On 25 May last year a police officer in Minneapolis, US, pushed his knee into the neck of an African-American man in custody, Mr George Floyd, until he was dead. By early June protests against police violence to African American people spread across every state in the US.
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On June 6 protest marches were held across Australia. 5000 people protested in Newcastle. More protests occurred in our city and around Australia in the following weeks. Like in the US, Australians marched under banners saying Black Lives Matter.
On June 11, Knights legend Ashley Gordon spoke about Black Lives Matter on sports podcast Toohey's News, hosted by Herald sports journalist Barry Toohey. Gordon pointed to Aboriginal deaths in custody as the link between the killing of George Floyd while he was in police custody and highlighted the long standing problem of Aboriginal incarceration.
On July 5, Rod Smith, host of the Awabakal podcast Awabapod, brought together local indigenous people, Sean Gordon from Gidgee Group, Debra Swan, Cultural Educator for Awabakal, and the young artist Jacob Ridgeway to discuss the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Remember, these were the months when fears of COVID-19 were at a peak. Organisers needed court intervention to confirm their right to protest. But reactionary politicians joined media shock jocks in ridiculing the Black Lives Matter banner. All lives matter, they responded.
It's a shame the all lives matter choristers hadn't listened to the interviews with Ashley Gordon, Sean Gordon, Debra Swan and Jacob Ridgeway. Their stories of a long history of dignified Aboriginal protest come with measured anger at the slow pace of improvement in indigenous lives across this wealthy land. All tell of world-worst rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people, and of dreadful incidence of alcohol and drug addiction and suicide.
Fittingly, we start 2021 with heightened awareness of the lessons of the fire tragedies of 2020, and of our need for action to address climate change.
We have become a key player in the jailing of indigenous people.
So too the fight against COVID-19 strengthens our commitment to a quality public health system, backed by trained, properly paid workers, especially in aged care.
But we need to add the agenda of Black Lives Matter to our new year resolutions. The statistics are stark. Whether for health, education, housing, employment or wealth, indigenous Australians are dealt a lesser hand.
Then the Black Lives Matter agenda becomes a very local question when we think of the role played directly by our region in the incarceration of Aboriginal men.
Consider that 1800 men, all types of men, spend their days locked in the Hunter's four prisons. One, the St Heliers Correctional Centre, a minimum security prison farm halfway between Muswellbrook and Aberdeen, holds 270 inmates.
The other three prisons are in Cessnock. One, the original Cessnock jail, holds 520 minimum security prisoners. Two new Cessnock jails, called Shortland and Hunter, both maximum security, hold 610 and 400 inmates respectively.
Within these four jails, 29 per cent (about 520 inmates) are Aboriginal men. Yet only 2.9 per cent of people in NSW are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. If the rate of imprisonment for Aboriginal men was the same as non-Aboriginal men, the number of Aboriginal men in Hunter prisons would be only 52.
In 2020 there was, I think, a transformation in the Hunter's attitude to coal, an acceptance that our region contributes disproportionately to climate change and that we have a direct responsibility to pursue a transition out of coal as a matter of urgency.
The same logic, I think, applies to the incarceration of Aboriginal men in our region. We have become a key player in the jailing of indigenous people. We are the imprisonment stage in a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, poverty, domestic violence, crime and reoffending, that sees Aboriginal men spend vast proportions of their lives in jail, in our jails.
The problem - unlike coal and climate change where we know what we can do - is that our jails are hidden from us.
We know nothing about the lives of Aboriginal men behind those walls, about what these men need, about other lives destroyed, about alternatives.
The lives of these men matter. We need to get involved.
Phillip O'Neill is professor of economic geography at Western Sydney University
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