Vanished: The unsolved cases of First Nations women

By Brooke Fryer

Warning: This article may contain images of deceased First Nations women

There are over 250,000 missing people across Australia. But when the odds of being found are thought to be influenced by skin colour, some First Nations families can’t help but feel some lives may matter more than others.

Reporter Brooke Fryer, a Dharawal woman, had known that for some time First Nations women were going missing at disproportionate rates. She wanted to know why, and set out to investigate the reasons.

Evelyn Farrell had heard Aboriginal women were going missing from their communities, but nothing prepared her for what her family was about to go through.

On a Saturday morning in 2014, Evelyn’s day began with making breakfast for her young daughter and friends, who were gushing over their collected lollies from Halloween the night before.

Evelyn walked outside and saw all her family together, but noticed the piercing absence of her favourite captivating laugh, which belonged to her cousin Joanne Anderson.

Evelyn’s stomach sank and she shuddered, knowing instantly that something was wrong.

Evelyn Farrell, cousin of Joanne.

Joanne Anderson vanished without a trace from Mataranka in the Northern Territory, last seen on Halloween night in 2014 with her husband, mother and step-father.

The tiny town, about four hours south-east of Darwin with a population between two to three hundred, celebrates Halloween fairly significantly.

The school organises trick-or-treating for the children, the local police help out and local fire and rescue volunteers manage the streets onboard a firetruck.

Evelyn Farrell, cousin of Joanne.

Joanne Anderson

The tiny town is about four hours south-east of Darwin.

Evelyn had two choices that night. One was to join Joanne and family members, and the other was to take her daughter along to the school events, which included a disco for the children after they finished trick or treating.

“I wanted to go and meet them after, but we went to the hall and the kids started having their party … and there were no [parents] to be found.”

Evelyn said those parents were also out drinking alongside her family, so she stayed with the kids.

The Northern Territory has more than 100 communities and areas where alcohol is banned or heavily restricted. The Mataranka Transient Camp, known by locals as Mulggan, has an alcohol ban but is less than two kilometres away from the pub in Mataranka. The town Mataranka has no alcohol ban.

“They could buy a takeaway if there was no police around and they could sneak it down into the bush,” one local, Des Barritt said.

And so that’s what Joanne and her family did. They spent the night in the bush and when they all woke up the next morning, Joanne was nowhere to be seen.

Des Barritt led a search for Joanne Anderson with a group of volunteers.

‘She was an itinerant type person'

Des is the captain of a local team of volunteers that gets called out when the Northern Territory Fire and Rescue can’t respond right away. It’s a group the police rely heavily on, considering at the time of Joanne’s disappearance, only two officers were stationed in the town.

It was three days after Joanne disappeared when Des first heard about the case. In those days before Evelyn got in touch with the police, she wanted to make sure Joanne wasn’t with any family before going to authorities.

“I got a phone call from some sort of local Indigenous mob, they were concerned and couldn’t get in touch with police,” said Des.

“There was no police here that day, we grabbed the fire truck and drove around [and] we sort of had a good little look.”

Des and another local searched the area where Joanne was last seen on foot for a few hours. That evening Des was planning more searches with more volunteers, but a phone call halted his plans.

There were reports she had gone south to Elliot, north to Palmerston and even crossed the border to Kununurra in Western Australia.

"We relaxed a bit and well, the police called it off,” Des said.

Those reports came from witness statements the local officer collected that same afternoon.

Senior Sergeant Thomas Chalk, one of the officers stationed in Mataranka, was the one who chased up those false leads.

“My understanding is she was an itinerant type person or transient type person who moved around a fair bit,” said Mr Chalk.

“We conducted a thorough search down there when she was reported missing and found nothing at all. It is unusual.”

The Feed understands it took about three weeks for the police to chase up those reports only to find they were all inconclusive, delaying a crucial search time in what could have been the difference between life or death.

October in Mataranka is what Des describes as ‘the suicide season’ with dry temperatures soaring well above 40 degrees.

“It was a pretty harsh time of the year so straight away there were alarm bells ringing in my head,” he said.

Des said by then, which was three weeks later, they’d definitely be looking for a body.

The second search had about eight people involved and went over two days, including “a local police officer and his wife on their own motorbikes”.

Then a third search went for just a few hours in the same location on December 15.

Greens Senator Dorinda Cox in Parliament.

Before politics, Dorinda Cox worked as a police officer in Western Australia.

