Aboriginal Deaths in Police Custody Are Fueling an Australian Black Lives Matter Movement
There have been huge turnouts for Black Lives Matter protests in every major city in Australia. Organized in solidarity with demonstrations in the US, they’re fueled by racist policing at home and the staggering rate of Aboriginal deaths in police custody.
The New South Wales Police formed a protective perimeter around a statue of Captain Cook, the British explorer who initiated the colonization of Australia, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Sydney, Australia. (David Shoebridge / Twitter)
On Monday, June 8, residents of Matraville, a suburb in Sydney’s southeast, briefly found it difficult to breathe. This time, the air was laced with tear gas.
Overhead footage captured the source. Following a fight in the Long Bay Correctional Complex, six Indigenous men had used towels to spell out “BLM” in an exercise yard. In response, riot guards flooded the yard with gas.
Long Bay is where David Dungay, a twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man, was killed in 2015. Dungay, a diabetic, refused orders to stop eating a biscuit. Six Immediate Action officers stormed his cell before five of them pressed down on his back until he died. Like George Floyd and Eric Garner before him, Dungay’s last words were, “I can’t breathe.”
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