Alison Bairnsfather-Scott’s childhood in Perth was a happy one. The Noongar woman’s family was strong and supportive. Her home – with her parents, brother and sister Jessica – was safe.
“I had everything I needed all the time,” she says. “It was caring, nurturing.”
So safe, though she didn’t realise it at the time, that it was a refuge for others in their community who were fleeing violence.
“We had lots of aunties come and stay with us. Cousins come and live with us at different times. Even people from other families that weren’t related to us,” she says. “I knew that things were wrong, but it’s kind of in later life that I’ve pieced that together.”
But as she grew up, Bairnsfather-Scott realised her own family tree had shadows dotted across it.
“My mum had a sister murdered just before she was born. My aunt is currently missing and has been for a few years.”
And her sister, Jessica, from the same safe, strong home, was murdered by her partner in 2019. Alison made a submission about Jessica’s death to the Senate inquiry on missing and murdered First Nations women and children, which is due to release its report on Thursday.
“I know that if I go back and look further, I will find more,” she says. “Sadly, my story is like so many other Aboriginal people’s … it’s not unique.”
Indigenous women and children are 33 times more likely to be admitted to hospital and six times more likely to die from family violence than non-Indigenous women and children.
“It is just so common in our families,” Bairnsfather-Scott says of family violence. Still, she says, “I didn’t realise how much was around me growing up.”
She has spent her working life in the community service sector, which has meant colliding with family violence. She has worked in out-of-home care for Aboriginal children and refuges for women fleeing violence, and has run an Aboriginal maternity group practice, all programs with domestic violence at their core. She has seen the consequences, understood the causes and navigated the systems.
But despite all this knowledge, she says, she found herself in two violent relationships.
She has different feelings about them.
“I don’t even to this day think that he is a horrible person,” she says of her former partner in the first of the two violent relationships.
She says one thing that often keeps Aboriginal people in abusive relationships is a knowledge of the trauma that may have shaped the perpetrator.
“We know that these men are often from very challenging backgrounds, they have experienced so much trauma, they don’t have support systems, they didn’t have a good childhood, they might have health problems and addiction problems and things like that as a result of those things. So leaving becomes so much more difficult when you know it’s not just because they’re an absolute shit. It’s because of all these things that have gone wrong in their life … I think I was drawn to those kinds of people that needed that help and support.”
After she left him, she confronted some difficult questions. “I was like, how did I get here? I came from a good home. I’ve got lots of great supports.” She pushed herself – did a lot of counselling, got a degree, worked hard to support her children.
Then she got into another relationship. It was, she says, “even worse”. The violence she describes this time was mostly psychological.
“It was a lot of very serious threats, not only threatening me but my family members … So, although the physical stuff that actually played out was minimal, I knew at the end I had to be incredibly cautious and do all the right things to keep myself and my children safe.”
Alison says she lived in grave fear.
“I remember walking down the street, going to get food for my kids while I left my boys with a colleague, thinking, he knows where I am. I remember walking down that street to go to Woolworths thinking I might not return.”
Bairnsfather-Scott says after two attempts she ended up getting a restraining order against her ex-partner and has rebuilt her life.
“I have all these privileges that lots of people don’t. I had my parents … I had a lawyer, a good lawyer, and I had a safe place to go home to. I had a job. I had enough money,” she says. “And it was still incredibly hard. And without all those things, I don’t know how any woman can muster up the courage and the strength, because it takes so much energy from you to actually go forward with that stuff.”
‘I remember knowing that she was dead’
Jessica witnessed much of what her sister went through in those relationships and helped her leave and rebuild her life.
“She was my biggest fan,” Bairnsfather-Scott says. “She reminded me of who I am.”
Despite this, and despite the fact that Jessica also worked in the domestic violence sector, she ended up in a relationship with a man who would go on to kill her, Harold Carter.
According to government data, 63% of Indigenous female victims of homicide in 2022-23 were killed by a current or former partner, compared with 52% for non-Indigenous female victims.
“I did not trust him at all,” Bairnsfather-Scott says. Carter was 18 years older than Jessica, secretive and a heavy drug user.
One weekend in September 2019, Bairnsfather-Scott and her parents were unable to reach Jessica on the phone. They began receiving odd messages from her phone number, as well as strange explanations from Carter about where she was. Concerned, Alison and her parents went to Jessica’s house with Alison’s then-husband, a police officer (not one of the former partners mentioned above). Neighbours told her parents they had heard Jessica screaming for help the night before, but had not intervened.
Alison’s husband broke in through the back door.
“We heard nothing for ages, it was probably a couple minutes. And I yelled out for him, and then he said, ‘Call the police’. And I remember knowing that she was dead. I just remember thinking: if it was an ambulance, there’d be hope. But it’s just the police.”
Jessica had been stabbed in the chest. She was 32.
Carter was arrested at Perth airport. He was convicted of Jessica’s murder and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years in prison.
“We were told to be happy with [that].” Any minimum sentence of 18 years or more, they were told, was a “good outcome”.
“He could get out when he’s 71. But I’ll never have my sister.”
“There is racism within systems. That’s what happens with colonisation. This stuff is ingrained and we have not addressed it in our country,” Bairnsfather-Scott says.
She says she once went to the police station to make a statement after a former partner smashed up their house.“I had to go back three times and demand that they take my statement, because they told me ‘it’s a waste of time, you’ll just take it back, you’ll renege on it.’”
She says when she finally was able to give a statement, the officer stopped taking notes midway through, and gave her the impression that he “should be doing something more important”. More than once, she says, she called the police to report violence and was asked, “Is the perpetrator Aboriginal?”
“I would refuse to answer that question because it should not matter. It should not [determine] how long you take to get out to my house.
“As Aboriginal people we never feel like we get full justice within the western justice system, that we are treated differently, that our lives just don’t matter as much. And unless we do something about that, this will continue. Because there is less penalty for harming us than anyone else.
“All our services are set up to work for white Australians. They’re not set up for us. They don’t take into consideration our culture. They don’t take into consideration the racism that is in Australia,” she says.
She hopes the inquiry will recommend the full-scale reform that she believes the system needs. No more “tinkering around the edges”. That means long-term funding for Indigenous-led solutions.
Many of the services available now are not appropriately tailored to meeting the needs of Aboriginal women, she says.
“So I recover and I heal on my own with my community. What that looks like is leaning on the women in my community, a lot. But they’re hurting too. Why are we always leaning on the people that have been hurt the most?
“There’s just a lack of equity. A lack of genuine care. And that’s what I hope that this inquiry spells out very clearly. And that for once they are actually going to do something.”