Two weeks after the coroner refused to release footage of an Indigenous woman, Ms Dhu, and her treatment in custody, her uncle Shaun Harris gave me a call.

“It’s the truth, what she’s not releasing,” he said. “The video is proof of how we are still being treated over here, every day.”

Harris has seen the final moments of Dhu’s life. So has her family. So have senior members of Western Australian police. So have I, and the other journalists who sat in the public gallery of courtroom 51 in the Perth central law courts to report the inquest into the 22-year-old Yamatji woman’s death in custody.

It is shocking. It is also, for the purpose of public debate and political repercussions, hidden.

The footage was played repeatedly during four weeks of hearings. It was reported on extensively. But as the Four Corners program into the treatment of children in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth detention centre has shown, there is a vast difference between reading a report and seeing the footage yourself.

In the Don Dale case, it was the difference between a number of reports the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, said “hadn’t piqued my interest sufficiently”, and a royal commission.

But when the media, supported by Dhu’s family, applied for the footage to be publicly released, the state coroner, Ros Fogliani, said no.

It was impossible, she said, to control the dissemination of the footage once it was released from the court’s control, and impossible to predict the impact that seeing it later could have on Dhu’s family and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

“All of the images of her is when she is fragile, vulnerable and when her health is in a state of decline,” she said. “Her suffering was extreme and it was a great tragedy. Whilst I realise the legitimate interests of the media outlets in reporting … on this case the media requests are denied.”

The footage that was not released included an hour of Dhu crying in pain on the night of her arrest until transport was arranged to take her to hospital.

It showed Dhu falling back to smack her head on the concrete floor after a police officer yanked her into a sitting position then accidentally dropped her hand.

It showed her handcuffed and dragged from her cell at a time when, according to expert medical witnesses, she already would have succumbed to septic shock.

“[They] dragged her around like a dead kangaroo … No regard for any race, especially Aboriginal,” Dhu’s grandmother, Carol Roe, said after the inquest.



“Who puts handcuffs on a corpse?”

Dhu’s family think the footage of her treatment in custody could have a similar impact to the Don Dale footage, if it was released. Unless it is leaked to the media, or released as part of follow-up court proceedings, they may never know.



Successive police officers who had custody of Dhu in the 48 hours she spent in police cells before dying of septicaemia from a prior injury told the court they believed she was either “faking it” or exaggerating her symptoms.



There is a moment, in the second-last scene of the footage, when two police officers unload her from the back of a police van and into a wheelchair outside the South Hedland emergency department, and her head lolls back.



Every time it happened, one of her aunties, sitting in the row ahead of me in the courtroom, would whisper: “See? She’s already dead.”

Less than five minutes later, a triage nurse, who had been told by police escorting Dhu that she was “faking it”, would inform the shocked officers that she had gone into cardiac arrest.

Dhu’s family do not want footage of that moment released to elicit sympathy. They want it released to effect change. Harris started a national campaign of protests, in one case locking down Melbourne in peak hour, to draw attention to his niece’s case. Imagine the impact a national television program could have.

What of the “riots” that destroyed Perth’s Banksia Hill youth detention centre in 2013, causing children to be housed and strip-searched at an adult’s prison. What might video footage of that incident show?

Australia’s problem with Indigenous incarceration is well known. The structural racism imbued in police forces and prisons is well known. The overrepresentation of Indigenous children in prison is well known.



The abuse of Indigenous young people, and the dismissal of Indigenous women, are old truths, frequently ignored.

Neither the Don Dale footage, nor the Dhu footage, if it were released, show us anything we do not already know about ourselves.

It certainly did not show anything that political leaders, at state, territory and federal level, would not have been aware of or at the very least could not have discovered, had their interest, to borrow Scullion’s phrase, been sufficiently “piqued”.

But it does refuse to be ignored.