Brothers up in arms
02.10.1999
TWO thoughts struck me when I met Cape York Land Council chairman, Richard Ahmat, in his Cairns office yesterday. Facially, he was not unlike the Gulf firebrand Murrandoo Yanner and, typical of his indigenous brother, he was angry.
It's not a good thing to resemble Murrandoo. In fighting for his people, he's accumulated an impressive list of enemies.
I'd heard the story several times how, a couple of years ago, a drunken white man named Donald Booth allegedly tried to kill Murrandoo by driving his car into a group of Aboriginal people on the footpath outside the Burketown pub. Several were injured, one seriously. Murrandoo escaped unscathed, but one of his friends spent almost a year in hospital after having his left leg amputated. Booth is doing six years for his crime.
Ahmat was holding court. He hadn't bothered to rise when we met and shook hands, but launched into a tirade about an injustice handed out by the courts to a black brother. Ahmat was loudly and forcefully quoting sections from the court transcript of a case in Cairns where five white youths decided to assault some homeless Aboriginal people who live in the city's parks.
Ahmat was fuming at newspaper reports of the trial of the five youths which saw each plead guilty, and the main perpetrators _ Darrell Perks and Wade Dempsey _ sentenced not to prison but to a nine-month intensive correction order. Under such a sentence they could be directed to perform community service up to 12 hours a week.
The court had been told the five were at a school party in Cairns when it was suggested they go to a park and cause some trouble. The group ran, yelling, into the park, and the Aboriginal people ran _ except for jockey-sized Rodney Pascoe who was asleep. When he did wake and run he was tripped by Perks and then kicked as he lay on the ground. Dempsey got stuck into him with a baseball bat. The youths then ran off, got into cars and assembled at a fast-food store where Dempsey told his mates: ``I smashed a coon in the back.'' Perks said: ``I ankle-tapped an old fellow and wrestled him and threw him back on the ground.'' Others bragged how they punched or ``smashed'' frightened ``parkies''.
In relating the story to me, Ahmat was upset about several things. The obvious one was the cowardly attack by the group on a harmless, homeless man. The other was that the sentencing judge made a finding that the attack was not ``motivated by racial hatred''. Judge Peter White commented: ``It was submitted that such conduct was most usually seen in such places as Alabama and Mississippi, no doubt a reference to the long history of serious violence inflicted upon black people in the southern states of the USA by the infamous Ku Klux Klan. I absolutely reject such a view. I have no doubt that the prisoners felt a degree of contempt towards the Barlow Park people, many of whom are Aboriginal people. However, in my view it was mainly contempt for their lifestyle, rather than any deeply held racial hatred.'' He also said that the prisoners' conduct was a desire to pay back unnamed park people for allegedly having, at some time in the past, harassed Perks.
By this stage of telling the story, Ahmat was furious. He pointed again to the statement that the youths had bragged about assaulting ``a coon'', and how they had planned the attack, and armed themselves with a baseball bat, a hockey stick and a length of piping. Ahmat was disgusted at the media's handling of the issue, particularly the fact that no journalist in north Queensland had bothered to interview the victim.
The judgment had not escaped critical media comment, but Pascoe's story had not been sought, and his victim impact statement to the court was not quoted in the media. In it, he expressed the desire to see his assailants suffer the same treatment that had been meted out to him.
Judge White appealed publicly that his full reasons for judgment be read before critical assessments were made.
I was searching for a defence for my journalistic colleagues, and was tempted to pull Ahmat up by asking him what experience he'd had with victims of crime.
Was he just playing black politics, jumping on the bandwagon where he saw an opportunity to lash out at ``white oppression''? I knew something of his history _ that he'd worked for 26 years for Comalco at Weipa and was a leader in the big strike in 1995 over the introduction of contract employment.
But to the present _ and his anger and frustration at the court reports. Had the position been reversed, he asserted, and a bunch of black kids decided they did not ``approve'' of the yuppie lifestyle of some white folk, armed themselves with baseball bats and assaulted them, they would have been sent straight to prison.
To me, it seemed the argument would have been stronger coming from an Aboriginal legal service representative, or at least someone who was in touch with violence against indigenous people _ not just an educated land council chairman. I was about to put a question about what I presumed was his personal inexperience of white violence against innocent black people, when we were interrupted by a secretary reminding him of his next appointment. He threw the transcript across the table, and invited me to read it.
Then he pushed his chair back from the desk, reached in the drawer and took out an elastic bandage. I watched as he bent over and picked up an artificial leg from the floor, and attached the bandage and prosthesis to the stump that was his left leg.
He rose, excusing himself. Then, by way of response to my staring, just said: ``I'm still getting used to it, brother. Happened at Burketown a couple of years ago . . . never even saw the car coming up the footpath . . . the bloke's doing six years . . .''
