Jacinta Price takes her anti-violence campaign to Canberra
Jacinta Price says what few dare about Aboriginal culture. But now the stakes have been raised — and she’s being warned.
Soaked in blood, with nightclothes clinging to her skin in the thick, muggy heat, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price sprints to the nearest neighbour’s house and begs them to call the police. It is 7am, Darwin, 2008. Five months into a new relationship — the first since splitting with her high-school sweetheart and father of her three kids — and Price is bolting for her life. Drugs and feral outbreaks of jealousy have broken the veneer of the honeymoon period. In the heat of the attack a lamp is hurled at her with such force that it leaves a gash requiring six stitches. “I looked at my hand, it was covered in blood and the blood was dripping down my shoulder,’’ Price recalls. “And I thought, ‘I have to get out of here because if I don’t get out of here, he’s going to kill me.’ ”
She manages to make a run for it, out the door, feet slapping the driveway of the flats where she lives, across the road and into sanctuary. “I felt like the stereotypical Aboriginal woman victim of violence. And I felt really degraded,” Price says now. “Sitting in this stranger’s house, bleeding all over their floor and asking them to call an ambulance for me, and the police. I was just so glad that my kids weren’t there to witness that.”
The proud Warlpiri-Celtic woman peers at the bushland across the street from her mother’s place on the edge of the Alice Springs township. “Immediately there’s a stigma attached to a victim of family violence. And I felt it, straight away. And I felt like, ‘How could I let this happen to myself? Why didn’t I see this coming?’”
This would be the last time Jacinta Price would be a victim. She broke up with her boyfriend, roused her spirits and took a good hard look around her. In the mirror stood a clever young Territory woman with much to say — although it would take some years for her to articulate all that she’d seen and experienced since she was a tiny kid running through the potholed backstreets of Alice. But soon she began to speak some uncomfortable truths. She lifted the veil on the murderers and rapists and victims in her own extended family and the kinship ties and “cultural excuses” that protect the perpetrators. She has been hailed as a fearless anti-violence warrior and at the same time has become a lightning rod for criticism. But once the lid was off she realised there was no turning back. Despite the vitriol, the scorn, the social media hate campaigns. No running away.
Weaving through clutter, books and furniture, apaper trail of life well-lived, Price scours the nooks of her parents’ home, searching for a lost Stimson’s python. The reptile’s gone missing, but as the 36-year-old Alice Springs town councillor and aspiring federal politician rightly points out, the snake shit in the middle of the lounge room is a good indication it hasn’t yet fled the roost. Price’s family members are close at hand — her father Dave hovers around the kitchen, colourfully criticising a letter in the local newspaper, the Centralian Advocate, which he dubs “highly defamatory” and critical of his family. Jacinta’s mother, Bess Price, a former minister in the notoriously dysfunctional Adam Giles-led Northern Territory government, potters around in a back room. The walls are lined with family memorabilia: Bess catching a barra in the Top End, and meeting Barack Obama in the White House; Dave as a “don’t say hippie” young man exploring outback Central Australia; Jacinta as a bright, smiling child; and a portrait of Linawu, the brother who died of leukaemia when she was just three years old.
On this sun-bitten Red Centre morning, one day before Jacinta Price announces her ambition to run in the next federal election, the bond of family reverberates through the household, with in-jokes, giggles and wry, gentle jibes bouncing off the walls. It’s a bond that has kept this unit sane through some of life’s tougher hurdles: Jacinta’s teen pregnancy (her first baby was due on the day of her Year 12 formal), the kidney disease that almost took her mother’s life, and a string of bloody deaths in the family, including the murder of Bess Price’s sister while the politician held parliamentary office. “We were always a very close family because of just the sorts of things that we’d been through … the amount of loss — family — in our lives. Knowing we had to be each other’s support network,” Price says.
Family may never have been a more necessary oasis for Jacinta Price, as political spotfires smoulder across the landscape. Her outspoken views have built her simultaneously into a refreshing renegade and a divisive pariah on the national political stage. Her comments about Aboriginal domestic violence being ingrained in traditional culture, and her strident stance around keeping Australia Day on January 26, have brought social media trolls scuttling out of the woodwork, barfing out insults, death threats and racist bigotry. One meme recently emerged of Price Photoshopped next to three Ku Klux Klansman and the caption, “Jacinta Price and her followers”.
Price’s husband is Colin Lillie, a fiercely bearded Scotsman who earns his crust as a troubadour gigging around the country. While not formally hitched, Lillie says the couple were joined “Jacinta’s way — bashed over the head with a nulla-nulla. That’s it, we’re married. In Warlpiri cultural way, I’m accepted as her husband, and I’ve got to take everything on board that comes with that.” The pair became firm during Price’s former life as a musician, when Lillie helped produce her debut album, Dry River. They now have four children between them — Price’s three boys, now in their teens, and Lillie’s son.
