Beach, your 9 year old story refers to Anna Bligh ordering a review, it does not give the outcome of that review. What was the outcome? There must be something to report by now. Link please.

A news item yesterday reported that the mortality rate for Indigenous kids aged between one and five was (according to my unreliable short-term memory) ten times the national average. Abstract from that the Indigenous working population whose mortality patterns would be similar to the Australian average, double it for remote areas, and it's possible that mortality of very young children is forty times the national rate.

Remote-'community' domestic violence isn't just an unwilling spectator sport for young children, but something that they are often dragged into, and fatally. Kids in those 'communities' are not just neglected, poorly fed and cared-for and sexually abused, they are belted, thrown against walls or out of windows just as much as their mothers or aunties.

Reflecting on this, I went back to some stats that I'd drawn up about thirty years ago, of mortality rates at one southern community, between 1890 and 1957: 59 % of deaths were of people below twenty years old, and only 18 % were of people over sixty. Even in the 1950s, the comparisons were roughly the same.

If current mortality rates are also comparable, then one consequence stands out starkly: half the Indigenous population doesn't live long enough to reproduce. A corollary of that is: to cover up brutality against Indigenous children and women, or to do nothing about it, may amount to genocide. Because that's the long-term effect of losing half your child-bearing population.

These are urgent issues, and most certainly not to be swept under the carpet with mealy-mouthed side-tracking issues like 'Recognition'.

Joe

Hi Joe, I agree, those are terrible figures and they bear out my own calculation based on other data, that around 80% of all serious domestic violence in the country occurs among a few Aboriginal communities (not by any means all are affected).

Leaving that aside, perhaps you could put your anthropological hat on for a moment? I'm interested in the comments by yourself and Big Nana that this culture of violence predates European settlement. It seems to me that there may well be an evolutionary explanation for it. These were nomadic peoples, who often occupied very harsh environments and lived in small tribal groups by necessity - the land won't support large groups in any one place, especially in drought. It's also a very harsh environment more generally.

I wonder whether the treatment of children and women is a form of selective pressure? To put it crudely, it's better to have the weak die young than to allow them to drag the whole group down. In order to breed tough kids who'll survive, you need tough mothers, so do your best to weed out those who aren't. I've known some bloody tough Aboriginal women, as I'm sure you must have as well.

The problem, perhaps, is that the world has changed very rapidly around these people, in much less than 10 generations since white settlement in many regions. The cultural models which made them such a successful coloniser of this continent are no longer appropriate to the challenges facing them, but they haven't had time to evolve new ones. My understanding of Aboriginal cultures generally is that they are very conservative and distrustful of new ideas, which would also be understandable in evolutionary terms: you don't want to go taking chances on new ideas if you already have a successful model for survival even if it's not perfect.

I know that's a bit of a digression, but it might help with context. Any thoughts?

Hi Craig,

Out of my deep respect for you, I'll overlook that hurtful slight about being 'anthropological', as I'm sure Big Nana would too. But I have great admiration for some anthropologists like Peter Sutton, the Berndts, Phillip Clarke, Phillip Jones, and I sympathise with the usual antropologist career imperatives that they must be 'loyal', utterly unquestioning, of one's group's behaviour, in order to remain that group's bitch, and in order to retain some academic cachet.

Yes, indeed, there are many tough Aboriginal women. I met my dear mother-in-law actually before I met my wife, at a funeral, when she was about forty, and stroppy as buggery (she was the first woman who I ever heard use certain words and phrases, but I had lived a sheltered life in Bankstown); I didn't know then that she had already had ten kids. When she and the old man were drinking of a weekend, if she got too insensible, he use to kick her around - but the next weekend, I'm told, when HE was pretty insensible, she would kick the daylights out of him. Her daughter really took after her (well, except for the mutual kickings). Ah, halcyon days !

Yes, women fight back, and the men get ever more violent in response. Is it traditional ? I'm just finishing William Buckley's account of 32 years with the Geelong groups, and there's some of it there, although there seemed to be so much violence generally, it's hard to differentiate: actually there seemed to be more indiscriminate, random violence against children. In SA, in the various documentary sources, there are plenty of references to violence against women, and the law was often bent to allow for 'tradition'.

[TBC]

[contd.]

Back to now. The upshot is that almost all women murdered in the NT each year tend to be Indigenous, from 'communities', killed by partners. I wouldn't be surprised if that goes for kids as well. But it's probably been the rule in 'traditional' societies, tribal societies, since we all left Africa.

Peter Sutton re-examined many Aboriginal skeletal remains of women and found that a huge proportion had died with head-crush injuries on the left side. That's been the reality for more than fifty thousand years. How many women in that time ?

And for how much longer ?

Cheers and thanks,

Joe

The point of being an adult is that one controls ones temper even in cases of provocation. Hitting a woman is never excusable. Walk away, even walk out.

Or be prepared to suffer the consequences.