A Cop Was Acquitted Over Kumanjayi Walker’s Death. Then A Coroner Read His Texts

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this episode names a person who has died and includes descriptions of violence. In line with Warlpiri custom, he is referred to as Kumanjayi Walker. In November 2019, 19-year-old Warlpiri and Luritja man Kumanjayi Walker was shot three times during an attempted arrest at his grandmother’s home in Yuendumu, a remote community north-west of Alice Springs. He died at the Yuendumu police station that night, while his family waited outside asking to be let in. They didn’t learn of his death until the next morning. NT Police Constable Zachary Rolfe was charged with murder and acquitted by a jury. It was the beginning of a six-year legal process, ending in a coronial inquest that shook the Northern Territory Police to its core. Journalist and author Kate Wild features in the new SBS and NITV documentary series 2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback and has written a book on the case, The Red House. In this episode, she takes Gemma through what happened in Yuendumu that night, the trial and the inquest, and the questions about justice, policing and race that the case continues to raise. Stream 2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback on SBS On Demand now, with the final two episodes available next week. Purchase Kate's book The Red House by Kate Wild here. https://fave.co/4sSg2Ok GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 MAMAMIA OFFERS: Subscribe here https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe/?utm_source=shownotes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=truecrime&utm_content=black-friday&code=BLACK30 for 30% off your annual Mamamia subscription for Black Friday with code BLACK30. Code applied at the checkout. Offer ends November 30. Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Host & Executive Producer: Gemma Bath Guests: Kate Wild Produced by Ella Maitland Video Editor: Lisa Chen Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Gemma Bath?

  We'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land we're recording on today. We pay our respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening. Before we begin, this episode discusses the death of a young Aboriginal man and includes descriptions of violence. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners, please be aware that it names a person who has died. In line with Walprie custom, he is known as Kumanjayi Walker. Kumanjayi is the word used in place of a person's name after they pass.

• 0:39Gemma Bath?

  It's a Saturday in November 2019 in Yundamoo, a Walprie Indigenous community about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. Today, the town, full of red dirt roads, low houses and desert stretching out in every direction, is fuller than usual. Families have driven in from across central Australia for a funeral. The man's grandson, 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker, is hoping to join the commemorations and pay his respects. But there's one small problem: he is wanted by police. By 7 o'clock that evening, four officers from the Alice Springs Immediate Response Team have arrived in the community. Their orders for the night are to patrol the town,

• 1:23Gemma Bath?

  be visible, and arrest Kumanjayi if they come across him. By 7:21 PM, they find him in his grandmother's house. "Put your hands behind your back", 28-year-old Constable Zachary Rolfe tells Kumanjayi. There's a struggle, and Rolfe fires at him. 2.6 seconds later, he fires again and again.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I know Kumanjayi would be so proud of all of us.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  But this is not the end of his story. And this is not the end of our fight.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  When? We are going to get justice.

• 2:10Gemma Bath?

  I'm Gemma Bath, and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. Kumanjayi Walker died at Yundamoo Police Station at 8:36 PM after being shot three times. He died without his family's support, even though they stood outside begging to be let in. They didn't learn about his death until 8 AM the next morning. Their grief and anger was felt across Australia, sparking national outrage. Then, the police officer involved was charged with murder. It was the start of a six-year court process across a murder trial, which resulted in an acquittal,

• 2:53Gemma Bath?

  and then a shocking coronial inquest that rocked the Northern Territory Police Force to its core. In a landmark SBS and NITV documentary series from Blackfella Films that premiered this week, 2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback is re-examining Kumanjayi's story and the events that followed. Author and journalist Kate Wild features in the four-part series and has also written a book on this case. It's called The Red House. I want to acknowledge before we start that Kate and I are two non-Indigenous women. We can't speak to that lived experience, and we're not here to speak for anyone. We're covering it because we think more people need to know about this story.

• 3:37Gemma Bath?

  Kate has sat with Kumanjayi's family and immersed herself in their community. But to hear directly from them, we'll link to the work of Samara Fernandez-Brown in our show notes. She's Kumanjayi's cousin and the force behind the Justice for Walker campaign. Here's Kate.

• 4:01Gemma Bath?

  Kate, you were living in Sydney in 2019 when Kumanjayi was killed by a police officer in 2019. Do you remember your first reactions as that news was breaking?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Vividly. I remember hearing the story on the radio, a very brief news report that a young Aboriginal man had been shot by a police officer in the community of Yundamoo. And I know Yundamoo really well. I've been there a couple of times. And I know that part of the Northern Territory really well. So I could see pictures immediately. I could see the images of what...

• 4:35Gemma Bath?

  You could visualise it?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I knew right away that it would have a national impact because there's something so iconic in our history and something so essential to our history of an Aboriginal man, in particular, being shot by a white police officer. And we very soon found out fatally, fatally shot.

• 4:58Gemma Bath?

  Can you give us a bit more context about your involvement up there? Because you'd been living and working in the Northern Territory for quite a number of years.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  So I lived in the Northern Territory from 2010 to 2016. I worked for a good deal of that time as a journalist, as an investigative journalist for the ABC. And most of what I covered was stories that involved First Nations communities and First Nations people because a lot of the big news stories involved their communities and involved things that were happening to them. So I... And also, I had plenty of friends in those communities. And so my husband, he's a lawyer and was involved in Aboriginal legal aid up there. We both were really involved in everything that was going on in the community.

• 5:44Gemma Bath?

  This is probably a big question, but what did living and immersing yourself in those communities, what did it teach you about that part of the world?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  That it's a different country. It's a different country to the rest of Australia, a fascinating country, a place that you cannot assume you know anything about. And a place where if you don't understand what's going on, you have to spend time working out what is going on because there are so many cultural differences that, you know, I could give you so many examples of times when I would think that a friend from one of the communities had sort of stood me up or wasn't returning my phone calls or that something like, something strange was going on. And then I would find out later on what the reason was, that they had thought that I didn't want to speak to them anymore

• 6:38Speaker 03

  or that they had thought that I wasn't going to be there. There were, there was so often a cultural explanation for why miscommunications happened. And I think that's one of the really big things I learned. The other thing I have taken with me from the Northern Territory is that nothing is straightforward. Nothing is, you know, the cliche, black and white. Everything is complicated and everything is multi-layered. And that's its beauty and also its difficulty.

• 7:08Gemma Bath?

