These poems were written in January 2016, at the request of the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, to support a campaign for awareness about the death of Ms Dhu in police custody in South Hedland in August 2014.
The poems are posted here with permission from Aunty Carol Roe, via Ethan Blue.
Today the coroner has handed down her findings and recommendations. She stated that MS Dhu received "inhumane treatment" from the police concerned, and that her death was preventable.
According to one news source, the coroner
"found the conduct of the medical staff and police officers involved was well below the standards expected".
While it's clear to anyone reading the coroner's findings just what level of neglect and indifference prevented Ms Dhu receiving the care to which she was entitled, we are baffled as to the unaccountability of police (and medical staff) in this case.
The Guardian reports that a Senior Constable was
"issued an assistant commissioner's warning notice after an internal police investigation for the 'lack of urgency' she showed after Dhu hit her head, and 10 other officers were given disciplinary notices for failing to correctly follow lockup procedure. Most told the inquest they did not understand the notice and did not know why they had been disciplined."
How long can this sort of inhumanity toward Aboriginal people go on?
In reproducing the following two poems, we wish to express our heartfelt support for Ms Dhu's family and our desire to see justice for Ms Dhu's memory.
Ms Dhu
A
daughter begins so small but soon
outgrows
her mother
bigger
than love can keep hold of
from
bud to blossom
and
even thorn
we’ve
no control of
Out
in the world, the future
Yet
to a mother,
a
grandmother,
a
father, she’s forever
–
some part of her –
that
little slip they watched over
We
want respect for her
When
she cries out we want to come to her
or
for others to do the same if we can’t be there
Not
the cold shoulder, the sneer
the
hard voice out of nowhere
that
says Faking it
Not
the indifferent she’ll-be-right, the
failure
to
listen when someone says pain
is
ten out of ten, what can it mean
if
she’s treated like nobody’s daughter?
What
sort of blight are we under?
Tracy
Ryan
In Marapikurrinya: for Ms Dhu
The
uniforms won’t listen, ore heaped up,
long
steel ships waiting to take country
away.
They refuse to see themselves,
boots
and all, march away
from
all spirits. They laugh at body,
they
laugh at words, but they
have
no idea they are dead-in-themselves,
their
faces dressed up for the cameras.
They
kill with impunity. They are designed
that
way. In another lock-up, I have
seen
the body of a young Noongah bloke
tossed
like a hessian sack, his bones
all
busted, and the ring-a-ring-a-rosie
circle
laughing and saying you deserve
what
you get. The uniforms denied he was
in there, inside his own body.
The sounds
that
crept out were television – they all watched
American
cop shows. It’s all there for them –
the
land dressed up as state or nation:
they
fancy their long arms reaching out,
they
fancy their long arms reaching
across
tribal boundaries, heaping it all
into
the belly of those long ships
or
into trucks or train. To furnaces.
Stretching
fences across stone and sand
and
far into sea? Their magnificent
jurisdiction
of brutality. They are their
own
totems. They worship their ‘order’.
I
know that port. I have been in a house
where
Nyangumarta and Yamaji
came
together listening to Coloured Stone
and
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
And
stories were told then, back
then, as the death-toll rises
and those
hunting
parties of the Old North
find
their latest manifestation.
This
reaches out to you, Ms Dhu,
and
to all those from past and present
who
hold you close, who won’t see
you
lost in the files of the ‘deceased’.
You
will outlive them all.
You
will hold back the uniforms
from
striking more and more of your people down.
You
will be the beginning. You will never end.
John Kinsella
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