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So what happened on that day, on 7 October 2021, on Stone Street in Wilsonstone, the day that Gungarri man Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar was killed by police?

(Stone Street, Wilsonstone in Toowoomba).

It all happened so fast, within 40 minutes.

For Stevie Lee, it was only supposed to be a short stop on his way home to Mitchell, a four-and-a-half-hour drive inland from Toowoomba.

He was with three other young men, when they pulled up to the driveway of his aunty’s house in Stone Street.

Unbeknownst to Stevie, there was a person watching.

A neighbour had looked out at the street and had seen what they considered was a suspicious vehicle parked in front of a house.

It was suspicious because of the occupant. There was a young Aboriginal man - Stevie Lee - sitting inside.

And so, the neighbour looked up the license plates online, finding out they were expired and registered to another vehicle. They picked up the phone.

At the inquest, the family’s lawyer, Stewart Levitt, told the court that:

“It’s my submission that the entire incident arose out of racial profiling, because at 1:07 pm, at the end, the police did not know the name of the person who had died.”

It all happened so fast.

In the next street over, there were two cops - Senior Constable Simon Giuliano and Constable Brandon Smart.

Neither of them knew who Stevie Lee was, and neither of them had had interactions with him before.

It took them one minute to get to Stone Street, where they immediately saw the vehicle.

They drove down and parked directly behind the car.

At this point, neither police officer turned on their body cam, but there was dash cam footage from the police van.

It was here, that the two police officers both said the car moved back and forth. They claimed it made them fearful, that they thought they would be ‘rammed’.

Stevie’s aunt Saraeva Mitchell spoke to the other young man in the car afterwards, who provided a different version of events.

But this movement, back and forth, was what was used to justify what happened afterwards.

The two police officers, and the police officer who reviewed the footage, claimed the two cops thought they were in danger of injury and the incident was now ‘high risk’.

At the inquest, the family’s lawyer Mr Levitt questioned the officers several times about whether they were actually in any danger.

But it all happened so fast.

Because he claimed he was about to be rammed, Constable Smart said he got out of the rear of the police van, and immediately went to the front passenger window, where he claimed he checked the door, and it was locked.

He claimed that he mouthed and motioned to the person in the passenger seat to get out.

And then, he said the car moved forward further into the driveway, towards the house.

Constable Smart drew his baton, and despite the fact he claims he was in danger of being rammed, he walked behind the rear of the vehicle.

At this point, he did not turn on his body cam footage, claiming at the inquest “quite frankly it was not on my mind”.

He moved towards the driver’s window and without checking that the door was locked, began smashing the window with his baton, bang bang bang, three or four times.

Inside, was a scared, and sick Stevie Lee, who could not run as fast as the others.

He was never given the opportunity to comply with police directions before the police officer started striking the window with his baton.

The driver’s side door was unlocked, but Constable Smart had not bothered to check.

It all happened so fast.

The window shattered, and Stevie Lee moved towards the passenger seat, away from the glass shards, and as he exited the vehicle, at the passenger side, he was intercepted by Senior Constable Giuliano, who says Stevie Lee “came out quite rapidly and we become entangled. We initially went to the ground”.

He told the inquest that Stevie Lee was trying to get away from him, and that he tripped over his left leg, causing them to tumble to the ground.

Constable Smart again walked behind the rear of the vehicle towards the passenger side.

He still had his baton out, and he walked towards Stevie Lee and Snr Constable Giuliano. He still did not know Stevie’s name at this point, or his identity.

He used his baton and struck Stevie on the quad several times; and then when he claimed that didn’t work, he wrapped the baton around Stevie Lee in a bear-hug-esque fashion.

It meant Stevie Lee could not comply; he could not move, he was trapped in the bear hug, which is not a technique usually used by the QPS.

At this point, Stevie Lee was struggling; it had all happened so fast, but despite his sickness, the officers claimed he was ‘strong’ and was holding onto Senior Constable Guiliano’s baton.

Constable Guiliano attempted to strike Stevie Lee twice again with the baton.

It was all happening so fast.

Stevie Lee was crying out ‘you’ve got me’ several times, and ‘help me’ and again ‘you got me’.

At this point, Stevie Lee was exhausted, speaking in “exhausted breaths”.

At the inquest, Mr Levitt put it to Constable Smart that Stevie Lee couldn’t get down on the ground because he was being restrained in a position where he couldn’t do so, which Constable Smart denied.

But before the next part, before the chokehold was applied, Stevie Lee had already said several times you got me.

All three were exhausted, but the officers still claimed Stevie Lee was strong.

By that point, another officer had arrived - Senior Constable Tyllar Colman, who trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He had responded to a code 2 and was on the scene where he saw all three - Stevie Lee and the two officers struggling against the car.

It was here that Constable Smart yelled out he’s got the baton, Stevie Lee said oh no, and then Senior Constable Guiliano said:

Constable Smart did not repeat those words in the interview transcript after the death, claiming he did not recall at that time.

It all happened so fast.

Constable Colman came in and applied what the police call a Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint, a type of chokehold authorised by the QPS.

As the officer applied the chokehold, Stevie Lee went limp, Senior Constable Guiliano said he’s asleep, he’s asleep, let him go, and Stevie fell to the ground unresponsive.

At this point, as CPR was about to commence, Constable Colman yelled for the officers to put the cuffs on Stevie, but then another officer had said don’t worry about it start CPR.

CPR continued for 32 minutes. Stevie was pronounced dead at 1:07 pm.

From the police arriving, to Stevie Lee dying: it was only 37 minutes.

It had all happened so fast.

But the wait for justice; so long, so tiring; is always so slow.

(Stevie Lee’s grandmothers Valma McKellar, Aunty Lynette Nixon and his mother Dr Raelene Nixon. Image: Charandev Singh)

It had all happened so fast, that that Stevie Lee’s aunty, who was inside the house, did not see what happened.

As Stevie Lee lay on the street, she called Aunty Lynette in Mitchell, who called Dr Nixon in Victoria, who jumped out of a Zoom meeting with her PhD supervisors with a sense of foreboding because her mother never rang her at that time, and immediately heard the panic on the other side.

Dr Nixon phoned her cousin and asked her if her son was okay.

Dr Nixon then asked to speak to the police, and so her cousin took her mobile phone out to a police officer; he had previously served out at Charleville, which is not far from Mitchell.

This was one of the first silences; one of the first periods of waiting.

Because the cop had taken her cousin’s phone, Dr Nixon’s family had no choice but to begin ringing around every hospital, asking if Stevie Lee had been admitted, and to the Toowoomba police station.

They rang the local Aboriginal Legal Service in Toowoomba, as well, but were told there was nothing they could do, until police notified them that he had been arrested.

The family would only find out later, that Stevie Lee was never taken to the hospital.

He remained on that street for eight hours and was taken to the morgue, where his family could not see him for seven days.

He was never under arrest.

Stevie Lee had died while sitting in a car in his aunt’s driveway.

Like George Floyd, who had been murdered on a street an ocean away from Stone Street, Wilsonstone; Stevie Lee had also died for being black and for being visible.

But unlike the murder of George Floyd, which rightly drew international condemnation, what happened to Stevie Lee is silenced and the Coroner and the police want his family to move on.

From the very beginning, Stevie Lee’s family have campaigned for two measures as a way to fight for justice.

(Image: Charandev Singh)

One of those measures is a ban on the use of the LVNR.

According to Yuin academic and policing historian Dr Amanda Porte, “Queensland is currently the only state in Australia to allow the controversial chokehold”.

The then QPS Commissioner Katarina Caroll had removed the chokehold as a use of force option for the QPS in April 2023, Dr Porter wrote in the National Indigenous Times.

”Just one month later, Commissioner Caroll reneged, stating pressure from the Queensland Police Union, who challenged the ban, arguing it prevented officers from defending themselves. The LVNR is currently allowed in ‘dangerous situations’.

The other mechanism for justice would be the release of the bodycam footage, that would show the public the truth about what happened to Stevie Lee.

In releasing his findings, Coroner Ryan called on further submissions about the release of the footage.

But within 48 hours of those submissions being made, acting state Coroner Stephanie Gallagher knocked them back, instead siding with the Police Commissioner, that the footage would be viewed out of context.

Coroner Gallagher had stated that the releasing the footage to the media was not “in the public interest”. She accepted the submissions of the Commissioner of Police, which included that the footage would be taken out of context and it involved officers “attempting to lawfully detain Steven using reasonable, and lawful, use of force”.

She also accepted the Commissioner’s claim that releasing the footage to the media would “further impact on the officer’s health and wellbeing”.

But that excuse does not make much sense, or give much consolation to the family of Stevie Lee, and those in the coroner’s court who witnessed the footage of his last moments at the inquest.

It does not make much sense when Stevie’s only crime was to be sitting in a car while sick, when it all happened so fast that Stevie Lee had no chance, that his last words, before a chokehold, was one of surrender: you got me you got me, said not once, but several times.

It all happened so fast; and yet now, justice is all too slow.

To read the previous stories, click on the links below:

His spirit went home: The death in custody of Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar

The bodycam footage of Stevie Lee’s death is horrific. The Qld Coroner refuses to release it.

In 2020, Toowoomba police officers bent the knee in support of #BLM. Within a year and a half, they killed two Aboriginal men in separate incidents.

In the meantime, you can support the family’s campaign to release the bodycam footage of his death, by signing the petition.

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(Dr Raelene Nixon, and her family walk out of the Toowoomba court house on the last day of the inquest into her son’s killing by police. Image; Charandev Singh)

In February 2026, nearly five years after that day, the Queensland State Coroner Terry Ryan released his long-awaited findings into the police killing of Gungurri man Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar.

The inquest had been held over a week in 2023 in Toowoomba, but the family had to wait nearly two years after that for Coroner Ryan to deliver his findings.

Rather than an in-person hearing, the coroner’s office had emailed the findings to Stevie Lee’s family on a Friday afternoon, meaning that it missed many of the major news bulletins, and also meant, that few media outlets aired the family’s response.

It has become a practice for the Queensland Coroner’s court to do this. Coroner Stephanie Gallagher also emailed the findings of Aunty Sherry Tilberoo’s inquest, who died in custody in a Brisbane watchhouse in 2020, to her family.

After the findings were released into Stevie Lee’s death, Toowoomba’s local newspaper The Chronicle posted a paywalled article on their Facebook page, which garnered over 1000 of mostly racist comments within two days.

(A screen grab of racist comments on The Chronicle’s Facebook post about the death of Stevie Lee)

The commentors hadn’t bothered to read the article, or the inquest, or anything about the case.

Instead, racist Toowoomba - described as One Nation heartland, which recorded record ‘no’ votes at both the 1967 and 2023 referendums - claimed the killing of Stevie Lee was justified.

There was dashcam and bodycam footage of police actions leading up to Stevie Lee’s death, but in releasing the findings, Coroner Ryan also knocked back the family’s request to release this footage to the public.

Earlier this week, acting coroner Stephanie Gallagher knocked back another submission by the family calling for the footage to be released.

Coroner Gallagher rejected the family’s submissions within 48 hours, but accepted the submissions of the Commissioner of Police, stating that because the family had made serious allegations against the police officers who had killed Stevie Lee, then the bodycam footage would “mislead the public into forming unfair inferences and opinions in respect to the officers’ actions and the officers’ themselves”.

There was no similar care shown towards the family of Stevie Lee, and their “health and wellbeing”.

The family believe it is in the interests of open justice for the public to see the truth. For them to make up their own minds as to how their son, their cousin, their nephew, their uncle died, rather than rely on the narrative told by police and laundered through the coronial court.

The first time Dr Nixon saw the footage was at the Brisbane police headquarters, after Stevie Lee’s funeral.

Up until then, she had been told three things:

There had been a violent altercation. He had become unconscious. He couldn’t be revived.

But now, as she waited to see the footage, the police officer was telling her that she would see something else.

He told her she was going to view Stevie Lee being put in a restraint called a “Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint” and she had to take what she saw in context.

At that point, the family had not been given an autopsy. They had not been given a cause of death. Even then, it felt like the narrative had already been decided.

And so, Dr Nixon sat with her nieces and she watched the footage. It was horrific. It was shocking.

But there was something that also angered her.

“The audio wasn’t great on the footage, because it hadn’t been edited but I could hear the word ‘c**t’ and I said, ‘are they swearing at him?” she said.

But the police officer said that was Stevie swearing at the coppers.

What she heard, as she watched her son dying on police bodycam, was the voice of Senior Constable Simon Giuliano, calling out to another police officer, Senior Constable Tyller Coleman:

Constable Coleman had then put Stevie Lee in a chokehold, which the police maintain is the Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint or LVNR, and Stevie Lee had collapsed onto the ground.

It later emerged at the inquest that Snr Constable Coleman was trained in Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Prior to being put in the chokehold, or ‘LVNR’, Stevie Lee had repeatedly said ‘help me, help me’, and ‘you got me’.

That day she saw the footage, Dr Nixon went straight to the airport, back to the plane back down to Victoria, her head filled with her son’s last moments.

It was one of the worst flights of her life.

When a police officer kills an Aboriginal person, they immediately start telling their own side of the story, and this story silences the stories told by black families.

This is true of Mulrunji Doomadgee, it’s true of Ms JC, it’s true of Kumanjayi Walker; it’s true of Mark Mason Snr, and it’s true of Daniel Yock.

Often, it is footage - whether bystander, CCTV or police bodycam - that can contradict these stories, and that can legitimate the voices of black families.

For example, the family of Ms Dhu - who died after suffering excruciating pain in a Port Hedland watchhouse - called on the coroner to release the CCTV footage of her last moments, in order to reveal callous disregard shown towards her both in life and in death.

The bystander footage of African American man George Floyd - who was murdered by a police officer - sparked a global movement for Black Lives Matter.

Coroner Ryan not only refused to release the bodycam footage, but his findings also absolved police of any wrongdoing.

He found Stevie Lee had suffered a cardiac arrest, and that the cause of death was ‘multifactorial’.

In the findings, Coroner Ryan said it could not be determined which factor caused Stevie Lee’s death - whether it was the neck restraint, whether it was the baton being applied to his abdomen, whether it was the physical and psychological exertion, or whether it was Stevie’s underlying health conditions.

It was not dissimilar to the police officer’s instructions to Dr Nixon on the day she first saw the footage. The police narrative had not changed, even after an inquest.

During the inquest process, the family were repeatedly denied their right to tell their story, and the lasting image of Stevie Lee was one limited to his records as constructed by those who were surveilling and criminalising him: the health and ‘justice’ systems.

“I talk about the inquest being one of the most expensive theatres I’ve been to,” Dr Nixon said.

“It was so well rehearsed and scripted, and so controlled. We knew when we went in there that there would be nothing really there for us.

“The counsel assisting was so strict about what she would or wouldn’t allow, and now we have seen the findings, we can see that the coroner has just selected what they would or wouldn’t allow there anyway.”

At the end of the week, the family were also told to censor their family impact statement, and as negotiations around this censoring went on for an hour and a half, Dr Nixon had decided to pull the statement entirely.

“I afforded every other speaker the opportunity to voice what they believe happened here and our family has not been offered the same opportunity,” Dr Nixon told a press conference at the time.

The inquest concealed the reality of racist violence in the town, and the fact, at the end of the day, all Stevie Lee was doing was sitting in a car, while sick, and while black.

This was the side of the story that the coronial findings will not tell; that the court and the coroner refused to hear.

It is the side of the story shown in the bodycam footage, which when shown at the inquest, prompted members of Stevie Lee’s family to cry out in disgust, and for one of his grandmothers to say loudly:

What was on the bodycam footage? The third installment of the #JusticeforStevieLee series will be published tomorrow.

*I refer to these framings as ‘imaginary spears’: the ways police and media arm Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with implements and weapons to construct an image of them as a ‘threat’; even when it is the police officers who hold the guns and batons.

To read the previous stories, click on the links below:

His spirit went home: The death in custody of Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar

In 2020, Toowoomba police officers bent the knee in support of #BLM. Within a year and a half, they killed two Aboriginal men in separate incidents.

In the meantime, you can support the family’s campaign to release the bodycam footage of his death, by signing the petition.

Share

TWO weeks after Toowoomba police officers killed Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar, his family gathered on the street where he said his last words: help me, help me, you’ve got me.

(Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar’s mother Dr Raelene Nixon holds a photo of her son as a child. Image: Charandev Singh)

It was usually a quiet street, a cul-de-sac which ends next to a BMX track across from sprawling green parkland called the ‘Captain Cook Recreation Reserve’, not far from a small air strip where on occasion, light aircraft fly low.

But this day was solemn and grey, the clouds heavy and threatening a downpour.

Stevie Lee’s family had travelled a long way; his grandmother and aunties had driven in from his hometown of Mitchell, a four-and-a-half-hour drive west, and his mother, Dr Raelene Nixon, had flown in from Victoria, although she was not there on the street that day.