  Yundamoo specifically, tell us about that community. Because it's quite distinct when you look at photos, the bright red dirt. But what's it like there? Give us some context.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  It's a small place by most people's standards, but it's quite big for an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. There's probably anywhere between about 300, 400 people there most of the time, but that can swell to sort of 800

• 7:34Gemma Bath?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  if there's a sports weekend on or if there's a funeral on. Aboriginal people are very mobile in the Territory. People are travelling 300, 500 kilometres a day to visit family or to do various things. Like, it's just really not uncommon for someone to say from Alice Springs, "Oh, I'm going out to Yundamoo today", and that's a 350-kilometre drive. And that's not a big deal for people. So, so Yundamoo is, it's a desert community. It's very, very red soil. I write about it in my book as looking like a bunch of buildings sort of tipped out of a dustpan. Everything's a little bit higgledy-piggledy. There are a couple of sort of official buildings, like the council building and the school and PAW, the local media organisation,

• 8:18Speaker 03

  which have quite high fences and are really locked up. And then there's all the sort of people's homes, which have sort of waist-high sort of cyclone fencing, like we're used to in New South Wales, we're used to having like around a schoolyard. Lots of people live in a house. It's very overcrowded. There's lots of dogs running around. Yeah, and you can, you can turn up one day and there's absolutely no one there. It's like a ghost town.

• 8:41Gemma Bath?

  Really?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  And then you can turn up there, there's two shops in Yundamoo, and you can turn up in the morning and it'll just be like, it feels like everyone in town is at the shop just to catch up on the gossip and get their groceries or fill up on fuel.

• 8:53Gemma Bath?

  So you don't really know what to expect when you rock up?

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Never. You never know what to expect.

• 8:56Gemma Bath?

  Well, I'm going to quote you back at you because I just thought this was a beautiful description. You said "Yundamoo's physical poverty disguises the depth of its residents' lives".

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I have given a lift back to a friend from Yundamoo. And the whole way along that stretch of road, that 350 kilometres, she would talk to me about the stories and the animals and the plants that belong to each little section of country that we're passing through. She can tell me stories about her family, about other families, about the geology. I've sat around campfires and been taught how to cook a kangaroo tail and been told fantastical stories about, you know, lightning jumping between clouds, being like the clouds are talking to each other on the telephone, telling each other not to rain right now because there's someone sitting outside eating their dinner. Yundamoo is one of the places that's quite close in Territory terms to Papunya,

• 9:52Speaker 03

  where the Western Desert Art Movement started. They have had a bilingual education, Walprie-English education system for decades. They have PAW Media, which is where Bush Mechanics, that famous TV show, was made and filmed. It's a really, really rich place and people have so much knowledge. But Walprie people don't show off about their knowledge. So most people don't ask, so most people don't know it's there.

• 10:24Gemma Bath?

  Can you give us some context to what the relationship was like between police and the community prior to this happening? Because there is a lot of history there, isn't there?

• 10:34Speaker 03

  There's a lot of history, and it's really hard to tie it down to a certain relationship because, of course, you know, all the police are individuals, all the community members are individuals, and some of those people might get on and some of them mightn't.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Even throughout this whole story of Kumanjayi's death, there were a lot of elders in Yundamoo who spoke of their fondness for certain police officers and how much they needed the police and cared for them and cared about them. Not the specific police officers involved in this incident, but police who had looked after their communities for years and who they knew well and who had lived with them and who'd been adopted into families or just cared for. So it's a complicated relationship, always. And in the Northern Territory, there's also that historical relationship of police having been involved in massacres in the past. You know, in particular for Yundamoo, the Coniston massacre in 1928,

• 11:29Speaker 03

  that's, it's often called sort of the last state sanctioned massacre in Australia. And a police officer led that and it went for months. So that's, that's very much living history in Yundamoo.

• 11:44Gemma Bath?

  That's not that long ago.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  It's not that long ago. Until, you know, 15 years ago, there were still people alive who remembered it as kids. But their families all still know the stories. And even when I was in Alice Springs in Yundamoo, writing about this story, I had people in their 60s come up to me and tell me about the deaths of family members in that massacre or in other instances, either by other, by white station owners or by police officers.

• 12:14Gemma Bath?

  I was interested to learn that Rolf was ex-military, but there's a lot of ex-military, particularly in the Territory.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I haven't been able to compare it to other states. So I don't know if it's similar in WA, for instance, or if it's similar in the ACT. But going off the top of my head, there's something like, something approaching 20 to 25% of the Northern Territory Police Force has a military background of some sort, has been in a defence force in the past. That is an enormous.

• 12:46Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, it feels big.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  That's an enormous number, right? Whether, whether other places have numbers similar or not, that's a big number. That's, you know, one in four cops you see on the street are going to have had a military background of some sort.

• 12:58Gemma Bath?

  Kumanjayi, can you tell us about him? A bit about his background, his story, who he was?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  He's a complicated character. He was 19 when he died. He didn't really ever get a proper sort of set of psychological tests to be able to pin down exactly what his cognitive disabilities were. But a psychologist who worked with him quite a bit has said to me that he had the mental capacity of about a six-year-old. So he had cognitive disabilities, quite likely brought on by fetal alcohol syndrome. His mother was a very heavy drinker. She died when he was less than 12 years old. His father died around the same time. So by the time he was 12, he didn't have parents. He was raised by members of his extended family.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  So he grew up mostly in Yundamoo. He had family in other remote communities as well, who he often visited. But when he was very young, before he was even one year old, he was sort of adopted out to a woman in Yundamoo, Leanne Oldfield, who cared for him because there was a lot of substance abuse, mostly alcohol abuse in his family. And members of his family decided it was better for Leanne to bring him up. He still grew up surrounded by a lot of violence and in a very fractured community and a very fractured family. He was sniffing petrol as a young child. He smoked a lot of cannabis by the time he was about 14 and onwards. And he was in and out of the justice system, in and out of juvenile detention,

• 14:31Speaker 03

  mostly for breaking into houses in Yundamoo. But also eventually for assaults on his, a number of girlfriends that he had. So there are two stories I would often get told about Kumanjayi, depending on who I was talking to. Many people would say, oh, he was a very friendly young man. He was not violent. He smiled a lot. He would laugh. He loved animals. He loved his family. And I'm sure that all of that is true. There is another truth, which was that he was very violent towards women in his life. And he died quite young and we don't know what that would have become.

• 15:11Gemma Bath?

