This is Curtain, a podcast where we expose the disappearances of Aboriginal people across this country, shining a light on the darkest parts of our justice system.
We ask who are the victims? I am Aiming.
McGuire and I'm Martin Hodgson, Senior advocate at the Foreign Prisoner Support Service. And a warning, this series contains the names of deceased people and includes distressing content that may upset some listeners. Welcome to episode two of season two
of Curtin the podcast. To begin this week, Amy's going to tell a story and like a lot of the breakthroughs we've had in both Kevin's case and understanding this issue more broadly, Amy's mind was sparked by a conversation with her father, Sterling maguire, who you've heard before in an interview on this podcast and a number of years ago. Sterling mentioned to name Amy, can you tell us what your dad said and where that led? Yeah?
And I think from listeners of our podcast, we know that a lot of the stories I've been working on, particularly coming from Rock Campden, including Kevin Henry and Annie Queeney, who would talk about later in this podcast, and we have talked about previously actually came from conversations that my dad had with me, and so a number of years ago, I think I was only about eighteen, I was working
down in Canberra. Dad actually called and told me about a man in Rock Campden and he was well known around the community because he was involved in the local soccer scene. Like my dad had actually been involved in the killing of a woman over in his home country of Canada, and that was obviously very shocking to me. So today I want to just recount a brief story because I think it connects a lot of things with what happens in relation to the murders and disappearances of
Aboriginal women over in Canada and America. To hear on our own traditional homelands. This story is about a woman named Pamela George. Pamela George was a solte woman from the Sakame Reserve, one hundred and forty kilometers from Regina in the province of Saskatchewan in western Canada. Pamela had three children who were only young when she was killed in April nineteen ninety five.
She had a five year.
Old and a ten year old and a two year old baby who had passed. She was remembered by her sister Denise as a person who respected her elders and she never harmed anyone. But her life was tragically taken by two white men who each received six and a half year sentences and were paroled within two years. They were not sentenced for murder, but for manslaughter. Their names
were Alex Tanowski and Steve Cummerfield. The lenient sentence sparked outrage from Indigenous people across Canada, and it was fueled by the judge's instructions to the jury at trial that they should include the fact Pamela George was working as a sex worker at the time in their deliberations. The defense had argued that quote, since both men were highly intoxicated, they bore administ responsibility for the beating, and it was a horneous murder. The boys did quote pretty darn stupid things,
and quote the judge said, but they did not commit murder. Regina, where Pamela George was from, and my hometown of Rockampden are an ocean apart. And yet Pamela George's murder and the callous treatment of her, her family, and her community by the Canadian justice system had too many similarities with stories we will speak about on this podcast, including the story of Annie Quinny Hart and Linda, who were both murdered on my traditional d Rumble homelands by the River Tunabal.
But there was another similarity.
As I said previously, I had not heard of Pamela George until two thousand and seven when my father rang me that day. I did not know her name, and I would not know her name until years later when I started doing a PhD into missing and murdered Indigenous women.
But one day Dad.
Told me that there was a journalist at our local newspaper who had been convicted of killing an Aboriginal woman in his hometown in Canada. Dad knew only the briefest of details. That journalist, who was also an editor at
the Morning Bulletin, was named alex Toanouski. Alex Toanoutski, who had murdered Pamela George and only served two years and had even bragged about it to his friends before he was convicted, had ended up employed by my local newspaper thousands of kilometers away on my own traditional homelands, the place where Annie Queeny Hart died, the place where Linda died. The place where so many d rumble people were massacred. Now did the Morning Bulletin know? By two thousand and
seven it definitely did. It published an article based on court proceedings about Tanoutski. It said, alex To and alcohol don't mix. Yesterday, the thirty year old paid for his latest slip up, driving a red moped along Rock Campden's William Street at eleven thirty pm on New Year's Eve while almost five times the legal limit. Tanotski had a checkered past of alcohol field indiscretions, and in the fifth
paragraph The Morning Bulletin wrote only one sentence. Tanotski was sentenced to six years in jail in Canada after he and another man bashed a prostitute to death in nine ninety five. Those were the only details about Pamela George. She had been reduced just to a prostitute, and her savage killing had been deemed the result of only an alcohol fuel slip up. Martin, You've just heard me describe this unbelievable connection between Regina and rock Hampton. What do you take from that?
