Letter from Sydney: There were riots in Australia again over a recent weekend. On the Friday and Sunday nights, hundreds of drunken youths pelted police with bottles when violence flared in Perth, writes Padraig Collins.
Nine people were arrested during Sunday night's riot, which took police four hours to control. Nine others were arrested during Friday's disturbances.
Didn't hear a word about it? Don't worry; news barely reached Sydney, never mind the other side of the world.
The reason these riots did not make news had nothing to do with the fact that Perth is an isolated city on Australia's west coast and everything to do with the colour of the rioter's skin. The Perth rioters were white; the Sydney rioters a couple of weeks earlier were Aboriginal.
The Perth riots centred on a drunken brawl outside a teenage disco and gatecrashers being refused entry to a house party. The riots in Sydney's inner city Redfern area came after the local community believed the police were responsible for the death of a local Aboriginal boy.
It seems likely that 17-year-old TJ Hickey was not being chased by police - though he thought he was - before losing control of his bicycle, being impaled on a low fence and subsequently dying. The police were looking for another Aboriginal youth in Redfern (a position backed up by video footage) but, after being summoned to the scene of TJ's accident, they had his blood all over them as they tried to revive him. Policing in the inner city has come a long way since a 1992 TV documentary, Cop It Sweet, showed an officer calling an Aboriginal rugby league player "a coon".
The programme showed how police singled the player out for questioning on the basis of his race. The police officer involved explained his actions by saying the term "coon" was part of the culture of Redfern police and that no offence was intended.
Without condoning last month's riot in any way, the only surprising thing about it was that it had not happened a long time ago. The situation of the vast majority of Aboriginals in Redfern is desperate. In one of the world's richest cities they live in absolute poverty. Very few have jobs, their life expectancy is 20 years shorter than the national average and alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and illiteracy are rife.
Aboriginals were only granted Australian citizenship in 1967. Never mind that the Aborigines have been here for 40,000-50,000 years; when white settlement began 216 years ago, Australia was considered terra nullius - empty land. This ruling allowed white settlers to take whatever land they wished without any accommodation being made with the traditional owners.
New Zealand's situation is very different. The Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 granted citizenship and land rights to the Maoris in return for accepting British sovereignty. It did not settle all differences then or now, but in any New Zealand city today you will see Maoris working side-by-side with people of European and Asian backgrounds.
In Sydney or Melbourne, you could go weeks or months without even seeing an Aboriginal. They have become invisible in their own land. There has never been a treaty here.
Waitangi Day (February 6th) is New Zealand's national day. Australia Day (January 26th) celebrates only the settlement at Sydney Cove by Europeans. Little wonder Aboriginals often know it as "invasion day".
One of the most respected thinkers on Aboriginal issues is lawyer Noel Pearson. His view is that citizenship was something of a poisoned chalice for his people. "On the one hand, there was recognition of our human rights and our land rights, and that was unequivocally a great thing. But at the very same time we got disengaged from the economy because of the equal wages decision," he said.
Having to be paid equal wages for equal work led to a huge amount of Aboriginals working on farms and factories losing their jobs as employers said they could not afford it. A lot these people then migrated to places such as Redfern in order to get the social welfare they were now entitled to. "Two things came together at the same time. We got work-free income and availability of alcohol," Pearson told ABC television.
"People want to hear that we're in such a miserable situation because of all these larger historical and social and economic factors, but the key thing seems to me to be that we stopped needing to work, and we were placed in a position of complete dependency through the social security system.
"And, of course, this welfare situation, where the surplus of the wider society is able to sustain people out on the margins on a perpetual drip-feed is a poisonous situation, completely poisonous situation."
But who could blame them for wanting something back from the state when, in New South Wales alone, $69 million (€42 million) in withheld wages stretching back to 1900 is owed to as many as 11,500 Aborigines.
Between 1900 and 1969 various trust schemes kept a proportion of wages in the belief Aboriginals were not capable of managing their own finances. Tania Major, a 22-year-old Aboriginal activist, wrote a few months ago: "In less then 60 years the people of my tribe have gone from being an independent nation to cultural prisoners to welfare recipients.
"When I was growing up there were 15 people in my class. Today I am the only one who has gone to university, let alone finished secondary education."
"I'm also the only girl in my class who did not have a child at 15. Of the boys in my class, seven have been incarcerated, two for murder, rape and assault. Of the 15, there are only three of us who are not alcoholics. And one of the saddest things I must report is that four of my classmates have already committed suicide."
So long as so many indigenous Australians live in third world conditions with no hope and no future, further riots such as the Redfern one are not just possible - they are inevitable.