Aboriginal deaths in custody: the product of a racist system

By Hamish Chitts

On March 14 another Aboriginal person died in custody, this time in a Perth police watchhouse. He was 33 years old. His completely preventable death is one of over 300 that have occurred since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody issued its final report, with 339 recommendations, in April 1991. This latest victim of the racist “justice” system became quite ill in the watchhouse and was taken to hospital, then dragged back to the watchhouse, taken to hospital for a second time only to be brought back again to the cell where he would die.

In February, an 18-year-old Aboriginal man was on remand at Brisbane’s Arthur Gorrie high-security prison on misdemeanour charges when he became ill and later died in hospital. After initially receiving a headache tablet, he was repeatedly refused medical attention by prison staff and suffered in agony for 10 days. Other prisoners had to carry him around and when they protested to prison guards, one of the guards made the comment: “If he can go to the toilet, there’s nothing wrong with him.” It was only when the teenager became unconscious and fellow Aboriginal prisoners kept yelling and bashing on walls that he was taken to hospital. He died four days later on February 20. The cause of death has not been released.

At a 200-strong March 11 rally outside Queensland’s parliament the deceased’s mother told reporters: “I was treated badly at the hospital, very bad. I was sleeping on the floor in the hospital and then I was sent away from his bed the night before I lost him.” When asked by a reporter if this was by health workers or by prison officers she replied, “By the prison officers”.

March 11 was also the day when a new coronial inquest began into the 2004 death of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee (also known as Mulrunji) in the Palm Island watchhouse. This new inquest for the benefit of the Queensland Police Union has been called to officially and legally rewrite history. In 2006, acting state coroner Christine Clements found Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was responsible for Mulrinji’s death. Two autopsies found that Mulrinji had died from internal bleeding due to a ruptured liver and speen. He also had four broken ribs. These are the kind of injuries normally seen after a high-speed car crash.

A year later Hurley won an appeal against Clement’s findings in the Townsville District Court, which ordered a new coronial inquest. Last June, the Queensland Court of Appeal ruled Clement’s findings be set aside, but it also found the process of the decision made by the Townsville court was “flawed”.

The Mulrinji case demonstrates that little has changed since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The commission found that while black prisoners did not die at a higher rate than whites, Aboriginal people were much more likely to be incarcerated in the first place. While Aboriginal Australians comprise 2% of the general population, they make up about 20% of the prison population. “In every single Aboriginal death in custody since 1991, police officers across the six [Australian] states and two territories routinely and fundamentally ignored the royal commission’s key recommendations”, Sam Watson, deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, told the media.

The police in every state and territory were built in part on the dispossession, harassment, murder and attempted genocide of Aboriginal people. The police and prison guards are armed bodies of people that systematically harass and repress Aboriginal people. This situation is not unique to Australian capitalist society. The racist oppression of indigenous peoples by law-enforcement agencies is a common feature in the developed capitalist “democracies” that grew out of British capitalist settler colonies.

US government studies, as well as those of US and international civil and human rights organisations, have consistently found that Native Americans are disproportionately subject to human rights violations at the hands of law enforcement officers, ranging from pervasive verbal abuse and harassment, racial profiling, routine stops and frisks based solely on race to excessive force, unjustified shootings and torture. The Ojibwe News reported on January 31, 2003, how a police car pulled into the parking lot of a public housing project in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and police officers dragged two Native Americans, a man and a woman, out of the squad car. The officers physically abused them both, beating the man until he lay unconscious then left both of them outside in the parking lot in subzero weather. Witnesses reported that the man’s chest and head had been urinated on during the incident.

The American Friends Service Committee has reported that indigenous women detained in a Maine jail were routinely subjected to visual body cavity searches as a matter of policy whereas similarly situated white women were not. One US federal court of appeal has described the practice as “demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing, repulsive, signifying degradation and submission” — requiring women to bend over and expose their genital areas to officers, and were routinely accompanied by sexual and racist verbal abuse.In Canada, at a prison 200 km north east of Toronto on October 3, 2006, a native prisoner, Martin Blackwind, cut a major artery in his left arm. He pressed his cell emergency button, which brought him to prison officials’ attention. They provided no first aid and took ten minutes before calling an ambulance. Blackwind remained locked in his cell bleeding to death. The May 21, 2008 Intertribal Times reported that both corrections staff and fellow inmates have said that Blackwind’s race played a role in his death.

