The boys were arranged in a semicircle facing the camera. On their left was a tree that has become a memorial for one of their own, 14-year-old Elijah Doughty, killed when the motorbike he was riding was allegedly struck from behind by a ute. To their right, about 20 metres away, a ring of plastic flowers marked the place Elijah’s body lay, exposed and then under a blanket, until police took it away.

The walking track in the Gribble Creek Reserve where Elijah’s body was found runs through the middle of the twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, a goldmining centre located in the red dirt on the edge of the desert about seven hours’ drive east of Perth, Western Australia.

In the morning it’s a highway of teenagers taking a shortcut to the local high school. Elijah’s death, reported between 8am and 9am on Monday 29 August, occurred during peak hour.

Many of those gathered next to his memorial, six days later, had seen his body and stayed to watch the police investigation.

There were 15 boys there. When the Guardian asked “how many of you are scared now for your safety?”, 15 hands went up.



Elijah was good with motorbikes. He had a knack for mechanical things and could make old bikes work when others had given up on them. He had two of his own, though both had been stolen at some point.

Kalgoorlie’s acting police commander, Darryl Gaunt, told the media that the bike Elijah was riding had been reported stolen the night before his death, though it’s not clear where Elijah got it. According to his friends he had been handed it in the reserve.

Elijah Doughty.

Police said the bike had been reported stolen by a 55-year-old non-Indigenous man who lived near the crash site.

That same man allegedly drove his four-wheel-drive Nissan Navara utility into the reserve after the motorbike and struck it from behind some time before 8.55am, dragging Elijah under the car.

The driver was charged with manslaughter on Monday and eventually appeared via video link to a magistrates court in Perth on Wednesday. His identity has been suppressed by the courts and his family have left town.



You can recognise his face, He had his little hat on, little helmet, little cap, hood, jacket. He was so young Albert Doughty

In between, on the Tuesday, there was a riot outside the Kalgoorlie courthouse.

Ask locals in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, about these events, and you’ll get the same response: they don’t condone what happened but it is understandable.



There’s one key difference.

Indigenous people say that about the riot.

Non-Indigenous people say that about Elijah’s death.

The riot began as a peaceful protest. About 200 Indigenous people gathered outside the courthouse in Hannan Street, the main street of Kalgoorlie, to rally for justice for Elijah. (On the same street, in 2007, Elijah’s aunt, Blanche Ursula Smith, 25, was killed in a hit-and-run. The crash was caught on CCTV but no one was charged.)

While the crowd gathered, Elijah’s close family waited in the courthouse, ushered first upstairs into the district court waiting room, then downstairs to the magistrates court, then upstairs again.

Elijah’s grandfather, Albert Doughty, was inside the court on the Tuesday. He had formally identified his grandson’s body the night before but had known who was under the blanket as soon as he arrived at the reserve by a policewoman’s description.

“Elijah wore a gold watch and chain all the time … when they said he had a gold watch and a chain on I tried to calm Darryl [Doughty, Elijah’s father] down, but he went and crying and the police were there,” he said.

“The sergeant came over and told me, ‘we think it’s Elijah.’ To make sure I went up to the hospital. It was him all right. You can recognise his face, He had his little hat on, little helmet, little cap, hood, jacket.

“He was so young, 14 years of age.”

Doughty said the trouble started when the court guards decided to lock the front door.



“Aunties, cousins, kids, they wanted to go into the courthouse and hear his side of it, see him up there. When they found out they wouldn’t let them in … they banged the doors.”

Windows at the entry to the courthouse, which is tucked away in a courtyard, are evidence of what happened next. Two were smashed through with thrown half-bricks, others are flecked with gravel chips. Upstairs, a window in the jury room was smashed by a rock thrown from the street.

A memorial at the Gribble Creek Reserve to 14-year-old Elijah Doughty. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

Inside the court, the police prosecutor told Doughty that the matter would have to put off until that afternoon, when everything had calmed down.

“Then they said, come back this afternoon, we’ll do it by video link, give us your phone number,” he said. “They never rung us up. They flew him [the man charged over the death] to Perth and did court down there.”

Doughty and the rest of Elijah’s close family were ushered out the back and then police asked him to address the crowd to tell them to calm down. He did so, but by then, he said, the small group that had caused trouble had moved further down the street and smashed in the window of a police car.

