Sydney riot highlights simmering aboriginal tensions

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 the neighbourhood of Redfern in Sydney has dramatically highlighted problems of race that have haunted Australia ever since the first white settlers arrived more than two centuries ago.

Forty officers were wounded, eight of them in hospital, in a nine-hour street battle with a mainly Aboriginal mob on Sunday night and Monday morning in and around a slum known as “The Block,” a grid of near-derelict houses not far from Sydney’s centre.

The trouble started when Thomas Hickey, a 17-year-old Aborigine, fell off his bicycle and impaled himself on a fence on Saturday. He died in a hospital yesterday amid allegations that he had been chased by a police patrol – a claim denied by officers.

Aboriginal leaders mourned the teen but said the reasons for the riot went deeper than the cause of Hickey’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 Senator Aden Ridgeway, the only Aborigine serving in federal Parliament.

Ironically, Aboriginal heritage and culture is a multimillion dollar industry in Australia. Tourists buy thousands of mass produced boomerangs and traditional paintings each year – many of them in stores just a few miles from the scene of Sunday night’s riots.

But most of the money generated goes to non-Aboriginal businesses. Few visitors see the crisis in housing and health care that is crippling indigenous communities and fueling the sort of resentment that exploded yesterday.

Chased from their lands by European settlers when the first colonisation of Australia began in 1788, Aborigines have lived uneasily alongside the rest of the population ever since.

Repeated and costly government policy failures have turned Aborigines into a community with Third World health problems cast adrift in one of the Western World’s wealthiest societies.

Aborigines now number 400,000 in the 20 million population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics said in 2002 that Aboriginal men have a life expectancy of just 56 years – 21 years less than the national average. Aboriginal women’s life expectancy is 63 years – 20 years less than other Australian women.

Aboriginals are 10 times more likely to suffer blindness than other Australians, mainly as a result of trachoma, a bacterial infection eradicated in most of the developed world.

Discounting government employment projects, unemployment among Aborigines runs at about 40%, according to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an elected body that distributes about £500 million in government funding each year.

Unemployment is partly blamed for Aborigines making up nearly 20% of the nation’s prison population despite numbering only 2% of the nation’s people.

Alcoholism and drug abuse are major scourges.

Relations under the current conservative administration of Prime Minister John Howard have been strained by Howard’s refusal to apologise for past governments’ mistreatment of Aborigines.

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 upmarket neighbourhoods have been gentrified while The Block has crumbled into a rubbish-strewn slum.

The state government and the area’s Aboriginal owners are redeveloping the site, but social problems persist.

Clashes between police and Aborigines often erupt in small towns around the country, but they get little coverage in a nation where media outlets are concentrated in major towns and cities.

Officials have promised to hold an inquiry into Sydney’s riot. But the legacy of distrust is unlikely to dissipate quickly.

AP