On December 5, 1998, Frank Joseph Paul, a 47-year-old native Canadian living in Vancouver, was arrested by two Vancouver police officers for being intoxicated in a public place. He was taken to a Vancouver police department jail but instead of being put in the jail’s sobering up facility, he was removed from the lockup, placed into a police van, and left soaking wet in an alleyway in East Vancouver. Paul’s body was found in the same alley the following morning. He had died of hypothermia. It took almost 10 years of campaigning to get Paul’s case investigated. When the inquiry concluded in 2009 it admitted that the “justice system failed Mr. Paul”. It made some recommendations but just as these inquiries go in Australia or the US, they are purely to protect the system, not indigenous people, by appearing to take action.

At the beginning of the Paul inquest in 2007, journalist and author Warren Goulding warned: “Inquiries, in particular, are expensive, unwieldy devices that generally do little more than pad the bank accounts of lawyers. It’s a mechanism used by government when it is no longer possible to ignore the issue or the injustice that has been done. There’s little to fear from most inquiries. They are conducted with a great deal of civility and faithful servants recycle previous recommendations and tender a few new ones that are too unrealistic to be implemented, too wishy-washy to be of any real value or, almost always, simply shoved under the carpet. Occasionally, government gets lucky and is able to boast about implementing a specific recommendation simply because it’s something they’ve had on the table anyway.”

Aboriginal leaders in Australia are again calling for a new royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. A new royal commission might put the spotlight on the systemic murder of Aboriginal people in custody and reveal it to a wider audience, but Goulding’s warning about such inquiries in Canada should be kept in mind. No-one should have any illusions that the results of a new royal commission will be any different from the one that concluded in 1991. Its well-meaning recommendations have simply been ignored by a police force and a prison system that enforces the racist oppression of Aboriginal people that is endemic to Australian capitalist-ruled society. As Malcolm X said shortly before his assassination in February 1965: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia

Free Lex Wotton – political prisoner

By Kathy Newnam

A 400-strong rally was held in Brisbane on November 1 as part of the campaign to free Lex Wotton, an Indigenous community leader from Palm Island, who was found guilty on October 24 of “rioting with destruction” by an all-white jury in Brisbane’s District Court. Wotton was singled out for his participation in the protest on Palm Island that took place following the death in custody on November 19, 2004, of Mulrunji Doomadgee, a 36-year-old Palm Island man, at the hands of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. Despite admitting responsibility for the death, Hurley was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in Townsville on June 19, 2007.

In the week following the murder, Palm Island residents demanded justice and were met with a massive increase in police repression. At a community meeting on November 26, 2004, the autopsy report into Mulrunji’s death was read out. The report found that the massive injuries, including four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, a torn portal vein and his liver being cleaved in two were as a result of an “accident”.

The murder of Mulrunji was the 147th Aboriginal death in custody since the 1987-91 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Most of these deaths were hidden from the public. The protest that took place on Palm Island, which involved at least 400 people (at least 10% of the population of the island), was instrumental in bringing the murder to public attention. As a result, political pressure was bought to bear on the Queensland government which was the main reason that Hurley was eventually charged.

But the capitalist “justice” system has many an escape clause to protect its own — and staging the trial of Hurley with an all-white jury in the racist heartland of Townsville was only the beginning. The prosecution failed to call key witnesses and other evidence of murder was disallowed in the trial. The collusion between the Queensland Labor government and the Queensland Police Union ensured that, as usual, the racist criminal “justice” system would look after its own. On the other hand, the same “justice” system will bring its full weight down on those who resist racist police violence.

Immediately following the uprising of November 26, 2004, Palm Island was put under police siege. An illegal state of emergency was imposed and the anti-terrorism squad sent to the island. The squad spent the night illegally detaining those suspected of involvement in the protests; smashing into homes, carrying out illegal searches, brutalising and bashing residents, including attacking them with Taser electric shock guns and police dogs. There were reports of police pointing rifles at children. Police told residents that they could kill them and no-one would know what had happened. Wotton was arrested by 50 police and Tasered while standing outside his house with his hands raised. The police then went into his house and forced his children to lie face down on the ground with guns to their heads.

The raids and illegal detentions continued into the week following the protest. At least 80 heavily armed police continued to lay siege to the island. During Wotton’s trial, evidence was presented of a 22-year-old woman who was detained for a day without food and dressed only in a nightgown then pressured into giving a statement against Wotton. Eighteen men, three women and two children were arrested and flown off the island to Townsville. One man, David Bulsey, was unable to return to his home and his eight children for six months because of the bail conditions. He was subsequently acquitted by a Townsville court.

