An Indigenous voice that seeks to unite Australians
Matters of the Heart: A Memoir, by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (Sydney: HarperCollins Australia, 2025). Foreword by Hon. John Howard AC. Paperback: 384 pages. ISBN: 9781460766767. RRP: AUD$37.00
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s memoir begins with an account of her birth and her heritage, and concludes with the prayer of St Francis, “Make me a channel of thy peace …”. It has a foreword from former Prime Minister John Howard and reproduces in an appendix the author’s maiden speech to Parliament. The simple but subtle title may be interpreted at several levels.
Jacinta’s mother’s family are Warlpiri people, from Yuendumu in the Northern Territory, and Nampijinpa is her skin or kinship name. She bears the Portuguese saint’s name, Jacinta, in honour of a Catholic friend of her mother, Bess, on Melville Island. Her father, David Price, who is referred to as “Dad” throughout the book, comes from a large Australian Catholic (non-Aboriginal) working-class family in Newcastle, New South Wales.
She is rapturous in describing the beauties of her mother’s outback Warlpiri homeland, stories of the Dreaming, totemic names — hers is Yirrikipayi (the female crocodile) — and the workings of the relationships within the kinship group. We learn about Dinny and Clara, her maternal grandparents, and of how their marriage — although she had been promised to another — had been allowed. Just as they had been acculturated by working at the local school, so was their daughter Bess avid to gain an education.
However, Bess’s pregnancy at age 13 while a boarder at Darwin’s Kormilda College found her back at Yuendumu, with a son, enduring a violent marriage to the father, while also working at the school. Her escape and eventual marriage to white teacher David Price began a series of adventures for Jacinta and her brother Linawu, relocating to live in a succession of places — the Tiwi Islands, Noonkanbah in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, Darwin and finally Alice Springs. Connections were maintained with family in visits to Yuendumu, from which Jacinta has fond memories, despite the dysfunction and tragedy she witnessed there.
Matters of the Heart is Jacinta’s autobiography, drawing on the lives of members of her Warlpiri kinship group to illustrate the factors which make for Aboriginal disadvantage, especially for women. Her most passionate quest has been to discover the fate of her aunt, Marion Nelson, who disappeared 40 years ago. She had been promised in marriage to a brutal older man. She had escaped but was recaptured and was last seen in a car with a group of men heading into the desert. There she reportedly ran away and was never seen again. Bess and Jacinta believe that she was murdered and that the evasive witness of those men and the negligence of the police conceal a dark secret. A Sky News documentary on the case can be found online (“Yimi Junga”, September 2023).
Jacinta believes that we Australians are one people and that, although there is much beauty in Indigenous culture and law, there is a cruel and violent side of it which must be reformed. Under cultural laws, women and children in remote settlements have few rights. Her mother’s first husband regularly assaulted her, which their neighbours accepted as a matter of course.
She writes: “During one vicious assault, she was hit with a metal barbecue plate and whipped with a hose during another. She still has a scar on her chest from one attack, and lasting damage to one foot from where he had used a house brick to crush her toes …. He could do whatever he wanted because, under blackfella law she belonged to him.”
Her family were angry, but cultural law dictated that there was nothing they could do. Not all Indigenous men behaved this way, however. Jacinta’s grandfather Dinny never beat his wife Clara and even advised his infant granddaughter to marry a “whitefella”.
Growing up in Alice Springs, Jacinta was an excellent student who lived her teenage years to the full, with music, sport, parties and many friends. Life was soured only by the loss of her brother Linawu to leukaemia and news of the violent deaths of several of her kinsmen at Yuendumu. A relationship with Simon, a fellow student of Mauritian extraction, resulted in her graduating from secondary school with high marks but also pregnant. She never considered abortion an option; marriage and three sons followed. Unfortunately, their relationship deteriorated, and Jacinta and Simon separated amicably. However, he continued to play a part in their sons’ lives.
A subsequent liaison with a man named Jai led her to Darwin and her own traumatic experience of domestic violence, followed by a return to Alice Springs. There began a career in entertainment, first on the music scene, which led to problems with alcohol and drugs. Her rehabilitation was followed by employment as co-host of a TV show, Yamba’s Playtime, an educational program for Indigenous children, and touring with Yamba’s Roadshow.
