‘A 10-year-old girl has taken her own life. How can we possibly look away?‘, Guardian Australia, 9 March 2016
Discusses the death by suicide of a 10-year-old Indigenous girl in Western Australia, one of 19 Indigenous suicides in remote WA since December. (The piece received more than 10 000 shares and 300 comments in one day.)
I can’t speak to the specifics of this girl’s life or death, but I can say she was born into the sadness that too often is our world. She was born into the intergenerational trauma of so many black families. This was her inheritance …
I have spent these last weeks travelling Australia speaking to people about how we – Indigenous people – live with the weight of our history. We are connected directly to the darkness of our past. We are born out of the legacy of dispossession and suffering and injustice. The crippling malaise that sits at the heart of so many black communities and lives in this country is seeded in that still unresolved grievance that underpins the Australian settlement: Terra Nullius.
There are more details here and a comment here from Indigenous actor, Nakkiah Lui. (‘My attempt to put into words how incredibly worthless being an Aboriginal person in this country can make you feel.’) More from her.
