Australian
Screen

Clip description

A hand fumbles for a box of matches on the floor of a car, lost amongst other junk. Shane Francis (David Ngoombujarra) one hand on the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the road, strikes the match with his freed hand. Flashback: a young woman (Kylie Belling) is seated by a fire. Shane Francis sits listening to her. We see the young woman struggling as two men wrestle her to the ground. She tells us how they arrested her before they raped her. The two men we see are dressed in police uniforms, behind the unfolding brutality, a police car is parked. Later, seated back in is office Shane Francis receives a phone call. The voice of the man (Joe Foster) on the other end tells him the woman has been killed, having been bashed then stabbed through the eye. Francis back in his car now driving into the morning, asks, ‘I wonder if the storm will ever end?’.

Curator’s notes

This sequence of No Way to Forget depicts an Indigenous woman’s trauma after allegedly being raped by uniformed police officers. There are findings that suggest that the rape of Aboriginal women is not taken as seriously as the rape of white women. The Australian police force has historically been implicated in the regulation of the sexual liaisons between Indigenous females and white males which were considered illegal and immoral from early in the 20th century. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established in 1987 to investigate allegations of murder of Australian Aboriginals in prison.