Take me away from your dance floor,
Leave me out of your parade,
I have not the heart for dancing,
For dancing . . . on his grave.
Australian musician Paul Kelly, who had two sellout nights in Dublin last year, wrote this song both to commemorate a young Aboriginal man who had died in custody, and as a protest against the "white man's celebration", the bicentennial (of European settlement) in 1988.
Twelve years later, it seems that some things have not changed, and the high rate of deaths in custody of indigenous Australians is one of them. Another is the possibility that Aboriginal issues will blight an otherwise great national occasion, the Sydney Olympics.
Indigenous Australians, the Aborigines, are complaining that they have been sidelined in the hype and expense of the Olympics.
Last week Irish radio listeners heard the veteran Aboriginal politician, Mr Charlie Perkins, threaten, as he has at home, to "punish" the white establishment and spoil its big international party, with threats to "burn, burn, burn". The almost unthinkable, for Australians, vision of race riots is confronting the authorities and Olympic organisers.
After all, if the austere and gentlemanly World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle last December could be disrupted by debt campaigners and assorted anti-capitalists, there is no reason why the sprawl of Sydney too could not be visited by organised chaos.
What has brought the Aboriginal issue to the top of the agenda is a row over sentencing policy in the Northern Territory, the vast tract of mostly arid land bordered by South and Western Australia and Queensland.
The territory has its own first minister and legislative assembly, but fewer powers than the six Australian states. It has refused to change a policy of mandatory jailing of youths who came before its courts on often petty charges, such as small thefts.
The argument peaked when a 15-year-old boy, nicknamed Johnno, was found hanged in a detention centre bedroom. he had been jailed for 28 days for the theft of pencils and stationery. Johnno's death had resonances of the high rate of "jail suicides" in Western Australian jails, a scandal which apparently was defused some years ago, and on which the Paul Kelly song quoted above was written.
The NT was criticised by civil rights and Aboriginal campaigners, as well as by the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, for refusing to modify its sentencing policy. The Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, declined to act, as he constitutionally could. This sparked a revolt by federal MPs, including even the Federal Treasurer, Mr Peter Costello, demanding action. Eventually the Northern Territory "compromised" by moving the age limit on its jailing policy by one year, from 17 to 18, a move derided in many quarters.
"Human rights don't stop when you turn 18. People over 18 will continue to be sent to jail for one year for trivial offences," said Mr Gordon Renouf of the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service.
The sentencing controversy coincided with Howard's latest failure to accept collective responsibility for the "stolen generation", the children of Aboriginal families who were removed from their homes between the 1920s and 1960s and re-created as of a white culture. Howard, a veteran politician of small "c" conservatism, has provoked Aboriginal ire because of his refusal to, modishly, apologise to Aboriginal people for the wrongs and often casual brutality visited upon them in the 200-plus years of white occupation.
Many see this stubborn attitude at the top as illogical. It is now three years since Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission produced a report in which it said government policies on Aborigines had amounted to genocide and called for a national day of apology.
In July 1997, Australia's Catholic and Anglican churches apologised for their role in the stolen generation policy, which involved an estimated 100,000 children.
Last August the federal parliament passed a declaration of "deep and sincere regret" for past injustices to Aborigines, but Howard himself has avoided a full apology. He and his Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mr John Herron, created the latest controversy by saying that the figure of 100,000 was "only 10 per cent" of the whole and the issue had been exaggerated.
"There is a growing level of frustration . . . about the government's inability to deal with these outstanding matters," said the chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Mr Geoff Clark, who predicted large demonstrations in the run-up to the Olympics.
Thousands marched through Sydney, where a Chinese face is more common than an Aboriginal one, in protest last week. At a similar demonstration in Melbourne, a Green Party senator, Mr Bob Brown, told the crowd the Prime Minister did not understand Aboriginal issues.
"John Howard went to the Blue Mountains for a tree-planting ceremony on Friday, and because there were indigenous people protesting . . . the Prime Minister complained he could not hear the children singing. The problem, Prime Minister, is that you can't hear the children crying."
The issue also cast a shadow over the Liberal Party's national convention yesterday. Business people - traditionally a Liberal constituency - are concerned that controversies such as that on the treatment of Aborigines, were not in their interest.
A great deal of often uninformed material has been written recently about Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers and legitimate refugees. The impression created has been that refugees in Australia are incarcerated behind barbed wire in Dickensian misery. In fact Australia has developed a sophisticated and largely humane immigration policy. The real scandal is, and always has been, its treatment of the people who inhabited the vast country when the first European settlers were immigrants.