The view that Aboriginal women live the life of an itinerant is a common thought thrown around police stations, according to former Western Australia police officer and state Greens Senator, Dorinda Cox.

“There is a very, very large view that they just lead a very casual life and therefore have just taken off or gone walkabout,” she said.

Senator Cox observed a clear divide in relation to urgency during her time as a police officer. For First Nations missing persons, the police response was a lot more “casual”, an attitude she said came down to a much deeper issue.

“The view that First Nations women's lives don't matter in this country is the hangover from colonisation,” she said.

“I think what we've done is we put them at the bottom of the social ladder,” she added.

For a missing person’s report, the most critical timeframe is the first 72 hours, when the details are fresher.

That window is often being missed when it comes to First Nations women, Senator Cox said.

Another mother vanishes

For the family of Rebecca Hayward, that timeframe had elapsed before a search began, leaving them frustrated over the inadequate urgency.

Rebecca was a beloved mother of three children who disappeared on January 2 in 2017 from Alice Springs.

She arrived in Alice Springs from Perth on New Year’s Day and planned on going to rehab. Her main goal was to get her children back into her care and remove herself from a circle of friends with whom she used drugs.

That night Rebecca left her aunty Cherry’s house, where she was staying, with just $30, headphones and her phone following an argument with her cousin Amy over buying cannabis. Amy suspected Rebecca needed something to help take the edge off withdrawals. But Amy was also attending the rehab centre and so she said, she couldn’t help.

“She looked like she'd been up for a few days,” Amy said.

Rebecca Hayward with her kids.

Rebecca Hayward arriving in Alice Springs.

Rebecca told Amy she was going for a walk to the corner shop to buy some cigarettes.

That was the last night anyone from Rebecca’s family saw her.

For Amy, alarm bells sounded straight away - Rebecca knew no one in Alice Springs.

But that night wasn’t the last time Rebecca was seen. The next morning on January 2, Rebecca was spotted by numerous witnesses 15 kilometres north of town on the Stuart Highway.

The coroner’s report found that a group of doctors in a car did stop to offer her a lift back into town. Rebecca declined and they handed her a bottle of water, which she took.

The last known reported sighting of Rebecca was at 8.45am that morning by another motorist who didn’t stop but recognised the unusual nature of a person walking so far out of town.

The question that still lingers in everyone’s mind is, how did she get out there?

Rebecca Hayward's cousin, Amy, last saw Rebecca in January 2017.

Rebecca's older brother, Eric Hayward, lays a wreath at the location of her last sighting.

“She was an avid walker, that was one of her mental health regimes,” her older brother, Eric Hayward, said.

“It would've been strange, someone walking along in thongs not dressed for summertime in the Territory. She would've looked odd, she would've looked out of place.”

Despite this, Cherry isn’t convinced. She believes something else happened that night, something much more sinister.

“I think Rebecca's been murdered, I believe someone's picked her up and murdered her,” she said.

Five days after Rebecca’s disappearance, the search begins

No more than 24 hours had elapsed when Cherry raised the disappearance with police. Less than 48 hours after her disappearance, Rebecca’s parents had filed an official missing person’s report from their home in Perth.

Both times authorities were notified within the 72-hour timeframe.

“They just thought she had walked off, they said she might turn up the next couple of days, there wasn’t an urgency,” said Amy.

It wasn’t until six days later when the police started their search.

A Freedom of Information request obtained by The Feed, revealed the officer-in-charge of the search, Sergeant Lee Bauwens, was worried about the delay.

“The delay in commencing the search was of a concern to me, and in my experience a ground and air search was essential to be conducted at the earliest time for the best chance to locate [a] missing person,” Mr Bauwens said in papers prepared for the coroner.

No further information is noted about the delay.

The search was called off after five days following advice from a search and rescue doctor who said it was unlikely Rebecca would be alive.

“I expect her to be within a few kilometres from the last known position, because of high temperature, and hot dry wind causing rapid dehydration,” the doctor wrote in emails to Mr Bauwens obtained by The Feed.

“[She] would have stayed on the road until hyperthermia and dehydration caused irrational thought, then left the road, collapsed and died not too long afterwards.”

The cases of Joanne and Rebecca are not isolated to the Northern Territory. First Nations women are going missing across the country at disproportionate rates.

Real number of missing First Nations women unknown

Every state and territory collects data differently, with no standardised method for investigating missing person’s cases in Australia.

