Kimberley tragedy echoes movie themes

THE terrible cycle of domestic violence continues to destroy indigenous lives in Wyndham.

ON an autumn night last year, Roxanne Maree Williams and her de facto husband arrived home in the remote Kimberley town of Wyndham and watched a DVD in their bedroom.

They had been drinking and soon witnesses heard shouting. Williams, then 14 weeks pregnant with her second child, ran from the bedroom and grabbed a large butcher's knife. This woman, who has a slight, almost childlike physique, approached her partner and, without warning, plunged the knife into his chest.

She would later tell police that her boyfriend - who had a history of assaulting her and their eight-year-old daughter - had tried to strangle her in the bedroom.

"I just wanted to, like, injure him in the shoulder to stop him from hitting me," she said.

Instead, her 30-year-old partner, who cannot be named for cultural reasons, collapsed on a living-room chair and lost consciousness. A stunned Williams tried to resuscitate him. He was rushed to Wyndham Hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.

This week in the Supreme Court of Western Australia, Williams was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for his manslaughter. She pleaded guilty and her case came to national prominence because of a bleak irony: she and her dead partner appear in the new Australian film Mad Bastards, about the attempts of troubled Aboriginal characters living in the Kimberley to turn their lives around.

The film's director, Brendan Fletcher, supplied the court with a statement asserting that Williams behaved in an "exemplary" way during filming and was a loving mother to her elder daughter. Fletcher has told The Australian that Mad Bastards' cast and crew were shocked when they learned about the death of their fellow cast member and Williams's manslaughter charge: "All I can say is that we were devastated when we found out."

Mad Bastards uses mostly untrained Aboriginal actors and is set in Wyndham, a remote port town about 1000km from Broome,Williams's home town. Williams's partner was cast as an extra who attends a decidedly eccentric men's group - the participants, all Aboriginal men, turn up religiously but have nothing to say. In a further irony, the film was released nationally on Thursday, the same day Williams was sentenced. Instead of walking the red carpet, Williams sobbed quietly in the dock, bowing her head while listening to her sad history being aired in court.

In the film, Williams plays the calm and sensible best friend of the volatile lead female character, Nella, a single mother more interested in drinking and partying than parenting.

Nella is portrayed by Broome-based actress Ngaire Pigram, who slips out of character at the end of the film to reveal: "I grew up witnessing domestic violence. I have consequently been through some relationships with domestic violence."

As the WA Supreme Court heard this week, Williams was also the victim of sustained violence committed by the man she eventually killed.

Indeed, Williams's lawyer, Peter Collins, argued that "from bitter experience", it was clear to him that "it was almost inevitable that one of the parties in the relationship would die: either one of his bashings would have gone too far and she [Williams] would have passed away or, as occurred here, tragically, she has reacted to the violence ... and resorted to the use of a weapon."

Williams's partner punched her in the face while she was pregnant with their first child. According to a police report, he said "he hits her to shut her up all the time". The violence stopped when the couple broke up for several years. When they reunited in 2009, Williams was again concerned for her safety: she contacted police about her partner's abuse just a couple of weeks before she stabbed him.

But Williams, who, like her partner, drank heavily, could also be violent. In 2007, she was convicted of kicking her daughter in the head because the child wouldn't stop crying. (Williams is adamant that the kick did not connect with the child.) She was also convicted of an aggravated unlawful wounding in 2007, when she threw a glass at a hotel and injured a patron.

In court, a portrait emerged of a volatile young woman all too aware of her disastrous start in life. She was born to a 16-year-old alcoholic mother - she calls herself "a foetal alcohol syndrome baby". She was abandoned when she was four months old, yet her mother had another 11 children to four other men. Williams's father was largely absent from her early life and is in prison for assault.

Williams was allegedly attacked by an extended family member at the age of eight while sleeping, Collins told Justice Michael Murray in court. When she was 15, her brother hanged himself at the family home.

Her prospects improved dramatically when she was a boarder at Darwin's St John's College. Here she completed Year 12, excelled at sport and her artistic talents were nurtured, something she later revived in Mad Bastards. In the months between leaving school and meeting her abusive partner she worked as a receptionist and a ranger, and completed a business course at TAFE.

Since her imprisonment she has given birth in jail to her second child, who is now six months old and fatherless. Her elder daughter is being cared for by relatives in Wyndham.

Most victims in murder and manslaughter cases involving domestic violence are female. But Collins says there have been seven cases during the past six years where WA Aboriginal women have been convicted of manslaughter. He says all had suffered domestic violence and most received more lenient sentences than that given to Williams, who will be eligible for parole in November.

The sergeant in charge at Wyndham police station, Brad Warburton, concurs: "The circumstances of her case are similar to many others that have occurred not only in the Kimberley but in indigenous communities throughout Western Australia." Such cases, he said, usually involve domestic violence and alcohol abuse.