Prelims

Half Title Page

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities

Title Page

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: Criminalisation and Contested Sovereignties

By

Thalia Anthony

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Juanita Sherwood

Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Harry Blagg

University of Western Australia, Australia

And

Kieran Tranter

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL

First edition 2024

Copyright © 2024 Thalia Anthony, Juanita Sherwood, Harry Blagg, and Kieran Tranter. Published under exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80071-083-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-082-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-084-9 (Epub)

Dedication

For First Nations people whose lives have been taken at the hands of settler colonial automobilities.

For our families who have supported us and have been part of the struggle against colonialism in all its forms (Joel, Lyndal, Sophia Alex, Gilly, Rosie, Markus, Mark).

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

We would expressly like to thank:

Scott Marsh for permission to reproduce his image ‘Burning Police Car Mural’ (2021). This image appears on the front cover and in the book.

Lyndall Ryan, Jennifer Debenham, Mark Brown and Bill Pascoe for permission to reproduce their figure of ‘Colonial frontier massacres in Eastern Australia 1788–1872’.

Elizabeth Jarett for permission to reproduce an extract from her Facebook account from 21 July 2017 and her poem that was read at TJ Hickey memorial rally 14 February 2023.

Tony Albert for permission to reproduce his image ‘We Can be Heroes’ (2012).

Francis Jupurrurla Kelly for cultural permission to reproduce images from the television series Bush Mechanics (2001). Further thanks to Tess Foxworthy and Jeffrey Bruer from PAW (Pintubi, Anmatjere and Warlpiri) Media for facilitating his permission.

Zsuzsi Szucs, Team Lead, Creative and Research, for working with us to identify and retrieve high-resolution images from National Film and Sound Archive collection.

Phillip Noyce, Christine Olsen and Jabal Films Pty Ltd for permission to reproduce images from Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) and Backroads (1977).

Gary Foley for his support and insights into our discussion of the film Backroads (1977).

Nicholas Korpela for research assistance in relation to motor vehicles and colonial practices in Canada and New Zealand. Vicki Chartrand for comments on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two Spirit+ people on the Highway of Tears in British Columbia. Tegan Thomas for her coding of Night Patrol data. Tangentyere Council for facilitating some of the ongoing research on Night Patrols cited in Chapter 7 and permission to reproduce the image of its Youth Patrol vehicle.

Note on Terms

We have used the term First Nations peoples as a sign of respect and acknowledgement of the unceded sovereignty of the peoples whose cultures and communities predate the British invasion and occupation of the lands that have become to be known as Australia. We retain the imposed terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ only in relation to quotes in historical material and in relation to the formal names of legacy entities and institutions such as the ‘Aboriginal Protectors’ or the ‘Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’.

Sensitivity Note

This book contains names and images of people who have passed. It also discusses details of colonial violence and First Nations deaths at the hands of the police and settler automobility.

First Nations readers and people impacted by the carceral system are advised that details of violence inflicted by settlers and the state may cause re-traumatisation.

Foreword

As an experienced practitioner with over 30 years in the justice systems, including police and legal arenas, I thought I knew it all, well, as it happens, the reality is that I don't.

This book and its authors, Professors Thalia Anthony, Juanita Sherwood, Harry Blagg and Kieran Tranter, they all put a whole new meaning to the statement ‘drive it like you stole it’.

Using the motor vehicle as the metaphor, this book highlights how a colonial tool which First Nations people in Australia still heavily rely on to visit family, connect with country and culture, hunting and culture, alongside the need to attend ceremonies and other social purposes has become more than just a means of transport.

Instead, this book outlines how the motor vehicle can be best understood as a colonial weapon. A weapon where the vehicle, as well as the driver's licence that many of us take for granted has been used to intercept, control, manage and constrain First Nations actions and activities. How colonists use motor vehicles to impose colonial power and behaviours on First Nations people.

All too often First Nations people have remained the ‘passengers’ of these motor vehicles, controlled and under surveillance by others with power and privilege, even when we own the land, and the motor vehicle. We as First Nations people are still made to feel like we stole it – all of it.

Those who doubt this concept need to read this book to see how this happens.

How First Nations people have been captured, processed and consumed by the justice system as drivers, passengers and pedestrians, and the criminal sentencing of First Nations drivers and more.

This book highlights that colonial controls continue in 2023 for both adults and children, playing a role in the deterioration of our well-being and compounding our ongoing high levels of intergenerational poverty, trauma and disadvantage.

With the turn of every page, you will be intrigued, because who would have ever thought that a motor vehicle and its relationship with First Nations Australians would be so intense and ever so present in our criminalisation since colonisation that continues even today.

From First Nations led night patrols, to the danger of police chases, the dangers the roads, these all take on a different meanings alongside the use of the vehicle for travelling to and from communities.

