The letter that Cleveland Dodd wrote to his father just weeks before taking his own life in a Western Australian youth detention centre was never delivered. Cleveland, a 16-year-old Yamatji boy from Meekatharra, was awaiting trial when he was transferred from Banksia Hill, the state’s main youth detention centre, to Unit 18, a second facility established within an adult jail in 2021 to house “disruptive” detainees. 
Cleveland made eight calls to staff on the night of his death, asking for water and Panadol, and to see the nurse. Staff told him to be patient—but he had run out of that. Cleveland had been in Unit 18 for nearly three months when he hanged himself from a broken air vent on 12 October last year.
A coronial inquest has now heard how and why Cleveland became the first Aboriginal person to die in youth custody. While the coroner’s findings have yet to be released, eyewitness testimony and admissions on the stand in recent months have painted a picture of the callous neglect, racism and brutality of Western Australia’s juvenile detention regime. Now, as the inquest adjourns before a third session later this year, another teenager, whose name has not been released, has died in custody.
Located in the maximum-security adult prison Casuarina, Unit 18 was established in response to rebellions against the awful conditions at Banksia Hill—conditions so bad that Children’s Court President Hylton Quail preferred to sentence offenders to time served or send them to adult prisons to keep them out of the place. 
The WA Supreme Court has twice found that Banksia Hill and Unit 18 violated state and international laws against solitary confinement. Even the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services was forced to concede that Banksia Hill’s Intensive Support Unit, nicknamed “the cage”, violated detainees’ human rights.
Long before Cleveland’s death, youth justice advocates and organisations such as the Aboriginal Legal Service had criticised the government for failing to address the prevalence of self-harm at Banksia Hill and Unit 18. There were twenty attempted suicides and more than 350 instances of self-harm in Unit 18 alone before Cleveland killed himself. 
Responding to criticisms last year about the facilities, Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia said: “This particular cohort of young people regularly self-harmed wherever they were”. The insinuation is that locking young Indigenous people in jail makes little difference.
“That’s basically a slap in the face”, Megan Krakouer, a Noongar woman and director of the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery Project, told Red Flag. “[Papalia is] a very inhumane person who has no idea about the grim reality, who is not immersed in what the challenges are that face First Nations people, and most certainly the most vulnerable cohort.”
Krakouer and Gerry Georgatos, a university researcher and human rights advocate, have worked on programs to combat self-harm and suicide at several prisons across Western Australia, including Banksia Hill and Unit 18. But they have been shut out for encouraging youth detainees to join a class action against the government’s youth detention regime. 
“We couldn’t sacrifice our morality”, Georgatos told Red Flag. “We wanted the funding; we wanted to keep on working. But we were going to call out, on behalf of all those others, all the crap we saw on the inside. All the racism, all the classism, all the inhumaneness.” 
They both expressed grave concerns about the institution and the people running it. “How can we believe anything that the government says? Particularly with what we’ve heard at the Cleveland Dodd coronial inquest, where they’ve been very untruthful and have misinformed the public”, Krakouer said. 
In April, the first session of the inquest focused on Unit 18 staff. Some of them spoke about chronic dysfunction and a culture of negligence. Guards regularly watched movies on shift, logged false welfare checks hours in advance, and routinely failed to carry their walkie-talkies, the inquest heard. The senior officer on duty the night Cleveland died reportedly was napping. Maintenance was repeatedly deferred. When Coroner Urquhart visited the facility six months after Cleveland’s death, seven of the unit’s sixteen cells had similarly broken air vents that could be used as ligature points.
Negligence is why Cleveland was not visited by any mental health professionals during his thirteen weeks in Unit 18, despite him being diagnosed with major depressive disorder and a language disorder. It is also why his complaints about the pain in his left ear (from an infection), recurring headaches, bronchitis and untreated dental issues weren’t taken particularly seriously. Staff admitted that his dental care was repeatedly postponed.
