Daniel Yocke Character Analysis

Daniel Yocke was a real-life Aboriginal dancer who died in police custody in 1993 after being racially profiled and arrested by Brisbane police while out drinking with a group of friends. The Woman invokes the story of Daniel Yocke’s death—and the outpouring of public grief and rage that followed—in order to show how, even when tragedy strikes the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, their collective pain is not taken seriously. While the grief felt in the wake of Yocke’s death unites the Woman with hundreds of members of her community as she takes part in a march through Brisbane, the fact that Yocke died alone and most likely afraid cannot be erased. Yocke’s death—and the white Australian public’s indifference to it—is a microcosm of the indifference and apathy that is shown to the First Nations people of Australia on a daily basis. By invoking the tragedy of Yocke’s death, the Woman gives voice not just to her grief but also to her anger about the continual slights and injustices that she and her people must suffer as a result of colonialist oppression and structural racism.