An 11-year-old boy charged with murder has come to epitomise Australia's great shame: the plight of its Aboriginal citizens.
The boy is one of the youngest people to be charged with murder in Australia. He was part of a gang of seven or eight boys, teenagers and young men who roamed Perth late into the night on Australia Day, January 26.
Around 3am, the boy's gang got into a fist fight with another group in the city's downtown. But some of the gang members were armed with wooden stakes, screwdrivers, glass bottles and metal fence pickets, and they chased 26-year-old Patrick Slater into an alcove of a tram stop. Slater, also an Aboriginal, was left bleeding from fatal wounds to his head, chest and leg.
The nature of the death horrified Perth. The 11-year-old, who cannot be named under Australian law, was arrested nine days later.
More Aborigines than ever are going to prison. "They are the most imprisoned people in the world," said Harry Blagg, a professor of criminology at the University of Western Australia who specialises in Aboriginal policy.