'The hospital would not help him': Indigenous boy died after being repeatedly turned away

Hospital in Cape York guilty of systemic failures' after turning away a sick child in 2017, who later died from a serious bacterial infection

Six-year-old Charlie Gowa became so sick he could no longer eat or walk. Charlie's mother brought him to the nearest hospital in the remote Cape York community of Bamaga every day for almost a week in January 2017.

On their fourth visit, she entered the hospital with her boy in her arms - his body too feeble to carry him on its own. It was an entrance of desperation, but the local hospital turned them away - as they did for five days in a row, sometimes with paracetamol. Days later on 14 January, the Torres Strait Islander boy died from sepsis - a fatal reaction to a bacterial infection that is known to occur in remote tropical north Australia.