How To Make Gravy – A Recipe For Rights

NB: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this article contains distressing content, everyone else is warned that it’s simply the truth, deal with it!

A little over 12 years ago I wrote an article for a relatively new online news blog and TV show, ABC’s The Drum. That piece Lingiari’s Legacy: From Little Things Big Things Grow, which was first published on this blog, drew on the song by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, to tell the story of one of this country’s great human rights struggles, the Wave Hill Walk-Off and the victory of the Gurindji.

So, as news comes through that The Drum in all its forms has been cancelled for good and with today being the 21st of December, I felt it was time to dust off the keys to this website and let Paul Kelly introduce us to another fight.

Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well
It’s the 21st of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I’ll be out of here by July
Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don’t let ’em cry for me

This song in letter form is not as simple a history lesson as Kelly’s other anthem with Carmody, and most seem to see “Gravy Day” as a chance to debate the recipe on social media, welcome the end of another working year and the coming of the Christmas break. But Kelly always has a tale to tell much deeper than that, and Joe could be any of the some 43,000 people who will spend a not so festive season behind bars in this country. Yes, Captain Cook might have brought Christmas and cricket to these shores, but he also began our national pastime of caging and killing in custody.

But rather than being a Junior Murvin fan like Joe, the average prisoner in Australia is a young (18-39), Aboriginal (highest per capita), Man (90% of the prison population). That young Blak man has a better than 50% chance of having a chronic health condition (52%), a serious mental illness (51%), and has not completed school up to year 10 (66%). And his crime? Illicit drug offences (most common crime in 5 of the last 6 years).

So to recap, Joe is most likely to be a young Aboriginal man, with a chronic health condition, and a serious mental illness, who has been given a poor and underfunded education and has been locked up for, let’s check that again… drugs.

When you ask yourself what future generations will judge us harshly for, insert locking up Joe!

But it gets worse, far worse. The fastest-growing prison population in Australia is Aboriginal women, burdened on average with the same chronic and mental health conditions, this group has seen their numbers double in the past decade, while overall, the prison population has remained relatively steady.

So now Joe is increasingly an Aboriginal woman, with a chronic illness, a serious mental health condition, is most likely homeless (51% homelessness before incarceration) a victim of domestic violence (70%) and the one that should really make your Christmas stuffing turn in your stomach, has been physically, sexually or emotionally abused as a child or adult (90%).

Of course, you can already hear the instant experts wondering aloud to themselves, “Why don’t they call the police if all of this is happening to them?” Well, Karen…, of those who do call the police, 58% are misidentified by Constable Plod as the perpetrator and not the victim, and you wonder how this problem began in the first place! Then you self-medicate with drugs to cope with the society that has long since thrown you overboard, and again, it’s off to the cells.

Then there are the more than 600 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who have died in custody since the Royal Commission into Black Deaths, which was supposed to put an end to all that. Plus we cage children, as young as ten, most of whom have a developmental disorder. And then incomprehensible femicide that has been going on for more than 200 years, which I have explained with my Co-Host Amy McQuire on our podcast Curtain, that has seen Aboriginal women and children murdered and disappeared at numbers nobody really knows.

Oh praise the Baby Jesus, have a Merry Christmas…

… and make your New Year’s resolution not about some stupid weight loss goal, but the true health of this nation. Which is releasing all those blessed souls from the colony’s cages and into safe houses and homes. Because in the end, I hope next Christmas we all get to taste the fat, at home, with friends and family!