THE DROVER’S BOY

Some years ago I sat in the dusty heat outside Alice Springs and listened to that quintessential outback Aussie singer Ted Egan sing one of his  own compositions.  It was called The Drover’s Boy.

At first it sounded like any other cowboy song. The long cattle drives, the camp fire, the dust and  the flies.  But then I listened again. Egan, who later became Administrator of the North Territory, was singing about something that wasn’t talked about in our history books.

The drover’s boy was actually a girl. A young Aboriginal girl, hair cut and dressed like a boy, but at night she was used (and I used that word deliberately) she was used as a woman.

I thought of it today with the story of shame on Page One of The Age  about the abuse of young indigenous girls by white, supposedly respectable, males.

A lot of people will find the story uncomfortable. It’s easy to tut tut about the beastly behaviour of tribal black men in the Outback. The savagery of savages. And the cruel treatment of little girls and boys by these adult creatures.

And those cases are tragically true. But what about the white men in the Northern Territory and outback Queensland  who are quick to use racist terms like ‘Abo’ and ‘coon’ in the pub while defiling girls  the same age as their daughters—even grand daughters?

Girls as young as 13 being bribed with cash and booze and marijuana for sex with older white men.  In the town of Nhulunbuy, 650 kilometres east of Darwin, girls were picked up outside the local pub. Others were offered free taxi rides in exchange for sex.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the most influential Aboriginal leader and a former Australian of the Year, told Lindsay Murdoch from The Age:

‘Everybody here knows what has been going in and the time has come for us to put an end to it once and for all’.  And Leon White, a former school principal in nearby Yirrkala said there had been a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the abuse.

The Northern Territory’s own Little Children are Sacred report referred to allegations about a rampant sex trade in which mining workers with heaps of cash were using Aboriginal girls between 12 and 15 for sex  with payments in  cash, alcohol and drugs.

I have said before if this were happening in South Yarra and the exploited and abused teenagers were white just imagine the outcry. Talk about out of sight, out of mind. It’s really not our problem. Is it?

Friday, April 4, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008