This show of brute force had nothing to do with “restoring order” as claimed by the Queensland government and police. There was no physical threat. But there was a political threat — and the force used was commensurate with how seriously the authorities took this threat. The Palm Island protest posed a serious public challenge to the immunity given to police who kill Aborigines in custody. Similarly, to protect this immunity immense resources are put into the cover up of Aboriginal deaths in custody — which are not so much about protecting individuals like Hurley as they are about protecting a racist system of intimidation and control. The protest on Palm Island set an example that the police could not allow to go unchallenged. If Indigenous people rose up in mass protest every time there was an Aboriginal death in custody or instance of racist police brutality, the police force’s power to intimidate and control Aborigines would quickly erode.

The brutal state repression of Aboriginal resistance has been a critical function of the police throughout Australia’s history. This repression was, and still is, essential in the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land. The social devastation that Aboriginal communities face today is a direct result of this dispossession and the attempts to disperse, disorganise and crush any resistance to it.

The intensification of this repression that is currently taking place in remote Aboriginal communities affected by the federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency intervention” can be directly linked to the mining companies’ increasing thirst for access to land — which requires a roll back of the gains of the land rights movement. An example of this intensified repression was the military-style police raid on Kunoth, a town camp in Alice Springs, on the night of October 9. According to a statement issued by the Alice Springs-based Intervention Rollback Action Group, “Police jumped over fences, displayed rifles, pushed and abused residents and trained a red laser light on the chest of one man, perhaps from a taser or a gun”.

Aboriginal resistance to this sort of police repression is presented as being an act of aggression in order to justify further repression. The corporate media plays a central role in this, acting to fuel racist bigotry in order to undermine the other working people’s solidarity with Aboriginal people struggling for their rights. This tactic — of presenting the resistor as the aggressor — is also used internationally. It is used particularly successfully by the Israeli government and the Western media to justify the Zionist state’s occupation and repression of the indigenous Palestinians. A 2001-02 study by the Glasgow University Media Group in Britain found that 90% of British students did not know Israel was occupying Palestine and some who believed that the Palestinians were the occupiers!

This is what the Queensland government, police and corporate media have attempted to do in their singling out of Lex Wotton. He was targeted and charged on concocted evidence to draw attention away from the cause of the Palm Island uprising and to make an example of him. His case is being used as an attempt to re-win ground that the police lost in the massive public exposure of the brutal murder of Mulrunji and the subsequent cover up. As part of this effort, the corporate media reported just days after the guilty verdict was handed down against Wotton that the 22 police on Palm Island on the day of the uprising would receive “bravery awards” at a ceremony in Townsville on November 3 — four days before Wotton’s sentencing in the Townsville District Court. Not a single cop was injured by the Palm Island protesters.

Lex Wotton is a political prisoner. He is behind bars for speaking out against the murder of his friend. He is behind bars because he is an esteemed leader of his community. Meanwhile, Hurley and the hundreds of other cops who have murdered in cold blood, walk free. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

Aboriginal deaths in custody: Protests to demand justice

By Kathy Newnam

Protest actions are being planned for Brisbane in October when Lex Wotton faces court. Wotton has been portrayed by the Queensland police, government and establishment media as the leader of the “riot” that occurred on Palm Island on November 26, 2004. A police station and residence were destroyed after a police report on the death of community member Mulrunji Doomadgee was read at a public meeting; the report concluded that his death was an accident. The October protests will call for the dropping of all charges against Wotton and demand an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, there has been an increase in Aboriginal people dying in custody. During the commission itself, which ran from 1987 until 1991, just under one Aborigine per month was dying in custody. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, there were 14 Indigenous deaths in custody in 2004; 15 in 2005 and 10 in 2006. In 2006, Indigenous Australians accounted for 30% of all deaths in police custody. These rates are higher than in South Africa at the peak of the apartheid regime’s brutality.

