Riot Highlights Australia Race Problems

[Yann]

Riot Highlights Australia Race Problems    

By MIKE CORDER, Associated Press Writer

SYDNEY, Australia - A young Aborigine dies. His family and friends bitterly blame police, and within hours gasoline bombs and rocks rain down on a Sydney ghetto. Cars and a train station are torched.

Australians like to think of their society as fair and egalitarian. But a riot in Sydney's Redfern neighborhood has dramatically highlighted problems of race that have haunted this country ever since the first white settlers arrived more than two centuries ago.

Forty police were wounded, eight of them hospitalized, in a nine-hour street battle with a mainly Aboriginal mob Sunday night and Monday morning in and around a slum known as "The Block." It's not clear how many protesters were hurt.

The trouble started after a 17-year-old Aborigine fell off his bicycle and impaled himself on a fence on Saturday. He died in a hospital Sunday. There had been allegations he was chased by a police patrol — a claim denied by officers.

But Aborigines said the reasons for the riot went deeper than the boy's death.

"People should not kid themselves; this is Australia and last night's display of violence is an extreme example of the extent of the alienation felt by some Aboriginal kids," said Sen. Aden Ridgeway, the only Aborigine serving in federal Parliament.

Ironically, Aboriginal heritage and culture is a multimillion dollar industry in Australia, with tourists buying thousands of Aborigine-themed souvenirs each year.

But few visitors see the crisis in housing and health care that is crippling indigenous communities and fueling the sort of resentment that exploded Sunday.

Aborigines now number 400,000 in a population of 20 million, and they live on average 20 years less than other Australians.

Discounting government employment projects, unemployment among Aborigines runs at about 40 percent, according to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an elected body that distributes about $780 million in government funding each year.

Aborigines also receive millions of dollars each year in land earnings since a 1992 court case returned ownership rights taken away after European colonists arrived in 1788.

But the money has done nothing to alleviate the problems.

Unemployment, alcoholism and drug abuse are blamed for Aborigines making up nearly 20 percent of the nation's prison population despite numbering only 2 percent of the nation's people.

Relations under Prime Minister John Howard have been strained by Howard's refusal to apologize for past governments' mistreatment of Aborigines.

For decades, authorities took many children away from their Aboriginal parents — often by force — in a now-discredited attempt to assimilate them into mainstream society, creating the so-called "Stolen Generations."

Although only a few hundred Aborigines live in and around The Block in Redfern, it is one of the highest profile symbols of Aboriginal inequality.

Much of this is due to its prime location, just one railway stop from Sydney's Central Station. Nearby upscale neighborhoods have been gentrified while The Block has crumbled into a garbage-strewn slum.

Officials have promised to hold an inquiry into Sydney's riot. But no one expects a legacy of distrust to dissipate anytime soon.

New South Wales state opposition leader John Brogden — a senior member of Howard's Liberal Party — said the only way to clean up The Block was to knock it down.

"I'd bring the bulldozers in because I think allowing this to happen every couple of years, which is what's going to happen, will never fix the problem," he said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040216/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_race_relations_3

[Yann]

Race hatred polarises Australian town

Aboriginal leaders say skinhead attacks on homeless are fuelled by official crackdown on park dwellers

David Fickling in Townsville
Saturday June 21, 2003
The Guardian

Claims of racism are nothing new in Townsville, the hardbitten industrial city in Queensland's humid tropics, which is often described as the capital of Australia's deep north. "This is probably the most racist town in Australia," says Lloyd Wyles, a broadcaster for indigenous radio station 4K1G.
Aboriginal and Melanesian people here claim to have been harassed by the police, refused housing and jobs, turned away from pubs and restaurants, and subjected to verbal and physical attacks.

The grave of Eddie Mabo, the founder of the Aboriginal land rights movement, was painted with swastikas only a day after a monument to his legacy was erected in the city in 1995.

Recently, however, matters have become extreme even by Townsville's standards. Indigenous leaders say there has been a string of beatings and attacks in recent months. They claim that on more than one occasion Aboriginal teenagers were deliberately run over in hit-and-run attacks.

