A royal commission meeting in Arnhem Land heard one boy from the community was tied spread eagled and later made to drink urine at Don Dale

A juvenile detention centre officer urinated in a toilet and told a boy to drink it after the boy asked for a glass of water, it was alleged at a royal commission community meeting in Arnhem Land on Tuesday.

The meeting, in Maningrida on the northern coastline of the Northern Territory, also heard from a number of attendees who added to mounting calls for the inquiry into child protection and detention to recommend communities be given back more control over their own affairs.

While the inquiry is examining the entirety of the protection and detention systems in the territory, Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in both, and the royal commission is in the midst of a tour of remote Indigenous communities across the territory. The first formal public hearing wrapped up in Darwin’s supreme court last week.

Commissioners Mick Gooda and Margaret White asked those attending the meeting in Maningrida’s town hall to share their stories in the hope the commission could then investigate what went wrong.

One man said his relative had been detained at Don Dale for about a year, when Labor was last in office. In July they watched the Four Corners episode on mistreatment of juvenile detainees inside NT correctional facilities, and the boy said: “I know this place.”

He said the boy, a “bush kid” with little understanding of city institutions, told him he’d been tied spread-eagled and upright and left for two hours, and that when he once asked an officer for a glass of water, the officer urinated in the toilet and made him drink it.

Another time he’d requested a blanket and was given one which “smelled of shit and urine”, the man claimed.

Just a few dozen of the 3,000-odd people who live in Maningrida had come to the meeting, with many people away conducting ceremony, at festivals, or attending a funeral. Others, including dozens outside the nearby shop, simply didn’t go. “Someone should go and close that shop,” said one older woman in frustration.



An hour before the meeting began, Baru Pascoe walked the streets with a megaphone.

“You gotta remember that Four Corners program,” he shouted. “What they did to those boys and girls. Some of those boys and girls were from Maningrida.”

“Today this is your opportunity to talk to the royal commission and say this is what they did to my daughter, this is what they did to my son. Come on, get up.”

Pascoe told Guardian Australia the community were upset by what they saw, and from an apparent lack of action by the Northern Territory government.

“To us, the corrections system, Don Dale, the adult prison, lot of policies have been breached,” he said.

Children who were taken from parents by authorities to Darwin lost their culture and struggled to reengage with their community when they returned, Pascoe said.

“These kids have learned white man’s law, white man’s culture. They forget their Aboriginal culture … and it’s hard for them to catch up.”

Inside the meeting the recurring demands for greater self determination and community control continued. Let communities do things for themselves, discipline their own kids, and be allowed try community solutions and fail, people said.

Some spoke of bringing children back home, and setting up a prison farm where young detainees could serve their sentence out on country, learning culture. Another asked why offenders couldn’t do community service in their communities instead of Darwin.

Young people come back from being incarcerated in Darwin and say “I’m a criminal, I’m a smartarse, don’t fuck with me,” Pascoe told the meeting.

Women in and outside the meeting spoke more of the violence in town and of children being taken away from their parents by police. They said there needed to be more done to protect women and children, who too often frequented the sole safe house. Gambling and marijuana were problems, and school attendance could also be better, they said. The community’s night patrol needed more support.

Helen Williams called for people to stop blaming others and take responsibility.

“Things need to change in our community, it’s all us. We’ve got to start waking up,” Williams said.

“Children are getting taken away and of course they are taken away because we make mistakes. It’s important. We’ve got to start from here, our community, our people. Let’s start a good plan, we can’t blame others.”

Gooda told the Maningrida meeting he and White would make recommendations and governments would be held accountable, but “the people who are going to drive the change are community people”.

“We’ll make the bullets for you, in those recommendations, but it’s you who’s got to fire them at government and keep them accountable,” he said.

“Unless you’re willing to get together as a community, just be prepared to accept what government is going to do to you for the rest of your lives. The only time governments take notice of you is when you all talk with one voice.”