While you are waiting for Mark Bin Bakar's musical arrangement and performance of the Jack Davis poem 'John Pat' to load up (this should take about 30 seconds by broadband or 5 minutes by dial-up connection) you can read the article below which gives some background information about this most notorious case of an Aboriginal death-in-custody and the way Aboriginal people have been treated on their own land by their guests; the white people of Australia.

An Aboriginal death in custody : the case of John Pat

     The town of Roebourne is in Western Australia, situated 1200 km north of Perth in the Pilbara Region, It lies in the traditional lands of the Ngarluma people. Whites first settled there in 1864. Roebourne was substantially affected by the mining boom of the 1960s, which saw nearby Karratha become the regional centre. By the early 1980s Roebourne had a population of 1200, with about 800 of Aboriginal descent.
      On 28 September 1983, four police officers and an Aboriginal police aide returned to Roebourne from a police union meeting at Karratha. They were off duty, and had each drunk six or seven glasses of beer at the Karratha Golf Club. Upon their return to Roebourne, they called in at the Victoria. One Aboriginal, Ashley James, was threatened by one of the off-duty policemen when he sought to make a purchase at the bottle shop. A barmaid later testified that police swore at James and threatened to get him when he left the hotel: '"We'll get you, you black cunt".
      James himself later testified that one of the police subsequently accosted him outside on the footpath, and told him to 'get fucked'. James then claimed that he fought back, and was then attacked by the other police. A brawl began with Aborigines and police trading punches. A sixteen-year-old Aboriginal youth, John Pat, joined the fray, and according to witnesses, was struck in the face by a policeman and fell backward, striking his head hard on the roadway.
      Witnesses said one of the off-duty police went over to Pat and kicked him in the head. Pat was then allegedly dragged to a waiting police van, kicked in the face, and thrown in 'like a dead kangaroo' Pat and three other Aborigines were driven to the Roebourne police station.
      Observers across the street from the station alleged that the Aborigines were systematically beaten as they were taken from the police van. One after another, the prisoners were dragged from the van and dropped on the cement pathway. Each was picked up, punched to the ground, and kicked. According to one observer, none of the prisoners fought back or resisted. One witness from across the street said she could hear the sound of loud blows, and 'come on, fight, you bastard'.
      One of the prisoners said he had spent a week in hospital as a result of his injuries. Another said his head had been slammed repeatedly on the concrete until he passed out. John Pat, however, was taken to the police lockup, and a little over an hour later, when police sought to check on him, he was dead. A subsequent autopsy revealed a fractured skull, haemorrhage and swelling as well as bruising and tearing, of the brain.
      He had sustained a number of massive blows to the head. In addition to the head injuries, he had two broken ribs and a torn aorta, the major blood vessel leading from the heart. The autopsy also showed that John Pat had a blood alcohol reading of .222.