In Victoria, the Indigenous status of 71 per cent of the state’s missing persons is still unknown. In New South Wales, there are nine missing Indigenous women, in Queensland there are four, in South Australia there are three, in Western Australia there are three, and in the Northern Territory there are 15.

Tasmania is currently reporting no missing First Nations women - but Tasmania Police acknowledge this may not be a true representation.

Senator Cox estimates the real number of missing Aboriginal women is not truly known, and we can expect it to be much higher.

“At this stage, we don't know how many First Nations women are missing across the country,” said Senator Cox.

This may be because families aren’t even reporting missing Indigenous person’s to authorities.

“What Aboriginal people generally see is that police forces cause more harm and that's due to death in custody, police bashings, other incidences where they've had cases dismissed or overridden by other circumstances,” she said.

“So I don't think it's a surprise that Aboriginal families haven't gone directly to the police to report these cases.”

A government inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women is due to open submissions over the next six months.

A similar investigation in Canada in 2019 found Indigenous women and girls to be 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing compared to non-Indigenous women - a rate of violence the inquiry labelled a genocide.

It was the Canada inquiry that inspired Dorinda to lobby for one in Australia. She hopes it will shine a light on the disparity.

Amy says Rebecca was headed to the corner shop the last time they spoke.

Rebecca's aunt Cherry believes something more sinister has happened.

Mataranka is a town with a population between 200 to 300.

Where are they now?

Joanne’s case was eventually handed over to a specialist investigative team after the three unsuccessful searches.

But to this day, Evelyn said she has never heard from the police or received an update on the investigation.

“Nobody ever kept looking. I don't know what they've been doing,” she said.

“The police didn’t speak to us at all, it was very annoying and disrespectful. Everyone was seeing on the news that police always update the families, but they weren't doing it with us.”

Commander of Crime Command, Sachin Sharma told The Feed he wasn’t aware if any news was given to Joanne’s family, but a next of kin should have been notified about the coroner’s decision to rule her as deceased, due to unknown causes.

“But for us, we are still working on it. We will still continue to work in the hope that we will find Ms Anderson,” he said.

After the delayed five-day search for Rebecca, a second search was conducted in the same area eight weeks later. But again, nothing was found in the additional two days.

About two years after his sister disappeared, Eric moved to Alice Springs for work. He began to search for Rebecca himself.

“You cry out for your family and you think, you're here in a strange place and you didn't belong, what happened to you? Did someone pick you up? Did you wander off the road somewhere and get disoriented and lost?”

With no more searches conducted and her case seemingly gone to whispers, Eric began pushing for a coronial inquest into Rebecca’s case. Eventually, and only after persistent lobbying, he was able to get a coroner’s report.

That report was handed down in 2020.

“It took a lot of effort and energy and lobbying to get the police to complete aspects of their work and to get the Coroners Court to do their work,” he said.

Eric, who works as a lawyer, says it was because of his law background that he was able to lobby the way he did.

“I understand in many cases, families that don't have the capacity to be able to negotiate and pursue that themselves would give up and not have a resolution.”

The coroner’s report into Rebecca’s disappearance ruled she had likely died. They were unable to determine a cause of death, noting it was possibly due to environmental exposure.

It stated that no inquest would be held because it’s believed it would not provide new information.

Rumours continue to be whispered

With the cases unsolved and hauntingly mysterious, many people are still pondering over what might have happened to these women.

“[It’s] just gone to nowhere. What happened to Joanne? I would not have a clue,” Des said.

“She could have literally just gone out there in the bush and passed away after night's heavy drinking … someone could have hit her and chucked her in the back of the ute because they didn't want to get done for drink-drive and who'd know, someone could have actually gone and targeted her.”

But for Evelyn, rumours among her community and family from Mataranka and afar are still alive. Sometimes they say Joanne is still alive, sometimes they speculate about the night she disappeared.

“They were gossiping around here saying that she was drinking at the pub with a white guy,” she said.

“A man with a car or a Toyota. I mean, one time, one person wanted to take me in a Toyota and take me away from here ... Maybe [he’s] picking up Indigenous woman or something like that.”

Watch 'Vanished' on The Feed at 10pm, and catch up on the whole investigation on SBS On Demand.

Credits

Written by Brooke Fryer

Produced by Michelle Elias

Video and images by Sissy Reyes

Graphics by Patrick Forrest

Additional reporting by Claire Aird