Black Australia's Games of shame

By GREG ANSLEY

Cathy Freeman - intelligent, charming and faster than any woman in the world this year over 400m - is the Aboriginal face Australia yearns for the world to take home from Sydney.

Freeman is more than a runner of outstanding talent. She has become a high-water mark of Aboriginal achievement and a voice of moderation, even after wrapping herself in politics and the Aboriginal flag for her gold-medal victory lap at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Canada.

But Freeman's high tide surges from a very shallow pool: the large Australian team will include only half a dozen other Aborigines.

The invisibility of indigenous representation extends to the opening ceremony, a celebration of home-grown talent that conspicuously excludes black artists while promoting such icons of middle Australia as English-born singers Olivia Newton-John and John Farnham.

The real voice of black Australia will be heard outside the Olympic complex at Homebush, in the tent city that is mushrooming at nearby Victoria Park as a home for protesters intending to use the Games to bring black dispossession to the world's notice.

It will be heard also at the "sea of hands" to be planted across Sydney's Centennial Park by the group Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, and during a big international press conference organised by the National Sorry Day Committee.

Black Australia, says Geoff Clark, outspoken chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, must seize the Olympic moment.

Even Malcolm Fraser, the former Liberal Prime Minister demonised by the left after the 1975 sacking of the Whitlam Government and the man who catapulted John Howard from obscurity and set him on the road to prime ministership, has spoken out for black justice.

'I now believe that our own system has so patently failed to protect the rights of Aborigines that we should once again look at the establishment of a bill of rights in Australia," he said in a speech that enraged fellow Liberals.

Freeman has also crossed the divide.

When she took the Aboriginal flag from a spectator in Canada and draped it over her shoulders, it was an act of such natural elation that it captured the hearts of Australians, who cheered her at home, and excoriated Arthur Tunstall, the national Commonwealth Games chief who bitterly attacked her.

This moment aside, Freeman had until this year avoided direct involvement in the angry politics of race, at times frustrating radical Aborigines who wanted her global profile as a weapon for their cause.

But in July she broke her silence in an interview with London's Sunday Telegraph that exposed the Howard Government to the unforgiving glare of the international media.

Freeman's story was both deeply personal and tragically common. Her maternal grandmother, Alice Sibley, had been one of the Stolen Generation - black children taken from their families, language and culture and placed in institutions or domestic servitude in conditions of near-slavery.

"My grandmother was taken away from her mother because she had fair skin," Freeman said. "She didn't know her birthday, so we didn't even know how old she was when she died ...

"I was so angry because [the Government] were denying that they had done anything wrong, denying that a whole generation was stolen."

As Freeman's revelations burst around Mr Howard's head, his Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator John Herron, continued his efforts to convince the world that there was no Stolen Generation, and that for those who were removed from their families the blame lay elsewhere - with state Governments, churches and non-government institutions.

Such stonewalling, and the Prime Minister's continued refusal to apologise for past pain and suffering, is tinder for the outrage now gathering around Homebush in the tent city housing a growing population of Aboriginal activists and supporters.

It has been fanned further by the Darwin Federal Court rejection of a test case brought by two members of the Stolen Generation, 62-year-old Lorna Cubillo and 53-year-old Peter Gunner. Justice Maurice O'Laughlin's finding that the pair had failed to prove that the Commonwealth had not acted in their best interests in taking them from their families dealt a cruel blow to legal acceptance of the Stolen Generation and its claim to compensation.

To this has been added a new lost generation - the children and teenagers of the Northern Territory, overwhelmingly black and poor, who are sent to jail for minor offences under mandatory sentencing laws attacked by human rights advocates at home and abroad.

And as activists championed this cause, another, distressing symptom of Aboriginal despair broke surface in the federal Parliament during an inquiry that quantified for the first time the enormous toll exacted by solvent abuse. Bad enough that petrol sniffing is endemic among black youth in many communities - worse still, the inquiry was told, were the babies soothed to sleep with petrol-soaked rags by mothers who were often themselves brutalised by soaring rates of domestic violence.

Fed by alcohol and substance abuse, crime and violence permeate black Australia.

In Katherine, south of Darwin, the sale of cask wine and port is banned on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in a bid to curb crime and ensure there will at least be money for food and children.

At the Mekhong Thai restaurant, diners eat in a courtyard topped by double strands of barbed wire.

At the start of the 21st century, the cruel fact is that indigenous Australians live 27 years less than the national average - one in four Aboriginal men and one in 10 Aboriginal women do not live past 45.

Federal health authorities say that blacks continue to die at rates not seen for whites since 1900.

Almost every disease strikes Aborigines harder than other Australians, with death rates three to six times higher for circulatory, respiratory and endocrine diseases, and 40 per cent more deaths from cancer than should be expected.

Black babies are more than twice as likely to die at birth, and those that survive are likely to have a low birthweight. Indigenous rates of child abuse are up to nine times higher; Aborigines are more likely to kill themselves from substance abuse, accident or suicide.

And their smoking rates rise to more than 80 per cent in some places.

Housing in many areas remains appalling, often with unsafe water, inadequate sewerage and intermittent power supplies. Unemployment rates hover above 50 per cent.

But the Olympics have given black disadvantage an international voice.

In Europe, activist Michael Anderson has set up a base in Europe, priming European journalists before they leave for Sydney.

Once in Australia, they and others from every other continent will be confronted daily by the Aboriginal cause, centred on the tent city but spreading across Sydney with plans for marches on Mr Howard's inner-city office and the Olympic organising committee headquarters, a "human chain" along roads leading from Sydney airport, and a series of rallies, festivals and demonstrations.

Organisers predict that up to 20,000 people will demonstrate daily, their ranks swollen by supporters expected from New Zealand and North America, and by anti-capitalist protesters moving up from the World Economic Forum summit in Melbourne.

With Cathy Freeman carrying the flag inside and the army of protesters massing outside, the world will not be able to avoid black Australia.

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