  Will you explain really well why those family members or the community would have given a more sanitised version of Kumanjayi? There is a reason.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  There's a really good reason why Aboriginal people tell the more sanitised version of events in community. Because the intervention, which was brought in by John Howard's government, you know, around sort of end of 2006, is still talked about as a time of immense horror in the Northern Territory, by Aboriginal people in particular, and its impacts are still felt. It came about because there had been reports, you know, media reports of serious child abuse in remote communities. A very measured report and investigation was done on that by two very well-respected people in the Northern Territory. That report was given to government and Howard's government used it as an excuse

• 16:07Speaker 03

  to send the army in. And if you hear Aboriginal people tell the story, terrorise their communities. It was in the name of protecting children. It did not have that impact. And so in the eyes of many Aboriginal people who I've spoken to, that's what happens when you tell the truth. You don't get listened to in a compassionate way. You don't get supported and helped. No one asks you what the solutions might be, even though you know very well what the solutions will be. White people just come and jump on you and lock you up and shout at you and tell you you're broken and wrong. So that's a very easy story to tell about Kumanjayi because some of that is true.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  But it's not the whole truth.

• 16:54Gemma Bath?

  No.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  And if you tell some of the deficit side of the story, that's all that people hear.

• 17:01Gemma Bath?

  Before his death, police had basically been, and am I right in saying this, basically hunting him?

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Look, they're, they're, they're words that have been used. I, I shy away from hunting because it just sounds, maybe just because it sounds so harsh. But there was certainly a lot more interest in tracking down this particular 19-year-old Aboriginal bloke who had done nothing more than break out of rehab.

• 17:26Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, so that's what they wanted him for. He'd basically.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  He'd, he'd broken a suspended sentence by breaking out of rehab a week before he was meant to leave. Not the kind of violent incident that you would normally get an entire unit of police officers out to go searching for someone. Not the kind of behaviour that would normally lead to, you know, 12 police officers surrounding a house in a town camp. You know, maybe my reaction to the word hunting is just that it is so, it is such an awful image. But there was a lot more attention paid to catching Kumanjayi than was reasonable.

• 17:58Gemma Bath?

  Was part of the justification for that, this axe incident that had happened earlier?

• 18:04Speaker 03

  The axe incident, I'm trying to remember. I don't think the axe, the axe incident hadn't happened when the police went to the town camp to look for Kumanjayi.

• 18:13Gemma Bath?

  Oh.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  So the day after he escapes from rehab, a day or two later, there's a whole police unit surrounding Leanne Oldfield's house in the Walpera camp. And he's not there because he's headed off to Yundamoo already. He's hitched a ride with someone and no one, everyone knows who it is, but no one will say who it was who gave him a ride to Yundamoo.

• 18:33Gemma Bath?

  Of course.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  That will, that will stay buried in history, I think. But it wasn't, from my understanding, I'd have to check this, but it wasn't until a couple of days later that Kumanjayi threatened local police officers in Yundamoo with an axe in order to escape from the house. And I know that, because I used to feel this way before I lived in the Territory, what I say next will sound like an excuse. But it's one of the cultural differences that I learnt when I was in the Territory. Kumanjayi was in his girlfriend's house. Two local police officers from Yundamoo went to knock on the door to say to him that he needed to be arrested because he'd escaped from, from rehab.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  He didn't want to go with them. He wanted to go to his grandfather's funeral in two nights' time. So he pulled a small axe out from under the bed and he raised it above his head and he threatened these two police officers with it. He could have hit them, he could have easily killed one or desperately injured either of them. He didn't. They ran out of the house and he ran away. Now, that is an assault and those police officers would have been justified under law to pull their gun. And they would have been justified in shooting Kumun Jai, under our law. They didn't do either of those things because they understood, because they had lived in that community and understood Walpuri culture.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  He was behaving in the way that a Walpuri man believed he should behave, which was that he was being embarrassed in front of his girlfriend. The police maybe were going to hurt his girlfriend, so he had to be a big man and make a big show. And also, he wanted to escape. He wanted to get away and he knew that threatening them would let him get away. It's called demonstrative violence. Nothing comes of it, except a big show. Your bark's a lot bigger than your bite.

• 20:21Gemma Bath?

  So Rolf and the team that came to Yundamoo, they didn't have all of that context?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  They did have that context.

• 20:27Gemma Bath?

  They did, because they were from Alice Springs.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  They were from Alice Springs. They were a supposedly semi-elite unit who were able to respond to events, to sort of emergency events quickly. It was Rolf and the same crew who had gone and surrounded the house in Walpuri camp days earlier, looking for Kumun Jai. It's known that Rolf watched later on, watched the body worn video of that axe attack multiple, multiple times. Make what you will of that.

• 20:57Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  So that unit came out to Yundamoo. They had been asked to come out as a support unit. The local police had made a plan that Kumun Jai would be arrested at dawn. He would be allowed to go to his grandfather's funeral. He was supposed to then come and hand himself in at the police station, or his family were. That's regular occurrence in small Aboriginal communities, that people will make an agreement with the police when they'll come in and they'll come in. But the cops were pretty sure he wouldn't do that. He didn't. So their backup plan was, we'll arrest him at dawn. We'll go and we'll go into the house and we'll get him when he's asleep. Rolf and his crew were meant to come and just do patrols of the community and just keep everything settled down. Maybe do some random breath testing.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  They weren't meant to be part of arresting Kumun Jai. They were meant to stand back. They were not even meant to be the people who went in to grab Kumun Jai.

• 21:48Gemma Bath?

  While all this was happening, you mentioned his grandfather's funeral. For those that aren't aware of what a First Nations funeral looks like, it's huge.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  It can be, yeah.

• 21:59Gemma Bath?

  And this one was?

• 22:00Speaker 03

  And this one was because his grandfather was a very, very important man in Walpuri culture and also very important in non-Indigenous culture. He was a very important artist and very skilled by cultural man. So he had a lot of friends and supporters in the Kardia community. But a lot of people came from lots of really remote places to be there at that funeral. And it's sort of like a day, a day-long affair, you know, there's sort of ceremony all throughout the day and then the burial in the evening. And it was while people were around the gravesite that phones started ringing in the cemetery to say Kumun Jai's been shot.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  So you're standing at a funeral and you hear about the death of a young.

• 22:48Gemma Bath?

  Well, a family member, because his whole family would have been there. Extended family, family acquaintances.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also Walpuri culture has, families are a much bigger concept than it is for us. You know, Kumun Jai had dozens of grandfathers.

• 23:05Gemma Bath?