Over two days of testimony, nurse Fiona Bain described the situation in Unit 18 as desperate, with up to 50 threats of self-harm or suicide per day. Officers routinely checked on detainees in person or through monitoring cameras installed in their cells. The teenage detainees would cover the cameras with wet tissue paper to maintain some privacy. In response, the guards would leave them restrained and alone in their cells, sometimes for hours. 
Detainees who “acted out” were not given water after their evening meal, despite the requirement under international humanitarian law that prisoners be given water on request. Senior officers also reportedly denied medication to frustrated and aggressive detainees.
The second session of the inquest, held from 22 July to 16 August, investigated the role of senior officials in the Department of Justice. Former Director General Adam Tomison had to be subpoenaed to appear. Dr Tomison, an internationally renowned expert on child abuse and family violence, accepted that the facilities he had helped to create were perpetrating “institutional abuse”. Counsel assisting the coroner read extracts from letters that the department sent to family members of the detainees and others, falsely claiming that Unit 18 would have all kinds of dedicated services for inmates. Tomison admitted that these assurances were lies.
The inquest then turned its attention to a briefing note given to Justice Minister Bill Johnston before the creation of Unit 18, which Tomison admitted contained “a series of grievous lies”. The note, drafted by the department’s strategic communications team, passed unchallenged through the hands of both former Corrective Services commissioner Mike Reynolds and former deputy commissioner for Young People Christine Ginbey. By the time Ginbey made it to the stand, she had hired a lawyer.
Ginbey appeared just hours after the inquest heard that the State Solicitor’s Office had released a trove of documents, including her statement. The documents included a Unit 18 operating manual and further information about the genesis of the unit. “The court must have real concerns about whether we have got everything that is relevant”, counsel assisting the coroner said. 
Unit 18 was supposed to be open for only one year, from July 2021 to July 2022. Cleveland died more than a year after the facility was planned to be shut. Ginbey revealed on the stand that, at the time, no steps were being taken to close the facility.
Due to the delay in Ginbey’s testimony and the submission of new material to the inquest, a third session will be held in October.
“I have more confidence than ever before in terms of the way we are managing our juvenile detention facilities ... I believe that we can say that those children are safe”, was Premier Roger Cook’s line at a press conference on 31 August, which was called to announce a second death in youth detention.
“The comments were insensitive, unconvincing and offensive ... They seem not to understand that a child died last night at Banksia”, Kurin Minang Noongar woman Dr Hannah McGlade, a human rights advocate and lawyer, told Red Flag after the press conference. “Aboriginal children’s lives matter; we want our premier to meet with us and live up to his commitment to reform youth justice.”
At the press conference, Corrective Services commissioner Brad Royce said: “What we need to spend more time [on] and will take generational change is the young people themselves. When they come to me, I have very short periods with them ... for me this is going to take a significant piece of work and it will be generational to get through this”. 
In other words, it’s tragic, but it’s up to the young Aboriginal people themselves to stop dying in custody. One hundred and ninety-five years after the Swan River colony was established, the government is still blaming Aboriginal people for their own oppression.
“It’s not just about moral and political will; it’s cowardice”, Georgatos said of the excuse-making. “It’s not just the ministers who have the portfolios and the cabinet who have responsibility; it’s every politician in the party room. It’s every politician on the back bench. It’s every politician in the Labor Party that should hang their head in shame that they haven’t raised the alarm bells when they’ve seen so much wrong and injustice go on, so many lives put at risk—it’s every politician.”
The inquest resumes in October.

