Opinion: Voice to Parliament must provide sanctuary for Indigenous people subject to violence

The romanticism that many Australians feel about Aboriginal communities can be challenged when actually confronted with the often terrifying reality, writes Michael Madigan.

A lawyer who did much to assist Queensland Indigenous communities in his long and worthy career once said something to me that has remained in my mind for decades.

“When you stay at an Aboriginal community for a few nights, and you hear the wailing of the women, it does tend to change your perspective,’’ he said.

What he meant was that the romanticism – that earnest, youthful, vocational sense of obligation that many Australians have felt when using their skills to assist Aboriginal communities – can be challenged when confronted by the tortured screams of a fellow human being receiving a flogging.

Queenslanders fortunate enough to live comfortable, middle-class, suburban lives would struggle to comprehend how routine this violence can be.

A seemingly orderly gathering can suddenly combust as angry shouts and denunciations rapidly evolve into blows from either fists or weapons.

Young Indigenous Australians on the street in Alice Springs. Picture: Liam Mendes

The unfortunate victims – perhaps a teenage girl whose slight build has already made her a magnet for the bullies – can wail and plead piteously for mercy as the mob urges on the assailants, and the blood spills into the dirt.

Were many of us caught up in such a situation, it would quite possibly leave deep psychological scars requiring years of counselling.

Yet for some young Indigenous people such scenarios are not some bizarre departure from normality but a daily routine.

The media stories and vision coming out of Alice Springs this week demonstrating how entrenched violence has become represent only a brief flurry of interest which will swiftly pass.

An elderly Australian journalist this week mentioned on social media that he also authored a story exposing alcohol abuse, drugs and violence in Alice Springs, which was also greeted with outrage and demands for change. That story was broadcast just under 50 years ago.

Yet the national desire to see Indigenous people taking their rightful place at Australia’s table, sharing in the abundant wealth, safety, security and comfort that even our working class see as the norm, endures.

The Voice is being presented this year as the latest solution – the key to unlocking the door to those sunlit uplands of Indigenous education, jobs, housing and prosperity.

Those looking to learn more about the proposal should go back to its genesis, the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

That statement provides an eloquent summary of the emotional landscape of a people caught in “the torment of our powerlessness’’ – a people who view themselves as disenfranchised despite living in one of the world’s most successful democracies.

The core of the idea is hardly complex – a body recognised in the Constitution to make representations to the Parliament and the executive on matters relating to Indigenous Australians.

It would have an administrative arm with a chief executive and 24 members.

Police on the streets in Alice Spring. Picture: Liam Mendes / The Australian

To perhaps an untutored eye, it does appear as merely a sophisticated version of an old-fashioned lobby group, albeit one actually inside the government. What is clear is that the Voice has captured the imagination of an influential political and media class using social media to affirm support.

Yet many of these ardent supporters will probably never visit an Aboriginal community and, I suspect, back the idea merely to cultivate carefully curated public perceptions of themselves as empathetic progressives who can, by virtue of their moral superiority, denigrate those who don’t.

If it succeeds at referendum (and this week’s Australia Day celebrations which exposed an internal split vote have suddenly made that less likely) its number one priority on setting up office has to be aiming for laws offering some form of sanctuary.

For every intoxicated kid wandering a North Queensland Indigenous community at night there is another timid, terrified young soul hiding in a back room, desperately looking for an exit from the hell their life has become.

Sanctuary was often available, right up until the first decades of the 21st century, with elderly women brought up on Christian-based missions who never drank, smoked or allowed foul language in their homes, and who possessed a natural authority which could effortlessly stare down a violent, drunken abuser.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Alice Springs this week.

Those women, most of whom are no longer with us, provided not only sanctuary but a form of salvation for kids who had fled their own violent homes to find a cooked meal, a
kindly word, a safe bed for the night and a glimmer of hope that there might be another world to aspire to – one free of drugs, alcohol, joblessness, aimlessness and fist fights in the street.

The system that shaped those women has been deplored, some of the churches that oversaw it discredited, and the entire Christian philosophy that underpinned it largely discarded.

The Voice is this century’s answer to dysfunction in Indigenous communities, for good or for ill, and I strongly suspect the majority of Australians earnestly hope it can provide some answers.

But, it must be said, when you’re left looking to a government for sanctuary and salvation, you’re already living on a bleak landscape.

Michael Madigan has covered Indigenous issues in Queensland and Australia, off and on, since 1991. In 2015 he won a Queensland Clarion Award for Indigenous Issues Reporting.