In the 1980s a strong campaign against Aboriginal deaths in custody was spearheaded by the National Committee to Defend Black Rights. In response to this campaign, the Hawke Labor government established the royal commission. It was presented with 124 deaths in custody between 1980 and 1989, of which it investigated 99. However, not a single police or jail officer was charged. The commission made 339 recommendations, half of which aimed at keeping Aborigines out of jail, with the emphasis being on prison as a last resort. Seventeen years later, those recommendations are still not being implemented.
Over-policing

According to a 2006 Australian Medical Association report titled Undue Punishment? Aboriginal People And Torres Strait Islanders In Prison: An Unacceptable Reality, Indigenous people accounted for 22% of prisoners in 2005 despite being only 2.4% of Australia’s population. Imprisonment rates are even greater for young Indigenous people, who are 19 times more likely to be imprisoned than other Australians. According to NSW-based organisation Justice Action, which campaigns on criminal justice and prison reform, in July 2006 Indigenous people made up 39.7% of the prison population; by January 2007, this figure had risen to 41.7%.

Over-policing is the main reason for this over-representation. Indigenous communities are routinely subject to a greater level of surveillance and intimidation. Police use certain laws to harass and intimidate Aboriginal communities; one example is known as the “trifecta” — offensive behaviour, resisting arrest and assaulting police. In this way, a charge can be concocted against people whose only “crime” is coming into contact with police.

Police powers, such as search and remove powers, are also over-used in areas with a high Aboriginal population. A 2001 study by the Aboriginal Justice Advisory Council (AJAC) found that in Bourke, police used their powers at a rate 492 times the NSW average, and Aborigines were searched at 30 times the average NSW rate. The study also found that police used their “move on” powers at 321 times the average NSW rate in Walgett, 173 times in Moree and 145 times in Broken Hill. The study also found that in 10 areas in NSW with high Indigenous populations, Aboriginal women were locked up for intoxication at 40 times the rate of non-Aboriginal women and that detention for outstanding warrants was 14.4 times higher for Aboriginal men, 16.5 times for Aboriginal women.

This racism continues throughout the “justice” system. According to AJAC, 10% of Aboriginal defendants were refused bail in 1999, compared with 4% of non-Aborigines. The majority of Aborigines in prison are serving short sentences for minor offences. According to Justice Action, if all the Indigenous people currently serving sentences under six months were given a non-custodial sentence, the number of Indigenous prisoners would be reduced by 54%.
Systemic racism

This systemic racism is justified by politicians and the corporate media in terms of “law and order”. Both major parties regularly resort to racist fear-mongering to justify increased police powers, or to whip up scare campaigns at election time. They readily attack the most marginalised in society, but never mention the devastating impact of the structural racism. They point to symptoms of this in Aboriginal communities — high levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse — and turn it around to blame the victims.

The “justice” system perpetuates the dispossession of the Aboriginal people — according to the AMA’s Undue Punishment? report, more than 30% of Indigenous prisoners were taken from their parents as children and a third of those were never returned. Among Indigenous people in prison, 31% of women and 21% of men reported that their parents had been forcibly removed from their families as children.

Australia and its “justice” system were built on attempted genocide against the Aboriginal people and the theft of their land. Ongoing dispossession is at the heart of the high rate of incarceration of Aborigines and the continuing immunity of police and prison officers who kill Aborigines in custody. This immunity amounts to state-sanctioned murder, and is an important weapon of control and power.

It is not just a product of corruption or turning a blind eye to a few “bad apples”. Those responsible for deaths in custody are not only immune from punishment, but are often promoted. After the murder of Mulrunji on Palm Island on November 19, 2004, the police officer responsible, Sergeant Chris Hurley was transferred to a cushy post on the Gold Coast. Recently, he was awarded a $100,000 payout, ostensibly for “loss of belongings” in the fire at the Palm Island police residence that took place during uprising after the release, on November 26, 2004, of the autopsy results. These detailed the extent of Mulrunji’s injuries — four broken ribs, a ruptured liver, spleen, portal vein and internal bleeding that caused death — but whitewashed the injuries as being the result of a scuffle.

The resulting uprising of more than 400 Palm Island residents (10% of the population of the island) brought the death into public view — setting it apart from so many other black deaths in custody that take place every year. This public attention and pressure from the campaign eventually resulted in Hurley being charged with manslaughter. His subsequent acquittal, despite admitting in court to causing the death of Mulrunji, confirmed how rigged the “justice” system is against Aborigines. He was tried in the racist heartland of Townsville by an all-white jury, and key evidence in the case was disallowed.
Cover-ups

The extent of the cover-up of deaths in custody was also revealed in a 2005 civil case brought by Letty Scott against prison officers involved in the death of her husband, Douglas Scott, in Darwin’s Berrimah prison on July 5, 1985. Letty Scott fought a 20-year battle for justice, gathering overwhelming evidence of murder that was presented in the court case, including the exhumation of her husband’s body and forensic examination which found that his injuries could have been inflicted only by prolonged assault and torture.

