Louis Nowra begins his compelling essay Bad Dreaming by describing a conversation he had with an Aboriginal man during a stay at the Alice Springs Hospital, a place notorious for assaults on staff.

The Aboriginal man proudly tells Nowra that he had to rape a 13-year-old girl because she wouldn't say yes. Nowra goes on to recount how some years earlier he struck up a conversation with two Aboriginal men in their 70s who were off to town to buy a toy dinosaur for a 12-year-old girl who had sex with them simultaneously.

What amazes Nowra in both these cases is the men's lack of embarrassment or shame. In the next 90 pages Nowra explores the history of male Aboriginal violence against women and children from the early days of white settlement through to the present. Drawing on official statistics, court records and media reports, he paints a grim, deeply disturbing picture.

Many of the crimes he details are unspeakably violent: babies raped and drowned; a woman bashed, bound and left to die on an ant nest; another doused with petrol and set alight. The list goes on. The problem he sees are the men and a legal system that has twisted itself in knots to understand the unthinkable and the unimaginable.

Nowra, however, is a sympathetic and knowledgeable observer of indigenous culture. As a playwright and author, he has worked with Aboriginal actors, lived in and visited indigenous communities over many years. He writes lucidly and candidly about his experiences with domestic violence in his family and the housing estate where he grew up.

For those who have followed the issue - it is more a national crisis - Nowra's essay is a profound contribution to the debate. While there may not be much new factual material, having it all drawn together in such a sustained, well-crafted, well-argued way makes for powerful reading.

Nowra's account is a print version of the landmark interview Alice Springs crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers gave to Lateline in 2006. As such it may be a more lasting document.

There are those who have argued, and continue to argue, that Aboriginal violence is no different to domestic violence found in mainstream society and that to draw attention to indigenous crimes against women and children is just another form of racism. Nowra rejects this, noting that in Queensland alone indigenous children are up to 45 times more likely than non-indigenous children to be admitted to hospital having been assaulted. "For many Aboriginal children, the only future is an endless repetition of the horrors they have already experienced," he notes.

Part of the reason Nowra gives for penning his unrelenting commentary is a respect and concern for Aboriginal people and a determination to keep the epidemic of violence on the policy screens of decision makers, law makers, indigenous leaders and countless publicly funded pressure groups. Nowra worries that coverage of Aboriginal violence in the mainstream media is sporadic, that it comes in waves with shocking revelations one day and nothing the next. He has a point. Some publications, such as The National Indigenous Times, have largely ducked the issue or even shot the messenger.

The publicity given to indigenous violence sits at odds with the sustained media attention devoted to the stolen generation and Aboriginal deaths in custody. Nowra quotes National Indigenous Council chairwoman Sue Gordon, accusing government agencies of taking a softly-softly approach to child abuse because they are "frightened of creating another stolen generation".

Audrey Bolger, notes Nowra, wrote in her neglected report Aboriginal Women and Violence that the number of murdered Aboriginal women exceeds those of indigenous men who died in custody.

I also suspect that part of the reluctance lies in what Noel Pearson describes as the great divide in the Aboriginal community between those who argue for rights and those who call for greater responsibilities. So much of the indigenous struggle has involved fighting for rights - legal rights, land rights, human rights, rights to royalties - that to acknowledge male violence may subvert the notion of entitlement for past wrongs.

The situation would be helped if, as former ATSIC chief Mick Gooda tells Nowra, more Aboriginal men stood up and said violence is not a part of "our culture".

If this essay has a weakness it is Nowra's need to convince his audience of the problem rather than exploring solutions. Take the perfectly reasonable option, floated by Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough and endorsed bly Nowra, of physically removing men accused of violent crimes from communities.

The resources required to do this are probably way beyond the budget of the Federal and Northern Territory governments, which still treat indigenous affairs as part-time portfolios. Where would these men go? Under what laws would they be held when they have been convicted of no crime? How would the victims who remain in the communities be protected against payback from furious relatives?