Dwayne Watega, 18, was walking to his relatives' house in the Townsville suburb of Heatley a fortnight ago when he was attacked by white youths. "Five pulled up and started punching into me," he says. "When I was on the ground they were kicking me, not saying anything, just kicking away. Then there was a car coming so they all jumped in and took off. I was in hospital for two days. I've got bruised lungs and a split spleen."

According to indigenous community workers, the most serious attacks are not on well-off children like Dwayne but on Aborigines sleeping rough in Townsville's parks - the so-called parkies.

At Morey Street Park, east of the city centre, residents say racial attacks occur nightly. "The last one was last night," says Shannice Daphey. "They came past yelling, 'Get up you black stinking cunts,' calling us niggers and coons." Other reported incidents have been more serious. Several people in the park claim to have been beaten by skinhead gangs, and there have been reports of rock-throwing and even petrol bomb attacks.

At Happy Valley, an Aboriginal shanty town under the flightpath of Townsville airport, residents last year were attacked by a mob claiming to be Ku Klux Klan members and carrying metal bars, chains and fence posts. Such attacks are rarely reported to police. Claims of police harassment, including looking for "grog", are routine, and few local indigenous people trust the officers or "bully men".

Alcohol and substance abuse is certainly a problem, particularly among the parkies. David Smallwood, an Aboriginal leader, says many indigenous people arriving in Townsville end up sleeping rough after being displaced from traditional rural communities. "A lot of people come here from remote communities for medical treatment, people who aren't used to an urban lifestyle. It's a complete culture shock, and sooner or later they end up in the parks as a statistic."

Townsville's council has put the issue of public drunkenness at the heart of a populist law and order campaign. Critics claim it is fuelling race hatred. A council meeting on Tuesday extended a limited ban on public drinking to all parks in the city centre, a move widely felt to be aimed at indigenous people.

"For the wider community it's not thought to be a nice tourist attraction to have our people sitting around in parks, but you don't see them making a fuss if there's white people having a bottle of wine with their picnic on a Sunday," said Gracelyn Smallwood, deputy area head of the Aboriginal affairs body Atsic.

Stereotyping


Ms Smallwood believes that official attitudes to the parkies, who number little more than 80 people among Townsville's indigenous population of 15,000, are feeding a wider racism in the city. Her view is echoed by Townsville's state MP, Mike Reynolds. "It is almost as if the offensive behaviour of a relatively small number of people is secretly welcomed as fuel for racist agendas, and that deeply rooted racial intolerance is being directed at the black population in general," he told local media earlier this year.

There are countless tales of racism directed at local people. Particular bars and nightclubs are thought to unofficially run segregationist door policies, a situation admitted privately even at official levels. "In the city centre, one end of Flinders Mall is where whites party and one end is where blacks party," Ms Smallwood said.

The white population is intensely suspicious of criticism from outside, and insists the city has no serious racism problem. Townsville's indigenous population is certainly more visible than in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and the racism in town is little worse than in other parts of regional Australia.

But many of Townsville's white residents go further, claiming that indigenous people are simply making up or exaggerating racial attacks. The mayor, Tony Mooney, says complaints about racism are a "diversionary tactic", not objective. "There's as much evidence to show that the situation is the other way round."

He does not regard Aborigines' intense distrust of police as a problem in the collection of accurate figures about attacks. In any case, the police do not collect statistics on whether or not crimes are racially motivated, and although racial vilification is strictly prohibited under Australian law, no one can remember a case being brought in Townsville.

But the head of the government-funded human rights and equal opportunity commission visited this week to investigate. Royalie Walters, the regional manager of the anti-discrimination commission, says public obsession with parkies seems to have bred impunity among a minority of white youths in town. Unwitting media stereotyping meant people felt justified in yelling racial abuse and even causing constant harassment, she said.