Unsurprisingly, First Nations people have also been able to turn the colonising car on its head and use it as a powerful tool of decolonisation. Easily accessible examples include Bill Davis' Pitjantjatjara anthem Mutuka Wiya (no motorcar), the Warumpi band's Jailanguru Pakarnu (Out from Jail) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubxZsfyEwWY and the ironic, incredibly joyful and inventive Bush Mechanics film made by Walpiri media and the spin-off television series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8WfjkgqK9A.

So, if you want exposure to the relationships between First Nations Australians and motor vehicles since colonisation, then this book is a must read. It will open your mind to new issues, new explanations and bold thought-provoking concepts.

Leanne Liddle

Arrernte Lawyer 2022 Northern Territory Australian of the Year

South Australia's First Aboriginal Police Woman

Director Northern Territory Aboriginal Justice Unit

Preface

In a book on the legal and cultural place of the motor vehicle in occupier states, there is a tendency towards using a car-based lexicon. This book emerges from an intersection of distinct projects and concerns shared between us. The collision between an absolute and resurgent colonial sovereignty and First Nations peoples' law, culture and way of life that was the Northern Territory Intervention in 2008 was a particular catalyst. For criminologist Harry Blagg, who had been working with First Nations communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, the Intervention immediately highlighted a contestation of mobilities. The mobile agents of the state – welfare officers, police and army – speed into First Nations communities and one of the immediate effects was to stop First Nations peoples' movement. The historical ways that the occupier state reduced the movement of First Nations peoples in the Northern Territory, the carceral mentality, was of particular interest to lawyer and criminologist Thalia Anthony. In the early 2010s, Harry and Thalia completed a project funded by the Australian Institute of Criminology on the ‘law and order’ outcomes of the Intervention. That project revealed that the Intervention had led to a significant increase in the criminalisation of First Nations peoples for minor traffic offences.

The motor vehicle and its use is a primary site for ongoing colonialism. For Juanita Sherwood, a Wiradjuri woman, health worker and researcher, the motor vehicle as a technology of the occupier state was visceral – the anxiety of seeing a police vehicle, the accounts of community members of being hurt in vehicles, chased by vehicles and hit by vehicles driven by police and occupiers. For Kieran Tranter, whose background is cultural legal studies, the journey to this project began through reading the Australian Humans Right Commission Report on the Stolen Generations that was released in 1997. A striking feature in most survivor stories was the memories of the motor vehicle as the active agent in the taking of children.

Juanita and Harry also came to this book following their trailblazing research on First Nations night patrols in the early 2000s. Harry conducted an Australian study on patrols and Juanita researched the distinct features of NSW Aboriginal patrols – both finding that night patrols mobilise the vehicle to empower community and enact First Nations sovereignty. This common recognition that the occupier state and its colonial project of the twenty and twenty-first century is embodied in the colonisers' motor vehicle – mechanised, fast, carceral and with explosive violence – while also met with resistance of night patrols and First Nations forms of automobility – brought us together and lead to multiple research and writing projects. This book capstones and brings together these projects. In particular,

• Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 were published in Thalia Anthony and Harry Blagg (2012). Addressing the ‘Crime Problem’ of the Northern Territory Intervention: Alternate Paths to Regulating Minor Driving Offences in Remote Indigenous Communities (Criminology Research Council); Thalia Anthony and Harry Blagg ‘STOP in the Name of Who's Law? Driving and the Regulation of Contested Space in Central Australia’ (2013) 22 Social and Legal Studies 43–66.

• An earlier version of parts of Chapter 3 was published as Thalia Anthony and Kieran Tranter ‘Travelling Our Way or No Way!: The Collision of Automobilities in Australian Northern Territory Judicial Narratives’ (2018) 27 Griffith Law Review 281–306.

• Parts of Chapters 4 and 5 were based on Thalia Anthony and Kieran Tranter ‘Taking a Lens to the Chase in Australian Settler State Colonialism’ in Kim Weinert, Karen Crawley and Kieran Tranter (eds) Law, Lawyers and Justice: Through Australian Lenses, Abingdon, Routledge, 2020, 59–81.

• Parts of Chapter 6 were based on Kieran Tranter and Thalia Anthony ‘Race, Australian Colonialism and Technologies of Mobility in Kalgoorlie’ (2018) 45 University of Western Australia Law Review 99–134.

• Parts of Chapter 7 were drawn from Harry Blagg and Thalia Anthony Decolonising Criminology: Imagining Justice in a Postcolonial World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Chapter 11, 279–318; Harry Blagg and Thalia Anthony ‘“If Those Old Women Catch You, You're Going to Cop It”: Night Patrols, Indigenous Women, and Place Based Sovereignty in Outback Australia’ (2014) 8 African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 103–124; Thalia Anthony and Juanita Sherwood ‘Post-Disciplinary Responses to Positivism's Punitiveness’ (2018) Journal of Global Indigeneity 3.