Teen's death reopens wounds for Aborigines

By Uli Schmetzer
Chicago Tribune

	AP Mourners stand at the grave of Thomas Hickey, 17, an Aborigine, in his hometown of Walgett, northwest of Sydney, yesterday. Within hours of his death Feb. 15, as many as 200 indigenous Australians rioted.
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Witnesses said Hickey was being chased by police. On a sharp bend in Phillip Street, the bicycle skidded out of control and crashed. The boy sailed over the handlebars and was impaled on a spiked fence.

Two police officers who arrived in a squad car eased the youth off the fence. He died a day later in a hospital.

Within hours of his death Feb. 15 up to 200 indigenous Australians rioted in Redfern, torching cars, shops and the railway station in an area known as The Block.

The mob, mainly young men, bashed police with bricks, hurled Molotov cocktails and rushed at officers while brandishing burning sticks. In nine hours of mayhem, about 40 police officers were injured and five rioters were arrested.

The riot shocked a country that has paid little attention to the native population or its requests for compensation for tribal lands appropriated for mining and grazing. Worse, the disturbance was a major setback to Australia's decadelong policy of "reconciliation" among the continent's estimated 400,000 Aboriginal and mixed-race people and the rest of Australia's population of 20 million, most of whom are white.

For Redfern's residents, there was no doubt that police had chased Hickey to his death. They said police often cruise the neighborhood.

"If you are black and if you see a police car, you just run," said Virginia Hickey, an aunt of the dead youth.

Police denied the allegations. New South Wales Police Inspector Bob Emery said the officers who were first to arrive had been looking for a purse-snatcher and were "miles away" when the accident occurred.

In many ways, the dead teen was typical of urban Aborigines. Hickey left school at 9. He was unemployed and had a police record. His uncle Michael West acknowledges the teen occasionally stole food and cellphones.

Hickey's father, Ian West, and two uncles are in jail for armed robbery.

"Nearly every black father is institutionalized and the mothers are left with four or five little kids. It sends them crazy," Virginia Hickey said. "Some of the mums go on the needle (take drugs) and then the kids don't have a mum or a dad."

Redfern is a legacy of the maltreatment of Aborigines, including eviction from their land by white settlers and mining-company owners. Not until 1967 were Aborigines given equal rights and counted in the national census.

Until the 1970s, Australian government agencies and church groups took native and mixed-race children from their families and handed them over to white foster families.

In a country short of women, mixed-race children in the 1930s were married off to whites under an official policy "to breed the blackness out of them." A government report released in 1992 found many of those children were emotionally and sexually abused.

Today native-rights groups complain Aborigines still are humiliated, badly educated, badly fed and without proper health services.

But the outlook of white Australians seldom is sympathetic.

"These people always complain," said Graham Thorn, a psychiatrist. "They want it both ways: their way and our way. They want to live in our society and be respected, yet they won't work. They steal, they rob and they get drunk. And they don't respect the laws."

But Ray Minniecon, an Aborigine who is director of Redfern's Crossroads Aboriginal Ministries, has a different explanation for the problems of his people.

"We are one of the oldest cultures on Earth," he said. "For 50,000 years we have never had any desire or reason to build cities, let alone live in them. ... We are still so very young in our attempts to adjust, manage and control our affairs within the fast-moving pace of city life."

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