Tension hangs thick in the air. Months ago, a 14-year-old boy dropped dead after a footy match in Mount Liebig, about 70km down the road to the west. Senior men have been on the warpath ever since. The boy’s death was nobody’s fault, but this is a world where payback, retribution, spearings and mob violence are ever-present. Since the boy’s death in February, clan clashes have rocked Papunya and Mount Liebig. The perpetrators from powerful families call it payback. Rather, it is traditional law perverted to maintain the power and status of the men who are fighting to maintain an iron grip on their homelands in the face of the biggest intervention in indigenous affairs in recent history.
This is the real story behind the emergency intervention in remote Aboriginal communities, where vigilante justice is aimed not at perpetrators but at whistleblowers, and reporting child sexual abuse is so terrifyingly dangerous that even the strict secrecy codes of the nation’s top crime commission cannot encourage those who know to speak up.
- Natasha Robinson / The Australian ‘Secrets in the shadows’