  From the police's point of view, what actually happened? Because they entered the Red House, as it's known, and they came across Kumun Jai. What happened?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  So what happened was that Rolf and the team that he was in Yundamoo with were meant to go out and just start looking around Yundamoo and getting a lay of the land. What they did instead was they immediately went looking for Kumun Jai, even though they knew they weren't, he wasn't meant to be arrested until dawn. They went looking for him. They went to the houses where they knew he stayed and they asked for him. They went inside and they searched for him. They spoke to people and asked where he was. People told them where he was.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  They said they thought he was at either the blue house or the red house next door. And so then Rolf and Iber, who were partners, Iber went into the house first. Rolf followed him and Kumun Jai was in the house. They asked him who he was, what his name was. He gave him a false name. And then Rolf sort of pushed Kumun Jai up with his back against a wall. And is, I've seen the footage, Rolf is holding up his mobile phone beside Kumun Jai's face, trying to get a match, an ID. And that's when Kumun Jai pulls a pair of medical scissors or nail scissors out of his pocket

• 24:30Speaker 03

  and starts swinging at Rolf and ends up stabbing him in the shoulder, at which point Rolf draws his gun and shoots him.

• 24:40Gemma Bath?

  Three times?

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Three times. He shoots him once. Iber then gets Kumun Jai in a, in a sort of headlock and wrestles him to the ground and he's lying on top of Kumun Jai.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Rolf then leans down, puts his gun

• 24:57Speaker 03

  very close to Kumun Jai's torso and fires two shots in rapid succession at very, very close range.

• 25:04Gemma Bath?

  I've seen the footage too. It's quite hard at that point to see what's going on, which is obviously why everything, which is, has happened since.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:14Gemma Bath?

  In the documentary, a lot of the family members talk about what happened next, the ones that were nearby, about watching Kumun Jai being dragged out of that house. They say, like a kangaroo and dragged across the floor. And they were making the kind of comparison that if Rolf had been shot, there is no way he would have been carried like that. I know you've seen what I'm talking about.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it goes back to your use of the word hunting, doesn't it? And I think that is, that is very much how

• 25:46Speaker 03

  the Aboriginal community can feel.

• 25:48Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Or members of the Aboriginal community can feel in the Northern Territory about the way that they are sometimes treated. And that physical evidence of being dragged like a kangaroo. I mean, that's, it's all about respect. It's all about signs of respect. And that's another thing that Walpuri people are really big on, is showing respect.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  And I think that's one of the most often repeated.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  It's more than a complaint that, that people have had, is just the lack of respect that has been shown to them throughout this whole story.

• 26:27Gemma Bath?

  Coming up, Kate takes us through the trial process and what it was like in the courtroom.

• 26:37Gemma Bath?

  A note I want to make before we move on, there were no medical people in town that day, were there?

• 26:41Speaker 03

  No, there weren't. And this is the other side of the story, right? This is, it's not the other side of the story. This is part of the complexity of these stories is kids like the kid that Kumun Jai was when he was doing it, break into the shop and break into houses in Yundamoo all the time for fun, for something to do. Sometimes looking for alcohol, sometimes looking for food, sometimes looking for cigarettes, sometimes just for the kicks. And it can be really terrifying for people who don't live there, usually, for non. It can be terrifying for Walpuri people as well, but it can be terrifying for visiting nurses and doctors who are not used to life in a remote community or who are also just not used to having, you know, someone take a crowbar to their window in the middle of the night.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  It's violent and it's really frightening. And there had been a spate of break-ins for the week preceding this. And the nurses had had enough. They were scared and they were pissed off. And their bosses, they called their bosses in Alice Springs and said, this is what's happened and we're over it. And their bosses ordered them to leave town. So there was no one running the clinic. There was no one at the clinic. All of those staff had left.

• 27:52Gemma Bath?

  So the people trying to save Kumun Jai's life were the officers, including Rolf.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:57Gemma Bath?

  He was taken back to the police station. They worked on him and we, in the documentary, you get to see it all. You see it all on body camera and it's, it's a challenging watch. Why do you think it is important or do you think it's important for Australians to witness Kumun Jai's final hours?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  I, I think Darren Dale and Blackfellow Films are some of the most sensitive, thoughtful filmmakers in Australia. And I think the way that they have gone about it is very careful and very respectful. And I think the decisions that they've made to show this are about really bringing it home to people.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  The violence of a death in custody and the trauma of that situation. The trauma of a young man lying on the floor of a police cell, bleeding out. And men older than him trying to then save his life after one of them has shot him.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  There's such a, there's such complexity and such trauma and such horror in all of that. And I think the only way to really feel it is to see it.

• 29:18Gemma Bath?

  And unfortunately, sometimes people need to see it to believe it.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  I don't know how I feel about it personally. I think it's a very intimate thing to see someone die.

• 29:35Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Gemma Bath?

  Well, his family would have liked that opportunity to be with him, but they weren't allowed in. No one was allowed in.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 29:45Gemma Bath?

  What was happening outside the station?

• 29:48Speaker 03

  So there, once news spread through Yundamoo very rapidly that Kumun Jai had been shot and that the police had taken him back to the station, pretty much the whole town walked or drove to the police station and sat down outside to try and find out what was going on. There was a group of, reports said 80 to 100 men armed with traditional and non-traditional weapons, walking towards the police station at one point. And female members of that, those men stopped them and took the weapons off them and put them in the boot of the car. And the men went towards the police station. I mention that because that is part of the story. And that level of anger and threat is part of the story.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  But by all reports and by the vision I've seen, the people's, everyone sitting outside the station was pretty calm and pretty relaxed, not relaxed, but pretty, pretty calm. And the elders were keeping everyone under control. There were young men throwing rocks on the roof of the police station. People just really wanted to know what was going on. Was Kumanjayi alive or dead? Where was he going to get help? What was going to happen next? Could people go in to see him? And the police locked the doors and wouldn't let anyone in. And there was an Aboriginal police officer, Derek Williams, who's related to Kumanjayi, who stood outside with his father and grandfather, keeping the crowd under control. And police inside the station didn't let Derek know what was going on either.

• 31:12Gemma Bath?

  I just don't understand why. What?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Because, as the police officers who made the decision explained on the stand during the coronial, they were faced with the decision of telling Derek, as a Walpary uncle to this young man, that his nephew had died, which entails a whole lot of cultural obligations for Derek, of people who he has to tell and things that he has to do. And telling him as a police officer, who could help them contain any blowback and help people understand what had happened. And police who made those decisions were also very aware that, in a lot of ways, they themselves were the most dangerous people in the scenario because they had guns.

