Proud Aboriginal Man or Christian Terrorist?
This post is about the tragic killings that occurred at Wieambilla in Queensland on December 12th 2022, where six people, including two police officers, were shot and killed.
It is of interest to our website Dark Emu Exposed as part of our commentary on how the media report on ‘race’ and ‘identity’, particularly that of Aboriginal people in Australia today.
We are also interested in the frequent phrase that such-and-such a person is a, “proud [insert tribal name here] (wo)man.”
The other side of the ‘pride’ coin is ‘shame’, but one never seems to hear that the actions of so-and-so makes him/her a “shameful [insert tribal name here] (wo)man”, no matter how dark their deed or character.
It thus seems to us here at Dark Emu Exposed, that systemic, political biases within the media are being used to shape how Australians view a particular event, or the actions of a particular Aboriginal person.
In coverage of the killings at Wieambilla, the general thrust of the media and police commentary was that the alleged killers, the brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train, and Gareth’s wife, Stacey Train, subscribed to, what investigating Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner Tracey Linford called,
‘…a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system known as pre-millennialism and [they] executed a religiously motivated terrorist attack…’.
(Source - watch here)
There was some push-back by other commentators against this description of the causes of the killings at Wieambilla. For example, commentator Ben Davies, writing in the Spectator Australia concluded that,
‘… What the Deputy Police Commissioner appears to have misunderstand [sic] is that Christianity (and Premillennialism) is not responsible for any injustice orchestrated by professing Christians, because every injustice is carried out contrary to Christianity… An injustice is only ever committed when a person ventures beyond the bounds of Christianity. In other words, the injustice is not an indication that the perpetrator was too Christian, but rather, not Christian enough…’
Overall, the media appear to have decided to portray this tragic event, perhaps rightly (or maybe not, depending on one’s political or religious view), as three ‘nutters’ who were overwhelmed by the evil caused by conspiracy theories and/or ‘Christian terrorist beliefs’.
But then, perhaps the media are not telling us the whole story?
Like many other events in our country’s history, there are often two sides to the story. As we have illustrated many times in our posts on the Dark Emu Exposed website, our country’s history is nuanced - many events can never usually just be assessed in simple black and white terms. There is always some uncertainty as to what really happened. In addition, human and political biases invariably ‘slant the narrative’ on how the event is analysed and recorded by the various observing parties.
The killings at Wieambilla appear to be no different, as we explore below.
A Missing Aboriginal Man
On 8 December 2022, four days before the killings at Wieambilla, the ABC in western NSW reported on a filed missing persons report for one, Nathaniel Train, ‘described as being of Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander appearance’ (Figure 1):
Figure 1 - Excerpt of Missing Person Report on ABC Western Plains Facebook (Source)
Nathaniel Train was a very well respected school teacher and principal who began making his mark in 2013 as a ‘turn-around expert’ at poorly performing schools which had high numbers of Indigenous students. He achieved significant results for students at the previously poorly performing, Innisfail East State School (Figure 2).
Figure 2 - Excerpt of a 2013 report on the much admired skill of Nathaniel Train in motivating indigenous students to higher levels of academic excellence. (Source: Full article here)
However, from a private blog site run in support of teachers who are ‘bullied’ by the ‘education system’, we learn that Nathaniel Train’s health deteriorated rapidly after he was transferred to the ‘notoriously violent’ Walgett Community College School campus for the 2021 school year.
Figure 3A&B - Excerpt from a private opinion, ‘bullied teacher’s’, support blog site (Source).
A follow-up of Nathaniel Train’s concerns by NSW parliamentarian, Mark Latham, produced an ineffectual response from the responsible NSW government department (see here).
Despite the Walgett High School campus being well resourced (data from 2018, showed that the annual per-student funding at Walgett ($47,158) was higher than at Sydney Grammar ($42,827) and, unlike private schools such as Grammar, Walgett is funded entirely by state and federal governments), there has been a high principal turnover, with 11 principals between 2013 and 2021 (Source).
