New book details how 19-year-old Aboriginal man’s death exposed police racism in Northern Territory

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Simmering racial tensions, a botched arrest on Aboriginal land and a fatal police shooting of a First Nations teenager. In 2019 then police officer Zachary Rolfe shot and killed 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker in the remote community of Yuendumu, sparking national protests. Mr Rolfe was found not guilty of murder in a Supreme Court trial. New book The Red House explores the tragic shooting, the murder trial and a protracted coronial inquest that exposed racism in the Northern Territory Police Force. Walkley Award-winning author Kate Wild speaks about the moment that brought Kumanjayi Walker and Zachary Rolfe together and how it changed the nation.

Transcript

00:00This is a story that did remain in the public eye for a long time and it has created a lot

00:05of conversation and a lot of discussion about the justice system and about contact between

00:10police and Aboriginal people in Australia.

00:13In terms of how the country has changed, it's changed remarkably in that five years, not

00:20necessarily permanently, but if you look at the fact that we've had the voice referendum

00:24since the shooting and that we've had a national conversation, not a very kind or polite one,

00:32but a big conversation about race in Australia.

00:37And we've also had the Black Lives Matter movement really explode with the death of George Floyd.

00:42That happened six months after Kumanjai Walker was shot in Yundamu.

00:45So I think Australia has changed since then, not only through this shooting, but through

00:50conversations that have come out of it.

00:52The shooting of Kumanjai Walker, the murder trial of Zachary Rolfe and this really long

00:58running coronial inquest have been, as you say, very divisive across the country and in

01:04the Northern Territory.

01:05People have really strong feelings on all sides of this case and they're often very, and I

01:12borrow this phrase from your book, they're often very binary views.

01:16But you and I both know, many people involved in this case know it's a lot more nuanced than

01:22that.

01:23Exploring those nuances was really just a matter of listening to Territorians, listening to

01:28people who were affected by Kumanjai Walker's shooting, whether they were police officers

01:34or families of police officers, whether they were people within the community of Yundamu or

01:38Alice Springs.

01:40Everyone in the Northern Territory is affected by an event this big.

01:44The concept of time is a really significant through line in this book.

01:49You weave from one year to another in this case, but you also go back in time to before all

01:57of this started.

01:59Why did you do that?

02:00I chose to treat time in a certain way in this book because I think that the moment that

02:08Zachary Rolfe and Kumanjai Walker faced each other in that red house in the desert was a

02:14moment that brought to life many moments in Australia's history.

02:18And as I was doing my research, I came across a term that W.E.H.

02:22Stanner, an anthropologist, had used, which Aboriginal people in the Territory had taught him, the

02:28every when, and it refers to an Indigenous perspective of time, which is circular, which says that

02:32the past and the present and the future are all happening at the same time right now and

02:38they're affecting each other.

02:40And to me, that was the perfect way to look at this story because I think it wakes up other

02:49moments in history that are unresolved and that this moment between them in the house offered

02:55us another opportunity to try and resolve those problems and those issues.

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