The 19-year-old Warlpiri man was wanted by police for threatening two local police officers with an axe three days earlier.<\/p>\n
When police came to arrest him at his grandmother’s house, he stabbed then-constable Rolfe in the shoulder with a pair of medical scissors.<\/p>\n
Mr Rolfe then fired his gun three times at Mr Walker, who died in custody an hour later.<\/p>\n
The shooting sparked protests calling for “Justice for Walker”<\/a>, with more than 1,000 people marching in Alice Springs, six months before the murder of George Floyd in America kicked off a wave of Black Lives Matter protests.<\/p>\n “Justice for Walker” was spray-painted onto a road sign on the way to Yuendumu. (ABC News: Xavier Martin\u00a0)<\/p>\n In March 2022, Mr Rolfe was found not guilty of Mr Walker’s murder<\/a> after a six-week trial in Darwin.\u00a0<\/p>\n Three years later, in July 2025, the NT coroner released the findings of a coronial inquest into the fatal shooting<\/a>. She found Mr Rolfe was “racist” and could not exclude the possibility his attitudes “were a contributing cause of Kumanjayi’s death”. He has been dismissed from the NT Police Force<\/a>.<\/p>\n The PMLA judges described The Red House as “deeply compassionate \u2026 rigorous and urgently necessary to an ongoing national conversation”.<\/p>\n “Her searing and unflinching investigation examines national difference, the depth of the colonial wound, and the awful repetition of state violence and dehumanisation that makes the confrontation at the heart of this book possible, even inevitable,” the judges wrote.<\/p>\n Wild tells ABC Arts she feels “pretty stunned and proud” to have won the award.<\/p>\n “It’s really affirming,” she says. “It’s really nice to know people care about this.”<\/p>\n Other PMLA winners include Rohan Howitt’s The Southern Frontier, about Australia’s relationship to Antarctica, which won the Australian history prize; and the fiction winner, A Piece of Red Cloth<\/a>, which saw Leonie Norrington work with Yol\u014bu Elders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru, on a book about the Indonesian fisher-traders visiting Arnhem Land.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Jump to the full list of PMLA winners<\/a><\/p>\n Murky waters<\/p>\n Throughout The Red House, Wild reckons with the difficulty of the task she has set for herself: to write about Mr Walker’s death in a nuanced way.<\/p>\n The Red House also won The Age newspaper’s prize for non-fiction book of the year. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n In the book, she speaks to a former defence force chaplain who is also staying in Yuendumu, who asks why she wants to write about the shooting.<\/p>\n Wild writes: “Australia’s collective view of history was changing and the country was changing with it, I said. How people reacted to Kumanjayi’s death and Mr Rolfe’s trial was one measure of how much.”<\/p>\n The chaplain counsels: “it’s not an easy path you’re setting out on.”<\/p>\n Wild replies: “One way or another I expect to be cancelled.”<\/p>\n So far, Wild hasn’t been cancelled.<\/p>\n “It’s dangerous to write about very conflicted subjects and spaces, particularly in the world we live in at the moment,” she says.<\/p>\n She had noticed within hours of Mr Walker’s death people declaring where they stood on the issue \u2014 positions that were often diametrically opposed.<\/p>\n “I was so frustrated by those really predictable left-right positions they were taking without thinking,” she says.<\/p>\n “I’m impatient with that approach to anything, but particularly to subjects which are so contested.<\/p>\n “What living in the Northern Territory teaches you more than anything is that nothing is left-right; nothing is Black-white.”<\/p>\n Wild had long conversations with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous friends about whether she \u2014 a white, middle-aged, middle-class woman \u2014 should write the book.<\/p>\n She soon resolved to do it, regardless of the possible backlash.<\/p>\n![\"Justice](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/a97149651542460232524b218a2fccb2.jpeg\")
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