Learning in activism
Black Deaths in Custody
Jails and police cells had always been dangerous places for Aboriginal people. But in the 1980s, the deaths occurring at the hands of police had a strong link to Tranby and its students. These deaths were tragic, the campaign to end them was a powerful learning experience.
Tranby students had been involved in the protests about Eddy Murray’s death in Wee Waa in 1981. The network supporting the Murray family included the Flick family, who had become close friends of Kevin Cook. Elder Isabel Flick often taught at Tranby – or played cards with students while she got to know them - and her niece Karen took up the role of student adviser. Another young man died soon after although not many knew about him till later. Malcolm Smith from Dareton was in his 20s then, but had been taken away from his family at age of 11, growing up in Kinchela and Mt Penang Juvenile Justice Centre without learning how to read. The experience of child removal – the ‘Stolen Generations’ – was shared by Burnam Burnam, one of the elders who taught at Tranby and it was common too among Tranby students and their communities. In December 1982 Malcolm Smith died by suicide, disturbed and alone in a Sydney jail.
In 1983, a new teacher from Western Australia, the activist Helen Corbett (then Boyle) joined the Tranby staff to become Director of Studies. She had been campaigning for some time for justice for John Pat, who had died in police custody in WA in September 1983. John Pat had been just 16 when he was standing outside a pub in Roeburn with a few other young Aboriginal men. A group of off-duty police officers who had been drinking inside came out onto the footpath as they were leaving, and fell into an argument with the young Aboriginal men. The argument became violent and one witness testified that they saw John Pat kicked in the head by one of the officers. All the young Aboriginal men were then arrested – John Pat died later in the police cells. Four police officers and a police aide were charged with manslaughter and tried in May 1984, but were acquitted by an all-White jury and later all reinstated to duty.
In September 1984 at Tranby, Helen and Karen, together with Rose Stack, Tranby librarian and another Western Australian and Rosemary Wanganeen from South Australia, formed the Committee to Defend Black Rights (CDBR). They began organising to direct public attention to the deaths and to build support for their demands for investigation and justice. The CDBR met at Tranby and involved students in the planning as well as staff. As Karen described it, because the meetings were held at Tranby, students would often sit in on the meetings and when visitors came to work with the Committee, they would also give talks to classes or groups of students. Students would take part too in public actions, like the demonstration outside the NSW District Court at Darlinghurst in 1984.
Karen Flick speaks at demonstration against Deaths in Custody, Darlinghurst.
Tranby teacher, Margaret Friel, and student Veronica Collett, at Darlinghurst.
Helen Corbett, Veronica Collett and others CDBR demonstration at Darlinghurst.
In the Meeting Tree Year Book of 1986 (written and produced by the Tranby-NSWIT Link Communication course of 1985) the work of the Committee to Defend Black Rights was outlined and its many events and program were shown.
We Have Survived Poster for Concert, January 27 1985. Playing were the Indigenous bands, No Fixed Address and Caribbe alongside Maori band Tamaroa.
Tranby and the Committee to Defend Black Rights in the Meeting Tree Year Book, 1986, reporting on the Committee’s work. View large version
The Committee to Defend Black Rights continued to campaign for investigation into the deaths. Karen Flick explained that the committee saw its main role to be supporting the families who were left grieving and troubled by the many questions around their loved one’s death. In a conversation recorded in 2002 with Kevin Cook and Judy Chester, Karen said:
‘…that was biggest thing, not the fundraising. It was supporting families …. the people who were involved in these tragedies and were trying to work out how to cope with it. ’
Kevin Cook: I was at the inquest up at Glebe [the second part of the Eddie Murray inquest in 1981]. They just broke down and just sobbed and sobbed. It just broke your heart…
Judy Chester: They had it really hard, they had to keep reliving it, go there every day talking about it, and they didn’t actually get to bury their family and get on with their lives. Day in and day out….’
A banner at a CDBR march focusses attention on the need to support and protect grieving family members.
