Disappeared again

The first public inquiry into the crisis of 'missing' and murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Australia was handed down on Thursday. After two years, it only delivered ten recommendations.

Earlier this year, in June, the children, brothers, and extended family of Constance May Watcho, again made the journey from Cherbourg to Brisbane to hear deputy state coroner Stephanie Gallagher deliver her findings into Constance’s death.   

(Image Credit: Charandev Singh)

The inquest had begun in September 2022, so they had already had to wait over a year and a half. They had packed out the courtroom; so many people there that the staff had to bring in extra seats.  

It had been over five years since Constance’s remains had been found in the most dehumanising of circumstances in the affluent suburb of Kangaroo Point, by the base of a cliff not far from where children rock climb on Saturdays; over six years since she was last seen two minutes from where she was found, in a unit she stayed in with three white men; five years since the wounds of her body reduced her personhood to body parts and not the whole of who she was; five years since a police press conference pled to the public for information about her ‘murder’; five years since images of a dirt-stained duffle bag were circulated instead of pictures of her; five years since the $250,000 reward again calling for information about her ‘murder’; even longer since anyone had heard her voice; and five years since she had been buried, back home in Cherbourg cemetery, in a grave adorned with a white cross, and purple flowers, and solar lights so that she may never lay in darkness, should never be concealed, or disappeared, again. 

It was over five years and still no one had been charged over Constance’s murder. 

Rather than the Supreme Court, her death and the circumstances surrounding it were the subject of a coronial inquest.  

Her family had sat through five days of evidence, and had heard from only two police officers in the investigation; one of whom had told the court that his investigation had never been a “homicide” investigation, despite the fact the state homicide squad had been involved, and the police had released a reward calling for information about her ‘murder’. Instead, he had told the court hers was a “suspicious death”.  

There were no clear answers about why the state homicide squad had taken on only a level two role and had not stayed involved in the investigation, and no questions posed to the Missing Persons Unit about their involvement or lack of. In the ten months Constance was missing, the QPS never organised any physical search for her.

There were so many unanswered questions from Constance’s family, and yet, they would remain unanswered.  

That day, Gallagher delivered her findings in under six minutes. It had taken a longer time to set up the chairs.
 
Gallagher had told the court that Constance’s cause of death was ‘unknown’ and so was the identity of any persons responsible for interfering with Constance’s body.

Not only that, she had said that there was a possibility that “Constance had died from some other unknown cause”, leaving it open to the suggestion she had caused her death.  
 
Suddenly, there were no perpetrators in Constance’s death; despite the brutality and violence inflicted upon her remains; despite the fact she had been extremely vulnerable in the days before her enforced disappearance.

There was a truth in the air that floated above us all: this would never happen to a white woman.

In the public gallery, members of Constance’s family wept and others stood in anger. One woman yelled “No Justice! No Justice!”, and another, “Another black life!”.  They were not a ‘threat’; they were there to make it known that Constance was worthy, that Constance deserved more, and that justice was not to be found here.

Gallagher had moved to the side to exit and then had come back, hitting the duress button. She was overheard telling the counsel assist that she had called security. 

The treatment of Constance’s family and the treatment of Constance herself, both from when she was first disappeared in November 2017, to when she was found ten months later, to the media reporting and then the coroner’s court, is a brutal reminder that instead of justice, Aboriginal women can only expect apathy, indifference and the same message repeated over and over again: this settler colony does not care about the lives of black women.  

The coroner’s court, in particular, has become so accustomed to the inevitability of black death after black death, that it cannot or refuses to recognise black life. Black life cannot be abstracted to a statistic, and through the presence of the families in these processes, those who have died cannot become statistics either.  

And yet, the reality of coronial processes and the public inquiry often work to confine the lives of those not only experiencing but resisting violence to these statistics, to focus acutely on ‘deficiency’ and reproduce demeaning racialised stereotypes. This works not to uncover the truth but exonerate the state, the police, and individual perpetrators.

On Thursday, the long-awaited report on the parliamentary inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was handed down. Instead of ‘uncovering’ the truth of the crisis, it demonstrates again how the state will refuse accountability for its own complicity in the forcible disappearances of Indigenous women.

