When police officer Zachary Rolfe was cleared this week of murdering Arnold “Kumanjayi Walker”, the only real surprise was that he had ever been charged in the first place.
Rolfe shot Walker at the remote Northern Territory community of Yuendemu, when Walker stabbed him and a fellow officers with scissors. The officers were attempting to arrest Walker. Three days earlier, he had attacked other police officers with an axe.
The fatal incident was just the endpoint of a life of escalating violence Despite a chorus of blame from the Yuendemu community, and Aboriginal activists in general, it’s clear that Walker was no “good boy” at all.
Face-biting, bashing her head with a rock, punching, kicking, pinching her cheeks and choking are among the sickening acts of violence that Arnold Walker inflicted on his girlfriend Rickisha Robertson in the years before police fatally shot him.
The Australian
The story of Walker’s short and violent life is a whirlwind of all-too typical stories in Aboriginal communities. Abandoned by his alcoholic parents, Walker moved in with grandparents — and yet another milieu of alcohol and the pall of violence inflicted by men on women under the suffocating blanket of “traditional culture”. “My grandmother and grandfather told him, ‘you gotta live with us and we gotta give you my granddaughter,’ says Rickisha Robertson. Within a year, Walker was regularly inflicting savage violence. Violence which was only brought to police attention when it got so bad that she was hospitalised. Otherwise, “Robertson’s aunt showed her how to use bush medicine on her injuries”.
When Walker’s savage life reached its inevitable conclusion, the Yuendemu community, rather than accept responsibility, turned instead on the people who’d only ever tried to help. Not just the police, but remote area nurses, who’d recently been forced to evacuate the community for their own safety.
In Yuendumu, the danger felt palpable.
“You don’t walk around, you don’t go to the shop, you don’t do anything that puts your personal safety at risk,” she said.
“I have had a lot of experience. I’m well trained in personal protection and it (living in Yuendumu) scared the crap out of me.”
[Cassandra Holland] told detectives she had been verbally and physically threatened while working in the community.
“It’s the most aggressive area I’ve ever worked and I’ve worked in jails,” she said.
For more than six months, the nurses’ homes had been regularly attacked and broken into. In the days leading up to their flight from Yuendemu, the attacks escalated alarmingly. Their houses were ransacked, often while they were home. Their cars windscreens were smashed. Young nurses living alone fled to one another’s houses and sat up all night together, too scared to sleep. Police seized abandoned shovels, pickaxes and other weapons left behind by the attackers.
The nurses specifically mentioned Walker.
Before Holland left, [Julie Frost] mentioned Walker.
“I could see her level of fear and frustration regarding this individual,” Holland told detectives. “We had a conversation on that day (November 9) and she told me how scared she was of him […] And this person is not, I didn’t appreciate reading in the papers that he was a 19-year-old teenager. He was a man and he was a very scary man. I recognise him as someone in the crowd that I wouldn’t want to tangle with.”
Instead of calling out the culprits, the community moved them from house to house, to hide them from police. Even when the nurses were forced to flee, they came under attack again.
“I had quite a group of people go around the ambulance and they were yelling at me not to take the ambulance.
“The locals said ‘you can’t leave, you can’t take our ambulance’. Yes, everything is ‘theirs’.
“My personal safety at that stage was under concern, so we just continued driving.”
After Walker’s death, the community again turned on the nurses who’d been driven out by the violence.
The morning after the shooting, NT Health staff met at the Peter Sitzler Building in Alice Springs where they were updated on the situation in Yuendumu. The nurses had heard that the community blamed them for Walker’s death because they weren’t there to treat him […] medical staff then attended a “confronting” and “overwhelming” community meeting, where locals directly blamed the nurses for Walker’s death.
The Australian
All of this would have gone mostly unreported and unremarked by the likes of city-based Black Lives Matter activists, except that Walker finally attacked someone with the means to defend themselves.
The short and violent life of Arnold “Kumanjayi” Walker is a savage indictment on, not just a violent young man, but communities that do nothing but savage the hands that help them and steadfastly refuse to accept responsibility for their culture of violence.