What the cat dragged in

 Zachary Rolfe and (jaded) masculinity on trial

 An inquest seemingly almost without end is now finally coming to some kind of end – meaning that the going around in circles, and in particular that one big statement of the obvious, paradoxically repeatedly left unresolved, will soon stop – Phew!  Business as usual, in the male-dominated (at the pointy end) policing of remote Aboriginal communities in the NT will soon – and probably has already – resume/d.

I have only a very small sliver of sympathy for former NT policeman Zachary Rolfe.  My heart goes out to Kumanjayi Walker’s family, and I am hoping that what I write here does not add to their grief, or at least that if it does, some long-term good (= deep cultural change) may come out of this whole sorry business.

So, after that contextual disclaimer, here goes.

Plainly trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded as Rolfe was (and presumably is, and always will be $$), it genuinely baffles me as a man that the inquest needed more than about five minutes to establish this rather obvious fact, and then to move on to less obvious – and surely more important – matters.  Such as whether being trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded is written-in to the position description (reading between the lines, of course) of the immediate/critical response cop role that Rolfe held at the time.  Or put another, more direct way:  after all the key non-Warlpiri/Yapa health workers had been evacuated from Yuendumu that fateful night over (their own) safety concerns, who was going to be on the first plane back into Dodge?  And should history repeat here (and without deep cultural change, it undoubtedly, sadly will), are we really supposed to be satisfied that this next time it will be Anyone But Rolfe – another “random”, another trigger-happy, testosterone-loaded “bad cop” (and then years later, another three million dollars, and counting).

I acknowledge that coroner Elisabeth Armitage presumably also sees – or at least at the start, hoped for – deep cultural change as a beneficial, if formally collateral outcome of the inquest.  But oh, how the wheels have since fallen-off over the last 18 months, and the gendered sledge-hammers been lobbed as slow-but-furious nut-crackers.

Exhibit one here is a text message sent from Zachary Rolfe in March 2019 (about six months before Kumanjayi Walker was fatally shot by Rolfe) to an unknown (but apparently not called before the inquest, possibly because his context evidence may have required another three million dollars to neutralise, by a thousand oblique cuts) recipient:

 “I'm out at Borroloola, a random community on the coast, 'cause they're rioting. But we came up last time they did this and smashed the whole community. So, this time, as soon as we arrived, they started behaving.”

 This text message was tendered to the inquest in September 2022 and then again just recently (in February 2024), for commenting upon by two different witnesses – Sgt Anne Jolley and Sgt Lee Bauwens – which resulting in two strikingly different  narrative streams at the inquest, despite both witnesses working for the NT Police at all material times.  It is too trite to say that the Good Cop was (of course) female, and the Bad Cop (of course) male.   More specifically revealing here is the admonitory tone of, and strangely-chosen “gotcha” word in the recent exchange b/w the (male) Counsel Assisting the Coroner Patrick Coleridge (in September 2022, this role was performed by Peggy Dwyer) and Sgt Lee Bauwens.

“Smashed” was strangely-chosen as a “gotcha” word for two reasons, I think:  because Bauwen’s (notably defensive) contextual explanation of it as not connoting violence rings plain and true (for this man, at least) and also because two other words from the above text message are actually of note, but were let slip through by the inquest, preoccupied as it was with Admonitions of the Most Obvious. 

“Behaved” in its above context, is at very least, violence-adjacent, with Rolfe seemingly bragging about the Aboriginal residents of Borroloola cowering when they heard he was coming back into town (whether they indeed reacted to this news, and if so, then how, of course may be quite a different story, but again, this is a narrative that the inquest passed over). 

Rolfe’s use of “random” also connotes violence in a more abstract way, of the non-particularity of his vector through time and place, aka his crassness and presumption as even a temporary resident of a remote Aboriginal community in the NT.  There is perhaps nowhere in the world less “random” than Borroloola (or Yuendumu) [or conversely, more “random” than Canberra, but I digress].  I can attest to Borroloola's particularity as a whitefella who hasn’t even been anywhere near the place nor knows any of its “inside” stories; but there is a wealth of even whitefella-on-whitefella narrative out there (Hashtag Bill Harney, Roger Jose, Carnegie library), and if you’re bi-cultural, these are only the surface gleanings ....

Rolfe perhaps also used “random” in a secondary, and very male, sense – to glumly corroborate, en passant, his relatively unimportant position in the NT Police hierarchy at that time; a man (yet again?) shuffled at short notice from one temporary assignment to the next place, as a (mere) gun for hire.  If so, that’s the terrible beauty and nuance, in a (cracked) nutshell, of what I’ll call Rolfe’s three-million-dollar text message:  one man’s jaded – and to me, simply sad – obliviousness to time and place getting all dressed-up to become Every Woman’s Admonition About That One Thing, spoken on infinite and futile repeat.

 $$ Unless perhaps Rolfe one day might take up the Borroloola Cure – which worked a treat for the runaway Roger Jose.