The majority of students at both of the school’s campuses (Primary and High) are Indigenous (Source).
Nathaniel Train - A Proud Wailman Aboriginal Man
By all accounts, Nathaniel Train appeared to be a dedicated primary school principal, who was used by the NSW Education Department to ‘fix’ those low-performing schools that had high enrolments of Indigenous students.
We suspect [but haven’t found documentary evidence as yet] that the NSW Education Department allocated Nathaniel Train to those schools with high numbers of Indigenous students because he himself identified as Indigenous. As such, Nathaniel Train could well be described, in modern parlance, as a proud Aboriginal man for his success in turning around these schools.
It was reported in the Brisbane Times that he did in fact identify as Aboriginal (Figure 4).
Figure 4 - Excerpt from the Brisbane Times, claiming that Nathaniel Train identified as Aboriginal. Source: Jordan Baker reporter, Brisbane Times December 13, 2022
Our genealogical researchers at Dark Emu Exposed have determined Nathaniel Train’s partial family tree shown in Figure 5. This research lends support to Nathaniel Train’s belief that he was of Aboriginal descent.
This Train Family Tree in Figure 5 is not a complete Family Tree - all we endeavoured to show was how Nathaniel (and perhaps his brother Gareth also?) believed that he was of Aboriginal descent, so we have just traced Nathaniel’s line directly to the alleged apical Aboriginal ancestor, in this case a woman believed to be known as ‘Matilda’.
We don’t need to prove that it is true that Nathaniel descended from Matilda, but rather just that Nathaniel Train himself thought it was true - that is, he believed he was a descendant of an Aboriginal woman and thus he could identify as Indigenous.
Figure 5 - Alleged Partial Family Tree of Nathaniel Train showing his apical Aboriginal ancestor, ‘Matilda’, his 3X great -grandmother. Full File here
The full research notes in support of this Family Tree are shown here. The crucial link from the Aboriginal woman Matilda to the Cheetham/Cowley (Couley) and ultimately the Train families is based on research by other family members on Ancestry.com (see pages 16-17 of accompanying full research notes above).
We have not at this stage independently proven that this Aboriginal woman Matilda is biologically linked to the Train family, but we can confirm that the Train family believe that she is.
A further confirmation that Nathaniel Train and his family were recognised as being Aboriginal is found in a report on a young man, Aidan Train in 2018, who we understand is Nathaniel Train’s son. In this report, Aidan Train identifies as a ‘proud Wailwan man.’
Figure 6 - A Facebook post identifying a young man named Aidan Train (who is understood to be Nathaniel Train’s son) as a ‘proud Wailwan man.’ (Source)
We understand Aidan Train was identifying as a Wailwan Aboriginal as early as 2015-16 when he was a interviewed as a recipient of a Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Foundation scholarship (source).
We understand that this Aidan Train is Nathaniel’s son given that the Brisbane Times reported that,
Figure 7 - Excerpt from a Brisbane Times newspaper article confirming that Nathaniel Train’s son identifies himself as ‘a proud Wailwan man’ and he was the recipient of a high-achieving, scholastic award. This correlates with the claims of the young man known as Aidan Train in Figure 6, thus confirming Aidan is Nathaniel’s son and the family thus identifies as Aboriginal. (Source: Jordan Baker reporter, Brisbane Times December 13, 2022)
The above Brisbane Times article also reported that Nathaniel Train’s estranged sister also identified as Indigenous.
The ABC goes silent on Nathaniel Train’s Aboriginality.
Although the ABC referred to Nathaniel Train’s Aboriginality, when it posted a missing person’s report on 8 December 2022 (Figure 1), after the killings of the police officers was reported on 12 December 2022, the ABC dropped any further reference to the family’s Aboriginality.
In not one of the ABC reports on this tragedy was the Aboriginality of the Train family mentioned - ABC 12-12-2022, ABC 14-12-2022, ABC 16-12-2022, ABC 15-2-2023, ABC 17-2-2023, ABC 18-2-2023, etc.
