Australia Through American Eyes<br />"The argument should be, Why are our common peers allowed to fall to<br />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.<br />So when her cousin went out one evening last September after a camping trip, Ms. Jessell recalled,<br />"I told her I’d be waiting for her." But Ms. Jessell would never hear from her again.<br />When an Aboriginal teenager from the remote Kimberley region would climb aboard the school bus, she said, her white classmates would tease<br />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.<br />The number of indigenous university students has increased in recent years, to 1.1 percent of all higher education students,<br />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.<br />Ms. Jessell found herself squarely in the middle of one of the most depressing realities<br />for Aboriginal people in her corner of Australia and beyond: suicide.<br />A report published last year in the Medical Journal of Australia found<br />that in the Kimberley region, where Ms. Jessell lives, suicide had become normalized among the region’s indigenous population.<br />When Mr. Salee was released from jail in 2009 in Cairns — this time he had been charged with hitting a<br />police officer with a stereo — she sent him 500 miles north to his ancestral homeland, Murray Island.
