Welcome to Season 2

from where we started and what brought us here. In season two, we're going to start talking a lot more about missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and you will have heard us speak about a number of the cases that we've raised over the years in quests that Amy's attended, and the just sheer lack of justice for the women and children who have gone missing and been murdered and for their families. Amy, can you explain why we've decided to make.

But we always recognize the fact that the victim in this story, a strong, proud Aboriginal woman named Linda, had been all forgotten in the media coverage at the time and then the court portrayals, and that was a leading reason why this miscarriage of justice existed in the first place,

the dehumanization of a strong, proud Aboriginal woman. And as we continued this podcast over the past five or six years, as we did the episodes, those themes kept coming up, and we widened the podcast to look at not just this one case of injustice and we still fight for Kevin, but also other cases of injustice affecting Aboriginal people, because that's the only way that you will understand is by looking at the broader context of how this is happening,

how this state sanctioned violence is being continually perpetrated against not just Aboriginal men, but Aboriginal men, women, and children.

And during that time, Martin and myself have actually started looking into a number of cases of Aboriginal women who have been killed and died by violence and for which there has been no justice, There have been no charges, and they've been all but forgotten, partly also because of this devastating media silencing that makes them responsible for their own deaths, and so we felt like it was very important to relaunch the podcast by centre Aboriginal women, and

we do that very deliberately because by centering Aboriginal women, we are able to see all aspects of racial and gendered violence in this colony and how it has been continually reproduced through the justice system and through the media and sanctioned effectively by state and federal governments in Australia. And that's really why we are focusing specifically on centering Aboriginal women as we continue in this podcast, and we hope our listeners will join that journey with us and

take those lessons on board. Martin, we have been doing this for a long time, but you also had a long history investigating these cases even before I met you. But what have you actually learned from doing this investigation.

work that's been done. In addition to making the podcast and understanding these stories, Amy's always had a real focus on Linda and the other Aboriginal women who have been involved in these stories and who have been treated so appallingly. And from the first time I read the transcript of that initial trial that we started this podcast about Curtin, you could see the way that Linda just was not present. There.

No one involved, be it the judge or the prosecution or the police, ever seemed to care about Linda, her personhood, her humanity, who she was. It was as if she disappeared.

And this comes to something that not only have I learned, but this is something that Amy has been teaching about and writing about over recent years and really informing the public on so Amy, one thing I read when you put your articles out into the public sphere that really challenges things is that you don't just talk about missing and murdered, but you very deliberately use the term disappeared. So can you explain to the audience why you use that term.

It was almost like I was a different person. And I wanted to say that, to say that our practice as journalists and as lawyers and as commentators is really informed by the cases we worked on, and not just informed that by viewing the violence in the violence of the justice system, but also informed by the testimonies and the acts of resistance by Aboriginal women who have died so in their living they resisted multiple forms of violence, and I learned from that, but also in the advocacy

and the resistance of their families. All of these lessons haven't come from academia, They haven't come from other legal avenues. The lessons I've learned has actually been from not just through this podcast and talking to Mardin, but also in sitting with families and in learning of the lives of Aboriginal women. And I think that is really important to

say because I think it differentiates us a lot. And I want people to know that it is very important to understand that the media is a part of this apparatus of disappearance which I'll be talking about, and so we have to actually be very careful that we don't reproduce violence, the violence that has already been done, and we have to act as a form of resistance to

that violence. And so I learned about thinking and talking about disappearance in that context, and it was really from the stories of Aboriginal women who had been deemed missing in Queensland. So those are stories like stories we've talked about on the podcast Menique Club, but also cases in Queensland like Misspernite and Constance may Watcho, who we've also

talked about and who are subject to continuing inquests. And I realized you're sitting in those processes and talking to the families and talking to advocates, particularly advocate shareon of Sin, that the word missing was actually silencing in itself, So it had concealed a lot of levels of violence, and so I orientated to thinking and talking about it through

the perspective of disappearance. So a framework of disappearance, which are actively disappearing Aboriginal women, and the reason I talk about it was because one missing was being used by the police to claim, you know, these women have just gone missing on their own accord, they've gone walk about, they could turn up at any point, and that the police were doing everything they could define them, which was

not true. So it redirected the responsibility back to themselves and it made absence the existence of potential perpetrators, which we're playing a key part in not ailing the failure to bring the women home, but to find justice for

the women and their families. But a framework of disappearance is really predicated a lot on what I also learned from reading about the testimonies, particularly of the mothers in Argentina, who were fighting for the rights of their loved ones who'd been disappeared into detention centers or killed under the