It was in the music scene that Jacinta met her now husband, the Scottish singer Colin Lille, who has one son and calls himself a “Scossie”. Together they have created a close-knit blended family, which has become a rock for her in her now very public life. Like her parents they are hospitable, but reject “humbugging”, the leech-like practice of making demands on other members of the community as if by customary right. She is scathing of those “academics and experts from the city who romanticise Aboriginal culture but have never spent a night in an Aboriginal camp”. Jacinta and her mother Bess have insisted on this reality and have won no friends among the educated elite who claim to speak for their people.
On the ABC TV show Q&A in 2011, Bess spoke of the progress for women and children made under the Howard Coalition government’s emergency intervention in Northern Territory Indigenous communities. Activists berated her for not speaking from the “typical blackfella’s script”, unleashing a “tsunami of ill-informed hate”, while Indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt tweeted that “a show where a guy had sex with a horse … was less offensive than Bess Price”.
Bess Price had already served in local and Territory government as a Country Liberal Party (CLP) minister when her
daughter was elected to the Alice Springs town council. Bess had already become what is called a “polarising figure”, owing to her involvement in the Howard government’s intervention in the NT, achieving alcohol bans in some camps and other restrictions in the interests of women and children. Describing themselves as former Labor voters, she and husband David had despaired of the ALP’s inaction and joined the CLP for its more realistic approach to Indigenous affairs.
Then in 2016 Jacinta posted a long reflection on social media, beginning with “I love Australia Day …”, rejecting the leftwing activists’ position that it was a day of mourning and hate.
This went viral. She drew on the lives of her grandparents to show how much better off they were from the coming of white settlement: clothes and shoes, running water, medicines and so on. It was a Monty Python “What have the Romans ever done for us?” moment! She condemned the victimhood ideology which “paints whites as oppressors and racists and blacks as victims to be mollycoddled” and queried those who call themselves Indigenous but have European ancestry too. Her bottom line was that in the modern world we can’t turn back the clock.
Interwoven in several chapters that follow are her husband Colin’s burgeoning musical career and her own emergence as a political figure, along with descriptions of their family life. As her profile grew, speaking engagement opportunities arose; but on the issue of domestic violence and Indigenous women’s safety she was relentless. At an Alice Springs conference on domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, at which Professor Marcia Langton was a fellow-speaker, Jacinta was surprised to find women protesting at her message that Indigenous culture treats them as second-class citizens and that traditional laws normalise, enable and justify violence against them.
She reiterated this message in a 2016 speech, “Homeland truths: the unspoken epidemic of violence in indigenous communities”, at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). At the National Press Club in late 2016, she repeated the charge that “Aboriginal male perpetrators have got away with their crimes based on the argument that they were acting within their culture’s confines”. When she also added that Indigenous leaders needed to be held to account like anyone else, she must have touched a raw nerve, as violent threats and insults against her and her family erupted from east-coast activists and some closer to home, which only encouraged her to “roar louder”.
Election to the Alice Springs town council had given her confidence as a speaker and involved her in local matters; but the larger issues of health, education, family violence and youth crime were part of the bigger picture, as were the actions of the land councils. She believed that these weren’t effectively representing traditional owners and lacked transparency, which is a major focus of her work today and of her possible future as Minister for Indigenous Affairs. This led her to seek and win CLP preselection for the NT seat of Lingiari in the House of Representatives.
Out of the blue there appeared in the Australian weekly newspaper, The Saturday Paper, a patronising and hurtful attack on Jacinta from Professor Marcia Langton. She was dismissive of Jacinta’s career as a children’s entertainer, and questioned her fitness for political preselection. It was alleged that she had been selected by “conservative outfits” as “coloured help” to rescue them from their racist image.
For Jacinta it highlighted one of the issues which had driven her into politics, as it had similarly inspired the late Neville Bonner, who served as a Liberal senator for Queensland, that all Indigenous Australians are supposed to think alike and can be expected to act accordingly.
