How This Award-Winning Indigenous Journalist Uncovered The Real Story Of One Death In Custody

Allan Clarke has been a journalist for years and is the proud winner of a Walkley, but the two-year effort to bring together the story of one Indigenous death in custody and its impact on the victim’s community was one of his most challenging projects yet.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should know the following article contains images and names of deceased persons.

“When I first began it, it was an investigative story for me,” he says, on the phone from France. “I was looking at it from a true crime perspective.

“It all became extremely difficult. It was one of the hardest stories I had to do as a journalist.” His look into Daniel Yock’s 1993 death, the subject of his recent podcast Thin Black Line, began with a tipoff from a contact up in Brisbane while he was working on an unrelated story.

Daniel died after being arrested by Queensland Police, who took him in after following him and his mates who were drinking in a West End, Brisbane park. As the police followed them on their way to a hostel, the boys shouted at the officers for shadowing them. They then brought them in for being drunk and disorderly.

Daniel died after the arrest. A Criminal Justice Commission ruled a heart attack killed him. Witnesses say he was unconscious when he was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a paddy wagon.

The resulting inquiry into the death didn’t address why Daniel and his friends were targeted, leaving his friends, family and the sole witness with a deep sense of loss that was made worse by the lack of validation from the police and justice commission.

Their story, rather just Daniel’s death, became the focus of Allan’s six-part podcast series.

“I can see why Daniel’s family feels like it’s unfinished business, it was very hard to get documents from the police and no one wanted to talk to us,” Allan says. “The big question is: ‘would he be alive if the police didn’t target him and his friends?’ They were doing nothing illegal until they were followed and that’s when they got angry and the police said: ‘we can get them on drunk and disorderly’.

In episode two, “You love that type of stuff”, Allan includes the transcript of the two officers calling for backup while following the boys. The title was taken from those records, and was said when other police officers declined to come for the arrest.

“The radio transcripts we got of the police watching Daniel and his friends in Musgrave park were really confronting to me,” he tells me. “They weren’t being outright racist. They weren’t saying things where you could easily say they were doing the wrong thing.

“The reality is we are targets for authorities when we are in public spaces. There was a real ominous tone in it for me.”

Allan himself is a Muruwari man, from a nation on the border of NSW and Queensland.

“I believe they were targeted because they were a group of young Aboriginal men in a park having a drink,” he says. “They had done nothing illegal so there was nothing to warrant their attention in the first place.”

The CJC investigation into the death didn’t investigate the institutional racism in the police or why the boys were targeted. The entire saga played out before the backdrop of the Royal Commission into Indigenous deaths in custody, which handed down its findings recommendations two years before Daniel died.

The trauma of the whole experience and the refusal of police to validate it pushed the subject of one of the key interviews in the series, Joseph Blair, to live the rest of his days in an isolated depression. When he opened up to Allan, it was the first time he had spoken about the day he watched his mate die in nearly 30 years. He died not long after giving the interview.

“I feel like I’m opening old wounds and breaking open scars. It’s not a very pleasant process but it is one that is necessary to try to commit to truth telling. It’s very hard to move forward if we don’t talk about it,” Allan says.”[Joseph’s] family told me he’d been quiet for decades and he opened up to me because he felt the time was right to tell the world about his death. He passed away and it was incredibly sad.”

Joseph, and others in the Murri community, had struggled to move on because they felt they had never been given justice. No police were charged and the death was ruled as a tragic accident.

The police commissioner at the time, Jim O’Sullivan, went as far to demand an apology for rumours that Daniel was bashed to death by the arresting officers. Allan says that this lack of contrition had hurt the Queensland Murri immensely.

“Having the police commissioner asking for an apology from the community was outrageous and even at the time the media was taken aback by it,” he says. “I can understand why a police commissioner would say his officers have done nothing wrong when there are allegations that his officers have done something wrong and there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that.

“It goes to the heart of how bad the relationship between the police and the Murri community was at the time.

“It’s something we’ve seen time and time again but in particular in Queensland, the way the police came together to protect each other even before the official ruling.”

The whole experience, from the trauma of the community to the chilling behaviour of the police, weighed heavily on Allan. But he only let himself feel the pain once he’d finished the years-long project.

“Doing Thin Black Line was incredibly distressing. There were moments where it felt so raw,” he tells me. “And the intensity of the people who were close to Daniel. Their emotions. It felt like I was sitting in front of someone who lost Daniel the day before.

“It was like it happened yesterday. Having to interview people when they’re in that raw emotional state is very heavy.

“I didn’t go through it, and I didn’t know Daniel personally and I have a responsibility to let emotions interfere with the people opening up to me.”

The weight of knowing there are more cases like this one out there and that they can’t all be the subject of such an investigation hurt Allan a lot.

“I listened to the podcast the other week and it really hit me,” he confesses. “Listening to it back was when I had a moment to reflect and it was very very upsetting. I get so frustrated and upset with the sheer scale of injustice in the country.

“Daniel’s case is just one of thousands. I get contacted every week by a family who lost their child in a death in custody or a murder and they feel like they’re not being listened too.

I get angry and I get upset about how disempowered I am as a person. Australia rallies around the deaths of white people constantly and incidents that involve whitefullas and yet our loved ones, our mob, are just very rarely spoken about. People don’t rally around us.

“In our community people die so young. So it’s almost a race against the clock to speak to people about their stories before they pass on.”

You can find Thin Black Line here, on ABC listen, or on Apple and Google podcast apps.