Five First Nations girls took their own lives within the first eleven days of 2019. The oldest two were 15, the youngest two were just 12 years old. And three of the minors, who were driven to such despair that they took their own lives, lived in Western Australia.
Then, in March that same year, four First Nations youths took their own lives in Queensland within the space of 40 hours. Indeed, by a third of the way into 2019, a total of 56 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had died by intentional self-harm.
This spate of deaths brought the country's long-term and ongoing First Nations suicide crisis into stark relief. Politicians at the highest level vowed that they were going to make Indigenous suicide a priority until the media focus shifted onto something else.