Defeat at the 2019 election only gave Jacinta the momentum to keep going, to dispel the dominant message that Australians were ignorant racists and that Indigenous people were chronically oppressed. She put together a speaking tour to spread the plain truth about the issues preventing economic independence and individual freedom: family violence, welfare dependency, cultural practices like promised marriages, high rates of incarceration and the lack of accountability of land councils. She spoke to packed audiences across South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, with her message that Aboriginal people have wide-ranging views about the issues that matter to them.
Jacinta explained the high rate of Aboriginal youths in detention as the result not of structural racism, as Marcia Langton maintains, but of poor parenting and school attendance, abuse and neglect, and lack of employment opportunities.
For her, the solution lies in jobs and education that lead to functioning households, together with the right to use the land to create wealth, without the restrictions imposed by layers of bureaucracy and environmental concerns.
Most of all she focused on the level of violence and abuse suffered by Aboriginal children, including those removed from their families and placed in foster care with Aboriginal kin or carers often equally unsuitable, a practice mandated after the Rudd Labor government’s 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generation. She illustrates the effects of such traumatic childhoods with the story of her violent cousin, Kumanjayi Walker, shot in self-defence by NT police constable Zachary Rolfe in 2019, which made national news when treated by activists as a racist killing.
Jacinta’s recollections of her election to the Senate in 2022 are marked by the circumstances of her maiden speech and Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement of a referendum for an Indigenous “Voice to Parliament” to be inserted into the Constitution. July that year saw the Labor government allowing the alcohol bans existing in some communities to lapse, with no plan to manage the consequences.
In the following six months, police data showed increases of over 50 per cent in Alice Springs in property damage, breakins and assaults. Jacinta describes the town as looking like “a zombie apocalypse film”, as kids carrying weapons rampaged through the streets. She describes with disgust the PM’s few hours visit to the town in January 2023 before returning to Melbourne to hobnob at the Australian Open.
Of Jacinta’s tireless efforts, along with those of Warren Mundine and others, in their uphill battle for the Voice to Parliament referendum’s “No” campaign, and of her elevation to shadow minister, there is surprisingly little, whether from modesty or belief that it is all familiar territory to her readers.
During the referendum campaign, she reiterated at the National Press Club her belief that colonisation continued to have a net positive impact on Indigenous Australians. She told her audience that the main problems confronting Indigenous communities derived from tradition, not colonisation, and cited the example of young girls married off to older men. This might not have been what reporters wanted to hear, but her words were quite well received by her audience.
Nevertheless, for much of this time Jacinta required a security detail. Verbal assaults and threats from angry Indigenous women — and indignant non-Indigenous women — became commonplace, and sledging from Indigenous identities such as Marcia Langton and activist lawyer Noel Pearson continued in the public arena. Even on a visit to the NT town of Yuendumu she was refused entry by two white women, who questioned her right to be there — only to be set aright by the elders. Jacinta is humble about the outcome of the referendum, expressing relief rather than triumph and attributing the defeat to the accurate “bullshit detectors” of the Australian people.
In the introduction to an ABC TV Australian Story episode (February 11, 2025), Jacinta Nampijimpa Price was described as a “polarising” figure. The irony is that her most constant message is that we are one people and must not be divided by race. Along with other conviction conservatives, such as John Howard and Tony Abbott, she is accused of being “divisive”, which should be worn as a badge of distinction, as it means that the so-called progressives fear her.
As it transpired, Australian Story gave voice to her critics, such as Labor’s former Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney, Noel Pearson and Gurindji leader Rob Roy, who accused her of defaming all Aboriginal men; yet on balance the program provided a very fair account of Jacinta’s life and work. It stands alongside the excellent feature article published in the Australian Weekend Magazine (February 8–9, 2025) at the time of her book launch as a valuable introduction to this remarkable Australian. As Jacinta herself explains, if it’s all out there they can’t dig it up and use it against her.
Matters of the Heart itself offers a rewarding read, with some fascinating insights into the lives and problems of our Indigenous fellow Australians. Against formidable odds, Jacinta Nampijimpa Price is determined to cut through the cant and obfuscations which plague public policy on these vital matters and she deserves our understanding and heartfelt support. It deserves a place on our bookshelves and at your local library. If it’s not there — ask for it!
John Morrissey is a retired secondary school teacher who has taught in government, independent and Catholic schools. He lives in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn with his blue heeler, Tammy.