It's so shocking to me still, although I shouldn't be surprised the language used to humanize a woman, an Indigenous women who's been the victim of a horrific crime, and
find ways to excuse the white murderer. And then there's just something about him coming to Rockhampton of all places, and being involved in the media, because so much of what we hear about what happens comes through these media channels, and so much of what is wrong about what's said about the victim and the perpetrator doesn't necessarily come from just police and magistrates and prosecutors, but from journalists and
editors themselves. And so for him to find himself in that position in a town on the other side of the world that's also known for that horrific colonial violence, it boggles the mind. But it just shows how close those links really are.
And Martin, I think the other thing that really stood out to me was the fact that that, you know, I grew up reading the Morning Bulletin, but I know that when I went back into the Morning Bulletin archives and I read how they spoke of Annie Quinni particular they called her things like dark and colored, and also the way they talked about Linda as if she was nothing or she was just totally erased from their coverage.
I think the other thing that.
Really shocks me is just it connects the complicity of media in ways that I don't fully understand even now.
You know what I mean. How a white.
Men from Canada can come over here and be given some sense of innocence and have his really colonial violent crimes downgraded to such an extent, and the newspaper seems to have washed its hands of any accountability in the elevation of him to not just a journalist, but to an editor.
I think it shows why it's important to interrogate every aspect of violence against Indigenous women and children. When Amy first told me she was embarking on a thesis and looking at the media's role in the reporting of the deaths of murdered and disappeared Aboriginal women and children, I must admit I thought to myself, there's much bigger issues
here around this case. And this was quite a few years ago, and now as the years have gone by, I've come to understand why the work Amy's doing is so important, and it's part of why it's important to get out of our own silos, whether they be in journalism, the law, education, all these other areas. Where they're actually all linked and it too easily can be simplified when in fact it's a much bigger story.
And just picking up from that, Martyn, I mean I started looking into well, first it started with interrogating media representations of violence against Aboriginal women. But then I realized there was this enduring crisis around murdered and disappeared Aboriginal
women in our homelands. And that has come from working on cases with you and from talking to so many other families, but it also comes from acknowledging that over in Canada, in particular where Pamela George was from, there has been a long movement to make these deaths visible.
And Pamela George is really one of the most.
Landmark or most highly publicized cases because of the fact that these two men, Alex Tnnounced and Steve Cummerfield, were led off so leniently, and because of the way Pamela was so dehumanized in the media.
But over the course of those years.
Where Aboriginal women and families were fighting to make these deaths visible, it culminated in a watershed inquiry that was handed down in twenty nineteen, which became the Missing e Murdered Indigenous Women's and Girls Inquiry in Canada not just looking at women and girls, but also trans and non binary people who have been killed and two Spirit people,
which they call in Canada. And we do have a national inquiry over here currently undergoing in the Senate, but it is a far cry from the inquiry in Canada, which spoke to thousands of families and advocates and experts as it was doing its inquiry.
But even four years after the.
Missing and Murder Indigenous Women's and Girls Inquiry in Canada, Aboriginal women are very concerned that there has been little movement. So the inquiry actually delivered two hundred and thirty one calls for justice after it had been completed.
Just some of these calls, I mean, it goes through a lot.