But Mr Wyles thinks the town's problems are more deep-rooted. "It goes right back to the constitution. This country was founded with a racist white Australia policy. Indigenous people weren't even citizens until 1967."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,12070,982067,00.html

[Yann]

Poster taped to a power pole which accuses police of murder, in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern on February 16, 2004

[Ayinde]

by John Pilger
New Statesman
February 19, 2004

Once again, the neat, placid surface of white Australia is disturbed by those who owned and cared for this country and remain its internal exiles. On 15 February, a crowd of Aboriginal youths set fire to a railway station and fought riot police in a run-down area known as The Block, in the Redfern district of Sydney. It is the last redoubt of Australia's original inhabitants in the centre of a city built on land from which their forebears were first evicted 216 years ago.

On a hot Saturday morning, 17-year-old Thomas "TJ" Hickey was impaled on a metal picket fence in circumstances which the police, politicians and journalists say are "in dispute". There is no dispute in The Block. TJ was being chased by police, or at the very least riding his bike as fast as he could to get away from a provocatively cruising police car.

There is no dispute, because every Aboriginal youth in The Block, and in every city and town in Australia, can expect to be harassed incessantly by police; the vast majority are arrested for petty offences and end up in custody. In the Northern Territory, 89 per cent of an average day's prison arrivals are Aborigines, who comprise 2 per cent of the Australian population. Once inside, many die by their own hand, and some are beaten to death. Think of Stephen Lawrence many times over and you get the picture.

White Australians know this. They know, or they ought to know, that the life expectancy of Aboriginal people is one of the lowest in the world, and that their health is the worst in the world. An entirely preventable disease, trachoma, which has been beaten in many third world countries, still blinds black Australians because of untreated cataracts and appalling living conditions. Epidemics of rheumatic fever and gastroenteritis ravage black communities as they did the slums of 19th-century England.

The cause? Poverty and dispossession. In a society obsessed with property values, 90 per cent of overcrowded households are Aboriginal. A few years ago, Dr Richard Murray, of the Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services Council, told me: "What it comes down to is a lack of political will to allocate resources. The federal government spends about 25 per cent less per capita on the health of Aboriginal people compared with the rest of the population. Look at the phenomenon of suicide, which comes from a lack of opportunity and hope for the future. It is the young men who bear the brunt. In a typical community where there are, say, 50 men up to the age of 25, one or two will kill themselves, two or three will try and another dozen will give it some serious thought. They come from families that have to live with constant grief. It is a heart-wrenching truth that the outside world knows little about."

Gail Hickey, the grieving mother of TJ, says police were "after him" in their home town of Walgett, New South Wales. Soon after the family arrived in Sydney, he was beaten up by police, according to his aunt. "They claimed it was mistaken identity," she said. Whatever the fine detail, the events leading to TJ's death are typical. Recently, I wrote a funeral eulogy for Leila Murray, an Aboriginal friend and the mother of Eddie Murray, who was found hanged in a police cell in the town of Wee Waa, New South Wales, on 21 June 1983.

Eddie had been arrested and taken to the police station; his crime was being drunk. At least one policeman lied at the inquest, and the coroner concluded that Eddie had died "at the hands of a person or persons unknown". And that was that. Except that Eddie's parents, Leila and Arthur, began a tenacious 21-year campaign for justice. They petitioned three New South Wales attorney generals, they provided compelling new evidence, and they finally won the right to exhume their son's body. The new autopsy revealed that Eddie's sternum had been crushed, as if subjected to blow upon blow.

Leila and Arthur demanded an independent inquiry but instead came up against a new wall of indifference and silence. Having fought for justice through the system, they had barely rippled the surface of white Australia. When the heroic Leila died, not a word appeared in the mainstream media. The other day, the Sydney Morning Herald interrupted its lifestyle coverage to offer this lecture: "The Redfern Aboriginal community should understand that no one should be immune from the processes of the law if an offence has been committed."

