Australia A Cry of Desperation

By William E. Smith

Eddie Cameron was 23 when he was arrested, charged with burglary and placed in a solitary cell in Geraldton, Western Australia, one night last July. A few hours later he was found dead, hanging by his own bootlaces. But the death of Eddie Cameron, an Aborigine who was a local football hero and the son of a political activist, sparked a riot by 300 of Australia's native sons.

The reason: Cameron was just one of at least 103 Aborigines to die while in police custody or prison since 1980. Says criminologist David Biles of the shockingly high death toll: "An Aboriginal person is 20 times more likely than a white to die in custody."

Biles is chief researcher for a royal commission appointed last year to delve into the phenomenon. Last week the commission released an interim report attempting to explain the causes of Aboriginal deaths in custody and offer some prescriptions to prevent them. "Australia must know the truth behind the deaths," said the chairman of the commission, Justice James Muirhead.

The majority of the deaths under investigation were described by the authorities as suicides, often involving alcohol abuse. Others were the result of physical or mental illness. More than half occurred while the victim was in police custody rather than in prison, and many took place within two or three hours of confinement. Among the alleged suicides, details of the deaths are often hauntingly similar. Eddie Murray, 21, hanged himself in 1981 while in custody in the New South Wales hamlet of Wee Waa. Loyed Boney, 28, was found hanged in his cell at Brewarrina, New South Wales, in 1987. Bernard McGrath used a strip of toweling in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, to strangle himself. McGrath's relatively minor offense: violating probation after conviction for driving without a license. A few cases involve charges of police brutality, while others focus on the failure of police to realize that a prisoner was seriously ill.

The interim report offered 56 specific recommendations to prevent more Aboriginal deaths. Among them: imprisonment for lesser crimes should be used only as a last resort; public drunkenness should be abolished as an offense; treatment centers for alcoholics should be established as soon as possible. The report also suggested a national task force be appointed to examine the effects of alcohol abuse on Aborigines, a particular source of trouble for these indigenous people.

The commission's wide-ranging investigation has helped to open the country's eyes to the plight of Aborigines. Ever since the First Fleet arrived from England in 1788 carrying British convicts, the Aborigines have been retreating from the land they held for 40,000 years -- to the outback and more recently to the seedy fringes of urban society.

They are the nation's second-class citizens. Between 1788 and 1900, their numbers dropped from 300,000 to 93,000. Since then, the Aboriginal population has grown back to 230,000, or 1.3% of Australia's 16 million people. About 11% have never gone to school (vs. 1% of Australian whites), and 30% are unemployed (vs. 7% of whites). The life expectancy of Aborigines is 18 years less than that of whites. Significantly, Aborigines gained the right to vote only 21 years ago.

Like American Indians, Australia's Aborigines find themselves in limbo, alienated from their own culture and shut out of the white society around them. And when Aborigines are locked up in confined spaces, they often suffer great depression. "It is a double identity crisis," says psychologist Joseph Reser of Queensland's James Cook University, "characterized by near powerlessness. Suicide is probably an individual expression of the only kind over which they have control, a cry of desperation."

Two hundred years after the first European settlement, the government of Prime Minister Bob Hawke has embarked on a series of long-term reforms. Canberra has promised to take the symbolic step of signing a "treaty" with the Aboriginal population that, in Hawke's words, would acknowledge "the errors and wrongs of the past." The government is also trying to reorganize a system of land councils to encourage greater unity and self-determination. And it is returning historic tribal lands in the Northern Territory to Aboriginal control. Uluru National Park has already been transferred to Aboriginal ownership. Within its boundaries is the great monolith known as Ayers Rock, the national landmark that is also sacred to the Aborigines.

Such initiatives have been heatedly debated in Australia but are a measure of the country's willingness to make partial restitution to the original Australians. So far, however, neither the transfers of land nor improved sensitivity in the criminal-justice system has managed to erase the sentence Aborigines carry from birth: to live as unequals and virtual outcasts in their own country.

With reporting by John Dunn/Melbourne