Six words

Coronial inquests and the settler-colonial war machine

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Trigger warning: references to death in custody. This piece also uses the name of a Samoan person who has passed away. It was written with their family’s permission.


AFTER SPENDING THE past two weeks at the death in custody inquest of Selesa Tafaifa, I have realised that there is only one key takeaway from coronial inquests, and it’s not justice. It is six words: ‘I can’t remember’, most uttered by prison officers on the witness stand, and ‘I can’t breathe’, most gasped by prisoners who are the subjects of coronial inquests.

The two sentences are not the same: one extinguishes life and one alibis other people’s choices.

Selesa Tafaifa was a forty-four-year-old Samoan mother, sister, aunty, grandmother and daughter. She died in custody in Townsville women’s prison in November 2021. Selesa was begging officers to allow her to make a phone call to her family. She waited and waited until money was in her account and when they finally allowed her to leave her cell to make the call, it went unanswered. She begged them for just ‘one more minute’. But that’s not how it works in prison, and the officers decided she had to go back to her cell. A distraught Selesa cried, ‘You always say tomorrow.’ She was desperate for them to see her grief, to show her an ounce of humanity, but as she fell to the floor, all those officers seem to have seen was a prisoner resisting, disobeying their commands. Not a human being with human needs.

As a formerly incarcerated woman who has waited in line to phone my kids, who has met the violence of brutal officers, my heart ached for Selesa as I watched the footage. Selesa wasn’t resisting when she collapsed; she was in utter despair.

However, what transpired after that unanswered phone call was the beginning of the end for Selesa. As she dropped to the floor, wailing, the officers placed their hands and knees on her, shouting orders. She was cuffed, spit hooded and taken back to her cell. As this was done, Selesa wheezed, ‘My puffer, my puffer.’ Not once did the officers provide her with her Ventolin inhaler. When the spit hood was put on Selesa’s head, one officer said, ‘It’s suffocating her,’ yet it remained, even when Selesa panted, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.’ The officers closed the cell door and left her there, on the floor in the ‘modified prone’ position, to die by the toilet.

During the inquest, one of the officers, after viewing the footage, commented that as they left, Selesa was ‘[be]coming compliant, she stopped resisting…stopped trying to spit, she was recovering her breath’. The reality is that Selesa was dying. Or she was already dead. The officers say she was breathing, that they could feel a faint pulse, but can we really believe them when so much of what they said on the stand contradicts the footage?


CORONIAL INQUESTS ARE bullshit. They aren’t about finding the truth. They are, at best, as Debbie Kilroy says, alibi courts.

On the first day I arrived at the inquest, my friend Charandev Singh said to me that coronial inquests exist to alibi state actors for the deaths they’ve caused, the lives the state has previously taken, and to protect the state for all the future lives it will steal. Every single one of these agents of the state is complicit in these alibis, too. It’s not just the screws that spit-hooded Selesa; it is everyone standing behind and alongside them now, financing their legal defences, securing their liberty and providing shields to protect them.

And let me tell you, this goon squad has so many shields.

When I was in prison, I used to watch the goon squad train. I thought that training in front of us was such a basic strategy. That it was no more evolved than wedging a bloody head on a stake in medieval times, the dripping skull warning us into submission. They thought their presence intimidated us, but mostly we went about our business. I liked watching them though. I’m a people watcher (not in a creepy way, mind). I’m curious about what makes people tick, and these jumped-up motherfuckers were a writer’s dream. They did their drills, knees up, running in unison with their riot shields. They’d act out their manoeuvres and pat each other on the back for a gammon job well done. I’d watch these daft cunts for hours.

I started looking at them like Barbie and Ken dolls, as if Mattel was rolling out a new prison-officer edition, because there sure as hell is a type. I noticed it in this inquiry, too – they’re all the fucking same. 

Let me play some dolls out for you.

There’s your ex-army one. I call him ‘one jump’ because he’s done one jump too many in his army training and is way too amped up on his own ego. He walks around dishing out orders like he’s back in Iraq. Usually he’s in the goon squad because he loves any excuse to throw down on a prisoner.

There’s the young guy who thinks he’s hot. He wears his prison uniform one size too small so that his muscles bulge, and he struts about like a bulldog on ’roids. This one thinks every woman in the prison wants him – both officers and prisoners, mind. The women prisoners flirt with him to his face, which ramps up his ego, but what he doesn’t know is when he’s out of earshot they bust out laughing, call him a filthy dawg and say they wouldn’t fuck him if he was the last man on Earth because his dick is probably as small as his brain.

You also have the scruffy misogynist who hates every woman she’s locking up. She defers to her male colleagues even though she’s a rank higher than them. She can’t pass the physicals, and secretly she’d like to fuck the top dog, but she hasn’t got a hope in hell. She treats the prisoners like shit because it makes her part of the gang.

Then there’s the softy screw. The one who tries to connect with prisoners on their level. They might call you by your name, look at you with their head cocked to the side and ask how your kids are doing. But when you’re being pinned to the floor, all of a sudden they lose their tongue.

And let’s not forget the Blak or brown-faced screw, the equal-opportunity hire. The one the state tells us will be more ‘culturally appropriate’ and ‘safer’ for mob to have around. Only, they back their white-faced buddies and watch on (or throw down) when shit’s going off. 

They’re all the fucking same, each prison over. And all the screws who gave evidence in Selesa’s inquest fit this mould too. Basic as batshit.


PRISON CHANGES YOU on a molecular level. I have not been the same since coming home. I don’t sleep; I remember. I remember in agonising detail every time an officer placed their hands or eyes upon me and my body.

I relive moments like a slow-motion movie. Sometimes I relive it as I rest my head on the pillow at night. Sometimes it comes at me hard and fast while I’m shopping at Aldi.

But always, I remember.

As prisoners, we remember every fucking detail of our traumatic experiences.

So, when I sat in that inquest and heard officer after officer say ‘I don’t remember’, I wanted to rise to my feet, point my finger towards the witness box and yell, top note: ‘LIAR, LIAR, LIAR!’

Because these people lie. They lie. They lie. They lie.

And these coronial courts enable it. Worse, they allow people to kill with impunity.

Every single person at that inquest not there in the interests of the family was part of the arsenal of the settler-colonial war machine.

I shouldn’t be surprised; this country is built on a bedrock of lies.


IN THE END…

I came home from prison. Eventually. I have a shit ton of scars. Some so deep they are like fault lines running across my body. But I came home.

So many, like Selesa, did not.

And worse, so many in the future will not make it home, either.

So, for them, I leave this message to the system that caged and killed Selesa: For as long as I draw breath, I will not rest until the walls are torn down, the cages opened, the buildings burned and the shackles broken. I hope that until that day comes, you never have a single peaceful night’s sleep again.

This piece was commissioned by Allanah Hunt at State Library of Queensland’s black&write! project, supported by Queensland Arts Showcase Program funding through Arts Queensland.

Image credit: Hedi Benyounes courtesy of Unsplash

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About the author

Tabitha Lean

Tabitha Lean is a First Nations poet, storyteller and abolition activist who argues that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and often deadly...

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