Tell that to the Hickeys, and the Murrays, and to the countless other black Australians who, denied justice and health and employment and hope, have been betrayed time and again by the law. The Australian high court's judgement in the "landmark" Mabo case in 1992 was said to recognise that Aborigines had land rights. But it did not order stolen land to be handed back, and in a follow-up judgement, the "moral victory" became a war of legal attrition fought against Aboriginal groups. The ensuing litigation has cost several billion dollars, which might have improved living conditions in ghettos such as The Block and provided jobs and decent health services. The bitterness felt throughout Aboriginal Australia was expressed by the anger of the 4,500 Yorta Yorta people, who had suffered a lifetime of peonage and whose claim to their stolen homelands was rejected in 2002 by the judiciary, which heard from a powerful array of white political and corporate interests.

Australia, like white South Africa, has a deeply racist history of dispossession and cruelty, buttressed by "the law". But even history is a battleground, in which "revisionists" - the likes of Keith Windschuttle, a self-publishing and much-publicised "new historian" - can suggest that Tasmanian Aborigines lacked humanity and compassion.
Not anywhere in the world with indigenous populations, not in North America, New Zealand, even South Africa, could you get away with such a slur.

Windschuttle has been the darling of an influential group of white supremacists, who buzz around the far-right magazine Quadrant (once funded by the CIA). They deploy their arguments in a manner not dissimilar to the way David Irving used his history texts to promote Holocaust denial, with the difference that they have been given generous space and tacit support in the press. In rejecting what they call "the black armband view of history", they claim, absurdly, that mass killing and resistance in Australia did not happen, nor many of the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families, ordered by the state. They are supported by Prime Minister John Howard, who is famous for sending the Australian military to turn away leaking boats carrying refugees, and to kill Iraqis in their own country. Howard often expresses the jingoistic national "pride" that comes with uniforms, flags and cricket.

Lyall Munro, a much-respected Aboriginal elder, referred to the real thing. Standing where the riots took place in The Block, he told his people: "There's been a stand made here [by] some really brave young black people that we are immensely proud of."

http://www.newstatesman.co.uk

[Yann]

As yet comments by the State on this matter have been to chastise the parents of the children who participated in the riots, to buldoze the area of Redfern  entirely and to adopt even harsher methods to deal with violence. The Austrailan newspapers have unsurprisingly little to say in defense of the dead child  or by way of investigations into the alleged police actions.  Given Australia's track record of investigating claims of police brutiality  toward its black population, I expect quite little there. The arrogance of the Australian government and the scant lip service paid to this issue by the media highlights the evil situation Australia's aboriginal peoples have been forced into by those who stole thier land  and  exterminated thousands of thier people many years ago. Some aboriginals say they belive there is still a widespread ongoing plan to exterminate them... i think they are right...

Latham attacks parents of young rioters
Federal Opposition leader Mark Latham has criticised the parents of young children involved in Sydney's Redfern riot on the weekend

Aunt refused bail on riot charges
A Sydney magistrate has been forced to clear his court room after refusing bail to the aunt of Aboriginal teenager Thomas Hickey, whose death last weekend sparked rioting in the Sydney suburb of Redfern.

It takes a riot to care about these kids
As TV reporters converged on the Block - which these days looks likes a film-set ghetto with its cluster of junkies and pushers doing business, burnt remnants of demolished buildings and small groups of under-employed black urban dwellers - Sydney seethed. While the NSW Opposition Leader, John Brogden, advocated that the lot be bulldozed, Uniting Church minister Bill Crews heard one talkback caller advocating a special SWAT squad to deal with race relations hotspots, busting violent Muslim youths in Lakemba one day, rioting Aborigines in Redfern the next.

[Ayinde]

This Week in Redfern

By VANESSA JONES
February 20 / 22, 2004

There is a boy dead in a city morgue. A teenager. Thomas "TJ" Hickey. Dead at 17. How do you write about death? About riots? About an issue no-one in power seems to want resolved? The mad scramble of Australia as it is today. Inner city Sydney Redfern. Put on some music. Whatever is on the player. Hi 5 and Paul Kelly. And try and describe what happened this past weekend. Before time and more life fades.