In a newspaper article, Price listed the diverse cultural mix in her own household: “I am half Warlpiri and a mixture of Irish, Scottish and Welsh. My sons are of Warlpiri, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Malay, Indian, French, African, Chinese, Scandinavian and German ancestry. My stepson is half Scottish and a quarter Mauritian. They are all 100 per cent Australian.” Her point? “Most of the self-identifying indigenous members of our community who claim to feel hurt by Australia Day being held on January 26 would also have white ancestors in their family trees and may not even have been born if the First Fleet hadn’t come.”
“I wasn’t raised to deal with confrontation with words like Jacinta does,” Lillie offers in the thick brogue of the mining village near Edinburgh he hails from. “I learnt at a very young age the difference between an angry man and a violent man — an angry man is someone who just talks the talk. A violent man is someone who basically doesn’t talk. And that’s what I grew up with. And Jacinta has been able to teach me and help me grow to be a better man by showing me that words are powerful things.”
Lillie doesn’t subscribe to all of Price’s prickly viewpoints — “we might be husband and wife but, you know, I don’t always agree with everything that Jacinta says or does”. He does, however, vehemently believe in his partner’s right to say what she believes. “She’s a politician punk. She really is, she’s a punk when it comes to Aboriginal politics because she’s stepping out from how the Aboriginal community believe an Aboriginal woman should be behaving. And she’s a punk — she’s taking it from the inside out. And I’m extremely proud of her.”
Price’s views have attracted the attention of some high-profile allies, including the one-time prime ministerial candidate turned anti-PC baiter Mark Latham, who enlisted her to take part in a televised Australia Day campaign. “I heard her speak at a conference in Brisbane last year and was very impressed by her practical but compassionate approach to the indigenous issues,” says Latham.
The cavalcade of abuse that dogged Price in the weeks following her involvement in the campaign was “horrendous”, says the one-time Labor leader. “The trolls hate her because she’s the sort of person that identity politics would normally applaud — an indigenous woman, an elected councillor from Central Australia. She’s got impeccable credentials for speaking on indigenous issues, but she’s not toeing the inner-city green line, and their only response is abuse and online hysteria.”
Latham understates nothing when speaking of how far he believes Price could travel in politics. In April, if she is successfully nominated to run for the Country Liberal Party in the sprawling Territory seat of Lingiari — which insiders say looks a done deal — she then has the chance to ride into the House of Representatives on the ticket at next year’s election. “I think Jacinta is the most impressive indigenous person that I’ve come across in the political sphere,” Latham says.
Conservatives across the nation latched onto the Price juggernaut following the intense Australia Day coverage. Asked if she trusts figures like Latham and others now hooked on her and her political ideologies, and whether they have her best interests at heart, she cautiously replies: “Trust is a strong word. I think there are people who are valuable to have in your network, put it that way. You need to surround yourself with people you trust. There are only a few people you can trust. I’ve learnt that most definitely. And never necessarily trust those who are throwing themselves at you and want to do things for you. Even if they say they don’t necessarily want something, there is always something that someone wants.”
Price’s shift away from life as a musician and presenter of iconic outback children’s TV show Yamba’s Playtime into politics was abrupt, triggered partly by watching her mother’s time as a minister. As the Territory CLP Government shuddered from scandal to scandal, Bess found herself roped into the melee. She became embroiled in a travel entitlements furore in which her chief of staff Paul Mossman was later found guilty of corruptly receiving benefits. Her Aboriginality became part of the debate as she pushed to be permitted to speak her first tongue, Warlpiri, in parliament. Watching from the sidelines, Jacinta says she was getting “really pissed off and upset when I saw people saying nasty things. When you see the media portray her in a certain way, which was so untrue to who she was, it would get me really angry or upset.”
By 2015, the younger Price was in the process of a political awakening. She realised she too was now in a position to start raising her voice. The seemingly endless chain of violence in her family led her to speak out. “I got to a point in my life where we had that many deaths in our family. We had that many women traumatised by family violence and children traumatised by family violence,” she says. “And this ‘growing up yapa [Aboriginal] way’ is always like, you don’t talk about the really tough things. You pretend like they don’t exist. You know there are members in your family who have beaten the crap out of your own aunty, who have raped people, and yet your family expects you to pretend that these people haven’t done those things. You’re supposed to turn a blind eye to that. And I think I got to a point where I went, ‘I’ve had enough of this’. And I became quite vocal.”
