aborigines fighting
‘Noble Savage’ Dreaming
Peter Purcell, Quadrant, May 12 2026
The recent murder of a young girl in Alice Springs has raised, yet again, the spectre of Aboriginal domestic violence. It’s not new, of course. The appalling levels of physical and sexual violence against Aboriginal women and children have been known for a long time.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has spoken courageously about this problem for years. Louis Nowra’s 2007 Bad Dreaming sought to collect statistical and anecdotal evidence to attract attention to the scale of this national tragedy. Various investigations this century have found that sexual assault of children in Aboriginal communities was widespread, affecting both girls and boys:
♦ Child sexual assaults in the NT were four times the national average
♦ In Queensland, 10% of male Aboriginal youths were raped before they were 16
♦ In WA, the occurrence of gonorrhoea among Aboriginal children 10 to 14 years old was 186 times that of the general population
♦ In the NT, 30% of 13-year-old girls had gonorrhoea or chlamydia.
Nor is this problem limited to remote communities. In New South Wales, the Task Force found that child abuse was so widespread that no family in the 29 rural and urban communities surveyed had escaped its touch.
Contrary to blaktivist propaganda, the greatest threats to the lives of Aboriginal Australians are not white policemen but other Aboriginal Australians. Statistics spread across decades show the awful and unchanging reality. From 1989 to 2000, Aboriginal people were 15.1% of homicide victims in Australia and 15.7 of all homicide offenders, despite being about 3% of the population. Between 1989 and 2012, 951 Indigenous Australians were murdered, 765 of them (80%) by other Indigenous Australians, with a further 504 being victims of domestic violence.
Between 1989 and 2023, 476 Australian Indigenous women were homicide victims, seven times the national average. Almost all were killed by someone they knew (97%), most by their Indigenous male intimate partner (66%). Some 70% of Aboriginal people in jail are there for crimes of violence against their loved ones. Nor have the adults managed to contain this violence among themselves: in 2007-11, 26% of deaths among Aboriginal children were from physical abuse.