An introduction in 3 parts: Anthropological perspectives on the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker

This is an introduction in three parts. In the first part, I introduce this Special Issue, the briefs that led to its realisation, some of the key themes the contributors wrestle with, and the contributions themselves. The second part is more of a personal introduction; namely, an ethnographic narrative of my own experience of the first hours and days following the shooting. My aim here is to take the reader into the field at the beginning of the events that unfolded from a Yuendumu view (inherently different from the perspective presented by the media and the courts). In the third introductory perspective, I look at the nature of fear. In a series of short ethnographic vignettes, I explore how police and Warlpiri people's fears differed and overwrote each other. I contextualise Warlpiri fears by situating the shooting in an historical timeline with frontier massacres. The main thrust of my enquiry is to lay bare the opposition between Warlpiri people's views and those of the settler colony, and to analyse the power of the settler colony to legitimise its fears and make Warlpiri fears illegible. I conclude by pondering the continuing looming threat of settler-colonial violence in Warlpiri lives from the vantage point of the ‘Red House’, the place where the shooting occurred.

This TAJA Special Issue presents recent Australian anthropological work written in response to the shooting of 19 year-old Kumunjayi Walker by Northern Territory police officer Constable Zachary Rolfe.¹ On the evening of 9 November 2019, Constable Rolfe and other members of the Immediate Response Team (IRT) tried to apprehend Kumunjayi Walker in his grandmother's house in the Aboriginal community of Yuendumu, Northern Territory. Kumunjayi Walker died shortly afterwards at the Yuendumu police station, where he was transported by police.

Further, the space opened by the AAS and provided by TAJA allows me to honour requests made by Warlpiri people (in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and over the two years that have passed since) that I help tell their side of the story. I am one of many they asked for support and like many others, I responded to their call, not only because I am deeply indebted to Warlpiri people (my academic career has emerged in conjunction with almost 30 years of working with Warlpiri people at Yuendumu), but also because as events unfolded it became harder and harder to separate their sense of injustice from my own (see also Parts 2 and 3, below). Finally, the shooting affected me personally and not just professionally: it is not that long ago I sat and played cards with his grandmother and others on the very spot where Kumunjayi was shot. While I only knew Kumunjayi as one of the young men who occasionally came and asked his grandmother for something, and sometimes stayed in the room next door, or ate dinner at the same fire, I have known, lived and worked with many of his family for more than half my life. A small part of their pain is also my pain.

Indigenous people generally, and in this instance, Warlpiri people in particular, are only too aware of the ways in which the media, the public, and the courts view things from different, and often opposing, perspectives than they do. This is why this Special Issue diverges from what might be considered a more standardised academic response. Rather than beginning with (or for that matter, providing) a genealogy of all the anthropological work that has been undertaken to date in relation to relevant topics (e.g. policing, Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, settler colonial relations, and so forth), it starts with the shooting and its impacts on Warlpiri people.⁴

In this vein, the second part of this introduction provides insights into the community's feelings and experiences following the shooting—from my perspective as an anthropologist, as a person impacted by the events, and as someone doing their best to support Warlpiri people in their quest for justice for Kumunjayi Walker.⁵ Part 3 of this Introduction lays out some of the groundwork for investigations into the divergent and opposing views into the events by providing some vignettes of Warlpiri-police relations in the days following the shooting and a brief historical contextualisation of this relationship (see also Curran, Vaarzon-Morel, and Redmond, this Special Issue).

The article following this introduction presents Warlpiri voices collated by Georgia Curran, another anthropologist, who like myself, has been working with the community of Yuendumu throughout her career. The aim of this piece is to let Warlpiri words speak for themselves; something Georgia wanted to do without causing further trauma by asking Warlpiri people revisit the events, which is why she collated Warlpiri voices as they were quoted in the media.

