En Passant

A story of racist double standards is unfolding a few hours north of Perth, in Geraldton writes Robert Callan in Red Flag.

On 5 October, two Yamitji people – Horace Bynder and Christine Ryan – are walking along one side of a road. A 27-year-old white man, Desmond Peterson, is driving his ute – drunk – along the other side.

He veers onto the wrong side of the road, hitting and killing both of them. He promptly flees the scene. Several hours later, he turns himself in at the police station. He is released – without charge – and heads home to await a court summons.

Eleven days pass before any charges are laid, and then only after regular protests at the police station by family and friends of the victims. But the charges are so minor – failing to stop, failing to render assistance and driving under the influence – that it only inflames the situation.

Similar leniency is unthinkable had the offender been black.

On 31 October, the Indigenous community of Perth holds its own gathering, part protest, part public mourning. Local Indigenous activist Marianne Mackay (a cousin of one of the victims) leads a march around the Perth CBD, telling the tragic story over a megaphone (the West Australian saw fit to give it only a few centimetres). Perth police trail after us, sheepishly.

I spoke to Marianne after the protest, and she explained why people are angry: “If this was the other way around and an Aboriginal person had run down two white people, we know – from history and statistics – that he’d be sitting in prison right now, and he wouldn’t be out on bail. And that’s just the unfair thing, and what we want is justice, not racism.”

On the day of Peterson’s first court appearance, 7 November, more than 250 people rally outside the Geraldton Magistrates Court. Their demand is that the defendant be charged with the more serious offence of dangerous driving causing death.

After Peterson is granted bail with just a few thousand dollars as surety, protesters attempt to get into the building. They are blocked by police, and in the ensuing struggle a door is broken and a window smashed. Police subsequently arrest a man and announce a full investigation into this act of violence committed on a building.

Australia’s “justice” system usually reveals its racism by targeting and over-policing Indigenous people. It fills its prisons with them or kills them in police holding cells. This time the racism appears in the leniency shown a white man responsible for their deaths.

Either way, Aboriginal lives mean little to it.