Max Vickery

Inquest shines a light on Western Australia’s youth injustice system

In his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State, the founder of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl made the case for a flag. “We have no flag, and we need one”, he wrote. “I would suggest a white flag, with seven golden stars.”
Herzl’s proposal fell from favour, eventually superseded by the blue and white <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Israel">Israeli flag</a> we know today. However, his seven-star design lives on—inspiring, among other things, <a href="https://www.zim.com/about-zim/history">the flag</a> and <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ZIM_Logo.svg">logo</a> of ZIM Integrated Shipping Services. While this may seem trivial, ZIM’s adaptation of Herzl’s design for its logo is one sign of the close historical relationship between the company and the Zionist project. 
When it was established in 1945, ZIM was operated by Zionists who had gained their nautical know-how through their involvement in the clandestine immigration of Jewish settlers into British Mandate Palestine.
With the founding of Israel in 1948, ZIM became a state-owned company. It grew rapidly over the next decade, supported by reparation funds from Germany used by the Israeli government to purchase and construct new ships to aid the expansion of the Zionist project. It remained a state-owned company until it was bought by the Israel Corporation in 2004—though the Israeli state retained 51 percent of shares and the veto rights those shares secured.
Today ZIM is an international shipping company, and while Israeli exports and imports only accounted for 9 percent of ZIM’s total cargo in 2021, ZIM handled a whopping 30 percent of Israeli exports and imports.
Though operating “at arm’s length”, there can be no doubt that ZIM remains a creature of the Israeli state. While the company is notoriously secretive about its cargo, multiple independent investigations have found ZIM to be involved in the transport of armaments and military supplies both to and from Israel.
In its company-certified history ZIM proudly advertises its record of providing arms to Zionist militias in the lead-up to the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”—the systematic terror campaign that accompanied the establishment of Israel, in which more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 displaced). Seventy-five years later, as Israel was unleashing what many see as a second Nakba in Gaza and the West Bank, ZIM CEO Eli Glickman <a href="https://x.com/eli_glickman/status/1710992426972676256?s=20">posted on X</a> that the company’s “first priority will be to allocate the needed resources to aid Israel in this hard and difficult situation”.
ZIM, then, plays a conscious and crucial role in the Israeli war machine—which is why it has become a target of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
On Saturday 2 December, as part of that movement, Palestine solidarity activists in Perth, Western Australia, struck a blow against ZIM. Organised by Unionists for Palestine WA with the assistance of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/FOPWA/">Friends of Palestine WA</a> and the Western Australian section of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61552607146827">Students for Palestine</a>, a community picket was established at the entrance to the Patricks container terminal in North Fremantle. The aim of the picket was to disrupt the unloading and loading of the ZIM ship As Nadia. Despite barely 24 hours notice, hundreds turned out to put themselves on the line for the Palestinian cause.
The organisers of the picket targeted shift-changes at the terminal. The first picket assembled at 2:30pm and the second at 10:30pm. This was strategic. Instead of attempting to take direct action against ZIM and the trucks servicing that berth, the community activists called on the workers scheduled to work that day—members of the Maritime Union of Australia—to respect the picket. The workers did.
This was the first time in living memory that Australian maritime workers have respected a community picket for Palestine, but there have been international examples. In 2014, pro-Palestine activists in Oakland <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/18/picketers-oakland-california-port-israeli-ship-unloading">organised community pickets</a> targeting the ZIM ship Piraeus which were respected by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The action was so successful that ZIM had to stop all shipping to the US west coast for seven years!
The community picket in Perth delayed the As Nadia for 26 hours. One experienced port worker estimated the delay would have cost ZIM somewhere between $156,000 and $260,000 at this port alone, with further losses likely at subsequent ports along its route and damage to its global reputation.
The example of ZIM shipping shows the global nature of war. In the face of that we need a global resistance too. If small victories like that won against ZIM by activists in Perth can multiply, it can throw a spanner in the works of the Israeli war machine.

