DOI: 10.1177/0020872806059401 Family violence An Australian Indigenous community tells its story

The rate of family violence in many Australian Indigenous commu-nities is alarming (Memmott et al., 2001; Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Robertson, 2000; Sam, 1992) and continues to rise (Robertson, 2000: xxxiv). This was demonstrated dramatically by the many reports to a recent Commonwealth inquiry that human service workers from government and non-government organizations had come to an ‘acceptance of the reality and imperviousness of Aboriginal family violence ’ (Gordon et al., 2002: 26). Meanwhile, substantial progress has been made in developing effective policy and service responses to domestic violence in Australia although these have not worked in Indigenous commu-nities (Indigenous Australians include Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) because they are based on dominant western construc-tions of domestic violence (Pearson, 2000; Taylor et al., 2004). Analyzing the social issues experienced by Indigenous Australians from the perspective of colonization, oppression and dispossession has long been known to be fundamental to sound social policy (Elu, 2001; Huggins, 1989, 1994; Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Robert-son, 2000). However, these analyses have not influenced domestic-violence policy debates until recently. Indeed, the dominant construction may have suppressed the deep, long-held, Indigenous *i s