• 31:57Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  And if the community found out that Kumanjayi was dead, lost control, became angry, attacked the station, or started attacking police, police would defend themselves and they would likely use guns. And that would likely end up with more deaths.

• 32:12Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  So there's a very delicate, very morally complicated set of decisions that a couple of police officers are trying to make on behalf of a large number of very angry and frightened people.

• 32:27Gemma Bath?

  And you can kind of see it from both sides. But I can particularly see it from the family's side, when an ambulance leaves the station, heads towards the tarmac, the family thinks, oh, great, he's being medevaced out, he's going to get help. Meanwhile, Kumanjayi had already died. And that was a bit of a, like, it was a ruse to try and, it was to get Rolf out, wasn't it?

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it wasn't Kumanjayi's body in the ambulance going to the Yundamoo airstrip, it was Rolf. And he was being sort of secreted out. And the plane that met him on the airstrip was carrying reinforcement police officers from Alice Springs, who came in, some of them with long arms, unfortunately, to provide more police presence in Yundamoo and keep the peace.

• 33:21Gemma Bath?

  But you can see why they'd be angry by that.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 33:24Gemma Bath?

  That's really hurtful. And then the fact that they weren't told about Kumanjayi until

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 33:29Gemma Bath?

  8am the next morning?

• 33:30Speaker 03

  I think it is only absolutely reasonable and deeply human to be furious about that.

• 33:38Gemma Bath?

  Well, it wasn't just Indemou, it was Australia. Like, Australia was furious.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  But that's what makes this story different. Because mostly, people don't get furious. Mostly, people don't notice. People move on.

• 33:55Gemma Bath?

  So why is it that this one broke through?

• 33:57Speaker 03

  I think part of it is because Rolf was charged with murder three days later. Because police officers don't get charged with murder anywhere, but especially not in Australia, and especially not in the Northern Territory. And the fact that Rolf was charged, even though we must say here he was acquitted.

• 34:15Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  The fact that he was charged said, there's something to see here.

• 34:22Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  And so, people who might normally poo-poo a death in custody and say, oh, another one, it's just a bunch of whingers, or couldn't, because something was happening in the legal system. And people who are used to being overlooked and just being quietly angry, were given a bit of hope that something was happening differently this time. And I think that really brought, I think that put a lot of momentum behind this story. And then, six months later, George Floyd was killed in the US. And then, not long after that, you know, we started having conversations about the referendum for a voice in Australia.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  So there's, I feel like it happened, Kumanjayi's death happened at a time when a whole lot of forces were building in Australia towards the idea of First Nations people getting a bit of a better share of power and a bit of, bit of a voice. And in a way, this conflict between these two men sort of personified the power struggle between black and white.

• 35:27Gemma Bath?

  You say that, but while you were discussing all of those elements and all of that context in your own book, you also talk about this ANU research that came out at the same time, which, to be honest, I was quite shocked by.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:41Gemma Bath?

  That said, three in four people in Australia hold negative views about First Nations people. Three in four.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:51Gemma Bath?

  So even though there's all these Australians backing, we've got these stats showing.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  But the, and the way, and the way that that, the data that that survey, that that paper is based on, measures unconscious bias and unconscious prejudice. So it's a reaction to images. It's like a, it's a split second reaction to images. And so what it reflects is a, is a deeply embedded bias. You've got to remember, at the same time, you know, a couple of years after Kumanjayi's death, so he was shot at the end of 2019, by 20, end of 2020, 2021, all of the surveys that were being done to see how people felt about First Nations people getting a, getting a voice to parliament, those surveys were, were like,

• 36:38Speaker 03

  hitting 80% yes, for about three years in a row.

• 36:42Gemma Bath?

  Yep.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  So it was a time of change. We were getting our first Aboriginal judges on the bench, in the Northern Territory and elsewhere. Aboriginal languages are being taught again at TAFs and in schools. There was and there is this groundswell of, of growth and change and, and interest. And I do feel that this story, this conflict between this young black man and this white police officer is really, it's like two people playing out those warring desires.

• 37:20Gemma Bath?

  Can you tell us a bit more about Zachary Rolf? Who was he? We mentioned before, ex-military. Give us a bit of a background.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Grew up in Canberra, one of three boys.

• 37:30Gemma Bath?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  His mum was a lawyer. His dad owned a prestige car dealership in Canberra. Very wealthy people, very active in the philanthropy community, gave a lot of money to mental health and veteran charities. Zach went to a private school. He was described to me by people he went to school with as a very blokey bloke, who was very keen to sort of prove his masculinity. And a bit of a wild child. You know, a risk-taking, a risk-taker.

• 38:12Gemma Bath?

  And very attracted to courage.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  I-

• 38:15Gemma Bath?

  Bravery, that kind of-

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Yes. The bravery, the idea of physical endurance and physical power being a sign of courage and bravery seems, stands out very strongly to me from Zach, but also from his dad. His dad is very involved with the War Memorial in Canberra, gives a lot of money to it, is very into medals and, and bravery awards.

• 38:40Gemma Bath?

  He was bailed after being charged with murder. And I know that that was a point of real upset for the community. Can you explain why?

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Getting bail after murder is not that unusual. Because bail is based on your threat to the community, or your threat to other members of the community, perceived threat. A lot of people who kill someone else are only a threat to that person.

• 39:09Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  They're not a threat to anyone else. And while a lot of Aboriginal people say and have said, well, if that was a black person, we wouldn't have gotten bail, they have an argument to make. And I think it's, they're probably right on balance. I don't think there's anything that unusual about Zach getting bail. I know it pisses people off.

• 39:29Gemma Bath?

  Yeah. And you can see why it hurts.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  You can absolutely see why it hurts, because Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory are used to being locked up for absolutely nothing.

• 39:36Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  They're used to being locked up for yelling on the bus. They're used to being locked up for having a drink and a laugh in public. They're used to being locked up for all sorts of things. And then they see a white police officer kill a member of their community, he gets charged with murder and he's not locked up. And that is an enormous injustice in their eyes. And I can see why.

• 39:58Gemma Bath?

  So there's the Justice for Walker campaign on one side. So that's his community. And then on the other side?

• 40:06Speaker 03

  There's the infamous Facebook page, I Support Constable Zach Rolf, which was a wonderful source of information for me in my book, I have to say.

• 40:16Gemma Bath?

