With only fantasy & horror author Tessa Kum’s #IllRideWithYou hashtag standing athwart who knows what horror & fantasy Down Under, it’s worth checking into the latest atrocity: the stabbing deaths of eight children in Cairns. From The Australian:

5.32pm: Larry Woosup, a relative of the family, said the adults who lived in the house were his niece and nephew. “I just heard about it, my family just rang because they’re worried about our sister,” he told the ABC. “Some of them are my sister’s kids. I just got a phone call from my son’s mother from down Mackay because they had seen the news flash down there. “It’s the end of the year and it’s a family thing, Christmas and New Year, and you get this sort of thing happening. “This is a close neighbourhood this Murray Street, it’s sort of indigenous mob, [they] hang out together, especially my nephew you know? “I’m desperate like everyone else to hear [what happened].”

I did a little Googling to find out what kind of name Woosup is and found this on the official website of the Australian Parliament:

Many of those attending the public hearings also spoke about the confusion surrounding the Queensland wild rivers legislation and how it overlaps with native title or the laws that govern national parks and state reserves. Typical was Larry Woosup, a native title claimant for the Ankamuthi Traditional Owners Group north of Port Musgrave in Queensland. … “We cannot impact on the environment. We know how to look after it because we were the custodians for 80,000 years.”

So it’s likely an Aboriginal / Islander thing. Generally, any kill-all-the-children horror like this is domestic crime rather than street crime or organized crime.

Since we’ll probably be hearing about historic white crimes against Aborigines shortly, here’s what I had to say in 2008.