There are few simple answers. Alice Springs' jail is already overflowing. What is needed, as Nowra suggests, is a total-solution approach: tougher laws, education, zero tolerance, improved rehabilitation (the present situation is a revolving door) and the removal of children from lethal environments.

ProudKangaroo wrote on Dec 13^th, 2022 at 5:27pm:


Show me ONE vile and despicable argument against the Voice in the public, mainstream debate.  There isn't any.  There are questions and educated, legal speculations about unintended (?) consequences of lawfare. You have not provided anything but the usual emoting yourself.


Yet "Marcia Langton warns of risk of ‘nasty, eugenicist’ debate about race ahead of voice referendum"  “It’s unfortunate the Nationals have injected misinformation and vitriol into this debate so early on,” she told ABC Radio National.


Bollocks. There was no vitriol, there was no misinformation. She could have pointed out any if there had been any. She didn't.  Pearson ditto.

What will the Voice achieve that all the other hundreds of organisations and programs couldn't and how will it achieve it?
If such questions are 'sooking' to you then you are talking just as dishonestly and in bad faith as the other 'it's wacist to as question about the voice' numpties.

ProudKangaroo wrote on Dec 13^th, 2022 at 6:53pm:


That ranks amongst the most vapid and insulting posts put up here about the Voice.... that failure waiting to happen..... you are part of the problem not the solution and give ample reason why nobody should vote for such a stupid idea.

If they are cowards for posting on an anonymous forum - what are you?

Show me ONE vile and despicable argument against the Voice in that list below..... I dare you.

ProudKangaroo wrote on Dec 13^th, 2022 at 6:53pm:


Unlike you, eh??   

You are being dishonest.  Do you REALLY think that accusations of redneckery and racism by Pearson, Langton and other Yes proponents are referencing views on this forum, and not Price, Mundene, the Nationals, Albrechtsen etc and other public, identifiable voices asking questions?

Of course not. You ARE just being dishonest and shifty.

Sad, kangaroo. Try honesty next time. Or will that hurt your cause?

Are you familiar with the crime statistics of the NT?

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.”

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.”

Even worse was his description of practices around Glenormiston:

"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.

“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.”

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.”
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.”
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.
The controversy continues into the current period.

Peter Sutton finds it distressing that 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.

NOWRA WROTE his book “Bad Dreaming” after a spell in Alice Springs hospital in 2005, when he saw 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.”

In contemporary Australia, polygamy and 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,

“There are Aboriginal men who still claim these modern young girls as their promised possession, and have cars, guns, outstations and kin to help them secure and punish these resistant girls, well away from public purview. ..A man’s traditional sense of entitlement, and use of violence to enforce it, can still triumph over the emancipation of a young Aboriginal woman’s mind.”

In 2004 at Yarralin near Katherine, a 55-year-old married man physically and sexually assaulted his 14-year-old promised bride for two days while she pleaded she was too young for sex. In August, 2005, in an under-the-tree session, Justice Brian Martin noted the cultural context, and gave the man a one-month sentence suspended. On appeal the sentence was increased to three years and a defence appeal to the High Court was lost. Justice Martin later admitted he had been too lenient.

In 2002 at Maningrida, Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira, a 50-year-old wife killer, had forced sex on a 15-year-old promised bride, for whom he had given presents to the ‘bride’s’ parents. He then fired a shotgun into the air to warn off the girls’ family members. Justice John Gallop of the NT Supreme Court sentenced him to 24 hours gaol for unlawful sex, saying the matter should never have come to court. Pascoe, he said, was exercising his conjugal rights in traditional society and the girl ‘knew what was expected of her. It’s surprising to me [that the defendant] was charged at all’.

The North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service relied on expert anthropological evidence to argue that promised marriages were common and morally correct under Aboriginal law, and supported his application to the High Court.