It is early evening and the edges of passing cars and trees and road signs soften in the half-light as we head out of Darwin. It is as if we are driving in a dream.
Just near Palmerston camp, an Aboriginal settlement also known as 15 Mile because of its distance from the city, the road bends slightly to the right.
And there, in the middle of the lane, stands a young Aboriginal man, who is at the mercy of two tonnes of metal and rubber as I hurtle towards him at 100km/h.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Northern Territory are about 15 times more likely to be hit and killed by a car than pedestrians in any other part of Australia.
Since 2000, there have been 177 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander pedestrian deaths in the NT, according to government road data. About 25% of the territory’s population is Aboriginal, and yet this cohort accounts for about 80% of pedestrian deaths.
Everyone in the NT seems to have a story about a person being killed or almost being killed by a car. But no one seems to know how to stop it happening.
The stories non-Aboriginal people tell tend to be about narrowly avoiding running over someone. The stories Aboriginal people tell are about their relatives being killed.
Two brothers, two memorials
On a desolate strip of the Roper Highway, about 450km south of Darwin, two roadside memorials poke out of the scrub.
Brothers Shaun and Shane Baker were killed on this road, two years and a few kilometres apart, while travelling between Mataranka and their home in Jilkminggan.
The highway here is a long straight single lane, with red dirt on either side and a speed limit of 110km/h.
The spots where Shaun was killed in 2007 and where Shane was killed two years later, are marked out as memorials with star pickets and wire, fairy lights and bright plastic flowers.
Composite: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/THe Guardian
Wendy Baker says her brothers, both fathers in their 20s, were coming back from nights out in Mataranka when they were killed.
There was no criminal prosecution in relation to either death, she says, and there are no publicly available documents relating to any coronial investigation.
Speaking at her house in Jilkminggan, just up the road from the oval where her brothers excelled as footballers for the Blues, Baker says she still doesn’t feel she completely knows what happened to them.
Were they walking home when they were struck, or had they fallen asleep on the road? Were they resting just off the road, but had the misfortune to be struck when a car or a truck left the bitumen to yield to another vehicle coming the opposite way? Was it an accident, or careless or deliberate, she wonders.
The behaviour some drivers have shown towards Aboriginal people they have struck raises questions about how race should be factored into these pedestrian deaths.
In the past five years, according to court documents, non-Aboriginal drivers involved in fatal hit-and-run incidents with Aboriginal people have variously told police they hit dogs, left the scene or attended a car wash before going back to work, or simply drove home without stopping, meaning police could never test them for drugs or alcohol at the time of the crash.
Case one
Taxi driver John Tien Ching Mu hit and killed an Aboriginal woman known as MN who was lying on a street in central Darwin late at night in June 2018.
The NT supreme court found Mu kept driving after hitting the woman to drop off his fare. He went back past the scene, where the victim was still alive, but did not stop, instead pulling into a nearby service station and telling the worker inside to call an ambulance.
Mu went to a car wash and cleaned the taxi before driving to the airport, where he was arrested.
Mu pleaded guilty to driving resulting in death, and failing to stop at the scene, and was sentenced to three years in jail, suspended after 12 months.
Case two
Kumanjayi Palmer, 18, was trying to cross an Alice Springs road when she was hit and killed instantly by Troy Stevenson in January 2018.
The NT supreme court found Stevenson stopped briefly but then drove on. He was found by police 10 hours later, but denied all knowledge of the incident, saying he had not hit a person in his ute but “I hit a dog”.
Stevenson pleaded guilty to driving resulting in death, and failing to stop. He was sentenced to three years in jail, suspended after 18 months.
Case three
Joshua Maxwell waited three days after hitting and killing an Aboriginal man known as TM on a suburban Darwin street before handing himself in to police.
The NT supreme court heard police did not believe Maxwell’s driving was a factor in the October 2021 collision, but he left the scene and did not report the incident.
There was no suspicion he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but a judge noted: “It is always suspicious when somebody leaves the scene of an accident in the way in which you did.”
Maxwell pleaded guilty to driving resulting in death, and failing to stop. He was sentenced to 12 months’ home detention.