The trial bought to light that the cover-up went beyond the NT government, police and the prison system, involving complicity in the cover-up from the doctor employed to carry out the original autopsy, scientists called upon to give forensic evidence for the defence and the royal commission itself — Douglas Scott’s death was one of the 99 cases it investigated.

During the trial, Letty Scott stated that the royal commission was “a lawyer’s picnic on the blood of Aboriginal people”, that it had been “set up to cover [up] the murder of our people”. She detailed how she had been completely disempowered by the commission and not allowed to talk about any evidence of murder, but only about the “arguments and dysfunctions”. Further, she had not approved of the statement that was submitted to the commission by her appointed legal representative, supposedly on behalf of the Scott family. The commission did not hear from eyewitnesses to Douglas Scott’s murder. Other key evidence, including Polaroid photos of his body hung from the prison ceiling, was withheld from the commission.

Despite the overwhelming evidence presented in the 2005 trial, the court dismissed the case for murder while finding that it was “unable to be satisfied that the deceased took his own life”. The NT government took no action on this finding, despite the fact that it was contrary to the original inquest and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, both of which found that Douglas Scott had committed suicide.

The case demonstrated once again how stacked the “justice” system is against Aboriginal people. While murderers walk free, the full weight of the law is brought to bear against those who speak out for justice. It is this system of injustice, not freedom fighters like Lex Wotton, that should be on trial.

Wayne Wharton's Invasion Day Speech

Hamish Chitts, Brisbane

This is a transcript of Wayne Wharton of the Kooma people's speech to Brisbane's Invasion Day (Jan26) rally outside Queensland's parliament.

Photo: Wayne Wharton by Owain Lewis Jones

These boys are free men (pointing to the boys at his side) they are not citizens belonging to Australia, my daughters they are free women. When they go to school and they ask my children to stand up there and sing the national anthem my kids sit down. When they ask my children whose flag that is they tell them “It’s yours”. When they ask what their (the children) flag is they show them (pointing to Aboriginal flag). These are our children educating teachers. When we send our children to school we should be sending them there with the truth. Not with the lies that these fellas spend millions and millions of dollars on portraying to their children down the road and across the road today (Australia Day celebrations in Brisbane).

Our people have done many things over the years to survive. I can remember the time watching Dennis (Dennis Oodgeroo Walker) and the other fellas, the other warriors that fought in the early days. I know other people and myself when we went home got spat on by our own people. “Don’t bring your black shit here, we’re good black fellas here, we’re living alright we’ve got a job. Don’t bring your land rights shit here!” Now every bastard wants to be a traditional owner. The same bastards, my uncles, my father’s brothers that spat on me and told me don’t bring your shit here, they were the first pigs at the trough looking for their T.A. The same dogs are coming at your door now.

This Rudd Government he’s going around hand picking the Jackies, hand picking the Marys, how many secret meetings trying to get an amicable solution to his problem, we don’t have a problem with being black do we, he’s got a problem with us being black. His community, Brisbane, has a history of leading the politics of Indigenous affairs in this country. I’m proud to stand here with the handful of staunch people that showed up today, that haven’t given up the fight. The other people that couldn’t be bothered getting here they’ll come along when the T.A. is on the tray, I’ll bet you. The thing is they talk about this national body, a new mob of Jackies to sit up there and rubber stamp their racist ideologies and their racist politics. They are doing that now, we as a community we have an opportunity this year to jam that process, to take the staunch back and put this community back in line and pull Rudd and Swan into gear and start running the agenda back to us fellas rather than hand pick Jackies and Marys around the country.

How we do this is to start acting like the Brisbane Blacks community that we were. Turn up at the community meetings get the resolution on the floor and start taking it to their electorates and their offices here in Brisbane. We don’t have to rake up money to go down to Canberra or down to Sydney, we got the bastards here in this town. If we can’t get a $2.50 fare to get to a meeting, to turn up for a march and go and show these blokes out there in the electorates, we shouldn’t be standing here. That opportunity is in our grasp this year. With the proper leadership in this community and this community starting acting like a community again we can take these bastards on and we can change the agenda and we can lock out the Marys and the Jackies.

