A BATTERED body was found just after midnight on Tuesday, November 24, 2009, on a footbridge over a stormwater drain near one of the busiest roads in Cairns. Within two days, the Cairns Post reported that the dead man had been "identified as an itinerant fruit picker from Papua New Guinea".
Almost two years later, on September 24, 2011, Jelta Sailor, who had been on parole for a previous conviction of torture at the time, was jailed for causing Niko Wowo's death by repeatedly stamping on his head. As a cursory search of the North Queensland PNG Board website tracking the investigation of the incident will show, in the months between Wowo's death and Sailor's arrest, numerous racist stereotypes of PNG nationals were posted, shifting slightly when Sailor was revealed as a Torres Strait Islander.
While at this stage of my career working in northern indigenous Australia I'm no longer surprised by such reactions, I am saddened that the commonality of violence in indigenous Australia - and in PNG - nurtures the preconceptions that feed them.
But while Wowo came from a violent society, it was not the chaotic domestic or tribal violence of indigenous Australia or PNG, it was state-sanctioned terrorism. He was raised near Merauke, just across the border from PNG, and was a political refugee from Indonesian-occupied West Papua.
Wowo was born just after Indonesia, with Australia's complicity, asserted hegemony over West Papua, incorporating it into a greater Indonesia extending, as was anticipated in a nationalist song from the war of independence, "from Sabang to Merauke". Sabang is at the archipelago's Indian Ocean westernmost extent in Aceh, where there was also an independence movement.
Wowo was raised in the violent penumbra of Indonesian military subjugation, and as a young man escaped across the border to a refugee camp in the Western Province of PNG. He had an important role with freedom fighters in West Papua, had been captured and tortured, saw villages razed and left a family behind.
A decade before his death, he made his way to Australia in an attempt to gain support for the fight in his homeland, only to end up in refugee detention in Port Hedland. He was released and returned to north Queensland where he got seasonal work harvesting bananas, in the course of which he developed health problems through exposure to agricultural chemicals.
Wowo found sanctuary but not security in Australia. Even when he could work, it was sporadic and money was always scarce. He had limited English and relied on other members of the West Papuan refugee community in Cairns to help him navigate the government bureaucracies, particularly Centrelink.
Separated from his family and community, he was anxious, depressed and often wandered the streets at night unable to sleep. He was presumed to be other than who he was - Islander, PNG national, dole-bludger, malingerer.
Wowo was lost, as is the case for most of the West Papuan refugees, and such preconceptions frustrated attempts to get help, particularly from medical professionals. Fortunately, some found understanding from Simon Bridge, a suburban GP who had experienced the aftermath of war in Mozambique and worked for two decades in Australia to improve services for people with serious mental illness and for indigenous Australians.
Bridge attended to his West Papuan patients' health but also recognised their social and psychological problems, including, as was the case with Wowo, post-traumatic stress disorder. He became a local advocate for their rights and needs.
Bridge, who died in March, and Wowo have been brought together in the dedication to an important report: Mental Health and Psychosocial Wellbeing of West Papuan Refugees, by Susan Rees, Derrick Silove, Moses Kareth and Kuowei Tay.
This is the first study to document the experiences of this refugee population that numbers only about 60, largely in and around Melbourne and Cairns. But this is a small fraction of the refugees from the 40-year military occupation of West Papua, the majority of whom languish in abysmal conditions in PNG border camps and around Port Moresby.
For the "lucky" few who make it to Australia, the histories of trauma reported by almost all are compounded after migration. The majority have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The authors of the report identify two common clusters of symptoms and behaviours detailed by their informants.
The first, reported by two-thirds of those in the study - sakit hati - relates to the injustice of occupation and displacement, and is expressed in feelings of impotent anger and outbursts of rage. Three-quarters of the 44 subjects identified feelings that constitute the second - susah hati - profound sadness and frustration from loss and separation.
As I listened to the stories at a gathering to launch the report in Cairns last September, - to which none of the invited media responded - I thought about my practice as a psychiatrist in remote Aboriginal communities. While the histories are significantly different, the feelings of grievance, anger and debilitating despondency are obvious, but in a sense more complex.
In the welfare ghettos of remote Cape York, the indigenous attribution of violence is frequently, if not usually (as was the case with Sailor) black magic. The institutional response is judicial and/or counselling (variants of "walk away, cool down").
The sadness and frustration has come to be understood as grief and loss, which exists as a symbol of collective experience and an emotional state.
By the time Wowo and Sailor met on the footbridge in the early hours of November 24, 2009, their pasts had probably primed them in particular ways, undoubtedly they had much in common.
But while their origins were separated by only a short space of sea and both were from societies that had experienced colonisation, Wowo was - as Sailor was not - a refugee, detached from hearth and homeland.
He was in a sense invisible. In not recognising or reporting his origins, the media missed probably the most critical element in his story. Invisible was the man who had attempted to stand up for his people and who had fled oppression. Invisible was his pain and the source of it. What was left was two-dimensional, and wrong.
The invisibility survives him. This is not only because the number of Wowo's compatriots in Australia is so small and their collective voice so faint. It is because, there has been bipartisan political silence about West Papua in support of a regional realpolitik that recently includes co-operating with Indonesia to crack down on people-smuggling.
Which is why this report is important. The evidence presented is incontrovertible - in documenting their plain and present pain it challenges the invisibility of West Papua and the political fiction that sustains it.
It should also challenge us, as a nation, to acknowledge that pain and make the invisible visible.
The report will be launched in Melbourne later this year and is
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