Baker’s husband, Steven Rory, says he and others from the town, including children, often fish at Elsey creek, just on the side of the Roper Highway outside Jilkminggan.
There are signs nearby warning drivers: “Community area. Reduce speed”. Rory reckons most drivers do the right thing. But some, he says, seem to go faster, wilfully disregarding locals.
“I reckon some of them are racist,” he says. “And some of them are all good.”
‘I’m not a racist but that’s what it is’
The Baker brothers are among a group of at least 10 Aboriginal people hit and killed by cars around Mataranka, which sits near the junction of the Stuart and Roper highways.
It is the start of the dry season and smoke from planned burns around the town stains the sky and creeps into the nostrils. Raptors glide in the updrafts, watching for prey fleeing the flames.
According to the 40 years of road data provided by the NT government, pedestrian road deaths are fairly evenly distributed between rural areas, such as Mataranka, and urban areas, like those around Darwin and Alice Springs (it is impossible to determine from the data where people identified as Aboriginal are more likely to be killed).
In 2014, Prof Marcia Langton and two other University of Melbourne academics said in a federal government inquiry submission that they had been told about eight deaths involving “intoxicated people wandering from drinking camps into the path of fast moving vehicles on roads on the Stuart Highway near the Mataranka hotel and on the Roper Highway”. At least two more men have died since then, both in December 2021.
The woman behind the bar at the hotel isn’t keen to talk about pedestrian deaths. Nor is the local sergeant, who peeks from behind the locked door of the police station just up the road from the pub and says any questions should be sent to the media team in Darwin.
A road train driver walking back to his truck from the Mataranka Roadhouse is more forthcoming.
“Someone will be standing under that tree there and step right out in front of you,” he says.
“They don’t do it out of spite, they do it because they don’t know where the fuck they are.”
“They” are Aboriginal people.
“I’m not a racist but that’s what it is, blackfellas and alcohol,” the truckie says.
“You’ve just got to get these critters here to lay off the grog. That’s all it is.”
‘Horrifying’ statistics
Locals say this attitude ignores the reality that there will always be people who drink, and it is important to keep them as safe as possible, rather than putting them at risk by having drinking areas or grog shops near major roads.
Marlene Collins, from nearby Mulgan camp, says drinking areas around Mataranka have been repeatedly shifted. The best solution, she says, would be a fenced area away from the highway and on the same side of the road as the shops.
“You need a designated area which is fenced in,” she says.
“Just like you got a yard there for bullock and a yard there for cattle.”
At Barunga, a community about 80km farther north that has also suffered numerous pedestrian deaths, moving a drinking area seems to have made people safer, locals say.
Six people were killed in a decade walking on the Central Arnhem Highway between the old drinking area and town, the ABC reported in 2018, but no one has died since the area was moved, according to Cynthia Williri, a local health worker.
There is nothing in the latest Territory Towards Zero road safety action plan that points to solutions that could work more broadly. It notes the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in pedestrian deaths, but has no strategy for specifically dealing with this group.
The five-year plan expired in 2022 and a new one is yet to be released.
“The issue of pedestrians, particularly Aboriginal pedestrians, being killed or seriously injured as a result of a road crash is complex,” a spokesperson for the infrastructure department said in a statement.
“Pedestrians being killed or seriously injured on our roads can also be influenced by broader societal factors.”
Malarndirri McCarthy, a Labor senator for the NT, says the issue must be confronted at a national level, and a strategy is being formulated with state and territory governments to reduce the rate of Aboriginal pedestrian deaths.
“I’m absolutely appalled to see the statistics that show here in the Northern Territory that every pedestrian death [in the past four years] is a First Nations person,” she says.
“It’s quite horrifying to read those statistics.”
McCarthy, a Yanyuwa Garrawa woman, says members of her own family have been hit and killed by road trains and compares the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in pedestrian deaths to other mortality statistics which are the focus of closing the gap measures.
McCarthy says practical solutions, such as road safety advertisements in Indigenous languages, or more transport options, would help, but harder concepts also have to be reckoned with, such as the racism some drivers appear to show.