She had been forced into quarantine.

It was a year and a half after African American man George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, sparking historic Black Lives Matter protests, and COVID border restrictions were still in place in Queensland.

At that point, Dr Nixon and her family had not been given any information about her son’s death beyond a QPS media statement released on 7 October 2021, the day he was killed.

It was the first time his death was confirmed; Dr Nixon had received it over Facebook Messenger from a relative before a Victorian police officer came knocking on her door hours later.

The statement had said:

Dr Nixon had then been told Stevie Lee had been involved in a violent altercation with two police officers.

Even then, she knew it didn’t add up.

That was because, two days before his death, Stevie Lee had been in the hospital.

He had chronic asthma, and he had contracted pneumonia.

“When they rang and said he was in a violent altercation, I said he wouldn’t have been violent. I said even if he wanted to fight and bash two coppers, he couldn’t because he was too sick,” Dr Nixon said.

“That was why he was coming home to Mitchell,” his grandmother, Aunty Lynette Nixon told Black Witness.

She had spoken to him over the phone the night before.

He was going back to Gungarri country so he could recover and so someone could look after him.

Stevie Lee had come from a long line of Indigenous health experts.

Dr Nixon was completing a PhD in Indigenous health at the University of Melbourne, and her mother, Aunty Lynette, was legendary in Aboriginal health; she had co-authored numerous Gungarri language children’s books, had helped establish several key Aboriginal organisations, and had written a landmark text on Aboriginal health Binang Goonj- Bridging Cultures in Aboriginal Health.

The family knew about Indigenous health, but they also knew about racist violence and the reality of police brutality; they knew the experience of living between two stories; of navigating black and white worlds.

Now they were being told to accept two competing narratives from the police, two stories that contradicted each other.

“They were saying in one sentence, he’s superhuman, and he’s so strong and these two cops couldn’t bring him to the ground, and in the same sentence saying he had pneumonia and had heart disease and pre-existing medical conditions that meant he was destined to die anyway. But it has to be one or the other: you can’t be both.” Dr Nixon told Black Witness.

So that day on the street, two weeks after he died, they came for the Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar who was known for being “cheeky” and “mischievous”, but who also was “the type to take in strays - whether people or animals” and had the special “ability to walk in other people’s shoes”. He was a person who would give you the shirt off his back, according to Dr Nixon.

They came for the Stevie Lee, who “was such a character”, according to Aunty Lynette and who loved her so much his last post on Facebook was about how much he looked up to his grandmother.

And they came for the Stevie Lee who would always “make us laugh, he was the life of the party”, according to his aunt Saraeva Mitchell, and who was the best uncle, the Stevie Lee who would pick up his little niece, along with a bottle and nappies, and play with her all afternoon.

They came for the Stevie Lee who was born in 1993, a year after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was handed down; the commission that said it was largely over-incarceration rather than police brutality that was killing young black men.

They came for the Stevie Lee who should still be here.

And so, they gathered there for the Stevie Lee they knew, on the street where he was killed.

And alongside them were local mob from Toowoomba who came to pay their respects at the street where he had died; local mob who said they had come because they also knew the reality of police brutality. Months earlier, the Toowoomba police had killed another young Aboriginal man on a Toowoomba street - Ashley Washington, who was only 31.

But even then, as they came to mourn, they were still under surveillance from undercover police who were watching them from across the street.

“They had a few just stationed around,” his aunty Saraeva told Black Witness. “They probably thought we were going to cause trouble.”

“But we just wanted to send his spirit home,” Aunty Lynette says.

“I knew he was still there because it was quick and it was violent, so he couldn’t move from there. I talked to the family, and they organised a smoking ceremony where he passed. We got quite a crowd there.”

And then, as the smoking ceremony commenced, something strange happened.

Everyone there saw it; it was caught on the NITV news camera.

(A rally for Stevie Lee at his inquest in 2023. Image: Charandev Singh).

When Aunty Lynette made it back to Mitchell, and walked into her house, she realised she could feel him there, throughout the house.

Stevie Lee was completing his journey out west towards Gungarri country.

He had made it home.

The next installment of the #JusticeforStevieLee series will be published tomorrow.

In the meantime, you can support the family’s campaign to release the bodycam footage of his death, by signing the petition.

This is the first excerpt in a series on black deaths in custody in the Queensland town of Toowoomba. Next week, I’ll be publishing stories on the deaths of Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar and Ashley Washington.

The family of Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar have organised a petition, calling on the Queensland State Coroner to release the bodycam footage of his death. Please sign the petition here.

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(An image from the rally for Stevie Lee Nixon McKellar, held before the coronial inquest into his death in September 2023. Stevie’s family held a rally where they walked from Queen’s Park, to the steps of the courthouse, laying 551 flowers for victims of black deaths in custody. Image: Charandev Singh).

In June 2020, a group of about 200 people walked through the picturesque Queen’s Park in Toowoomba, Queensland, on the same street as the town’s police station and courthouse, holding Black Lives Matter placards.

‘Justice for David Dungay Jnr! Justice for Mulrunji! Justice for George Floyd!’ they chanted, joining the tens of thousands across the country, and the millions worldwide. The blackfellas in attendance walked behind at the rear of the rally or towards the centre.

An hour and a half away down the Toowoomba range, 30,000 people were marching through the centre of Brisbane’s CBD; and further south and across the country, a collective 200,000 converged on Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth; but here, in quiet Toowoomba, the protest, led by a local African Australian group, walked through the gardens, careful not to disrupt a cricket game or any of the flowers.

The month prior, a police officer in Minneapolis, USA, had killed African American man George Floyd by holding his knee to his neck for more than nine minutes, a form of chokehold or neck restraint utilised by police.

It was the bystander footage of Floyd’s death that sparked outrage, drew condemnation, amplified the call that Black Lives Matter, and led to national and international rallies. Before an autopsy, before a murder charge, before an investigation, there was the footage, which showed blatantly that Floyd’s death was not accidental or justified or natural causes. It was a killing, a homicide, and Floyd’s crime had been to be black in public. After Floyd was murdered, 32 of the United States’ 65 largest police departments placed bans or restrictions on the use of neck restraints, according to the Washington Post.

So, we walked across the country, and in Toowoomba, the protesters walked through Queen’s Park, which in Spring is a carnival of colours for the annual flower festival, but on this day was cold, crisp and clear, and as they walked, three uniformed Toowoomba police officers stood watching, their guns on one side and their batons on the other.

The rally cautiously approached the cops, moving closer, and as the space narrowed between them, one police officer stepped forward.

(Toowoomba police officers bend the knee at the Black Lives Matter rally in Queen’s Park in June 2020.)

The leaders of the rally halted, the rally moving in front of them, and they continued to yell ‘Black Lives Matter! I Can’t Breathe!” Then, the first cop walked forward and dropped to one knee.

The two police officers behind him followed suit, and there they were: a trinity of cops bending the knee in front of a majority non-Indigenous rally still chanting the last words of George Floyd and David Dungay Jnr, who was killed by correctional officers in Long Bay in Sydney.

The rally continued chanting, and then clapped for the officers, and then they moved on, with blackfellas looking on quizzically, walking in the rear

(A grab from a 7News report on the Toowoomba Black Lives Matter rally in 2020.)

The rally moved on, and the town moved on, and within the next two years, the Toowoomba police moved on to kill two young Aboriginal men - 31-year-old Kamilaroi man Ashley Washington and 27-year-old Gungarri man Stevie Lee Nixon-McKellar - in separate incidents, both times on the streets of Toowoomba.

Both men suffered cardiac arrests, and in both cases, forensic pathologists claimed their cause of death was ‘multifactorial’, that they had underlying health conditions, and that they could not determine whether the police had anything to do with their deaths at all.

(Stevie Lee Nixon McKellar)

Ashley had been tasered six times, and then had been restrained, and administered a sedative by paramedics. He died in the ambulance. Stevie Lee had been put in a chokehold, which was an authorised move called a “Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint”. The last words Stevie Lee heard were one of the officers yelling out ‘choke the c**t out”, before another officer put him in the chokehold.

Both deaths were subject to coronial inquests, one of the only recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIDAC) to be implemented, but in both cases, the Coroner Terry Ryan absolved the police of any wrongdoing.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (ATSILS) had tried to get the two cases linked in a combined inquest, because of their similarities - including the fact that one of the officers had been involved in both deaths. But Coroner Ryan had knocked back the request, claiming “the fact that the same officers attended at both deaths is not surprising given the size of Toowoomba and the pool of available police officers.”

Coroner Ryan had also knocked back Steven’s family’s request to include structural and institutional racism in the scope of his inquest.

Stevie Lee’s inquest was held in Toowoomba in September 2023, two years after he was killed, in the Toowoomba courthouse, just a short walk from Queens Park.

In the lead up, Stevie’s family and mother, Dr Raelene Nixon, knew the “coronial inquest wasn’t going to be a place of justice.”

(Stevie Lee’s mother Raelene Nixon'lays flowers at the step of the Toowoomba courthouse. Image: Charandev Singh).

On the first day, they organised a rally from Queens Park, where they spoke out forcefully for justice for Stevie Lee. Members of the local Toowoomba Aboriginal community conducted a smoking ceremony and welcome, and they walked away from the park, onto the street, holding over 551 flowers and candles to lay at the steps of the courthouse, in recognition of every black death in custody, in recognition of every single injustice.

“It was to symbolise this wasn’t just about one death. This is what the experience is for a lot of Aboriginal men in this country and especially in Queensland,” Dr Nixon told Black Witness.

Earlier this month, on a Friday, the coroner’s office emailed the findings of Stevie Lee’s inquest to his mother, Dr Raelene Nixon, nearly two years after the inquest was held in Toowoomba in September 2023. The family were not given the dignity of an in-person hearing. Throughout the inquest, the family had also felt silenced throughout the process.

“We knew the coronial inquest wasn’t going to be a place of justice,” Dr Nixon told Black Witness. “They had created that narrative from the very beginning about criminalising Steven and blaming him for his own death.

“I’ve learnt from that experience how the powers that be protect the powers that be, and how these institutions strategically set out to protect themselves. And I realise there was never an opportunity for truth-telling or accountability.”

Ashley Washington’s step father Paul Henningsen, who raised Ashley since he was a young child, told Black Witness that there had been no attention paid to his son and the inquest had also criminalised him. His family was left with no answers.

“The inquest was more or less about how he had been in trouble before. But it doesn’t matter how much a person’s been in trouble, how come there’s only two fellas, not that far apart, same sort of circumstances, and they die?,” Mr Henningsen told Black Witness.

“I’m white myself, but how come all these whitefellas don’t die when they are arrested?

“You don’t hear about it.”

This is the first story in a series about black deaths in custody in Toowoomba.

As always, you can send feedback or any tips to amy@blackwitness.com

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Amidst the sea of Australian coverage, a short wire report was published in The West Australian newspaper. The cop who had shot Aboriginal woman Ms JC on the streets of Geraldton, WA, was being charged with her murder. We know now that Ms. JC and her community did not receive justice and that the cop walked free; another miscarriage of justice. Unlike the protests in America, I did not see any public outrage over her death outside of her community and Indigenous communities across the country.

I immediately opened a Substack account and, in an hour, wrote my first post about Australia’s silence on black deaths on our own shores. Since then, I’ve updated this newsletter occasionally, but never regularly, and despite this, over the past six years, many of you have stuck around, as well as many new readers. My email list has grown to over 7000 subscribers and I take this as a sign that there is a need for independent Indigenous journalism that centres on justice as blackfellas define it.

That’s why, in 2026, I’m relaunching this Substack as ‘Black Witness’, with a clear agenda to champion independent black journalism, with a focus on continuing and building an ethical Indigenist journalistic practice.

This is a journalistic practice that does not operate by the same ethical principles as imperial media, but instead is Indigenist. It is centred on blackfellas as ‘primary informants’, as Professor Lester Irabanna-Rigney says, or Black Witnesses; and is centred on resistance, and as writing, or testimony, or witnessing as forms of resistance. Those two pillars mean that it is already opposed to the western tradition of journalistic ethics (and we have seen that the Australian media rarely abides by it in practice anyway).

Black Witness is also centred on stories. All of us are continually engaged in storytelling in different ways, and Black Witness tells stories through the process of an ethical Indigenist journalistic practice. Black Witnesses is about honouring the lived resistance of blackfellas towards interlapping forms of violence, and in building a journalistic practice that is centred on relationality and the ongoing relationships we have with each other that every structure of settler society attempts to destroy.

I hope you will all stick around. As always, all posts will be free and will not be behind a paywall.

Correspondence can be sent to amy@blackwitness.com. You can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook.

In solidarity,

Amy

Palestinian author Mona Zahed wrote her book Tabkha: Recipes from the Rubble, on her mobile phone from Gaza. It is published by Slingshot Books.

On 7 August, from her position of safety, comfort, privilege, and intellectual dishonesty, Douglas sent a message to Mona, the victim-survivor of an ongoing genocide. The message did not contain a single word of care, or pose a single question about the experience of living through a campaign of extermination. Instead, Douglas interrogated Mona about two social media posts from 2023, based on a mangled and erroneous AI translation of the Arabic in these posts.

Following Douglas’s message, Mona said in a statement for her publisher:

For many months, every moment of my waking energy has been spent finding enough food to keep my children alive. The greatest fear for any mother is finding your family suffering before your eyes from the lack of their basic rights, like a loaf of bread, water, medicine, and education.

The message I received this morning from a journalist in Australia made me very fearful. After everything we have seen and survived all we hope for is a safe and simple life — and survival for our children.

When we talk about the violence of the media, we are not being hyperbolic or rhetorical. First Nations people have long known and felt how media reporting has enacted violence upon their lives, bodies, communities, and countries. They have seen how journalists and media outlets shelter behind obscure definitions of ethics that serve their own purposes; how they hide their direct complicity in these colonial crimes through distance. They deny accountability and then wash their hands of the consequences. But their role in the apparatus is both hidden and highly visible; it sanitises and justifies the machine’s very existence. They help decide which bodies are marked for killing, while marking others with the right to live.

Mona Zahed, who has survived through 672 days of continuous genocide, is currently living amongst the rubble with her husband Osama, her four children, and their community. In 2023, Israel destroyed Mona’s catering business and her husband’s pharmacy business. They are now suffering under the Zionist-made conditions of starvation, deprivation, repeated displacement, and the ever-present threat of massacre by the IOF. Mona is an intelligent, resourceful, caring mother, working against the odds to nourish and protect her hungry children, while generously sharing every scrap of available sustenance with her extended community.

In 2023–24, from her eighth displacement location — a tent in Khan Younis — under the precarity of continuous Zionist siege and bombardment, and using a sporadic internet connection, Mona wrote a cookbook on her mobile phone in an attempt to raise funds for the survival of her family and community.

Tess Cullity of Slingshot Books immediately agreed to help publish the book as a 100% mutual aid title, with all funds supporting the survival of Mona, her family, and a number of other families. Tabkha: recipes from under the rubble is now in its second edition.

Cullity then went through the arduous process of organising Mona’s safe passage from Gaza to Wurundjeri land. Mona and her family were finally granted Australian visas. Their journey to safety was to have occurred this week.

In ‘researching’ her article, Douglas did not contact Cullity or Slingshot Books for comment. Cullity has spent many months advocating for Mona’s visas and safe passage, organising Mona’s book tour, securing accommodation, essentials, and community support for the family, fundraising, and researching the best practice for refeeding after famine.

Douglas did not contact any of the bookstores or venues awaiting Mona’s tour. Douglas did not contact any of the civil society organisations who had enthusiastically endorsed and promoted Mona’s visit. These would have unravelled the Herald Sun’s agenda.

Instead, the only other person Douglas contacted was Matt Chun, whose role in Mona’s story is merely that of Cullity’s supportive romantic partner. However, The Herald Sun knew that centring Chun in its article would be red meat for its Zionist readership.

The article was full of inaccuracies, large and small. ‘Journalism’ was never the point.

On 8 August, this threadbare and disingenuous article was made the cover story of the Herald Sun’s Friday print edition under the headline: ‘FROM HATE TO G’DAY MATE’ — with ‘political editor’ James Campbell added to the by-line.

The ‘story’ was immediately replicated and amplified in a coordinated frenzy by The Australian, Sky News, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier Mail, The Daily Mail, and other pro-Israel outlets, with the by-lines of Joseph Olbrycht-Palmer, Conor Breslin, Holly Fishlock, Danica De Giorgio, Steve Price, Kimberley Braddish, Caitlyn Rintoul, Brittany Busch, Nick Wilson, Max Aitchison, and others.

Within hours, Tony Burke cancelled the visas of Mona, Osama, and their four children. Australian media sabotaged this family’s safety, and Tony Burke doubled down. A number of these same news outlets immediately published triumphant follow-up articles announcing the cancellation of the visas. Zionist trolls and ‘influencers’ across social media erupted in gleeful bloodlust.

