Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaks out about fleeing the violent partner she feared would kill her

For the first time, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has revealed how she ran from her home, bleeding, and terrified her former partner was going to kill her.

Jacinta Price was just 27 years old on the morning she thought she was going to die.

Her partner at the time had woken her up, threatening to attack her.

When she picked up the phone to call the police he cracked her head open with a heavy-duty spotlight torch.

He’d previously had some “odd behaviours” but nothing like this had ever happened before.

Price remembers feeling “stunned” when she reached to feel where she’d been hit.

“I remember just looking at my hand because there was this warmth and I was bleeding,” she says.

Still in shock and wearing just the singlet and underpants she’d been sleeping in, Price desperately tried to avoid him coming at her from the other side of a table.

Senator Jacinta Price during her passionate maiden speech in the Senate Chamber in Parliament House. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

They had been living with her three boys — aged nine, seven and five — in a duplex in Darwin. With astonishing foresight, she had taken the kids to stay at a relative’s after her partner had stormed out the day before.

“He went to grab the table and I thought, ‘I need to get the f..k out of here otherwise … he’s gonna kill me’,” Price recalls.

In that moment she managed to bolt out of the front door and into the street. By chance, a neighbour had just pulled up with a boat on his trailer. It was just after 7am.

“I ran straight into his house, I didn’t even ask,” Price says. “I just remember feeling dread. Like, horrible. And I’m bleeding all over the floor. And the lady brings me a sarong so I can cover myself up more. I’m begging these people, ‘please, just call the cops, I’ve just been attacked by my partner and I’m scared he’s going to come and find me’.”

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has spoken out about the violent partner she feared would kill her. Picture: Chloe Erlich

And yet, even within that terror, lay another fear — that her neighbours wouldn’t take her seriously because she was just another Aboriginal woman who was a victim of domestic violence.

Price ended up in hospital with six stitches to her head. Yet it was her partner — who was not Indigenous — who played the victim.

After the attack he tried to woo her back with stories about his own traumatic childhood, eventually calling her from a service station saying he’d just been bashed by a group of people. Price drove out to find him and when she got out of her car he threw her to the ground.

“I remember him just grabbing me, putting me on the ground, sitting on me and then just double-punching me in the face. I just remember the sound of his fists hitting my eyes,” she recalls.

Summoning some superhuman strength, Price managed to throw him off her and scramble back to her car.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as a child with some of her family.

Price later found out that no order had been taken out against the man by police and when she tried to press charges they kept asking if she was sure she wanted to. She did, but by the time the matter got to court, he had skipped town.

Again, Price wondered if it was because she was another Aboriginal victim of domestic violence — something so shamefully prevalent in Indigenous communities which her mother had experienced and she had seen all around her growing up in Alice Springs.

It was the most terrifying and traumatic experience of her life and yet Price says she “felt like just another ­statistic”.

And so this firebrand crusader was forged.

Senator Jacinta Price with her grand-aunt Tess Napaljarri Ross at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The Jacinta Nampijinpa Price of today is just as courageous as the woman who fought off her attacker almost two decades ago. But she is now an Australian senator and arguably the most powerful Indigenous voice in the country.

It is thus perhaps ironic that it was she who more than any other single person was responsible for the defeat of that other Indigenous Voice at last year’s referendum.

But it is no irony to her.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as a baby with her father.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with her brother, Linawu, who died when he was three of leukaemia.

Price fiercely believes that any division or differentiation on the basis of race is toxic to both Indigenous communities and Australia as a whole.

Instead it is disadvantage that must be tackled and this can only occur by Indigenous people taking responsibility for their lives and being leaders instead of supplicants to welfare and other government services.

This makes Price something of a Judas to the modern urban left who, as she sees it, want to condemn Aboriginal people to perpetual victimhood of colonialism and ­racism.

And so, while she is a proud Walpiri woman — her mother is the famous former politician and community leader Bess Price — her father David was of Irish heritage and she believes that Australia, like her, must embody the best of both cultures and discard the worst.

To this end she insists that misogynistic attitudes she says exist in some Indigenous traditions — such as blaming mothers for the death of their children – need to be abandoned just as the misogyny of Western history is now looked upon with scorn.

Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine at a Voice to Parliament No rally. Picture: NCA NewsWIRE/Philip Gostelow.

“We don’t burn women at the stake and accuse them of being witches anymore,” she says. “So why should we ­suggest that sorcery is the cause of any premature death?

“We’ve got to have our enlightenment stages as well. But we’re continually told this romanticism about being the world’s oldest living culture. Yeah, that’s great, but what does that mean for trying to establish ourselves in a modern Australia? And not just survive, but thrive?”

These days, Price is often touted as a future prime ­minister. So I ask her, if she was PM, what is the first thing she would do?

“Well, first things first, I would want to focus on supporting Australians on the basis of need, not race,” she says. “Because one thing that I absolutely understand is that being Indigenous doesn’t automatically make you disadvantaged. It’s your circumstances. And then we could focus our efforts on supporting our most disadvantaged.

“And I would push to understand our nation’s history in its entirety and work on being proud to call ourselves Australian.

“If our children don’t have pride in who they are, how are they going to be the future leaders who want to resolve some of our tough problems and recognise what it is that makes us a wonderful country?”

Matters of the Heart, by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with Sue Smethurst, will be published by HarperCollins in February 2025. RRP $36.99. Pre-order now via Amazon.