Similarly, we could find no reports by the Queensland Police acknowledging that Nathaniel Train identified as an Aboriginal man (and possibly his brother Gareth as well, although we haven’t been able find evidence that Gareth self-identified as such).
This begs the question, why did the ABC decide not to continue their original coverage that Nathaniel Train was an Aboriginal man?
Why did they describe him as such on 8 December 2022, when he was simply a missing person, but then fail to do so four days later on 12 December, and afterwards, when he was reported as being involved at Wieambilla?
Once he was identified as one of the attackers of the two young police officers killed at Wieambilla, the ABC appears to have dropped all reference to Nathaniel Train as being Aboriginal.
We can only speculate as to why this might be - perhaps the ABC and the Queensland Police felt it was irrelevant? In their eyes, this case was just a scenario where three people from the same family were alleged to have shot, in cold blood, two police officers and a third neighbour.
The police had responded with a tactical unit that then is alleged to have killed the three alleged perpetrators. In no report that we could find, did the ABC or the Queensland police state that any of the two male perpetrators were Aboriginal. This is despite the 13 December report in the Brisbane Times, the day after the shooting, where it was disclosed that Nathaniel Train ‘identified as Aboriginal’.
We don’t know the answers to these questions but it leads us to muse on several thought-experiments.
Thought- Experiment 1. Will the killing of Nathaniel Train be listed as an ‘Indigenous Death in Custody’?
On the 24 February 2023, the ABC told us when reporting on the death of Kumanjayi Walker that,
Constable Rolfe shot and killed Indigenous man Kumanjayi Walker during an attempt to arrest the 19-year-old in the remote community of Yuendumu in November 2019.
This tragic affair from the get-go was viewed in much of the media as a case of the police killing an Indigenous man (a charge of murder was laid on Rolfe within days of the shooting, although subsequently he was acquitted). This was despite the fact that Constable Rolfe always claimed it was in self-defence of himself, and the other police officer involved, both of whom were stabbed by Walker.
The Guardian online added the case to their ‘Indigenous Death in Custody’ database (Figure 8).
Figure 8 - Extract from the Guardian’s Indigenous Deaths in Custody 2019 database (Source).
Under the Guardian website “About” button, a definition of a ‘death in custody’ includes:
"‘…a person is considered to have died in custody if they:
Are held in the physical or legal custody of a prison, a youth detention centre or of police at the time of their death; Have died as the result of traumatic injuries sustained or lack of sufficient care provided while in custody, even if that period of custody has now ended; Are fatally injured in the process of attempts by police or prison officers to detain them; Are fatally injured while trying to escape police, prison or youth detention custody”
For the purposes of this database, we [Guardian] have also included all deaths that are said to have occurred in the presence of police officers, including deaths from self-inflicted injuries. These include deaths that occurred during a welfare check by police, or attempts by police to prevent someone from committing self-harm. We do not imply any fault by police or prison guards except where fault was explicitly found by either the coroner or the courts. For this reason our numbers will differ from the numbers recorded by the AIC.
A lawful citizen’s arrest for the purpose of preventing an alleged crime is also a death in custody.”
On this basis, the killing of Aboriginal man Nathaniel Train would appear to be, a similar ‘Indigenous death in custody’, statistic.
We have yet to see any media report even suggesting that Nathaniel Train’s death should be, or even could be, considered as an ‘Indigenous death in custody’.
Indeed, when Kumanjayi Walker stabbed his arresting police officers and was subsequently shot dead, the writers over at The Conversation described the case as having, ‘echoes [of] a long history of police violence against First Nations people.’
Dark Emu Exposed contacted The Guardian for their views on why Nathaniel Train’s death was not considered an ‘Indigenous death in custody’ but we are none the wiser after receiving their response (See The Guardian’s response to us in Note 1 below).
Thus, no such ‘Indigenous death’ narrative seems to be forthcoming for Nathaniel Train.
