The inevitability of suicide for Aboriginal Australians

All available data suggest that, like many other Indigenous peoples, Australian Aborigines are significantly more like to kill themselves than are non-Aboriginal Australians. This statistical disparity is normally positioned an objective, ontological and undeniable social fact, a fact best explained as a function of endemic community disadvantage and disenfranchisement. Our research suggests that higher-than-normal Aboriginal suicide rates may also be a function of coronial decision-making practices. This paper explores the idea that coroners utilise a colonial narrative when they invite us to position Aboriginal deaths by suicide as more likely, more understandable, more reasonable, than non-Aboriginal deaths by suicide.