Suffering of Aboriginal people continues

John Pilger says that the Suffering of Aboriginal people continues.

In Western Australia, the brutal past of Rottnest Island is hidden away from the tourists who visit it.

What was done was the torture, humiliation and murder of the First Australians. Wrenched from their communities in an insidious genocide that divided and emasculated the indigenous nations, shackled men and boys as young as eight endured the perilous nine-hour journey in an open longboat. Cold, sick and terrified prisoners were jammed into a windowless "holding cell", like an oversized kennel.

Today, an historical plaque refers to it as The Boathouse. The suppression is breathtaking.

This suppression continues today:

During the boom, Aboriginal incarceration has more than doubled. Interned in often rat-infested cells, almost 60 per cent of the state's young prisoners are Aboriginal — out of 2.5 per cent of the population. While their mothers hold vigils outside, aboriginal children are held in solitary confinement in an adult jail.

A former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me the state was now "racking and stacking" black Australians. Their rate of incarceration is five times that of apartheid South Africa.

The Aboriginal stereotype is violent, yet the violence routinely meted out to black Australians by authority is of little interest. Deaths in custody are common. An elder known as Mr. Ward was arrested for driving under the influence on a bush road. In searing heat, he was driven more than 300 miles in the iron pod of a prison van run by the British security company GSL. Inside the mobile cell the temperature reached 50 degrees centigrade. Mr. Ward cooked to death, his stomach burned raw where he had collapsed on the van's scorching floor.

Yet Australians condemn Indonesia for its treatment of prisoners (only if they are young, white women).

And people wonder why Australia is violent and racist because that is what the governments practice daily against the Aborigines. State violence becomes normal behaviour.