Obviously, Train is alleged to have committed a most heinous crime - the real details of which we may never know given that the Queensland police acted as victims, judge, jury and executioners all in one in this case [Note 2 below] - but that technically should not absolve the Queensland Police documenting his death (and perhaps his brother Garet’s as well?) as Indigenous deaths at the hands of the police (in custody).
Some of our Dark Emu Exposed staff just wonder whether the clumsy attempt by the Queensland Police to put the blame for the killings at the door of ‘Christian Terrorists’ [has there ever really been such a group since the Middle Ages?] is just a way of deflecting blame away from the Qld police for clocking-up another ‘Indigenous death in custody.’? Maybe or maybe not - we don’t really know.
But we do know that this very messy, tragic case was caused by a couple of violent ‘nutters’ - but were they Aboriginal ‘nutters’ or Christian ones? The Queensland police and the media have obviously placed them in the latter category.
In the case of Kumanjayi Walker, the fact that he was from an extended family of Christians does not seem to have been refered to by any in the media as a possible cause for his erratic and violent behaviour:
Yesterday a group of Walker’s family members gathered at Christ Church Anglican Cathedral, where the Dean, Rob Llewellyn prayed for them. Some are students at Nungalinya College, a college to train Indigenous Christians for leadership in their churches. (Source).
Was the erratic and violent behaviour of Kumanjayi Walker due to his being from a family heavily involved with ‘Nungalinya College, a college [used] to train Indigenous Christians for leadership’? Most likely not, but did the ABC and the NT police even consider this and investigate, like they did in the case for the two Train brothers?
At least perhaps, Walker’s family group of Christians could have accepted some of the ‘blame’ for not supporting Walker in his hour of need? But then that doesn’t suit the ‘victim’ narrative that seems so prevalent in Aboriginal affairs in Australia.
Much easier in Kumanjayi’s case to promote his proud Aboriginality and blame the police solely for his death, and in Nathaniel’s case, let’s ignore that he was an Aboriginal man who is alleged to have committed a shameful act. Instead, we will sheet the blame onto some hypothetical Christian terrorists for his actions. When it comes to Aboriginal people it always seems that it is someone else’s fault when things go wrong with their lives.
Thought-Experiment 2.
Given the supposed long history of ‘colonial oppression’ of Aboriginal peoples by the Queensland Native Police Corps, during the so-called ‘Frontier Wars’, one would have thought that the writers at the Conversation may have recognised ‘echoes [of] a long history of police violence against First Nations people’ in the killings at Wieambilla, as they did so in the killing of Kumanjayi Walker.
As Alison Holland, Associate Professor, Macquarie University explained in her Conversation article,
The cycle of police violence, murder charge and acquittal [in the Kumanjayi Walker/Constable Rolfe case] reminds us of the last time in Australian history when seven men were executed for the massacre of Aboriginal people in northwestern New South Wales in 1838. They were white settlers, not police, but their execution was described as an act of “judicial murder”. After this, settlers maintained that no white man should in the future be prosecuted for the killing of a black person.
- Alison Holland, The Conversation, 25 March 2022
So why don’t authors at The Conversation view the killings at Wieambilla with the same cultural lens - two Aboriginal men, Nathaniel and Gareth Train, kill two Queensland police officers in the remote Queensland bush?
In retaliation for the killing of ‘two police officers and a neighboring white settler’, the Queensland police force mount a reprisal raid of the property and kill [execute] the two Aboriginal men. No charges are laid, for murder, manslaughter or misconduct, against any of the police reprisal party [unlike in the Kumanjayi Walker. case]. A full inquest is yet (as of Feb 2023) to be undertaken.
