Early last year Graham Richardson wrote a piece in The Australian headed 'Alan Jones isn't racist, he wants Aboriginal kids to be safe'. He wrote about a trip he had once made to the 'extremely remote' Balgo community in the Kimberley, where, he said, he discovered the prevalence of child sexual assault.
He returned to that topic earlier this month. In an article titled 'Richo takes on Noel Pearson over indigenous constitutional recognition', he wrote: 'My real failure was to ignore the horrendous tales of child sexual abuse at Balgo. I beat myself up every day over this. I had been too gutless to risk being labelled racist.'
What caught my attention in his original article was reference to the trip he had made as Federal Health Minister to remote Northern Territory and West Australian communities in late 1993. As part of that trip he visited Balgo. He wrote: 'At the town meeting I noticed that the only attendees were women and children and some very old men.'
Some 23 years ago I did not think I was then a very old man, but I was present at that community meeting. I was living at Balgo at the time and was the parish priest. It was Saturday 22 January 1994. His comments have drawn me back to my own notes and the weekly parish newsletter of that time.
My understanding is that Senator Graham Richardson (pictured front right) flew in for a brief community meeting — after visiting a number of other Aboriginal communities — along with another ten people, including a journalist and photographer. It was summer and the weather had been very hot (in the 40s), school had not yet begun for the year and the meeting was on a Saturday afternoon. I was not surprised then that not many people attended and few had travelled in from three outlying communities.
The people of the region had never met Richardson before. Meetings planned for Saturday afternoons in the desert summer tend not to be taken too seriously unless they are extremely well prepared. The weekend store closes for the weekend at Saturday lunchtime. People weren't going to wait around in the heat for a meeting with someone they didn't know. It was not a long meeting. The visiting group flew in and out the same day.
Richardson wrote: 'When I inquired about where the men were I was told they were at home and drunk. The real shock was that the women could not leave the children at home with the men because sexual assault was so common.'
It is possible that someone had commented on men who had returned to the community drunk; it is also possible that someone raised concern about their children. However, I don't remember any public discussion about the absence of men or the sexual assault of children. What those present did raise with Richardson was the shortage of housing and the need for dental care.
"Richardson's repeated allegations of what people told him at that Balgo meeting concern me, not just because I don't believe they were said but also because they defame a particular Aboriginal community."
I first came to live in that community in 1973 and have been associated with it over many years since then. It was only in 2007, many years later, that I felt I could address some of the complex issues of child sexual abuse that the Northern Territory intervention was opening up for Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley. I published at that time an article entitled: 'Aboriginal child abuse: whom do you trust?'
One thing I learned is that community members find it very difficult to discuss publicly issues of shame involving others to whom they are closely related and with whom they closely live. It takes time to build up trust around sensitive and sexually taboo topics and rarely will this ever occur within community meetings, much less in the presence of people they don't know.
Richardson said, 'To my eternal shame I did nothing about this. Maybe I was intimidated by the prevailing culture of denial about child abuse in these communities. Maybe I was afraid of what the really nice people would say about it. Maybe I just didn't have the courage.' What I remember from that meeting is that Richardson promised much. It was his first visit to this community. He said he would follow up a number of things that were raised. He had been on national television promising more funding for Aboriginal health, but resigned as Federal Minister some nine weeks after his trip to Balgo.
Richardson's repeated allegations of what people told him at that Balgo meeting concern me, not just because I don't believe they were said but also because they defame a particular Aboriginal community and in a context of a 'prevailing culture of denial'. What he originally described as 'common' became, some months later, 'horrrendous tales' of child sexual assault. Did I miss something so important as this? Was I acting in denial of what I heard in 1994? I don't think so.
I am left wondering what the others in his travelling group remember of this meeting or whether what he heard on his long summer trip, after visiting other communities, became conflated. I simply do not believe such a topic of child sexual abuse could have been raised or was raised in public at that time.
He did not mention the location where the meeting occurred. It was a tin-roofed and shaded space which had once been the boys dormitory when the 'mission' moved to its present site in 1965. The dormitory was closed in 1974. Until then, boys and girls were removed from their families, with the boys being placed under the care of lay missionaries and the girls with religious sisters. It is ironic then that this place should be chosen as the site for the meeting, and hardly surprising that those gathered would make a request for better dental care and housing necessary for their own children to have a better life.
Those who came to that meeting in 1994 left with hope that a Federal Minister would keep his word and follow up on the issues they raised. They were not to know he would resign some nine weeks later and they would not see him again. They would be devastated to learn that all these years later, he has made these repeated claims of child sexual abuse in a media outlet which none of them would likely ever see.
Fr Brian McCoy SJ is the head of the Australian Jesuits. He first came to Balgo in 1973, was parish priest between 1992-2000 and completed his PhD, Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the healh of Aboriginal Men, in 2004, based in that Kimberley region.