The department of home affairs did not contact Mona or Slingshot Books with an enquiry. No clarification was sought, and there was no investigation into the Herald Sun’s claims. There was no communication with the civil society groups who had supported Zahed’s application. There was barely an hour in which any due bureaucratic diligence could conceivably have been undertaken. That Burke would take action without so much as a fact-check or the employment of a registered interpreter is not only professionally incompetent but immeasurably injurious to the family concerned.

This direct targeting, trial, and verdict by right-wing media, with the uncritical deference of politicians, was supported and upheld by the silent cowardice of supposedly ‘progressive’ media. The Guardian had originally planned to publish a counter-piece in anticipation of the Herald Sun's campaign, but later killed the piece. They have instead remained silent despite knowing the consequences of the media’s attack on Mona and her family.

Not only do the events of the last 48 hours demonstrate collusion between those in power and the many imperialist media outlets, but also the coordination between the news outlets themselves. These outlets refuse to see Mona and her family as humans worthy of justice and protection. For them, this is a game. For Mona, as with so many Palestinians, this is her life; her very right to exist hinges on the whim of western media.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people know of these collusions between the powerful, the right-wing media, and even supposedly ‘progressive’ media, because these are the very same tactics employed to dehumanise them. On the frontier, the colonial media was used as a tool to ‘settle’ or ‘clear’ the land and ‘disperse’ the ‘natives’. There was never a Black voice; instead the story of genocide was told through the words of those who benefited from the slaughter. Little has changed: Australian media continues this legacy.

Australian journalists tell certain stories about themselves as fearless truthtellers. They hold themselves to standards of objectivity, of impartiality, of ‘fact’. And yet we have seen over the past two years, and even the past 250 years, how they work: rather than challenging those in power, they are a critical part of the apparatus that secures it. Like a 'non-lethal' F-35 part, they are an essential component of a machine that inflicts violence upon the most vulnerable.

Journalists continue to claim innocence. They say they are just doing their job. They claim they are undertaking due diligence. They hide behind murky conceptions of the public interest. But they fail even to live up to their own low standards. Often, the best we can hope for is an ‘apology’ and a ‘correction’ printed in small type. But in Mona’s case, the consequences are devastating. An apology is not sufficient. Mona and her family’s lives have been put at risk due to irresponsible and violent reporting that goes far beyond complicity.

We’ve seen that since 2023, the media’s role in facilitating genocide has become increasingly clear to the growing majority of non-Indigenous people. But with this growing awareness comes the knowledge that ‘complicity’ is now an insufficient term. It does not accurately describe what we are seeing. What Mona’s story shows us is that the Australian media is not just complicit in genocide, it is a footsoldier. In fact, it is an essential component of the machine.

And like any sadistic imperialist soldier, the media strategises and co-ordinates, chooses its targets with impunity, and devastates lives. It enacts violence. And it must be stopped.

Contact Tony Burke to demand that Mona’s and her family’s visas be reinstated.

Electorate Office

Shop 29, Broadway Plaza
Punchbowl, NSW, 2196

Telephone:

(02) 9750 9088

Parliament Office

Telephone:

(02) 6277 7860

_____________

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Nova Peris’ with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog

The vast majority of First Nations people in Australia don’t read Rupert Murdoch’s favourite newspaper, The Australian. Not only is it behind the paywall, but it also has a long history in slandering and dehumanising Indigenous peoples, while also acting as a government press agency for Indigenous policy. In the past two years, the paper has also been focused on trying to break the powerful political praxis of Black Palestinian solidarity; utilising Indigenous voices with long links to Israel, like Professor Marcia Langton.

But because so few of us bother to read The Australian, many would have missed the reporting of the paper’s non-Indigenous Indigenous affairs correspondent Paige Taylor, who is currently bunkered down in Jerusalem with black Zionist Nova Peris.

Indigenous affairs report Paige Taylor

Within a couple of weeks, Taylor shifted from failed attempts at confecting outrage over the use of ‘genocide’ by Indigenous people here, and instead got on a plane to propagandize for a settler colonial state currently committing a genocide in Gaza.

Taylor is currently on a Zionist junket arranged by the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), along with black Zionist Nova Peris, and other First Nations people - including Australia’s first Indigenous ophthalmologist Kristopher Rallah-Baker, Maurice Goolagong, Renee Fowlestone and Jody Hampton. The chair of the AIJAC is powerful Zionist lobbyist Mark Leibler, who was co-chair of the Referendum Council, which led to the Uluru Statement.

Before Israel’s attack on Iran earlier this week, Rallah-Baker was posting on his social media accounts about his visit to Israel, failing to mention that Israel has attacked every hospital in Gaza, has massacred paramedics in Gaza, and that Israel’s genocide in Gaza has collapsed the healthcare system, even as Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian men, women and children. He also didn’t mention the Palestinian doctors killed in custody - like Dr Ziad Mohammed al-Dalou or the widespread torture of Palestinian doctors in Israeli detention.

Peris meanwhile has spent the past two years constantly propagandizing for Israel. She also flew to Israel in March 2024 with Wangkumarra/Barkindji man Sean Gordon, who is the managing director of Gidgee Group.

Nevertheless, Taylor has continued reporting from the bunker, on her Zionist junket trip to propagandize genocide, proving that western journalism’s adherence to any semblance of ‘objectivity’ is as much a joke as having a long career at The Australian.

In a piece yesterday, titled ‘Bunkered down in the war zone, Indigenous figurehead has some sage words for Australian extremists’; Taylor quotes her bunker mate Nova Peris, in urging “hard left Indigenous activists and Australians pro-Palestinian movement to understand the Jewish story’.

In a follow up op-ed published today in The Australian, Nova Peris refused to mention the word “Palestine”, instead claiming that Israel reminds them “that every life matters”. She wrote, without a hint of irony, that Israel “minimises civilian death when fighting its enemies”, despite the fact that the official death toll form Israel’s killing mission in Gaza is over 55,300, so many of them children, and that this is likely a very conservative estimate. Israel is also being accused of targeting civilians in Iran.

Peris then went on to make an argument she has made several times: that Jewish Australians had been involved in the fight for black justice for a very long time, drawing the implication that blackfellas are being ungrateful. What it really reveals is a perception of solidarity which is the very opposite of the praxis of Black Palestinian solidarity, and that is the idea that solidarity is transactional.

In her op-ed, and in Taylor’s piece, Peris’ does not claim that there is wide reaching Aboriginal support for the Zionist project, because it is very obvious by now that there isn’t. Instead, she continually pleads for blackfellas to support Israel or ‘Jewish’ people, refusing to accept the long tradition of anti-Zionist Jews who also stand with blackfellas on the frontlines, or the fact that yes, blackfellas can also read, and yes, we also can make up our own minds.

Palestinians have never made pleads to Aboriginal Australia to do this. Blackfellas have witnessed for themselves the genocide that is being livestreamed in our hands; and they have also been very clever in drawing out the links, the solidarities between the forces of extractivism here, and the Israeli war machine.

For example, as the Wangan and Jagalingou continue to fight the Indian mining giant Adani, who is threatening their lands and waterways, activist Gurridyula drew out the links between Adani and the IDF. In 2018, Adani established a deal with Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems to manufacture military drones for the IDF. It also operates Haifa Port. It has over a billion dollars in investments in Israel.

Black Palestinian solidarity is not transactional; it is a solidarity grounded in the understanding that settler colonialism, colonialism and imperialism is intertwined, and so our resistances to this violence is also intertwined in each other.

And the moral depravity to accept Zionist junkets to Israel as evidence grows of the massacring and slaughtering of Palestinian men, women and children needs to be placed on record. Because if you support genocide over there, you can not come back here, and claim any moral high standing in the continual fight against racist violence on our own shores.

After a long hiatus on this website, I’m back with two articles within a day. There is a reason for this.

Earlier today, I published a critique on early media complicity in running police propaganda over the killing of an Aboriginal man in Mparntwe.

I wanted to disrupt the logics and tactics that are used to routinely cover up racist violence. I wanted to point out how news stories are not naturally newsworthy, but are implicated in relations of power, and always, always end up oppressing and killing blackfellas in this colony.

And that is why today, I’m handing over this platform to Professor Chelsea Watego to share a statement.

The Australian newspaper has a long tradition in slandering and dehumanising Indigenous peoples. It is an outlet that has a violent history in relation to our mob.

It has a particular methodology it employs in Indigenous affairs; a particular form of news gathering which involves framing certain black voices as ‘moderate’ and ‘legitimate’ as a method to de-legitimise voices like that of Professor Chelsea Watego.

I would note that Professor Chelsea Watego has a long tradition in supporting, and elevating the voices of Black Witnesses. She is generous in her time and support, and I will pull out one quote from her statement below:

· The irony of this is, when I spoke on the morning of Day 2, I reflected on the legacy of those that have gone before us. Specifically, I referred to learnings offered by Pastor Don Brady’s biography ‘Yalanya’ and the chapter ‘Brady and Bonner’. This chapter spoke of the different political strategies between that of ‘Black power’ and a more conservative approach, while noting the personal respect and care they had for each other. The intervention I personally made at the summit when I spoke, was a call for us to work better together, in that same spirit, irrespective of our approach.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much focus is put on a relationship with the state, rather than relationships with each other.

By prioritising relationships with the state, you turn to solutions within violent institutions, which includes the media, and in particular, The Australian - Rupert Murdoch’s favourite newspaper.

The Australian is good at enacting violence and breaking relationships between blackfellas because it has practiced it and fine-tuned it over years, just as the processes of settler colonialism were practiced and refined over centuries.

What you read in The Australian is not a ‘truth’; instead it is a process of news gathering which is directly implicated in what is currently happening in Indigenous affairs, particularly in the vacuum of the referendum.

I urge you to pay attention.

Here, I’ve published Professor Chelsea Watego’s full statement below:

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Statement by Chelsea Watego regarding Bandarran Marra’Gu Gathering Strength Summit.

(Munanjahli and South Sea Islander academic Professor Chelsea Watego)

In recent days, The Australian newspaper have tried repeatedly to link me to a confected controversy between ‘senior Indigenous leaders’ over Black political strategy.

I have been repeatedly asked to comment on discussions at the Bandarran Marra’Gu Gathering, and they have contacted my employer perpetuating allegations that are simply untrue.

I was not present at whatever argument that those briefing The Australian have imagined, and I have no interest in contributing to further media reports which are designed to distract from the actual violence that is being visited upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children.

Statement of facts:

I was an invited delegate and speaker attending the Bandarran Marra’Gu | Gathering Strength Summit convened in Magandjin on 19-20^th May 2025.

Unbeknownst to me, my attendance alongside approximately 12 others from the delegation of over 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was made public in a range of articles relating to the summit.

I have not made any public comments regarding this event as I honoured the ‘Principles and Wellbeing Guidelines’ that the convenors had provided all delegates and speakers.

On Sunday morning (25^th May, 10.30am) I received an email from a journalist at The Australian asking my thoughts about alleged discussions at the summit regarding “using the word genocide” and whether I had raised this. I did not reply as I was honouring the “Principles and Wellbeing Guidelines” that we had all agreed to.

On Sunday evening (25^th May, 9.01pm) the journalist published an article titled ‘First Nations ‘genocide’ uproar over children’s human rights statement’ with the claim:

It would go on to claim:

In reference to Senator Lidia Thorpe, the article included a hyperlink, which referenced the Senator’s attendance at a symposium I convened earlier this year.

On Monday (26^th May, 12.48pm) I received a text to my personal mobile from the same journalist, stating “I understand you were among the leaders/thinkers/activists who advocated for the word genocide to be in the formal statement…” and proceeded to ask a range of questions claiming “I would like to quote you” with notice that the article was to be filed by 5pm that day.

I replied to advise that their sources were “clearly misinformed as I was not involved in any such conversations”. I asked her to disclose her sources to which she refused because “she gave her word”.

The journalist proceeded to ask more questions insisting “Quite a few people have told me about it but not all mentioned you. Were you there for the back and forth about the word genocide?”

The journalist went on to state “I saw you used it in some comments about Australia Day last year, and it is in Lidia Thrope’s most recent media release out today”.

Again, I reiterated that “I don’t know anything about this alleged discussion”.

Shortly after this interaction, I would come to learn that the same journalist had contacted my employer’s media department prior to having texted me (26^th May, 11.41am) with the following claim:

“We understand from listening to people present that Professor Chelsea Watego was strongly in favour of using the word genocide in the formal statement of the summit” followed by a raft of questions interrogating my views on the alleged discussion.

That evening (Monday 26^th May, 8.13pm) the journalist would publish another story titled ‘Radicals who live for the performance are part of the problem’.

Here “some of the nation’s most respected Indigenous leaders” were juxtaposed against “radicals…people who want the endless fight. People who live for the performance…[and] achieve nothing”.

The journalist went on to claim “the Blak Sovereign Movement was fomenting malcontent” stating, “activists at the summit revealed they wanted to make a splash by accusing the state of genocide…This is when senior leaders stepped in. They knew this would derail the summit. It would be all anyone spoke about”.

The following day (Tuesday 27^th May, 12am) The Australian would publish an editorial titled ‘Genocide claim a calculated evil’.

The editorial would assert, “using the term genocide was calculated to be inflammatory” but “Thankfully Professor Langton, in particular, has been able to demonstrate a deep understanding of the mischief and confusion at play. She rightly denounced earlier attempts by the “Blak sovereignty” movement to link the issue of Aboriginal disadvantage with the Palestinian cause, where claims of genocide are also being made”.

I wish to make the following points clear:

• I was not in attendance at the summit when this conversation was alleged to have taken place.

• I am deeply disappointed that delegates at the summit have not honoured the protocols that we had all agreed upon.

• The allegations and associated reporting were designed to distract from the central concerns that delegates shared regarding the care of our children and the role of the state. These concerns included the failure of the ‘Commission of Inquiry into Queensland’s broken Child Safety System’ terms of reference to make explicit mention of the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families.

• The claim that the discussion regarding the term ‘genocide’ was a “calculated” move is odd, given the inquiry and its terms of reference had been released just one day prior to the Summit. The Australian’s publication of three articles regarding this apparent issue, in under 48 hours and their attempt to attribute this apparent conflict to me does seems rather calculated, however.

• The irony of this is, when I spoke on the morning of Day 2, I reflected on the legacy of those that have gone before us. Specifically, I referred to learnings offered by Pastor Don Brady’s biography ‘Yalanya’ and the chapter ‘Brady and Bonner’. This chapter spoke of the different political strategies between that of ‘Black power’ and a more conservative approach, while noting the personal respect and care they had for each other. The intervention I personally made at the summit when I spoke, was a call for us to work better together, in that same spirit, irrespective of our approach.

• During the two-day summit, I was present during a conversation in which a delegate expressed concern with the initial wording of the proposed statement, namely the use of the term ‘leaders’. There appeared to be a general consensus that the word ‘leaders’ should not be used. Given the media reporting since, it is clear how ‘Indigenous leadership’ has been weaponised to silence, denigrate, divide and enact violence upon other Indigenous peoples.

• · I am not a leader, nor am I a radical or an activist – I am a Blackfulla, a race scholar and a single mother of 5, who holds a deep personal commitment to keeping our families and communities stronger, together.

• It is most disconcerting that Indigenous ‘leaders’ would enlist the Murdoch press to cast Indigenous mothers as uncaring and posing a risk to the safety of our own children and communities. After all, it is this racialized discourse that has been central to the rationalisation of the over-representation of our children in the ‘child safety’ system, the hyper-incarceration of our kids and the ongoing contraventions of their fundamental human rights. It is this that should be the focus of any Indigenous leader and Indigenous Affairs journalist in this moment.

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(An image from a Death in Custody rally in Naarm in 2018. Image by Charandev Singh)

An Aboriginal man has been killed by NT Police, during an arrest at a Coles supermarket in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). He was killed on Tuesday afternoon.

Uncle Ned Hargraves Jampijnpa released a statement about his jaja (grandson).

Already, the media are lining up to run police lines, even when we know from past reporting of black deaths in custody, that every single police account, every single quote, every single ‘fact’ or ‘assumption’, needs to be scrutinised and questioned.

Although journalists will claim that journalistic practice, and due diligence, requires them to first run authoritative accounts, we have a large body of evidence - from the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, to numerous reports, to coronial inquiries, to the lived experience of black families - that clearly demonstrate that police use the media to bypass their own accountability and deny wrongdoing prior to any investigation. This has happened time and time again.

It has happened in the case of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In the case of Stevie Lee Nixon. In the case of Ms Dhu. In the case of Ashley Washington. In the case of Wayne Fella Morrison. In the case of Mark Mason Snr. I could continue: in every single one of these cases of outright police brutality, the police have first lied, and run accounts that do not align with evidence. And the media have uncritically printed them; even bringing these same logics to coronial inquests, when the evidence of this outright brutality stares them in the face.

