We may never get to a “true” version of what happened on that dirt road forty-one years ago. Further crucial details may be found in the many thousands of pages of Court, Coronial and RCDIAC transcripts and the numerous submissions, statements, correspondence and exhibits used in those matters.
Last week two Aboriginal men—Matthew Ryan and Ross Mandi—filed a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission (the AHRC) against the Australian Electoral Commission (the AEC) alleging that the AEC has effectively suppressed the Aboriginal vote in remote areas in the Northern Territory.
Keep Australia Clean (Kill a Coon); If Abos want land they should buy the bastard the same as the whites do. They have no rights to any land whatever. If they don’t want to work under our system – let ‘em starve; People with black legs won’t be served; and Buy some Coon cheese today for catching black mice: Noticeboard, Daly Waters Hotel, 1978.
It was not until 16 August 1975 that negotiations with Vesteys, owners of the Wave Hill lease, were completed, and the lease for the Gurindji tribal land at Wattie Creek was handed to Vincent Lingiari, leader of the Gurindji.
The neck is stretched out, the head thrown back, the legs straight and stiff. The fits are brought on or made worse by the slightest touch, sound or light. Finally, one dreadful seizure follows another, until they are continuous and death ensues.
It was late November 2010, one of those red-hot November days that only the Western Desert can turn on. Over six hundred people travelled for days from far and wide to bury young Jampijinpa at the small town of Nyirripi, a four-and-a-half hour dusty drive west from Alice Springs on rough dirt roads.
It is a matter of some sadness to the Court to have been involved in a matter which has so many unsatisfactory and unsavoury actions of the police force of the Northern Territory ... It may be that the defendant can be described as a serial pest. He may be provocative and cheeky and a trouble causer. He is 19 years old. He is not Jack the Ripper.
There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through fifty thousand years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation. We cannot imagine that. We cannot imagine that we will fail.
All up the bill for lawyers alone in the Brett Cattle Company matter might be $12 million plus loose change and walking around money.
“We must remove white police from the aboriginal reserves – and we must tell the black man: 'Don’t you leave your reserve all you will be subject to the white man’s law'. David Jennings, November 1978
