I was having an extended break from writing. After four novels, I’d turned aside to put my heart and soul into a property near Billinudgel on Bundjalung Country in Northern New South Wales. (That property later became the setting for my novel Mullumbimby – literally another story.) Somewhat to my surprise, Professor Julianne Schultz, the brilliant founding editor of Griffith Review, rang me up with a proposal. I agreed and took time out from eradicating camphor laurels and ripping down rusty barbed wire fences to fly up to Palm Island. There, my kinship sister Gladys introduced me to one of her senior Elders, and at that Elder’s kitchen table I learned about life for Bwgcolman people in the aftermath of the killing in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. Six months later, Griffith Review published ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’ 

Fast forward two decades, and as this book goes to print yet another Aboriginal man, Kumanjayi White, has just met his death in police custody. Kumanjayi, a Warlpiri man living in town due to his disabilities, died after being held down on an Alice Springs supermarket floor by two off-duty police. Frail, thin and, according to one former supermarket worker, clearly someone living with disability, Kumanjayi had allegedly been pinching chocolates. Between the killing of Mulrunji Doomadgee and the death of Kumanjayi White, hundreds of other Indigenous men, (women and children have died in the custody of the Australian state. As one Koori community member asked angrily of the prison system while at a rally for another victim, the late David Dungay Jr: ‘How much training do they need to stop killing our people?’ A question worth repeating, again and again, until it’s answered, and until the killings cease. This pattern of lethal state violence towards Blak people (the term ‘Blak’ coined by the late artist Destiny Deacon, who began spelling the word without the ‘c’ because, she said, she was sick and tired of being called ‘a Black c …’) seems so deeply entrenched in Australia as to be inevitable. It isn’t inevitable. We First Nations lived here successfully and fruitfully for thousands of years, and we can do so again. 

As I write in ‘Staying White’ – the most recent of these essays – Australia can join us in a better future. You don’t need to be Indigenous to engage with First Nations mobs and our ancient, sustainable Law in the twenty-first century. You simply need to be a decent, mindful human who cares about your neighbours and the earth, and acts accordingly…

Continue reading the extract here.

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