Examining Colonial Trauma: Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award's A$80,000 Prize Goes to The Red House, Chronicling the Police Shooting of an Indigenous Youth

According to ABC News, Australian journalist Kate Wilder's The Red House has won this year's Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction, carrying the top prize of A$80,000. At the core of the work is a fatal shooting that took place in November 2019 in the remote Northern Territory Indigenous community of Yuendumu, along with the subsequent trial of the police officer who fired the shots, Zachary Rolfe.

Nineteen-year-old Warumpi man Kumanjayi Walker, who had been wanted for three days, was arrested at his grandmother's home. During the incident, Walker stabbed Constable Rolfe in the shoulder with a pair of medical scissors, and Rolfe responded by firing three shots. According to ABC News, Walker died approximately one hour after being taken into custody.

The shooting sparked large-scale protests across Australia. The slogan "Justice for Walker" was spray-painted on road signs leading into Yuendumu, and more than a thousand people took to the streets of Alice Springs — six months before the "Black Lives Matter" movement was galvanised by the killing of George Floyd in the United States.

In March 2022, after a six-week trial in Darwin, Rolfe was found not guilty of murder. However, according to ABC News, in July 2025 the Northern Territory coroner concluded in an inquest finding that Rolfe harboured "racist" attitudes and could not rule out that his disposition "was a contributing factor that led to Kumanjayi's death." Rolfe has been dismissed from the Northern Territory police force.

In their citation, the Prime Minister's Literary Award judges described The Red House as "profoundly compassionate… rigorous and urgently necessary to a national conversation still underway." Quoted by ABC News, the judges said the book offers a "fierce and unflinching examination of the depth of ethnic difference, colonial trauma, and the terrible repetition of state violence and dehumanisation that makes the confrontation in the book possible — indeed inevitable."

Speaking with ABC Arts after her win, Wilder said she felt "both shocked and proud." She explained the path that led her to write the book: as a white, middle-aged, middle-class female journalist who had been based in Darwin from 2010 to 2016, primarily covering Indigenous affairs, she had held lengthy discussions with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous friends about whether she had the right to write the book.

She told ABC News that, after much reflection, she believed "framing it as an Indigenous story is itself part of the problem." "It was a white police officer who shot [Mr Walker], so the story is both a story of white Australia and of Indigenous Australia," she said bluntly. "I didn't want [the story of this case] reduced to a bunch of racist white rednecks and a bunch of Indigenous people as victims. That isn't the truth."

Structurally, The Red House employs the Indigenous concept of time known as "Everywhen" — a worldview in which past, present and future occur simultaneously — as its narrative framework, situating the 2019 confrontation within a broader historical cycle of violence. Wilder explained the choice to ABC News: "I learned to stop seeing time as something that moves linearly — this happened, and then it caused that." She said, "What happens in the present carries the ghosts of what happened in the past."

Former Northern Territory politician Scott McConnell pointed out to Wilder that the racial tensions of 2019 paralleled a triple set of violent incidents from the 1980s: a station owner shot by an Indigenous youth, an Indigenous man shot dead by police near Titjikala, and two Indigenous people who died after drinking wine deliberately laced with strychnine.

Wilder told ABC News that she had expected the book to get her "cancelled" — but events did not unfold as she had anticipated. "In the world we live in right now, writing about highly controversial subjects and terrain is dangerous," she said. She observed that within hours of Walker's death, the public had rapidly split into sharply opposed camps, and that she herself felt "a deep frustration with the predictable left-right posturing of those who take sides without thinking."

Invoking the Everywhen conception of time, Wilder pointed out that colonial violence is not a closed chapter of history but a present reality still cycling through. She stressed to ABC News: "Every single one of us has a responsibility to live in a way that makes repair possible."

The Red House also took out The Age's Book of the Year for non-fiction. Other winners at this year's Prime Minister's Literary Awards include Ron Hoyt's historical work on Australia's relationship with Antarctica, The Southern Frontier, and the novel A Piece of Red Cloth, a collaboration between Leonie Norling and elder Yolngu.