Not only that, it has been proven time and time again, that the NT Police are racist.

A police investigation has already been announced into the lethal killing of this young man, who has not yet been named. It is not an independent investigation; it is again the case of ‘cops investigating cops’. The one thing I know for sure: This Death was entirely preventable and this man would still be alive if not for the police entering the supermarket that day.

In his statement, Uncle Ned called on the police to release the CCTV footage, and to “stop spreading stories and show some respect”

But instead of scrutinising how horrific this is, that a young Aboriginal man with a disability is killed by police in a supermarket, in front of shoppers, the mainstream media reporting is remarkably uniform; utilising passive language, like this headline from the NT News: “Death in Custody: Man ‘lost consciousness’ during supermarket arrest’.

According to this headline, the man has just ‘lost consciousness’.

Really?

Here are some lines that the mainstream media have already run uncritically from the mouths of NT police spokespeople:

“NT Police said that while he was being restrained the man stopped breathing and CPR was commenced.” - The Courier Mail

“…He was placed on the ground by those police officers. He was later identified as losing consciousness” - Police quote run by News.com.au, who also ran the quote from NT Assistant Commissioner Travis Wurst: “It will also have a significant impact on the security guards and the police officers and NT police have already provided welfare support to the officers involved.”

“A 24-year-old Aboriginal man has died in custody in Alice Springs after being restrained when police intervened in an altercation at a Coles supermarket.

“…He stopped breathing while still in the supermarket. CPR was attempted and St John ambulance called.” - The Guardian

“An NT police spokesperson said two officers, who were in the Coles supermarket at the time, responded to the incident about 1.10pm on Tuesday and restrained the man.

"A short time later, the man stopped breathing and CPR was commenced," police said. - ABC

That is because the police, and the media, through their repetition of police propaganda, or copaganda, have begun not just constructing, but also fortifying a framing that aligns the man, who lives with a disability, with criminality, even when he is the one who has died; even when he is the one who is a victim.

Now, these are the questions I would ask based on the coverage:

How did the police ‘restrain’ this man? What technique did they use?

What is the meaning of ‘placed on the ground?’ This choice of terminology makes this act seem innocent, even benevolent. We do not yet have the CCTV footage. The only account we have is by police and so running this line, prior to viewing any evidence, is extremely unethical from the mainstream media. Given the vast majority of cases I have witnessed, I would question this idea that this man, who “lost consciousness’ and “stopped breathing” was simply “placed on the ground”.

When was his family informed? How long did it take them to be informed?

Where are the witnesses in the supermarket?

Was this man being surveilled in the supermarket?

How is it possible that a 24-year old man can die in a supermarket shortly after police come to arrest him? We have no information about why he was arrested, and why he was being surveilled. The only information comes from the police, who have just killed him, and thus this information needs to be heavily scrutinised and questioned.

Was this a wrongful arrest? Was this an outcome of police oversurveillance?

How has the state already been intervening in the life of this young man? What state sanctioned violence has he already been subjected to that make him the target of police?

Who was he? Who is his family? How was he loved? There needs to be an immediate recognition that his life is grievable, his life is worthy.

Would the supermarket and security guards have called police on a white man?

Will there be an independent investigation?

In a statement released today, Debbie Kilroy and Tabitha Lean from the National Network of Incarcerated Women and Girls called on a full and independent investigation into this killing, stating it is a “lethal police intervention”.

Read their full statement here.

This piece has been edited on 29/05/2025 to include Uncle Ned’s statement.

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Audio recording of article

Every day for the past year, those of us who continue to stand for humanity and refuse to normalise the most brutal of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, have woken to scenes of horror.

We wake up in the morning and reach for our phones to see an unthinkable atrocity broadcast into our hands, captured by Palestinian journalists on the ground. Then, if we can stomach it, we turn on the tv or check the websites of imperial media to see that they have not covered it at all, or if they have, it’s sanitised through the talking points of an IDF spokesperson or the words of our cowardly leadership or even Zionist lobbies.

It is not just the horror that we feel but also the refusal to acknowledge that horror, the refusal to acknowledge the vast, immense loss of life, the refusal to acknowledge the worth of these lives, and the refusal to acknowledge the complicity of our government, and our media, and everyone here in this country who sits silent, and washes their hands, while living on stolen Aboriginal lands.

Every day we have sat in horror to witness how many people turn away from these scenes, and see how this violence is made ‘normal’ because it is being perpetrated against those bodies who are so dehumanised that in the words of Lana Tatour, they are being ‘removed from the category of human’.

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It has been more than a year since October 7, 2023, and the western-backed and sponsored Israeli violence has intensified in Gaza, and in particular, north Gaza, where those few journalists who have not been killed and who are still reporting were over the weekend sharing their good-byes on social media. This morning, I woke to scenes of another massacre of burning tents and slaughtered children, and pictures of those children with smiling faces and bright eyes commemorated by accounts like Martyrs of Gaza. I checked the ABC News website and the SMH and other legacy media organisations to find no word on these horrific scenes.

As Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel Fattah wrote in a piece in Mondoweiss published today:

“Since October 7, we have seen, in real-time, live-streamed to our screens, apocalyptic scenes of violence methodically inflicted on a besieged population as the world watches on—in the service of a political project that has unfinished demographic business, that requires the extermination of the ‘brutes’, the elimination of the native, in order to achieve the goal of a Jewish majority and control over the entire stolen land from the river to the sea and beyond, into southern Lebanon and Syria. Each day has been a horrifying chronicle of industrialized genocide, domicide, scholasticide, infanticide, femicide, medicide, and ecocide.”

Over the past year, those of us who stand with humanity, those of us who refuse to see this horror as normal, and stand with Palestinians and the fight for a Free Palestine from the river to the sea, have also recognised that we ourselves have been changed in every single way. As Noura Erakat wrote on the anniversary of October 7:

“We are also forever changed: Our eyes wide open, primed to distrust media, social, and political authorities bullying us into becoming walking zombies obsessed with pop culture distractions, wide open to the fact that imperialism shapes the minute details of our daily lives.”

And yet, when I checked the imperial media today, I saw no mention of the latest atrocities. Instead, there were reams of coverage about the first anniversary of the failed Voice referendum, because the beginning of the genocide coincided with it.

The basic themes of most of the coverage were that the Voice was an attempt for ‘unity’ and not ‘division’; it was a gift; it represented hope; it was never going to be a magic bullet but it was ‘better than nothing’. The failure of the Voice was again about ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘toxicity’, lack of civic literacy, the difficulty of successful referenda, two-sidesim and even, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to move forward with it even when the early polling showed it would fail.

There is still no reflection upon the role of racism in the tidal wave of ‘no’ votes in the majority of states and territories in the country, and the fact that the most racist parts of Australia voted overwhelmingly ‘no’. In the coverage, there is a continued optimism about ‘unity’ in the country; about closing the gap, about one day getting a voice or salvaging the ‘reconciliation’ process.

And yet, the coverage and politik on the Voice is remarkably silent on the issue of Gaza and how it changes absolutely everything including how we view imperialism and colonialism, the complicity of the imperial media and the allegiances paid to it, and the very nature of our own resistance.

Very early on, as we saw Albanese delivering a long-awaited referendum and positioning himself as a supposed champion of reconciliation, we saw in the very same month, just how willing he was to comply and support the slaughter of our Palestinian brothers and sisters. In March this year, law firm Birchgrove Legal submitted a 92-page document of evidence outlining the complicity of Albanese and the Australian government to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine. The document was endorsed by 100 Australian lawyers and barristers.

Michael West Media reported that the actions included:

• Freezing $6 million in funding to the primary aid agency operating in Gaza – UNRWA – amid a humanitarian crisis based on unsubstantiated claims by Israel after the International Court of Justice had found it plausibly to be committing genocide in Gaza.

• Providing military aid and approving defence exports to Israel, which could be used by the IDF in the course of the prima facie commission of genocide and crimes against humanity.

• Ambiguously deploying an Australian military contingent to the region, where its location and exact role have not been disclosed.

• Permitting Australians, either explicitly or implicitly, to travel to Israel to join the IDF and take part in its attacks on Gaza.

• Providing unequivocal political support for Israel’s actions, as evidenced by the political statements of the PM and other members of Parliament, including the Leader of the Opposition.

In November last year, Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau reported on the secretive US surveillance base Pine Gap near Alice Springs, which is “collecting enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel battlefield - and this data is being provided to the Israel Defence Forces”.

Not only that, in September, Declassified Australia’s Kellie Tranter revealed via FOI documents the extent of Australia’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocide by supplying Australian parts and components to the F 35-1 Adir fighter bomber aircraft which Israel has been using in Gaza.

“Australia’s collaboration extends beyond the F-35s’ mechanical parts and components, to also include the data gathering and processing that is critical to the successful operation of the F-35s as shown in the plane’s documentation.”

In all of the reflections from the Voice, what about the one that has changed us so deeply: the fact our own Prime Minister and government, who aimed to reconcile the country, now have blood-soaked hands?

The imperial media would like us to distance the Voice referendum and Indigenous policy from Albanese and the Australian Parliament’s complicity in genocide, but in my mind, they are intrinsically linked.

The Australian government’s support of Israel’s genocide - which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, so many of them children, with so many children disappeared under rubble and into Israeli torture centres, reveals its own motivations in Indigenous rights here on stolen Aboriginal lands. The Australian government’s support of genocide and the horrific daily massacring of men, women and children, suggests a politics that will only support black rights if it is in THEIR interests, and that means, one that does not disrupt the institutions that continually oppress blackfellas.

It is not enough to fight for something that 'is better than nothing’. ‘Better than Nothing’ is not any form of ‘progress’, however you wish to define the word, but rather becomes a concession or compromise. It is a compromise that is only about Indigenous peoples restricting their own radical imaginings of a future and instead, appealing to the goodwill of a government that is so willing to support genocide even when we are all witnessing the same genocide live-streamed for the first time in history.

The failed referendum also brought with it a reckoning for the imperial media’s role in the overwhelming no vote, with claims that it propagated ‘false balance’ and ‘false equivalences’, while uncritically amplifying racist arguments for the ‘no’ and misrepresenting the black sovereign no vote.

And yet, we have seen again how the imperial media’s collusion with the state and its allegiance to state violence has manufactured consent for genocide in the most horrific ways. We have seen how it equates Palestinian resistance with ‘terrorism’ while refusing to name state terrorism in the form of Israel and the US. We have seen how the imperial media has laid a foundation for impunity in which the violence has not ended but ramped up, and through its silencing of Palestinian voices, has further restricted any form of dissent so that protest is again criminalised. This is not anything new, or revealing about the imperial media and yet, it has further cemented the fact that the imperial media is first and foremost an organ of power, a powerful vehicle for propaganda, and its ‘journalists’ as highly paid stenographers who write for the pursuit of awards and not for truth. The imperial media has never changed how it reported on Indigenous affairs and has mostly been in collusion with the state, only able to report on black dysfunction, deviancy, and victimhood and never resistance.

The year since the Gaza genocide and the failed Voice referendum has given us a lesson in how appealing to the ‘goodwill’ of a country that is built on genocide, on the very bone and blood of Indigenous peoples, could have never succeeded, and even if it did, with the most non-threatening of proposals, only would have served to make white people feel good about themselves.

The year since has also changed us in the ways blackfellas have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people because we recognise that this same 21st-century manifestation of violence has its roots in the same logic used to justify the colonial violence wrought upon our peoples at the very first invasions of Aboriginal lands. It has revealed how the systems that oppress blackfellas over here, are also the same systems that oppress Palestinians.

The practice of Black-Palestinian solidarity has continued to strengthen that it has become a threat to the establishment, so threatening that it was proponents of the Voice like Marcia Langton, Nova Peris, and Sean Gordon who came on board as the most adamant supporters of genocide, to attempt to delegitimize the voices of blackfellas who refuse to be complicit. Their names will be remembered decades later not for the Voice but for their support of the mass killing of Palestinian men, women, and children. The majority of high-profile Voice proponents have been notably silent in public on the Gaza genocide, which has not gone unnoticed. It suggests that the very same elitism that the Voice attempted to dismantle may have been replicated in the very strategy behind it: of a non binding advisory body designed by the same Parliament who is now on record as supporters of genocide.

A year on from the failed Voice Referendum, I can not distinguish or distance it from the genocide, not just because it happened in the same month, but because there is no distance between them both at all. The logics of colonialism and settler colonialism are all connected and the Albanese government has placed Australia amongst the worst in history for its role in it.

And I can’t help but ask myself a question, if we did have the Voice, if we did, at this point in time, have a constitutionally entrenched committee of blackfellas to advise the government, what would these same people have said about the genocide?

Maybe it is best we do not know the answer.

NOTE: Just after publishing I saw sis Lynda June Coe’s article on post-referendum reflections - please see here as well as this is very worth reading. Lynda writes:

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(Image Credit: Charandev Singh)

The inquest had begun in September 2022, so they had already had to wait over a year and a half. They had packed out the courtroom; so many people there that the staff had to bring in extra seats.  

It had been over five years since Constance’s remains had been found in the most dehumanising of circumstances in the affluent suburb of Kangaroo Point, by the base of a cliff not far from where children rock climb on Saturdays; over six years since she was last seen two minutes from where she was found, in a unit she stayed in with three white men; five years since the wounds of her body reduced her personhood to body parts and not the whole of who she was; five years since a police press conference pled to the public for information about her ‘murder’; five years since images of a dirt-stained duffle bag were circulated instead of pictures of her; five years since the $250,000 reward again calling for information about her ‘murder’; even longer since anyone had heard her voice; and five years since she had been buried, back home in Cherbourg cemetery, in a grave adorned with a white cross, and purple flowers, and solar lights so that she may never lay in darkness, should never be concealed, or disappeared, again. 

It was over five years and still no one had been charged over Constance’s murder. 

Rather than the Supreme Court, her death and the circumstances surrounding it were the subject of a coronial inquest.  

Her family had sat through five days of evidence, and had heard from only two police officers in the investigation; one of whom had told the court that his investigation had never been a “homicide” investigation, despite the fact the state homicide squad had been involved, and the police had released a reward calling for information about her ‘murder’. Instead, he had told the court hers was a “suspicious death”.  

There were no clear answers about why the state homicide squad had taken on only a level two role and had not stayed involved in the investigation, and no questions posed to the Missing Persons Unit about their involvement or lack of. In the ten months Constance was missing, the QPS never organised any physical search for her.

There were so many unanswered questions from Constance’s family, and yet, they would remain unanswered.  

That day, Gallagher delivered her findings in under six minutes. It had taken a longer time to set up the chairs.
 
Gallagher had told the court that Constance’s cause of death was ‘unknown’ and so was the identity of any persons responsible for interfering with Constance’s body.

Not only that, she had said that there was a possibility that “Constance had died from some other unknown cause”, leaving it open to the suggestion she had caused her death.  
 
Suddenly, there were no perpetrators in Constance’s death; despite the brutality and violence inflicted upon her remains; despite the fact she had been extremely vulnerable in the days before her enforced disappearance.

There was a truth in the air that floated above us all: this would never happen to a white woman.

In the public gallery, members of Constance’s family wept and others stood in anger. One woman yelled “No Justice! No Justice!”, and another, “Another black life!”.  They were not a ‘threat’; they were there to make it known that Constance was worthy, that Constance deserved more, and that justice was not to be found here.

Gallagher had moved to the side to exit and then had come back, hitting the duress button. She was overheard telling the counsel assist that she had called security. 

The treatment of Constance’s family and the treatment of Constance herself, both from when she was first disappeared in November 2017, to when she was found ten months later, to the media reporting and then the coroner’s court, is a brutal reminder that instead of justice, Aboriginal women can only expect apathy, indifference and the same message repeated over and over again: this settler colony does not care about the lives of black women.  

The coroner’s court, in particular, has become so accustomed to the inevitability of black death after black death, that it cannot or refuses to recognise black life. Black life cannot be abstracted to a statistic, and through the presence of the families in these processes, those who have died cannot become statistics either.  

And yet, the reality of coronial processes and the public inquiry often work to confine the lives of those not only experiencing but resisting violence to these statistics, to focus acutely on ‘deficiency’ and reproduce demeaning racialised stereotypes. This works not to uncover the truth but exonerate the state, the police, and individual perpetrators.

On Thursday, the long-awaited report on the parliamentary inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was handed down. Instead of ‘uncovering’ the truth of the crisis, it demonstrates again how the state will refuse accountability for its own complicity in the forcible disappearances of Indigenous women.

The inquiry’s report was the first public inquiry into the crisis and so, it is often referred to as ‘landmark’, in the few media reports that have bothered to pay attention to it. But, it is far short of ‘landmark’.

Instead of breaking a silence, it reproduces the silencing processes that I have witnessed time and time again in coronial inquests in which First Nations women have been forcibly disappeared.

