- perpetuating myths and stereotypes in the media
- 'The Colour of Money', Damien Murphy, The Bulletin, October 95
- Comment:
- Executive Officer of the Aboriginal Justice Advisory Group, Gail Wallace, on the media's role in bridging the cultural gap
- Executive Director, Strategy & Review Branch, NSW Police, Neil Bridge, on the reality of policing in Redfern
- ABC TV Indigenous Programs Unit producer/presenter, Michelle Tuahine, on the media's stereotyping of Indigenous Australians
- 'Black is not a Colour', Letter to the Editor from HREOC's Zita Antonios and Mick Dodson, The Bulletin, 31 Oct 95
Please note that none of the reports in the case studies have been the subject of complaints or queries under the Racial Hatred Act.
The Colour of Money
Damien Murphy, Oct 1995
Melting pot or meltdown? For all of his wealth, influence and sheer cult of personality, the question of race in the O.J. Simpson verdict has become almost academic. Could it happen here? On statistical probabilities alone, probably not. We can take wealth and influence out of the equation, for a start.
The nightmare begins this way: you are driving along a freeway through an American city when the engine falters and you pull off the nearest exit. Suddenly you find yourself in an alien world of burnt-out tenements, boarded-up shops an garbage-strewn streets. A sullen group of black youths blocks your way.
Tom Wolfe, for all the melodramatic excesses in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities, got that part right. What he didn't mention was that same frightening scenario doesn't only haunt white people. Many Afro-Americans also live in fear of the hate plague that infects many of their race, reducing intellect to violent reflex, making payback the rule.
Our Newsweek section (from page 54) explores the aftermath of the extraordinary O.J. Simpson verdict and its scary implications for race relations in the United States. It would be comforting to think of the American colour-binding experience as unique and holding no lessons for Australia. The big difference between the two countries is the fact that drug usage is pivotal to US race relations - there is the widespread perception that crack was designed to keep blacks enslaved in the ghettoes - whereas Australia's hard drugs trade is now largely driven by the Asian community, a matter of economics, not race.
Numbers
In the end, the race relations may come down to simple numbers: 30 million Afro-Americans comprise 14.5% of the US population, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up only 1.6% of Australia's population - concentrated in the north, the outback and northern NSW, far from most urban centres, with little electoral, social or financial clout. Race relations in Australia swing between notions of dispossession and possession. Yet in the US, the claims of Native Americans play second fiddle to an equal rights battle between two relatively newly arrived group, one claiming to be an oppressed minority. But Afro-American consciousness has shaped Aboriginal aspirations to the point where race relations in Australia parallel the US experience.
Proportionately, blacks are the poorest Australians, the sickest, the most jailed, the least educated and, just as Wolfe's confronting boys in the 'hood represent an American dream gone bad, there are "no-go" areas in our own country. Eveleigh Street, Redfern, the broken heart of Sydney's Aboriginal community, looms large in white Australia's psyche. It is Australia's Black South Central, "star" of so many television documentaries that the image of blacks hanging out between rows of trashed, graffiti-daubed terraces has become media shorthand for race conflict.
Redfern is "locals only", a mix of long-time residents and transplanted troublemakers from the bush. Any errant visitor risks abuse - purses might be snatched, cars vandalised. The only outsiders tolerated are taxi drivers and the dealers slide in from outer-suburban Cabramatta in their flash cars to ply drugs.
Wrestling
Once, all Australian capitals had their Redferns - Fitzroy and Northcote in Melbourne, West End and Fortitude Valley in Brisbane, etcetera - but gentrification has driven most Aboriginal communities out of the urban centres. In the bush, where nothing to do is a way of life, the streets have been taken over by youngsters who toss stones and bottles and rob the homes of black and white alike. Towns along the Darling River - Bourke, Wilcannia, Brewarrina - have been hit hardest, but coastal cities like Townsville in Queensland, Taree in NSW, Ceduna in South Australia and Geraldton in Western Australia are also wrestling the problem. Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, among other centres, has limited liquor sales to restore some semblance of order.
It's not all about black tension, however. Ethnic rivalries have created other "no-go" situations: Vietnamese gangs have turned Cabramatta into a war zone, while on the northern outskirts of Melbourne, Broadmeadows and the rundown 1956 Olympic Games village of Heidelberg West are similarly off-limits.
Australia may never have an O.J. Simpson. He moved effortlessly from football hero to celebrity, symbolising the hopes and dreams of many. But few black Australian heroes - Cathy Freeman, Evonne Cawley, Lionel Rose, inventor David Unaipon, Captain Reg Saunders (our first Aboriginal commissioned officer), former SA governor Sir Doug Nicholls - fall from grace.
Those who stumble afford Australians a deep look into themselves. Ten years before a referendum recognised Aborigines as citizens, the painter Albert Namitjira was so lauded down south in the big cities that he was granted full citizenship in 1957. The following year, trapped between two cultures, he was jailed for supplying grog to relatives who as "non-people" were not allowed to drink. Namitjira died in 1959. Earlier that year, Rupert Max Stuart was convicted of the rape and murder of a mime-year-old whit girl on a beach near Ceduna, SA. It became the year's biggest story. T.G.H. Strehlow, a priest and academic, queried Stuarts's confession - claiming that, as an illiterate, he could not have spoken with such articulacy. His execution date was changed seven times before a royal commission forced the government to retreat and commute his sentence. Stuart served 14 years and was released to a community in Central Australia, where he resides today.
The Stuart case hinted that the Australian legal system could advantage one group of people over another. Yet four decades later, as in the O.J. Simpson case, the question remains: did Stuart do it or was he fitted up because he was black?
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