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Explaining her desperate escape to a remote town two days journey away across the desert, she said: "If I don't escape him now, that man will kill me for sure."

It was no exaggeration. Last year Alice Springs man Ronald Djana was given two life sentences after raping his wife Janey Norman with a metal pole and killing her slowly over a period of hours in their town camp.

Dale Wakeford, who runs a women's shelter in Alice Springs to where many Aboriginal women flee, said: "We see ourselves as a murder prevention unit." However, she added, "We don't always succeed. Most women go back to their husbands, and some of them are killed."

One of the girls currently in the shelter, 18-year-old Lesley who has been with her husband since she was 15, showed off axe wounds to her head and legs. Her tendons, like those of many Aboriginal women, had also been sliced to stop her from running away from her abuser.

Lesley is regularly beaten in front of her neighbours but their silence has left her utterly unprotected.

"My husband attacked me with an axe in front of other people but they were too scared of him and his family to help me," she said. "His family have killed others who were weaker than them."

Many in Australia explain away the violence as a tragic result of the social dislocation and widespread alcohol abuse that has devastated Aboriginal culture.

Peter Sutton, a renowned anthropologist who has lived and worked with Aborigines for 40 years and is author of a new book 'The Politics of Suffering,' described this as a 'myth'.

"Aboriginal women's roles have traditionally been subordinate when it comes to matters of power' he told The Times. 'Men's violence against women is well documented at extreme levels from earliest colonial times.

"Ancient human remains suggest little had changed in this regard for thousands of years. But alcohol, the modern breakdown of social norms, and a fall-off of discipline, as well as closed rooms in western housing, have made life perilous for Outback women in new ways."

A senior police officer who asked not to be named told The Times: "This is systemic and targeted violence, often with the purpose of maiming women to make them less attractive.

"Women are burnt in the genitals with fire sticks, their faces are slashed open and we often see women who have had their tendons sliced to hobble them," she said.

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