At the same time, the group was trying to focus public attention on the unanswered questions around these deaths. Helen Corbett spoke on behalf of CDBR at a press conference held at Tranby in April 1987, with Len Culbong and Charlotte Szekley, both relatives of Aboriginal people who had died in custody.
CDBR Press Conference, Tranby, 13 April 1987, Sydney Morning Herald. Photographer Ian Cugley, Photo courtesy Fairfax Media.
There were a number of Aboriginal deaths in custody during 1987 of young men who came from the areas in NSW where students at Tranby had family. One was Mark Quayle from Wilcannia and another was Lloyd Boney from Brewarrina. Both were found dead from hanging in police cells, only hours after their arrests on minor charges, but their deaths were hurriedly attributed to suicide and no further inquiries were to be made. These and other deaths were viewed with rising suspicion and concern across the Aboriginal communities, with rising calls for investigation of police behaviour. Anticipating conflict and apparently provoking it, the police moved large numbers of heavily armed ‘special’ squads of police into these country towns, intensifying Aboriginal suspicions and fuelling rising protests from the CDBR and Aboriginal legal services across the country.
Eventually, the Hawke government called a Federal Royal Commission in August 1987 to investigate the circumstances and the underlying causes of the deaths of Aboriginal people in police or jail custody. Initially, there was just one Commissioner, James Muirhead, but as more deaths occurred and were included in the inquiry, it was clear that this was an enormous task. After one year, the Commission was restructured to include five additional Commissioners. The Commission was led and coordinated by Elliot Johnston with additional commissioners including Pat Dodson, the only Indigenous commissioner, directed to focus on Western Australia but actually contributing to the overall analysis and Hal Wootten, a formerly a judge in the NSW Supreme Court with a long history of supporting Aboriginal Legal Services, who was to focus on NSW, Victoria and Tasmania. The Royal Commission was instructed to investigate 99 deaths, placing enormous pressure even on five Commissioners. Most frustrating for many families was that a Royal Commission does not have powers to lay charges or initiate criminal proceedings, but only to make recommendations, including that further investigations should be undertaken.
Dolly Eatts and her son, Bradley, soon after David Gundy’s death. Courtesy: The Courier Mail, 13 Nov 2013.
The final case to be investigated by the Royal Commission was the death of David Gundy, a tragedy particularly hard felt by Tranby students. In April 1989, police in Sydney’s CBD came into conflict with an Aboriginal man with a history of violent offences. Shots were fired and a police officer killed. Armed police stormed into a number of Aboriginal organisations, without evidence, including Tranby in Glebe and insisted on searching the premises at gunpoint, terrifying Tranby’s students. Some packed their bags and did not ever return to their Tranby course. The next morning police with shotguns broke into a house in Marrickville where they – again mistakenly – believed their suspect to be, and without asking questions, opened fire on the occupants. David Gundy, completely innocent of any connection to the suspect, struggled to get out of bed as the armed police stormed into his room, but they shot him dead. Gundy’s partner was Tranby student, Dolly Eatts, who was away visiting relations but their young son was in the next room when his father was shot. Dolly Eatts was, as Kevin Cook recalled, ‘…never the same again after that – she needed a lot of support. But that little fella, you know, to see all that. He’s got to carry that with him for the rest of his life.’ Tranby staff and students rallied around Dolly to support her as best they could and the Committee to Defend Black Rights – still based at Tranby – organised legal advice to try to help on the long road to justice.
BDIC flyer explaining the pressures grieving families were under during the Royal Commission hearings. View large version
The Commission hearings – just like the Inquest of Eddie Murray that Karen, Kevin and Judy talked about (above) in 2002 – were distressing for grieving families. The atmosphere was intensely adversarial because police and governments all had legal representation trying to shift blame away from themselves. Families yet again carried the burdens of grief and the Committee to Defend Black Rights again tried to support them.
