Justice can sometimes be a long game. For the Wirrpanda family who live in the remote north-east Arnhem Land outstation of Dhuruputjpi, it is now 90 years and counting. This is the story of a police death, a famous miscarriage of justice and a likely murder.
The long-running saga resurfaced last month when the Northern Territory coroner released findings into the 1934 disappearance of Dhäkiyarr Wirrpanda, who was last seen in Darwin a day after the high court ruled to overturn his conviction for the 1933 murder of an NT police constable, Albert McColl, on Guwaŋarripa (Woodah Island) in Blue Mud Bay.
When the NT police force’s cold case taskforce began its investigation last year, Wirrpanda’s disappearance remained one of Australia’s oldest missing person cases. He was last seen alive on 10 November 1934.
His grandson Dhukal Wirrpandasays: “That’s a long time ago – 1934. We’ve been waiting since then and we still don’t know what happened to him.
“If somebody knows then they are keeping it secret, but we lost our leader and we lost all of his knowledge and power.”
It’s a sentiment consistently and emotionally expressed by the family, with Dhäkiyarr’s nephew, the legendary leader and artist Gawirrin Gumana AO, calling for an inquiry and information more than two decades ago.
In 1933-34 it was a case that rocked the nation. The violence began when a group of Japanese fishers were killed in Arnhem Land and a police party was sent to investigate the circumstances of their deaths the following year.
One of those police officers, McColl, chained up a group of women as part of the investigation, and when Dhäkiyarr returned from a hunting trip he discovered this scene. On his own country and believing he was subject to his own law, Dhäkiyarr speared the police officer to release his wife, Djaparri, and the other women. There are many versions of this story but this is the one that was recounted by Mulkun Wirrpanda, Djaparri’s daughter, in the film Dhäkiyarr vs the King.
The killing of a police officer by an Indigenous man ignited a national culture war. The NT administrator, Robert Weddell, said the federal government needed to counter with a “strong demonstrative force”, making “casualties amongst these Aboriginals inevitable”. In front-page news in the Melbourne Herald, he argued that a punitive expedition was required to “teach the natives a lesson”.
This was just four years after the devastating massacre of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye First Nations people at Coniston in 1928, and public sentiment was being mobilised by various groups to “stop the war on Aborigines”. Large-scale demonstrations against the intended military solution were successful and government policy was changed, with the prime minister, Joseph Lyons, instead supportive of a “peace mission” of church missionaries to visit the Yolngu communities.
In 1933 the missionaries convinced a group of Yolngu men, including Dhäkiyarr and men from the Djapu and other clans, to travel to Darwin to face justice. As a result, in a four-day trial held from 3 to 6 August in the NT supreme court before Judge Thomas Wells, Dhäkiyarr was found guilty of the murder of McColl and sentenced to death by hanging. After a national outcry and protest action against the injustice of this decision, it was appealed in the high court. The verdict, in a case known as Tuckiar v the King, was overturned in the high court on 8 November 1934, when the court found that the trial had “seriously miscarried” due to prejudice.
This year’s NT coroners report details how the high court then ordered Dhäkiyarr’s immediate release, with Justice Hayden Starke adding that he assumed “steps would be taken by the commonwealth to arrange for ‘Tokia’ to be sent to his own country”.
“But he never came home,” Dhukal Wirrpanda says. “He never came back home to us. This is the thing we have been asking. He disappeared in police custody at Kahlin compound and we have never heard what happened to him since then.”
The 2025 NT police cold case unit report noted “two prominent scenarios about what may have happened to Dhäkiyarr are that: (a) he left the Kahlin Compound on his own accord to travel home and perished sometime thereafter; or (b) he was murdered by members of the Northern Territory Police Force in retribution for the killing of McColl”.
Family members, none of who were interviewed by the coroner, do not think it likely he would have tried to travel home alone on the day of his release. “Darwin is a long way from here – he would have been expecting help to get home to us family,” Dhukal Wirrpanda says.
“Twenty years ago we went to Darwin seeking information and justice, and we had a Wukidi ceremony in the supreme court to try to find out what happened to him. We thought this coroners report might add something, but we are disappointed.”
The 2025 NT coroners report does document a theory offered by “two old Darwinites” to Ted Egan in 1994: “That a policeman called Vic Hall shot Tuckier.”
This was a reference to a mounted constable, Victor Charles Hall, who was the leader of the police expedition sent to investigate the Japanese deaths, of which McColl was a member when he died. But the report concluded that while there was a motive for a then serving member of the police force to harm Dhäkiyarr, “in the absence of any living witnesses, forensic evidence, or a body” this theory couldn’t be confirmed or ruled out.
Disappointingly, the coroner found that: “The deceased was not, immediately before death, a person held in care or custody.”
Dhukal Wirrpanda is adamant this cannot be the case. “If this is true then who was in charge of his care? Who had responsibility and was looking out for him?
“No one brought him home. It is a clear picture from my mind. The Northern Territory didn’t do their job. They killed him. The police, their people, they did that.
“Where is the justice? I ask you to consider our pain and loss. The coroner is wrong in this. It is simple. We need honesty. It is over 90 years now and we still don’t have justice for our family.”
• Tom Murray is a film-maker who has made radio and screen documentaries about Dhäkiyarr Wirrpanda. He is professor of media and creative arts at Macquarie University
