THE REV Djiniyini Gondarra, a softly spoken clergyman from tiny Elcho Island off Australia's remote north, is fighting a life and death battle for his Aboriginal people against what they regard as the white man's sorcery euthanasia.
Gondarra is part of a coalition of lawyers, doctors and church leaders which has launched a Supreme Court challenge to the world's first voluntary euthanasia law, which came into force in Australia's Northern Territory yesterday.
But for Gondarra and his Aboriginal people the fight is not about white Australia's concerns, such as medical ethics, parliamentary jurisdiction or constitutional rights. It is about protecting traditional Aboriginal laws dating back more than 40,000 years and passed on, they say, from the spiritual Dream time when the earth was born.
"It (the new law) is the practice of sorcery," Gondarra said. "It does undermine Aboriginal traditional law, customary law.
"People still live in fear of the customary law of the land", he told reporters before entering the Supreme Court in Darwin, the Northern Territory capital, yesterday.
Scores of Aborigines, many barefoot, travelled from remote outback camps to pack Darwin's Supreme Court for the opening hearing of the legal challenge to the euthanasia law. A lawyer representing the anti euthanasia coalition argued the new law was unconstitutional, as only the judiciary, not parliament, can authorise the taking of a life.
But for Australia's 300,000 Aborigines, it is simply a matter of life and death. Many Aboriginal communities are highly sensitive about death. In some groups a dead person's name cannot be uttered for several months and his photograph cannot be displayed publicly.
Across Australia's rugged and remote northern "Top End", many Aboriginal communities believe death is caused by an external force, called sorcery, regardless of whether a person dies in a car accident or from cancer or euthanasia.
"Traditional Aboriginal people don't want to talk about it (euthanasia)", Gondarra said. "They don't want to hear. They are really terrified because it contravenes the law of the fan. It is awful to talk about somebody's death or somebody using sorcery to take somebody else's life.
"It is the law of the land and has been in existence before white man's law as long as the land has been here", he said.
Another Aboriginal elder, Mawunytil Jarawirrtji, described the euthanasia law as evil.
"Yes (it is), because injection is something like murder, murder of mankind", Jarawirrtji said. "We want to see our Aboriginal people die naturally, because that's our life."
The federal government in Canberra is likely to join the legal challenge if, as expected, it" reaches the High Court, the country's final appeal court. Meanwhile, Mr Kevin Andrews, a federal MP from Victoria, will introduce a Bill when parliament resumes in Canberra next month to override the Northern Territory's law retrospectively. Doctors have been warned that they could be charged with murder or manslaughter if they give lethal injections.