Police shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker at centre of book that won $80k

Book about fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker among winners at Prime Minister's Literary Awards A book about the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker and the murder trial of Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe is one of six winners at this year's Prime Minister's Literary Awards (PMLA). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains the name of an Indigenous person who has died. Journalist Kate Wild has taken out the $80,000 prize for non-fiction for her book The Red House, which explores the incident in November 2019, when Mr Walker was shot and killed by police in Yuendumu, a remote community in the Northern Territory, 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. The 19-year-old Warlpiri man was wanted by police for threatening two local police officers with an axe three days earlier. 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. Mr Rolfe then fired his gun three times at Mr Walker, who died in custody an hour later. The shooting sparked protests calling for "Justice for Walker", 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. In March 2022, Mr Rolfe was found not guilty of Mr Walker's murder after a six-week trial in Darwin. Three years later, in July 2025, the NT coroner released the findings of a coronial inquest into the fatal shooting. 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. The PMLA judges described The Red House as "deeply compassionate … rigorous and urgently necessary to an ongoing national conversation". "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. Wild tells ABC Arts she feels "pretty stunned and proud" to have won the award. "It's really affirming," she says. "It's really nice to know people care about this." 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, which saw Leonie Norrington work with Yolŋu Elders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru, on a book about the Indonesian fisher-traders visiting Arnhem Land. • Jump to the full list of PMLA winners Murky waters 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. 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. 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." The chaplain counsels: "it's not an easy path you're setting out on." Wild replies: "One way or another I expect to be cancelled." So far, Wild hasn't been cancelled. "It's dangerous to write about very conflicted subjects and spaces, particularly in the world we live in at the moment," she says. She had noticed within hours of Mr Walker's death people declaring where they stood on the issue — positions that were often diametrically opposed. "I was so frustrated by those really predictable left-right positions they were taking without thinking," she says. "I'm impatient with that approach to anything, but particularly to subjects which are so contested. "What living in the Northern Territory teaches you more than anything is that nothing is left-right; nothing is Black-white." Wild had long conversations with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous friends about whether she — a white, middle-aged, middle-class woman — should write the book. She soon resolved to do it, regardless of the possible backlash. "After a lot of conversations and soul-searching, I came to the position it was part of the problem to frame this as an Aboriginal story," she says. "It was a white police officer who shot [Mr Walker], and so the story is as much a white Australia story as it is a Black Australia story." Wild brought her knowledge and connections, sown over six years reporting mostly on Indigenous affairs in Darwin from 2010 to 2016, to the book, but also a deep love of NT and its people. "I didn't want [a story about the case] to be reduced to a bunch of racist white rednecks and a bunch of victim Aboriginal people," she says. "That's not the truth." An expansive approach to time Wild was interested in understanding how the altercation between Mr Walker and Mr Rolfe in Yuendumu reflected something broader about "where we're at as a nation in terms of race and reconciliation". "But by the time I got to the end of it, I had an even bigger picture of history," she says. Former NT politician Scott McConnell alerted Wild to the parallels between the racial tensions in NT in 2019 and the 80s. He pointed to three acts of violence: the shooting of a station owner by a group of Indigenous young people; the killing of an Indigenous man by police near Ti Tree; and the deaths of two Indigenous people after they drank from a bottle of wine deliberately laced with strychnine. Those parallels led Wild to thinking about the "Everywhen", an Indigenous conception of time where the past, present and future are all happening simultaneously. She found it a useful way to conceptualise how historical moments of violence between Indigenous peoples and the police seemed to repeat. Wild used the Everywhen as a structural device in The Red House, which allowed her to eschew a chronology, instead move fluidly between times and places. "I learned not to look at [time] as a linear thing — this happens and that leads to this," she explains. "What is happening now carries the ghosts of what has happened in the past." The Everywhen also offered a unique way of looking to the future, taking away the seeming inevitability of both police violence and Indigenous disadvantage, instead engendering the possibility of change. "Finding the Everywhen and understanding how I could use that to frame the whole story, to me, is such a hopeful way of looking at things," Wild says. "Maybe if the non-Indigenous world can learn to look at life in this more open way, a more creative way, maybe that's where some of the answers lie. "If we can open our view a bit more, we're going to find better answers and better relationships, rather than pointing fingers." Full list of winners Australian history The Southern Frontier by Rohan Howitt (Melbourne University Publishing) Children's literature Song of a Thousand Seas by Zana Fraillon (University of Queensland Press) Fiction A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru (Allen & Unwin) Non-fiction The Red House by Kate Wild (Allen & Unwin) Poetry Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan (Giramondo Publishing) Young adult literature Drift by Pip Harry (Hachette Australia)