Activists in Perth strike a blow against Israeli shipping company ZIM

“The [Voice] referendum is about whether we retreat into ourselves or have the courage to advance forward”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared in a keynote speech at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land on 4 August. 
Albanese likened his government’s resolve to the kangaroo and emu that sit on the Australian coat of arms. “[They] are two of the only animals in the world that never go backwards – they just go forwards”, he said.
Yet go backwards Labor did.
On 8 August, WA Premier Roger Cook and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Tony Buti fronted a press conference to declare their government’s surrender in the face of a racist campaign by farming, mining and pastoral interests against the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which came into force on 1 July. 
Cook announced that the Act would be repealed and that the state government would revert to the 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act, which has provided a licence to mining interests to destroy Aboriginal heritage sites for the past half century.
“Put simply, the laws went too far, were too prescriptive, too complicated and placed unnecessary burdens on everyday Western Australian property owners”, Cook <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/08/wa-repeals-axes-aboriginal-cultural-heritage-laws-premier-roger-cook">told</a> the media.
When Rio Tinto blew up two sacred sites at Juukan Gorge in 2020, the mining company ignited outrage across the world. The rock shelters were sacred to the Pinti Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples in the Pilbara region. They contained artefacts that included unique stone tools, human hair and animal remains that, <a href="https://www.terrijanke.com.au/our-culture-our-future">according</a> to Wuthathi-Meriam woman Terri Janke, provide evidence of “cultural practices, resources and knowledge systems’ of human life going back 46,000 years”.
Rio Tinto’s wanton destruction of Aboriginal heritage and total disregard of the wishes of traditional owners was made possible by Section 18 of the 1972 Act, which allowed the minister to weigh heritage concerns against the “public interest”. Once the minister’s decision was made, it was final. Traditional owners had no right of review, even when new evidence of cultural heritage is found.
The Section 18 process became so routine that it was known as an “approval” or “clearance”. In 2011, the former Liberal minister Norman Moore <a href="https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/parliament/commit.nsf/(Evidence+Lookup+by+Com+ID)/A8958147D45E57874825794A002F70A3/$file/ef.aar10.11111.tro.001.Department+of+Indigneous+Affairs.pdf">joked</a> at a mining industry function that the raffle prize would be a free Section 18 approval. <a href="https://www.klc.org.au/land-councils-say-new-cultural-heritage-laws-are-pointless">According to</a> South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council CEO Wayne Nannup, “Over 99 percent of the 400 plus Section 18 applications made by miners and developers to the McGowan government [had] been granted” as of last year.
Additionally, anyone from big agribusiness to small farmers could defend the destruction of Aboriginal heritage by simply claiming that they didn’t know that the site was there and couldn’t reasonably have known it was there. 
Under the 1972 Act, the process for registering a protected heritage site was extremely onerous for Aboriginal applicants. The Act established an Aboriginal Cultural Materials Committee, which could provide recommendations to the minister about whether a site should be protected, and whether the economic use of a site was compatible with its preservation. The final decision rested with the minister, who was always free to disregard the council’s advice, though often the minister felt no need to do so.
In 2020, when Rio Tinto destroyed sacred sites at Juukan Gorge, the chair of the committee was Gavin Fielding, a life-long state bureaucrat and former head of the WA Industrial Relations Commission, who just happened be a Rio Tinto shareholder. Fielding insisted he held no conflict of interest. Also on the committee was the chief surveyor of Landgate, a state government authority responsible for land development.
Over the past half century, there are many examples of WA state governments using “public interest” (i.e., mining and development interests) to permit the destruction of Aboriginal heritage in the face of determined community opposition. Some of the most high-profile cases include US multinational Amax’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7540">oil drilling exploration</a> at Noonkanbah station in 1980 and the development of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6661">Old Swan Brewery site</a> on Perth’s foreshore in the early 1990s.
In the decade prior to the Juukan Gorge disaster, mining companies were granted permission to damage 463 “protected” sites, including some containing rock art dating back tens of thousands of years. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/28/more-than-100-aboriginal-sacred-sites-some-dating-before-the-ice-age-could-be-destroyed-by-mining-companies">According to</a> the Guardian, Rio Tinto has 13,300 ethnographic and cultural sites on its Pilbara mining leases, Fortescue manages more than 5,900 Aboriginal heritage sites across its leases, and BHP manages about 8,000 sites.
When elected in 2017, Labor had promised to update the antiquated law. However, at the time of Rio Tinto’s destruction of Juukan Gorge, Labor had done nothing to act on this promise.