Many Aboriginal people are more vulnerable also because they simply have no option but to walk vast distances along the roads.
“People do walk, they do walk from their outstation to the main town, or main community, and it’s something that I think drivers … need to be more in tune with, that it is a way of life, not out of any kind of choice, other than a necessity,” McCarthy says.
“People don’t often have cars, so they walk, or people don’t have enough money to get fuel, so they walk, or people don’t have enough support, and so they walk.”
Rare criminal case
Nathaniel Dixon sits on a couch on the front veranda of his house in Pmara Jutunta, a community about 190km north of Alice Springs.
He is thinking about Kumanjayi Dixon, his sister, who died so far away from here, on such different country, a year earlier.
Her death was uncovered only after one of her legs was found near the Stuart Highway, outside Darwin.
While the brutality of her death meant it attracted more headlines than other pedestrians who have been killed, it is also unusual in another way: it is the subject of a criminal prosecution.
The man whose vehicle allegedly struck Dixon, and his mother, who allegedly helped him return to the crash scene and bury the rest of the body, intend to plead guilty to charges relating to the incident, a court has heard.
Regardless of the outcome of the pending court case, Nathaniel, a deeply religious man, says he has forgiven them.
“It really hurt me, but I have to take it, and go through it … her love was strong, to me, and to others.
“Instead of blaming, I have to understand … it’s just forgiveness, and love.”
An NT courts document obtained by Guardian Australia shows that only nine of 23 pedestrian deaths since 2020 have resulted in criminal charges, including that of Dixon.
There were multiple cases still under investigation at the time the document was produced, or noted as having a prosecution pending, but only three deaths had resulted in a completed prosecution.
None of the people prosecuted were jailed, despite one driver driving while unlicensed in an unregistered and uninsured car, another exceeding the speed limit and driving under the influence of cannabis and the third fleeing the scene of the crash.
Police say every fatal crash is attended by major crash investigators, and implore drivers to stop at the scene of accidents, but would not comment on whether racism influenced the decision of some drivers to flee after striking Aboriginal people.
“To knowingly strike someone with your vehicle and then choose not to stop to help is not only illegal, it is reprehensible,” Jeshua Kelly, a detective acting senior sergeant at the major crash investigations team, said.
Inadequate infrastructure and a busy road
Lawyers with the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency say it is rare for civil claims to be pursued in relation to pedestrian deaths or injuries, or for the families of victims to receive any compensation.
NAAJA’s acting chief executive, John Paterson, says his own grandfather was hit and killed by a taxi on the Stuart Highway outside Darwin in the 1960s, while walking between a local shop and a humpy he lived in near a creek.
He does not know what happened to the driver.
Paterson, a Ngalakan man, says he sees people coming from country into Darwin who are not used to living around so much traffic.
He says safety could be improved in multiple settlements around the city with improved lighting or paths, but that the behaviour of some residents also needs to change, as they sometimes cross busy roads wherever it suits, even if a safer crossing exists nearby.
“Our mob, they look for the shortest way to get from point A to point B,” Paterson says.
Paterson and NAAJA’s principal legal officer, Nick Espie, reckon there’s one spot we should check out where there is a history of pedestrian deaths, inadequate infrastructure and a busy road: Palmerston.
The Stuart Highway here is dual carriageway with a median strip.
Our car is in the outside lane when I round that slight bend and see the man in the road.
I immediately take my foot off the accelerator and he scarpers back to the safety of the median strip where another young man – boy, perhaps – is sitting. I realised afterwards that I had not gone for the brakes. I froze.
We pull over just up the road, and watch, helpless, as the pair try to navigate the traffic. The first man tries a few times and eventually makes it to the other side, followed by his friend.
Later, my mind turns to a Kate Bush song, The Dreaming, about Aboriginal people being killed so their land can be mined.
“Many an Aborigine’s mistaken for a tree,” Bush sang in 1982.
“‘Til you near him on the motorway and the tree begin to breathe.”
• Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Melbourne Press Club’s Michael Gordon Fellowships program.