After nearly three years, it could only deliver ten recommendations – the second of which is a call to ‘harmonise best police practices’, which include ‘cultural awareness training’ and more black cops.  

This was a recommendation that we warned about, with my colleague, Sisters Inside CEO Debbie Kilroy stating forcefully in her testimony to the inquiry:  

“We believe that for any inquiry into the crisis to be meaningful, it must not bolster the carceral state. Recommendations that simply reinforce or extend the powers of the existing systems of the racial and gendered violence of policing and incarceration will only result in more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women disappearing and being murdered, with their families left to bear the burden of seeking justice alone. Instead, there must be a shift towards creating an independent national body dedicated to addressing these issues, free from the biases and failures of the current system—a body that doesn't replace the already failed system; an independent body that is truly independent.” 

This is because, in my home state of Queensland, and across the country, the police do not keep women ‘safe’ but instead are complicit in the violence inflicted upon them. They are complicit in the forcible disappearing of black women not only across the landscape but also within the watchhouses and the jails.

In many of the cases, including Constance’s, Aboriginal women are first criminalised and incarcerated, and so while they are objects of intense police surveillance while they are alive, when they are ‘missing’, the police suddenly are unable to find them. Even when police release missing persons alerts, they have a practice of using ‘mugshots’, making the women seem like ‘wanted persons’ and not ‘missing persons’. I’m not being hyperbolic: the police make it possible for black women to be disappeared through their criminalisation of black women, high rates of incarceration, and when they are ‘missing’, their failure to search for them so that their disappearance is entrenched.

You also cannot reform the police to make it safer for black women because the police, from the frontier to now, lay the foundation for impunity in which white perpetrators can abuse black women with little accountability.

While the WA police were chastised for their failure to appear at the inquiry, the Queensland Police were given brownie points because they brought a large contigent of cops to the hearing, held in a fancy hotel in Queen St.

I attended the Brisbane hearing of the inquiry to witness this. I saw their large presence there not as evidence of care but rather a deliberate tactic to avoid questioning. It worked.

The Queensland Police brought three black police officers from the First Nations Unit, even though none of them were involved in homicide or missing persons investigations. Despite the clear issues with putting up black cops to cover for your failures, diversifying the police force and ‘cultural awareness training’ was deemed so important to the inquiry that they highlighted it as one of their few recommendations.

And so the parliamentary report demonstrates a colonial apathy that not only characterises this inquiry but so many other inquiries I have witnessed. Black families are made to repeat their trauma for processes that digest, consume and spit it back out at them, their accounts then re-told through White Witnesses, which are then largely ignored by media (in fact, on the day after the report was released, I counted only six articles in MSM outlets - the majority of them written by black women).

While trauma is re-told and re-told, the perpetrators of that trauma and that violence remains untold, a part of a silence that black women are then told we are responsible for breaking.

I have witnessed time and time again the coronial processes that refuse to recognise the violence of white perpetrators even if the wounds of the women have been highlighted in the most gratuitous and sensational ways.

Despite the story being of the wounds to the body, it is the white perpetrator who is afforded a presumption of innocence, which is never afforded to the woman who has died (in fact, in every single inquest I’ve attended, it becomes about the responsibility of the woman in her own death; the woman, in the coronial inquest, is put on trial).

This is not only another form of violence, but it also allows for landscapes in which violence can happen. It leads to impunity which only leads to more brutal forms of violence, a violence that we are seeing currently being perpetrated on the Indigenous men, women and children in Gaza, where passive language and the continual dehumanisation of Palestinian people, work to conceal what is an overwhelmingly visible perpetrator.

Instead of speaking of the perpetrators - which, in my definition of disappearance are not just individuals but also the state, the police, and the media - the report also affords them a presumption of innocence, and in doing so, embeds the idea that the violence will not be stopped and the forcible disappearing of black women will continue.

‘Justice’ cannot be found in this inquiry; which calls to ‘remember’ those killed in its first recommendation, but does not speak of a concrete way to stop it.

This morning and afternoon, we have been watching with horror the genocide currently being perpetrated against those who have been pushed into Rafah, the supposed ‘safe area’ that Palestinians were told to retreat to - the area of the Gaza Strip closest to Egypt. Today, Israel launched a merciless assault on Rafah as the US revels in its extravagance and excess; a cynical campaign of capitalism that they call the “Superbowl”. As the Superbowl trends, Palestinians in Rafah are being slaughtered in darkness and amidst the silence of the world. Palestinian lawyer Noura Erakat in her analysis on BBC: “As much as it’s not surprising because Israel has made its intent clear, its war cabinet has made its intent clear from the very beginning, in the first week of October 7, has told us that its goal is to depopulate Gaza. They have equated the decimation of Hamas, which they cannot achieve militarily, with the depopulation of the entire Gaza Strip. “ Erakat spoke of the fact Israel has continued to move displaced Palestinians, pushing them further and further to Rafah without a safe corridor. “There are now 1.5 million of the 2.2 million people in the Gaza Strip in Rafah who are now told they do not have safe corridor. There is a pattern and practice indicating that Israel is aiming to depopulate the Gaza Strip in the name of decimating Hamas which all international law prohibits, including the crime of all crimes, which is tantamount to genocide”.

As images emerge from the slaughter, horrifying images that are still horrifying after all we have seen over the past 100-plus days of this genocide, there are calls for us to focus on anti-semitism and promote the ‘tolerance’ of Australian society. These words come straight from the Twitter account of Member for Wentworth Allegra Spender, who said on Twitter today: “Australia is the best multicultural country in the world. Racism has no place here and I am deeply concerned in particular by the unprecedented rise in antisemitism over the last few months.” Spender then went on to talk again about the Zionist WhatsApp transcript, claiming it is an example of “doxxing” and supporting the “Victorian police investigations” into the matter. She claims she is deeply concerned about “the tragic horrifying events in Israel and Gaza” but still feels the need to prioritize the leaking of a list of people who were never unsafe but instead were working to harass and even get fired, pro-Palestinian activists and authors, including Aboriginal poet Evelyn Araluen at Overland. Spender ended by saying “We cannot let events overseas divide this country. While we are imperfect, we need to continue to be a beacon of what a tolerant, open society looks like.”

Spender is not the most tone-deaf, or has even uttered the most disgraceful comments on Gaza by an Australian politician - but her sudden treatise for ‘unity’ while at the very same time, Israel is launching its most devastating assault yet on Gaza, is so disturbing that it warrants special mention. It is not only because there have been over 27,000 Palestinians murdered, and over a million displaced, and it is not only because those in Gaza are starving, and mothers are forced to feed their babies dates rather than milk, it is not only that the hospitals have all been destroyed as have the universities, it is not only because over 100 journalists have been targeted and slaughtered, and that is not even counting their families; it is not only because of the fact of a genocide sanctioned by the world. It is also because there is this false, ridiculous claim that Australia is ‘multicultural’ and not ‘racist’ and somehow ‘tolerant’, while our politicians and media have cheerled an active genocide and told us to shut up about it. By doing so, they want us to forget the countless black deaths in custody, and the massacres on our own land, perpetrated to build this supposedly tolerant society of Australia. They can do this - preach about tolerance and multiculturalism - even while our own people suffered genocidal violence to clear the land, that is currently being perpetrated in the most extreme way, and backed by the US and the rest of the western world, in Rafah, throughout Gaza and occupied Palestine. Tolerance is just a shady term to position the colonisers and their adjacent colonisers as benevolent.

Palestine has shown us that our politicians and the media are shameless, superficial hacks who will go to no end to secure their positions of power. Palestine has shown us that the media is in such a symbiotic relationship with those in power that they are nothing more than propagandists and stenographers. We’re not going to accept this confected outrage and these tactics designed to steal our attention away from the genocide, even as it is being posted in real-time. We are not going to accept false appeals for “tolerance” when we know that is a complete lie sold to wash away the blood that is on our hands, for letting this happen. Let’s thrown away liberal fantasies of tolerance and instead invest our focus on resistance, in whatever form it takes.

A non-Indigenous man has been charged with the murder of Kokoberra woman Ms Bernard, who was disappeared in Coen, in Far North Queensland, over 10 years ago. He was the last person to see Ms Bernard alive.

A coronial inquest which in part probed the QPS response to Ms Bernard’s disappearance, was ongoing at the time of the charges being laid. Despite over 11 years passing since Ms Bernard was last seen, she has still not been found, and her family still long for her to return home, to bring her spirit back to her country.

The events are significant as until today, Ms Bernard’s disappearance has never been viewed as a homicide by the QPS. Ms Bernard is one of three Aboriginal women who had been disappeared in the state of Queensland – one being Monique Clubb, in 2013, and Constance May Watcho in 2017. Just like Ms Bernard, Monique Clubb’s case and Constance May Watcho’s case had never been viewed as potential homicides. This is despite the fact that the women were all seen in the company of white men before they were disappeared.

Ms Bernard is remembered by her family as a “cheeky little girl” who grew up in the loving presence of her community of Kowanyama. She loved dancing and swimming in the freshwater of her country. She was grown up by her mother Aunty Dellis Burns, and was still close to her other mother – Aunty Edwina Bernard.

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In February 2013, Ms Bernard was making her way home to her family to attend her son’s birthday. Ms Bernard was a loving mother to three children, one of whom had passed, and she was known to never miss a special occasion, even if she was travelling away from her children. When she did not make it back home, her family immediately contacted the local Kowanyama police station, to report her missing.

Ms Bernard was last seen at the Exchange Hotel in Coen, leaving the premises with a local non-Indigenous man, who admitted taking her to the Archer River quarry that night. Since then, her family have not stopped fighting for justice for her, despite the lead investigator suggesting as late as 2021, that he still considered the most likely possibility being a case of her walking off into the wilderness of the quarry. Several searches of the quarry found no trace of Ms Bernard.

The first search was called off in 2013, with media reporting the case as a “Cape mystery”. There was limited news of Ms Bernard’s story afterwards, until 2019, when a local Courier Mail journalist approached Sisters Inside CEO Debbie Kilroy. Together with Ms Bernard’s family, Ms Kilroy pushed for a coronial inquest into Ms Bernard’s disappearance, which began in 2021, and was supposed to be held in three stages – with the third part kicking off in February 2024.

At the inquest, Ms Bernard’s two mothers – Aunty Dellis and Aunty Edwina, as well as her uncle Teddy Bernard, attended, and laid fresh orange hibiscus next to two pictures of Ms Bernard – one picturing her with her grandmother, who had passed, and the other with her two children, who still long to know what happened to her. They sat through days of police testimony which delivered limited answers about what happened to Ms Bernard. For nearly a decade, the only story they heard about her disappearance was the one told by the man who last saw her alive, who claimed that she had run off into the quarry in the night, with no clothes, and only wrapped in a towel. This version of events was contested by the search and rescue expert on the stand, Snr Sgt Jim Whitehead, who said it was “unusual” for someone to walk somewhere if lost at night, and that usually they would sit still. There was limited visibility the night that Ms Bernard was disappeared.

The second part of the inquest ended in 2022 with Coroner Nerida Wilson ordering another search of an area known as the ‘Bend’ in Coen, a separate search area from the quarry. Coroner Wilson also ordered a review into the adequacy of the QPS’ investigation into Ms Bernard’s disappearance.

Ms Bernard’s disappearance was framed as a ‘mystery’ and a case of a woman ‘vanishing’ into thin air. There was suggestions that she had gone ‘walkabout’; a colonial term used to justify the continual disappearing of Aboriginal women. But Ms Bernard’s family have always fought for justice, for the truth to come out, for their loved one to return home, so her spirit can be at rest.

Today, Ms Bernard’s family released a statement saying that they “still grieve for her to come home”.

“This has been a long sad journey for us as a family. After nearly 11 years the police have finally charged the man who last saw our granddaughter, daughter, mother, sister, niece, aunty and cousin alive,” they said.

“When we reported our loved one missing to the police in 2013 they believed the man who is now charged with her murder and who told police that she ran off in the middle of the night for no reason.

“When we reported our loved one missing to the police in 2013 they believed the man who is now charged with her murder and who told police that she ran off in the middle of the night for no reason. The police never suspected his involvement in her death and in the disposal of her body which has never been found.

“Our women do not go missing and they don’t run off into the dark for no reason.”

The family said that the police investigation has been pressured by the family lawyer Ms Kilroy and the coroner to finally do their job and follow up their “failed investigation” in 2013.”

Professor Angela Davis speaks at the Blackfella-Palestinian solidarity symposium in Magan-djin.

This feels like an unprecedented time. A time when we can see clearly the machinations of settler-colonialism and how we are all linked as Indigenous peoples. Last week, in Magan-djin (Brisbane), there were a number of events that brought this message into sharp focus. One was the Blackfella Palestinian Solidarity Symposium, and the other was the Sisters Inside Abolition Feminism Now conference. At both events, we heard from Palestinian, Aboriginal, and international voices, people like Rihab Charida, Jamal Nabulsi, Boe Spearim, Uncle Lionel Fogarty, Uncle Shane Cogill, and the legendary Professor Angela Davis.

At Sisters Inside, we heard the thinking and work of abolitionist organisers and academics, as well as families of Aboriginal people who had been killed in custody. I was honoured to share a panel with three of these families: Dr Raelene Nixon, the mother of Steven Nixon-McKellar, Salote Tafaifa, the daughter of Selesa Tafaifa, and Latoya Rule, the sibling of Wayne ‘Fella’ Morrison.

We heard from a panel of former incarcerated women, who asserted their right to speak in a system that had silenced them and continues to silence them. We heard from solid, staunch poets who spoke truth to power and brought us all to tears. As Prof Angela Davis said, feminism has been redefined by people in black and Indigenous communities and in the working class. We must think of it, she says, as a methodology, a method of thinking and acting, and a way of bringing issues together out of isolation from each other. And this is where she sees the struggle to free Palestine as an important part of abolition. Our methodology must be anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-carceral, she says.

In that spirit, I’m bringing to you my speech from the Blackfella Palestinian Solidarity symposium, with some parts added from other panels and speeches I’ve given this week. The media silencing campaign continues.

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First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I’m speaking from today – the Turrubal and Yaggera peoples – I would like to acknowledge their continuing sovereignty, and the sovereignty of all First Nations people. I want to acknowledge my elders and ancestors and the elders and ancestors of all people here today. I am here today as a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman and journalist, to say I stand in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

We are currently witnessing a genocide being perpetrated before our eyes. And yet, the outlets that are supposed to be bringing us the truth, that are supposed to act as the ‘fourth estate’ – the mainstream media – are wilfully blind. Their actions, or inaction, go beyond silence, even beyond acquiescence, and emerge towards complicity. Our mainstream media outlets – including the ABC – are so cowardly that they refuse to even mention the word ‘genocide’. This was demonstrated recently when the ABC released a statement after an interview with Labor minister Tony Burke – who spoke out against the silencing of Palestinian voices. It was retweeted by one of the most high-profile ABC journalists Patricia Karvelas, who wanted to clarify that “ Karvelas did not use the word “genocide” herself.” On Friday, I sat in on another panel on news media reporting of Palestine, hosted by UTS, and heard another prominent journalist, also from the ABC, claim that we should not use the term ‘genocide’ until it had been determined by international law. This suggests we should only speak of acts of genocide after they have been perpetrated, and not now, to stop them.

In a time when Palestinian journalists are risking their lives to document the truth of what is happening in Gaza, across the ocean, Australian journalists feel it so important to remind us that they had not uttered the unspeakable: the word genocide.

Why is it unspeakable? I think I know. They purposefully do not want to speak of genocide, because by doing so, they would have to also acknowledge that they are speaking from lands which are stolen Aboriginal lands, which were secured not just through genocide, but also maintained through a continuing genocide. The term ‘genocide’ was clarified for use in settler colonial contexts by the landmark Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women inquiry in Canada. It said in its supplementary report: “genocide encompasses a variety of both lethal and non-lethal acts, including acts of ‘slow deaths’… this reality must be acknowledged as a precursor to understanding genocide as a root cause of the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada”.  

But what is happening right now in Gaza, and throughout occupied Palestine – is unprecedented, the brutality so intense, and the silencing so fierce, that it feels incomprehensible. And yet we must comprehend it. I was honoured to share a stage earlier this year with Palestinian writer Saree Makdisi at the Adelaide Writer’s Festival, which was targeted by Zionist lobbies after Jewish Australian publisher Louise Adler programmed an extensive line up of Palestinian voices. Earlier this month Saree wrote: “What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st...What’s worse, if anything could be worse, is the near total indifference on display by so many in and out of government in the Western world.”

We are seeing how genocide is carried out when there is a devastating indifference from the Western world and the media and a nuclear-armed state that feels it has impunity to kill and kill and kill. But, through this, Aboriginal people in Australia know that this is also an old story – a story of settler -colonialism. We know this is a genocide because we have seen how a genocide is committed and why it is committed: to disappear us from our land and to secure a settler colonial state.

