Introduction

One Saturday morning in January 1992, at about 3 am, 19 year old Louis Johnson was walking home along a road in the quiet middle-class Perth suburb of North Beach. It was his birthday and he had been at a party. He stopped to lie down on the grass verge for a while. Some time later a car containing five other youths, completely unknown to him, pulled up alongside. The three boys and two girls got out of the car and Louis was viciously bashed by two of them while the others watched. He was then left lying beside the road. Moments later, some of the youths returned in the car, and deliberately ran over him at high speed. The five white youths then returned to observe their victim and the driver said to the group: 'I got him, I am glad I got the black sod'. Louis lay beside North Beach Road with massive internal injuries and a shattered pelvis until a passing cyclist spotted him at around 7 am and called for an ambulance. Waiting for the ambulance, Louis was still conscious and lucid enough to talk to the cyclist who, as a layperson, had formed the view that Louis was seriously ill.

Tragic ironies seem to attach themselves to this horrific affair. Louis's middle name was St. John, and he was a fully paid-up subscriber to the St. John's Ambulance Fund. But, according to the cyclist, the ambulance attendants simply assumed, without any examination, that Louis had been sniffing petrol. Instead of taking him to hospital, they took him home, telling his younger sister he was intoxicated, was not a hospital case, and should sleep it off in bed. Later that morning the Johnsons found their son in bed. It was obvious that he was seriously injured, and they called a second ambulance. Louis died before it arrived. His grieving father Bill described his son as dying with 'dignity, courage and stoicism'.

In a taped confession to police after being arrested some days later, the driver of the car claimed that it had not been his intention to kill Louis, only to break his legs. Why had he done it? He answered openly: because he was black. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to seven years and nine months in prison. Another youth is awaiting trial at the time of writing; he has pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder.

When the sinister circumstances became established, this killing should have attracted prominent media attention, given the fact that according to a concurrent media campaign Perth was in the grip of a spiralling youth crime rampage. Only nine days earlier, on Boxing Day, youths had stolen a car and, while under high speed pursuit by police, had collided with another car, killing a pregnant mother and her son. This was the latest of about a dozen tragic deaths during such high speed car chases in little over a year, and it intensified the media and public campaign for a police and legislative crack-down on juvenile crime.

But somehow Louis Johnson never achieved the status of an emblematic 'victim of youth crime' in the way the previous fatalities did. With the sole exception of the weekly Sunday Times some two months after the killing, his case was not taken up by the media with equal fervour, despite being more sinister and horrifying than those of car-chase victims. While those deaths were accidental, Louis's assailants attacked him with premeditated and repeated violence. Moreover, Louis was killed because he was Aboriginal, and for no other reason. Thus, in Western Australia, enormous emotional values were attached to accidental killings, but they did not seem to apply to the cold-blooded racist murder of an innocent Aboriginal man. The relative lack of media interest in the murder of Louis Johnson raises serious questions about the entire structure of news reporting in Perth, and about the role of the media in shaping public attitudes towards crime, Aboriginality, and justice.

The muted media response to Louis Johnson's murder was nowhere so quiet as on Perth's high rating morning radio program The Sattler File: it wasn't mentioned.2 This silence is noteworthy as Howard Sattler had established himself as the unchallenged champion of previous victims of juvenile crime. He used his show to mobilise a gathering of up to 20,000 people at Parliament House in August 1991 to demand stiffer gaol sentences for juvenile offenders; the so-called Rally for Justice. He kicked off this crusade in April 1990 with a now-notorious pronouncement, on-air, about the deaths of 3 Aboriginal youths in a high speed police chase:

Sattler: I say good riddance to bad rubbish, that's three less car thieves, I think they're dead and I think that's good.

Sattler went on to convert his program into one of the most effective public policy lobbies ever seen in Perth, with daily stolen car reports, interviews with the victims of crime, and promotions for the 'Rally for Justice'. Balanced journalism got short shrift as Sattler deftly classified as 'protectors of criminals' anyone who suggested that locking kids in gaol was not the best solution to juvenile offending -- the 'do-gooder social workers, profiteering lawyers and lenient judges, heads-in-the-sand academics, self-promoting Human Rights Commissioners, fringe groups and the Aboriginal Legal Service'.3

But if Sattler's passion for the victims of crime could not, for whatever reason, extend itself to murder victim Louis Johnson, then there were other aspects of the case that fitted his regular agenda. For example, the matter of Louis's shocking treatment by the St. John's Ambulance attendants was well suited to Sattler's well-known fervour for lambasting institutional impropriety, his frequent advocacy of 'battlers' unjustly dealt with by insensitive bureaucrats, or free-loading public servants and 'ideological' unionists. Important matters for public consideration were certainly raised by Johnson's death: for example questions about how it is possible that mortally injured Aboriginal people can simply be assumed to be petrol sniffers by medically qualified professionals; how white people in responsible positions get the idea that Aboriginal people 'are all the same'; how negative stereotypes are circulated within society; and who is responsible for spreading them around.

After all, Sattler himself is somewhat of an authority on the stereotyping of Aboriginal people. He knows full well that such conceptions are not only shared among a certain section of his listeners, but are also offensive to others, as this transcript for August 6 1990 shows:

Caller: Good day Howard, how are you going?
Sattler: Good Bradley.
Caller: Answer a quick one about the Waugle [Nyoongar Aboriginal word for Rainbow Serpent].
Sattler: Yes.
Caller: Um, what do Waugles and pink elephants have in common?
Sattler: What do Waugles and pink elephants have in common?
Caller: You've got to be drunk to see either of them.
Sattler [in a facetious tone]: Now now, now now, now now, Bradley, you shouldn't be like that. Well, I can't account for everyone.

Sattler could also have posed a question to his listeners, as he often does when he wants them to ring in to his program -- where does this hatred for Aboriginal people come from, such that a young man could be so casually slain just because he was black? How is it sustained? Do media personalities have an influence here? Is it in the things we don't say when we should, or shouldn't say when we do?