look after that baby. And sometimes when I tell her off,
she get, you know, she want to beat that baby up. Another day she put that
baby in the rubbish bin, the 44 drum, I had to call her cousin to do something
for her. She just ran and beat her up and told her not to do that.
REPORTER: Drinking and abuse by women are worrying symptoms of community
breakdown, since women are the principle carers of children. Families torn
by domestic violence often end up here at the Women's Shelter in Alice Springs.
REPORTER: What is the impact on children?
WALLACE: They're so bewildered when they come here. Like Aboriginal children
are a little different from white children. They learn from very young to
be quiet, so they don't show emotions. So we really don't know when they
come in how much damage has been done to that child.
REPORTER: Zita Wallace is a worker at the shelter, where the clientele is
98 percent Aboriginal women and children.
WALLACE: Five, six year olds rely on their seven, eight year old brothers
and sisters to cook for them, look after them in the home or they go walkabout
to other family or friends looking for food, because their fathers and mothers
are drinking and fighting.
LIMBIARI: When I look at them they are lost. They got no mother and no father.
With me I want to see my grandchildren with their father and mother and I
want their father to raise them up and teach them the proper way.
WALLACE: As an Aboriginal person I really despair that nothing's being done,
they're just living the same cycle, and until that cycle's broken its going
to continue for another generation.
REPORTER: While sexual abuse of children occurs throughout the wider community,
Kerrie Arabena, who runs the Apunipima Cape York Health Council, is deeply
disturbed about the high incidence of child sexual assault now occurring
in Aboriginal communities.
ARABENA: Because I deal in that area I was finding out more and more and
there were more and more stories around the sorts of violence people had
to live with, sexual violence, sexual devastation. So it got to the stage
where myself, if I heard one story, just one story, it would have been okay.
But I was hearing 10 stories and then 20 stories, and it seemed like everyone
wanted me to help them do something about it. And it became too much. So
the conclusion I'm drawing from my own experience, is that sexual assault
on children happens often. It's perpetuated within families and extended
family groups. That it's not just necessarily the older male that's perpetrating
that sort of assault, but you know victims and perpetrators are within the
10 to 15 year old age group. We actually need to start looking and focussing
on those young people to try and break that sort of silence and break the
consequences of sexual assault in our communities.
REPORTER: Such is the level of concern, Sunday understands that health
services are now screening for, and detecting, sexually transmitted diseases
such as gonorrhoea, in children as young as 12, in some North Queensland
communities. The highly sensitive figures are kept confidential.
REPORTER: Is sexual abuse of children going on here?
SYLVIA REUBEN, KOOTARNA WOMEN'S CENTRE, PALM ISLAND: There is a lot of sexual
abuse, it's very underground, a lot of people don't want to talk about it.
REPORTER: Does it go unreported?
REUBEN: No its not reported, a lot isn't reported. Some is, but a lot
isn't.
REPORTER: The problems within Aboriginal communities are all too stereotypical
of a downtrodden and disadvantaged people. The violence and abuse have been
largely ignored and allowed to fester. While highly visible, they've received
only token acknowledgment by governments and community leaders. There is
now however a groundswell that demands to see these problems dealt with,
whatever the cost. In part two, Sunday looks at the ways change will
be affected, by both the women and men involved in domestic violence.
PERCY STEWART, CHERBOURG COMMUNITY: If and when we belted our women it was
right to do it.
REPORTER: Is that right? So you didn't accept that it was a criminal offence
and that it was bad?
STEWART: No, because it was our right to do it, because we thought the woman
should sit back and take it.
PART TWO
REPORTER: It's the endless stream of violent episodes, intertwined with so
many other problems, that means solutions are not easy. Many isolated Aboriginal
communities are separate from non-indigenous settlements. But in a racially
mixed town like Alice Springs, local Aboriginals live in small housing clusters
that ring the town, known as camps. Often relatives visit from remote
communities.
WALLACE: If they lucky enough to have relatives then they'll go and stay,
but a lot of them don't, so they just sleep in the Todd (River) and they
get into a lot of trouble. A lot of alcohol flows around the Todd, more than
water.