So how do you commit a genocide?  

A genocide is committed when an Indigenous population are forcibly displaced and expelled from their homelands, massacred wholesale, with their villages destroyed – like what happened in 1948 with the Nakba, when  750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from the homelands of their ancestors and denied a right to return. This is what happened on the Queensland frontier, when our own ancestors were massacred by tens of thousands to make way for white settlers to build a colony - our graves were in rivers, and by the bottom of cliffs.

A genocide is committed when settlers are armed with guns and weapons to remove Palestinians from their homes and villages – like what is currently happening in the West Bank – where footage has shown images of armed Israeli settlers entering villages to expel and kill Palestinian people. This happened on the Queensland frontier as well, when white settlers were given an ‘unofficial license to kill’ to clear the land of our own people.

A genocide is committed by the re-shaping of ancestral country into colonial borders, in which spatial configurations determine which bodies matter in which spaces, what bodies are seen as threats to public order, and which are seen as need of protecting from. This is happening under the apartheid regime of Israel, where Palestinians have their lands seized, where illegal settlements are built, where Palestinians can not walk freely in certain spaces, where there is one set of laws for Palestinians and one set of laws for Israeli settlers. Queensland was the model for ‘apartheid’: our Aboriginal Protection Act, which forcibly removed Aboriginal people from their homelands and into reserves and missions, with their entire lives strictly controlled and their movements inhibited by the protectors and the police, was the very inspiration for Apartheid South Africa.

A genocide is committed when there is a forcible amnesia of history: in which the histories of these blood-stained places we walk on are mythologised to make settlers and the colony seem victorious, brave, and benevolent. Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has written of this as “illegal mourning”, in which Palestinian histories of the Nakba are silenced in what she calls an “Israeli version of terra nullius”. This is true, ever so true, of this place: in which there are national celebrations on our day of mourning, on our nakba – January 26. A day of invasion canonised by the colonisers as “Australia Day”.

 A genocide is committed when thousands of Indigenous people are disappeared into jails and detention centres – like the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners – so many of them children – locked away in Israeli jails – out of sight, and contained and tortured. We are seeing a mass incarceration of black men, women and children in this place, right here: in which our people are seen as ‘criminals’, and an affront to the supposed safety of white society.

And a genocide is committed with the erasure of Indigenous bodies from Indigenous lands – and in the poisoning of the country, which is intimately tied to our survival as peoples. On the Queensland frontier, they poisoned the water holes, they decimated the country and they continue to do so – through extractive industries, which deny our own right to return and sicken our lands and waterways. In Gaza and throughout the occupied territories, I have seen not only the bombing of country but also the wilful destruction of ancient olive trees. As the Israeli genocidal machine rains down white phosphorus on the people of Gaza, burning the bodies of women, men and children, I also see how it contaminates the waters, white phosphorus seeping into the lifestream that sustains land. The destruction of country is an attempt to destroy a people. It is part of the genocide.

These are all the reasons why Patricia Karvelas and other Australian journalists can not utter the word ‘genocide’, even as numerous genocide scholars have said that what is happening in Gaza right now is a ‘textbook case of genocide’ and another chapter in the Nakba. But we will remember them for their silence. We will remember the more than 10,000 men, women, and children who have been murdered and the thousands who are still disappeared under the rubble. We will remember them not as numbers, but as names, and lives, who deserved the right to live. We will remember them through the media silencing.

When I speak of silencing, I don’t speak of the fact that Indigenous people – both Palestinian and Aboriginal – are voiceless. As we know, Palestinian people have been speaking for decades about the truth of their lived experience, as have our own people over here. When I speak of silencing – I speak of it as the discourse – the more acceptable discourse – that displaces the less acceptable discourse – the language of the oppressed.  This ‘acceptable discourse’, is operationalised against us, so that when we speak, our voices become too radical, or ‘biased’ or untruthful so they go unheared, unless we become legitimised by coloniser voices, and authoritative voices – those who are perpetrating the violence. It is used to both make invisible a shockingly visible colonial violence, while also constricting the limits of what we can say so that we in turn become the violent ones – it is only the violence of the oppressed that is made visible.

There is a common question that has been asked repeatedly of every Palestinian in the media, and always in Australian media. It is “do you condemn Hamas?” That question has a certain function. It is used to put an ultimatum to Palestinian people: that you can have a voice but a conditional voice. It is conditional on whether you speak within the parameters of the discourse that has already silenced you. It also says something else about the nature of Palestinian resistance and suggests that Palestinians do not have a right to resist, which by proxy, suggests that Palestinians do not have a right to speak at all about the reality of the occupation, about the reality of the siege, about the reality of the apartheid, and about the reality of the genocide - because everything is still conditional upon the discourse already set by the occupier. They can’t say any of this, without first condemning Hamas - and if they don’t -everything else they say afterward is silenced or deemed too radical and even untruthful.

I wanted to include a word on ‘resistance’ through my own lens - the lens of the Aboriginal, or what I call Black Witness. When I think of all the countless cases of black deaths in custody we have had in Australia, I realised that there is only one case that really resulted in wall-to-wall media coverage, the coverage that every single black death deserves. That was the death in custody of Palm Islander Mulrunji Doomdagee. Now Mulrunjis’ death was not an aberration - there are many black men who have been bashed to death by police officers. But what made this different, what resulted in a different media coverage - was resistance. Black resistance. In every black death, or killing, in custody - families always resist - but it is particularly when black resistance is framed as violent, that the media finally takes notice.

The Palm community were able to attract media coverage because they staged an uprising, burning down the site of Mulrunji’s death - the Palm Island watchhouse, and the house of the man who had killed him: Snr Sgt Chris Hurley (Hurley was later acquitted of charges of manslaughter). Now, this is one case where I would also concede there were GOOD examples of reporting: there were campaigning journalists who held the QPS accountable, who refused to believe their lies, and who worked to tell the truth of what happened to Mulrunji. That pressure was important.

But in the midst of this, there was one event in which every single media outlet, other than Aboriginal media, failed. And that was coverage of the ‘uprising’, which they labeled a ‘riot’, and which we call resistance. This suggests to me that the media may sometimes be equipped to understand the violence and understand the victims, but they never, ever, understand the resistance - in any of its forms. Because to understand the resistance, you have to name the perpetrator - and what we are seeing now is passive language and an outright refusal to name Israel as the perpetrator of genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. To understand the resistance, would be to understand settler-colonialism, for which mainstream media is intimately entwined with the state in this country. The media can’t speak of resistance, because it can’t identify it. Resistance is never seen as what it is - the battle between an occupied people resisting an occupier. The context is important and vital.

Resistance is not part of the ‘acceptable discourse’. This ‘acceptable’ discourse, that which silences the voices of the oppressed, rests on the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples – in Palestine and here, in this place. A genocide, finally, can not be perpetrated without first putting in place dehumanizing regimes of representation that see Palestinians as not people – as less than people – as ‘human animals’, ‘as terrorists’, as ‘unworthy’, and as ‘ungreivable lives’. Just as we are people, so are Palestinians – they are not human animals, they are not terrorists, they are not ungrievable or unworthy. They have a right to live free, they have a right to liberation, they have a right to resist, they have a right to defend themselves, and they have a right to their sovereignty, which has never been ceded – and never will be ceded despite the genocidal attempts to destroy it. Silencing is insidious because not only does it cement the status of the ‘other’ as unworthy of grief, and as bodies marked for destruction, but it also refuses to acknowledge the imaginings we have of a future: it sees this future only through the prism of the destruction of another people, and not on the very right of an Indigenous people to enact a sovereignty never ceded. The Palestinians should not be denied their right to imagine a just future.

I want to end by condemning the mainstream media – the cowardly Australian journalists who shield themselves behind false pretenses: journalistic notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ which only serve the powerful. Just as they say we are not journalists, that we are ‘activists’ or have ‘agendas, I say that they are also not journalists: they are propagandists and stenographers for the powerful – for the shameless ALP, and the Coalition - who are indistinguishable to me anymore. I pay tribute today to the 35 Palestinian journalists – and this only what has been confirmed – who have been killed by the Israeli genocidal regime, and their families, who have been targeted for their truth-telling.  They are brave truth tellers, so powerful that they pose one of the biggest threats to Israel. Every day, they hand us the mantel of bearing witness – and we must take our responsibilities as witnesses seriously. We must never stop speaking, never stop fighting, and never stop resisting for our Palestinian brothers and sisters. In doing so, we must assert their humanity as Palestinian people – we must share their horror and grief, and we must mourn those who are lost – those beautiful jarjums, those courageous women, those brave, tireless men.

Just as we are STILL HERE after hundreds of thousands of years, we know that our Palestinian siblings are also STILL HERE. And we will love and support and fight for you – today and tomorrow, until the siege ends, until the occupation ends, until the wall is brought down, until the olive trees regrow.  

From the River to the Sea, Always Was Always Will Be.

(Image credit: Charandev Singh)

Last week, ABC journalist Leigh Sales, formerly of flagship ABC program ‘7:30’, delivered the annual Andrew Olle lecture. In it, she sought to explain the public’s growing distrust of the media, but not before recounting a long, mundane anecdote about the time she stole the parking space of ABC chair Ita Buttross (which is probably of no interest to anyone outside of the small, Australian media landscape, which to me, suggests a limited capacity to understand what’s in the ‘public interest’).

According to Sales, the public’s lack of trust in the media comes down to one key factor: the lack of independence and integrity, and the abandonment of core journalistic principles like ‘objectivity’.

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“Too often, too many journalists, at all media organisations, are abandoning values espoused by people like Andrew Olle, for various reasons. One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters,” she said.

“They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers. I’m not sure they can even identify their own bias. Others haven’t had enough training to understand what independent journalism actually is, or their organisation has an ideological bias and the reporter knows the way to get ahead is to toe the line … better still, to step over it.

“Or perhaps it’s awkward and exhausting to constantly push back against the groupthink of your colleagues. Another reason is fear of the consequences of reporting the full picture: that inconvenient facts could set back a cause the journalist believes in. Others think objectivity is impossible and so even striving for it is pointless.”

Sales’ treatise on journalistic ethics came in the midst of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which Australian journalists have shown their sheer cowardice in supposedly gathering the ‘facts’, ‘independently’. This is largely due to colonial notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’, which in fact are orientated towards those in authority. Palestinian voices can not speak the truth of a 75-year occupation, and 16-year seige on Gaza, without first being asked questions about whether they condemn Hamas, or Palestinian resistance at all.

Meanwhile, Palestinian journalists in Gaza are reporting relentlessly on the ground, while their families are being targeted and killed. Twenty-four Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since October 7. While I watched Al Jazeera, or via social media as they courageously continued reporting even in the midst of mourning, I thought of the cognitive dissonance required for Australian journalists to lecture on ‘objectivity’. Do the journalists in Gaza have the luxury of being objective?

(Image from Motaz Aziaza’s Instagram page).

Meanwhile, the bravery of Palestinian journalists is juxtaposed by the shameful timidity of Australian journalists, who are so weak-kneed that they cower, not from airstrikes, but on whether to call Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza a ‘genocide’. Last week, Sales’ colleague Patricia Karvelas, re-tweeted a statement put out by the ABC after an interview with Labor minister Tony Burke, who spoke out forcefully against media silencing of Palestinian voices. According to the ABC statement: “As part of a lengthy, detailed interview with Federal Minister Tony Burke on Friday 27 October she put to him the usage of the word “genocide” — which is being widely discussed, for example in a UN statement last week — and asked for his thoughts on its usage. Karvelas did not use the word herself.”

How is this ‘balance’? How is this ‘objectivity’? Several scholars of genocide have already labeled Israel’s war on Gaza as a ‘genocide’, including the Israeli scholar of genocide and holocaust studies Professor Raz Segal, who labeled it another chapter in the Nakba, and “a textbook case of genocide”. Karvelas was so quick to deny using the term ‘genocide’, with no explanation on why it could not be called a ‘genocide’, simply because the ABC, for its claims, is not ‘independent’. Instead, through it’s purported striving for ‘impartiality’, it elevates the powerful over those deemed powerless.

This is the same ABC that in 2021 banned journalists from using the term ‘Apartheid’ in describing Israel, even as international human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch and Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, labeled it an ‘apartheid’ state. According to the ABC, it had a specific use in the context of South Africa, even as South Africa labels Israel an apartheid state. The fearless former ABC journalist Sophie McNeill, herself targeted by Zionist lobbies for her reporting on Palestine, who claimed she was not ‘objective’, said at the time: “As a former Middle East correspondent for the ABC, I know how coverage of Israel and Palestine can work. It’s not that anybody tells you specifically not to cover something, it is just routinely put in the ‘too hard’ basket, with editors fearful of complaints over coverage of the controversial topic. The ABC should explain to its audience the modern-day legal definition of apartheid. Failure to do so will lead to misunderstanding and self-censorship, and ill-serve the millions of Australians who rely on the broadcaster for news.”

Is this the ‘objectivity’ that Sales is referencing? Is this ‘balance’? Is this ‘impartiality’? Sales suggests that diversity in newsrooms is the answer, with no understanding that black and other journalists of colour are only afforded space if they report in the limited confines of white media discourse, and have to continually fight to tell their truths and the truths of their own communities.

In turn, they are punished if dare to be unapologetic. The brave Palestinian Australian journalist Jennine Khalik outlined the continual barrage of criticism she received when joining the Australian newspaper at age 21 in John Lyon’s expose ‘Dateline Jeruselum’. As Anthony Lowenstein summarised: “The Israel lobby routinely complained about her presence on the newspaper. Within News Corp, some key editors and sub-editors were vehemently pro-Israel and made her life hell. After writing a story about a visiting Palestinian refugee and singer, Oday al-Khatib, a sub-editor came over to her desk and accused her of being a poor journalist and informed her that, ‘Palestine does not exist.’ Khalik left the paper soon after.”

Lyons, a veteran ABC journalist and Middle East correspondent wrote: “It’s the story of how the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the single issue which the media will not cover with the rigour with which it covers every other issue. And, most importantly, it’s the story of how the Australian public is being short-changed — denied reliable, factual information about one of the most important conflicts of our time.”

I’m guessing Sales is not critiquing the ABC’s dreadful coverage of the war on Gaza, which, through aiming at ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’, conceals the historical context of the issue in which Israel is the occupier and the Palestinian people are the occupied. To tell the truth about the occupation would mean being accused of being an ‘activist’ or a journalist with ‘agenda’. The determinations of who is an ‘activist’ and who is a ‘journalist’, are made by those who are already close to power, those who are awarded for timidity with high-ranking positions in the ABC (and cooking shows!), who are part of the daily news cycle but in turn, have no capacity to interrogate anything outside of the ideological confines of their own reporting.

The issues with ‘impartiality’ and ‘two-siding’ were on clear display during the recent coverage of the Voice referendum, in which ABC journalist Laura Tingle made it clear that striving for balance had resulted in the elevation of misinformation coming from the racist no camp: “In the interests of trying to be balanced ... we’ve ended up not doing a good job of covering the referendum debate,” she said.

In turn, journalists are not held accountable for not only their failures but their complicity in the continuing oppression of Aboriginal peoples on our own shores. Patricia Karvelas, who has claimed to be a supporter of First Nations rights, spent many years at the Australian uncritically publishing stories which paved the way for the Howard government’s neoliberal agenda in Indigenous policy, while also making time to lead campaigns against our First Nations scholars like Professor Larissa Behrendt. Australian journalists claim to be ‘impartial’, but only in ways that support the interests of the powerful.

Let me make it clear: Objectivity is a colonial notion that bypasses the voices of Black Witnesses by making their legitimacy conditional on the backing of White Witnesses and authoritative accounts of those who are perpetrating violence. ‘Objectivity’ is a rope handed to the colonisers to continue strangling the oppressed, to restrict them of air in which to speak.

‘Objectivity’ means lying about your own positionings because every single article we see today is biased. Bias affects the way a story is framed, and the way a people are represented. If I can again use the example of Indigenous Australia, many of the stories about ‘violence’, are predicated first on colonial representations of Aboriginal men as inherently violent and upholders of violent traditional culture. These representations are not innocent, but instead have history: Australian journalists are working within a regime of representation in which this is the only way to speak of Aboriginal peoples. By abiding or striving for false notions of ‘objectivity’ that deny the very reality that everyone is biased, you obscure another journalistic cornerstone: that of transparency.

And it is here I want to speak of the Australian media landscape’s lack of transparency when it comes to Palestine - because it is surely the most concerning case of the severe lack of ethics. As Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook wrote on Twitter recently: “All journalists are activists. The proper distinction is whether we declare our activism or not, and whether our activism is for the good of humanity or in the narrow interests of a state or a billionaire. What you should care about more is whether journalists are independent’.