But it takes effort. Where do we go? We’ve got Lex Wotton's case coming up in April, we’ve got to be here again in numbers. All these other people as soon as he (Rudd) decides on his national body you look around here, you where it is, when the time comes we have to make the right decisions and in April this case means we’ve got to double this strength (of the crowd). If you’ve got cousins, sisters, brothers, aunties still sitting at home you make sure they turn up to the next one. Have your debate at home, but we’ve got to stand, we’ve got to tell the truth. There are people in Townsville marching today, there are people in Cairns, Cunnamulla, Geraldton, Perth. They might only be 10 and 5 and maybe a couple of hundred at the others but they are all talking the same.

Stay strong stay true!

Lex Wotton speaks

Hamish Chitts

Photo: Wotton and Chitts on Palm by Kathy Newnam

Lex Wotton has been portrayed by the Queensland police, government and mainstream media as the ringleader of the so-called “riot” that occurred on Palm Island on November 26, 2004. A police station and residence were destroyed after a police report on the death of community member Mulrunji Doomadgee that concluded that his death was an accident was read at a public meeting. Wotton will face court in April 2008. He continues to be vilified in the media. I spoke to Wotton at his home on Palm Island.

Wotton is a key member of the Palm Island community. He has been the driving force behind trying to build support for a community-owned and -controlled organisation that can buy the Palm Island store. The store currently has very little variety of stock, is extremely expensive, and not very healthy. The store’s profits go to the Queensland government. At the moment, most residents have to catch a ferry to Townsville to do their shopping (the ferry only runs to the island and back Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, so residents have to stay in Townsville for at least two days when shopping). “We’re talking pretty basic items, just groceries”, said Wotton. He believes a community-run store will reduce costs and improve the standard of living for islanders.

For years Wotton has been helping run the island’s Drug and Alcohol Centre. In 1997, he set up a men’s group, which, since the death of Wotton’s close friend Mulrunji, runs a cell-watch program and night patrols. He’s heavily involved in community activity, has been on council twice, and attends all public meetings. Wotton wants to one day set up a combined library and cultural centre on the island so residents, particularly children, can learn about where they come from. Members of over 40 different Aboriginal nations from all over Queensland were sent to Palm, and some of the descendants are more connected to their past than others. Eighty-six per cent of the community on Palm are illiterate. “We can empower the community to lift itself up. In order to empower the community, you have to educate them”, Wotton told GLW.

Police treat the people on Palm Island like inmates and provide a poor response if they are needed. If you phone the police station outside of business hours you get put through to Townsville, 65km away on the mainland.

Three years after the death of Mulrunji, the Palm Island community is still waiting for the truth about his death. Wotton asks, “Why haven’t the police officers who botched the initial investigation into Hurley been stood down? People have to question what would have happened if Mulrunji had been white? It’s terrible how the police used their own investigators to cover up what happened.” (Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was charged with manslaughter after Mulrunji’s death but found not guilty by a Townsville jury. He didn’t face court until mid-2007.)

Justice for Mulrunji now!

Hamish Chitts

Photo: Palm Island by Kathy Newnam


Justice for the Innocent: A Benefit Gig for the Doomadgee Family of Palm Island
The Arena, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, August 11
Tickets $42 + booking fee available from music shops and

Justice for the Innocent, offers an excellent chance for Murris and their supporters to get together and hear great music while supporting Aboriginal peoples’ struggle for justice.

Since Mulrunji’s death in a Palm Island police cell in 2004 the Doomadgee family have lost two more members and a close family friend through grief. “An enormous amount to bear for any family”, said Bob Weatherall, Aboriginal activist and member of the band Dick Desert & The Shotgun Country Club.

When family and friends of Mulrunji reacted in grief and anger, they were labelled rioters and many have been imprisoned awaiting trial or are already serving sentences. Already struggling families have lost income while relatives have been imprisoned. “We’re talking everyday costs like rent and hire purchase that have to be made up for. That is why the band decided to help out with a benefit gig”, Weatherall said. He told Green Left Weekly that as well as providing financial assistance the gig will show the families on Palm Island that they are not alone.

Headlining are the Beasts of Bourbon and top Indigenous artists including Kev Carmody, Banawurun and the Indigenous Intrudaz. Other artists include Lola the Vamp, the Palm Island Dancers and Dick Desert & The Shotgun Country Club. Alex Doomadgee will MC proceedings.