Counting the Dead: Recent Episodes
Eloise Brook
Where are Australia's missing transgender dead? There's a mystery at the heart of missing transgender and gender diverse people in in Australia. Three homicides in the last twenty years, means our dead have slipped between the cracks and gone missing. Join Eloise Brook from the NSW Gender Centre as she pieces together story, memory and rumour to bring our lost and forgotten dead to Sydney's 20th anniversary of the trans day of remembrance.
Searching for the missing transgender dead, Eloise heads to Melbourne, travels a darker more violent version of Sydney's Bondi to Bronte walk, and learns from a protestor at the Philippine consulate just how angry two communities are growing over the awful way Mhelody Bruno's death has been handled by Wagga Wagga's Police.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the transgender day of remembrance (TDoR), when the trans and gender diverse community come together to mourn their dead. But there is a mystery at the heart of TDoR: after 20 years there are still only 3 official homicides despite the communities own experience of violence, prejudice, poverty and disadvantage. Eloise Brook, media spokesperson for the NSW Gender Centre sets out to bring as many names of the unremembered dead to this years TDoR. However, after 6 months of searching she has been unable to find even one more name to add to her list. Then on the 21st of September Filipina transgender woman Mhelody Bruno is murdered in Wagga and everything and nothing changes. In episode one, Eloise maps out the ongoing crisis at the heart of transgender deaths in Australia and attempts to make sense of them in light of the shocking reveal around Mhelody's death. As the trail appears to be going cold, Eloise is given a lead to a Melbourne transgender archive that nobody has looked at in more than 25 years.