Three years ago Chris Hurley killed Mulrunji Doomadgee.
Chris Hurley is a police officer, who arrested Mulrunji Doomadgee for ‘Drunk and Disorderly Behaviour’ – the criminality of being drunk often depends on the colour of your skin. How you get treated when you get arrested also depends on the colour of your skin. There was Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, but 13 years later the recommendations had been ignored and Mulrunji Doomadgee died.
In police custody, he suffered four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and a his liver was almost split in half.
Since his death, Mulrunji Doomadgee’s family has fought for justice. The first police investigation was done by police officers who had dinner with Chris Hurley while they were ‘investigating’ the case. Last year the coroner decided that the police were responsible for Mulrunji Doomadgee’s death.
On Wednesday the jury found Chris Hurley not guilty.
Mulrunji’s death is a horrific, but it’s just one of daily crimes against indigenous Australians. His arrest, his beating – they happen every day. The theft of land is what Australia is based on.
Then, yesterday, supposedly to protect children for sexual abuse the government announced a package of direct attacks on indigenous people. Most of which, like market rents, benefits, and land thefts – are simply neo-liberal attacks on people’s basic subsistence.
When I went to Australia with a group from my high school we spent several days camping in the bush with an aboriginal elder. We learned a lot about his culture and what has been and continues to be done to his people. For these reasons this kind of thing shocks and saddens but does not surprise me.
An old friend of mine from high school, an African-American, recently returned from Australia (his wife is Australian) and told me of an interesting experience he had while visiting Ayers Rock. He was wearing (inadvertantly) the same kind of bush hat and clothes that most of the tour guides were wearing and when he and his wife were on a trail by themselves and ran into one of the Aborigine guides, he said the man looked at him with the start of a recognition, assuming that my friend, too, was aborigine, then a look of puzzlement as he realized he didn’t know him. My friend had never met an Aborigine before, and likely the Aborigine had never met an African American before, and my friend said it gave him a pleasant feeling of racial solidarity that had never even occured to him before.
It’s sad to realize that Australia learned how to treat its indigenous population from the United States…
Sp – Aborigines, not Aboriginies.
Yes, this has put Australian reconciliation back years. Apparently Hurley just fell on him. Right – his liver was split in half. Some fall.
It’s also preferred to capitalise Aborigines, although many of use prefer the term Indigenous Australians anyway. “Aborigines” has some nasty history and implications attached to it.
What do they call themselves? Always a good starting point.
According to Wikipedia , there are 200 Indigenous Australian languages (of which all but 20 are highly endangered), so I am guessing that there are 200 or so answers to that question.
Heh, true. But I didn’t mean the individual tribal names for their own tribe/people (which I assume there would be lots, as you say) but what they would call themselves collectively in English if you asked them.
Or do they see themselves as one broad group of people at all? To white settlers they probably are mentally lumped together, but maybe they themselves hold to much more stringent distinctions.
Thanks Helen and Hexy
Guess you didn’t catch the “us”.
It really does differ from area to area. Most Koori use “Koori” or “blackfella”, at least amongst ourselves…. and tribe if we want to be specific. In a more formal context, it’s “Indigenous Australian” or “Aboriginal Australian”. Some still use “Aborigine”, but it’s being moved away from.
I describe myself as an Indigenous Australian, a Koori woman of the Wiradjuri tribe, a wajin blackfella… or, y’know, “hexy”. *grin*
As for the distinctions between us, you’re right on the ball. Whitefellas consider “Aboriginal Australia” to be one thing, one group…. but it’s actually a series of separate nations with completely different cultural disctinctions, each made up of many smaller tribes. Most of the area being discussed in these horrific proposals are Yolngu country.
All the nations are (or at least were) connected, but they’re still distinct.
Thank you for sharing your first-hand knowledge, hexy.
No worries. Thank you all for discussing the topic!
“Whitefellas consider “Aboriginal Australia” to be one thing, one group…. but it’s actually a series of separate nations with completely different cultural disctinctions, each made up of many smaller tribes.”
Wow, that sounds familiar. Most whitefellas consider all Native Americans to be one group, too. And think we all live in teepees and wear long feathered warbonnets.
Out of curiosity, what kind of language differences are there between Indigenous Australian tribes? There are several different linguistic groups among Native Americans (Iroquoian, Siouan, Athabaskan, etc.), with very little in common.
It’s the same here. Generally, each tribe has it’s own language, and while the dialects of neighbouring tribes tend to be close enough together that speakers can make themselves understood, the languages of geographically distant tribes are completely separate.
Nowadays, of course, we’ve lost a lot of the languages. The ones that remain in use tend to be around areas where people still live reasonably traditionally, and there’s a few that are still around but dying rapidly.
[Context: White, Australian, female, attempting to learn as much as possible, trying not to put her foot too far down her throat in the process.]
I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the US tend to use the tribal name “Koori” to cover all Indigenous Australians, and it sometimes gets frustrating to have to explain that the Koori people are down in the South-East of the continent. Around Queensland, there’s the Murri, here in South-West Australia there are the Nyoongar, and the Pitjanjara people have tribal lands in the central desert region. Even with the few groups I’ve listed above, I’m short-changing the vast number of Indigenous Australian tribal/cultural/language groupings.
My favourite analogy for those from the US is that it’s like using the name “Sioux” to cover all the Native American peoples from the Pueblos right the way up to the North-West territories of Canada. I’d like to thank Hexy for giving me an alternative term I can hand to those people I try to educate in future – Indigenous Australian is a godsend in that regard.
Meg: The Pitjanjara are a tribe within the Yolngu nation, which covers most of NT, some of SA and a little bit of northern WA.
And yes, I’ve noticed that too, that some use the name of one nation to describe others. I find myself correcting a lot, but it’s preferable to changing my own usage.
Guess I don’t have to ask where Hurley and others like him learned to write their police reports.
Very interesting topic and posts. Unfortunately, there’s quite a few parallels between the treatment of indigenous people by law enforcement in Australia and the United States, it seems.
Yep. Which is one of the many things that makes this new “invasion” of armed forces into native communities quite unsettling.
It is disappointing that after $7 million worth of investigation and prosecution in conjunction with a private investigator and a lawyer hired to gun for Hurley ironically proved Hurley innocent beyond reasonable doubt that this type of thing should be said about him. I guess it is just another example of “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”.
I can’t help noting the comment “Right – his liver was split in half. Some fall.” For anyone who isn’t familiar with this matter… The context is all medical experts involved held that the fall theory could explain the injuries. There were questions as to the mechanics of the fall and whether or not it was deliberate but the whether or not it could explain the injury was never in issue.
I’m coming to this late, but notwithstanding hexy’s indigenous heritage she’s dead wrong on one account. The Pitjantjatjara (pronounced pitjanjara) are NOT part of the Yolngu nation at all. The Yolngu live in Arnhem Land, i.e. extreme NE part of the Northern Territory. The Pitjantjatjara are a large group at the southern extremity of the Northern Territory/northern SA and the borders with WA. Linguistically, they are quite distinct, and culturally as well. Pitjantjatjara people refer to themselves as Anangu. In between the Pitjantjatjara and the Yolngu lie many other groups, including the Walrpiri, Arrernte (Aranda), Waramungu, Pintupi, Wardaman, Jawoyn, Kunwinjku, Rembarrnga, all within the NT.