The remainder of the Special Issue speaks to the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker by providing anthropological contexts and analyses of issues of immediate relevance to and raised by the shooting death:

In her article, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel provides a perspective from Willowra, a neighbouring Warlpiri community to the north of Yuendumu. At Willowra (as much as at Yuendumu), the shooting was seen as the latest materialisation of an ongoing, highly fraught relationship with the police. Vaarzon-Morel addresses the contours of this troubled history by interweaving historical material from the Coniston Massacres of 1928 onwards with findings from a 2009 report on police stations established as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, also commonly referred to as ‘the intervention’),⁶ and ethnographic vignettes from her own long-term fieldwork with Warlpiri people.

The following essay takes the reader to the town of Alice Springs/Mparntwe, the central Australian service centre which looms large in Warlpiri life. In this paper, Lora Elizabeth Chapman draws on her recent PhD fieldwork with young Aboriginal people in the town to explore the ways these youths navigate and, at times, resist the all-pervasive surveillance and over-policing that characterises their lives. Through fine-grained analyses of young people's interactions with police and security personnel, as well as conversations about these interactions, Chapman illustrates how Aboriginal youth understand the police force as ‘peopled’ and, also how subtle they are in their critiques of interactions with police – a most important insight that echoes across this Special Issue.

Anthony Redmond's contribution focusses on the political economy of Australia's prison-industrial complex, its history, and its relentless impact on Indigenous communities. He does so by interconnecting historical, statistical and ethnographic data (the latter from his long-term fieldwork with Ngarinyin people from the Kimberly region of Western Australia). His insights provide an invaluable and immediately relevant comparative contextualisation of the situation in Yuendumu.

Patrick Horton presents evocative ethnographic vignettes of what he terms ‘carceral spectres’ – indices of how Indigenous life in the Victoria River District, NT, is haunted by hyper-incarceration and hyper-policing. His analyses show how the violence of the settler colonial state is co-present in everyday life, not just through outward force but also in constant and almost imperceptible ways. While his paper is deeply ethnographically local and Timber Creek-specific, his insights hold true for Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory, and I would suggest, elsewhere in Australia.

Liz Scarfe's study considers Northern Territory former Chief Minister, Michael Gunner's promise of grief counselling for families in Yuendumu in the aftermath of the shooting as the starting point for an analysis that interrogates multiple relationships between the Australian settler colonial state and the psychological care sector in central Australia. Perceptively, Scarfe exposes settler colonial sleight of hand tactics, from ‘downgrading’ trauma to grief, to the inequity in counselling service provision for non-Indigenous and Indigenous people, respectively.

These contributions were written before the March 2022 conclusion of the trial of Zachary Rolfe in the NT Supreme Court in Darwin and have been awaiting the lifting of all associated suppression orders allowing for publication. This also means they were written before any of us knew whether or not Constable Rolfe would be found guilty of any of the charges laid against him.

In the Walker case, David Edwardson SC, the defence barrister for Rolfe, consistently referred to Constable Rolfe as a “hero” and said about Kumunjayi Walker that he was “dangerous”, “violent” and “the author of his own misfortune”.⁷

From a Warlpiri perspective, the verdict of not guilty makes no sense and too much sense at once: how, they asked every day on the court lawns where Warlpiri families gathered to support each other during the trial, can somebody who shot somebody else dead not be guilty? Then again, this is a police officer, before an Australian court and a 100 percent non-Indigenous Northern Territory jury – what can you expect?! A guilty sentence would have signalled the potential for a shift in the relationship between Warlpiri people and the settler colonial state. But nobody is fooled: while it would have meant a lot in the moment, it might not have meant anything long term (a bitter irony brought home by police firing six shots at a 19 year-old Aboriginal man in Darwin during Week 5 of the trial, see also Hope, 2022). And, it would only have been the first step on the long path towards coming to terms with the shooting. Ahead lie the coronial inquest, civil cases, and months and years of poking around in the open wound left in the aftermath of Zach Rolfe's Immediate Response Team (IRT) descending onto Yuendumu on a Saturday afternoon in November 2019.