So where is the scrutiny over the fact for many years, Australian journalists have been going on propaganda tours of Israel funded by Zionist lobby groups? Are these Australian journalists independent? Are these Australian journalists ‘impartial’? Isn’t there a fundamental conflict of interest in accepting a propaganda tour? Is this journalistic ethics? Why is Leigh Sales focusing on ‘journalists with an agenda’ and not those with ‘hidden agendas’?

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On Saturday night, Australia overwhelmingly voted ‘no’ to a constitutionally entrenched Voice to Parliament. In every state and territory, except the ACT, Australians told Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders where we stand in this country. The outpouring of grief from First Nations people has been enormous; coming not from shock, but from another recognition: that this country, built on racial violence, can’t even allow for the most modest, most non-threatening proposal.

The ‘Voice’ was proposed as a ‘gift’ by those in the Yes campaign, with the Uluru Statement to the Heart, delivered in 2017, addressed not to politicians, but to the Australian people. There was a belief from those in the Yes camp that the Australian people would recognise this ‘gift’ and would accept it, graciously. ‘Reconciliation’ would be advanced, although of course, this ‘reconciliation’ was still predicated first on the compromises made by First Nations people. But it was still an unequal playing field.

Blackfellas were told not to speak about land rights, justice, or racial violence because those were mere complications in the fight to win the hearts and minds of non-Indigenous Australians. The Yes campaign barely made a peep when the WA government reneged on its cultural heritage laws, which were intended to address the destruction of sacred sites at Juuken George in WA, legally destroyed by mining giant Rio Tinto - acts of cultural genocide. There was fear of how it would impact the vote in WA. Rio Tinto was, in turn, not fearful of the prospect of a constitutionally entrenched voice - it donated $2 million to the Yes campaign.

There have been conversations in the media about why the ‘no’ vote succeeded. Analysts and commentators talk about the active ‘no’ campaign, spearheaded by Senator Jacinta Price and former ALP National President Warren Mundine. They talk about the lack of bipartisanship and its role in the failure of referenda throughout history. Opposition Peter Dutton used the tired, racist political trope of ‘saving the children’ in his framing, with Price acting as a black rubber stamp to legitimise him. Other analysts claim that there was still a lack of detail and that many voters did not know what they were voting for. The media were targeted for airing the ‘no’ side and for spreading misinformation and disinformation (which they did) — there were conversations about the false balance at the ABC, which it still clings to, and the outright lies and conspiracy theories peddled by the Murdoch media. The mainstream media has always been a reproducer of racist violence when it comes to First Nations people. There is limited accountability for the slander they publish on the regular. Even black journalists working in the confines of MSM feel the brunt when they are forced to compromise to the limited parameters of debate set for them.

But all of these things do not fully explain a ‘no’ vote. It does not explain why voters in my own hometown - Rockhampton, and other parts of Central Queensland, voted over 80 percent ‘no’. I target this area of the country not just because it is the area I know most intimately, but because it recorded the highest no votes in the whole country. The reason the ‘no’ vote succeeded was because of racism. It is racism underlying the way they still see First Nations peoples. First Nations people are seen as ‘threats’, as ‘criminals’, and as unworthy of justice, let alone a Voice. Earlier this year, in Rockhampton, we had white vigilantes roaming the street targeting black children, trespassing in their yards, and advocating for outright violence. The media gave airtime to these white supremacists, not calling them for who they are, but rather stating they were ‘anti-crime’ advocates. During this time, blackfellas on the riverbank were threatened with guns by white vigilantes.

Queensland had the highest no vote in the entire country. This is the same state where the Queensland government has such impunity in its law and order agenda that it can bypass its own human rights act to allow for the locking up of black children in watchhouses. This is the state where over the past year, we have had THREE inquests into the disappearances of Aboriginal women — Monique Clubb, Ms Bernard and Constance May Watcho - all of whom were last seen in the presence of white men and all of whom no charges were laid. This is a state where just a month ago, in Toowoomba, two separate inquests were held into the deaths of Aboriginal men - one - Steven Nixon-McKellar was killed by a police officer in a chokehold, and another, Ashley Washington, was tasered to death. The inquests provided no answers and were set up instead to absolve the Toowoomba police for their brutality. In all these cases of racial violence, the common thread is that all victims are framed as responsible for their own deaths. The perpetrators - highly visible and at the same time, invisible, were afforded a presumption of innocence that we are never afforded.

By claiming the ‘no’ vote was NOT racist, but instead was about campaign messaging or lack of bipartisanship, the reality of racial violence, which is ingrained in every single structure and institution in this settler colony, is also denied. The conversations that blackfellas want and NEED to have are again silenced. The country is not ready to deal with its own racism, because it is a racism that sustains it. It is a racism that every single non-Indigenous voter who cast a ‘no’ vote benefits from. Australia is not ready, but we will make them ready.

This issue was not related to the progressive ‘no’ who voted because they knew this reality, and instead wanted to centre our own sovereignty and our own aspirations, but rather Australia’s comfort in a settler colony founded first on the erasure of Indigenous peoples. Instead, it gives us another lesson in strategy - a strategy not predicated on the ‘goodwill’ of Australia, but rather on the black power we still hold as First Nations peoples. As Prof Chelsea Watego said on the ABC broadcast - we must retire hope as a political strategy:

“The one hopeful thing out of this for me is that this may reinvigorate a black political movement across this country where we’re not appealing to the so-called radical centre which effectively is the far right, and actually fighting on our terms for what we want. Because the Australian people have shown us that even the most moderate concession in which they have the ultimate power over us, they still don’t think we’re deserving of.”

Australia will want to continue framing us as the ‘problem’, but we are not the problem, in the words of Aboriginal elder Aunty Rosalie Kunoth-Monks. We must re-center this ‘no’ vote on what we already know is true: the racism and white supremacy of a settler-colonial state, which even now, even as the country votes against us, refuses to acknowledge its true face.

(From my friend Matt Chun - see his website for prints).

Solidarity with our Indigenous Palestinian sisters and brothers

It is not time to be silent, not for our own people, but also for our Indigenous and brothers and sisters in Gaza, and across the world. Many genocide scholars have already stated that what is happening in Gaza is a textbook case of genocide. This is mass ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the Israeli government has already perpetrated war crimes on the people of Gaza. The mainstream media have been complicit in selling a genocide, and have been actively peddling lies about the Palestinian people, while the death toll continues to rise — many of them children. Electricity, water and fuel have been cut off to Gaza, which was already under a suffocating land, air and sea blockade. Here in Australia, the Albanese government has been spineless and have shown their horrifying complicity in their allegiance to Israel and our overlords across the Pacific - the US. The NSW government threatened protestors who were showing up in support for Palestine. Our landmarks were lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag.

Aboriginal solidarity with Palestine has never ended and in this time we must continue to stand in solidarity and amplify Palestinian voices, even in the midst of the referendum fall-out. That is because anti-colonial movements are GLOBAL. We are all connected through our resistance. This is a statement written by my colleagues at the Institute for Collaborative Race Research.

“Colonising powers aim to separate our struggles, in order to fragment our resistance and make Indigenous and racialised peoples easier to control. The similarities that we can see in this moment between the repression of Indigenous peoples’ globally are not a coincidence.

“From racist stereotypes to state surveillance, violent technologies of colonial control continue to be necessary because Indigenous peoples keep resisting colonisation: forging global networks of solidarity that actively threaten the legitimacy and power of the colonising state.

“Now, as always, we must take our lead from Aboriginal and Torres Strait activists and thinkers, and ground our global solidarities in Indigenous sovereignty here. Blackfullas have long stood in solidarity with Palestinians in their interconnected anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. Indigenous and intersectional anti-racist solidarities are crucial to fracturing the global colonial order that chokes all occupied peoples. We know that the legitimacy of colonial regimes relies on making some of us complicit; recruiting us to justify the violence of the colony and reproduce its founding myths.

“For those of us seeking to resist our colonial complicity in order to actively support anti-racist struggle, we must begin by following the lead of Indigenous and Palestinian communities in this moment. In this moment, we come together to build the tools necessary to fight the transnational system of colonial white supremacy that deals in death, land theft and racial violence. As always, we stand behind Indigenous sovereign activists in insisting that the only pathway to a safe and just world is through connecting the struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere. In centering Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, we learn from the people who have been fighting colonisation the longest; people who have the clearest view of its many disguises.”

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Sisters Inside Ruby Wharton and Debbie Kilroy outside a rally at Parliament House on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the Queensland government stealthily passed new laws that will allow children - predominately black children - to be detained in watchhouses for extended periods.

They passed it from a building that sits a 20-minute walk away from the Brisbane City Watchhouse, a place where Amnesty International in 2019 recorded over 2655 breaches of domestic and international law, including the failure to “provide children with adequate clean clothes, underwear, and personal hygiene products, the institutional use of violence; the use of isolation as punishment, and failure to provide adequate health and medical care”. It is the same place where the brave whistleblower Steve Marshall revealed shocking racist and sexist remarks by watchhouse staff, where children were being exposed to sexual acts by incarcerated adults, where a girl was held in a holding cell with two males, where illegal strip searches were being carried out on children, and where children were treated like incarcerated adults.

Twenty minutes away from a place of unimaginable violence wrought on the bodies of young, black children, the Queensland government sat in its fortresses and suspended the Human Rights Act, not to stem the violence, not to heal the children, not to make safe communities, but rather to secure its own political interests. They did this to ensure that they can sit comfortably in that institution of power, while the many young black anonymous children are disappeared behind watchhouse doors, in small cells where light is dim and where their cries can not be heard.

It is black children who will be victims to this merciless pursuit of power, the black children who are here today, and as Sisters Inside Debbie Kilroy noted, those who are not born, those generations who will bear the consequences of their political violence. This decision will have ramifications for generations of black children, and their families. The most victimised demographic in the state will again be victimised.

As the Guardian’s Eden Gillepsie and Ben Smee wrote today, this unprecedented assault on democracy was motivated by the Palszczuk government’s own self-interest, the fear that they will be left open to legal action that the detention of children in watchhouses could be unlawful. It followed a potential test case brought forward by Cairns-based Youth Empowered Towards Independence to the state Supreme Court, which sought orders to urgently transfer three young children from watchhouses. As Gillepsie and Smee wrote today:

“However, in the process, the state made a written concession – revealed in the published judgment – that there was “a prima facie case” that children were being unlawfully detained….

“On Thursday, the youth justice minister, Di Farmer, said the urgent changes were required after she received new advice from the solicitor general, Gim Del Villar KC, that keeping children in police custody on remand was not lawful.

Farmer said Del Villar advised the state government it had been relying on an interpretation of the Youth Justice Act that was “likely incorrect”.

The advice forced the government’s hand. It had to either remove kids from watch houses or change the law. And it decided to change the law.”

The fear coming from Labor, according to the Guardian, was that kids would be released to youth detention centres which would double the cells and ‘cause riots’. Aboriginal children are being framed as threats to community safety, rather than in need of protection and in need of healing; in need of a solution that comes not from incarceration and state-sanctioned violence, but within the community.

It comes in a media landscape that has used a ‘youth crime crisis’ to redirect outrage from the state to black children and black parents. As Kilroy said at a protest on Thursday, at the front of Parliament House, “We’ve got to stop taking on the narrative of the state, which is we’re blaming parents. The (parents) are the state. They have taken these children from the day they’ve been born or when they’re quite young. The state is their parent. They are the failure - no one is calling them to account.”

In this environment, black children are never afforded a chance to achieve their potential, to grow up safe and strong in culture and community: instead, they are only seen as ‘criminals’, and ‘perpetrators’, rather than what they are: children. They are condemned to cages, watchhouses and child jails.

Change The Record National Director Maggie Munn told the protest that it was an outrage, and a shame on the state:

“This is a continual and deliberate decision to harm First Nations communities, our children, and everybody in that kid’s life who loves them…. Governments can deliberately choose to override (The Human Rights Act) to criminalise our kids.”

This is the second time in the space of a year that the Queensland government overrode the Human Rights Act - the first in order to push through horrific new bail laws that made breach of bail a criminal offence for children, yet another measure that will only end up forcing more black children behind bars.

Sisters Inside campaigner Ruby Wharton told the rally that the solutions were not to be found in watchhouses, but in safe communities: “The government has said to children and their families that they don’t deserve human rights in this state.

“That their place in this state is behind bars, with no windows, and with no access to support, family or any other entity that cares and values the best interests of these vulnerable children.

“….Laws do not make communities safer, people make communities safer. WE make communities safer.

“We have heard this government talk about therapeutic healing centres. About smaller populations of prisons for children. But we have seen everything work actively against that. From the voices of Mark Ryan, from the voices of Annastacia Palazczuk, from the voices of Dianne Farmer. This is your legacy.

“What we are standing for today is for free, safe communities. For communities that we all have access to. This is about changing the lives of children that are not here with us yet. This is about changing the trajectory. Changing the standards and changing the values that Queensland has. This is about valuing First Nations children and families.”

The Queensland government, though, was not prepared to listen to the rally on Thursday. Rather than meet with the families and black children affected, Police Minister Mark Ryan instead hosted a group of ‘Youth Parliament’ made up of white private school students, and boasted of it on his social media page.

As Kilroy told the rally: "They will never let us in that house to sit around that table to have a conversation. They won’t ask us to come up and talk about community safety. Because they don’t care about community safety.

“They care about cops and cages.”

Aboriginal man Derek Bromley has been locked up for 40 years and has continually maintained his innocence.

There are so many things to say about the way Kathleen Folbigg has been treated. The first is that what she has suffered and survived is unimaginable: a mother wrongfully convicted of killing her children, and then tarred as ‘Australia’s worst female serial killer’, convicted on circumstantial evidence that should never have held up in court. She has been criminalised and brutalised within the prison system. Now that she has been pardoned by the NSW Attorney General, the tide has turned. The mainstream media have reported on her ‘first night of freedom’, and how now there are questions about compensation, which seems to be the least the system can do given the magnitude of what has stolen from her. Finally, Kathleen has been given the right to innocence: a fact she has always maintained as she weathered the brutal blows against her.

But the one conversation that is missing, and desperately needs to be had, is on the prevalence of wrongful convictions in this country. Because exonerations are relatively rare compared to places like US, cases like Kathleen Folbigg are seen as aberrations of the system rather than the result of it. But, as my colleague Martin Hodgson - who has had over a decade’s experience working on cases of wrongful conviction overseas, including the high profile case of Rodney Reed - there are likely many wrongfully convicted persons sitting in prison:

Civil Liberties Australia estimates that 7% of Australian prisoners are innocent. The current prison population in Australia is over 40,000 people, which would mean there are 2,800 more Kathleen Folbiggs currently locked behind bars for crimes they either didn't commit or for which there is insufficient evidence. This is an outrageously high number, an entire rural town's population rotting their lives away because of a broken justice system.

The situation is compounded for Aboriginal people, who are the most incarcerated people in this country, and the most incarcerated people in the world. When we speak about the over-incarceration of Aboriginal people we do not often speak of ‘innocence’. ‘Innocence’ is an imperfect word, because the opposite is said to be ‘guilt’. As Angela Davis et al writes in Abolition. Feminism. Now: “the use of the category “innocence” is often invoked as an adequate measure of determining who gets released and who “deserves” to remain in prison”. Perhaps the reason we do not speak of ‘innocence’ is because through innocence there is an underlying suggestion that those those who the justice system criminalises and incarcerates as ‘guilty’ are deserving of the horrendous violence it imposes. I would also suggest there are issues with the word ‘innocence’ because it does not adequately incorporate cases affecting black women where they have retaliated against their abusers, like that of Robyn Kina and Jody Gore, who I would class as wrongfully convicted and wrongfully incarcerated. But “innocence” is also a politically useful term as there is no other term that really conveys the experience of being locked up for a crime you did not do and the unique traumas and injuries that are inflicted in having your entire reality continually denied and downgraded. Due to the over-criminalisation and targeting of Aboriginal people and due to the often inadequate legal resources available, which often recommends they enter guilty pleas, there is the continuing potential and undeniable reality that many blackfellas locked up are innocent. We need to talk about ‘innocence’ not as the aberration but as the the inevitable consequences of a racist violent system. This is a question posed by Martin Hodgson nearly seven years ago when we started working on just one of these cases of innocence: “How many Indigenous prisoners in Australia are innocent?”

We already have high-profile cases of wrongfully convicted Aboriginal people. Kwementyaye Stewart. Gene Gibson. Kevin Henry. Derek Bromley. There is so much I could say about each one of these but I’ll just draw out some of the parallels - in three of these cases, Stewart, Gibson and Henry, police extracted false confessions which were used to convict them. In all of these cases, there was questionable eyewitness testimony. In the cases I’m most familiar - Derek Bromley and Kevin Henry - their wrongful convictions were based on inadequate forensic pathology. In Bromley’s case, the egregious use of the now discredited former SA forensic pathologist Colin Manock - who was the basis for Henry Keogh’s exoneration - has been contested. In Henry’s case, there is doubt about the pathologists’ determination of drowning for the victim, as well as the fact there is no DNA at all tying Henry to the scene of the crime, as well as an alibi that he was not even present. Both Bromley and Henry are both awaiting justice, with Bromley’s case currently before the High Court. Bromley has spent four decades in prison while Henry spent over 28 years inside.

