These themes of drunkeness, lousy parenting, children out of wedlock, and senseless violence are disturbingly common in large swathes of black life around the globe.
Eight bodies, most of them very small children, were pulled from the house through the previous night after Mersane Warria, also known as Raina Thaiday, 37, allegedly went berserk and stabbed and suffocated to death her seven children and a niece.
Four girls, aged 14, 12, 11 and two, and four boys aged nine, eight, six and five were murdered.
Police have now spoken to their five fathers after their deaths…
Murray St in Manoora, in the western part of Cairns, had a reputation as one of Cairns’ most notorious areas long before this inconceivable crime…
They are accustomed to drunkenness and domestic violence, which is why a group of teenagers didn’t pay too much attention when they saw Warria, whom they knew as Aunty Mali, allegedly acting very strangely in the street, hours before the murders.
Sisters Cristal and Jade Atkinson, 19 and 14, Aaron Oui, 14, had turned into Murray St at 11.30pm on Thursday evening and encountered Aunty Mali on the road, several hundred metres from her home, screaming into her phone at someone.
“She was saying (on the phone) really twisted words,” says Cristal.
“We just thought she was drunk.”
In this area, made up of white, Torres Strait Islander and indigenous families, people expect a certain amount of steady trouble.
It becomes compounded in the hot months leading up to Christmas, when people drink harder to fight off the heat. And then spirals further with the knowledge their kids’ Christmas is disappearing on alcohol and drugs.
She was seeing two men, neither of whom were the father to any of her kids. She’d broken up with one of them two nights earlier…
Natasha says Murray St gets a bad rap. “The cops make it seem bad.”
But no one works, she says, and she doesn’t even know how much rent she pays – it comes straight out of her dole.
“It’s not as bad as it seems,” she says, taking a slug from her Jim Beam mixer can, at 6.45am.