Melinda Hinkson (another anthropologist with an extensive long-term history of work with people from Yuendumu) has authored the afterword, the one contribution to this special issue that was written after the trial concluded. She provides an incisive analysis of the Australian media's complicity in crafting the common narrative of events, including acceptance and perpetuation of the law's forensic scope as the dominant view, the criminalisation of Kumunjayi Walker, and the purification of Zach Rolfe. She closes by reading the ways in which the settler colony dealt with the shooting as a grim prognosis for future truth telling.

Taken together, the contributions to this Special Issue present perspectives on how contemporary anthropological voices consider the nexus between Indigenous people and the settler colonial Australian state, generally, and the Australian criminal ‘justice’ system, particularly, at a time of heightened concern for this relationship.

I am grateful that I have been able to bring together a diverse range of contributors, which includes seasoned as well as emergent scholars (including two PhD students and one MA student), anthropologists who work with Warlpiri people and anthropologists who work further afar, as well as academic and applied anthropologists. I hope that, together, we manage to satisfy not only the AAS brief (“bring anthropological perspectives to bear on the wider issues highlighted by the Yuendumu shooting”) but also the Warlpiri one (“to tell the story so that people can hear and understand the Warlpiri view”).

How to describe it all? The confusion, the fear, the shimmers of hope, the disbelief, the growing understanding that this was happening, that this was real—those first spasms of what was to become an ever-heavier gut-thrumming communal trauma that was to remain unresolved for years to come.

On the evening of Saturday, 9 November, 2019, my colleague Jo Thurman and I sat on a sofa in a cosy little house in the mountains south of Australia's capital city, Canberra, watching Netflix. This was the last night of a one-week writing retreat. We had worked hard and this was well-deserved time off. My phone rang. I ignored it. A bit later Jo's phone rang. And rang again.

The calls had started, and as we answered, sitting on that sofa, each talking on her phone to different friends of ours at Yuendumu standing somewhere in the sea of people in front of the police station, the events of the evening of 9 November enfolded us as well. Separated from Yuendumu by 2962 km by road, we were quickly caught up on what had happened so far and then followed what was going on at Yuendumu in minute-by-minute updates. Fully swept up in the whirl of events, we exchanged information on the sofa between ourselves, received news from friends and passed them on to our counterparts, googled news updates, read and watched all manner of Facebook posts (live streams by Warlpiri people outside the police station, various NT Police Facebook pages), talked, and listened all at once.

The facts of the situation up to that point were clear: In the early evening of Saturday, 9 November 2019, while some community members were still at the Yuendumu graveyard following the burial of a prominent community member (one of Kumunjayi's grandfathers), police officers attempted to apprehend 19-year-old Kumunjayi Walker at his grandmother's house (‘Red House’ hereafter). They were not local police officers but members of an especially trained IRT (Immediate Response Team), who had arrived in Yuendumu for the first time the same afternoon. During the apprehension attempt, three shots were fired before community members witnessed the officers dragging a handcuffed and bleeding Kumunjayi Walker to the police van and drove off to the police station. People ran from everywhere—surrounding houses, the graveyard—and joined in the crowd gathering at Red House. As more community members heard what happened, everyone began flocking to the police station, where family members, the Aboriginal Police Aide (an uncle of Kumunjayi Walker), members of the Yuendumu Mediation Committee, Warlpiri Elders, and staff of the Youth Programme, took turns trying to communicate with the police, to find out how badly Kumunjayi Walker was hurt and to negotiate entry for members of his family.

Rumours intensified; as did actions. At Yuendumu, people engaged in sorry business (Warlpiri mortuary rituals), community meetings, and a protest march to the police station; in Alice Springs, locals both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, organised Snap Action protests (see Figure 1); in newsrooms nationally and soon internationally, journalists began calling sources and writing up stories; Social Media exploded with commentary; lawyers started receiving and making phone calls; and Jo and I left the house in the mountains to return to Canberra.