  A bit of a treasure trove.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  An absolute treasure trove of, of Australian masculinity.

• 40:20Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Um, yeah. It was set up by friends and family of Zach's to support him and to give voice to what ended up mostly being ex-military and ex-police and, and serving military and police officers to comment on what they thought was going on. And also a few local Territorians.

• 40:38Gemma Bath?

  I guess, like, you're allowed to support.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 40:42Gemma Bath?

  But why was this different? For me, it was like, the merch, the-

• 40:46Speaker 03

  The merch was pretty full-on, the I Back Zach t-shirts and stubby holders. Again, it's that very Manosphere kind of edge

• 40:56Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  to it. And I think the fact that it was all, there was no respect for the fact on that Facebook page that a young man had lost his life.

• 41:07Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  No respect at all. There was no awareness of that voiced by anyone. It was just-

• 41:19Speaker 03

  He got what was coming to him and let's just make sure that Zachary Rolfe doesn't go to prison.

• 41:24Gemma Bath?

  The trial eventually got underway.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 41:27Gemma Bath?

  There was lots of delays and pushbacks and it was COVID.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  It was COVID.

• 41:31Gemma Bath?

  Were COVID.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:33Gemma Bath?

  Some of them were not.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Some of them were legal challenges, yeah.

• 41:35Gemma Bath?

  When it finally went ahead, you were there in that courtroom. What was it like?

• 41:40Speaker 03

  It was a very unusual courtroom.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  It was poisonous by the end. The room was poisonous by the end. I, I was there for every day of the trial, but I left

• 41:57Speaker 03

  the day before the, before the verdict came down. I, I just couldn't be in the building anymore.

• 42:02Gemma Bath?

  Why?

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Because the venom brought into the room by

• 42:11Speaker 03

  people who were there to support Zachary Rolfe, and this is not Zachary Rolfe's responsibility. The venom that they brought into the room was just unbearable. It was just, it was inhuman. It was awful.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  There were so many young men with their chests puffed out, strutting around like roosters,

• 42:38Speaker 03

  as though they were there to show the world that this was what anyone was up against if they wanted to go after someone like Rolfe. I found it really distasteful. And there were a lot of Walpury people in court. Most people didn't stay in the courtroom for very long, other than Ned Jumper Jimbo Hargreaves, who was there every single day.

• 43:01Gemma Bath?

  Was he?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 43:03Gemma Bath?

  And he's an elder from the community?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a, he's a very important elder from the community.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  But it was too hard for most people to be in that room. And also, the legal system is hard enough for anyone to understand unless, you know, unless you're really used to it. It's even harder to understand if it's being, you know, performed in a language that you don't speak or that you're not fluent in. And if you don't have great hearing and if you're still traumatised by, you know, the death that's being spoken about. And there was a big police presence outside the courthouse as well, as though, as though.

• 43:40Gemma Bath?

  That were going to cause trouble?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think that was one of the most racist things I, not one of the most racist things. That was one of the things that really struck me as being incredibly racist.

• 43:53Gemma Bath?

  In terms of the evidence that was presented, was there anything that surprised you?

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Yes, there was something that surprised me in evidence in the murder trial. I think it surprised a lot of people and that was when Zachary Rolfe took the stand and said that Kumanjayi had reached for his gun in the red house and tried to get his gun off him. Because no one had heard that, it was sort of, you know, it was a year and a half, two years by the time the murder trial came on. That hadn't been mentioned in any of the media interviews that Zach had given to different newspapers or TV outlets.

• 44:32Gemma Bath?

  And that's huge in terms of a piece of evidence.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  It's, it's enormous.

• 44:37Gemma Bath?

  It's like intent, it's, it's, it's.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, it would be the biggest piece of evidence in your standard, you know. Yeah, it's very big. But it hadn't been mentioned in anyone's statements. Any of the other police officers, none of them had said, oh, you know, and Zach said to us after he came out of the red house that that Kumanjayi had reached for his gun.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  So that was a big shock.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  I think everyone was surprised by that.

• 45:06Gemma Bath?

  Because both sides agreed that the first shot was self-defence.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:12Gemma Bath?

  The argument was the next two shots.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Were not necessary.

• 45:16Gemma Bath?

  Was that murder?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:19Gemma Bath?

  As you mentioned earlier, he was acquitted. By the time you got to the end of the trial, you said you left. Did you know? Did you, could you have foreseen what that outcome was going to be?

• 45:29Speaker 03

  I think you could have foreseen.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Even if you know the law, if you understand the law and what it takes to prove a charge of murder, you would have known going into that trial that the chances of Zachary Rolfe being found guilty of murder were extremely small. Not zero, but extremely small.

• 45:48Gemma Bath?

  I'm curious, I know you weren't there, but you've obviously seen all of the footage, his reaction, his people's reaction. What was that like?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  To the verdict?

• 45:57Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  I have a very strong memory of Zachary Rolfe's barrister, David Edwardsen, and also the president of the Police Association of the Northern Territory, standing on the stairs of the Supreme Court and giving sort of victory speeches, really.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Zachary Rolfe himself was very subdued and didn't say anything much, just said that he didn't feel like it was the right time to say anything.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they were obviously happy with the outcome.

• 46:37Gemma Bath?

  Do you think Kumanjayi's family had hope though? Like that they were pretty, they were crushed.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:45Gemma Bath?

  So they, they did think that.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  It might happen.

• 46:49Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  And, yeah, they did. And it might have, it wasn't very likely, but it might have happened. But what I also know and understand very deeply from following this case and following the coronial inquest after it and still being in contact with lots of people in the community is that the difference between Walpury law and its approach to Kumanjayi's death and what Walpury people call cardio law or white law, those worldviews of how justice is done are so completely different that

• 47:28Speaker 03

  there's just, it just doesn't compute for Walpury people that nothing happened to Rolfe for taking a life.

• 47:35Gemma Bath?

  That that was the end?

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Or call it anything else, that that's the end.

• 47:37Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Like that just doesn't, it just doesn't compute. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that people were still asking at the coronial, oh, might he go to jail after this?

• 47:46Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  And no one ever go, you know, not, that doesn't happen, that's not what a coronial is about. But people just couldn't understand that the process was over without Rolfe having been sanctioned in any way.

• 47:59Gemma Bath?

  After the break, Kate tells us about the coronial inquest and takes us through the evidence that was never revealed during the murder trial.

• 48:09Gemma Bath?

