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Understanding Aboriginal silence in legal contexts 291

police officers. The case centered on the issue of whether or not the boys had got into
and travelled in the police cars against their will: no doubt was ever raised that they
were approached and told to get in the police cars, and that they were taken to the in-
dustrial wasteland and abandoned there. The defense case was that the boys ‘gave up
their liberty’ and that ‘there’s no offence of allowing a person to give up his liberty’.

The cross-examination of the boys was devastating: these three young Aborig-
inal part-time street kids, with minimal successful participation in mainstream
Australian institutions, such as education, were pitted against the two most
highly paid and experienced criminal barristers in the state. It is hardly surpris-
ing that the boys were unable to maintain a consistent story under the barrage
of cross-examination, which involved so much shouting at times that many legal
professionals in the public gallery were amazed that the lawyers were not re-
strained or disallowed from using this haranguing behaviour. Elsewhere (Eades
2002, 2003), I have written about the linguistic strategies used by these two
defense counsel to manipulate and misconstrue the evidence of the three
boys. These strategies succeeded in the magistrate accepting defense counsels’
construction of these victim-witnesses as criminals with ‘no regard for the com-
munity’, and the reinterpretation of the alleged abduction as the boys volun-
tarily giving up their liberty while the police took them for a ride (both literally
and metaphorically). As a result, the charges against the police officers were
dropped.
Perhaps the most pervasive linguistic strategy used by defence counsel was
their exploitation of the Aboriginal tendency to freely agree to propositions put to
them in Yes-No questions, regardless of their actual agreement, or even their
understanding of the question. Termed ‘gratuitous concurrence’ (Liberman 1981),
this conversational pattern is widely found in intercultural interactions involving
Aboriginal people, and is considered a major problem for the way in which Abo-
riginal people participate in the criminal justice system (Eades 1992, 2002).
A number of factors increase the likelihood of an Aboriginal witness in
court using gratuitous concurrence, including interviewer hostility, for example
shouting or haranguing. Example 2 occurred during the cross-examination of
the oldest of the three boys, who was fifteen at the time. It typifies much of the
cross-examination by the first of the two defence counsel, who used shouting
and repeated question tags (such as didn’t you), in response to answers that he
did not accept. As we see in this example, the witness’s response to such harass-
ment (in Turn 4) often appears to be gratuitous concurrence.

(2)
1. DC1: And you knew (1.4) when you spoke to these six police in the Val-
ley that you didn’t have to go anywhere with them if you didn’t
want to, didn’t you?
2. BARRY: (1.3) No.