Vanessa Rockman has a pretty good idea how the family of Elijah Doughty is feeling right now.
So does Danielle Warner.
"Stay strong. It's going to get harder, not easier. You're going to get frustrated. We know what you're going through. Just keep focused on Elijah and what his life was worth," Vanessa said.
"If you focus on the guy who did it, you lose a bit of yourself and it will just make you bitter."
Vanessa and Danielle rallied in Geraldton today in support of the family of the 14-year-old who was killed when he was riding a stolen motorbike, and chased down by a man in a ute. The 55-year-old driver of the ute has been charged with manslaughter.
In Geraldton, they stood for reconciliation, for justice, for peace, for Kalgoorlie, and to mark the life of Elijah.
And unlike the emotionally charged divide in Goldfields community right now, police eventually stood beside them.
The death of the talented, happy-go-lucky, immensely loved but mischievous teenager has brought a lot of grief, frustration and political outrage to the surface for so many Aboriginal families across Australia.
Grief at the grossly disproportionate number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, young people taking their lives, young people dying of health conditions that shouldn't be touching them for another 30 years, and the fact so many of these passings go by without a stir amongst the wider community.
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| Vanessa Rockman has a pretty good idea how Elijah Doughty's family is feeling. |
"We've had six funerals in the last three weeks here in Geraldton, and we have to go to another one soon," Vanessa said.
"These are young people. This is a suicide epidemic.
"We're dying and burying people quicker than we're giving birth to them."
Because broken court windows, stolen motorbikes, tensions between the Australian legal system and traditional law, he said - she said, and social media fireworks aside, it really comes down to one thing for these families.
Black lives matter. And it's time they mattered more to non-Aboriginal Australia. Much, much more.
Vanessa is the cousin of Patrick Slater, the 26-year-old man murdered in the hours after Australia Day celebrations near Elizabeth Quay station in Perth.
The 26-year-old was allegedly chased down and attacked with star pickets, screwdrivers, rocks and glass bottles after a brawl he was a bystander to in the early hours of January 27.
Eight people - five men aged between 19 and 29, and three boys aged 12, 14 and 17, have been charged with the murder. But the court process is slow and barely steady.
Vanessa's 22-year-old niece also died in police custody in South Hedland in 2014, after being locked up over unpaid fines.
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| Danielle Warner at the rally. |
Yesterday, Danielle Warner was also at the Geraldton rally with a sign reading: "We're here to be heard. For our lost loved ones, we'll fight for what they deserve."
She is the niece of Christine Ryan and Horace Bynder, who were killed in a hit and run in Geraldton in October 2013.
A 28-year-old man was eventually found guilty of leaving the scene of the crash, after his ute struck the respected members of the Geraldton Aboriginal community, on Chapman Valley Road.
When emergency services arrived, they were unable to resuscitate the pair.
The driver left the scene and didn't report the crash and was sentenced to four-and-a-half years prison in November 2014.
"I'm here supporting all the Aboriginal people who have died or been killed, and those who have lost their loved ones," Danielle said.
And the rally comes just more than a month after ABC's explosive Four Corners' revelations about the mistreatment of young detainees at Darwin's Don Dale facility.
The Australian public was shocked and shamed when the program revealed the treatment of children behind bars, where young offenders have been stripped naked, assaulted, tear gassed and strapped to chairs. Children younger than 13 were held in solitary confinement for weeks on end in tiny, ghoulish cells with no access to sunlight or running water.
Politicians pretended to be shocked, despite reports being made available to them much earlier and wide media coverage in September a year earlier.
A royal commission has been set up and is due to have its first public hearing today.
More than 95 per cent of young people currently held in youth detention in the Northern Territory are of Aboriginal descent and there are reports children continue to be held in solitary confinement.
Vanessa said its just too many generations of lives being swept under the carpet, of cover-ups and misinformation. Too many years of miscommunication and cultures not coming together.
"By trying to remove people from the public gallery at the court in Kalgoorlie, letting the media in but not the family, they just made things worse," she said.
"They didn't realise there were elders there trying to protect that peace, and they removed them and then they get upset about windows getting broken.
"And this is all because reconciliation is a one sided thing. They say we have to reconcile our problems, but when we speak to white people they say it is an Aboriginal problem.
"We had a peaceful rally here in Geraldton some time back and people were driving past and yelling at us to get jobs.
"Geraldton is a really beautiful place, but if you scratch the surface there's something darker there.
"It's the same in Kalgoorlie, Port Hedland, Karratha, Carnarvon.
"This is not about crime, or housing, or revenge or any of these things.
"We're not going to fix any of this unless we look at the big picture.
"We all need to come together as one.
"We invited the whole community to come down to today in support of the family, for this boy, for Elijah, but it was mostly just Aboriginal people here.
"But this isn't about Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal.
"If this was a white child we would all come down.
"This is about the tragic loss of a child and not forgetting what his life was worth."