Argentinian dictatorship. And they were deliberately being killed and disappeared, And it was a very specific form of violence because there was in a state of between life and death, and that ambiguity was what was making it so incredibly traumatic, and I realized that was what was happening here. So a framework of disappearance goes beyond just the violence of individual perpetrators. It includes the police who failure to search

and to prosecute. It includes the media for failing to cover these stories properly and for further dehumanizing the women. And it covers the State of Australia through acquiescence, because they're consenting, through their failure to actually stop these deaths and to put pressure, are actually sanctioning these deaths and disappearances. And we know in the setl of colonial project Australia as a Setlar colony, it's predicated on the disappearance of

our peoples. And the most powerful way you can hurt us as people is by targeting our women, because our women are the links to the next generation. And so that's why I use disappearance deliberately, and that's why we'll be using the word disappearance rather than the words missing.

And I also want to say that disappearance also incorporates the deaths and the containment of our women in watchhouses and pre ms all across the country, because there are clear links between the criminalization and over surveillance of ambush or women with our deaths inside and even our deaths outside. So Martin, just thinking about that and what we've been talking about in the cases we've been working on. How does that aspect of disappearance play out?

Colleen Walker. And immediately the police started talking about the fact that she'd supposedly gone walk about, that she was missing, that she'd gone to another town, and this meant there was no investigation early on, where really, as soon as anyone goes missing, but especially a young person and especially a woman, you need to be making those investigations a

priority and immediate. You have no time to lose. And yet what they did was to blame Colleen for going missing, when in fact, as you've explained, and as anyone who would know who's read anything about what happened to the Barraville children, is she had been murdered, and so she was never missing. It was never a missing person's case.

She'd been forcibly disappeared from her community and killed. And as people know from anything they've read and heard about that matter too, is that two more Aboriginal children would be murdered by the same individual because the police had failed to act, because they'd shifted the focus onto this idea of missing and this old trope of people Aboriginal people going walk about as if Colleen was just lost into the ether, when in fact it wasn't ambiguous at all.

She had been forcibly disappeared and removed from her community, murdered, and taken from her family forever. So I think this is why this term that Amy uses is so important. It shifts things back to how they really are, and the very deliberate use of missing by police so that it shifts the focus from the missing woman and their family, the disappeared women and their family, away from the real killer. And we know all these killers are getting away with

it scot free. But it's not just the police who are doing this, who are shifting the focus, who are using blame. It's also the media, who we've seen time and again blame Aboriginal communities for these issues that do not begin inside Aboriginal communities and the language that the media uses. I mean, you've done a lot of work on the way the media operates in this sphere and

published a long paper on this issue. Can you explain the media side of the reporting on these issues, how the media is failing and also what damage it does.

The main way they report on it is to say it's an issue of the Aboriginal community, it's an issue of Aboriginal culture. It's black on black violence. You know, it's a punitive, savage Aboriginal community who are killing their own women, which is totally divorced from historical context. And that framework has been used very insidiously to pass really draconian laws against Aboriginal people, which only leads to further violence, and we know that from for example, the anti intervention.

So the media have no framework or language in which to speak about the actual violence of what's happening. They'd grow critique not only their own outlets, but they also don't critique, for example, the coronial process or the police, and that leads us into the other issue is that they have very reliant not on black witnesses, but on white witnesses, and often their stories are predicated first on

the authority of the police. So, as I said before, the police are complicit in the disappearances of Aboriginal women. So they're taking that language from the police and not adequately questioning it. But they also dehumanize Aboriginal women to the way that they report on our bodies as if we're just wounds or we're just body parts, rather than who we are in our living and that has a severe impact, you know, and it's been used from the

day of the Frontier to now. So Aboriginal women have been painted in very certain ways through colonial stereotype, and that stereotype is still being used. So the media are reporting on a very limited way of representation, which they've always reported on so they're not actually reporting on the truth. They're reporting on the way the stories have been told about us for two hundred years. And so that's why I say, when we talk about violence, we have to

