Bad dreaming: Aboriginal men's violence against women and children, by Louis Nowra

Last December, when the Queensland DPP announced that no charges would be laid against Sergeant Chris Hurley for the horrific murder of Eric Doomadgee, a 36 year old healthy Indigenous man from Palm Island, I remember feeling sick to the stomach. (That decision was later overturned and Hurley is now charged with manslaughter). In my ignorance, and indignation, I overlooked the fact that women and children have been battered, raped and violated on Palm Island every single day, for year and years. Hurley’s crime was inexcusable, but so equally, is the perpetual assault on Aboriginal women and children.

Why does it take the intervention of a white man to expose the awful reality of the lives of black women? It’s a frustrating fact, but that’s how it is in an increasingly patriarchal Australia. Should we feminists stand up and say we don’t need or want men to speak for us? We can speak for ourselves? Maybe, in an ideal world, but in my observation contemporary feminists are enormously reluctant to speak about gender-based oppression within non-mainstream communities, for fear of buying into racism or going against the notion of (equal but different) multiculturalism.

So, I’m glad that the playwrite, Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) took personal responsibility to write an essay which condemns the appalling levels of male violence in the Aboriginal community, and which sheets the blame straight home to men; “I have been driven to write about this because, as a man, I know that at its dark unwholesome core, it is a man’s problem.”

While we shuffle our feet, Aboriginal women are living daily with hideous levels of violence. And dying. Audrey Bolger, in her 1990 report, Aboriginal Women and Violence points out that the number of murdered Aboriginal women exceeds the number of Indigenous men who have died in custody. Why aren’t we marching in the streets?

Nowra’s essay is carefully crafted. He begins with his personal experience of domestic violence and his response to confronting the horrific evidence of Aboriginal men’s violence during a stint in Alice Springs hospital. He goes on to explore the traditional roots of violence in Aboriginal communities, the impact of invasion, the issue of “promised wives”, homosexuality and the use of customary law as a defence in the judicial system. Some of his examples of violence against women and children, including toddlers and babies, are profoundly distressing. And yet again, I was pulled up short by my own silly assumptions. Nowra writes: “Women remain victims of men’s versions of indigenous customs and culture.” Yes, it’s obvious – human rights must always come before cultural rights.

But Aboriginal women aren’t always victims. Nowra tells the story of several strong women who have fought back. But again, it’s women who are doing the work. Sometime soon, individual Aboriginal men, in large numbers, are going to have to stand up and pledge never to hit, rape or abuse another woman or child.

Nowra has been predictably accused of appropriating Aboriginal culture (in the title), racism in his generalisations, and even of using this issue as a money-making tool! (By publishing an essay in Australia – I think not!) He has also been criticised for not presenting concrete solutions. At the Gleebooks forum, an Aboriginal man who described himself as a health policy worker from NSW Health, made an angry attack on the validity of Nowra’s statistics, asserting that the problem was caused by failed government policy, and condemned the book as “unscholarly”. I just wish he could feel equivalent anger about the injustice Aboriginal women and children suffer.

Nowra mentioned to me afterwards that he has seen young Aboriginal men who stand up against this behaviour effectively ostracised from family and community. It's a risky business for men to stand against men too. But it's got to be done.

My only criticism of Nowra’s book is that it doesn’t even bother to question “why?” Why do men rape and attack women and children? What do they get out of it? He writes from the premise that if they can get away with it, they will. that an idle man is a dangerous man. That is deeply, deeply depressing.

Read this book and get angry.

Published as part of the NOW series by Pluto Press and available from Gleebooks