Recently the ABC online, and the Weekend Australian, both published detailed articles about problems within the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. They took a slightly different perspective. No surprises there.

The ABC headline was ‘Brian was stolen from his family, flogged with a cricket bat, and “thrown into sewers”. The state insisted it was helping him.’ Fairly standard fare for the ABC when covering Aboriginal affairs. Brian Toohey’s headline in the Weekend Australian was, ‘NT court’s revolving door for evil men’ and focussed on ‘the recidivist nature of Adult Aboriginal offending and the extreme violence, usually fired by alcohol (which) creates each new generation of lost children’.

Both articles looked at the same problem but took such different perspectives that one might reasonably conclude they were talking about two different groups. Sadly, they were not. Even sadder is the fact that both stories did contain an element of truth.

‘Uncle Brian’s’ tale of woe was reported by one Carly Williams and it was vintage ABC ‘if you have tears prepare to shed them, now’ stuff. We are told at the beginning of the article that, ‘Records have been provided by the family for the purpose of truth telling and healing. They should not be repurposed or photographed.’ We are not told whether Carly was allowed to read them or was merely allowed to hold them. Nor were we given any insight into what the records were.

This is a problem because the account we are given of the life of Uncle Brian does strain credulity at times. Carly tells us that Brian was stolen from his family at the age of four and went to an Anglican orphanage in Rockhampton where his head was pushed into toilets and he was thrown into sewers and so on. At the age of twelve he was told that his mother was dying but he was not allowed to visit her. According to Carly, when Brian was given this news, he replied, ‘What’s a mother? What do you mean? Can you explain what a mother is?’

It is possible that a four-year-old might forget who his mother was, but having spent the subsequent eight years in an orphanage with other children, is it credible that no one would have mentioned what is one of the most central concepts in every culture on the planet?

We are never told why Brian was stolen from his family nor were we given any details about the structure of his family. We never are with ABC reports and must assume they were a sober industrious group of people trying to get ahead in a racist society. Crusader Carly last year was mentioned in a Sydney Morning Herald article which claimed that a report she had produced on a meeting of the Alice Springs public about the violence in the indigenous community ‘breached 31 standards of impartiality and accuracy’.

Brian Toohey’s report in the Weekend Australian made for grim reading. It presents details of the hideous crimes committed by a variety of Aboriginal frequent offenders who have spent most of their adult lives in prison. When they are released, they merely return to their former activities and are rearrested. Toohey quotes John Tippet KC, a leading Northern Territory barrister, about the problem of trying to help recidivist males while they are incarcerated. Tippet argues, ‘Men who beat Aboriginal woman do not face disapproval in their own communities. They’re not stripped of their position on the local council for beating up their wife…. It’s not culturally part of a taboo.’

Tippet claims that nothing can be done to rehabilitate such men and that the focus must be on the young children who grow up in a family unit where the dominant male is in and out of prison and repeatedly beats up his wife when intoxicated. The focus, he argues, must be on the children living in such a toxic environment. ‘It’s all very well for parents… to scream about their kids being taken away. But you parents are not sending them to school. You are not feeding them…. They have scabies. You are not engaging in their health care… and their cognitive abilities have suffered because you are not looking after them.’

Toohey’s report covers the same group of people as that of Ms Williams. His argues that we must reconsider removal of kids from dysfunctional families. This is a return to ‘the Stolen Generation’ solution. It is difficult to see why policy in this area is still so contested but the ABC’s history of producing tendentious, ideologically driven reportage will not help.