REPORTER: Others often outstay their welcome with relatives in the town camps.
Overcrowding, tensions over sharing food, and partying often produce a cauldron
of emotions that can lead to violent confrontation between husbands and wives
or other family members. Abbott's Camp was one such area, notorious for its
incredibly high level of serious assaults, domestic violence ... even murder.
That in a community of just half a dozen houses.
NORA ABBOTT: This place was Vietnam.
REPORTER: Vietnam?
ABBOTT: Yes.
REPORTER: So it was like a war zone?
ABBOTT: Yeah.
WIRRI: The police didn't want to come and the ambulance.
REPORTER: They didn't even want to come in here?
WIRRI: Nup.
REPORTER: So they feared for their own lives?
WIRRI: Yep. It was the worst place in town. In town camps.
REPORTER: So for fighting?
WIRRI: Yeah.
REPORTER: How were people killed?
WIRRI: Grog, through grog
REPORTER: And violence?
WIRRI: Yeah violence.
REPORTER: What sort of injuries would there be?
DORIS ABBOTT, ABBOTT'S CAMP ALICE SPRINGS: Head, legs, broken bones.
REPORTER: In just a few years this small community in the centre of Alice
Springs transformed itself from a violent ghetto, a virtual no-go area, to
one of relative peace and safety. But the only way this could be achieved
was by the people who live in this camp erecting a steel spiked fence, banning
grog from inside the complex and literally locking out the troublemakers.
Often their own relatives.
REPORTER: Kevin Wirri and his wife Doris Abbott had moved back to this violent
camp, and were so shocked at its decline that they decided to take a firm
stand. They couldn't alter the alcohol laws outside, so with support of other
camp dwellers, including Doris's sister Nora, they banned it inside. For
the sake of their children's safety and their own peace of mind, they became
a gated enclave.
REPORTER: Why did it need to be such a big high fence with spikes on top?
KEVIN: We don't like people you know, coming in, running amok, looking to
other people for tucker. It is a safe place now.
REPORTER: So it's been a success?
KEVIN: Ah yeah its been going really good.
REPORTER: So far Abbott's Camp is the only one of the 18 Aboriginal camps
in Alice Springs to have taken such action. Others would like to follow.
While it hasn't changed long-term abusive behaviour, it has provided a safer
environment, and serves as a role model for other communities.
MAXINE CAMPBELL: It would be a good thing to see all the camps dry. To wipe
grog out of the town camps completely.
REPORTER: It's no solution just to either ban or restrict alcohol, until
it's understood why Aboriginal men, and many women, are drinking, and drinking
so heavily. And why it produces such injurious results.
DOUG GLADMAN, QLD HEALTH PROJECT OFFICER: I was asked to undertake a research
program where we were asked to identify the number of injuries within five
communities; the contribution alcohol is making to those injuries and also
the cause and effect of those injuries...
REPORTER: The research by Doug Gladman, a project officer with the Queensland
Health Department, revealed in detail the endemic alcohol abuse occurring
in some Aboriginal communities on Cape York.
GLADMAN: In one community we looked at, there's more than 90 percent of the
community are regularly drinking alcohol. They're drinking 10 litres of
full-strength alcohol a week,
REPORTER: Usually the drinking revolves around payday and extends for a few
days, til the money runs out.
GLADMAN: If we took into consideration a normal household in the community
we're looking at probably nine people in that household who are drinking
more than 30 cans of beer a week, each, full-strength beer within three days.
Every week. And that is a frightening amount of alcohol.
REPORTER: For the first time, Gladman's research showed just where the damage
from that abuse of alcohol is being done.
GLADMAN: The highest recorded injury coming out of the Cape was a head injury
to a woman.
REPORTER: Head injury to a woman?
GLADMAN: Mmm.
REPORTER: So what does that indicate to you in plain terms?
GLADMAN: Well if you've got conflict, a high degree of conflict, and you've
got head injuries to a woman, its obvious that domestic violence or violence
is playing a large part in that.
