Protesters gathered on Gadigal Country at Waterloo’s TJ Hickey Park on February 14 to mark 21 years since NSW Police Constable Michael Hollingsworth chased the 17-year-old Gomeroi boy TJ Hickey, who was riding his bike down the street, to his death in 2004.
The ever-resilient Aunty Gail Hickey, TJ’s mother, the Hickey family and supporters continue to march and campaign for greater transparency around the boy’s death.
Hollingsworth and Constable Maree Reynolds mounted a curb during the pursuit to chase TJ down a pedestrian laneway, prior to his taking a corner at speed and becoming impaled on a fence.
The police were searching for an individual who had robbed someone at Redfern Train Station. They began chasing TJ, who had not committed any crime.
His death so outraged the Aboriginal community in Redfern that they took to the streets in fury, leading to 40 police being injured and 25 arrests.
The injustice surrounding TJ Hickey’s death only increased in the wake of the incident. Then NSW Coroner John Abernethy found at the August 2024 inquest that, despite Hollingsworth following TJ down a pedestrian walkway, and another police vehicle giving chase by road, the police vans were not in pursuit, so they had not breached protocols.
When a pursuit is not a pursuit
“Aunty Gail has been fighting this fight for 21 years with no justice,” said Wiradjuri man Uncle Dave Bell, as he stood beside Aunty Gail Hickey in TJ Hickey Park among the residential housing towers in Waterloo Green.
“The problem was with the coroner’s report and with police investigating police.”
There were a number of discrepancies regarding the findings of the inquest.
This included how the coroner had come to the decision that the two NSW police vans were not in pursuit of TJ, but rather were only following him. From there, Abernathy was able to label TJ’s death a “freak accident”.
Police van “Redfern 16” was following TJ on his bike down Redfern’s Renwick Street, which ends in a cul-de-sac. After the boy mounted the curb to enter a pedestrian laneway linked to Phillip Street, he came out the other side where another police van “Redfern 17” was coming down that street.
TJ then turned into a residential block driveway, which is where the fatal incident occurred.
Two decades later none of the concerns raised by TJ’s family have been answered. They include police pulling TJ off the fence before the ambulance arrives, which is not officers’ emergency training.
Also, Hollingsworth and Reynolds neglected to mention in their incident reports that their van mounted the curb to follow the boy down the lane.
“The family is looking for closure 21 years on. Aunty Gail has gone through horrific trauma. We know what went on that day,” Uncle Dave said. “TJ’s spirit lives on, and we love him dearly.”
Professor Thalia Anthony discussed the long silence “as though the police are not responsible”.
“In 2020, Scott Marsh painted a mural in Redfern of a burning police car. It had TJ Hickey’s name on it. The police and council painted over it within two days. They whitewashed it,” Anthony said.
“And that is the history of how the life and death of TJ Hickey has been treated: as though the police are not responsible, as though we are the problem in calling for justice.
“They wouldn’t even let UTS students put up a plaque to commemorate TJ and to recognise that he was chased to death,” she said.
“This legal system is completely broken. It is a legal system that needs radical change, and here today, this is the change.
“We keep turning up 21 years later and letting them know that we are not going away until there is justice.”
The Hickey family and the Indigenous Social Justice Association in 2020 presented the then NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman with a petition, signed by more than 20,000 constituents which called for a parliamentary inquiry into TJ’s death.
They wanted to reopen the coronial inquiry, as the document claimed the police investigation was inadequate and the inquest incomplete. Speakman, the current Liberal leader, refused their request.
Indeed, then coroner Abernathy even chided the Redfern community for spreading “rampant gossip and innuendo” about NSW police being responsible for the death of the teenager.
“Justice doesn’t look like the legal system,” Anthony told the gathering.
“It looks like … recreating a system in which there is true self-determination and empowerment, in which Aboriginal kids can be riding their bike and not feel like the police are throwing at them a death threat, because that is how TJ felt.”
The war continues
TJ Hickey’s death is just one among 586 First Nations deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
That commission laid out 339 recommendations, most of which have been ignored.
No police or corrections officer has ever been convicted in relation to any death in custody.
In three recent murder trials, involving a prison guard who shot a Wiradjuri man in the back in NSW, a police officer who shot and killed a Warlpiri teenage boy in the Northern Territory and another who shot a Yamatji woman in Western Australia, all officers were acquitted.
“There wouldn’t be a Blackfella’s family in this country that hasn’t suffered directly under the injustices of what goes on. We are still at war,” said Uncle Wayne “Coco” Wharton.
“Don’t believe the bullshit they tell you about ‘Sorry’ and the other, because they are not. What you see played out here, was no different to what’s playing out in Gaza.”
Wharton said Aboriginal people have to live with the invasion, over policing and an unjust state every day of their lives.
The Kooma man explained that it is state policy to attack First Nations kids to break the will of their families and wider communities.
He pointed to Queensland’s Liberal National government which has changed the law so, under certain circumstances, a 10-year-old can be sentenced to life imprisonment.
Over the last 12 months, every state and territory across Australia has started a “youth crime crackdown”. Sixty three percent of children in child prisons nationwide are Indigenous children, yet they only account for 5.7% of those aged 10 to 17.
“They try and attack our children. They think they break us by attacking our kids. When our kids defend themselves and they look for safety, they attack them more.
“I just came back from Western Australia,” Uncle Coco said, “and the traffic police over there, the ones that control the trains and the bus stations, walk around like they are on steroids and pick on our kids going home.”
“Their system is to break our kids,” he said. “They designed this to keep our people in prison and in poverty. Poverty is a tool of genocide, and our young kids are the victims of this genocidal practice.”
[Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers, where this article was first published.]