In lifting the veil from the largely taboo subject of Aboriginal community violence, Price’s star began to rise. She was hand-picked to deliver a couple of high-profile addresses to audiences at the National Press Club and the right-wing think tank the Centre for Independent Studies. In the latter, in 2016, she told the audience: “Aboriginal culture is a culture that accepts violence and in many ways desensitises those living the culture to violence.” To the press club she admitted she had been placed under immense pressure to withhold parts of her story, saying she was putting her immediate family at risk of violent retaliation. “But why am I standing here if not to hold us all to account for the lack of responsibility, action and justice for these Aboriginal women and children and the thousands of victims of family violence and sexual abuse?” she said.
Prominent Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine says Price’s uncompromising stance on indigenous violence has never been more necessary. “It’s a voice we need to have in the parliament. Because the current situation is not working,” he says from Sydney Airport, where he is waiting for a flight to Darwin where he will meet members of the NT Government dealing with a child protection crisis after the alleged rape of a two-year-old Aboriginal toddler in Tennant Creek. “On the Closing the Gap figures, we’re spending something like $130 billion [in eight years to 2016] and we’re not really confronting the real issues,” Mundine says. “About the social breakdown and family dysfunction in some of these communities. And the alcohol and drugs and so on. So I think she’s spot on. The status quo is not working. We need new blood in there, we need someone to be disruptive and to shake it up so we start actually confronting and dealing with the issues.”
Labor senator and former NT child protection minister Malarndirri McCarthy warns Price to tread carefully, and reflect on what she’s saying in the national auditorium, so as not to “exacerbate a situation”. “There are moments where I wonder whether they are helpful comments. And I think that Jacinta … I would just say to anyone who’s thinking of standing for political life that you have a greater responsibility,” McCarthy says.
In her desert hometown, some have begun striking out against Price’s firebrand commentary. A perception that she hasn’t properly consulted with women in town camps and communities has added kindling to the blaze. In late January, a statement attributed to “the Aboriginal women of Central Australia” was read in the Alice Springs council chambers by indigenous councillor Catherine Satour, appearing to take aim directly at Price. “To be an Aboriginal leader it requires you to be appointed and recognised as such by the Aboriginal community,” the statement read. “As the Honourable Linda Burney MP so rightfully put: ‘Leadership in an Aboriginal cultural context is not given or measured by how much media you get or if you earn big money. True Aboriginal leadership does not come from high-level appointments or board membership. It doesn’t come from and cannot be given by white constructs. Leadership is earned; it is given when you have proven you can deal with responsibility and you understand that responsibility’.”
While Satour and others flatly deny the speech was pointed at Price, a heated stoush at the meeting’s conclusion suggests otherwise. Inflamed on social media beforehand, Price’s relatives showed up to defend her name. Price herself was a no-show, away in Sydney for unrelated business. White activists accompanied a group of Aboriginal women supportive of the statement. The place was packed. While the meeting dragged on, a din erupted on the council lawns. A screaming match between Bess Price and other desert women had broken out, with insults hurled in English and Red Centre languages. The stoush hit fever pitch as Satour left the chambers. It is alleged that an uncle of Price’s stormed up and verbally assaulted the councillor. “Following this statement [being] read is now a matter for a police investigation as I and the Arrernte woman were abused and I was threatened with violence,” Satour says. Territory Police have confirmed a report was filed. Council decided to upgrade its safety measures in the meeting’s wake.
The mood in the town council is tense. Alice Springs councillor Jimmy Cocking says “there’s a lot of angry people out there who feel they’ve been misrepresented” by Price on a national platform. “It’s a lot of responsibility being an elected representative of the community and you’ve got to make sure that you are not creating unnecessary divisions or vilifying sections of the community as well,” Cocking says. “That’s the responsibility that we have and we’ve got to take seriously … that we’re working to find ways that we can heal wounds rather than open them.”
Another councillor, Eli Melky, says the “issues Councillor Price has championed on a national level” have had little relevance to local council debate. “She’s entitled to have her passions, and is entitled to speak on the beliefs that she has,” Melky says. “And those things that she’s championing like [anti] domestic violence against women — who would disagree with that? Nobody. In fact, we supported the motion she brought to council — I think it’s the only motion that I’m aware of that she brought to council in the two years that she’s been there — about having a policy to support a position of anti-violence against children and women.”