REPORTER: So women are getting beaten?
GLADMAN: Yes.
REPORTER: And do you see that as really prevalent occurrence?
GLADMAN: Of course. The conflict across the board is a prevalent occurrence.
And this is a process that we've looked at to try and find an intervention.
REPORTER: The research also showed how alcohol is both a crutch and a catalyst,
but it is not the underlying cause of the violence.
GLADMAN: The biggest issue we found was the fact that there'd been a dramatic
breakdown in the family structure, and that the role of the male had in fact
been eroded.
REPORTER: Can you elaborate?
GLADMAN: Well, the tradition of the hunter, the protector and provider had
been eroded. His chances of employment was obviously very low. He has low
self-esteem, he is a person who has if you like, within the community, no
identity.
CHRIS SARRA, AT MEN'S GROUP MEETING, HEADMASTER CHERBOURG SCHOOL: "Not a
very nice picture is it? Of who we are and who we're supposed to be..."
REPORTER: This is precisely what the community at Cherbourg, in southern
Queensland, is trying to tackle. They want to return the self-esteem of men,
and boost their status. To that end, they are trying to establish a men's
group to openly deal with these issues.
SARRA: That's a picture I think, a pretty accurate one, and I think most
of you would agree that's how our society would describe us.
REPORTER: When primary school principal Chris Sarra dissects the problems,
he confronts the stereotypes of Aboriginals that both white and black society,
he says, have accepted, Descriptions like "drunks", "lazy", and "bludgers"
fill his whiteboard.
SARRA: There's something about this picture that is even more scary, and
that is a lot of us have bought the same picture, because when we think of
ourselves as Aboriginal men, I think some of us believe that that's who we
are really.
REPORTER: The driving force behind the men's group are those who in the past
have been domestic violence perpetrators themselves, and who see the damage
they've done and want change.
KEN BONE, MAYOR CHERBOURG: I've been a perpetrator and a very violent one.
I'm not proud of my past. Why those things happened I don't know, maybe,
I'm not going to blame alcohol because there was mixture of alcohol, smokes,
parties, everything. To be that violent person at that time made you feel
like I was a big man.
REPORTER: You were tough if you were violent?
BONE: I was tough, I was the master.
JIM SOUTH, CHERBOURG COMMUNITY: What you've got to realise, we're a spiritual
people. We live on those feelings, those emotions guide our actions. And
drinking, everything in there you can keep under control when you're sober,
all those feelings are let free, and you lose all sense of responsibility.
REPORTER: Ken Bone has now been "dry" for 16 years. He wants young Aboriginal
men to follow his example, having rebuilt his life, becoming mayor of this
community and successfully raising a large family. But he remembers how close
he came to throwing it all away.
BONE: You see little kids become motherless because of a senseless deed that
the daddy done to the mummy, I think of me because I was that close to doing
that.
REPORTER: You were that close to killing a woman, the mother of your
children?
REPORTER: I was that close, I really hit my children. Not only hit the mother,
hit my children. I was given a couple of years good behaviour bond, and that
was back in the mid-'70s. I'm not proud of what I done back then, but I've
changed because, well, realistically white man's law made me change.
ARNOLD MURRAY, CHERBOURG COMMUNITY: I used to bash Maylene up all the time,
fights, parties everything and fight her family whatever.
REPORTER: Just for no reason?
MURRAY: For no reason, mainly through alcohol...
REPORTER: After Arnold Murray served six months in jail for assaulting his
wife Maylene Saltner, he came out determined not to re-offend.
REPORTER: You thought it was your right to do that to your wife?
MURRAY: That's correct. I thought it was you know like a big joke all the
time.
MAYLENE: I used to run from him all the time, just pack up and go.
REPORTER: But you kept coming back?
MAYLENE: Yeah.
REPORTER: Can you explain why you did that?
MAYLENE: I don't know, I think it was just the security and everything.
ARNOLD: The time I went to jail, that time I could've really killed her.
REPORTER: You could've killed her?
ARNOLD: Yeah.
REPORTER: Arnold and Maylene are proof that counselling and control over
drinking can salvage a desperate situation.
