Cunneen, Chris --- "Royal Commission Report of Inquiry: The Death of Malcolm Smith" [1989] AboriginalLawB 26; (1989) 1(38) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 5

• Royal Commission Report Of Inquiry: The Death Of Malcolm Smith

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Royal Commission Report of Inquiry:
The Death of Malcolm Smith

by Chris Cunneen

Commissioner Wootten released the Report on the death of Malcolm Smith on April 20, 1989. The Commissioner found that Smith had died from selfinflicted injuries after the handle of a paint brush had been driven into his left eye. Smith was being held in the Malabar Assessment Unit at Long Bay Gaol at the time. Significantly, Commissioner Wootten specifically rejected the earlier coronial finding of death by suicide.

While the facts concerning how Malcolm Smith died are relatively straightforward, the Commissioner attempts in the major part of the report to answer the far more difficult question of why Malcolm Smith died. The answer to that question, according to Wootten, begins sometime between 26 January 1788 and 5th May 1965 when Smith was removed and isolated from his family at the age of 11.

Part two of the Report is a detailed examination of the background to Malcolm Smith's death. Smith was cut off from his family for eight years and spent the time "in despotic institutions of various kinds [which] left him illiterate and innumerate, unskilled, and without experience of normal society".

After being made a state ward, Smith was first sent to Kinchela Boy's Home. After four years the Home's achievements were summarised in a manager's report which stated, "taking into account Malcolm's lack of academic qualifications, being a persistent liar and his habits of perversion, it is difficult to be able to recommend anything for the future for him". Incarceration had transformed him into something "fairly typical of the emotionally deprived adolescent". Yet we can contrast this view with what we know of Malcolm's early life before state intervention. There was no indication of ill treatment or unhappiness. The worst "crimes" of eleven year old Malcolm were that he truanted from school and had gone joyriding on another child's bicycle.

In the next period of his imprisonment, Malcolm was held at Mt Penang Training Centre which was described in evidence to the Commissioner as a para-military institution. After Mt Penang came Tamworth Boy's Home, which consisted of a regime designed to turn boys into "automatons". In summarising the effects of this early period, Wootten states that Malcolm Smith "had been taught a model of human life based on dominance and subservience, rigid discipline and conformity, repression and dependence, humiliation and fear, with escape or defiance as the only room for initiative". Yet the original reason for the removal of Malcolm from his family was that he had been declared a neglected child and committed to the "care and protection" of the Aborigines Welfare Board.

During the nine years and eight months of his adult life, Smith spent nine years in adult gaols, often as a result of prison sentences which Wootten acknowledges to have been extremely harsh. It was during the period of his adult imprisonment that Malcolm's psychotic symptoms developed. Yet Malcolm was never properly assessed or diagnosed. Wootten states that, "it is a matter of concern that professional people should have allowed themselves to become so calloused to the inadequacies of the system". Despite numerous serious attempts at self injury, no thorough psychiatric assessment was conducted.

Importantly the Report broadens the background information on the death of Smith to argue that his particular death is part of a continuing legacy of "the appalling treatment of Aboriginals that went on well into the second half of this century in the name of protection or welfare". Much of the Report is specifically critical of various policies, services and institutions including the prison psychiatric services, the police investigation of the death and the coronial inquiry. More generally, the historical role of removal of Aboriginal children, and the assimilationist policy on which it was based, is recognised as falling within the definitions of genocide.

The Report is uncompromisingly strong in its condemnation of government policies to Aboriginal people: "The brutal cruelty of what was done in the name of protection and welfare by a smug, self-righteous and racist community is only now coming to be generally recognised..." Indeed the Report comes to the central issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody in its concluding paragraphs when it comments on the processes of racism and the connection of such processes to the disproportionate imprisonment of Aboriginal people.

The death of Malcolm Smith was a tragic event, but one not isolated in time or place. Reading Wootten's Report there is a sense of the profound historical dimension to that individual life and death. The Report is an important attempt to explain an Aboriginal death in custody through both individual factors and the over-riding external dynamics that structure relations between Aborigines and the wider society. Importantly the current political scenario is stated: Aborigines continue to be massively over-represented in prison populations and Aboriginal youth continue to make up around 25% of the young people held in the State's juvenile institutions.