  Obviously, there's the murder trial, he's acquitted, then it goes to coronial inquest. Not all deaths go to coronial inquest, but is it right that all deaths in custody do?

• 48:19Speaker 03

  What's, what's right is that all unusual deaths or deaths caused by a police officer or an employee of the state will. So because it was, this was a death in custody, but Kumanjayi was killed by a police officer. And so therefore it had to be, there had to be a coronial inquest. You might die in custody, you might die, you know, in prison from a heart attack.

• 48:40Gemma Bath?

  There's still one?

• 48:41Speaker 03

  There might still be a coronial, but it won't be a big sort of event. It might just be done on the paperwork rather than having a big set of hearings and evidence and witnesses.

• 48:49Gemma Bath?

  Well, this coronial hearing was supposed to be three months.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:53Gemma Bath?

  It went for many years.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Spread across two years.

• 48:58Gemma Bath?

  Because like, I don't think people expected what ended up coming out of it.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  No, they absolutely did not. I didn't expect a lot of what came out of it.

• 49:07Gemma Bath?

  Let's start with Rolfe. It's so different. He can basically get on that stand and things can be put forward that can't be put forward in a murder trial.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:19Gemma Bath?

  So things like his text messages to family and colleagues. Tell us about those because they painted a very clear picture.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  So the difference between a murder trial and a coronial case, murder trials and criminal cases are all about limiting the amount of information that you're making a decision on as much as you possibly can.

• 49:37Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Coronial is the opposite. You talk about everything.

• 49:41Gemma Bath?

  They want everything.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Everything's in. So the police had Zachary Rolfe's mobile phone and they had access to his text messages. And they were pretty damning, some that Zach sent, some that were sent to him. And counsel assisting, Peggy Dwyer.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Led evidence that brought those text messages on to the record and they were read out in court and people were ashen faced. It was, it was shocking. It was so shocking to hear that that sort of language is still used and how easily and how readily and how flippantly.

• 50:20Gemma Bath?

  We're obviously not going to share what those words were, but they were racist slurs.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Racist slurs and sexist slurs and homophobic slurs, basically your general, you know, dickhead Aussie bloke attitude.

• 50:36Gemma Bath?

  And then there was also evidence put forward of a number of other violent incidents that he'd been involved in.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is where I think it's also really important, you know, we're talking, you know, one of the, one of the sort of subtexts or maybe not even subtexts of what we're talking about is racism. And I think there's, you know, individuals can be racist or can act in racist ways. But I think it's also really important to understand that in the Territory and in Australia, we are working within systems that are deeply racist as well. And the Northern Territory Police Forces systems are deeply racist and the disciplinary system is deeply racist. I say that because, you know, 80, 90% of people who come before the courts or who were picked up by police are Aboriginal in the Northern

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Territory. So they are over policed and over imprisoned. But if you're a police officer in the Northern Territory and you do something wrong, or someone wants to make a complaint about you, such as overusing force or pushing a kid down a hill or whatever it might be, they've got six months to make a complaint. And if they don't complain within that six months, nothing can happen.

• 51:46Gemma Bath?

  Right.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  There is no recourse. So if you are being looked after by senior police officers who are letting just stuff go under the radar, or they're not noticing, or they don't care, you can do all sorts of things and not be disciplined in the way that you might otherwise be if someone was paying attention or if someone was doing their job properly. And there is an argument to say that that was very much the case with Zachary Rolfe. Now, he would, he would defend that. He has defended that in the past by saying, I never got more than an email. Those, all of those things were looked into again, even after the coronial. No one ever sent me anything more than an email. That's because that's all that's possible

• 52:32Speaker 03

  after six months have passed. That may be one explanation. Another explanation may be that they found that he didn't do anything wrong.

• 52:38Gemma Bath?

  Yeah. So he gives evidence. Was it after his evidence that, did he quit? Did he lose his job?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  He did, he was sacked. It was, that's another part of the racist system. It's incredibly hard to sack a police officer in the Northern Territory. Harder in the Northern Territory than anywhere else in Australia. There were many things that Zach had done up until then that might have led to him being disciplined if anyone had been paying attention. But the only thing that the police force could catch him on, breaking the rules by the middle of the inquest, was that he wrote and published a very derogatory letter, open letter about the Northern Territory Police Force and its executive, and published it in a newspaper. That broke the media rules, the, you know, police engaging with the media rules and

• 53:28Speaker 03

  a good behaviour bond that he was on at the time. And that gave them grounds to sack him.

• 53:32Gemma Bath?

  It just, it feels like the coronial inquests usually go, some of them go under the radar. This one, and this is only the start.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:39Gemma Bath?

  Because Zachary is sacked and then he comes back.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  And then he comes back and.

• 53:45Gemma Bath?

  And absolutely blows the lid on the entire Northern Territory Police Force.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 53:50Gemma Bath?

  In a real, well, you were there, right?

• 53:53Speaker 03

  In quite astonishing fashion, yes.

• 53:54Gemma Bath?

  It was shocking?

• 53:55Speaker 03

  It was absolutely shocking. He took the stand. He gave a lot of very interesting evidence. And a lot of it was about how racist everybody else in the Northern Territory Police Force was. He presented what were called examples of the Nogada Awards, which were also known as the racial slur of the year awards. And they were basically making fun of Aboriginal people and they were given to police officers for being, having bad hygiene, getting drunk, passing out, treating women poorly, any number of different kind of things

• 54:36Speaker 03

  that were supposedly associated with being Indigenous. One of them was printed on, one of the certificates was printed on an Aboriginal flag. Another one showed the body of a deceased Aboriginal man, surrounded by images of beer cans. One was a black and white minstrel.

• 54:55Gemma Bath?

  They're quite shocking to see.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  They're, they're really horrendous, yeah.

• 54:58Gemma Bath?

  Because Zach brought them in.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Zach brought them in.

• 55:01Gemma Bath?

  Which I think he needed, like, to, to actually hear about them is one thing, to see them.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:06Gemma Bath?

  To see the imagery.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:08Gemma Bath?

  And who was, who was involved in this? He was accusing really high levels of the police force.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  The TRG, the Territory Response Group, which is the elite, sort of like the SWAT squad in, in the Northern Territory, very much the heroes of the police force, the, the really tough guys who do the really, really tricky stuff. And he was saying that these awards had been given out in the TRG for, you know, decades, which seems to be the truth. And Zach had very much wanted to be a member of the TRG, but he had not been accepted. He passed the tests to get in, but he had not been given a position. So I guess he went from really wanting to be part of that unit to really wanting to dump on them.

