Australia's dark heart

When an Aboriginal man was killed by five white youths in Alice Springs last year, it was the latest race-hate crime in an area plagued by violence. But the lenient sentences handed down to the "Ute 5" have sparked alarm that there will be a racial backlash in the Australian outback


Will Storr
The Observer, Sunday 3 October 2010

One after the other, the photographs of the dead man fall. There is Kwementyaye walking Waffles the dog on the beach; there he is on the platform of Alice Springs station; there he is blowing his birthday candles out, "surrounded by girls," says his fiancée, Jade. "And smiling. He was always smiling." And then I see it – the saddest picture of all. It's Jade with Kwementyaye just a few weeks before his death. It's shocking to see how different she looked before he died; before she knew the full story of the beating, the racist taunts and the firing of the gun; before all the rage and injustice that was to follow the phone call on that cold Saturday morning last July.

The problem with sadness is that it is invisible. I couldn't see it, two hours ago, when I walked into the house that Jade Keil and Kwementyaye Ryder thought they'd spend the rest of their lives in. I couldn't see it as she pottered about making coffee, fussed over her uneaten carrot cake and talked me through the events of his death and the subsequent trial. Of course, misery is detectable only in its works, and I manage to grasp something of the sorrow and bedlam that Jade has been through when I glimpse the old photograph of her. She's slim, 30kg lighter, and her face shows none of the strange damage that bereavement has inflicted – the lines beneath her eyes like bruises, the blemishes and whorls like cuts.

The phone call came on 26 July last year. It was Kwementyaye's elder brother Darryl. He was sobbing. "Where are you? You don't know, do you? Get round here now. It's my bros. They've found him at the bottom of Anzac Hill. He's dead."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/03/alice-spring-murder-racism