Jo and I almost turned towards Yuendumu instead of Canberra when we reached Cooma but everything was happening so fast that we decided the long stretches without phone reception during the two-and-a half-day-drive to central Australia would be unbearable. Instead, we flew from Canberra to Alice Springs and arrived at Yuendumu on the Tuesday.

Both my notes and my memories of the first 24 h at Yuendumu are sketchy. What I do remember distinctly is feeling a profound sense of relief because I made it there and experiencing—once again (see Musharbash, 2008)—how sharing grief makes grief more bearable.⁹ A little calmed, my manic collection of bits of information (phone calls, news, social media posts) ceased and instead I turned my attention to more practical matters: helping with logistics, food, lifts, note taking, and so forth (Figures 2-5).

Another thing that stands out in my memory is how during those first days, every single person I met at Yuendumu recounted their experience of events as they had unfolded: where they were when they first heard the shots that had been fired; what happened at Red House when the “incident” took place and who had told them; what happened while everybody was waiting for information outside the police station; what happened on Sunday when police officers came to Yuendumu for a first community meeting; and lists of any and all snippets of information they had gathered (where the bullet casings were found, who had been present, how many shots were fired, when the first plane landed and when the ambulance arrived, and so on and so forth). Over and over these stories repeated themselves, at every camp I visited, in my car as I provided lifts, around the fire in the evenings, at the shop, in front of the school, this was all anybody could talk about. There was nothing else; everybody was traumatised, reliving the events over and over, trying to make sense of what had occurred while being caught in a toxic mix of distress, disbelief, grief, and fear.¹⁰

Warlpiri people, the police, the media, the public, politicians, anthropologists and more have been grappling with understanding the meanings and implications of the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker. Views tend to fall into one of two camps; one that views the shooting as an isolated incident during which Constable Rolfe acted professionally and correctly, and the other that holds that with the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Red House, the murderousness of the settler colony was set loose in plain sight, in the middle of Yuendumu.

It strikes me that which view one holds to a large degree is defined by whose fear one shares or can more easily empathise with: the settler-colony's fear of criminalised Indigenous people (see, amongst many others, Anthony, 2013; Cunneen, 2011) or Warlpiri fears of terror-moved-into-the-home.¹¹ To put this as starkly as possible: who scares you? The idea of Kumunjayi Walker and, generally, criminal(ised) Aboriginal people, especially young men? Or the idea of Zach Rolfe and, generally, cops busting into your house with guns drawn? Which idea is more threatening, more realistically scary, to you? The thing is, the fear of criminalised Aboriginal people is structured into the DNA of the settler colony—it is legitimised and hegemonic. The fear of being shot by the police is neither shared nor seen by the settler colony. This was made abundantly clear during the trial, which focussed on Constable Rolfe's fear of the threat he perceived in Kumunjayi Walker and obfuscated Kumunjayi Walker's fear of two armed men descending on him in his grandmother's house. It is also the only plausible explanation why no Warlpiri people were allowed into the police station after the shooting: the police's fear of a potential riot overwrote any considerations about the fear of a teenager dying from gunshot wounds surrounded by those who shot him with no access to his family. I here offer some ethnographic vignettes of Warlpiri and police actions, attitudes, and discourse in the days following the shooting to illustrate how those views developed, wrestled with and overwrote each other in those initial days; and add historical context to the Warlpiri perspective (see also Vaarzon-Morel, Redmond, and Horton, this Issue).

After a death occurs, Warlpiri people sweep away the foot prints and other tangible and intangible elements of the deceased's former presence (see also Musharbash, 2008). On the Wednesday following the shooting, a march of Warlpiri people in traditional mourning body paint proceeded from Red House to the police station. At the police station, each person entered with a leafy gum branch and, wailing, swept the inside with broad sweeping strokes. There was an awkward moment at the front door as the first people left after sweeping and a long row of people waited to enter. Normally, the branches are just thrown aside, and time and the wind eventually take care of them. Warlpiri people are hyper-aware of non-Indigenous standards of cleanliness and aversion to mess, and those exiting were unsure what to do with the branches. Somebody in the mass of people waiting said (in Warlpiri): “Leav'em, they can clean up themselves”, and every exiting person dropped their branch in the vicinity of the front door. They then proceeded to a container of red paint and left their (now emblematic) hand-prints on the outside wall of the police station. As police officers pleaded “come on, kids, help clean up” children adroitly slunk away and out of sight.