THE SCENE: Sydney, Australia. Feb 14, Valentine's Day: An Aboriginal youth- Thomas "T J" Hickey, aged 17 years. On his bike. Ends up impaled on a fence. How did he get stuck on a high metal fence? He dies the next day in hospital, from his injuries. Aboriginal people of Redfern get angry. People say he was chased by police. Tensions boil over. A riot takes place on Feb 15.

THE LOCATION: A slum corner of Redfern, central Sydney. Eveleigh Street. A one way street. Runs parallel to the railway line. Terrace houses, known as 'The Block". Expensive area. Except for the block. Aboriginal housing. Dispossessed people. Broken. Police on their backs. Lack of opportunities. Fracture. Poverty. Drink. Crime. Violence. University students getting the train in from leafy suburbs to Redfern pass Eveleigh Street on the way to Abercrombie Street, on the way to uni. On the way to a better world, a better future, by-passing Eveleigh.

TIME: SUNDAY FEB 15th: 9PM: 100 Aboriginal rioters. Midnight: 250 police called in. 50 police injured. Before Dawn Monday: Order restored.

MOTHER: The Mother of the dead teenager, Gail Hickey, says in an AM ABC radio interview with Michael Vincent on 16th February:

MICHAEL VINCENT: Can you tell me what happened when you found out about your son?

GAIL HICKEY: I don't know. I was terrified and that. Wild and that. I wanted to go up to the police station and smash the police station up, that's how wild I was. My 17-year old boy was just coming down to get money off his mother and then these dogs here, fu**ing end up killing my son. How does a fu**ing 17-year old boy end up on the fu**ing fence?

MICHAEL VINCENT: Did you go to the police station last night and tell them how angry you were?

GAIL HICKEY: I went yesterday morning. I wanted to check the bike, check the bike out he was on. How's he gonna...his bike, how's he going to get off his bike onto that fence. These dogs up here done it.

MICHAEL VINCENT: You believe that the police are responsible?

GAIL HICKEY: I believe it. The police fu**ing killed my son.

MICHAEL VINCENT: What happened when you went to the police station yesterday?

GAIL HICKEY: Oh, they deny it. They never done it.

MICHAEL VINCENT: Did they show you the bike?

GAIL HICKEY: Yeah, the chain's off the bike and it's buckled the back wheel. I believe the bike been hit by a car.

MICHAEL VINCENT: What happened yesterday when you came home from the police station?

GAIL HICKEY: I was sitting down here at Redfern, here all day with my friends and that and all I could see was police driving round at the top, wouldn't come down Eveleigh, only one car came down all day yesterday, they were intimidating us they was.

MICHAEL VINCENT: What happened when that police car came down yesterday? What happened to that police car?

GAIL HICKEY: All my son's friends got wild and that, started throwing things at him. They deserve what they get."

Residents say they saw Thomas chased by police. Then Thomas fell off his bike. Then he was impaled on the metal rods of a tall fence. Died the next day in hospital. Sunday after Valentine's Day. 17 years old.

SUNDAY RIOTS- WHAT HAPPENNED: Images.

DESIRES OF THE AREA: Developers want it. Inner city-Redfern, part of it being an Aboriginal housing area, now eyed off for it's prime inner city real estate value. Developers. Sold to more upwardly mobile inner city cool high earning business people, uni lecturers, film makers and designers. An area gentrified in the past 14 years. Terraces sold for around $100,000 15 years ago. One train stop away from Sydney's Central station, a short walk to the prestigious University of Sydney. But the Aboriginal streets of Redfern are a thousand miles away from the best of Australia's living standards. Respectable street's terraces costing $600,000 compared to a national housing average of $200,000 or $300,000, depending on cities.

Poverty stricken Aboriginal Housing Company homes. Drug dealing is planted there, goes the urban myth, to passively destroy the community, in the hope of freeing up the land for development. It's a meeting center for Aboriginal youth. Anthony Mundine's Dad's boxing gym is there.

