The spirit can not rest til the body is found: Remembering Ms Bernard

It has been ten years today since Kokoberra woman Ms Bernard was last seen. Her family are still searching for her.

Debbie Kilroy, Dellis Burns, Edwina Bernard, Teddy Bernard, Andrew Hoare, (b) Charandev Singh.

Today marks the tenth year that Kokoberra woman Ms Bernard disappeared; last seen in a remote quarry in Coen, Far North Queensland, far from her homeland in Kowanyama. At the time of her disappearance, as police searches of the quarry failed to uncover any trace of her, the media reported it as a “Cape Mystery”, as a story of a woman who had vanished into thin air. And yet, this is not a mystery. Ms Bernard has not vanished; she is somewhere. And her family desperately want to know where she is, so they can bring her home. As her uncle Teddy Bernard has said “in Aboriginal culture, when someone dies, you got to have a body to send the spirit home”. And so, over a decade, Ms Bernard’s family have not stopped searching her, from the quarry to the river bend to the coronial court.

It was Teddy, and Ms Bernard’s mother Dellis Burns who first reported her missing at their local police station, three days after she was last seen. They were worried because this was uncharacteristic. Ms Bernard had been in Coen for only a short while, and was making her way back to her home to celebrate her son’s birthday - an occasion that she would never miss. Ms Bernard had been young when she became a mother, and she had always leaned on Dellis, who had raised her as a young baby. “She never called me aunty, always mum”, Aunty Dellis said. The adoption had been a cultural one, because Aunty Dellis did not yet had any children. But she would always visit her biological mum Edwina Bernard, and would visit her other aunty, who was a similar age to her. Just like her two mothers, Ms Bernard was also an attentive, caring mother to her children; she was never far despite the geographical distance. So when she failed to return to her aunty’s place in Coen, on February 10, 2013, her family immediately knew that something was wrong.

Ms Bernard with her two children.

The last man to see Ms Bernard was a white man named Thomas Byrnes, who met her at the local Exchange Hotel, and took her back to the Archer River quarry that night. Byrnes was the local caretaker for the quarry. Byrnes never reported Ms Bernard missing, and his accounts of that night and what happened after, changed numerous times when speaking to police. He claimed that Ms Bernard had run out of his accommodation at night, either naked or wearing a towel, and had not been found. He changed his testimony to police; first stating that he had fallen asleep, and then later stating he had searched for her. The next day, he had reported his stolen ute to police, insinuating that Ms Bernard may have taken it, and then only a short while later, phoned again to say that he had now remembered bogging the ute in a near by dam. But at no point, did he ever report her missing.

Byrnes has never been charged in connection with Ms Bernard’s disappearance. No one has. The story had been buried, only known by Ms Bernard’s close family, until a local journalist approached Sisters Inside lawyer Debbie Kilroy, who began pushing for an inquest on their behalf. That inquest began in late 2021, and then a second part was held in early 2022; nine years after Ms Bernard disappeared.

The inquest was the first time that Ms Bernard’s family were able to push for answers, with police still suggesting to them in the lead up that Ms Bernard may have just walked off the quarry, and may have perished in the remote, dense, hill country around the area. Ms Bernard’s country of Kowanyama - dry, Savannah country, was so different from this place. But her family have always believed that she did not just ‘walk off’, or go ‘walkabout’. That something has happened; that someone is responsible for her disappearance. And they have believed that perhaps she is not in the quarry. After the initial police search in 2013, her family took it upon themselves to do their own search, in the cultural way. They had gone to the area with a local lawman, and had asked the spirits of the land to speak to them; to search the hills and mountains. But they could not feel Ms Bernard there; they could not feel her pain.

The inquest has subsequently probed not just what may have happened to Ms Bernard, putting Thomas Byrnes on the stand, but also the adequacy of the Queensland Police investigation, who has failed to find her. There have been questions raised about the decision by police not to undertake crucial testing; like undertaking forensic orders of Brynes, and of undertaking appropriate testing of Ms Bernard’s clothes, which were obtained from the accommodation where she was last seen. Byrnes claims that Ms Bernard had urinated herself from intoxication, and he had subsequently placed her clothes in the washing machine. But it was later found through the inquest that the washing machine was broken, and police had not tested her clothes for signs of urination.