Bowing to pressure and faced with a damning Senate inquiry, the McGowan government rushed the new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act through state parliament in November 2021 with little parliamentary opposition. The government’s key selling points were the removal of Section 18 and an increase in fines for those who break the law (from $50,000 to $10 million). The government <a href="https://consultation.dplh.wa.gov.au/aboriginal-heritage/aboriginal-heritage-bill-2020/">claimed</a> the new bill would “reset the relationship between land users and Traditional Owners and transform how Aboriginal cultural heritage is identified, managed and conserved”.
However, Aboriginal groups were sceptical. The Kimberley Land Council and the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council <a href="https://www.klc.org.au/land-councils-say-new-cultural-heritage-laws-are-pointless">said</a> in 2021 that the new Act would “not stop the destruction of scared sites as long as decision-making power over their protection remains with a government minister”.
And Kimberley Land Council CEO Nolan Hunter stated: 
“Whilst the changes remove Section 18, government endorsed destruction without the agreement of Traditional Owners would still be possible under a re-badged and rebranded Section 139. With a few more checks and balances, a minister will still have the final say on if a sacred site is important or not.”
Nonetheless, the 2021 Act shifted the burden of responsibility to identify Aboriginal heritage and consult with traditional owners to landholders and mining interests. The Act established new Local Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Services, Aboriginal-run independent bodies to investigate local heritage claims, for a fee.
As the implementation date of the new Act approached, the Pastoral and Graziers Association and the Liberal and National parties called for the Act’s implementation to be paused. A petition calling for a six-month delay garnered 30,000 signatures. Their campaign soon attracted support from right-wing media outlets such as the Australian and Sky News, and opponents of Labor’s proposed Voice to Parliament.
Geraldton mayor Shane van Styn <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/indigenous-australians/aboriginal-cultural-heritage-act-geraldton-mayor-shane-van-styn-claims-new-laws-stopped-tree-planting-event-c-11220261">told</a> the West Australian on 9 July that a tree-planting event at Wonthella Bush Reserve to honour the service of the late Queen Elizabeth II was “shut down” after a local traditional owner had claimed the reserve was a sacred site (she had actually protested the event because she objected to the site being named after the deceased monarch). Two days later, Styn erroneously <a href="https://www.2gb.com/new-indigenous-laws-stop-tribute-to-the-queen-elizabeth-ii/">claimed</a> in an interview with Sydney radio station 2GB:
“The Act gives Aboriginal folk the right to enter any property ... stop any works, they have a right to demand passwords to your computer ...” and that “the Act grants them enough powers that they can use force which is not likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death”. 
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce and One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson quickly piled on, stoking fears that Labor would roll out laws to curb farmers’ rights across the country. On 3 August, Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/peta-credlin/wa-cultural-heritage-act-is-socialist-state-gone-mad/video/bc0110ab73782b1b9da26faa9e6cdbba">told</a> Sky News presenter Peta Credlin that the legislation was the act of a “socialist state gone mad”.
Underlying the racist campaign was a desire by conservatives to leverage opposition to the legislation towards defeating the Voice to Parliament referendum. The latest Essential poll, on 5 August, shows support for the Voice has slipped below 50 percent in all states. In Western Australia, where support is lowest, only 39 percent said they would vote yes.
Despite government claims to the contrary, speculation has been rife that Albanese brought pressure to bear on Cook to get the issue off the agenda. Shamefully, Yes 23 campaign spokesperson Dean Parkin welcomed news of the WA premier’s capitulation. 
Parkin <a href="https://thewest.com.au/politics/dumping-heritage-laws-give-clear-air-for-voice-yes-campaign-director-c-11495233">told</a> the West Australian that the scrapping of the legislation “gives us a clearer pathway from now through to the referendum to be able to focus very closely on that very simple question of recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first peoples of this country through a Voice”. 
In other words, the modest but real gain of Aboriginal heritage protection in WA must be jettisoned to achieve a symbolic outcome at a federal level. As Red Flag contributor Jordan Humphries <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/voice-parliament-losing-ground-poll">observed</a> in June, “the whole messaging of the Yes campaign avoids any discussion of the racism that Indigenous people face” and, consequently, its “depoliticised approach ... is flirting dangerously with failure”.
While supporting a Yes vote, we should have no illusions that the Voice will address the structural racism that Aboriginal people face. Indeed, it has been engineered to avoid any significant challenge to the status quo. In WA, Labor has made it abundantly clear that it is more willing to listen to the voices of graziers, farmers and mining companies than Aboriginal people. Why should we expect that the Voice to Parliament, should it be enacted, is any more likely to be listened to?

Inquest shines a light on Western Australia’s youth injustice system

Activists in Perth strike a blow against Israeli shipping company ZIM

WA Labor capitulates to racist campaign against Aboriginal heritage law

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us