That night, after we went to sleep in the yard of Celeste's place in Yuendumu's East Camp, Celeste woke us up and pointed to the police station which was in our direct line of sight. There, in the middle of the night, equipped with ladders and buckets, we could see police officers—Lady Macbeth-like—scrubbing for hours to remove the red handprints.

This short vignette lays out some ingredients of the drama as it unfolded: the subtle (see also Chapman, this volume) and non-violent kind of protest mounted by Warlpiri people (note: not picking up branches of cleansing foliage is a long way from the ‘riots’ anticipated by the police and the public); the different ways in which Warlpiri people and the police, respectively, cleansed in the aftermath of the shooting; and the tug-of-war to come about who was the victim encapsulated in the hand prints (red for the blood shed by Kumunjayi Walker, blue for ‘our brothers in blue,’ the Australian police).

In the days immediately following the shooting, the police mobilised a multi-pronged response at Yuendumu. This included a community meeting fronted by one of Yuendumu's much appreciated former sergeants Acting Police Commissioner Travis Wurst, increased police presence on the streets of Yuendumu, deployment of the TRG (carrying assault rifles) to Yuendumu and Alice Springs in anticipation of ‘riots’, and roadblocks on the Tanami Road between Alice Springs and Yuendumu. This schizophrenic approach—presenting a friendly face while simultaneously demonstrating overwhelming force—encapsulates the fears of the settler colony. The smoothing over of the violence of the shooting while preparing for more violence are undeniable in these actions. They demonstrate scant empathy for and understanding of Warlpiri fears. In fact, they exacerbated them extensively. Consider the co-presence of TRG personnel with assault rifles and community police trying to show a friendly face by distributing lollies to children on the streets of Yuendumu—both of which left parents frantic with fear for their children. Once it became clear that the entire community was planning to travel to Alice Springs for the rally there, people started telling each other about warnings given by police not to take their children with them: “they might get shot,” and “welfare will take them”—either warning given with an air of care but perceived as very thinly veiled threats.¹²

Neither at Yuendumu, nor during the big rally in Alice Springs, was there any rioting. As senior Warlpiri elders kept telling the big contingent of Warlpiri people before and during the march from the Alice Springs council lawns to the Alice Springs court lawns: “We need to be calm. They think we are wild, uncivilised and dangerous. We need to show them: we are not the wild ones.” After the rally, an Anmatjere/Alyawarra friend of mine, and a nephew of Kwementyaye Briscoe (who died in the Alice Springs police watch house in January 2012) said to me: “When my uncle died, there were hardly any men protesting. This time everyone was there, men, women, and children, painted up for sorry, marching calm and with dignity, I got goose pimples I was feeling so proud.” The settler colonial flipside of this was reported to me by Liz Scarfe (pers comm. September 2021), who was told by some of her (non-Indigenous) research participants that they found the rally “really confronting” and understood the sorry paint as “war paint”.

