Allira Green's killer has walked free. It's her family who has received a life sentence.

Content warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following story contains images of deceased persons. This story also deals with domestic violence, which may be triggering for some readers.

The first thing you noticed about Allira Green was her smile. It was bright and wide, toothy, somewhat cheeky. And always given easily. 

"She was always full of life, that girl," Allira's mother, Nardia, tells Mamamia. "Always happy, always making sure everybody else was all right before herself. She'd bring home friends all the time and say, 'Aww, mum, her parents kicked her out', and I'd be ringing the parents and telling them that their daughter is here. That's the kind of person she was."

When Allira was little, the family lived in Queensland. Her father died when Allira was only six months old. Then Nardia's mum, who lived in Sydney, got sick and Nardia decided to bring the family back to Sydney so that she could look after her.

Allira Green as a child. Image: Supplied.

Sometimes, in the dark, despairing moments that every parent who has lost a child would recognise, Nardia will think about the other paths not taken. The what ifs. The should'ves, would'ves, could'ves.

"Allira was such a beautiful baby. And, you know, she was just a loving, really loving kid. And that's why I think, where did it all go wrong with her?" Nardia says quietly. "[Moving back] was maybe the worst thing I ever did. Because, you know, she wouldn't have been with this man."

Allira Green was just 23 years old, and almost six months pregnant, when she was killed by her ex-partner and father of her unborn baby, Christopher Anderson, in 2013. The night she died, Allira was at a friend's house when Anderson pushed his way inside. According to reports, Anderson attacked her friend, prompting Allira to grab a knife. In the ensuing struggle, Anderson took the knife from her and stabbed Allira once, piercing 15cm into her chest wall and upper heart. He then left.

Allira died before the ambulance arrived.

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It has been nine years since Nardia last saw her daughter alive, but she still remembers it like it was yesterday.

"I went to work on the Thursday, and I gave her some money on the Thursday afternoon when I came home from work. And the next day, we were all supposed to go out for dinner. And we never went because Allira cancelled and said, 'Oh mum, can we do it another time? Or tomorrow night or whatever? Because I'm just gonna see one of my friends who needs me.' And I said, all right then. That Thursday was the last day I saw her," Nardia recalls.

Then came the Friday night.

"I was living with a friend of mine then, and it was an everyday occurrence for police or sirens or helicopters to be all around," she says. "And this is like one o'clock in the morning, so you think nothing of it. It's just, it was just an everyday occurrence. So you never took notice. I sort of went and dozed back off, didn't take any notice of it, you know? That's when the police came knocking on the door that morning, at two o'clock in the morning. I’ll never forget that day."

Prior to her death, Allira and Anderson had been exchanging heated text messages about the health of the baby and Allira's drug habit.

"It's out there in the public that Allira was on drugs," Nardia admits. "But when she found out she was pregnant, she dropped it, she just said, 'Nah, no more.' I remember the day we were in court and they were talking about how she died from the methamphetamine and all this other stuff as well. And I'm like, hang on a minute, how can that be? She'd been clean since she found out she had the baby, she was going to the midwives.

"And one of those midwives said to me, years later, you do realise Allira was on drugs? I said, yeah... You know, I don't know if Allira would have been keeping that baby or not. Or if I'd be raising the third grandchild. These are the things that go through my head. But, it’s like, what do you do? I couldn't tell you if it was gonna be... But I mean, she was so happy. We went shopping for baby's clothes and maternity clothes. And it just lit both of us up."

No-one will ever know what the outcome of Allira's pregnancy would have been. That choice was taken away from her when Anderson took her life. The baby clothes she and her mother bought together are now folded and put away, never to be worn.

Allira with her nan. Image: Supplied.

As for Anderson, who was out on bail for a vicious assault on an ex-girlfriend's father when he killed Allira, he was sentenced to 12 years and nine months' imprisonment.

A few weeks ago, after serving nine years in jail, he was released.

For Nardia, there has been no justice.

"It makes me so angry that our laws and justice system is probably one of the weakest in the world, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the killing of women and children, especially," she says.

