Culture and Suicide

LAST month’s report by West Australian state coroner Rosalinda Fogliani into the suicides of thirteen Aboriginal children and young men in the Kimberley district between 2012 and 2016 is very depressing. This is not just because of the bleak portrait it paints of the brief lives of the five boys (twelve to seventeen years old), three girls (ten to thirteen), and five young men (eighteen to twenty-four) who it discusses in considerable detail. The report also indicates clearly how the current ideological agenda of the Aboriginal political class and its left-wing white supporters now dominates public policy about Australia’s remote communities, and how effectively this agenda has buried a more realistic approach that briefly came to the surface a decade ago. Rather than finding solutions to the alarmingly high rates of youth suicide in the Kimberley and other remote communities in the north, the Fogliani report guarantees that the same pattern of political and social…