Justice for Walker
More than a thousand people gathered in Alice Springs on Thursday in the park between the Magistrates Court and the overbearing NT Supreme Court building, which one of the speakers likened to the British naval ship, the Endeavour, making a neat pun about the continuing efforts of non-Aboriginal Australians to complete the colonial mission here. This was the fourth straight day of protests in the park and featured many family and community members from Yuendumu speaking about the death of a young Warlpiri man at the hands of Police.
Protests happened spontaneously in the scattered towns and remote communities all over the Northern Territory as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people came out to declare that this violence against first nations Australians must stop. The speeches in Alice Springs made clear the feeling that this latest killing by police is seen as a continuation of the frontier violence that decimated the Aboriginal population when the original inhabitants were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in Central Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The first person on the mic last Thursday loudly declared to the world, "We've had enough!"