A couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time trawling through the lists of women who had died as a result of men's violence and compiling my own list of the Aboriginal victims. Often, the women I listed required my educated guess work.
They had no names so I would include them on the basis of location and situation — where crimes were committed in areas where there was a high population of Aboriginal people, it was likely that the unnamed victim was an Aboriginal woman. Unfortunately, I was also able to count on the lack of interest shown by the press as being a sure-fire sign of the victim's heritage.
After a couple of years of compiling these lists, I stopped. As well as showing the exorbitant rates of Indigenous victimhood (seven times parity in both years), it ended up being an exercise in proving just how little society cared about these women. Not only did this work barely get picked up elsewhere but many unnamed victims remained unnamed for years, if the press ever followed up at all. Aboriginal women victims just did not appear to matter at all to broader society.
In recent times, two previously unnamed victims have been identified in the media. This was not, however, due to a public outpouring of sympathy marked by tears and vigils. Nor was it because some form of justice has prevailed for their deaths. In both cases, the victims' names (or at least culturally-sensitive versions of such) have made the press because police bungled the investigations so much that it is highly unlikely there will ever be justice for either woman.
Last week, a coronial inquest report laid bare the sheer lack of care and competence the Tennant Creek police had while investigating the death of Kwementyeye Green in 2013.
Not only had the police theorised she had killed herself leading them to destroy crucial forensic evidence which could have proven otherwise, but they released the man suspected of killing her without charge and without securing the crime scene, therefore potentially allowing him to tamper with further evidence. An ABC report stated that the director of public prosecutions has found there is now not enough evidence to lay charges.
This case had eerie similarities to that of Kwementyeye McCormack, an Aboriginal woman who died in Alice Springs in 2015, also due to bleeding out from an injury to her thigh. She was initially identified in the press due to her case being reopened following a coronial inquest which had proven police incompetence in the initial investigation.
"No matter how many times coroners state that institutional racism is not a concern, the fact that justice is continually denied for the deaths of Aboriginal women due to shoddy investigations states otherwise."
Police records showed that although Kwementyeye McCormack had called for police assistance for domestic violence on 32 occasions over a 12 year period, police failed to properly investigate the avenue of domestic homicide. They still failed to investigate properly when her partner's story kept changing. Yet ten months after the investigation had been reopened, there had still been no arrests. The lack of coverage since makes me wonder if there will ever be justice for her.
It keeps happening yet surprisingly, the coronial inquest into Kwementyeye Green's case denied that institutional racism was a factor. How is it then that Northern Territory police can continually fail Aboriginal women? Considering the incredible rates of incarceration in the NT, it's not as if the police have an issue with criminalising Aboriginal people. They do, however, clearly have problems recognising when Aboriginal women are victims of crime and acting accordingly.
If this were a phenomenon limited to the NT, then it would be easier to tackle. Yet it's not. If it hadn't been for the perseverance of family members alongside the work of influential Aboriginal women, there would never have been any justice for the death of Lynette Daley. Twice the NSW director of public prosecutions dropped the charges against the two men who brutally raped her and did not intervene as she bled to death, stating that there was not enough evidence for the case to go to court. When the case did finally go to court following the push to get it heard, the jury took just 32 minutes to deliver guilty verdicts.
Or what about Linda? For a couple of years now, journalist Amy McQuire and senior advocate Martin Hodgson have been delving into the case of Kevin Henry — an Aboriginal man from Toowoomba who has been imprisoned for 26 years for Linda's murder but who has always maintained his innocence.
Their acclaimed podcast on this case has not only uncovered a series of shortcomings in the police investigation including evidence of a coercive confession, but ultimately points to the fact that police cared so little about the victim that they failed to investigate the circumstances of her death properly. In this case, there have been two miscarriages of justice — one for Linda and one for Kevin. Despite this, there has been almost a complete lack of public outcry.
No matter how many times coroners state that institutional racism is not a concern, the fact that justice is continually denied for the deaths of Aboriginal women due to shoddy investigations states otherwise. How many more times are we going to see people get away with murder because police all across this country fail to value the lives and liberties of Aboriginal women enough to ensure they do their jobs properly? Will everyday Australians ever care enough to pressure these systems for justice for Aboriginal women, or will they continue to allow Aboriginal women to disappear from our societies — unnamed and unaccounted for?
At the end of the day, it seems that there is more fear around accurately labelling police operations and justice systems as racist and sexist and working to repair them than there is around the mounting tally of dead Aboriginal women for whom there will never be justice. Aboriginal women are mere collateral damage in the maintenance of the status quo. How many more of us are going to be allowed to just disappear without justice before anything changes?
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.