talk about the historical context. And they're just not willing to see that. And they're willing they're so uncritical. They do not accept the word first of Aboriginal Aboriginal women. And I just wanted to quote an amazing Aboriginal woman that we know, Tarita Fisher, who is the friend of Constance. May watch show and I remember her talking about the fact, you know, the police when Constance went missing, they never considered her in high risk disappearance. But Aboriginal people knew

she was a high risk disappearance. And that shows you the differences in Aboriginal ways of knowing and living and White ways, you know what I mean. So the media are responsible for what Ignatio Corona, a Mexican writer, says, in the context of Mexico, a second disappearance. So even if they report on it in any way, those stories

fall off the back pages. And what you'll find is, in all cases I've looked at, I can't think of one, there has never been adequate media attention given to an Aboriginal woman who has disappeared or died by violence, and I can't think of one where this has happened. And

so the media. That's why I include the media in this apparatus of disappearance, because they have so much power, and what we're doing as Aboriginal media and as independent media is actually allowing us to understand that black communities have our own power and we honor that power through

centering their testimonies and their perspectives and their resistances. So, Martin, just taking what I just said, how have you seen the issues with the media around reporting this these cases play out in reality and in other cases that you've seen.

had on ensuring no justice was ever served. And first that begins with Queenie Hart, who we've spoken about many times, and as Amy talked about the way that the media describes Aboriginal women, and at the time there was either a leak or the media came up with it themselves, and it was a leak, probably from the police, that Queenie was a sex worker, when that in fact was

not the case. And we know all too well from studies in the United States and Canada and just the sheer number of Aboriginal women and Indigenous women who have been murdered because they were sex workers, that once you plant this seed, that second layer of discrimination runs so deep and ensures that almost no chance of justice ever exists. And it was a complete lie. There was no truth to it ever then or now. And of course, as

we all know, Queenie Heart's murderer was never punished. Everyone knew who it was, and the police did nothing, and the media had a real role in that. Then if we fast forward through to the nineties and we look at the way the media covered the murder of Linda and their deliberate use of salacious details and a lot of things that again simply did not happen. The media seem all too happy to make things up when it involves Aboriginal women or simply believe anything the police say

without a shred of evidence. And I think one of the most despicable examples of this is that the community, Linda's family and everyone involved was led to believe that Linda was raped when that did not happen. I mean, this isn't a p hauling thing for the media to say and for the family to have to hear, and yet it never happened. And yet they planted that seed, and it exists for everyone who loved Linda until this day,

and the media faces no consequences for that behavior. And then if you come to the last few years in Queensland and the three inquests we've spoken about and that Amy's been involved in, and I've helped Monique Club's family a little bit of Miss Bernard Constance may watchhow and Monique Club. The media has taken photos supplied by the police which show the women in the blue prison uniforms and not from the families. And in no other case of a missing or murdered woman in Queensland have the

police done that. Only when it involves Aboriginal women. So again, the media is sending this signal that it's the women's fault, not the killer. They are taking everything away from the woman, They're taking everything away from her family. And we know, because we know the background of these women, and we know the background of over policing, that these were not

serious criminals or anything of the sort. These were women who had been overpoliced and charged for things that no other woman would be charged for, and had been surveiled and treated appallingly both in police custody and prison custody, and yet when they were the victim, that was used against them. And so the media has to take a lot of responsibility for the fact that they're not just doing bad reporting, they are actively participating in the murder

and disappearance of Aboriginal women and children. And I think it also goes to what Amy was talking about and their inability or unwillingness or deliberate excising of the voice of Aboriginal women and their families and simply not believing them. When a non Indigenous person goes missing or is killed, the family is rightly treated with a great deal of respect, kid clubs are used, and yet that never happens for

Aboriginal families. So it's a really important part of this story that we are trying to map out is the media's direct involvement and their complicity in all of this with the police and with corrective services.

to Aboriginal women. I'll be intending a number of inquests, and we'll be telling a lot of those stories more in depth and fleshing out those issues, but also the patterns of what we're seeing in how Aboriginal women are being targeted and killed all across the country.

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 curten podcast, and help to support our work at Patreon dot com. Backslash Curtain Podcast