Everything that is wrong in the Northern Territory’s relationships between black and white residents is laid bare in this well-researched, quite dispassionate account of the lives of Kumanjayi Walker and Zachary Rolfe … and Walker’s death.
Wild, who had previously spent six years in the NT reporting on Indigenous affairs, followed this 2019 case of Rolfe, an NT policeman, who fatally shot Walker
at Yuendumu.
By giving an account of the murder case: with Rolfe acquitted; subsequent drawn-out coronial inquiry into Walker’s death; historic cases in the NT involving deaths of black and white people; despair in Alice Springs about youngsters causing havoc; social media frenzies supporting Walker and Rolfe; the culture within NT police; and the beliefs of the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu; Wild covers a lot of ground in
this book.
The conclusion any disinterested reader makes is that Walker and Rolfe were each deeply flawed young men.
Walker was painted by some relatives as someone who smiled a lot and loved animals. They did not mention violence, poor physical and cognitive health, property crime, assaults, court hearings and custodial sentences.
A psychologist who had worked with him saw him as an impulsive, emotionally dysregulated, traumatised six-year-old in the body of a
young man.
Rolfe was a member of the Alice Springs Immediate Response Group (IRT) that came to Yuendumu to assist in Walker’s arrest because he had absconded from rehab and returned there, confronting local police with an axe.
But Rolfe, who had served in the Australian Army, disregarded the plan by the local (female) police sergeant to arrest Walker at 5am. Instead of intelligence-gathering the night before, Rolfe and his partner found Walker, and after he used scissors to slightly wound Rolfe, he was shot once. Rolfe’s partner overpowered Walker but Rolfe shot him twice more.
Wild makes the point that notable anthropologist W Stanner used the term ‘Everywhen’ in 1956 to describe a concept of time explained to him by Aboriginal people in the NT. In the Everywhen, time is circular with past, present and future happening at once.
Her account includes a conversation with a Yuendumu elder in which he explained that justice in the Warlpiri culture was a spear in the legs, witnessed by people from the families of the victim and the assailant. Once the assailant was speared the families would be ‘even’ with no need for anyone to go to jail.
The Yuendumu people did not totally understand white man’s law, but they appreciated the coroner’s report in July this year, delivered in the town where the death had occurred. Coroner Elizabeth Armitage found that Rolfe worked in an organisation where racism was entrenched; and he believed in his superiority to female colleagues, bush cops and more experienced officers. He had a history of violent confrontations with suspects, almost exclusively Aboriginal men, sending videos of those assaults to family and friends as entertainment. The coroner found that the failure to censure Rolfe’s policing was a taint on the NT police.
The Red House is a wide-ranging view of a tragic incident, but one with echoes and ripples in Australia and other parts of the world, very much Everywhen.kate
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Wild is an investigative journalist whose work with distinguished teams at the ABC has been recognised with three Walkley Awards and a Logie. Her reports from Darwin, where she lived from 2010 to 2016, laid the groundwork for a Four Corners story on juvenile detention that prompted the calling of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. Her first book, Waiting for Elijah, was published in 2018.
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