• 55:55Gemma Bath?

  Why do you think that is? Was it trying to point the finger away from him, trying to show that?

• 56:01Speaker 03

  I think in Zachary's mind, he's not the only one, you know, he was being held up as this individual who was really bad and really racist and done all these things.

• 56:11Gemma Bath?

  Like the bad apple.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  The bad guy. And he was saying, hey, guys, you know, I'm not the only one and I'm not the worst one. This is all around me and, you know, I'm just not going to sit here and carry this load for everybody in the police force.

• 56:27Gemma Bath?

  Well, when he first kind of gave that evidence about the awards, he didn't have the proof. And some of the, well, did they lie on the stand? They, they, they said they didn't know anything about it.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  There were senior police officers who were implicated in the TR, in the Nogada Awards, who wrote statutory declarations claiming that the Nogada Awards were not what they appeared to be, that they were about something completely different, that Nogada was making fun of a sort of caveman language and that they were always called cavemen because they could lift heavy things and they weren't very smart. And it was all bullshit. But that only lasted, that facade only lasted about 12 hours.

• 57:10Gemma Bath?

  Did any of them lose their jobs?

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Not that I'm aware of, no.

• 57:13Gemma Bath?

  Really?

• 57:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:15Gemma Bath?

  Because the findings for that inquest were last year?

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yes, July last year.

• 57:20Gemma Bath?

  They were delivered in Yundamoo?

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:23Gemma Bath?

  There were 700 pages?

• 57:25Speaker 03

  That was a lot, yes.

• 57:27Gemma Bath?

  We're obviously not going to say all 700 pages, but what, what were the top lines that people took away from those findings?

• 57:36Speaker 03

  That, that the coroner could not rule out that racism was a factor in Kumanjayi Walker's death, that the Northern Territory Police Force suffered from systemic racism, that Zachary Rolfe was racist, that a lot needed to change. Those are the ones that really stick.

• 57:55Gemma Bath?

  Was that validating for the community or?

• 57:58Speaker 03

  I think, again, it's hard to speak in absolutes. I know that Ned Jumper Jimba Hargraves said to me a couple of days later, well, we've been listened to. We got further this time than we've ever gotten before. We got a police officer to court, we got him on trial. We got the coroner to listen to us. That's the other thing that, one of the findings was also, Ned Jumper Jimba Hargraves in particular had, had asked that police officers not carry guns in remote communities. It used to be the case in the Territory that they didn't and now they do. He wanted to go back to the old days. And the coroner suggested that that should be looked into. But at the end of it all, Ned Hargraves said that he was, he felt really validated. He felt that the community had been listened

• 58:43Speaker 03

  to. I know that there are other people who sort of left partway through the findings being read out because they felt like it was just a lot of white fellas talking still and nothing changing.

• 58:54Gemma Bath?

  Well, you did mention that, that was, well, that's six months ago, that was last year. Have we seen any of those findings actually come into practice?

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Not that I'm aware of, but I must say I'm not following it really closely. You know, I've, I've had other things.

• 59:13Gemma Bath?

  Of course.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  There has been another death in custody, another death of a young Aboriginal man in Coles, in Alice Springs, in the course of being arrested by an off-duty police officer. So that coronial inquest will, another young man who grew up in Yundamoo, that coronial inquest will begin in March in Alice Springs. So there'll be an opportunity, I guess, at that inquest to see what has been enacted since the last one.

• 59:41Gemma Bath?

  It does feel though, like it's lots of words, lots of findings, lots of pages, which is often the case in not just inquests like this, you find it in.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  In royal commissions, in inquests, in investigations, all over the place, yeah.

• 59:57Gemma Bath?

  And it's like, okay, there's the talk, where's the action?

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Gemma Bath?

  So I guess what do we do? We can put pressure on them to?

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  I think 2.6 seconds will bring that question home. I think it will bring the experience for all sorts of Territorians, for police, the experience for police officers, who are, who are working in Alice Springs and in communities and in remote places. It will bring the experience of Walpary and Luritja and Arundah and all sorts of other Indigenous groups in the Territory. It will bring their experiences home. It will bring life in a remote community home. It will bring the complexity of the legal system and that cultural clash home. And hopefully it will bring that groundswell of support up like it did after Kumanjayi shooting. And maybe the public and the community can bring

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  some pressure to bear on what happens next.

• 1:00:52Gemma Bath?

  Because the documentary is remarkable in that you do hear from so many local voices.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Darren Dale is an amazing storyteller. He is so.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Instinctive and so trustworthy and so balanced. He is interested in what that experience was like for everyone. He's not interested in delivering people a line that they have to follow and believe in. He's interested in putting all of the perspectives in front of people and letting an audience make up their own mind. And I think he's done that beautifully.

• 1:01:28Gemma Bath?

  Obviously, we're talking about holding the police force to account. And what are you doing to change? But I'm going to quote you back to yourself again. Because you said in why you've written your book on this story is because Australia's collective view of history was changing and the country was changing with it.

• 1:01:49Gemma Bath?

  So from a society point of view, from a people point of view, do you think that that momentum has continued? Are we changing all these years later?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  I do. I think we are still changing. I think it's very easy to get stuck on the horror stories. But the, the rich, beautiful, cross-cultural, relationship-based work and understanding and growth is still happening. There are so many museums and galleries all around the world that are, that are giving artefacts and, and ancestors' remains back to Indigenous communities in Australia. And the people are finally able to bury their great, great grandfathers and grandmothers who've been sitting in a museum drawer for 150 years.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Language is being revitalised.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Even though the voice referendum didn't pass, so many relationships were built out of that and such incredible things are growing from it. Quietly, gently, in little places without any fanfare. And that is where change happens. And I have a lot of faith and I have a lot of faith in Northern Territorians as being the people who can show the rest of the country how to do it well and how to do it for real.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  So there's a lot that's still troublesome and difficult and broken, but it's there.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  It's totally there and we can do it. Like, we just can't give up. If Ned Jumper Jimbo Hargraves and the old people in Central Australia are prepared to keep going and keep trying, then nobody else has an excuse for not trying.

• 1:03:28Gemma Bath?

  You're here. Kate, thank you so much for being here, for helping us tell this story.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:03:38Gemma Bath?

  Thank you to Kate for helping us to tell this story. You can find the first two episodes of 2.6 Seconds: Deaths in the Outback on SBS On Demand. The final two episodes will be available next week. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.