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Aboriginal outcry over noose case

Aboriginal outcry over noose case

18 May 2005 - The Journal of Turkish Weekly (Turkey) - Australian indigenous leaders have reacted angrily after two white men found guilty of assaulting an Aboriginal boy were fined A$800 ($605).

David Hillary Tomkins, 44, and his son Clint William Tomkins, 23, dragged Alan Boland, 16, by a noose around his neck and beat him last November.

The teenager had allegedly broken into a farm in Queensland, north Australia.

The incident came amid heightened tensions between Australia's white and indigenous communities.

A court in Goondiwindi, the town 280km (175 miles) west of Brisbane, Queensland, near which the beating took place, fined the men A$500 ($375) each and ordered them each to pay A$300 in compensation to the victim.

The men had been working on the farm when Alan Boland, who was with three other members of the Toomelah Aboriginal Mission, near Goondiwindi, allegedly broke into a shed on the property.

The boy suffered minor cuts and bruising. The Tomkins' lawyer, Robbie Davies, denied the men's action was racially motivated.

But local Aboriginal leader, Bertie Button, said an appeal would be made.

"This is going to incite racial violence," he said.

"The justice system stinks. It's saying it's all right for non-indigenous people to go and put a rope around someone's neck and drag them up and down a river and give them a flogging. We're saying that's not on."

Aboriginal activist Murrandoo Yanner was outraged by the sentence.

"I bet if two blackfellas had gone out and done that to two or three white children, we would not be receiving an A$800 fine," Mr Yanner was quoted as saying by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Mr Davies said the farm had suffered frequent break-ins and local police had given the owner permission to restrain offenders.

"It's a pity they didn't have the hindsight to put a rope around his waist and not his neck," he told the court.

The incident last November came only a few days after the death in custody of an Aboriginal man on Palm Island sparked violent protests.

Australia also suffered a serious outbreak of racial rioting in Sydney last February, when more than 40 police were injured in a riot sparked by the death of an Aboriginal teenager. Police were later cleared of having caused the death of the boy.

BBC News

Source; The Journal of Turkish Weekly

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