All these cases speak to how wrongful convictions occur, as we know based on extensive research into many cases, many of them involving African Americans, in the US. These contributors include false eyewitness testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, false and coerced confessions, dodgy forensic pathology, inadequate defense and perjured testimony. But the largest contributors to wrongful convictions, as Martin Hodgson says, is the police. The police role is not only surveilling and incarcerating black people but in undermining the worth of victims, particularly in cases of black women, through shoddy investigations that lead to enormous miscarriages of justice like those I have just mentioned. In all of these cases, there is an overt racism that targets the men in the first place. These men, like Bromley and Henry, had already been heavily criminalised throughout their entire lives before they were wrongfully convicted. The role of all-white or non-Indigenous juries also plays a part in this. The reason we must speak of ‘innocence’ or ‘wrongful incarceration’ when we speak of injustice and over-incarceration, is because of the ways the men and women are seen as innately criminal due to their blackness and Indigeneity and thus are disbelieved.

Unfortunately, because this is such an under-reported issue and over-looked conversation, the systemic changes we need to address wrongful convictions in this county are simply not in place. What was most astounding about Kathleen Folbigg’s case is that she achieved any form of justice at all. While it was very easy, it seems, to convict her based on circumstantial evidence, it was enormously difficult to get her a pardon and freedom. Her legal team and all her supporters should be credited as well as Kathleen for her resilience. And yet, we are currently seeing a situation where we are always in upheld battle to get cases of wrongful conviction heard and overturned.

In South Australia, the second right of appeal was instrumental in freeing Henry Keogh. There are currently statutory second appeal rights in Tasmania, Victoria and WA, and Queensland has announced potential plans to introduce one. But there are downsides to the second appeal rights as well, which has played out most pertinently in Derek Bromley’s case.

The first step we need to do is to build upon the news of Kathleen Folbigg to begin pushing for systemic changes in order to address cases of wrongful conviction. As Martin Hodgson wrote:

What can be done is an urgent review of every single case where a person has a reasonable claim of innocence and more importantly, the full weight of the state must wield its might against those corrupt cops and officials. On any one day in Australia, 2,800 lives depend on it and tomorrow more innocent lives will be lost behind the bars.

New shadow Indigenous spokesperson Jacinta Price, Warren Mundine and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson at a Queensland Police conference.

Just as we expected, the mainstream media has equated the ‘no’ campaign with black conservatives like Senator Jacinta Price and former ALP National President Warren Mundine. Mundine in particular fronted an ad for his “Recognise a Better Way” campaign this week, which he described in crikey.com.au as a “fake campaign” in anticipation of a formal launch later this year, when the referendum bill goes before Parliament. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Mundine outlined two main reasons for his opposition to the Voice to Parliament: one that it would recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a homogenous ‘race’ rather than nations, and the second, that it would strip control from traditional owners at the local level through the Voice, who have an ability to make representations to government enshrined by the constitution. He claimed that he had “written and spoken extensively about attempts to undermine traditional owner decisions about their own Country, particularly to approve projects on their lands and waters.”

But black Australia has a long memory and the stench of hypocrisy is overpowering. Warren Mundine, as many would know, was a prominent member of the Howard government’s hand-picked advisory body the National Indigenous Council (NIC), which was put in place after Howard abolished ATSIC - our last truly national representative body - and made way for mainstreaming, normalisation and neoliberalisation of Indigenous affairs. The era was focused on dismantling any form of self-determination, and seizing control from traditional owner groups through assaults on land rights and Native Title, attacks which did not go away but continued under different forms from successive governments. It was Howard who made the 11th hour promise to ‘recognise’ Indigenous people in the preamable of the constitution, on the eve of his electoral demolition by the incoming Labor opponent Kevin Rudd. Rudd failed to deliver on constitutional reform, his successor Julia Gillard never responded to the Expert Panel report handed down in her term, Tony Abbott was one of the first to promote the lie of a third chamber, and Malcolm Turnbull immediately rejected the Uluru Statement when it was handed down.

Mundine’s time on the NIC was characterised by his agenda to reform land tenure in the NT, through the Land Tenure principles, which led to the Howard government and in particular Mal Brough’s 99-year leases on Aboriginal land. The leases were heavily opposed by the land councils in the Territory at the time. When they passed, many communities said that Brough was bullying them to sign over their land on leases in exchange for much-needed housing infrastructure and other government investment. While Brough and his cronies, supported by the media, blamed Aboriginal communities and painted them as hubs of depravity and abuse, they had been sorely let down by governments, and then in turn threatened by them: if they did not comply with government demands to sign over their land on leases, they would not receive the rights of citizenship like housing and education resources. The amendments to the ALRA, one of the strongest land rights regimes in the country which allows inalienable freehold title to be held in trust by traditional owners, also allowed for the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal townships for five years under the NT intervention legislation in 2007. These changes to land tenure were an attack on the right of traditional owners to have control over their land.

The NIC was criticised because it was a hand-picked black body who rubber-stamped punitive, draconian government policy. It helped rip away control from traditional owner groups - the very same people that Mundine now claims will be undermined by a hypothetical Voice, the make-up of which we currently do not know because the design has not been formulated or set in concrete. If Mundine wants to criticise the Voice he must also own up to his own impact in Indigenous policy including his role as black voice to the racist John Howard.

Which brings us to Jacinta Price, the NT CLP Senator whose electoral fortune is not due to any political powreress on her part but because of her promotion by the Murdoch press. She was a black voice to dysfunction and violence which made her a darling of The Australian, Sky News, and the Liberals. This week, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton announced she was the new shadow minister for Indigenous affairs. Price has been the black voice sanctioning Dutton’s harmful rhetoric on child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory. It feels like we are going back to 2006 and 2007 again, although we really never left.

The Guardian’s Josh Butler reported earlier this week: “Last week Dutton claimed that “young Indigenous kids are being sexually assaulted on a regular basis” in Alice Springs, while Price claimed that children were being returned to abusive homes. The Northern Territory and federal governments have said Dutton would be required to report specific incidents of child abuse to police, but the opposition leader countered that he had raised the issue with Albanese in meetings last year.

When asked on ABC’s 7.30 on Monday about Dutton’s claims that he had raised the issue with the prime minister, Albanese said he had “no idea”.

“It’s possible that there may well have been a letter somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know what the basis of it is. But certainly he has not raised any specific issue about any claim, about any individual circumstance with me.”

This reminded me of Mal Brough’s infamous ‘paedophile rings’ statement - which had no basis in fact, and for which he had continually failed to hand over evidence to back his claims to the NT Police. ABC Lateline tried to vindicate Brough’s claims by slandering the community of Mutitjulu, using a ‘whistleblower’ who turned out to be a staffer in Brough’s own department. These stories and claims led directly to the NT intervention - and gave the government legitimacy to not only stage a military intervention into black communities, to declare war on them, but also compulsory acquire black townships. This is the same political playbook - it has not changed. It’s as if Brough left behind instructions on how to slander black communities to pass punitive government policies on the back shelves of the parliamentary library. I’m bringing this up to show that in order to actually debate a “Voice”, the Liberals - Dutton and Price - are simply relying on the same tired strategies of bashing blackfellas to position themselves as moral authorities, when they are authorities on very little.

The Central Land Council today hit back at Price for again slandering black communities as havens of child sexual abuse. CLC Deputy chair, Warren Williams, from Yuendemu, said: “Our kids are the apples of our eyes. We are not abusers. We love our children. We’d like to know where she got her information from. It’s mandatory to report such evidence to the authorities. We can do without self-appointed lone crusaders who are unable to bring people of good will together.”

The black conservative ‘no’ campaign reeks of hypocrisy and self-interest, and the most egregious part of it, is that it undermines a very sophisticated ‘no’ campaign from other blackfellas who are approaching the issue from a different viewpoint. Many blackfellas I have spoken to are still concerned that the Voice may not lead to change or a challenging of the status quo. There are concerns about the racist rhetoric inevitably drummed up in a referendum year, and concerns about what a Voice design could look like. There are legitimate concerns about when and how we can ask questions and whether a Voice will be truly representative. These questions are drowned out by noise from the black conservative ‘no’ campaign who should not be given any air time because they have had a ‘voice’ for years now, both in Parliament, as hand-picked members of racist government, or as the Senators for the NT CLP - one of the most racist parties in this country’s history. If they want a voice they can have it, but don’t deny others the right too - or the right to ask questions of it.

Debbie Kilroy, Dellis Burns, Edwina Bernard, Teddy Bernard, Andrew Hoare, (b) Charandev Singh.

Today marks the tenth year that Kokoberra woman Ms Bernard disappeared; last seen in a remote quarry in Coen, Far North Queensland, far from her homeland in Kowanyama. At the time of her disappearance, as police searches of the quarry failed to uncover any trace of her, the media reported it as a “Cape Mystery”, as a story of a woman who had vanished into thin air. And yet, this is not a mystery. Ms Bernard has not vanished; she is somewhere. And her family desperately want to know where she is, so they can bring her home. As her uncle Teddy Bernard has said “in Aboriginal culture, when someone dies, you got to have a body to send the spirit home”. And so, over a decade, Ms Bernard’s family have not stopped searching her, from the quarry to the river bend to the coronial court.

It was Teddy, and Ms Bernard’s mother Dellis Burns who first reported her missing at their local police station, three days after she was last seen. They were worried because this was uncharacteristic. Ms Bernard had been in Coen for only a short while, and was making her way back to her home to celebrate her son’s birthday - an occasion that she would never miss. Ms Bernard had been young when she became a mother, and she had always leaned on Dellis, who had raised her as a young baby. “She never called me aunty, always mum”, Aunty Dellis said. The adoption had been a cultural one, because Aunty Dellis did not yet had any children. But she would always visit her biological mum Edwina Bernard, and would visit her other aunty, who was a similar age to her. Just like her two mothers, Ms Bernard was also an attentive, caring mother to her children; she was never far despite the geographical distance. So when she failed to return to her aunty’s place in Coen, on February 10, 2013, her family immediately knew that something was wrong.

Ms Bernard with her two children.

The last man to see Ms Bernard was a white man named Thomas Byrnes, who met her at the local Exchange Hotel, and took her back to the Archer River quarry that night. Byrnes was the local caretaker for the quarry. Byrnes never reported Ms Bernard missing, and his accounts of that night and what happened after, changed numerous times when speaking to police. He claimed that Ms Bernard had run out of his accommodation at night, either naked or wearing a towel, and had not been found. He changed his testimony to police; first stating that he had fallen asleep, and then later stating he had searched for her. The next day, he had reported his stolen ute to police, insinuating that Ms Bernard may have taken it, and then only a short while later, phoned again to say that he had now remembered bogging the ute in a near by dam. But at no point, did he ever report her missing.

Byrnes has never been charged in connection with Ms Bernard’s disappearance. No one has. The story had been buried, only known by Ms Bernard’s close family, until a local journalist approached Sisters Inside lawyer Debbie Kilroy, who began pushing for an inquest on their behalf. That inquest began in late 2021, and then a second part was held in early 2022; nine years after Ms Bernard disappeared.

The inquest was the first time that Ms Bernard’s family were able to push for answers, with police still suggesting to them in the lead up that Ms Bernard may have just walked off the quarry, and may have perished in the remote, dense, hill country around the area. Ms Bernard’s country of Kowanyama - dry, Savannah country, was so different from this place. But her family have always believed that she did not just ‘walk off’, or go ‘walkabout’. That something has happened; that someone is responsible for her disappearance. And they have believed that perhaps she is not in the quarry. After the initial police search in 2013, her family took it upon themselves to do their own search, in the cultural way. They had gone to the area with a local lawman, and had asked the spirits of the land to speak to them; to search the hills and mountains. But they could not feel Ms Bernard there; they could not feel her pain.

The inquest has subsequently probed not just what may have happened to Ms Bernard, putting Thomas Byrnes on the stand, but also the adequacy of the Queensland Police investigation, who has failed to find her. There have been questions raised about the decision by police not to undertake crucial testing; like undertaking forensic orders of Brynes, and of undertaking appropriate testing of Ms Bernard’s clothes, which were obtained from the accommodation where she was last seen. Byrnes claims that Ms Bernard had urinated herself from intoxication, and he had subsequently placed her clothes in the washing machine. But it was later found through the inquest that the washing machine was broken, and police had not tested her clothes for signs of urination.

During the inquest, lead investigator Detective Senior Constable Byran Worth had been questioned repeatedly about the fact Ms Bernard’s family had been told that it was not a homicide investigation. He claimed that he had always treated it as a homicide investigation, a fact that was contested by the Coroner at an inquest sitting in April 2022.

The Coroner stated that “the matter has never been referred to homicide, they were never called in to start with and the only reference to homicide in the brief… was because I specifically asked the Queensland Police to refer the brief of evidence to the homicide squad for review, which they did on evidence only”.

Constable Worth continued to state that he considered Ms Bernard’s case as a “suspicious disappearance”, but that “I have more or greater than 50 percent belief that she has potentially walked or run off… and perished as a result of that”.

“I believed she’s perished in the wilderness,” Worth said. “.. And again, Mr Byrnes’ version is very disjointed. It is not a perfect scenario, where I can say, unequivocally 100 percent, that this is what that’s happened. I cannot say that.”

The inquest heard that the search for Ms Bernard at the quarry was based around an idea that it was not a suspicious disappearance. Two search and rescue officers had testified that the search methodology for both the initial search for Ms Bernard in 2013, and then again in 2021, prior to the inquest, was that it would proceed on a basis that there was no indication of foul play.

The state’s most prominent search and rescue expert Snr Sgt Jim Whitehead, who has since retired, also gave evidence stating that on the night Ms Bernard had disappeared, the moon was a narrow crescent, with only 12 percent illumination, and by the time Ms Bernard stepped out, it would have been completely dark. He said it was “unusual” for someone to walk somewhere if lost at night, and that usually they would sit still. He testified that “it would be very had with no illumination to actually not fall over, within the first few metres… it would have been extremely hard to walk in any direction.” He also concluded that “I’m certain of that. If she was alive, then I believe she would have come out because of the noise of the searching. Unfortunately, if she had perished because of whatever the circumstances, then I believe we should have found her…. We generally find something in every search. And the reason we don’t find something, suggests to me that there was nothing to be found.”

At that point, the police had not searched any area other than the quarry. At the inquest, Sgt Whitehead testified that he had never heard of another search area; the first he had heard of a place called the ‘Bend’ was while sitting outside of the inquest, waiting to hear evidence.

Byrnes steadfastly denied on the stand that he had caused Ms Bernard’s disappearance or death. The first thing he said to a police officer who came to question him was “I haven’t done anything with her. I haven’t murdered her or anything else”. One witness, Jacqueline Mackay, testified to the inquest that Byrnes had once threatened her: “He was verbally disgusting but at that stage wasn’t physically threatening,” Ms Mackay said. And then he said: I put things like you in the ground.”

While being questioned on the stand, by counsel assisting Malia Benn, Byrns instead insinuated that Ms Bernard had gone walkabout.

 “Well they call it, like walkabout, um. Aboriginal people will, for seemingly no reason, at times, go for a walk. It’s not just a walk, might be gone for two or three days, a week, to reappear again. It’s like ah yeah he’s been walkabout, so it’s not a rarity thing… it might be these days. But a few years ago it was something normal,” he said.

But Ms Bernard’s family do not believe she went ‘walkabout’; a term that is often used to place responsibility for disappearance back on the person who has disappeared and to claim ‘transience’ as an innate part of Aboriginal culture. The Northern Coroner Nerida Wilson, at the closing of the second part of the inquest last year, ordered that the Queensland Police undertake a new search of the ‘Bend’. Ten years later, there has no been word of the detail of that search, and the family are no closer to finding out where Ms Bernard is.

At the inquest proceedings, they have instead tried to remember her even in the cold, sterile space of the courtroom. They placed pictures of her garlanded in fresh, orange hibiscus, as a tribute to her; as a way to remember and also to say that her spirit still needs to be brought home. 

The inquest into Ms Bernard’s disappearance will continue later this year. But for her family, the lack of answers, the need to bring her spirit home, the need to know amongst the great unknowing, still endures. Ms Bernard is one of three separate inquests into disappeared Aboriginal women that has been held in Queensland from late 2021-2023. Four months after Ms Bernard was last seen, Aboriginal woman Monique Clubb disappeared from a suburban Brisbane park on a busy Saturday afternoon. And in 2017, Aboriginal woman Constance May Watcho disappeared in the rich, waterfront suburb of Kangaroo Point. Her family were the only ones to search, and she was found ten months later, only two minutes from the place she was living.