Australia Through American Eyes

Australia Through American Eyes
"The argument should be, Why are our common peers allowed to fall to
that position and isn’t it a national responsibility to solve the problem?" In three very different parts of Australia — the mining areas of the west; Murray Island in the north; and Sydney, a city of five million in the east — I met many indigenous millennials who exemplify the challenges and promise that Australia has yet to fully embrace.
So when her cousin went out one evening last September after a camping trip, Ms. Jessell recalled,
"I told her I’d be waiting for her." But Ms. Jessell would never hear from her again.
When an Aboriginal teenager from the remote Kimberley region would climb aboard the school bus, she said, her white classmates would tease
her: "Go back to where you came from." "I couldn’t even stand being in school for eight hours a day," said the teenager, Zeritta Jessell.
The number of indigenous university students has increased in recent years, to 1.1 percent of all higher education students,
but while they are underrepresented there, they are overrepresented behind bars: Indigenous Australians are 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than nonindigenous Australians, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Ms. Jessell found herself squarely in the middle of one of the most depressing realities
for Aboriginal people in her corner of Australia and beyond: suicide.
A report published last year in the Medical Journal of Australia found
that in the Kimberley region, where Ms. Jessell lives, suicide had become normalized among the region’s indigenous population.
When Mr. Salee was released from jail in 2009 in Cairns — this time he had been charged with hitting a
police officer with a stereo — she sent him 500 miles north to his ancestral homeland, Murray Island.