ARNOLD: In jail you do a course on domestic violence and they show you videos
of other families and kiddies crying and it really touched me, and I said
I'm not going to let that happen to my family, you know.
REPORTER: While women have support networks and shelters, one of the only
options for Aboriginal men it seems to be jail.
TURGEON: It has become just too accepted. You know we've got so many relatives
in custody, its become too accepted that jail will be a part of my growing
up.
REPORTER: Darcy Turgeon runs the Indigenous Policy unit in the Qld Corrective
Services Commission.
TURGEON: We have 1071 in custody at this point of time, most of those are
Aboriginal men. Approximately 650 to 700 of them are incarcerated for violent
offences, and 450 of those are for violent offences committed under the influence
of alcohol.
REPORTER: That means that a huge number of offenders are in jail because
of domestic and family violence.
TURGEON: Alcohol is the common denominator. I can't stress the fact that
if you take alcohol out of the equation, we could almost close two jails
in this state.
REPORTER: Darcy Turgeon believes his people haven't to date been given adequate
rehabilitation to overcome their violence and alcohol problems, and he hopes
to rectify that with specific programs in Queensland jails.
DARCY: We can't bury our heads in the sand any longer. We can't be the good
men who do nothing any longer. We've got to start talking about this problem
and we've got to start saving some of these people.
REPORTER: In the Aboriginal community of about two and a half thousand people
on Palm Island in the Great Barrier Reef, the local council is trying to
start a men's group to deal with the social problems affecting them. Last
year Palm Island was branded by the Guinness Book of Records as the most
dangerous place on earth outside a war zone. It caused a media storm in Britain
and Australia, upsetting the locals.
ALF LACEY, PALM ISLAND COUNCIL: I think it was pretty sad that the international
media can expose those things and make it as worse as it is. But at the same
time it also gives us an opportunity to say our piece and tell people in
the wider community there's some type of problem there.
REPORTER: So you're not walking away from the fact that there are some pretty
serious statistics about Palm Island?
LACEY: Oh no, I'd never walk away from it because the more we continue to
walk away from it, the more we deny we have those problems.
REPORTER: Although it looks like a tropical paradise Palm Island has had
a particularly hellish past. It was set up in the early part of this century
as a penal colony and it turned into a dumping ground for so-called troublesome
and diseased Aboriginals, finally bringing together 40 different tribal groups
to live here. It's the legacy of that social chaos that many believe has
created the dysfunction that exists today.
LACEY: Setting up the Palm Island men's group was in response to the high
trend of suicides amongst young people in community, particularly young men,
basically using suicide as an easy way out of a very difficult life particularly
when you look at the rate of suicide that happened in '96/'97, there was
16 deaths.
REPORTER: 16 deaths in one year?
LACEY: A year-and-a-half.
REPORTER: The women's support centre, Katarna, also arose out of the social
chaos on the island.
REUBEN: Katarna was started back in 1985 simply because the year before there
was eight women violently murdered.
REPORTER: Women violently murdered, so as a direct result of domestic
violence?
REUBEN: As a direct result.
REPORTER: While Katarna provides much needed help, it's not a full shelter.
Despite an obvious need here, one has been promised, but is yet to be built.
This means many of the women affected by domestic violence must be sent off
the island.
SYLVIA: All of our women we have going through on the DVs are sent to
Townsville.
REPORTER: So they're flown over, how often?
SYLVIA: Two to three times a week and you're pulling out kids and mothers
from the houses and they're going to another place they haven't had any contact
with in the past. It's quite shattering.
REPORTER: Queensland's Aboriginal and Women's Affairs Minister Judy Spence
knows that governments have not done enough.
JUDY SPENCE, QLD MINISTER FOR ABORIGINAL & WOMEN'S AFFAIRS: Yeah I mean
I think that we really do need to provide more shelters for a start. We need
to provide more programs as well. We are not providing enough support, enough
experts on these communities to teach things, like anger management or anti-drug
strategies. And we can't say that we've tried enough unless we provide these
sorts of programs.
