Amy:

She just wanted to come down. Like the come down when you're on that stuff is horrible.

Brooke:

Around 8pm Rebecca left the house, possibly to try and buy cannabis … It was the last time her family saw her.

Cherry :

The next morning I got up and I was really concerned that Rebecca hadn't come home

Cherry :

I said to my daughter, we need to go and just have a quick look around town and ask people to see if they've seen Rebecca anywhere. And nobody had seen her.

Cherry :

I told the police, I said, you know, my, my niece had come over with me the day before and, and she'd gone down the street for a walk down to the shop and hadn't returned.

Brooke:

When did you first go to the police?

Cherry :

I went to the police on the second.

Cherry :

Then on the third, her parents filed a missing person's report from Perth

Brooke:

So when did the police start looking for Rebecca?

Cherry :

It was five days after I first went to the police station.

Brooke:

Several motorists told police they’d seen Rebecca walking along the Stuart highway.

…She was last spotted at 8:45 am, around 15kms out of town

Police & emergency services searched for hundreds of kilometers from here..  with a helicopter, motorbikes & on foot.

The search was called off five days later after advice she would no longer be alive.

Brooke:

So this was Rebecca’s last known sighting. Alice Springs is just down that way it’s quite barren, it’s very dry,  there’s just shrubs, but the questions is, how did she get out here.

Cherry :

Well, the theory is that Rebecca walked the, all those kilometers.

Cherry :

There's a possibility she could have been driven out there somewhere or so far and dropped off.

Brooke:

According to the coroner… at least one car did stop. A group of doctors offered her a lift back to town.. She declined and they gave her a big bottle of water.

Eric:

this is probably the vicinity of, of where we are looking for, you know, the likely remains of my sister. It's pretty, um, it's pretty distressing,

Brooke:

What goes through your mind ?

Eric:

Something like that, Where are you? You know, you, you cry out for your family and you think, you know, you're here in a strange place and you didn't belong. You know, what happened to you? Did someone pick you up? Did you wander off the road somewhere and, uh, get disoriented and lost?

Eric:

We don't know what the circumstances were, but we would like to have some closure.

Cherry :

It's a really hard thing to accept, you know, especially when you can't find out what has happened to that person. It's okay. When you, you, you find a body. But when there's no, when there's nothing to tell us what has happened to this person, I think it's really, really hard.

Brooke:

The coroner's 5 page findings tell the story of a troubled young woman who had a history of walking long distances when she was on drugs.

Brooke:

But what’s not in the finding is that police admitted there were concerns about the delay in starting the search ….It was estimated Rebecca would survive out there  only 3-4 days with water. Police started searching on day 6…  which meant they were likely looking for a body. One that they never found .

Brooke:

The officer in charge of the search also stated Rebecca could have been picked up because she

“lived the life of an itinerant…. due to her 15 year drug habit” And he admitted “she may have become a victim of foul play.”

Dorinda:

For first nations women, there is a very, very large view that they just lead a very casual life and therefore have just taken off or gone walk about.

Brooke:

 Dorinda Cox is the First Indigenous woman to represent Western Australia in the Senate - she was also a police officer for almost a decade.. specializing in domestic violence

Dorinda:

I was 17 years old when I joined wa police as a cadet. Uh, what drove me into policing was wanting to help people.

Dorinda:

I was disheartened and I was very, very, very frustrated by the end of it. And it all contributed to me leaving the wa police in particular.

Brooke:

Is there a difference in how police respond say when an Aboriginal woman goes missing and a non-Aboriginal woman going missing?

Dorinda:

what I did see is people were a lot casual in their, a lot more casual in their response and their timeframe for picking up their gear, getting people together, getting in the car and going out and talking to the relevant people.

Brooke:

Police receive 38 thousand missing persons reports every year in Australia.

Brooke:

After three months they’re classed as long term missing.

It’s hard to quantify just how over-represented First Nations men and  women are in these statistics.

Brooke:

In WA -  Indigenous people make up 4 percent of the population but 14 percent of missing persons.

Brooke:

In South Australia it’s 7 percent and in the Northern Territory just under half..

Brooke:

But other states have told us their numbers are likely to be much higher then their official figures.

Brooke:

For example in Victoria, the Indigenous status of 71% of the state’s missing persons is still unknown.

Brooke:  

And that’s the thing across the country there is no standardised method for investigating missing persons cases or collecting their data.

Dorinda:

I think that this is a national problem. If we leave it to the states and, and territories and those jurisdictions, it is only going to be reported in low level. Media is not gonna get the attention that it requires and we are never gonna end up fixing the system to provide justice to those families.

Brooke:

 A government inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women is due to open submissions over the next six months

Brooke:

 A similar investigation in Canada in 2019 found Indigenous women and girls

are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than non-Indigenous women.

Brooke:

 A rate of violence the inquiry labelled a genocide

Newsreader:

“My daughter was only 19 years old when she was taken, it took us two years and 10 months to find her remains….”

Dorinda:

The view that first nations women's lives don't matter in this country is the hangover from colonization. So women were, um, removed from country, their babies were removed from them, and I think what we've done is we put them at the bottom of the social ladder.

Evelyn:

It's very, very hurtful.

Evelyn:

Maybe people see us as a threat.

Evelyn:

That we just, we just drunks that  drink every day and every night, but they, they do not know what sort of person we are.

Brooke:

In 2019 a Northern Territory Coroner ruled Joanne Anderson was deceased. The Northern Territory Police say their investigation is ongoing.

Brooke:

What do you think happened for her?

Des:

what happened to Joanne, I would not have a clue.

Des:

She could have literally just gone out there in the Bush and passed away, um, after night's heavy drinking and someone could have hit her and chucked her in the back of the Yute, cuz they didn't want to get done for drink drive and who'd know, or, you know, someone could have actually gone and targeted her, you know, and that could have been black or white who'd know, you know like, so it's, it's just one of those big open cases

Evelyn:

When I hear, when she's somewhere, get my hopes up and then I get hurt from my own feelings and thoughts

Brooke:

Joanne and Rebecca’s families share a grief that comes with never being able to lay their loved one to rest.

Right now, two and a half thousand families across Australia are also waiting for news of their missing loved ones.

But for other st Indigenous families…, they can’t help but feel… When the chances of a person being found…a are influenced by the colour of their skin…some lives matter more than others.

Evelyn:

some people they see us different, Some kind of alien or something.

Evelyn:

This is the first time we had this In our family, cuz we've been listening to every story in other communities that this thing was happening.

Evelyn:

We, we have blood, we have bone. We talk, we got eyes. We same.

Eric:

the impact on us as a family has been devastating.

Eric:

My parents are elderly and they haven't been able to resolve this matter, you lose your youngest child and you don't know what's happened to them. You could only have to ask a mother what that would feel like.

Evelyn:

I wish I known what she's been going through and I miss her