Alad's fall off a bicycle in an inner Sydney street unleashed a race riot the like of which Australians had not seen in decades -- and now the post mortem into why this happened can begin.
The nine-hour pitched battle 10 days ago in the Redfern neighborhood, just a couple of kilometers from the Opera House, was ineluctable proof that 216 years since Europeans invaded the wide brown land, relations between white and black are still on a knife-edge.
Televised pictures of young children throwing stones at police deeply shocked and outraged most Australians, who believe it was the worst race riot in recent Australian history. Fifty police officers were injured.
"It peeled back the thin veneer of an undercurrent of racial tension building up over the past 10 years," Aden Ridgeway, the only Aborigine in federal parliament, said of the mayhem that followed the accidental death of 17-year-old Thomas Hickey.
The stone throwing, petrol bombing, trashing of cars and police injuries were "an extreme expression of the mistrust between Aboriginal youth and police set against a backdrop of poverty, lack of jobs and limited education."
These themes of discrimination, dispossession and disadvantage were taken up yesterday at Hickey's funeral in Walgett, 300km north west of Sydney.
Hickey was buried without his aunt, father, and two uncles in attendance. The last three are serving a long sentence for armed robbery. His aunt, whom he lived with in Redfern, is in custody over her role in the Feb. 15 riot.
Speakers at the ceremony in Hickey's birthplace eulogized him as a martyr for the cause, or a lad who had little chance in life, or a victim of the hell-on-earth that the black ghetto of Redfern has become.
The exact circumstances of his death are to be investigated by three separate enquiries. What's clear is that he died after impaling himself on a steel fence when his bicycle hit a curb.
Redfern residents say a police patrol car was in pursuit at the time. The police deny this.
The violent confrontation with police came a day after the boy died.
In its aftermath, Ridgeway pleaded with police not to inflame the situation by arresting those shown on video with bricks and bottles in their hands. They ignored him, picking up Hickey's aunt, his girlfriend and others who were in the fray.
The Labor Party's Bob Carr, the premier of New South Wales, cheered them on, arguing that disadvantage was no excuse for criminal behavior and that blacks must have justice meted out to them just like any other members of multicultural Australia.
His rival to govern Australia's biggest state, the Liberal Party's John Brogden, went further, saying the authorities should consider taking into custody delinquent Aboriginal children who were outside the control of their own community.
Brogden's comments followed an observation by Ridgeway that some black children lived on the streets because their parents were "dead, they're alcoholics, they're drunks, or they're in jail."
According to former senior Sydney police officer Tim Priest, Hickey, who left school and home at 14, was the product of a system that "has allowed a generation of young Aborigines to turn their frustrations about life into an excuse for a life of crime."
He had a criminal record and was wanted by police on a charge of assault.
But Ridgeway and other Aboriginal leaders turned the argument around. They asked why Aborigines leave school early, don't get jobs and so often find themselves in prison.
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