When Kumanjayi Little Baby died, Australia noticed. Too often we don’t

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It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to immediately condemn the violence in Alice Springs on Thursday night. The first question he received at his Friday press conference was on the topic – and the standard political response, for a decade or more, has been to condemn such actions, to condemn all violence, then move on to whatever else the politician feels it necessary to say.

Instead, Albanese began by saying, “It breaks your heart.” He was clearly talking about the killing of the five-year-old girl now known as Kumanjayi Little Baby. Next: “This is a community that are hurting.” Then he repeated something his minister for Indigenous Australians had said to him, the reminder that “literally hundreds and hundreds of people came together to search for this young girl”. He indicated a desire for an end to the disturbances. But rather than a stern reprimand, this wish was expressed in sympathetic terms: “We want to see the community come together, but we certainly understand people’s anger and frustration.”

What is not said is often as important as what is said. The little girl’s mother issued a statement, writing of herself and her son: “It is going to be so hard to live the rest of our lives without you.” In her plain concision, she evoked the drawn-out, daily grind of grief – and the wonderful girl she had lost.

Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire wrote for Black Witness that........

© Brisbane Times