A couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time trawling through the lists of women who had died as a result of men's violence and compiling my own list of the Aboriginal victims. Often, the women I listed required my educated guess work.
They had no names so I would include them on the basis of location and situation — where crimes were committed in areas where there was a high population of Aboriginal people, it was likely that the unnamed victim was an Aboriginal woman. Unfortunately, I was also able to count on the lack of interest shown by the press as being a sure-fire sign of the victim's heritage.
After a couple of years of compiling these lists, I stopped. As well as showing the exorbitant rates of Indigenous victimhood (seven times parity in both years), it ended up being an exercise in proving just how little society cared about these women. Not only did this work barely get picked up elsewhere but many unnamed victims remained unnamed for years, if the press ever followed up at all. Aboriginal women victims just did not appear to matter at all to broader society.
In recent times, two previously unnamed victims have been identified in the media. This was not, however, due to a public outpouring of sympathy marked by tears and vigils. Nor was it because some form of justice has prevailed for their deaths. In both cases, the victims' names (or at least culturally-sensitive versions of such) have made the press because police bungled the investigations so much that it is highly unlikely there will ever be justice for either woman.
Last week, a coronial inquest report laid bare the sheer lack of care and competence the Tennant Creek police had while investigating the death of Kwementyeye Green in 2013.
Not only had the police theorised she had killed herself leading them to destroy crucial forensic evidence which could have proven otherwise, but they released the man suspected of killing her without charge and without securing the crime scene, therefore potentially allowing him to tamper with further evidence. An ABC report stated that the director of public prosecutions has found there is now not enough evidence to lay charges.
This case had eerie similarities to that of Kwementyeye McCormack, an Aboriginal woman who died in Alice Springs in 2015, also due to bleeding out from an injury to her thigh. She was