During the inquest, lead investigator Detective Senior Constable Byran Worth had been questioned repeatedly about the fact Ms Bernard’s family had been told that it was not a homicide investigation. He claimed that he had always treated it as a homicide investigation, a fact that was contested by the Coroner at an inquest sitting in April 2022.

The Coroner stated that “the matter has never been referred to homicide, they were never called in to start with and the only reference to homicide in the brief… was because I specifically asked the Queensland Police to refer the brief of evidence to the homicide squad for review, which they did on evidence only”.

Constable Worth continued to state that he considered Ms Bernard’s case as a “suspicious disappearance”, but that “I have more or greater than 50 percent belief that she has potentially walked or run off… and perished as a result of that”.

“I believed she’s perished in the wilderness,” Worth said. “.. And again, Mr Byrnes’ version is very disjointed. It is not a perfect scenario, where I can say, unequivocally 100 percent, that this is what that’s happened. I cannot say that.”

The inquest heard that the search for Ms Bernard at the quarry was based around an idea that it was not a suspicious disappearance. Two search and rescue officers had testified that the search methodology for both the initial search for Ms Bernard in 2013, and then again in 2021, prior to the inquest, was that it would proceed on a basis that there was no indication of foul play.

The state’s most prominent search and rescue expert Snr Sgt Jim Whitehead, who has since retired, also gave evidence stating that on the night Ms Bernard had disappeared, the moon was a narrow crescent, with only 12 percent illumination, and by the time Ms Bernard stepped out, it would have been completely dark. He said it was “unusual” for someone to walk somewhere if lost at night, and that usually they would sit still. He testified that “it would be very had with no illumination to actually not fall over, within the first few metres… it would have been extremely hard to walk in any direction.” He also concluded that “I’m certain of that. If she was alive, then I believe she would have come out because of the noise of the searching. Unfortunately, if she had perished because of whatever the circumstances, then I believe we should have found her…. We generally find something in every search. And the reason we don’t find something, suggests to me that there was nothing to be found.”

At that point, the police had not searched any area other than the quarry. At the inquest, Sgt Whitehead testified that he had never heard of another search area; the first he had heard of a place called the ‘Bend’ was while sitting outside of the inquest, waiting to hear evidence.

Byrnes steadfastly denied on the stand that he had caused Ms Bernard’s disappearance or death. The first thing he said to a police officer who came to question him was “I haven’t done anything with her. I haven’t murdered her or anything else”. One witness, Jacqueline Mackay, testified to the inquest that Byrnes had once threatened her: “He was verbally disgusting but at that stage wasn’t physically threatening,” Ms Mackay said. And then he said: I put things like you in the ground.”

While being questioned on the stand, by counsel assisting Malia Benn, Byrns instead insinuated that Ms Bernard had gone walkabout.

 “Well they call it, like walkabout, um. Aboriginal people will, for seemingly no reason, at times, go for a walk. It’s not just a walk, might be gone for two or three days, a week, to reappear again. It’s like ah yeah he’s been walkabout, so it’s not a rarity thing… it might be these days. But a few years ago it was something normal,” he said.

But Ms Bernard’s family do not believe she went ‘walkabout’; a term that is often used to place responsibility for disappearance back on the person who has disappeared and to claim ‘transience’ as an innate part of Aboriginal culture. The Northern Coroner Nerida Wilson, at the closing of the second part of the inquest last year, ordered that the Queensland Police undertake a new search of the ‘Bend’. Ten years later, there has no been word of the detail of that search, and the family are no closer to finding out where Ms Bernard is.

At the inquest proceedings, they have instead tried to remember her even in the cold, sterile space of the courtroom. They placed pictures of her garlanded in fresh, orange hibiscus, as a tribute to her; as a way to remember and also to say that her spirit still needs to be brought home. 

The inquest into Ms Bernard’s disappearance will continue later this year. But for her family, the lack of answers, the need to bring her spirit home, the need to know amongst the great unknowing, still endures. Ms Bernard is one of three separate inquests into disappeared Aboriginal women that has been held in Queensland from late 2021-2023. Four months after Ms Bernard was last seen, Aboriginal woman Monique Clubb disappeared from a suburban Brisbane park on a busy Saturday afternoon. And in 2017, Aboriginal woman Constance May Watcho disappeared in the rich, waterfront suburb of Kangaroo Point. Her family were the only ones to search, and she was found ten months later, only two minutes from the place she was living.