‘We need to be strong together’: Mark Coles Smith on Australia’s ‘deeply offensive’ Indigenous suicide crisis

For Keeping Hope presenter and producer Mark Coles Smith, the issue of Aboriginal suicides is personal – and urgent. Photograph: Torstein Dyrting

At 23, the Western Australian-born actor Mark Coles Smith lost his best friend, a fellow young Indigenous man, to suicide. He spent the next 10 years “not letting go of that loss”, holding the grief within.

“He was a deeply inspiring human being,” recalls the Nyikina man and Mystery Road: Origin star, now 36. “A person of joy and good humour and good nature, extreme physical strength and capability, athletic, kind, loving.