Of the underlaying issues that lead to violence against Aboriginal women. But it also included some really important calls like, for example, standardization of protocols for policies and practices that ensure all cases of missing, a murdered Indigenous women's girls, and two
Spirit people are thoroughly investigated. Then they also called for the establishment of an independent Special Investigation Unit for the investigation of incidents of values to investigate police misconduct in all forms of discriminatory practices and mistreatment of Indigenous people within the POLICEIRSE, and critically it called for the establishment of a national task Force to review and, if required, to reinvestigate each case of all unresolved files of missing
a murdered Indigenous women's and girls and trans and two spirit peoples across Canada, and also produce all unresolved cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women to the National Task Force. And I pulled out just some of those recommendations from the two hundred and thirty one calls for Justice because I feel like that would be what we need over here.
But even then, an investigation by the Canadian broadcaster CBC found this year that only two of the two hundred and thirty one calls of the inquiry have been completed and only half have even been started, So about one hundred of those calls haven't even been looked at. And so it really shows that even when you have this
extensive inquiry, the follow three is just not there. And I think that cautions us over in our own country about the limitations of public inquiries as well, so that there was an inquiry in Canada and there's an inquiry going on in Australia. We've shown a little bit about the similarities between the cases of Pamela George and the
cases that we've also talked about on this podcast. There's the reason why we have this issue around the deliberate targeting of Aboriginal women, not just in Canada but over here. And I think it goes to our shared histories as Aboriginal people who have been victims of settler colonial societies. Martin, how do you see this and the links between Canada and Australia.
Yeah, I think it's important that the story of murdered and forcibly disappeared Aboriginal women is not just told, but told from the start. Unfortunately, the inquiry that we're seeing play out at the moment in Australia is telling the tale of individual cases, individual pages.
But this is an.
Anthology of colonial violence deeply rooted in the dehumanizing and barbaric treatment of Aboriginal women, where sexual violence was simply normal for settlers. In historian Henry Reynolds's book With the White People, he says, and I quote on pastoral stations Aboriginal women were preyed on by any and every white man whose women was to have a piece of black velvet,
as they called it, wherever and whenever they pleased. He goes on to say, on many stations there was no attempt to hide the extent of sexual relations between white station workers and black women. And when he says sexual relations, I think what he should say is rape and sexual slavery.
The book further tells us a pastoralist from the edge of the Nullibor plane told a South Australian Royal Commission in eighteen ninety nine that he'd known stations where and I quote, every hand on the place had a gin. That's a derogatory term for an Aboriginal woman, even down
to boys of eighteen years of age. Just six years later, when there was debate in West Australia that led to the establishment of the aborigin his Act of nine five, it was noted in Parliament that at Vitriol River stations, a witness observed that on many stations and I quote, there are no white women at all. Only these Aboriginal women are usually at the mercy of anybody, from the proprietor or manager to the Stockman, Cook rous about and
the Jack. But that Act that was supposed to protect Aboriginal women and to make provisions for the better protection of all Aboriginal inhabitants of Western Australia did nothing to stop the widening femicide and rape of Aboriginal women right across the state. It was simply business as usual. In fact, in many ways it got worse. There were also some
horrific ideas around the colony at the time. Amongst the white settlers, it was said the idea of chastity amongst Aboriginal women was considered by the European men as an I quote preposterous. In a paper by Professor Judy Atkinson, she quotes Northern Territory pastoralist Alfred Giles as saying, no less preposterous is the idea of a black woman being outraged.
