Australia's aboriginals: When the river runs dry

[Lodestar]

Twenty years ago, Jack Picone photographed Nancy just after she was beaten. He wonders what has changed since.




The heat was oppressive and crushing; the kind that has claimed countless lives in Australia's dead heart.

The birds had stopped singing and instead sat silently in the branches of the river eucalyptus trees. The leaves shielded us from the sun's cutting rays.

Around me in the dried up riverbed were clusters of Aboriginal men, women and children mumbling in low fatigued tones.

The men sat apart from the women. The riverbed was strewn with empty wine casks and beer cans. The children were peppered randomly around the dry riverbed. They sat on empty cardboard beer cartons playing with torn cigarette packets and drinking the dregs of left-over alcohol from cans discarded by their parents. Flies crawled over their faces and tunnelled through their hair.

I recall thinking to myself that it resembled another country, well more accurately, another planet.

It was not the country that I grew up in. I waited for it to come. And so it did. The guilt. Following the guilt there was the shame, the despair, and then the anger. After that the self-questioning began. How could Australia's indigenous people be reduced to such desperation and bleakness? Why is it like this? What was my role as a white Australian in what was before me? How am I responsible? Can I do anything to help? A sense of helplessness followed. And after that I simply did not feel anything.

Cont'd
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/02/australia-aboriginals-river-runs-dry-160210093033506.html

[Warpy]

1. I see the same things here and I ask myself the same questions

Treating them like children and taking the alcohol away isn't a solution. The tribal people here have alcoholism rates comparable to those in European populations. It's more that when the alcohol takes hold of them, it quickly devastates them. I've seen too many die in their 30s and 40s from alcoholic liver disease, while white folks generally survive long enough to develop Wernicke-Korsakoff first before their livers kill them.

What we're really seeing is an ancient people whose culture and way of life have been overrun by another, dominant culture. They're overwhelmed and lost, restricted to a smaller area that usually isn't enough to support them, and dependent on government handouts. They also know they stand to lose what little they have left. It's no wonder that the less adaptable turn to alcohol to numb themselves out.