No landmark: Australia's inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations Women and Children

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following post contains the names of people who have died.

Dear friends,

In episode 3 of the 2022 podcast Dying Rose by Douglas Smith, Indigenous Affairs Reporter with The Advertiser, it is fellow Advertiser journalists Emily Olle and Katherine Bermingham’s turn to take listeners through the group's investigation of the murder or disappearance of an Indigenous* woman in Australia, one of the podcast’s series of six such stories. It was the story of Courtney Hunter-Hebberman's fight for justice for her daughter Rose Hunter-Hebberman, who had passed away three years ago.

“There was one thing that Courtney said that really caught me when she talks about hearing the doors close of a police car,” says Emily Olle, in comparing her experience as a young white woman in Australia with that of her colleague Smith’s.

“[Courtney] said, I know that sound, you know, I know that sound.”

“And what caught me was that I realised, I don't know that sound. I haven't had to hear that sound. I haven't had to be scared of that sound,” says Ollie.

The journalists were compelled to make Dying Rose after hearing Courtney Hunter-Hebberman speak at an International Women’s Day lunch in Adelaide, on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people (and, as it happens, my home town, where NewsCorp’s The Advertiser has been the only newspaper for decades). The death of her daughter, Rose Hunter-Hebberman, was ruled a suicide by police in December 2019.

“If you think it's hard being a white woman in Australia, try being a black woman,” the heartbroken mother said to the audience, and described her ongoing battle to get police, or anyone, to pay further attention to the case, whose conclusions she doubts. Rose Hunter-Hebberman had been in a relationship with a violent man at the time of her death.

True crime: violence and femicide against Indigenous women

It’s more than the six stories of Dying Rose, or the three discussed in this July article of Australian Women's Weekly. Or the 315 calculated for the ABC Four Corners investigation How Many More?, or the average of 12 First Nations women and four children murdered each year between 1989 and 2020, or the potentially hundreds of Aboriginal women who are missing from outside of their resident community and thus erased in official data, as reported by Martin Hodgson and Amy McQuire in episode 10 of Season 2 of their podcast, Curtain. As a white settler colony of the British Empire, violence against Indigenous women was a founding strategy of the formation of the Australian state that endures to this day, 236 years since the British first invaded the lands of the Eora people in the place they named Sydney Cove.

As scholars Marlene Longbottom, Hannah McGlade and Kyllie Cripps write for The Conversation, citing research by Professor Cripps, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised for injury associated with violence than non-Indigenous women, and are eight times more likely to be a victim of homicide. This figure is higher in some areas, such as Western Australia, which recorded Aboriginal mothers as 17.5 times more likely to be a victim of homicide.

In another Conversation article, Chay Brown, Connie Shaw, Kayla Glynn-Braun and Shirleen Campbell note that, according to the recently released report of the Australian Senate Inquiry into Murdered and Missing First Nations Women and Children, 20% of missing women in Australia are Aboriginal women, and 53% of missing children reports concern First Nations children and young people in out-of-home care.

Speaking to Katherine Bermingham for the final episode of the Dying Rose podcast, Senator Cox, who spearheaded the Senate inquiry, described the routine neglect of cases of missing or murdered First Nations women by Australia’s justice systems, saying:

“They can mount a task force in days, hundreds of officers, send up drones, triangulate phones …but for a black woman in this country they cannot do that.”

Systemic racism “becomes practice that gets passed down from senior to junior officers of the academy”, said Cox, who is a former police officer. 

An interview with Antoinette Braybrook AM

“This Inquiry was an important step because it gave First Nations people across this country – for the first time – a national stage on which to tell our truths about our women and children’s lives and safety on the public record”, Antoinette Braybrook wrote to me from the road. She is currently completing a Churchill Fellowship study tour of Indigenous communities and organisations in Canada, the US and New Zealand, and was kind enough to answer my questions in an email interview last week for The Troubled Region.

Braybrook is an Aboriginal woman and CEO of Djirra, an Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation in Australia that provides holistic support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who experience family violence. In 2023 she was named a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her years of community service.

“For over 2 years, First Nations people and family violence experts from across this country made 87 written submissions and shared many hours of testimony to this Inquiry, sharing deeply personal stories of heartache, loss, and of being failed by the systems that are supposed to keep them and their loved ones safe,” said Braybrook.

“With all this firsthand evidence,” she continued, “I was very disappointed to see the Inquiry report included just ten recommendations.”

Braybrook is far from alone in her concerns about the result of the inquiry. Senator Dorinda Cox, who led the call for the inquiry, told Guardian Australia that the final result was a series of “weak” recommendations that did not constitute the “courageous” reforms communities had called for, while a statement from the Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute said “the Inquiry's recommendations do not reflect the urgent investment into systemic change that is required.” Chay Brown, Connie Shaw, Kayla Glynn-Braun and Shirleen Campbell wrote in their article that, “while important, it was not the moment of reckoning many of us had hoped for.” In particular, the report of the inquiry “fails to hold anyone to account.”

"We welcome some of the recommendations, including calls for Governments to urgently invest in frontline Aboriginal-led support services for our women and children experiencing domestic, family, and sexual violence,” said Braybrook in our email interview.

 “But many of the recommendations miss the mark or fall short.”

“If they had been bolder and centred on urgent, practical action Governments must take for First Nations women’s and children’s safety – this Inquiry could have been a game changer for First Nations people in this country,” she said.

