Local Aboriginal activist pinged - again Today is the last day of summer, which is fascinating. If it hadn't been a leap year it would have been yesterday. It was warm day here yesterday. Over a hundred degrees F for most of it on our front verandah thermometer.
There was a very interesting court case in Perth which wrapped up yesterday. An elderly but now infamous Aboriginal 'elder' named Robert Bropho (78) was sentenced to three years jail for a series of sex offences involving a young girl since she was eleven years old through to when she was 22. DNA evidence presented to the court was accepted as proof he had fathered two of the victim's children. The sentence was light. With good behaviour he could be back on the streets within eighteen months.
The initial offences took place in the early 1990s when Bropho was developing a reputation as the architect of long running series of sensational protests over redevelopment of the old Swan Brewery site on the riverside in Perth.
I was an impartial ethnohistorian in those days with an interest in local Aboriginal goings on. I have many photos I took of him, sometimes when he was in confrontations with police, plus I even managed to interview him; and his late wife Edna alone a couple of times about their respective customary knowledge of the Swan River environs. Getting to them when his loyal white female minder/advisors were absent was not easy.
Two years ago Bropho got 12 months for indecent dealings with a different 13 year old girl. According to media reports of yesterday's sentencing, he had a criminal record stretching back to 1947.
The latest case was heard before a single judge, whom in his summing up described the man as a paedophile, a bully and a liar who showed no remorse. Bropho on the other hand saw himself as the victim, and believed he was in the same league as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi.
Over the past two decades Bropho was involved in many altercations with state government agencies, politicians, cynical shock jocks and large businesses.
Initially, this confrontational 'activism' had appeal to many non-Aboriginal people who were keen to lend apolitical support as a way to make amends for the prejudiced mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples in the historical past. There even was one particularly memorable occasion when he had a heart attack and the Liberal State Premier, Richard Court rushed to his bedside at Royal Perth Hospital with a bunch of flowers. I don't think that sort of thing would happen again in light of the latest revelations.
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.
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