Seven people were charged and face offences ranging from breaching bail to disorderly conduct to criminal damage to assaulting a police officer. According to police, 12 officers were injured and five patrol cars damaged.

Elijah’s family and senior Aboriginal leaders have condemned the violence. But, said one Indigenous man, who declined to give his name because he was employed by a government-funded organisation, it had got the message out.



“I’m not condoning it, not at all,” he said. “But would you be here if that riot hadn’t have happened? Would we have got this level of media coverage of what goes on in this town?”

Would you be here if that riot hadn’t have happened? Would we have got this level of media coverage? Indigenous man

The answer is probably not. Chris Graham, the editor of independent Australian media outlet New Matilda, compared it to the riots in Palm Island after the death in custody of Indigenous man Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004 which drew national and international media coverage to the small community in the Great Barrier Reef. The increased scrutiny led to an internal corruption report and a charge of manslaughter against Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, the top-ranked police officer on the island. Hurley was acquitted by the jury on both charges but a coronial inquest later found he had caused the fatal injuries.

To some the case has echoes of the killing of 16-year-old John Pat in another West Australian town, Roebourne, in 1983, the death that sparked a royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Five police officers were charged with manslaughter and acquitted by an all-white jury. In Alice Springs, across state lines in the Northern Territory, another five men – not police – were convicted of manslaughter in 2010 for running over Aboriginal man Kwementyaye Ryder in the dry bed of the Todd River, in what the court found was a racially motivated crime, and sentenced to between five and six years’ jail each.

An Indigenous man who witnessed Ryder’s death told the Guardian the men had looked “like they were driving at a flock of birds”.

There are also cases that resulted in no charge, such as the death in custody of the Aboriginal elder known as Mr Ward, who was arrested on 27 January 2008 in Laverton and transported 400km in the back of an non-air-conditioned van to Kalgoorlie jail. He was dead when he arrived. A coroner found he had effectively been cooked alive.

Sit down with Indigenous people in Kalgoorlie and the names stack up. Monty Smith. Delray Beasley. Dennis John Phillips. Deaths the Indigenous community feel have not been properly investigated.

The Indigenous community in Kalgoorlie-Boulder did not believe that authorities would care that a black kid had died. When the charge came back as manslaughter, it did not matter what evidence was or was not before police. They felt their suspicions had been confirmed.

A group of Elijah’s relatives and friends set up camp at the Gribble Creek reserve on Monday night to protect his memorial from desecration. On Tuesday employees from the City of Kalgoorlie arrived with tents, portable toilets, food and a generator. The camp will remain until after the funeral, which is still several weeks away. Mothers sit on mattresses and plastic chairs and watch their sons, who sit in another circle of plastic chairs around the memorial tree.

Classmates of Elijah Doughty, from the Clontarf Goldfields Academy visit his memorial. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

Maria, Elijah’s aunt, said she was considering moving her children to a remote community to escape Kalgoorlie.

“I got a little boy, he lives [near] … my house … he’s a little white boy, he’s allowed to come into my house, help himself to the fridge, go out the back, play with my son, watch TV,” she said. “My son is not allowed at his house because my son’s black. His dad told him not to bring him over.

“It needs to stop. It’s 2016, kids should be free to play with kids no matter what colour they are.”

The local Indigenous kids already spent most of their time in the reserve, which Albert Doughty refers to as a “playground,” a place “little kids can go out and have safe day”.

In the trees past the crash site, Elijah’s friends are playing dodgeball. Scuffing his shoes in the dirt, his cousin, Albert, pauses before answering how he felt since Elijah’s death: “Angry. Not safe.”

He and Steven, a close friend who said Elijah was “closer to me than my own brothers,” said they had instructed their younger cousins not to go out.

The fear that Elijah’s peers feel following his death could be a good thing, some at the camp tell the Guardian. It could be used to keep them alive.

Elijah had been in trouble with police several times before but his record ran to less than a page. On a the sliding scale based on high levels of disadvantage and poverty in Kalgoorlie’s Indigenous community, a legal source told the Guardian, he was at the lower end.



The whitefellas have been really nice … like they don’t want us to think they’re a racist Aboriginal violence counsellor

Albert Doughty said Elijah was a good kid, despite a troubled upbringing. His mother has been in jail for much of his life. He was a star football player with the Kalgoorlie City Football Club under 14s side and would have played in his first grand final later this month. Instead the club retired the number 18 guernsey he wore and players in Saturday’s semi-finals ran on to the field wearing black armbands.

