"It cannot be normal that men hurt us women."
Edna's grief ricocheted through the coroner's court, as the long-running inquest into the death of her sister Negygo Ragurrk and three other women who were killed by their partners came to a close.
"Everyone must do more from the start, not just after women get hurt or killed," she wrote in closing submissions in November last year.
Since then, another 10 Aboriginal women have been killed in the Northern Territory by their partners.
In her findings, the coroner called the lethality of domestic violence in the Northern Territory a national shame.
Judge Elisabeth Armitage handed down 245 pages of findings in late November, into the killings of Kumanjayi Haywood, Ngeygo Ragurrk, Miss Yunupingu and Kumarn Rubuntja.
She found that since 2000, 86 women had been killed in the Northern Territory, where domestic homicide rates are seven times the national average.
More than 90 per cent were Aboriginal.
Some 40 per cent of domestic and family-related assaults in the NT involved weapons, more than in any other jurisdiction, and domestic violence accounted for up to 80 per cent of police call-outs.
Yet, the crisis services trying to prevent and respond received just $70 million over two years in the NT government's 2024/25 budget; only $180 million has been allocated over the next five years.
Ms Armitage used her findings on the four deaths to acknowledge the "horrifying reality of domestic violence" by highlighting the killings of 68 other women.
After a warning of the graphic details, the coroner recounted the callous beatings with sticks, a shovel and steel bars, and the way women were kicked and stomped on with steel cap boots, burnt, choked and run over with vehicles.
These women were all killed before the four women Ms Armitage investigated. In most cases the men were known to police and had prior convictions of domestic violence.
"The time for urgent action is now," she wrote.
Domestic, family and sexual violence researcher Dr Chay Brown, who was born and raised in Alice Springs, says the lethality of violence in the Territory is underpinned by racism.
"There is an apathy about violence against women in general but nowhere near what we see against Aboriginal women," she says.
"And that comes from racism.
"It comes from looking at Aboriginal people as though they're subhuman because if any of these deaths were of white women we would 100 per cent see a very different response."
The World Health Organisation says domestic violence is an outcome of unhealthy interactions among individuals, relationships, communities and societal factors.
In recent months three women have been killed by domestic violence in the big rivers region, three hours south of Darwin, where Dr Brown explains, homelessness in the region is 30 times the national average.
Productivity Commission data shows the Northern Territory has some of the highest rates of Aboriginal child removal, Aboriginal incarceration, homelessness, poor health outcomes and alcohol addiction.
Dr Brown says all of those risk factors accumulate and make it more likely someone is going to experience or use violence.
"The strongest risk factor, the one with the highest correlation with experience and perpetration of violence, is prior exposure to violence," she says.
"We've got these high rates because all of these things disproportionately exist in the NT."
Dr Brown believes the NT has created a culture that "allows violence to occur" and insufficient accountability from communities and the judicial system continues to perpetuate it.
When sentencing Billy Badwana for killing his wife in October 2002 Justice Trevor Riley said "the courts have repeatedly stated that violence towards women and children… is not to be tolerated and that the court must do what it can to protect such vulnerable people."
Mr Badwana pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated dangerous act after he stomped on his "lover" so hard he perforated her bladder, ultimately killing her. He was sentenced to a non-parole period of two years and three months.
The severity to which the courts must consider domestic violence when sentencing men is repeated in almost all 68 cases.
Last year, Justice Jenny Blokland sentenced Nathan Swan to a non-parole period of six-and-half years for the stabbing manslaughter of his partner Kwementyaye McCormack.
"You are clearly a man who engages in domestic violence against his partners, and you clearly pose a significant risk of committing further acts of violence against women in the future," she wrote.
"I consider your prospects of rehabilitation to be poor at best."
The coronial inquiry heard evidence from Corrections Commissioner Matthew Varley that prison programs were underdeveloped, underdelivered and only available to sentenced prisoners. Prisoners awaiting trail on remand, do not have access to programs.
Currently, Territory courts take up to three years to hear a case, meaning many men on remand never access help or rehabilitative programs before serving their sentence.
Top End Women's Legal Service Caitlin Weatherby-Fells believes the system is failing to provide hope or change.
"There is often a gap between victim survivors' expectation of the justice system and the justice system facilitating a rehabilitative response," she says.
"Knowing the realities of the current capacity of the Darwin Correctional Centre and that prisoners sometimes have a quick exit without there being any opportunity for change … we just end up seeing the same cycle of violence again and again."
She sas specialist legal services have seen an almost 25 per cent increase in demand, yet funding is piece-meal and without long-term commitments.
"The frontline service providers, including health, including legal, including crisis accommodation, we're all getting to levels of just responding because we do not have adequate resources for anything else," she says.
"And because of that, our turn away numbers are increasing … so we feel like we are failing even more than perhaps we felt even six months ago."
And for Aboriginal women it further erodes trust.
"Why would you trust a system who has intervened in your family and caused such destruction over such a long standing period of time?" she says.
Ms Armitage considers her findings were neither "radical or new" but rather what the sector already knew must happen.
She called on state and federal governments to deliver funding without delay, which could be used to increase men's behaviour change programs and specialist court services.
She encouraged prisons to deliver the programs to prisoners on remand and serving sentences of less than six months.
With police receiving more than 100 domestic violence calls a day, Ms Armitage urged a specialist and adequately funded response model, bringing police and social workers together.
"The plague of domestic violence homicides that relentlessly courses through our community in the Northern Territory is our horror and our national shame," she wrote.
"The number of domestic violence deaths in the Northern Territory is truly shocking.
The grief and trauma across our communities flowing from this traumatic loss of life is inexhaustible."
In the words of Kumarn Rubuntja's friend and colleague, Shirleen Campbell, Aboriginal women are not just numbers.
"We are not invisible women."