Instead, all the academic commentary at The Conversation frames the incident in terms of ‘conspiracy theory nutters’ [see Nicholas Evans, University of Tasmania], ‘the unfortunate dangers of general policing’ [Terry Goldsworthy, Bond University], ‘Right-wing extremism’ [Greg Barton, Deakin University] and/or ‘Global Anti-police sentiment’ [Kelly Hine & Katie Davenport-Klunder, University of the Sunshine Coast]
To our mind however, what happened at Wieambilla does seem to fit the Revisionist History version of Australia’s past, which is now the orthodox academic view. For example, from a 2018 interview with Professor Lynall Ryan from the University of Newcastle we learn that,
‘…The attacks [of the settlers and police against Aboriginal people] are often described as reprisals, but the formerly sceptical Dr Ryan has no doubt the overarching aim was genocidal. “It’s a common thread that, whatever period of time, the Aborigines are not wanted. The settlers and the police are trying to eradicate them completely from the landscape…”
As Senator Lidia Thorpe told us in 2011, when Aboriginal people are killed by the police,
“This is colonial violence. This is the continuation of the genocidal project that started in 1788. Over 470 people have died since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and we’re still waiting for true accountability. Is the system broken, or working according to its design? “The police are supposed to protect people, not kill them. Why does being around the police have fatal consequences for First Nations people?
However, the ‘narrative’ that has been developed by the media is that Nathaniel Train’s Aboriginality is to be ignored in his case. Instead, we need to view his actions as those of an ‘extremist Christian terrorist.’
Now maybe this is the case, but we hope that at least our Dark Emu Exposed readers will see that there are ‘two-sides’ to every story, and what Australia’s media tells us might not always be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Note 1 - Correspondence With The Guardian
Dark Emu Exposed emailed the reporter at The Guardian, Joe Hinchliffe, regarding why in his article he did not refer to The Guardian classifying Nathaniel Train’s death as an ‘Indigenous death in custody.’
Our initial email correspondence with Mr Hinchliffe was as follows:
Hello Mr Hinchliffe, [emailed at 11:22 am 27-2-2023]
regarding your article on the tragic shooting of the police and the perpetrators at Wieambilla, (Guardian 16 Feb 2023) , I was just wondering if there was to be any follow up article on this story from the point of view of the death of Nathaniel Train, at the hands of the police response force?
Would his death be considered an 'Indigenous death in custody' statistic, given that Nathaniel Train identified, and was recognised as being, Aboriginal? (see Brisbane Times )
Yours, Roger
Joe Hinchcliffe at the Guardian responded very promptly by email [within minutes at 11:36 am 27-2-2023] with,
We replied to Joe with the logical, evidence-based response that, under the Guardian’s own definitions used to determine what constituted an ‘Indigenous death in custody’, and used to collate the names of victims on their own website database, it would seem to us that Nathaniel Train was very much under police ‘custody’ in the events at Wieambilla.
Our emailed response was as follows:
We also contacted The Guardian’s main email address used for the collation of the Guardian ‘Indigenous Deaths in Custody’ webpage and this was the reply we promptly received:
Emailed reply received on 1 March 2023
Note 2 - Although as a society we believe we have outlawed capital punishment - the last hanging in Australia having been that of Ronald Ryan in Victoria on 3 February 1967 - in some ways it appears that a form of ‘capital punishment’ is still with us.
In the killings at Wieambilla, Aboriginal man Nathaniel Train, his brother Gareth, and Gareth’s wife Stacey, put themselves in a position whereby the Queensland police decided [were forced?] to act as the judge, jury and executioner of these three alleged murderers.
It is tough decision for the police to have had to make, but some might ask, did the police try their best at negotiation, or consider setting up the incident as a siege, to try to resolve the matter without the killing [execution?] of these three?
We don’t know the answers, but before our society and media berate say, Malaysia after an execution of Australians for drug trafficking, where they were at least given some form of a defence trial in front of independent judges under the Malaysian legal system, we need to be mindful that ‘capital punishment’ of perceived offenders still occurs in Australia under a legal system we all believe is acceptable.
This type of modern, Australian ‘capital punishment’ is by a police officer having to act within minutes or even seconds, and being a jury, judge and executioner in a case of where someone is shot dead. A graphic example of where a police officer is put in this position occurred in Melbourne in 2018 with the shooting of the murderer and terrorist Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, who later died of his wounds in hospital (See film clip below).