Football is the main place where the Indigenous and non-Indigenous sides of Kalgoorlie come together.

Among the non-Indigenous spectators on Saturday, there was a different view of Elijah’s death. “Definitely nothing to do with racism at all,” a woman told the Guardian.

Three other women, propped against the open hatch of the same car, nodded.

“It’s just tragic all round, really,” she said. “At the end of the day that man’s also lost his family and two children. They’ve had to leave town, uproot their whole lives. And, you know, they [the Indigenous community] were calling for justice, I’m not sure what else you could have done. The poor man was jailed, he’s going before the courts, I’m not really sure … what else do you do?”

An Aussie Rules football left at a memorial to Elijah Doughty. Elijah Doughty died when the motorbike he was riding was allegedly struck by a car just metres from this memorial on 29 August 2016. Photo: Calla Wahlquist for The Guardian. Photograph: The Guardian

Kalgoorlie, they said, was maybe a bit racist, but no more than anywhere else, and this death was definitely not about race. A Facebook page littered with comments like “how many bodies does it take to fill a mine shaft?” had been rightly shut down. The best thing for everyone would be for the community to move on.

“There’s a lot of Aboriginal people in Kalgoorlie and I know a lot of them are good people, but there are some that are just a bunch of criminals,” a man, watching the match with a group of friends, told the Guardian. “He didn’t die because he was Aboriginal.”

“It goes both ways,” his friend chimed in. “If that was a white kid and a white guy, do you reckon there’d be the same interest? It wouldn’t be the same interest. If it was a black guy and a white kid, no one would care.”

This was a story about the justice system, not race, they said. They also believed police were “afraid” to charge Indigenous kids, a belief not borne out by statistics: Indigenous children in Western Australia are 53 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous kids, the highest rate of racialised imprisonment in the western world.



[They said] that he deserved to die. They didn’t care what we said. They didn’t know him. Brianna James

“It’s not racism, it’s just maybe, for once, they are in the wrong,” the man said. “I try not to be as racist as possible but the truth’s there and you got to acknowledge it, you know what I mean?”

There are a lot of four-wheel drives in Kalgoorlie, most bearing the yellow reflective strip and orange flag of a mining vehicle. The town was founded in 1893 during the gold rush and gold remains both its biggest industry and defining characteristic: a 3.5km long, 500m deep open-cut gold mine, known as the Super Pit, is its biggest tourist attraction. The second-biggest tourist attraction is the skimpy, or topless, bars, which cropped up in the 19th century to keep the miners company. It looks like a movie set of an Australian town, a place where people would refer to themselves as “true blue” without irony.

According to the 2011 census, 6.8% of the population of 30,000 identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, but more live in surrounding communities and come into Kalgoorlie-Boulder for healthcare or schooling. Kalgoorlie has a poor track record for the treatment of its Indigenous community. It recorded the highest “no” vote in the country in the 1967 referendum to include Indigenous peoples in the census and was at the centre of a campaign to undermine native title laws in the 1990s, when local MP Graeme Campbell told the ABC Indigenous people would “sell their land for a corned beef sandwich” in an off-pension week.

But in the past week, some people say, there has been a change in how they have been treated by the white community suddenly conscious that they might have a problem.

“The whitefellas have been really nice … like they don’t want us to think they’re a racist,” an Aboriginal violence counsellor told the Guardian.

Not everyone has been understanding. Sitting under the memorial tree, Brianna James, Elijah’s 12-year-old sister, repeated in a small voice the comments she had overheard at school.

“[They said] that he deserved to die,” she said. “They didn’t care what we said. They didn’t know him.”

Back at the crash site, another football has been added to the memorial bearing the slogan of the Clontarf Aboriginal Academy: from little things big things grow.

It was delivered by a group of 30 boys aged between 12 and 15 who attended the football and mentoring program with Elijah. Linked arm to arm, they bowed their head as a teacher read out a prayer while yarn coloured the red, yellow, and black of the Aboriginal flag flapped in the breeze.

Kalgoorlie elder Bronwyn Newland sat at a camp fire nearby. “We want justice, you tell the world that. Justice for the Aboriginal people of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.”