Northern Territory politician Minister Bess Price pictured at Parliament House in Darwin city. Source: News Corp Australia
BESS Nungarrayi Price has only one younger brother left out of 12 siblings. All the others are dead.
It's a shocking statistic for a family that has not suffered through war, famine or disease. They did, however, grow up as Aborigines in the Northern Territory.
Ms Price, 53, the Country Liberals member for Stuart in central Australia, lost her sister Rosalie Nungarrayi through a stabbing in a Katherine town camp a fortnight ago.
Rosalie, aged 46, was a mother of five and a grandmother to 10, with another grandchild on the way. She had fallen into a life of roaming, drinking and sleeping in some of Australia's most dangerous addresses — the Territory's town camps.
She stopped over in Katherine's Warlpiri Camp, while waiting for a lift west to visit one of her daughters in Lajamanu.
Warlpiri Camp is used by Warlpiri people — Australia's largest tribal group — as a kind of halfway house, a place to sleep it off after savage drinking binges. A 31-year-old woman has been charged over Rosalie's death.
Ms Price took the unusual step of naming her dead sister, normally prohibited for cultural reasons. She said she did not want Rosalie to be another unnamed statistic.
"I know that people will think that I shouldn't have said her name, but I want to make sure that we can talk freely about our loved ones," Ms Price said.
The story of her siblings is a terrible one: four died as babies; three brothers died from alcohol; one from breast cancer; one died in her sleep for unknown reasons; and now there's Rosalie.
Only two of them made it past 50.
"It's not just me who has these stories," she says. "Lots more Aboriginal families who don't have the opportunity to speak encounter all sorts of problems with violence in our people's culture.
"They just think it's the norm and allow it to take over."
The story of Aboriginal violence is an unchanging one, despite attempts such as the federal intervention to force a new direction. Ms Price questioned why indigenous people were not campaigning against the emergency in their own society.
"The activists don't talk it up," she said. "What's wrong with them? They talk about reconciliation, Captain Cook's invasion, which is who they blame for our violence.
"We don't hear from them about the violence in our communities, the women that get killed. You just don't hear about it."
Ms Price grew up in Yuendumu, a large Aboriginal community northwest of Alice Springs. She says she has watched her home community, and others like it, deteriorating.
"I think it's worsened," she says. "The communities are unstable, people just don't believe in themselves any more.
"When I grew up in Yuendumu in the 70s, everybody had a job. Everybody had a role to play, or went to school. That's all changed. People are now free to move about, people now have this word we call 'choice'.
"They decide they can do whatever they want to do."
But even then, Yuendumu was not a safe place for Ms Price. After entering a marriage and having her first child by the age of 14, she made a very deliberate choice to get out, with the backing of her parents.
"I was sick and tired of being beaten up, for no reason," she says. "I had to leave and find a better life for myself, without violence. And I have done that."
Ms Price joined the Country Liberals, winning the seat of Stuart in a massive swing in the 2012 Territory election. It was an unusual political path given Labor's history of wrapping up the indigenous vote.
She is now the widely respected Minister for Community Services, Statehood, Women's Policy and Parks and Wildlife, but she found it hard to get through to her sister Rosalie.
"We encouraged her to stay put in Yuendumu or Old Timer's Camp (in Alice Springs)," Ms Price says. "We tried to explain to her, 'Look, settle down, ground your feet and stay put. You're at that age you need to settle down.'"
But she says there is a constant movement among Aboriginal people of the north, who travel from one place to the next, finding relatives and partying till it gets ugly.
"If you don't have a job, you can do that," she says. "You're free to travel wherever.
"I've got a job. And I think without employment, no jobs for our people, and education, Aboriginal people don't exist, more or less. Jobs create stability, family togetherness. But that's not the way Aboriginal people live."
She recalls Rosalie as her "smiling sister". And her last sister.
Ms Price wants her people to know it doesn't have to end that way. "You have a choice," she says.
paul.toohey@news.com.au
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