Debbie West, a proud Wakka Wakka and Wulli Wulli woman, grew up in Cherbourg. She lost her aunt, Queenie Hart, to a killer no court ever convicted. She survived domestic violence, homelessness, and the removal of her children, then fought Child Safety for six years and won them back. For decades since, she has stood beside First Nations women in the courts, the prisons, and the child protection system.
Debbie WestSpeaks at Mitchelton Library on Sunday 1 November 2026Read Debbie West’s Story
A thematic set of ingredients to read, watch, hear, and explore, chosen to follow up a Truth-Telling session. Start with ten minutes below, then follow the four threads over the weeks ahead.
In April 1975 a killer took the life of Debbie’s aunt, Queenie Hart, a twenty-eight-year-old Wakka Wakka woman, beside the Fitzroy River at Rockhampton. The judge dropped the murder charge soon after the trial began. Queenie lay in an unmarked grave in North Rockhampton for forty-seven years, until her family brought her home to Cherbourg in August 2022.
Read the ABC’s report of her return, in which Debbie speaks for the family. Then read Amy McQuire’s 2021 report in The Guardian, on how the Rockhampton press and the court treated Queenie in 1975.
Notice who speaks in each. The 1975 coverage spoke about Queenie; her family and a Darumbal journalist from Rockhampton now speak for her.
Who told Queenie’s story in 1975, and who tells it now?
Debbie spoke to the ABC when her family brought Queenie home, and the first three quotations below come from that report. The fourth comes from her story as told to Linda Harnett.
“Even though we can’t get justice for her, it gave closure for the whole family.”
No court has ever convicted anyone of Queenie’s death. Her family raised the money, won the exhumation, and buried her beside her mother, Janey Hart, on Wakka Wakka Country.
Debbie West · ABC News, 18 August 2022“Because of how the system worked at the time in treating my family.”
Debbie gave that reason for the family’s long silence about Queenie. Under Queensland’s Act, officials at Cherbourg controlled the family’s movements, work, and wages.
Debbie West · ABC News, 18 August 2022“A competent and strong-headed young woman, but always shy.”
Debbie remembers her aunt as a person. Amy McQuire has shown how the Rockhampton press of 1975 stripped Queenie of that humanity.
Debbie West · ABC News, 18 August 2022Debbie faced Child Safety with no voice and no support. She wanted every woman in that position to have both, and she taught the women she met in prison the department’s language and processes, so they could fight to bring their children home.
Debbie West’s story, as told to Linda HarnettEach selection opens a different side of Debbie’s story: the record of a woman’s death, a family’s fight for its children, a niece’s own account, and the system she works in. Begin with whichever draws you in, and return to the others when a question sends you looking.
A Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist from Rockhampton gathers the reporting and essays of a career spent covering deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders, and the Northern Territory Intervention. She argues that the media must believe Black witnesses.
The connection. McQuire’s reporting helped bring Queenie Hart home, and her doctoral research studied how the press portrays violence against Aboriginal women. Read her beside the ABC report and you see who decides whether a woman’s death becomes news.
Whose account of a woman’s death does the record keep, and whose does it drop?
Borrow or buy the book. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, on our reading list, sets Indigenous women’s own standpoint beside white feminism.
First Nations women die by homicide at up to twelve times the national rate. At least 315 have gone missing, been murdered, or died in suspicious circumstances since 2000, and no agency keeps a full count. Four Corners tells the stories of three women through their families: Ms Rubuntja in Alice Springs, Roberta Curry in Katherine, and Constance Watcho in Brisbane, whose remains turned up near the Kangaroo Point Cliffs. When the program aired, no one had been charged over her death.
The connection. Debbie’s aunt, Queenie Hart, lay forty-seven years in an unmarked grave, and no court ever convicted her killer. The families in this investigation fight the same silence, and Constance Watcho’s family fights it here in Brisbane.
Why do police treat some women’s calls for help as less urgent than others, and what would change that?
The program names and shows women who have died. For First Nations women in prison, Incarceration Nation (Dean Gibson, Guugu Yimithirr, 2021), also on our viewing list, includes Vickie Roach among its voices, on SBS On Demand.
McQuire and Hodgson sit down with Debbie, who worked with them to bring her aunt home to Cherbourg. The family tells Queenie’s story in its own words, restores her humanity, and names the man it holds responsible.
The connection. Here Debbie speaks for herself, at length, before she speaks at Mitchelton.
What did the family know that the court never heard?
The episode discusses a killing. Later episodes of Curtain turn to other First Nations women and children who have disappeared or died, among them “For Constance the Coroner Failed”.
The First Nations-led Change the Record coalition and the Human Rights Law Centre set out the crisis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s growing imprisonment. Family violence contributes, directly and indirectly, to women’s offending; the vast majority of the women in custody are mothers; and even a short stay in prison can cost a woman her children, her housing, and her job. The report makes eighteen recommendations.
The connection. Read it as Debbie’s working life in policy terms: the court support, the legal service, the women’s prison, and the mothers fighting to keep their children.
Which of the eighteen recommendations would have changed Debbie’s own story?
Two more reports take the subject further: the Senate’s inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children, which made ten recommendations in August 2024, and SNAICC’s Family Matters Report 2025, on the removal of First Nations children.
On Saturday 10 October 2026, Jayda Allen Bonner, a twenty-one-year-old Yagera (Yuggera) woman with family in Queensland, was found dead in an apartment in Carlton, Melbourne. Her aunt remembers a “gentle soul” with a “heart of gold”. Police have charged a man with her murder and allege protracted family violence; the case returns to court in January 2027. Her family gave the ABC permission to name her.
The Yuggera people are Traditional Custodians of the Country on which Mitchelton Library stands. Queenie Hart died in April 1975; Jayda Allen Bonner died in October 2026.
Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre stands at Wacol, in the city’s south-west. Sisters Inside, where Debbie once worked, has supported criminalised women and girls from Queensland since 1992. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, where she supported First Nations people through the courts, began in 1972.
Queensland’s Sentencing Advisory Council found in 2022 that First Nations women and girls make up close to one-third of the cases in which women and girls were sentenced in Queensland, almost eight times their share of the population. Debbie now works inside that system, as a Cultural Liaison Officer for Queensland Corrective Services.
Debbie faced Child Safety with no voice and no support. What would it take for the next woman in her place to have both?
Keep a few notes, or talk it through with a friend. The aim is to hear First Nations women as the authorities on their own lives.
Each learning companion asks the same question in a different place: who holds the authority to tell a First Nations story? Follow it from the Country beneath Brisbane, to the lives the State controlled, to the microphone, to the courts and prisons that decide First Nations women’s lives.
About this learning companion. Truth-Telling at Mitchelton prepared this learning companion in October 2026 to accompany Debbie West’s session at Mitchelton Library on Sunday 1 November 2026. We chose the selections and wrote the questions. Debbie’s quotations come from ABC News; her story, as told to Linda Harnett, appears on the Speaking Next page.
Country and cultural knowledge. Cherbourg stands on Wakka Wakka Country, Rockhampton on Darumbal Country, and Mitchelton on the Country of the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples. Public access to a recording, a record, or a website transfers no ownership of the knowledge within it.
Cultural advice. Linked works include the names, images, and voices of people who have died, and accounts of violence, imprisonment, and child removal. Follow the advice each publisher or platform provides. 13YARN, the national First Nations crisis support line, answers on 13 92 76, day and night.
Prepared 16 October 2026. Every link was opened and checked on 16 October 2026; access to each player depends on its platform.