The Redfern Aboriginals hang on, however dispossessed of dignity. By colonialism, unemployment, crime, drugs and racism. Homes of disempowered Aboriginals. Burning , destruction of the railway station. Sunday night. Breaking window glass with raw hands. Dropping burning bottles onto passing trains. Trains told not to stop at the station. Anger over their mate's death. Their brother. Over everything. The last straw. Police turning on the water hose of the fire truck the firemen had left behind when they'd exited the scene. The riot squad were not called in. Wonder why not. Rioting.

CAGED: The poison of being contained within the occupied system. Dependent on welfare. The maze. The need to get out, but the incapacity to get through the system to get the employment/training/loans/self esteem/ self respect/ community's respect. The racism. The lost literacy and education. The anger and despair. Get the police off your back. The pretending to be Spanish/Maltese/Italian to get out/get a job/cut your ties, or be swallowed up in the system that destroys and eliminates your existence, your people, at the same time as making you dependant. The social engineering, trying to run out of the maze of it. Yet never quite knowing the way out before it traps you, or the cop cars chase you, and you are cornered, impaled on the rods of a metal fence. Already at 17.

MEMORY: As a kid, used to visit a family friend there. Aboriginal kids knocking on her door asking for an egg or a bowl of flour. Like neighbors used to everywhere, when neighbors used to talk to each other. Before supermarkets were open all weekend and all night long. And she'd talk in hushed adult tones over a cup of tea about the police coming or a fire down the road. As we were supposed to be playing outside in the terrace courtyard. Coming in for a bikky or a sip of lemon cordial and hearing fragments of conversation about those people down the road.

Visiting a friend renting a terrace. A fire in a metal drum in the middle of the street down the road. Taking my son in, wondering about needles on the ground. Like St Kilda beach. Searching for star fish- finding them, under the pier.

SUNDAY- AFTER THE BOY'S LIFE CEASED: Aboriginal people of Redfern in mourning. Police patrol the streets insensitively, locals say. No consideration. History of harassment by police. They won't leave us a lone. Riots broke out. Thomas died Sunday. In hospital. He was on his way to get $20 from his Mum. Told his girlfriend he'll be 10 minutes, and she waited.

He went to get money for food and cigarettes. But he never got back. Police chased him, witnesses say, though they deny it. Witness saw cops chasing. On Valentine's Day, he never got back to his girlfriend. Got stuck up on a fence and died. On Sunday local residents start putting up on telegraph poles printed posters of most wanted cops. Aboriginal guys, after hearing of their mate's death, the TV news screen becomes like the anger of Palestinian guys on TV when someone's been killed by Israeli forces. The occupied. The occupier. Death.

Boys and bikes. Violence. Flames. Stone and brick throwing. The next day's/ that day's anger. The anger of all the years. A brick at a policeman's head. They say police chased a boy to death who ended up impaled on a metal fence. Anger. Throwing. Water spray. Arrests. Young men. Shirts off. Breaking and throwing. Then rounded up and arrested, after shots, video tape scanned for identifications. Lock them up. The ringleaders. Deaths in custody. Hatred of police. The cycle goes on and on.

THE LADY DOWN THE ROAD SAYS: "Well, those dark people are always getting into trouble. Yes, I suppose they were upset. They are very close, they live like that. At church, we pray for them. My Minister used to do a lot of good work for those people. God help us all. It's terrible, life these days. These things never used to happen. Life used to be good. Life is not like that anymore. We must pray to God for peace and an end to all this violence." As Paul Kelly sings beside me: "I keep my mouth well shut".

STRANGE COINCIDENCES: Last week a state government train transport disaster. Commuters calling for the Premier's head on a platter. Train commuters crammed into late trains like sardines. Hot sweaty days. Late summer. Underfunded trains delivering sub zero service. Newspapers actually talking about it. Now riots take over first place in the media. Last October, Sydney's public hospitals were exposed as under funded and deadly. Avoidable deaths recorded and reported by brave nurses. Breaking the silence to a listening media.