The inquiry’s report was the first public inquiry into the crisis and so, it is often referred to as ‘landmark’, in the few media reports that have bothered to pay attention to it. But, it is far short of ‘landmark’.

Instead of breaking a silence, it reproduces the silencing processes that I have witnessed time and time again in coronial inquests in which First Nations women have been forcibly disappeared.

After nearly three years, it could only deliver ten recommendations – the second of which is a call to ‘harmonise best police practices’, which include ‘cultural awareness training’ and more black cops.  

This was a recommendation that we warned about, with my colleague, Sisters Inside CEO Debbie Kilroy stating forcefully in her testimony to the inquiry:  

“We believe that for any inquiry into the crisis to be meaningful, it must not bolster the carceral state. Recommendations that simply reinforce or extend the powers of the existing systems of the racial and gendered violence of policing and incarceration will only result in more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women disappearing and being murdered, with their families left to bear the burden of seeking justice alone. Instead, there must be a shift towards creating an independent national body dedicated to addressing these issues, free from the biases and failures of the current system—a body that doesn't replace the already failed system; an independent body that is truly independent.” 

This is because, in my home state of Queensland, and across the country, the police do not keep women ‘safe’ but instead are complicit in the violence inflicted upon them. They are complicit in the forcible disappearing of black women not only across the landscape but also within the watchhouses and the jails.

In many of the cases, including Constance’s, Aboriginal women are first criminalised and incarcerated, and so while they are objects of intense police surveillance while they are alive, when they are ‘missing’, the police suddenly are unable to find them. Even when police release missing persons alerts, they have a practice of using ‘mugshots’, making the women seem like ‘wanted persons’ and not ‘missing persons’. I’m not being hyperbolic: the police make it possible for black women to be disappeared through their criminalisation of black women, high rates of incarceration, and when they are ‘missing’, their failure to search for them so that their disappearance is entrenched.

You also cannot reform the police to make it safer for black women because the police, from the frontier to now, lay the foundation for impunity in which white perpetrators can abuse black women with little accountability.

While the WA police were chastised for their failure to appear at the inquiry, the Queensland Police were given brownie points because they brought a large contigent of cops to the hearing, held in a fancy hotel in Queen St.

I attended the Brisbane hearing of the inquiry to witness this. I saw their large presence there not as evidence of care but rather a deliberate tactic to avoid questioning. It worked.

The Queensland Police brought three black police officers from the First Nations Unit, even though none of them were involved in homicide or missing persons investigations. Despite the clear issues with putting up black cops to cover for your failures, diversifying the police force and ‘cultural awareness training’ was deemed so important to the inquiry that they highlighted it as one of their few recommendations.

And so the parliamentary report demonstrates a colonial apathy that not only characterises this inquiry but so many other inquiries I have witnessed. Black families are made to repeat their trauma for processes that digest, consume and spit it back out at them, their accounts then re-told through White Witnesses, which are then largely ignored by media (in fact, on the day after the report was released, I counted only six articles in MSM outlets - the majority of them written by black women).

While trauma is re-told and re-told, the perpetrators of that trauma and that violence remains untold, a part of a silence that black women are then told we are responsible for breaking.

I have witnessed time and time again the coronial processes that refuse to recognise the violence of white perpetrators even if the wounds of the women have been highlighted in the most gratuitous and sensational ways.

Despite the story being of the wounds to the body, it is the white perpetrator who is afforded a presumption of innocence, which is never afforded to the woman who has died (in fact, in every single inquest I’ve attended, it becomes about the responsibility of the woman in her own death; the woman, in the coronial inquest, is put on trial).

This is not only another form of violence, but it also allows for landscapes in which violence can happen. It leads to impunity which only leads to more brutal forms of violence, a violence that we are seeing currently being perpetrated on the Indigenous men, women and children in Gaza, where passive language and the continual dehumanisation of Palestinian people, work to conceal what is an overwhelmingly visible perpetrator.

Instead of speaking of the perpetrators - which, in my definition of disappearance are not just individuals but also the state, the police, and the media - the report also affords them a presumption of innocence, and in doing so, embeds the idea that the violence will not be stopped and the forcible disappearing of black women will continue.

‘Justice’ cannot be found in this inquiry; which calls to ‘remember’ those killed in its first recommendation, but does not speak of a concrete way to stop it.