Deaths in Custody: History of Australia’s Aborigines

Michael (Willie) Wallace knew how grim the dungeon in this remote jungle settlement could be.

He had been locked in the tiny, tin-roofed jail for drunkenness before. Once, police crammed 27 other aborigines into the four-foot-wide cell. They had no water, no lighting, no toilet, no bedding and no guard.

But solitary confinement apparently was worse. Locked up alone on March 29, 1987, Wallace cried for water and his mother. Then, drunk and distraught, the 22-year-old ranch hand tied his socks to the window’s bars and hanged himself.

“Willie Wallace knew he had no future,” said Mark Plunkett, a Brisbane lawyer who investigated the death. “He wasn’t going to study the traditional knowledge and sorcery to learn where he came from and where he was going. That way of life was dead. All his role models were dead of drink. And he knew he couldn’t make it in a white man’s society. What could he do?”

It is a question that haunts Australia today. Not because Wallace’s death was unusual, but because it was not. At least 103 aborigines have died of suicide, neglect or brutality while in official custody since 1980.

A royal commission, an independent panel of judges appointed by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, is to complete a $40-million investigation of the 103 deaths this December. But already the preliminary reports have provoked intense interest by blaming the deaths largely on misguided government policies, official abuse and tortured race relations.

“They’re shining a light into the darkest corners of our history,” said Noel Pearson, an aborigine who is studying law in Sydney. “It’s a history not only of physical violence; it’s a history of powerlessness and hopelessness. The story of black deaths in custody is the story of tearing aborigines from their land and destroying their culture.”

According to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Australia’s original inhabitants have the highest infant mortality in the country, the most violent crime, the shoddiest housing and the poorest schools. Their life expectancy is 20 years less than that of other Australians, and their unemployment rate is six times the national average.

Although their death rate in prison is no higher than that for white prisoners, aborigines are 28 times more likely to be in jail than whites.

“It is a figure not unlike those you find in South Africa,” said John Walker, who compiled the statistics for the Australian Institute of Criminology.

One reason, studies show, is rampant alcoholism, and alcohol-related violence, in many aboriginal communities.

“It’s a means to feeling power for people who have no power,” anthropologist Peter Sutton said. “It gives you courage to fight the white system.”

Behind it all, according to the royal commission, is a history with sad parallels to that of the American Indian.

Hundreds of thousands of aborigines were shot, poisoned or killed by diseases introduced by European settlers who began arriving in 1788. About 225,000 survive today, less than 1.5% of the country’s population.

By the 1900s, most aborigines had been forced off traditional lands and herded onto reserves. Families were routinely separated and sent thousands of miles apart. Others, though they were never charged, tried or convicted, were sent to penal colonies for life.

“It was a system of terror,” Queensland University historian Thomas Blake said. “You had no rights. You could be moved for any reason. You had to seek permission of the chief protector, as he was called, to get married. He controlled your bank account. You had to get permission to spend it.”

Later, “assimilation” became national policy. This policy, which by 1970 had been largely abandoned, gave government agencies total control over aboriginal children, and tens of thousands were forcibly taken from their parents and sent off to white-run schools and boarding houses.

The policy was “designed to achieve the disappearance of aboriginals as an identifiable group of people,” Hal Wootten, one of the five royal commission members, wrote last year. “Such a policy would today be internationally condemned as genocide.”

Wootten investigated the death of Malcolm Charles Smith, a 28-year-old aborigine who died in January, 1983, in Sydney’s Long Bay prison after he stuck a paint brush into his brain through his eye socket.

Smith had spent most of his life in official institutions. He was taken from his parents at age 11 and sent to a children’s home 1,000 miles away. At age 19, he was illiterate and unskilled. He spent most of his adult life in jail.

In a 96-page report, Wootten said Smith’s death was caused not by police misconduct “but in large measure by the regular operation of the system of self-righteous, heartless and racist destruction of aboriginal families that went on under the name of protection or welfare well into the second half of this century.”

By most accounts, official abuses against aborigines lasted longest here in Queensland, the huge state in the northeast.

“Before 1984, you had the Dark Ages for most communities here,” said Barbara Miller, an aboriginal affairs official in Cairns. “You had by-laws and provisions that were against human rights conventions. You had to have permission from the white manager to use a transistor radio, or to wear a bathing suit.”

Similarly, all money the aborigines earned outside the Queensland reserves went into a state-run welfare fund. So did their estates when they died. What happened to the money, no one seems to know. No public accounting was ever made.

Ironically, the people in Willie Wallace’s tribe, the Kuku-Yalanji, were mostly ignored until the 1960s. They lived in tiny camps in the vast rain forest of northern Queensland, hunting and fishing in a mist-shrouded wilderness of rugged mountains, roaring waterfalls and dense jungle.

But Queensland officials decided that the Kuku-Yalanji were “unsupervised” and “needed looking after,” according to government reports. By 1970, about 300 had been crowded into crude cinder-block houses on the edge of the crocodile-infested Bloomtree River. The nearest town, Cooktown, was two hours away.

“They lived on each other’s doorsteps,” said Chris Anderson, an anthropologist who lived in Wujul Wujul. “That, together with a loss of all control in their lives, meant a keg of dynamite, particularly for young people. They’re caught between two systems.”

The conflict was evident on a recent Friday morning. A dozen men and women, shouting and clearly drunk, wandered barefoot through the dusty streets, past ramshackle houses with broken windows. Others could be heard fighting inside.

Julie Grosser, a Lutheran nun, treats the victims of these incidents in a busy two-room clinic.

“What I see most is men who put their fists through the windows,” she said. “To me, it seems a lot of frustration. And anger.”

Such random violence is not part of tradition, said Bobby Yerry, 50, a tribal elder. “My grandfather time, nothing happened like that. Then, when young people break the law, old people talk to them, or send them to the bush. Young people got to understand the old people way.”

But modern ways have not worked. Doreen Fullagar, 42, Wujul Wujul’s deputy chairwoman, was taken from her parents as an infant and reared in a white-run children’s home.

“You’re grateful, in a way, because better education was given you,” she said. “But you’re feeling awful inside for not learning the traditional aboriginal ways that my parents knew. They (people) say I’m too white now. I’m in between. It really hurts.”

Wujul Wujul is hurting as well. Self-management since last November has led to new conflicts among competing clans. Local police were fired a year ago and never replaced. The two-room death cell was condemned but never destroyed. It stands empty in a weed-filled field.

Few here expect much help when the royal commission finishes its work in December. Its 1988 interim report cited “appalling neglect” of jailed aborigines and recommended sweeping reforms. But no police or prison official has been prosecuted.

“There are no changes that anyone can see,” said Lester Rosendale, a Wujul Wujul official. “It’s just a record to be shoved away in the archive.”

But many whites praise the commission for forcing Australia to confront a painful past and a difficult future.

“The deaths in custody are a consequence of 200 years of violence, oppression and denial of rights,” said Blake, the historian. “It’s almost a cry for help from aboriginal society.”