ABORIGINES’ COURTS

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1931, Page 10

ABORIGINES’ COURTS

AUSTRALIAN INNOVATION '■TRIBUNALS TO BE SET UP. iSo tfiat aborigines charged with' tribal offences may receive “just and sympathetic treatment” the-Australian Minister of Home Affairs, Mr. Blakeley, has decided to appoint Courts of Native Affair* on lines which have been proved successful in Papua and New Guinea. The Minister sad that he considered that charges of tribal offences by aborigines should not be tried by' white men’s Courts, but should be dealt with in a special Court constituted to adjudicate on purely native matters. The native laws of the various aboriginal

tribes required that certain, offences should be punished according to the customs of 'the particular tribe. The fact that the method- of. punishment might not be in accordance with the views of the white man had no influence -whatever on the aboriginal, who, in a number of cases, knew nothing of the white man’s code.

As an example of this, some months previously"four aborigines had'been sen-, tenced to death by the Supreme Court of Northern Australia for the murder of of her....natives, although later the sentence’s “had been commuted to terms of imprisonment. The murders were the result of tribal offences, but, as the law of the Territory stood at the time, there was no alternative but to try the aborigines in the usual way. The proposed Courts would deal with matters as between native and native only, and would have no jurisdiction in connection with matters as between the native and the white man.