COMMENT: "Australia's greatest social failing"

Bill Bryson faces some home truths about Australia.

[In Alice Springs,] the people on the street were overwhelmingly white Australians but there were Aborigines about, too – not great numbers of them, but always there, on the edge of the frame, unobtrusive, nearly always silent, peripheral. The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once. It was very strange.

(snip)

You don't have to be a genius to work out that Aborigines are Australia's greatest social failing. For virtually every indicator of prosperity and well-being – hospitalization rates, suicide rates, childhood mortality, imprisonment, employment, you name it – the figures for Aborigines range from twice as bad to up to twenty times worse than for the general population. According to John Pilger, Australia is the only developed nation that ranks high for incidence of trachoma – a viral disease that often leads to blindness – and it is almost exclusively an Aboriginal malady. Overall, the life expectancy of the average indigenous Australian is twenty years – twenty years – less than that of the average white Australian.

(Bill Bryson, pp. 280-281)