Content Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains names of people who have died.
Hundreds gathered on 1st June for a vigil for Kumanjayi White: a 24-year-old disabled Walpiri man, killed on 27th May by two Northern Territory (NT) police officers in the aisles of a Coles supermarket in Alice Springs. The two police officers violently restrained the 24-year-old, who was in a confrontation with a security guard. Kumanjayi White was killed on the first day of National Reconciliation Week.
Warlpiri elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, the 24-year-old’s grandfather, has called for an independent investigation and for all CCTV and body-camera footage to be released. However, the NT police have rejected the call for an independent investigation.
This marks the tenth First Nations death in custody since the beginning of this year. Since the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 there have been 595 Indigenous deaths in custody.
The vigil on Gadigal land was chaired by Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung, and Dunghutti activist Lizzie Jarret. Jarret spoke about the pain felt by Indigenous communities at another young Indigenous person taken from the community by an unjust system. Jarret called on Uncle David Bell to deliver the Welcome to Country, and stated “Anybody in this crowd who has a problem of [sic] being Welcomed to Country, fuck off.”
Before Bell called out the names of Indigenous peoples and clans in NSW characteristic of his Welcome’s, he stressed the need for solidarity “from the river to the sea, because our rivers are our boundaries: and the boundaries of the Georges river, that connects to the Nepean river, to the Hawkesbury river.”
Paul Silva, Dunghutti man and Blak Caucus activist, shared his pain, telling the vigil about his uncle David Dungay Jr., who was killed by correctional officers in Long Bay Correctional Facility in 2015. Silva stated that the violence is systemic: “The police are targeting Aboriginal people, especially in small communities. This is not random. It’s not accidental. It’s a fucking pattern, two brothers from the one family taken.”
The results of the coronial inquest into the killing of the 19-year-old Walpiri man Kumanjayi Walker in 2019 were meant to have been delivered this June.
Silva asked, “Why was a non-frontline officer involved in this restraint? Why was excessive force used on someone with a disability? How many more Aboriginal people must suffer and die before real accountability?”
Jarret emphasised to the crowd the need for immediate action: “There’s no more time for silence. Silence helps enable this violence.”
Academic and activist at the University of Technology Sydney, Paddy Gibson, spoke next. Gibson works closely with the Indigenous community and has travelled to the NT since the 2007 Intervention, a program by the Howard Liberal Government that effectively suspended the human rights of the Indigenous peoples in the NT, to fight alongside the Indigenous community. He expressed outrage at the racism present in Australia, such that a plainclothes police officer “takes it upon himself to kill a man in broad daylight in the aisles [of Coles]”.
“I was just in Alice Springs last week. I was with the family of this young man. I was with one of his aunties, and she was just talking about him. I was sitting in her yard, and she was talking about him and his struggles, along with talking about the horrible, oppressive regime that their people are living under.”
Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul advocate and the Australian Capital Territory Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner, spoke to the grief and rage felt by Indigenous communities across Australia: “They took away his air. They took away his life. They took away his future.”
She illustrated the fear felt by Indigenous families that “for all of our people, particularly black mothers, aunties, we have that fear: will it be my daughter? Could it be my son? Will it be my nephew? Will it be my niece?”
Wiradjuri activist Ethan Lyons recounted how three years prior a vigil occurred at the exact spot in Sydney Town Hall mourning the murder of 15-year-old Cassius Turvey. He continued, “I feel like every day since then, there’s been a story [like that]”.
Lyons stated, “The system isn’t broken, the system is built against us. It’s built on black deaths. It’s built on police killing us: that’s how they remain powerful.
“It shouldn’t take a black death in custody, or a blackfella to have his neck stood on, for us to tell a story, for us to fight for change. How many more deaths need to happen for us to be liberated? How many deaths need to happen for us to see change?”
He concluded by reminding the attendees the importance of showing up again and again: “Solidarity means showing up for mob beyond Invasion day, beyond NAIDOC week, and beyond reconciliation week”.
The next action will be at 5pm on Saturday, 7th June at Sydney Town Hall.
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