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‘This Is Where a Seed Is Sown’: Aboriginal Violence – Continuities or Contexts?

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Violence and Mental Health

Abstract

Aboriginal violence has been an issue of major political and public health concern in Australia for some four decades and rates of interpersonal and self-violence are now substantially higher than for the wider national population. Despite research and interventions targeting putative proximal factors there has been little improvement and the situation, particularly across remote Aboriginal Australia, remains grim. In the contested arena of Indigenous affairs the representation of violence and of those involved has powerful political resonances. Constructions in the academic and lay press over the last two decades which foreground ‘tradition’ as cause or major contributor provide the frame for this paper which commences by revisiting an historical analysis of violence in remote Indigenous populations undertaken some two decades ago by the first author. Change over the ensuing decades is presented and the implications for current understandings and approaches considered.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Remote Area Mental Health Team, Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service, Cairns, Australia

    Ernest Hunter & Leigh-Ann Onnis

Authors
  1. Ernest Hunter
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  2. Leigh-Ann Onnis
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Correspondence to Ernest Hunter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Emden, Emden, Germany

    Jutta Lindert

  2. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Itzhak Levav

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Hunter, E., Onnis, LA. (2015). ‘This Is Where a Seed Is Sown’: Aboriginal Violence – Continuities or Contexts?. In: Lindert, J., Levav, I. (eds) Violence and Mental Health. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8999-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8999-8_11

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