REPORTER: While the murders of women and suicides have decreased, the circle
of violence continues on Palm, partly because of the unrestricted access
to alcohol ... yet it's the sale of alcohol that council needs for its coffers.
The canteen, as pubs are known in Aboriginal communities, is the island's
economic powerhouse.
LACEY: The council relies on it heavily for its revenue in regards to running
other services, that other councils wouldn't accept, or governments wouldn't
accept that type of behaviour.
REPORTER: So do you regard that as a very ugly catch-22?
LACEY: I think it is, and it's a sad state of affairs where our people have
to drink to provide dollars to keep people employed or to keep the local
ambulance service running.
REPORTER: 95 percent of people are unemployed on Palm Island. Since the state
government handed over the island to the Aboriginal council in '85, the primary
industries have disappeared. Peena Geia, council chairperson, believes more
needs to be done to get people working.
REPORTER: Is it a problem that the council has become dependent on the hotel,
on alcohol, financially?
PEENA GEIA, MAYOR PALM ISLAND: Yes because there is no other revenue. That's
the only place and if only we could have the industries put back in that
would alleviate the problems in the community.
SPENCE: I think in many respects we have failed them because the children
don't want to go to school when they don't see any potential to get any job
after school. We haven't ensured that employment and economic projects are
successful on these communities and we really do have to look at this whole
of government response.
REPORTER: The Apunipima Cape York Health Council, armed with a federal government
grant, is wholly committed to supporting those women, and men in the communities
themselves, who want to overcome the epidemic of violence.
KERRIE: Over the next three years we're going to be looking solely at the
issue of violence. We've got to work our way through this and we need as
much support from the wider community as possible.
REPORTER: More support is now coming from the Queensland government.
SPENCE: I set up the task force, the women's task force to look at domestic
violence and alcohol problems, because the Aboriginal women in Qld were telling
me that they wanted to be part of the solution, that this was their problem.
REPORTER: The task force, solely run by Aboriginal women, and chaired by
Qld academic Boni Robertson, is currently taking submissions ... its final
report due mid-year. Boni Robertson believes one area sorely lacking for
Aboriginal women has been their recourse to legal action. Indigenous women
have been particularly let down by their own Aboriginal Legal Service.
BONI ROBERTSON: You had the policy of no black on black, they wouldn't deal
with black on black.
REPORTER: So that means they wouldn't represent a black woman against a black
man?
ROBERTSON: That's right.
REPORTER: So the women were left high and dry?
ROBERTSON: In many cases yes.
REPORTER: But is it fair to say the ALS has really been discriminating against
Aboriginal women?
ROBERTSON: If you look at it in terms of discrimination, yes, I mean they
have been discriminating against our women because of that issue of no black
on black.
REPORTER: The Alice Springs Night Patrol, funded by the Tangentyere Council,
are the frontline troops in the battle against violence in Alice Springs.
They provide a mopping up service, taking victims home, to hospital, to the
Women's Refuge or to the only sobering up shelter in town called DASA. The
next morning, victims quite often end up here, at Congress, the only Aboriginal
medical service in the country that operates in remote communities as well
as Alice Springs.
REPORTER: In addition to providing immediate medical attention, Congress
has recently set up a new counselling and support unit, particularly for
domestic and family violence victims. Some are calling for far greater action
from governments.
DARCY: This is a national problem. Now a few years ago we had a Royal Commission
into Aboriginal Deaths in custody and there were over 300 recommendations.
In Queensland we have a review going on at the moment into violence against
Aboriginal women. I don't feel it was taken far enough. I think we should
have had another Royal Commission into the violence against Aboriginal women
on communities.
REPORTER: With so much collateral damage done by domestic violence in Aboriginal
communities across Australia, the fear is that the next generation might
be lost ... unless the problem is seen for what it really is, ultimately
self-destructive. Aboriginal Australians say their salvation must come from
themselves ... but with help from the rest of the community.
WALLACE: Our people has to get up there and stand up for ourselves and do
it. We can't expect white Australia to do it for us, so we have to do something
about it.