The Royal Commission reported in 1991, that none of the deaths had been due to police or jailer violence but that this "in no way diminishes the seriousness of the problem of Aboriginal deaths in custody”. This was because the rates of imprisonment of Indigenous people were so high in relation to population size and “in many cases death was contributed to by system failures or absence of due care". The Report’s main conclusion was that although Indigenous prisoners did not die at a higher rate than non-Indigenous prisoners, the number of deaths was extremely high because the rate at which Indigenous people were imprisoned was ‘grossly disproportionate’.
The Report made 339 recommendations, addressing a broad range of issues leading to the discrimination against, criminalisation of and dangers to Indigenous people. One of the recommendations was that Indigenous communities needed more information about their rights and the legal tools they could use so that they could defend themselves. Tranby was asked to develop a course in Legal Advocacy. As a result, Tranby’s Certificate and Diploma Legal Advocacy and Legal Skills courses were accredited in 2008 then revised and reaccredited in 2013. This coursework was designed to support all Indigenous community members, particularly Legal Service Field Officers, as well as, at Diploma level, allowing entry into tertiary legal studies.
Assessing the outcomes of the Royal Commission in 2001, ten years after it had reported (and end of the timespan of this website scrapbook) Chris Cunneen pointed out that there had been important changes across broader Australian society which were direct results of the Royal Commission’s recommendations. These include recognition of the damage caused by the removal of Aboriginal children, (including the initiation of the Bringing Them Home Inquiry), the establishment of the reconciliation process and the signing by the Australian federal government of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, allowing individual complainants to lodge petitions before the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva. Furthermore, a number of civil actions have been successfully pursued against police and state jurisdictions, where custodial authorities have been proven to have been guilty of gross abuse and neglect.
Yet as Cunneen documents in detail, the most urgent recommendation of the Royal Commission was to reduce the number of Indigenous people imprisoned. Soon after the Report was tabled, Australian governments – both Federal and States – shifted towards stressing ‘Law and Order’ as an election rallying call and legislating for mandatory sentencing in a number of jurisdictions. Far from reducing the rate at which Indigenous people were imprisoned, this – combined with poor implementation of Commission recommendations and other problems – has increased the rate of Indigenous incarceration. (Chris Cunneen, ‘Assessing the outcomes of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’ [PDF | 207KB], 2001, Health Sociology Review. Vol 10 (2).
Wiradjuri elder, the late Ray Jackson, took up the work of the CDBR after the Royal Commission and headed the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee. For decades, the Watch Committee tirelessly recorded and documented deaths and just as tirelessly supported grieving families. In maintaining public awareness, the Watch Committee has continued to demand recognition and the demand for accountability. The continuing need has been demonstrated when, by 2021, thirty years after the Royal Commission delivered its Report, a Deloitte review in 2018 found that only 64% of the Commission’s Recommendations have been implemented in full, while 36% have been implemented partially or not at all.
An investigation by The Guardian Australia has found that 474 Indigenous deaths have occurred in custody in the 30 years since the Report was brought down (The Guardian, 8 April 2021). It has been this continuing burden on First Nations communities which has given the Black Lives Matter such resonance in Australia.
Black Lives Matter poster.
Australian Maritime Workers in a demonstration in 2021 in support of the Black Lives Matter campaign.
And what learning was done in this difficult – and unfinished – story? It must be that the only reason any change took place – the only reason there was a Royal Commission or a Human Rights Inquiry into Stolen Children or access to the International Human Rights hearings – has been the political actions of these small organisations, the Committee to Defend Black Rights and the Watch Committee and many others. The costs have been high for individual activists who have been burnt out or retired, but the continued renewal of these organisations and the campaigning they have done has been the compelling force for change.
FURTHER READING
→ A useful accounting of the role of media in contributing to the failure to reduce the rates of Indigenous imprisonment can be found in Wendy Bacon’s recent piece: ‘Thirty Years On: how well has Australian media covered deaths in custody?’