Since securing her seat at a by-election in 2015 alongside CLP compatriot and Alice Springs builder Jamie de Brenni, Price has attended 39 out of 49 council meetings — about 80 per cent. Now deputy mayor, de Brenni is also vice-president of the CLP, helping the party rebuild its Central Australian conservative base, of which Price will be a cornerstone. “Jacinta is always knowing what’s best for the community she works for. She’s always been there when people need her. Outside of council, that’s Jacinta Price. When she’s at the council, she’s a councillor,” de Brenni says. “I don’t think she crosses over at all. She speaks her mind, she has her followers, she has her detractors. But that’s nothing that’s brought into the chambers at all. She doesn’t do that and I respect her for that.”
While acknowledging the limitations of what she can achieve on council, Price believes she has made ground for her Red Centre township. But now her ambitions are overshooting council boundaries. She may soon get the opportunity to try to knock off veteran Labor MP Warren Snowdon from the seat of Lingiari, which covers thousands of square kilometres of tough, remote Territory terrain — and some of the most difficult indigenous social problems in the nation. “One of the main issues that I want to drive is looking at the Land Rights Act — looking at how the land councils have been operating and having a review of it all,” Price says when asked of her policy plans.
The Northern and Central Land Councils were set up to control distribution of mining royalties across different indigenous groups — a system now seen by some to be fuelling internal community greed and an increasing reliance on so-called “sit-down money”. “I’ve seen the destruction from within my own family because of the royalties system, and I believe it is also contributing to violence,” Price says. “I’ve witnessed people in my own family, my grandfather’s sister being punched at a royalties meeting. And I think it’s all-encompassing in that our Aboriginal men need to feel a sense of value. They need to become part of the economy … which would help alleviate, I believe, the issue of family violence, if men are employed.”
When asked if she believes some of her more radical statements about male violence could spook some Aboriginal voters, she says, “You can’t hide from the truth. Yes, I have said those things and I’m not backing down from that. But we’ve got to find wholistic ways of dealing with the problem. I have stood at funerals of my own family members and I have spoken about these very tough issues, and have said to my family, as we stand there burying a young person in our family, that we should be teaching our children that this is not normal. We should not be accepting this as normal. And I don’t think anybody wants their family members to be dying so young.”
In the wake of the alleged rape of the toddler at Tennant Creek she took to Facebook and in typical style went right in at the deep end. “I have said it over and over again that a child’s life is far more important than anything else whether that be the child’s culture or kin!” she began. “Those who complain about the high rates of removal of Aboriginal children fail to point out why this is happening. Those of us who push for children to be removed in order to save their lives are fighting an uphill battle. The parents are failing their children and then the system is failing the children and this has to stop! The blood of our children is on the hands of those who want to keep pushing the ‘second stolen generation’ myth … political correctness and stigma brought on by our country’s history renders us useless to act on what is the right thing to do!”
Perched on their veranda overlooking a rocky outcrop, Bess and Dave Price recount their heartbreak and the “betrayal” inflicted by voters at the 2016 Territory election. After a term of chaos, ego wars and scandal, the CLP lost all but two seats in an electoral bloodbath. Bess was shafted from her outback electorate of Stuart, which contains many of her family members. Partly to blame, says Dave, was Jacinta’s growing outspokenness, which he believes was “twisted” and used by political enemies to help oust Bess. “Jacinta stood up even though she knew this could do her mother political damage. And it did,” he says. “She turned around and looked at us with tears in her eyes and said, ‘You’ve always taught me to tell the truth, no matter what, and that’s all I want to do’.”
The younger Price was preparing to deliver the address at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, where she called out murderers in her family, female genital mutilation and the existence of forced child marriage in the Outback. “I know of many stories of rape and murder, stories that belong to women in my family and many other Aboriginal families. Stories that never reach the ears of the wider public,” she told the audience. As difficult as it was to accept at the time, Dave Price beams when reflecting on his daughter’s actions. “We were saying, ‘Please don’t say it now. Let’s wait.’ Because we knew the political consequences,” he says. “Now, looking back, I’m enormously proud that she did, because she told the truth.”
Jacinta is acutely aware of the bumpy path ahead and admits to the rare moment when she’s wondered, why the hell do I do this? “There are times where I want to run away and go, ‘Come on Colin, let’s just go and move to Scotland and live there’. But then, I know that I can’t do that. Something will happen — like [when] a bunch of little Aboriginal kids came up to me one time. I was walking after a pretty tough day and they came up with their bikes and just started chatting away. They’re talking about how this happened and that happened and they’re hungry — and you want to just do things for them. There’s such a brightness in their eyes at such a young age, and you want to make their future brighter. And you’ve got to keep going. I can’t stop while they’re still living the lives they’re living. They’re not thriving or having the sorts of opportunities that my kids have, that other kids have.”
But Price knows the difficulties of the political landscape. She knows that the path to delivering a future with no more violence, no more victims in remote Aboriginal Australia remains as tough and treacherous as the red desert around her.