WHEN an Aboriginal lad died in police custody in the cotton-picking town of Wee Waa, New South Wales, the episode stirred one of my students to write on what, rather than who, killed Eddie Murray. Specific suspicions aside, the death seemed singular. Aboriginal suicide barely rated a mention in the largely anthropological literature. By the time Lloyd Boney died at Brewarrina in 1987, the 16th death that year, Bob Hawke was prepared to listen to the Committee to Defend Black Rights. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, appointed in 1987, then inquired into 99 deaths between January 1980 and April 1991, concluding with 339 recommendations in five volumes.
Aborigines die in custody at a rate relative to their proportion of the gaol population.
That, says the commission, is the crux. The report will rank in Australian history as significant for our race relations and racial attitudes. Wide-ranging and free of political censorship, the commission dealt with the people who died, the Aboriginal disproportion in custody, and the underlying issues explaining that proportion. Change includes the need for self-determination, improving the criminal justice system, breaking the cycle of youth unemployment and substance abuse, coping with alcohol, increasing economic opportunity, improving the obvious disasters of housing and health, and addressing land needs. The slanging between federal and state governments, between governments and oppositions, resumed.