At that time, there was the coincidence of ethnic violence- Lebanese gang shootings- drive by shootings. Hard to find who was doing the shootings- the mysterious sideshow detracting attention for government health disasters. First on the news. Convenient distractions from state political disasters of Bob Carr's government. Chance.

The chance of Aboriginal or Arab violence, coinciding with the government's health and transport disasters. Within 4 months of each other.

Yet one'd better shut up and not link one plus one equals 2. Not think about the recent council rezonings of Sydney by that Carr government. Not think about Redfern becoming part of the amalgamated Sydney City Council and how Labor will get voted in, with more people in government housing voting Labor. And wouldn't developed Redfern bring in so many new council rates. But that's unthinkable. Be positive.

BULLDOZE THE AREA: The opposition leader of the state, John Brogden says "I'd bring the bulldozers in." The developers would be cheering from the sidelines. All those investors salivating like hungry wolves waiting to grab a piece of developed Redfern. The Premier of NSW responded by saying that by next year all "the Block" terraces will be demolished. And, surprise surprise, development plans will be finalized over the next few weeks. A riot is the perfect political launching pad for bulldozing these areas. The electorate have been revved up and prepared. "Those dark people..."

MY DIARY: That Sunday at 9:30 pm driving back from Coogee Beach. Across the city. But not through Redfern. Through McEvoy St, Alexandria. Instead of Redfern. There are 2 places to cut through the city from the sea. Redfern or Alexandria . We did Alexandria, by chance. By 1 km, missed the riots. Didn't find out til Monday- when a friend called. The riots. At 2pm we found out about this city and what we'd missed by a whisker of a kilometere, last night, with the kids asleep in the back of the car, after digging sand at Coogee Beach and having a picnic. Just the other week I'd been lost around Redfern and headed over the railway bring towards the uni. Lost, but finding my way.

THE RESULT: There's a boy, a young man, dead in a city morgue. Died after a police chase, witnesses say, which police deny. A person lost. A boy killed. A boy with his life ahead of him. Impaled on a metal fence on Valentine's Day.

As I go to bed, I think of his mother, and how could she feel. And I can't sleep. Toss and turn and shift. And I know that's why it's easier not to be Aboriginal. It's easier to sit on the sidelines and watch, and be sympathetic. To be in it would be unlivable, unable to detach.

Like an Arab watching Iraq blown to pieces. In it. Occupied- physically or mentally. Attatched, no place to sit on the sidelines. Your brothers, your Aunts, your people. No way of sleeping, without feeling part of it.

Cut down in his youth.

Not the first, and, going by our colonial history, surely not the last.

MEMORIAL SERVICE: On the net I read about a memorial service, 2 hours ahead on Thursday. I think of going- call the Aboriginal Legal Service to see if it's ok if non-Aboriginals go along. "Anyone can come -it's open to anyone". I didn't know why I wanted to go. Show sorrow/solidarity/justice. I thought that if non-Aboriginals turned up, it shows people care.

Like crossing the Harbour Bridge back in 2000. The bridge full of people who cared about reconciliation. A cold and windy day. I called Redfern train station to see if the trains were running - no answer- is it still shut down after Sunday's riots? I ring another station- yes, they are stopping- "someone's probably having a smoko at Redfern".

Coming back, off the train, there are still frangipanis on the tree. The kids are watching afternoon TV. Some frangipanis on the footpath. I buy a drink on the way home, it's so hot. The Block, Redfern. People came together on that patch of earth next to a crumbling, broken down terrace, with the railway line opposite. Hot sun. Media people. Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals. A couple of church priests. I see the Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway, in a suit, standing back in the crowd. I see the Christian politician Fred Nile. He sits under the tent that's been put up for the elders. I comment to a bloke next to me how he takes the prime position. "Knows how to use the media" the man next to me says. But the elders ask him to move to the crowd, in the sun, to make way for the Aboriginal elders. No-one is there from the Carr state government. Thomas Hickey's mother, Gail, sits with grieving relatives, under the shady tent structure. You can see the city skyline behind, behind the crumbling brick terraces- Centrepoint tower. As Aden Ridgeway commented later, the wealthiest and biggest city in Australia.

