The more things change for many Australians the more they stay shamefully the same for Indigenous people in Western Australia’s ill-named “justice system” – particularly if they happen to be jailed at Roebourne in the Pilbara.
While searching through the archives of the State Library of Western Australia, historian Chris Owen came across a telling photograph of Aboriginal inmates of the original Roebourne regional prison, which closed in 1923 (and briefly reopened from 1975 to 1984). If a picture could tell the story of a prison system that was – and remains – medieval for Indigenous prisoners, this one, taken between about 1890 and 1900, might be it.
The male prisoners are seen in the picture chained together by their necks. Judging from the tribal ligatures on the upper bodies of several, they were living traditionally before their arrest. Those chained at the neck include two boys – one perhaps 14, the other maybe 11, 10 or younger. They are also chained to their wheelbarrows. The wheelbarrow (together with the pick and shovel) was the symbol of the white invader’s progress. But the barrow was also a human yoke for the WA Black man who dug the roads, built the rich pastoralists’ fences and helped quarry the minerals that built the white man’s wealth from the bounty of stolen Aboriginal land.
Anyone from the prime minister down who laughably asserts that slavery didn’t exist in Australia should look carefully at this photograph and many others besides. The great myth of Australian pioneering is that Australia was built on the backs of white miners and pastoralist’s sheep. The truth, at least in the west, is it was built on the enslaved and broken backs of Aboriginal people.
Just three of the chained Aboriginal males have been afforded hats to resist the stifling sun in notoriously baking Roebourne where, this summer, the temperature climbed above 50C (hold that thought). Every non-Indigenous person in the photo wears a hat.
Prof Barry Godfrey, who is making a documentary about the original Roebourne prison and what ought become of it, says Aboriginal prisoners were marched there on the chain and on foot across vast distances.
“People would be marched for hundreds of miles, thousands of kilometres, in hot, really hot, terrible conditions, often chained with the guards on horseback,” Godfrey, a social justice academic at the University of Liverpool, recently told ABC Pilbara.
“People routinely marched from the Kimberley, from all over the Pilbara, all over different parts of Western Australia.”
There was little relief from the searing heat upon arrival at the Roebourne jail; the prisoners were kept tethered to the walls in chains at night while the temperatures inside often reached 50C in summer.
“I don’t want to gloss it. It was horrendous,” Godfrey said.
He was talking about jail conditions a century or more ago. And yet ( … the more things stay the same) he may well have been talking about the newer Roebourne prison, which opened in 1984.
Ninety percent of the inmates at that prison are Indigenous. All routinely complain about the appalling physical and mental health impacts of the extreme heat inside – not least earlier this year when Roebourne reached a record 50.5C.
The Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia has lobbied successive state governments to install air-conditioning in all cells. It argues correctly that the appalling situation within the prison – where inmates can’t sleep or function during the day because of the extreme heat – presents a “flagrant breach of human rights” and is “inherently discriminatory” given the high proportion of Indigenous inmates.
ABC Pilbara, which has commendably prosecuted the open-shut case for fully air-conditioning the prison, published parts of a letter from the WA corrective services minister Bill Johnston to the legal service. In it Johnston reportedly writes that prison authorities manage “thermal discomfort” (if there is a more artful euphemism for extreme heat stress and dangerous dehydration, let’s see it!) by a variety of means including sunscreen and wide-brimmed hats – and by making electrolyte drinks available to buy at the prison canteen. Generous, that. There are also ice machines throughout the prison, and desktop fans in cells – which, you’d have to think, would do little to combat night-time temperatures of 38-plus degrees.
“At the time that RRP [Roebourne regional prison] was constructed in 1984, the Department of Justice assessed the use of air conditioning at the facility against the regulatory and community standards at the time,” the minister’s letter reportedly said.
“In 1984 air conditioning was not the standard in the local community or a feature of most homes and it was not included in the building plans. Relative to other forms of temperature control, air conditioning is likely to require extensive retrofitting for efficient operation.”
So … it’s apparently too expensive, then.
At this point it pays to step back and think a little about the Pilbara and whose land it really is, and the amount of wealth its natural resources generate for WA and the federal government.
According to the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development: “The Pilbara is the state’s mining powerhouse and makes a significant contribution to the national wealth. Its iron ore and liquefied natural gas industries are valued at over $70bn, representing more than 70% of mineral and energy production in Western Australia.”
That’s $70bn! And yet successive governments have refused to spend a fraction of it on air-conditioning the jail where it send its Indigenous prisoners to swelter and suffer.
Owen, an honorary research fellow at the University of WA, has done more than any other (not least through his remarkable book Every Mother’s Son is Guilty) to highlight how WA profited from the enforced labour of Indigenous people in the pastoral and mining industries, and the obscene and inhumane cruelty against them. The historian points to the historical symmetry of that photo of Black men in chains outside the old jail and the conditions in today’s version.
“Yes, for too many Aboriginal people here it is a matter of the more things stay the same. There is the same punitive attitude in the justice system and the same abuses of human rights,” Owen says.
It all begs a simple question: what’s the difference between being an Indigenous inmate of Roebourne prison in 1900 and today?
The answer: only 122 years.
