A first-hand, eye witness account of an Aboriginal tribal battle written in 1927
LINK Quote:Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”
Quote:Playwright and author Louis Nowra concurs: “Despite local variations, there is a consistent pattern of Aboriginal men’s treatment of women that was harsh, sexually aggressive (gang-rape for instance) and , in our term, misogynist. Given its pervasive nature across the whole of Australia, we can say that it was ancient and long-lasting.”
Quote:Nowra quotes Walter Roth (1861-1933) a doctor, anthropologist and Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland. Roth described at the turn of the previous century how, when a Pitta-Pitta girl first showed signs of puberty, "several men would drag her into the bush and forcibly enlarge the vaginal orifice by tearing it downwards with the first three fingers wound round and round with opossum string. Other men come forward from all directions, and the struggling victim has to submit in rotation to promiscuous coition with all the ‘bucks’ present.”
(substitute a male for the female victim here, then imagine the inflicted pain)
Quote:"
A group of men, with cooperation from old women, ambush a young woman, and pin her so an old man can slit up the shrieking girl’s perineum with a stone knife, followed by sweeping three fingers round the inside of the virginal orifice. “She is next compelled to undergo copulation with all the bucks present; again the same night, and a third time, on the following morning."
In Birdsville, a hardwood stick two feet long with a crude life-sized penis carving at the top, was used to tear the hymen and posterior vaginal wall
Quote:“In the Tully area, a very young man would give his betrothed to an old man to sleep with her and train her for him. The idea was that the elder would ‘make the little child’s genitalia develop all the more speedily’. There was no restriction on age or social status at which the bride would be delivered up. As Roth observed, ‘It is of no uncommon occurrence to see an individual carrying on his shoulder his little child-wife who is perhaps too tired to toddle any further.”
Quote:Accounts from the missionary era are daunting.
In 1905 the local telegraph operator at Fitzroy River reported that a five-year-old half-caste girl, Polly “was out with the old woman, Mary Ann, when a bush black took her away for two nights during which time the blacks here said he made use of her. Such actions as that of Polly and the men are very common among the natives.” [7]
Anglican lay missionary Mary Bennett in 1934 testified, “The practice to which I refer is that of intercision of the girls at the age of puberty. The vagina is cut with glass by the old men, and that involves a great deal of suffering…I remember my old Aboriginal nurse speak with horror of the suffering which she had been made to undergo.”[8]
A practice as bad as female genital mutilation is still inflicted on hundreds of boys annually – involuntary sub-incision, the slitting open of the male urethra
Quote:The controversy continues into the current period.
In the 1970s John Coldrey, later a judge of the Victorian Supreme Court, appeared for a Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service client in Alice Springs. The traditional man, drunk, had inflicted 201 separate injuries on his wife who then bled to death. She had been passively crouching, and there were no defensive wounds.The man was punishing her for having been with other men that day. He had not wanted to kill or seriously injure her, he said. J. Coldrey belatedly discovered that the wounds were on traditional punishment areas of the body, and the conviction was then of manslaughter, not murder
Quote:in north and central Australia, relatives of small children “cruel” them by inflicting pain to make the child angry and violent, even from six months old. He believes this is a tradition dating from earliest times when aggression needed to be instilled in children/quote].
[quote]in Alice Springs hospital in 2005 ---numerous Aboriginal women and young girls with severe injuries from domestic violence. He visited outback communities and found them astonishingly brutal:
“Some of the women’s faces ended up looking as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in the women’s eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission.”
Quote:In contemporary Australia, polygamy & traditions of promised-brides continue in Arnhem Land and other remote areas. Until recently, the judiciary was lenient in such cases involving forced under-age sex. Jarrett writes,
“Aboriginal men still claim these modern young girls as their promised possession - have cars, guns, outstations and kin to help them secure and punish these resistant girls, well away from public purview
Quote:In 2004 a 55-year-old married man physically and sexually assaulted his 14-year-old promised bride for 2 days while she pleaded she was too young for sex. One month suspended sentence
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