The Red House Wins Australia's Prime Minister's Literary Award: Examining Police Shooting of Indigenous Man and the Cycle of Colonial Violence

Australian journalist Kate Wilder's non-fiction work The Red House (《红屋》) has won this year's Prime Minister's Literary Award in the non-fiction category, with a prize of 80,000 Australian dollars. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC News), the jury positioned the work—which uses the 2019 Northern Territory police shooting of 19-year-old Warlpiri man Kumunjayi Walker as its thread—as a key text examining state difference, the depth of colonial trauma, and the cycle of state violence.

Wilder has long focused on Indigenous issues. In her book, she meticulously reconstructs the events of November 2019 in Yuendumu, Northern Territory: when police went to Walker's grandmother's house to carry out an arrest, Walker stabbed then-constable Zachary Rolfe in the shoulder with medical scissors, and Rolfe immediately fired three shots; Walker died after being detained for one hour. In the three days prior, Walker had been wanted by police on suspicion of threatening two local officers with an axe.

The shooting triggered an intense backlash in the Indigenous community. According to ABC News, more than one thousand people took part in the "Justice for Walker" march in Alice Springs, and the slogan "Justice for Walker" was spray-painted on road signs leading to Yuendumu. This collective outrage came roughly six months earlier than the global "Black Lives Matter" wave triggered by the killing of African American George Floyd in the United States.

In March 2022, Rolfe was found not guilty of murder after a six-week trial in Darwin. Three years later, in July 2025, the Northern Territory coroner released findings on the cause of death, determining that Rolfe harboured racist attitudes and stating that it could not be ruled out that his attitudes were "one of the causes of Kumunjayi's death." Rolfe was subsequently dismissed from the Northern Territory police force.

Speaking to ABC Arts, Wilder said she had long hesitated over whether she should put pen to paper. She repeatedly discussed with Indigenous and non-Indigenous friends—as a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman—whether she should undertake writing on this subject. She ultimately decided to write, on the grounds that "framing the incident as an 'Indigenous story' is itself part of the problem." Her formulation was: "The officer who shot (Mr Walker) was a white police officer, so this story is both a story of white Australia and of Black Australia."

Structurally, Wilder drew on the Indigenous concept of "Everywhen"—a temporality in which past, present, and future occur simultaneously. She used this to break with linear narrative, allowing fragments of historical violence to mirror contemporary events, exposing what appears to be a cycle of violence between police and Indigenous people repeating itself. She said: "What is happening carries the ghosts of the past."

The jury's citation stated that Wilder's investigation was "scorching and unflinching," and that it "examines state difference, the depth of colonial trauma, and the terrible cycle of state violence and dehumanisation that made the confrontation in the book possible, and almost inevitable." The jurors also described the book as "deeply compassionate… rigorous and vital to an ongoing national conversation."

Wilder said she was "shocked and proud" to receive the award. "It really makes you feel validated," she said, "that people care about this, and that is a comfort."

The gap between the criminal court's not-guilty verdict and the coroner's finding on racist attitudes constitutes the central tension The Red House seeks to present. Wilder writes: "Every individual has a responsibility to live in a way that makes repair possible." Other winners of this year's Prime Minister's Literary Awards include Ron Howat's The Southern Frontier (Australian History Award), and Leonie Norrington's collaboration with several Yolŋu elders, A Piece of Red Cloth (fiction), among others.