Shoplifting shouldn’t kill you. In 2024 Coles supermarkets recorded an annual profit of $1.1billion. This was during our cost-of-living crisis. Coles and Woolworths chains control about two-thirds of the market. It’s why they have been accused of price gouging and colluding to drive up profits. Corporate theft. But hey, it’s okay. They’re corporations.
Last week a 24-year-old Aboriginal man in Alice Springs died after shoplifting in Coles. I have been struggling all week to work out how that could have happened. My son is 24. As a mum I imagined myself in the position of the young Warlpiri man’s mother. I imagined my own son shoplifting from a Melbourne supermarket and being caught by a security guard. I imagined a phone call. A trip to the police station. Maybe a hearing. A fine. That’s how it would have gone for me. Then I imagined finding out he had died. Found out that two off-duty cops had restrained my son on the floor of a supermarket.
As a non-Indigenous mother of a 24-year-old son, that will never be my experience. Because my boy won’t die from stealing a few groceries. He’s white. How does a simple shoplifting incident escalate to death in custody? It happened to the son of an Aboriginal mother, because this is a colonised country, and our systems of power and privilege continue to enact violence on First Nations communities. Decades on, there’s still no justice for Indigenous deaths in custody. That’s why young men die brutal, violent deaths in the place we buy our groceries.
I feel so deeply for the Warlpiri mob of the Yuendumu community, and for the family of this young man. This unbearable, unbelievable grief. This shameful misuse of power over a vulnerable person. This young man with a disability, who was on the NDIS, who was restrained and died on a supermarket floor. It was reported that he was pinned to the floor with a knee behind his head. For shoplifting! The witness told the ABC they heard him crying, he was saying, ‘Mama. Mama.’ When I read that I felt such shame. Such outrage.
I saw footage of the vigil and witnessed the distress of the Elders. Of grandmothers and grandfathers. Of aunts and uncles. Of family and community. The vigil moved through the Coles supermarket for a mourning ceremony. Watching this ceremonial walk with mob wearing paints and carrying branches, using leaves to clean the tracks of the young man who died was a stark reminder of what our colonial system has done to Aboriginal people. There is no nature in this unnatural place.
To die on a supermarket floor, on the land that his people used to hunt, where there was once plenty, is a crime. Just 250 years ago that young man would have had his spear, he would have been hunting, not shoplifting, on Country where the concept of ownership and commerce did not exist. The land was his supermarket.
Welcome to Australia. The place that First Nations people call stolen land. The greatest theft of all is to steal an entire country. Isn’t it? A 24-year-old Aboriginal boy died on a supermarket floor. We should not be okay with this. We have a Labor majority government. Push for treaty. Push for truth.
- Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last two federal elections. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