Giles was the friend of Mounted Constable William Wilshire, who became notorious for his skills in dispersing the natives I quote, and wrote rapturously about black virgins all being nude, having suggested that perhaps God meant them for use as he pleased them wherever the pioneers go. Willsher argued for the use of Aboriginal women by white bushmen, but loathed the resulting offspring of these unions. The offspring, of course, became the first children known as half castes and who would
go on to be stolen from their families. Willshare was a notorious figure in colonial Australia. In eighteen ninety one, his men attacked a group of sleeping Aboriginal people camped at Tempy Downs, killing two. The incident was investigated, and will she became the first policeman charged with murder, and he stood trial in Port Augusta. The case was highly controversial, but public subscriptions raised the enormous amount of two thousand pounds for his bail and also paid for his defense
by Sir John Downer. While Aboriginal witnesses gave evidence, of course, Willshear was acquitted. After the trial, Willshear was simply transferred to Victoria River District in eighteen ninety three, where he would continue his crimes against Aboriginal people. His defender, Sir John Downer, was of course the grandfather of Alexander Downer, the foreign minister who took this country into an illegal
war in Iraq. Historian Tony Roberts, in his two thousand and five award winning book Frontier Justice, A History of the Golf Country to nineteen hundred, described the nature of massacres and violent counters with Aboriginal people in the Golf Country as part of the Australian Frontier War was His research showed that senior colonial politicians, including the likes of Downer and Shirdon Colton, along with South Australian police and
I quote Mastermind, condoned or concealed atrocities in the anti Golf Country, which led to the deaths of at least
six hundred Aboriginal people, according to Henry Reynolds. Roberts concluded that Downer's name occurred with greater frequency than any of his colleagues, and he pointed out that Downer, as a trained lawyer, an Attorney General from eighteen eighty one to eighteen eighty four and then as Premier eighteen eighty five to eighteen eighty seven, he must have either deliberately ignored the rights of Aboriginal people that were embodied at the
time or was directly involved. This has gone unchanged since the first ship landed from the massacres the supposed disbursement sees that drove Aboriginal people off their land and killed men, dragged women into sexual slavery, and left children to die.
This ingrained hatred and culture for Aboriginal women that said that these men had a right to Aboriginal women's bodies for sick sexual gratification swept through the colony for more than one hundred and fifty years unchallenged, and then when some changes came after the sixty seven referendum, the victim blaming began, and this was used to justify the horrors as the media stepped up its role in facilitating this genocide.
Queenie Hart was brutally murdered in the seventies, her body dumped in the Fitzroy River, and her killer, Stephen Henry Keem, allowed to walk free on the opening day of his trial by a judge simply acting on a whim the media having falsely labeled Queenie a sex worker or, to be blunt in their words, a prostitute. In nineteen seventy three, twenty three year old Aboriginal women Esther George, died in a Sydney house fire. She'd come to the city a
year earlier from Dumagy in Queensland. The coroner said her cause of death was and I quote from burns sustained then and then when the house fire broke out within those premises from a cause unknown. Not only a ridiculous statement, but we do know the cause. The building she was staying in that night was the target of a developer, Frank Thierman, who'd hired thugs, including two former New South Wales police detectives, Fred Cray and Keith Kelly, to intimidate residents.
Despite police attempts which ultimately failed to frame another Aboriginal man for the murder, there is little doubt in my mind that those retired New South Wales police officers were involved in Esther's murder when they set that fire. They were also accused of a number of rapes and murders of women around Sydney and the state of New South Wales. Lynette Daily and countless other women would follow, murdered and raped,
discarded as if worthless. The DPP filed twice to try Lynnette's killers, despite the coroner, Michael Barnes, finding that there could be and I quote no doubt that mister apt Order had inflicted the fatal injuries, but even beyond a reasonable doubt, the killer was deemed more worthy of freedom than Lynette was of her life, and to this day,
in Queensland alone, the inquest into such debts continue. White men, like all of the murderers I've mentioned so far, reveling in more than two hundred years of colonial culture and brutal killing of Aboriginal women like Constance may Watchow and Miss Bernard, and hundreds and hundreds of others. Each, every single one of these women has left this earth at the hands of a settler, taking their piece of black velvet, as they call it. And not one of these women
nor their families has had justice. This is the dark stain that is smeared across this country. This is the truth we seek to expose on this podcast and through our work to name without fear in our voices, this colonial culture that pulses through the pains of these lands and will only be healed when justice is truly handed down and hurt, and the humanity of each and every Aboriginal woman and child is finally treasured with the sacred love they deserve. This episode was brought to you by
Black Cast and produced by Clint Curtis. For more, you can visit us at www dot Curtain podcast dot com, follow us on Twitter at Curtain Podcast, and help to support our work at Patreon dot com backslash Curtain Podcast. M m hmmm.
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