The man next to me says his parents were English, and that he'd come to the opening of the Block 30 odd years ago. 1973. When the then P.M. Gough Whitlam opened it. Land handed over to the Aboriginal Housing Company, run by Mick Mundine. He'd done his uni thesis on the taking away of Aboriginals from their mothers and the brutal treatment kids endured at church run orphanages. That most of the people on The Block were from those backgrounds, or from distant rural areas. That the Block had become a meeting place for rural people coming into the city. And a focal point for activism.

There were a lot of young kids around. The mini bus brought them in from school. One local kid befriended a Channel 7 cameraman, wore his cap and earphones, and the cameraman let the kid hold and look through his precious camera. Kindly, and patiently, letting him stand up on a blue plastic milk crate and see how the cameras worked. Cap on backwards. How the eye of the media is created. It seemed to sum up what some whites wanted. To be able to share and connect. It took very little. But too often there were too few opportunities to do so. Other cameramen raised their eyebrows. While a musician was singing.

When I arrived, there were a couple of cops at the station. The windows were boarded up with timber- where they'd all been smashed on Sunday. A section of the station was screened off and sealed with timber. The turnstiles were not working, and people walked through, ticket unchecked. There were no cops down at the Memorial service. Just up at the station. It was so quiet and simple. A no frills set up. Just the land, a few chairs, a shade cover tent structure. The ceremony started with the playing of the digeredoo. A woman spoke of sensing the ancestral spirits alongside the people who'd turned up. A dancer performed a traditional dance. People brought flowers. Non-Aboriginal people, mainly women, stepped forward to place them in front of the photo of Thomas.

I think many people had come to express disgust at the whole history of police connections with Aboriginal Australia. Police being the power structure which linked law and land and people. The whole loss. Thomas Hickey's death was tragic, but somehow to understand this death was to understand so much of our shared history. One grain of sand within the whole lot. To show disgust at the whole process was atleast to show disgust. To do nothing would have been to do nothing.

An elderly woman told me that whites just don't understand "us", "our" connection to the land. That they just don't understand. She moves the earth under her shoe. She says her Mum had lived on The Block. Says that no-one's addressing the needs of young Aboriginal kids.

Drug and alcohol problems. Half the population are under 18.

A visiting man brings over 2 six packs of beer to a local crowd. At the end, people went over to talk to the mother Gail, to offer their condolences. She was sobbing with her relatives. The media cameras were clicking as each person went over, so I just walked away quietly. Up the station, looking back, once. Then the train I wanted came, and I was gone in a flash. The warmth of those people speaking together had left. A businessman opposite me, an Arab guy standing looking out the window. 2 Asian girls sitting chatting in school uniforms.

The Aboriginal people and even the politician Aden Ridgeway, spoke of having no powerful say in the direction of policies. But as the train sped away, I felt that few Australians had a say in policies that affected their lives. Money had the say, for access to education and healthcare, and there were millions of Australians going home from work that afternoon who had little say in their future, or the future of Aboriginal Australia. Who could guarantee that they'd get excellent tax payer funded health care at an emergency admission to hospital?

Who could say that the local primary school offered equal to expensive private schools? Why is university education getting dearer and dearer, and those who can pay can get in before those who can't? We are all tied up in these policies and results together. It is not only Aboriginal Australians who are denied good education and skills access. It is a challenge we must all take up, and realize, for all of our lives, however weary we are after a hot day at work, on a crowded train home.

Vanessa Jones lives in Sydney. She can be reached at: post4@bigpond.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02202004.html

[Ayinde]

'If you oppress people long enough, things will erupt. Riots will happen'

David Fickling reports from Sydney's downtrodden Aboriginal quarter, where the death of a teenager has sparked Australia's worst race violence  Continue here...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0%2c12070%2c1153549%2c00.html