2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback review – this docuseries about an Australian tragedy is shockingly intense

Source: The Guardian Australia · 2026-11-10T09:30:34.000Z · World

This four-part series about the killing of Kumanjayi Walker by police officer Zachary Rolfe is unquestionably a work of journalistic rigour – but the sheer detail included is both a virtue and a vice Warning: This article contains reference to Indigenous Australians who have died The first half of the title of Darren Dale’s four-part documentary series, 2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback, refers to the gap between the first and second of three shots that the police officer Zachary Rolfe fired at 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker, fatally wounding him, in the remote Northern Territory community of Yuendumu in 2019. Three years later, after a five-week trial, Rolfe was found not guilty of murder and cleared of two other charges. Three years after that, Rolfe was found to be racist by a coroner, who couldn’t rule out that his attitude played a role in Walker’s death. This case became, in the words of the journalist and author Kate Wild in Dale’s documentary, “emblematic of the rest of the country and of Australian history”. Those 2.6 seconds arguably crystallised two centuries of pain for Indigenous Australians and spoke to the ongoing, unrelenting tragedy of Indigenous deaths in custody , as well as the broader, global history of police killing black civilians. Continue reading...

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