The international media rarely descend on Australia — the last occasion was the 2000 Sydney Olympics — and for some Aboriginal Australians the Rugby World Cup has presented a rare opportunity to highlight the shabby state of indigenous affairs in many parts of the sport-mad nation.
Recently, in Townsville, a city of 140 000 people in the northern state of Queensland, hundreds of people participated in a protest opposite the Dairy Farmers stadium where the World Cup game between Scotland and Japan was being played.
The protest, organised by Gracelyn Smallwood, a prominent Aboriginal health and human rights expert, was designed to tell the world that the Australian justice system is discriminating against Aboriginal people.
The focal point for the protest was a recent sentence handed down in a case involving the hit-and-run death of a local Aboriginal woman, Yasman Rae Sturt (20).
Sturt was killed in October last year when a driver of an unregistered and defective car ran her over in the small town of Currajong, near Townsville. The driver of the vehicle was found to have had a blood alcohol reading of 0,253 at the time of the accident, but received a four-month suspended jail sentence and an A$750 fine.
The sentence outraged Smallwood and members of Sturt’s family. Smallwood last week told the local newspaper, the Townsville Bulletin, that the legal system had failed Sturt and that the way the case was handled through the court system “is like something in the Sixties in Alabama, where you [could] run over a black person and get a smack on the hand. Had that been a white 20-year-old girl, would there have been the same sentencing?”
As a further example Smallwood cited at sentence by a Sydney court, where an Aboriginal man was jailed for three years after being found guilty of killing an elderly white woman with whom he had collided while riding his bike.
Townsville mayor Tony Mooney has condemned the Smallwood-led protest. Mooney told the media that using the World Cup as a vehicle for getting international attention, was “ill-conceived”.
Another local Aboriginal leader, Jenny Pryor, also criticised the demonstration. “This protest could tarnish [the image of] the black community and could also add to racial tensions,” she told the Townsville Bulletin.
Aboriginal people comprise 10% of the Townsville population.
The protest has highlighted the way in which younger Aboriginal leaders in Australia differ from their elders in their pursuit of a better deal for their community — a point noted by Mary Butler, a speaker at last weekend’s peaceful protest.
Butler, a well-known Aboriginal community leader in Townsville, told the gathering that she feared that the “younger generation” of Aboriginal leaders were bent on “getting revenge” rather than “turning the other cheek” when it came to the white-black divide in Australia.
The Townsville protest was an indication of the strained relationship that has long existed between Aboriginal and white Australia in the economically thriving city. In 1995 a monument to veteran Aboriginal land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo was painted with swastikas.
This year has seen an escalation in tensions between the group of marginalised, predominantly low-income indigenous Australians and the city’s more affluent white population.
In May Mooney held a summit on public drunkenness. The local police force was granted the power to forcibly remove people from public areas and confiscate alcohol. Aboriginal leaders condemned the move saying it will do nothing to help curb the problem of alcoholism that is rife in some aboriginal communities.
There have been numerous reports this year of assaults of young Aboriginals by whites, particularly in the city’s parks and public spaces where Aboriginals tend to meet.
Townsville’s race problems has been covered in the international media this year. The Guardian on June 21 quoted Aboriginal resident Shannice Daphey as saying she and her fellow Aboriginal neighbours are often called “niggers and coons” by whites.
On June 26 the Australian government’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission issued a media release expressing “concern at attitudes towards indigenous people in Townsville and the hostile treatment some have experienced”. The statement went on to say that, “indigenous people [have] reported incidents of being shot at with flare guns, stoned, bashed, chased and verbally abused”.