Three hundred protesters gathered at Perth’s Cultural Centre on 5 September to demand justice for the family of Aboriginal youth Elijah Doughty. Killed a week earlier on a bush track near Boulder’s Gribble Creek, Elijah was allegedly run over by a 55-year-old white man chasing him in a Nissan Navara. The man, whose name police have not released, has been charged with manslaughter despite evidence suggesting his intention was to kill Elijah in a vigilante attack.

Les Schulz, a spokesperson for the Doughty family who had travelled from Kalgoorlie, told the rally, “This is not about a riot: it’s about the murder of a 14-year-old school boy”.

Schulz urged those at the rally to keep fighting for justice. “We have an opportunity as a united front to challenge the moral bankruptcy of white Australia.”  Schulz told the assembled protesters, “We are going to come up with a solution: a grassroots movement built from the ground up”. He said, “The government have failed us miserably”.

Responding to the hostile media coverage of a “riot” in Kalgoorlie – an angry protest during which a courthouse window was smashed and damage caused to a police car – prisoner rights activist Mervyn Eades told the protest, “Windows can be replaced, lives can’t”. Kalgoorlie protesters were responding to decades of institutional racism that have left them the most disadvantaged of the mining town’s community, argued Eades.

“What we are talking about here in Australia is systematic poverty”, Eades said. “Look at Kalgoorlie. Our people are still living in tin shacks. Our people have got nothing. They live on unemployment benefits and welfare payments. Our people battle for survival day to day.”

Robert Eggington, protest organiser and director of the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation, acknowledged the support that the Aboriginal community had received from the CFMEU, the Black Lives Matter movement and student organisations. He described Elijah’s slaying as part of a long history of injustice that includes deaths in police and institutional custody, from 16-year-old John Pat’s killing in a Roebourne police cell, in 1983, to Ms Dhu’s death at South Hedland police station, in August 2014, after being locked up for unpaid fines. Eggington also spoke out against the daily harassment Noongar youth experience from Westrail security guards on Perth trains.

“I’m sick of those who claim to be our spokespeople walking lost and futile around this country’s greatest institution of control”, Eggington said, referring to the record number of Aboriginal politicians sitting in federal parliament. “This leadership needs to be destroyed and pulled down forever.” 

Wiradjuri elder and prominent activist Jenny Munro expressed similar sentiment, calling on protesters to maintain their rage against injustice. “Racism is their weapon against us”, she said.

The next hearing for the man charged with Elijah’s “manslaughter” will take place on 28 September.