It is imperative to understand that while legally (and soon in public consciousness) the shooting was classified as an Aboriginal Death in Custody, for Warlpiri people, the incident was an unmistakable 21st century echo of Australia's last documented frontier massacre, the Coniston Massacres of 1928 (see also Curran, Hinkson, and Vaarzon-Morel, this issue). Between mid-August and mid-October of that year, a reprisal party on horseback, formed and led by Mounted Constable George Murray (like Constable Rolfe, he previously served in a war). In response to the killing of dingo tracker Fred Brookes, Murray and his party hunted down and shot (depending on the source) between 31 and 160 Warlpiri, Anmatjere and Kaytetye people (see amongst many others Bradley, 2019, Cribbin, 1984, Kelly & Batty, 2012, Rowse, 1990). The stories of running at the sound of hooves, of hiding in the hills or by burying in the sand, and of entire camps being shot—men, women, children all—continue to reverberate through contemporary Warlpiri lives. At Yuendumu, the Coniston Massacres are not ‘history’ (in the sense of a date, a name, an event in the past) but something that happened to parents, grandparents, aunties and cousins. Retellings of those experiences surface readily in everyday life, evidencing the massacres as a foundational element of Warlpiri understandings of their relationship to the settler colonial state. Warlpiri people made a film about the massacres (Kelly & Batty, 2012) and they often take non-Indigenous visitors to Yurrkuru from whence the massacres unfolded (see also Miller, 2022) – all ways of telling their side of the story.

From this perspective, Aboriginal Deaths in Custody are a continuation of early frontier violence in a new guise: the frontier abandon in killing is modified in scale and scope now affecting individuals rather than entire family groups, and more often accomplished through lack of care rather than outward violence (see also Razack, 2011). It also, usually, happens out of sight of the settler public, in cells and police wagons. In other words, Warlpiri people share Patrick Wolfe's (1999) view of settler-colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than event. From the Warlpiri perspective, however, this is not just a ‘view’, but quotidian experience: they know that they or their relatives might die in prison, in holding cells, and in the back of police vans; everybody is related to somebody who has died in custody. This is experiential knowledge of the fact that, as Razack (2011:354) puts it, “the violence that is meted out to Aboriginal people in settler societies is a paradigmatic and foundational violence”. And, I would add, the settler colony goes out of its way to overwrite fears about this violence with its own fears, which become the primarily legible and therefore legitimate ones.

From the Warlpiri perspective, the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker was a reminder that ultimately, there is no safe space from which to shelter from settler-colonial violence. The ‘incident’ moved the very real threat of deaths behind bars, inside cells, and in police wagons not just into the open – but into the home: “They can come into your home now [again!] and shoot you there!” was something I frequently heard in the days following the shooting. The Warlpiri view is (and I would argue, the anthropological perspective should be) that the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker in his grandmother's house, in the middle of the community, brings the murderous violence that the settler colonial state usually hides in plain sight into full view. To the rest of the world, the shooting makes this violence legible in short flickers (evidenced not least by the international media attention paid to the event). But then, what was briefly unmasked becomes unseen again as the apparatus of the settler colony regains control (see Scarfe, this volume, for an analysis of some of the machinations of this process and Hinkson, this volume, about the ‘scope’ of the law and the media's views).

Meanwhile, Red House stands as a memorial to the events of 9 November 2019 in a triple sense: Its outside walls have been painted with the Aboriginal flag, red hand-prints, and adorned with fairy lights, wind chimes, and plastic flowers; and this marks it as ‘the house where it happened’. If the house is a memorial to the shooting, the room where he was shot has become a memorial to Kumunjayi. In the days after the shooting, in accordance with Warlpiri tradition, visitors to the house laid down on the spot in the floor where he was shot, wailing. Now, there is a shrine there, with a large, framed photo of a happy Kumunjayi, and another of him and his mother in Brisbane, as well as an abundance of flowers.

Red House stands empty in the middle of Yuendumu, a community with desperate housing needs. It could not be reallocated post-sorry business as the associations and memories of what happened there made that impossible. The memorialisation of Red House appears to mark a significant intensification—if not a shift—in grieving practices associated with mourning the near constant flow of premature deaths in this community. Red House memorialises a death that needs to be held in full view and accounted for, a death that cannot be absolved by Warlpiri alone. Red House now is where Warlpiri people congregate at the start of rallies – much as Red House is in the middle of Yuendumu, so is the shooting at the heart of the issue they fight for: safety from the ever-present possibility that anybody could be next.