#MMIWG

The movement for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls - also known as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People; typically abbreviated to #MMIW, #MMIWG or #MMIWG2S on social - has been growing in action and energy worldwide particularly since its recognition by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2019. It principally refers to First Nations women and children in the former British colonies of the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who have been murdered or disappeared and where the state has not resolved their cases justly - instead taking actions such as neglecting to investigate, criminalising the person and their family/community, and/or re-victimising them in public discourse.

In the week that Reservation Dogs star D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai appeared at the Emmy nominations Sunday with a red palm print painted across his face in support of MMIWG2S, Braybrook said the international links between First Nations women and communities are strong.

“When I travelled in the US and Canada and met with many First Nations women working on the frontline of women’s safety in their communities – and leading the way with self-determined solutions that work – I saw so many similarities,” said Braybrook.

 “First Nations women are assaulted, hospitalised, and killed at far greater rates than other women. Systems violence – harm caused by racist and punitive policing and other systems – is often just as dangerous as men’s violence.”

 “All over the world, it is First Nations women doing the heavy lifting to keep our women and children safe. Offering culturally safe, holistic services and creating spaces and services to support First Nations women and their children escaping violence without judgement.

Braybrook said that the recommendations of the Senate inquiry do not compel action to address the massive gaps in data that policy and law makers use to make decisions that directly affect our women’s and children’s safety.”

“Closing the Gap data on the number of First Nations women and children experiencing violence – relied on by law and policy makers to make decisions that directly relate to our women’s safety - is now over 6 years out of date”, said Braybrook.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Braybrook also expressed concern about the inquiry’s recommendations on police practices.

“Pouring more and more public resources into policing and unfair, punitive and racist systems is not the answer,” she said. 

“It does not improve the safety of our women and children. Independent oversight mechanisms – led by Aboriginal women –can help improve police accountability.”

In Australia, it remains a critical issue of government policy and funding decisions that continue to ignore the voices and solutions of First Nations women to intimate violence committed against them, said Braybrook.

“Djirra welcomes the National Cabinet’s acknowledgment that men’s violence against women and children is at a crisis point and requires urgent national investment and action by Federal, State, and Territory Governments,” she said, while urging clarity from the national government on what funding or other resources will go to community-controlled and self-determined services like Djirra.

“Press conferences and promises do nothing to save Aboriginal women’s lives. Real investment in our self-determined frontline services is the only solution.”

Many thanks to Djirra staff for making the interview with Antoinette Braybrook AO possible.

Raygun tho

For Darumbal/South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire, the Senate inquiry enacted further “disappearance” of Indigenous women by the state. As she wrote in her newsletter, Black Justice Journalism:

“The inquiry’s report was the first public inquiry into the crisis and so, it is often referred to as ‘landmark’, in the few media reports that have bothered to pay attention to it. But, it is far short of ‘landmark’.”

McQuire also noted the scarcity of media attention on the inquiry in Australia, compared to the contemporaneous news of white Australian Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn’s Olympic breakdancing performance. 

To be sure, white feminist and carceral solutions to the crisis of gender-based violence tend to dominate in Australian government, policy-making and media discourse about it, often supplanting and sidelining community-controlled and self-determined service responses such as Djirra, which emphasise cultural safety over police and prisons and are supported by a robust international literature.***

As Marlene Longbottom, Hannah McGlade and Kyllie Cripps write:

“White feminists have pursued a law and order agenda that has been proven not only to be ineffectual, but potentially even harmful to Indigenous women. For example, coercive control laws risk misidentifying Indigenous women as the perpetrators of violence for not presenting as “ideal victims”.”

Further:

“As Aboriginal women with lived experience of violence, we continue to point out the urgency of addressing the abhorrent rates of violence through the inclusion of our voices at national forums. For years, Indigenous researchers, survivors, advocates and allies have called for action. This advocacy, and expertise, is often overlooked.”

In an unfortunate illustration of this very point, a recent emergency rapid review into violence prevention conducted by the Australian Government did not include any First Nations women, while it elevated white moral crusaders with a history of speaking over them and others.

First Nations women's advocacy: the "light on the horizon"

Writing in the National Indigenous Times about the MMIWG inquiry and its “mixed reactions”, Hannah McGlade says “there's still some light on the horizon. We're developing the first stand-alone action plan to address violence against First Nations women and children. This commitment has come about from our hard work and advocacy, supported by several UN treaty bodies and experts. We made this happen.”

Dr McGlade, who is Associate Professor of Law at Curtin University and member of the UN Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, adds that “the Australian state will never truly recognise the violence still being inflicted on Indigenous women." She continues:

"We know this violence is genocidal, and that Indigenous femicide is a feature of contemporary settler state and Indigenous relations globally, underlined by the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land for capitalist exploitation and gain.”

As the work of First Nations women scholars such as McGlade repeatedly demonstrates, under the patriarchal logic of the white settler-colonial state in the international system of liberal democratic nation-states, Indigenous women must fight exceptionally hard for their survival against men's use of violence.****

Connected across the seas by a shared resistance, the movement for the Missing and Murdered works against this reality, provoking it to expand its hard limits to keep First Nations women, and their communities, safe.

Thankyou for staying with the trouble,

Ann.

*I use the terms Indigenous, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and First Nations and/or the actual names of people and country in this post to refer to individuals and groups of people who may also refer to themselves as Black, Blak, and/or black. For a discussion on this terminology, IndigenousX’s Luke Pearson offers a useful discussion. For a deeper dive, check out the book Welcome to Country by Professor Marcia Langton AO.

**See for example Clapham et al. 2024.

***don’t take my white word for it - see for example: work by the scholars cited in this post; Professor Larissa Behrendt; Professor Chelsea Watego; Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson; Professor Megan Davis.