Considering the Changing Environment of Indigenous Child Development

Abstract

This poem, by a resident of Palm Island in northern Queensland, raises many issues—alcohol and drug use, unemployment, hopelessness, emotional pressure and pain and fights within the family. Between the lines there is much more, allusions, perhaps, to childhood sexual abuse. There is also mention of a mental health professional, a psychiatrist, seeking the solution inside that tormented individual's mind. But, as the author emphasises, ‘No one knows what's in another's mind’, not even the psychiatrist. Perhaps because — ‘they just won't listen’. At the end of the poem the rope appears as the inevitable end of the road.