New documentary explores Kumanjayi Walker shooting and the 2.6 seconds that shook a nation

The series marks the directing debut of Darren Dale, a longtime producer at Blackfella Films who previously worked on The Tall Man, a documentary about the 2004 death in custody of Palm Island man Cameron Doomadgee. Dale said that after Rolfe was acquitted of murder in 2022, he felt compelled to keep telling these stories.

The documentary captures the 2.6 seconds during which Rolfe shot Walker three times at close range on the night of November 9, 2019. Walker, a teenager, was on the run from a minimum-security prison to attend his grandfather's funeral when Rolfe and two colleagues from the Immediate Response Team were sent from Alice Springs to assist in his capture after Walker was spotted in Yuendumu.

The series examines what led to the shooting, the incident itself, the immediate aftermath, the murder trial and a 2025 coronial inquest. It includes footage from police body-worn cameras that captures the shooting and the steps police took and failed to take afterward. The documentary shows that requests for news of Kumanjayi or for a family member to be allowed in to see him were blanked, and the crowd was led to believe he was inside an ambulance heading to potentially life-saving surgery when he was already dead. In fact, it was Rolfe inside the ambulance, with a small puncture wound to the shoulder from a stab with nail scissors, being hurried away from what police feared would become a hostile community.

Dale said he wanted the audience to understand what it was like for police officers too, describing the panic of officers and the sense that a cyclone had started. He noted that no one comes away from the story unscathed. The series, he said, aims to present a story that allows people to hold two contradictory thoughts rather than falling into a binary view where “everyone thought either the cop was a villain or that Kumanjayi deserved it”.

To make the series, Dale had to win over the judicial system, the NT Police and the traumatised Indigenous community. He said newly installed NT Police commissioner Martin Dole appeared committed to transparency, and that Dole said turning around racism in a police force would not be easy. Dale's relationship with Yuendumu dates back to 2001, but he said many in the grieving town did not want to talk about it: “Someone being shot by a policeman with a gun in a remote community, people say it over and over in the film: 'We thought that happened in America, that doesn't happen here'.”

The case is unusual in Australia because fatal police shootings are rare, but since the Royal Commission into black deaths in custody handed down its final report in 1991, 644 Indigenous people have died in police, prison or juvenile custody. Dale said people should see each other as humans and care more about young men like Walker and Rolfe.