As the news came through on Friday that the man who had run down young Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie last year had escaped a manslaughter conviction and instead had been sentenced for three years for the charge of reckless driving causing death, I saw Aboriginal community members dissolve. Many expressed grief for Elijah's family and community. Others set about highlighting how there is rarely any justice in this system for Aboriginal people and how our lives mean nothing to greater Australia. Others set about activating the community by calling rallies and actions to protest this ruling and highlight the injustice.
Despite all this, the one reaction I did not see coming out of the community was surprise. Because we weren't surprised. From one end of the country to the other, Aboriginal community members were expecting this ruling and had been ever since police decided not to charge the 56 year old male driver (whose name has been suppressed) with murder, instead opting for the lesser charge of manslaughter.
We have seen it all happen before and history dictates that, at the end of the day, it is highly unlikely that killing an Aboriginal child, or man, or woman, will attract a sentence at all—if it even goes to court in the first place.
As Chris Graham points out, the number of Aboriginal people who have been killed, and for whom the justice system has failed, continues to climb. Yet there is rarely any outcry from the general public. It is telling that in the case of Elijah, not only has the conviction been watered down to what essentially amounts to a bad traffic misdemeanour, continuously in articles—in online commentary and so forth—it seemed the populace was excusing the perpetrator's actions by stating that Elijah had “stolen a motorbike” from him.
Never mind that the circumstances around how Elijah came to be riding that bike have never been established. Never mind that it also hasn't been established whether Elijah even knew the bike was stolen. Never mind that Elijah actually had two bikes of his own which had been taken by the police under “suspicion” of being stolen, only to be returned after his death when it was established that they weren't.
None of these facts seems to matter. Due to the racist undercurrent which permeates Australia, what seems to matter most is how the actions of a 56-year-old man, driving a two tonne vehicle, can be reconfigured so that when he decided, on impulse, to chase down and kill an Aboriginal boy it can be implied that the responsibility for the death lies solidly with the boy.
It doesn't matter that there was no evidence of braking or swerving at the crime scene. According to them, this boy's life was not even worth the motorcycle he was riding on—as if he was the true criminal in all of this.
As someone who lives in Melbourne, where the horrific Bourke Street attack happened earlier this year, I could not help but compare the two crimes and the reactions to them by the media, the justice system, the politicians and the public. There was never any question that Jimmy Gargasoulas would face murder charges for running down people. We knew that politicians would make sorrowful statements and act swiftly. We knew that the media would honour the victims and show it for the tragic loss it was. We knew that the general public would rally and also ensure that the victims were remembered and honoured.
Yet there were no murder charges for Elijah's death. There were no multiple page spreads in the newspaper respectfully remembering an Aboriginal boy whose life had been tragically cut short. And when the distraught Aboriginal community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder rioted over this injustice, the media instead decided to focus in on that violence, rather than the cause of the grief.
"As someone who lives in Melbourne where the horrific Bourke Street attack happened earlier this year, I could not help but compare the two crimes and the reactions to them by the media."
As highlighted by Dr Lissa Johnson, the best the then-State Attorney General, Michael Michin, could manage was to call the rioters a lynch mob and deny 'any role of the justice system in their distress, saying that they had 'taken advantage of… the death of this young teenager in order to exploit the situation'.
A reasonable portion of white Australia is not prepared to acknowledge there is any narrative in which Aboriginal people are the victims of white people, white systems or white governments. For far too long, the narratives have revolved around our criminality and our alleged shortcomings.
As Gerry Georgatos has highlighted, one in six Aboriginal people in Western Australia has been to prison. Yet while this state has no issue imprisoning Aboriginal domestic violence victims for unpaid fines and then allowing them to die in their cell after not receiving appropriate medical care three times—or imprisoning an Aboriginal child for stealing a chocolate frog—it has trouble applying that same harsh judgement to non-Indigenous people.
The failure to charge Elijah's killer with murder in the first instance, and the the failure to uphold a manslaughter charge in court—eventually passing a sentence which will probably see him out before an Aboriginal man who was imprisoned following the riot—suggests that race plays a huge part in sentencing.
To return to the community response, though, what I saw more than anything else was despair. Despair that regardless of how many years go by, our lives, and the lives of the generations which follow us, just simply don't matter.
Like so many others, I worried for the safety of my niece and nephews in a country which continually shows that their life and liberty is worth less than a motorcycle, or a building, or a parking fine. I worry that if something does happen to them, there will be little hope of justice—if indeed the perpetrators are ever held to account in court in the first place unless there is community outcry. I certainly was thinking these thoughts as the gavel came down last Friday.
Celeste Liddle is an Arrernte woman living in Melbourne, the National Indigenous Organiser of the NTEU, and a freelance opinion writer and social commentator. She blogs at Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist.