Aboriginal Deaths Research Articles

The Transnationalism of the Black Lives Matter Movement: Decolonization and Mapping Black Geographies in Sydney, Australia

This article responds to recent calls to “provincialize” (Hawthorne 2019) and “pluralize” (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a) Black geographies. We do so by adopting a relational, transnational, and multiscalar approach. Drawing on ethnography with Black Lives Matter activists in Sydney, Australia, we adopt a decolonizing framework to argue that Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and actions can extend the epistemologies and cartographies of Black geographies. The mapping of Black geographies in Sydney reveals three multilayered and intersecting ways through which Black agency, place-making, and resistance are made manifest in transnational Black Lives Matter protests: (1) through invoking “stretched out” geographies, forging shared solidarities between African American high-profile cases of policing injustice and Aboriginal deaths in custody; (2) through counterhegemonic attempts to reconfigure Australia Day as Invasion Day, reclaiming colonized histories that subvert the premise of Australia as a “White nation”; and (3) through conjoining transrural cases of violence toward Aboriginal communities living in peripheral places and then strategically amplifying their concerns through place-based activisms in the global city. Finally, we conclude by arguing that further international accounts are crucial to this emerging field.

“Never Settler Enough”

In this article, the authors examine the systemic nature of state violence and racial terror in the context of the Australian settler state and Indigenous deaths in custody. Drawing on Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s (2003) concept of a “double economy of terror,” the authors contend that police violence and Aboriginal deaths in custody must be read in terms of the standard operating procedures of a double economy of terror that ensures the institutional reproduction of the Australian settler colonial state. Death in police custody, Perera and Pugliese argue, is coextensive with the larger governmental and administrative apparatuses of the colonial state. In the face of the settler state’s systemic ignorability of the ongoing racialized violence against Indigenous peoples, the authors conclude their paper opposing such a state with an Indigenous voice that refuses tacit acquiescence and that howls with rage at the mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody and rates of Indigenous imprisonment.

Evolving beyond antiracism: Reflections on the experience of developing a cultural safety curriculum in a tertiary education setting.

There is an inextricable link between cultural and clinical safety. In Australia high-profile Aboriginal deaths in custody, publicised institutional racism in health servicesand the international Black Lives Matter movement have cemented momentum to ensure culturally safe care. However, racism within health professionals and health professional students remains a barrier to increasing the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health professionals. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Strategy's objective to 'eliminate racism from the health system', and the recent adoption of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples led cultural safety definition, has instigated systems level reflections on decolonising practice. This article explores cultural safety as the conceptual antithesis to racism, examining its origins, and contemporary evolution led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, including its development in curriculum innovation. The application of cultural safety is explored using in-depth reflection, and the crucial development of integrating critical consciousness theory, as a precursor to culturally safe practice, is discussed. Novel approaches to university curriculum development are needed to facilitate culturally safe and decolonised learning and working environments, including the key considerations of non-Indigenous allyship and collaborative curriculum innovations and initiatives.

Justice for Walker: Warlpiri responses to the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker

AbstractThe police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker in Yuendumu in November 2019 instigated an immediate and determined response from Warlpiri families who were shocked and saddened by the death of a loved one in the prime of his life and enraged by this latest event in a long string of colonial injustices. This article collates perspectives as expressed in interviews and public statements from Warlpiri spokespeople who have been on the frontline of the fight for Justice for Walker. Incorporating the initial responses in the days after the shooting, the links to the Coniston massacre in Warlpiri and neighbouring country in 1928, the ongoing horror of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the escalating energy behind the Black Lives Matter campaigns across the world, this article illustrates, through Warlpiri voices, the ways in which people from Yuendumu have expertly used the techniques of activist campaigns in their resolute fight for justice for Walker, for all Aboriginal people across Australia and for Black and First Nations people world‐wide.

Decolonise This Space

The 15 th April 2016 marked the 25-year anniversary since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) in Australia handed down its Final Report. The report signified a landmark in the relationships between Indigenous Australians and the post-colonial State and Federal governments. Established by the Hawke Labor Government in 1987, the Commission examined 99 Indigenous deaths. Most significant was the finding that the deaths were due to the combination of police and prisons failing their duty of care, and the high numbers of Indigenous people being arrested and incarcerated.
 In the wake of the RCIADIC, cross-cultural sessions and cultural competency workshops have become ubiquitous for public servants, therapists, and legal and welfare employees, in attempts to bridge gaps in cultural knowledge between agents of the welfare state and Indigenous clients. Using Indigenous Knowledges theory, this chapter assesses how cultural misalignments between Indigenous clients and those who work with them in the name of therapies designed to improve Indigenous lives, dominate cross-cultural interactions. In so doing the questions are posed: how do good intentions become part of the discourses and practices of on-going colonialism for Indigenous Australians, and what can be done to change the balance of power in favour of therapies of relevance to Indigenous people?

1457Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander deaths by suicide in Australia

Abstract Background The fifth leading cause of death for Aboriginal people in Australia is suicide. These deaths are preventable, and their impact is significant for family and the wider community. This work aims to increase understanding of suicide deaths among Aboriginal people by describing these deaths by a range of factors, and identifying similarities and differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal deaths by suicide. Methods Suicide deaths in Australia from 2001 to 2019 will be identified from the National Coronial Information System database. Demographic factors, details of the deaths and geographic factors will be described, and comparisons will be made between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal deaths by suicide. Overall suicide rates by Aboriginal status and age- and sex-standardised rates per 100,000 person-years will be calculated using mid-year estimated resident population and death counts stratified by year, age, sex, and Aboriginal status from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Results The analysis for this work is currently underway and will be finalised prior to the conference. Conclusions The results of this research will provide information about sub-groups of the Aboriginal population and areas of Australia with heightened and reduced risks and rates of suicide. The findings will be interpreted with guidance from the Aboriginal Advisory Committee involved in this work. Findings will be shared with service providers, policymakers, communities, and researchers to enable improved targeting of interventions. Key messages Better understanding of Aboriginal deaths by suicide is critical to inform and improve the much-needed targeting of services and interventions.

Analysing Innovation in Indigenous News: Deaths Inside

ABSTRACT In 2018, The Guardian won the award for Innovation at the Walkleys, Australia’s most prestigious awards for journalism, for its data journalism project, Deaths Inside, which has catalogued 164 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody between 2008 and 2020. This article takes a case study approach to explore the changing relations that have contributed to the development of Deaths Inside; how these have afforded an expansion of the field of Indigenous news, and how, in both form and content, Deaths Inside takes advantage of opportunities to challenge established traditions and formats of Indigenous news representation. Drawing on critical debates surrounding innovation, we suggest Deaths Inside can be considered “innovative” not simply because it takes advantage of the enhanced affordances of digital technologies for developing experimental forms of journalism. It also, importantly, delivers an enhanced social value that builds upon possibilities for improved representation.

30th Anniversary of the RCIADIC and the ‘white noise’ of the justice system is loud and clear

It's been 30 years since the tabling of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and for Indigenous people things are worse than they have ever been when dealing with the justice industry.

Necropolitics and the violence of Indigenous incarceration

Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, over thirty years ago, there have been over 400 Indigenous deaths in custody, with 28% of the Australian prison population identifying as Indigenous. Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system continues to be an unresolved issue despite varying attempts to reduce the high incidence of incarceration experienced by Indigenous Australians. This paper proposes a fresh approach to analysing the violence of Indigenous incarceration using the theory of necropolitics. The paper represents a critical discussion of a work-in-progress of how an analytical framework based on necropolitics has the potential to elevate the often-silenced voices of vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous Australians, within the criminal justice system. This is because the proposed study will present a multi-level analysis of the overt and covert forms of violence perpetrated against Indigenous Australians within the criminal justice system and unlock the potential of exposing the extent to which unequal relations of power contribute to these forms of violence. The significance of this research therefore lies in its capacity to provide policymakers with deeper insights into how such forms of violence impact upon and further disempower Indigenous Australians in the Australian criminal justice system.

‘I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’

‘I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’

Biopower of Colonialism in Carceral Contexts: Implications for Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain "truths" about First Nations lives that often render them as "bare life," to use the term of Giorgio Agamben (1998). First Nations peoples' existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a "state of exception" to the legal order and its standards of care (Agamben 1998). Zones of exception place First Nations people in a separate and diminishedlegal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial "biopower," both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay-treating them as "bare life."

Use of Data Linkage Method to Compile Life Tables for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

IntroductionAlmost all deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are registered, but some are not identified and recorded as such when registered. Therefore, registration data underestimates the actual number of deaths and death rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, and consequently their application can result in overestimates of life expectancy.
 Hence registered deaths needs to be adjusted before deriving life tables and life expectancy estimates.
 Objectives and ApproachObjective: To develop a data-driven method for estimating factors for adjusting registered deaths.
 Approach: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) linked Census records to all deaths that were registered within a year following the Census. Adjustment factors were estimated by directly comparing Indigenous status of a person reported in Census and death registration data. The ABS then used an established and widely used method to compile life tables, by making up-front adjustments to registered deaths by the factors derived from the Census and deaths linked dataset.
 ResultsAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths identification rate in registration data was estimated to be 89% at the national level in 2016-2017. Over the same period, identification rates varied considerably by state/territory and ranged between 0.69%-1.04%. It clearly showed the need to adjust for under/over identification in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander death registrations.
 Conclusion / ImplicationsStatistical data linkage methods can successfully be used to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians life expectancy estimates. This has implications for accurately measuring and monitoring the Council of Australian Governments’ ‘Closing the Gap’ target in life expectancy estimates between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous populations.

Reporting Black Lives Matters: Deaths in custody journalism in Australia

George Floyd’s death at the knee of USA police sparked protests and renewed reporting of Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia. As the 30th anniversary of the release of the final report of the Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody approaches, it is timely to update Wendy Bacon’s 2005 research on deaths in custody journalism. While most deaths in custody continue to pass in judicial and media silence, this article, written from a white journalism academic’s perspective, includes instances of in-depth reporting since 2005, journalism that meets the Royal Commission’s observation that journalism can contribute to justice for Aboriginal people when it places deaths in custody in their social and moral contexts. It also includes mini-case study of the news coverage of Mr Ward’s 2008 death, which demonstrates the relationship between governmental or judicial processes and announcements and patterns of coverage. It also notes the effect that First Nations journalists are having on the prevalence, perspectives and depth of deaths in custody journalism. Information and resources are provided for journalists and journalism students to more effectively report Indigenous deaths in custody, include Indigenous voices in their stories, and to better understand trauma and take care of themselves, their sources and their communities

School House to Big House

In 1991, the Australian Government released the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report. Of the 339 recommendations, Recommendation 62 identified that there was an alarming over-representation of Indigenous youth in contact with the criminal justice system. The report called for immediate action by governments to develop strategies that would urgently reduce retention rates of Indigenous youth within the prison system. Analysis of the literature indicates that almost three decades after the release of this report, the high numbers of Indigenous youth who are incarcerated, or who have come into contact with the juvenile justice system remains the same. Although there is a good deal of literature investigating the criminological characteristics of this phenomena; there is a substantial gap in the literature surrounding the educational exclusion of young Indigenous males from the formal education system. This paper focusses specifically on the literature surrounding student exclusion from state schools and how this may provide some insight into the subsequent over-representation of young Indigenous males within the Queensland juvenile justice system.

White Law/Black Deaths: Nomocide and the Foundational Absence of Consent in Australian Law

State and police brutality around the globe in 2020 brought into sharp focus the role of legal apparatuses in causing death, particularly of black and Indigenous lives. Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter (#BLM) events and protests, #endSARS in Nigeria and amid the ongoing fight against Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia, the critique made by Isobell Coe in Nulyarimma v Thompson, the case that sought to have the crime of genocide and its impact as part of ongoing colonialism recognised in Australian law, is more urgent than ever. Following Coe’s critique that Australian law becomes complicit in genocide if it fails to hear Indigenous peoples protests, how do and how should legal thinkers engage with the system of Australian law especially in a climate where the direct link between settler-colonial legal infrastructures (courts, prisons, police and legislators) and the violation of Indigenous and black lives has been laid bare. A legal system lacking consent at its foundation and characterised in the present day by a refusal to hear and engage with its violent origin, while seeking to acquire consent retrospectively is nomocidal. Nomocide captures the function performed by all arms of the law in committing genocide in Australia. As such, the complicity and culpability of a system of law founded in non-consensual conditions must be reckoned with, without delay. This requires a willingness among scholars and practitioners of law to see it as deathly or nomocidal in order to begin addressing the colonial violence that stems from it.

A death sentence for swearing: the fatal consequences of the failure to decriminalise offensive language

ABSTRACT Several commissions of inquiry have recommended the reform or abolition of laws that criminalise the use of offensive language in Australia. These criminal offences have been linked to the over-policing and deaths in custody of Indigenous Australians. Australian state and territory governments have not only ignored these recommendations; they have also added new weapons to the police officer’s arsenal to control and punish swearing in public. Through an analysis of several case studies sourced from coronial inquiries and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, this article argues that there is a need for urgent reform of laws that criminalise offensive language.

Deaths in custody in Australia: a quantitative analysis of coroners’ reports

ABSTRACTThis paper reports on a large-scale documentary analysis of all publicly available coroners’ reports on deaths in custody released between 1991 and 2016. The research was undertaken to mark 25 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. We collected quantitative data from 505 reports including characteristics of deceased persons, causes of death, type of custody and the state or territory in which they died. We found that Australian states and territories differ substantially in their reporting practices, and official information on deaths in custody remains difficult to access. Our results indicate trends that require further research. For example, despite the significant increases in the Indigenous and female prison populations in recent years, women and Indigenous people were under-represented amongst our sample of deaths in custody. We found that they were more likely to have died in police custody than in prisons. We also found that indigenous status was often not reported by coroners.

About Outreach: Prison Transformation through Creative Writing Design

About Outreach:Prison Transformation through Creative Writing Design Adelle Sefton-Rowston (bio) The YWrite project investigates the role of creative writing in prisons through a state-of-the-art prison education program designed specifically for incarcerated women and children in the Northern Territory. The workshops teach incarcerated students how to express themselves through creative writing in various forms of prison prose, graffiti art, and storytelling. Graffiti constitutes a special genre of writing that has been deployed by prisoners to reflect on their circumstance, to protest their penal incarceration, or even to transform their understanding. Because "graffiti" remains unconstrained by traditional writing conventions (of spelling, grammar, and punctuation), such writing provides a space for resistant writers or those of lower literacy levels to write intuitively. A writer of graffiti can articulate messages with a sense of urgency, uninhibited by conventional expectations of normative writing. The aims of the project are to foster motivation and self-efficacy through creativity, which in turn can lead to improved self-image and reduced emotional stress, an increase in literacy, and more postrelease opportunities. A major outcome of the program will allow detainees to share their "stories" through the publication or exhibition of their work, which will in turn contribute insights for society's understanding of effective prison arts programs and the effects of writing to transform. Why is this project important to the Northern Territory? In 2016, the Four Corners program "Australia's Shame" revealed the ongoing abuse of Indigenous youth in Darwin's Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and sparked many reasons why a penal system that does not rehabilitate at-risk Indigenous people should be completely transformed, if not abolished. Footage from the program showed children as young as twelve years old being punished with the use of restraint chairs, covered in spit-hoods, and locked up in isolation cells for indefinite periods of time. Such cruel and archaic forms of punishment have not far progressed since the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries in Europe, when criminals were punished with infliction and discomfort to their bodies through humiliation—or, to a worse extent, maimed, flogged, or sen-tenced to death. In Australia, Ronald Ryan was the last man to be executed at Pentridge Prison, and it was only in 1967. Yet even after the thirtieth anniversary of the Royal Commission into the Aboriginal deaths in custody, there remains a lack of willingness to transform prisons into places of support and rehabilitation for those who are incarcerated (who are mostly victims of domestic violence, the poorest of the poor, and those suffering from mental illness). The absence of a model of care to transform prisons in [End Page 432] Australia points to a gap in national consciousness regarding the humanity of those who are incarcerated. So why a creative arts program? Since the abuse of Indigenous children in Darwin's Done Dale Detention Centre was exposed, several fiction books on the theme of Indigenous incarceration in Australia have been published, including Kim Scott's Taboo, Paul Collis's Dancing Home, and some of the stories in Tony Birch's Common People. Such texts include the bitter fear of an alleged offender being chased by police authorities and the appalling circumstances of incarceration once caught. Yet these stories also show how the grit and determination of a few characters can transform prisons into places of colonial freedom when language and culture are strong, when there are opportunities to write, to share stories, and to empower oneself in preparation for release on the outside. To write is one of the most empowering acts of rebellion one can take—whether in the form of a novel or as graffiti written on a concrete wall. To write is to protest by creating the new formation of words in a different order to realize something new. Graffiti has a broad yet unique readership: it is not always read by choice, but nonetheless it has a fluid and encompassing range of readers—it is for everybody. The writing of graffiti is not an autonomous or mono act but can speak to many people in various ways. In prisons, for example, graffiti may communicate with inmates, prison staff, or perhaps even tourists...

‘You cunts can do as you like’: the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas

ABSTRACTIn the same year that Adam Goodes quit the game of AFL, soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham refused to sing the Australian National Anthem at the AFL Grand Final because she could not bear to sing the words ‘for we are young and free’. In this article, we examine why the act of singing about being ‘free’ would be both absurd and obscene for Blackfullas in Australia. Engaging with the songs of Black people, locally and globally, we reveal the fiction of free speech and freedom for all and the interests those fictions serve.Abbreviations: AFL: Australian Football League; AO: Officer of the Order of Australia; CMC: Crime and Misconduct Commission; RCIADIC: The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Undoing a model system: A new federal Custody Notification Service

The Custody Notification Service is a legislative scheme to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody. This article discusses proposed changes to the federal Custody Notification Service, that were before the federal Parliament in late 2017. It argues that the changes are inadequate, when compared with Custody Notification Service models in other Australian jurisdictions, primarily because the laws deprive Aboriginal people of important fair trial and custody rights. This article concludes by listing a range of legislative solutions proposed by Aboriginal organisations and legal representatives.