Hello friends & comrades,

Welcome to another episode of the Radio Reversal podcast in our new weekly format. If you missed our announcement last week, our live program Radio Reversal on 4zzz in Magan-djin, brisbane, has been picked up for national syndication via the Community Radio Network. This means that each week we'll be editing our live radio program for rebroadcast nation-wide, and we figured that we might as well take this opportunity to start sharing these episodes here on the podcast.

This week we're sharing a really special interview that I was honoured to record with my dear friend and colleague Dr. Raylene Nixon. Dr. Nixon is a Gungarri woman, an academic researcher and writer and a loving mother. Her beloved son, Stevie-Lee, was killed in police custody in Toowoomba in October 2021, after police were called on him while he was sitting in a parked car in his Aunty's driveway. Steve had been recently hospitalised with severe asthma, and (as the family later found out) pneumonia, and had been on his way back to his grandmother's house to be cared for by family. As Raylene explains in this interview, police officers arrived to find Steve sitting in a parked car and despite there being no evidence that he had committed any crime, they smashed the car window and violently assaulted Steve when he tried to get out of the passenger door. This interaction led to Steve's death at the age of 27.

His family have been fighting to find out what really happened that night, and they recently received the findings of a long drawn-out coronial inquest into Steve's death. In our interview, Raylene reflects on the violence of the coronial inquest itself, the ways that her family were further silenced through the process of attending the inquest, and how Steve's humanity and dignity were stripped from him at every point in the inquest process.

She also reflects on the ongoing fight for justice for Stevie-Lee, and the family's ongoing campaign to put pressure on the Queensland Coroner to accept their request to release the bodyworn camera footage from the police officers whose violent interaction with Steve led to his death. You can support that campaign by signing their petition here: https://www.change.org/p/release-footage-of-killing-by-police-chokehold-now-justice-for-stevie-lee

A note to listeners that this week's interview with Dr Nixon includes graphic descriptions of the police interaction that led to Stevie-Lee's death, as well as discussions of racism, the death of a child, and police brutality.

We'll be hearing more about the family's ongoing campaign for justice for Stevie Lee over the coming months, and if you'd like to hear more from Dr Nixon about her work advocating for reforms to coronial inquests and coronial law in queensland, keep your ears open for our upcoming standalone series Challenging Colonial Copaganda, which features Dr. Nixon and her colleague Dr. Helena Kajlich discussing their research on coronial inquests in settler colonial contexts and how they operate as sites through which the violence of colonisation is further obscured. If you sign up to the Radio Reversal podcast as a paid subscriber, you'll get first access to these episodes when they're released. You can sign up here:

Until next week, stay solid.

Yours in the struggle,

Anna (for the Radio Reversal collective)