Shame job

This is a shameful story.
It happened over a few days, starting with people gathering for celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the walk-off from Wave Hill - a landmark in the struggle for land rights.
People from all over Australia gathered at the communities of Daguragu and Kalkaringi for the event.
Ironic really, because our Federal Government has just gutted the Land Rights Act which owes much of its conception to the inspiration of Vincent Lingiari and the men and women who walked off Lord Vestey's Wave Hill Station.
Among the people who came for the celebrations was a blind and infirm elderly man, now known to be Mr Limbunya, who was dropped off at the Kalkaringi airstrip (about 750km south-west of Darwin) by a medical plane from Katherine.
When I say 'dropped off', I mean just that.
The plane left him at the airstrip.
It was 5km from Kalkaringi.
No-one was there to meet him because no-one knew he was coming back, although he was one of the few old people left from the time of the walk-off.
The plane took off and left him standing there.
What happened then is anyone's guess, but he probably tried to walk - he wasn't wearing any shoes - from the airstrip to either Daguragu, the neighbouring community he preferred, or maybe even to Limbunya, the place where he was born and whose name he bore.
No-one knew he was gone for three days.
Then the alarm was raised.
The search was called off on the weekend, but yesterday they found his body - nine days after he 'disappeared'.
Mr Limbunya's sister, Nawala, was one of the Stolen Generation.
Although they shared the same mother, his father was a proper way Gurindji man and Nawala's was the Irish station overseer.
She was taken to the Kahlin 'half-caste' children's home in Darwin before she turned 10 - a hard ride on horseback with the local policemen and then a lugger ride down the Victoria River and on across Joseph Bonaparte Gulf to Darwin - and didn't get back to see him until she was well into her 60s.
He couldn't see her, because he was already blind, but he knew her all right.
Nawala died in her 80s surrounded by family and she was mourned by both black and white people in Darwin.
There were upwards of 1500 people at her funeral service, many of them travelling to the graveside in an apparently endless stream of cars that were shepherded by police to the cemetery.
The Mill Sisters sang 'Arafura Pearl' to farewell her and, as the earth covered her coffin, a V-formation flight of pelicans wheeled over the paperbarks and flew away.
Mr Limbunya, on the other hand, died alone.
He'll have a big send-off, to be sure.
But he died away from family, and maybe his country too.
And what happened to him typfies for me what many of our fellow Australians think of the First Australians and it typifies how the current Government is dealing with them.
They're inconvenient, they're not worth treating with common decency and - ultimately - they're disposable.
There'll be an inquiry to find out how it happened.
But it's too late.
You just know it would never happen to a white man.
And you know why.
This is Australia in the year 2006.
God help us.