"[Anderson] deserved to be in there for two lives not one. He gets more of a right than the victim because he has to have a fair trial. And so we're not allowed to talk about him, or the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions], talking about him as a perpetrator. How can you sit there and he be the victim? And my poor daughter wasn't there. She wasn't there to have her say.

"My victim impact statement had to be changed three times, because his lawyer did not want me to say this or that. The DPP said, 'Oh, no, you can't say that. You can't aim it at him.' And I was like, 'What do you want me to write? You killed my daughter, thank you very much, see you later?' And how do you put your feelings on paper anyway?

"They kept saying, fair trial, fair trial, fair trial. What more do you want? He’s got a 20 year history of assaulting women and community. That says it all right there, as far as I'm concerned."

Ashlee Donohue, a proud Aboriginal woman from the Dunghutti nation, and an author, educator and advocate for topics specifically surrounding anti-violence, anti-racism, and Aboriginal women is as angry as Nardia. She is also a survivor of extreme domestic violence.

"The process after Allira's passing was just ridiculously traumatic on her mother and family. I believe that the fact that the perpetrator only got nine years' imprisonment leads perpetrators of violence to believe that killing someone is okay. That is not enough to deter perpetrators of violence from killing their partners," Ashlee tells Mamamia.

"People that have been to jail for their crimes, I can hear them saying, 'I'll do nine years standing on my head.' Meaning that nine years is nothing. Perpetrators of violence can use that information. That all goes into coercive control stuff too, just that fear of knowing, 'He has the capacity to kill me. And then in nine years, he'll be out'.

"I believe that if someone breaches an AVO, twice, there's a chance that they get sent to prison. They can then have that chance, but I reckon that they should then go on a database. If anyone has been charged with grievous bodily harm or murder, [they should be placed] automatically on a database of perpetrators of violence. I believe that Australia needs to come up with a combined definition of what domestic violence is in this country, because being assaulted in Queensland is no different than being assaulted in Western Australia. So therefore, why are the laws different? There needs to be a national AVO, DVO, whatever they want to call it, that goes across all states.

"We know legislations can be moved and changed extremely fast because look at the coward punch. It closed down cities. And I don't know if a lot of people know this, but the coward punch doesn't come into effect in domestic violence situations because the coward punch has to be perpetrated by a stranger, and under the influence of alcohol. And they get five years automatically. That's a five-year sentence. Why can't they do that for domestic violence? At a bare minimum. It just infuriates me."

To make matters worse for Nardia, Anderson has moved back into the neighbourhood where she resides - and right next door to the apartment where he killed Allira.

Nardia wasn't told of Anderson's release date or of the parole hearing which preceded it. It turned out that she wasn't on a specific registrar, and therefore there was no legal obligation for her to be informed.

"I wanted to go to that hearing. I wanted an exclusion. I didn't want an AVO because then my name and my address would have to be on that. I didn't want that. We’ve moved and I don't want him knowing our location. The exclusion order, for him to not even be within [her neighbourhood], I wanted that. I needed that, for my safety, for my children’s safety, from my grandchildren, my friends; anybody he's come into contact with. We're all scared of him. He's unpredictable," Nardia says.

"I don't go out. I ring my girlfriend who lives around the corner and say, 'I'm coming to get you, let’s go for a ride, I gotta go to the shop.' She’ll come to the shop with me. I shouldn’t have to do that. Just looking around all the time. This is what he’s brought on to me now, looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.

"I was watching him on the news, when I did that news report [for Channel 7, after Anderson's release] and here is his niece or nephew climbing up the stairs and giving him cuddles. And I just... I felt so instantly sick in my stomach, thinking, you bastard. You get to cuddle your family. I don’t get to cuddle my daughter."

Even though Anderson is the perpetrator, it is Allira's family who must live with a life sentence.

Watch: 7News report on Allira Green's killer being released. Story continues below.

Ashlee, who is friends with Nardia, has started a GoFundMe fundraiser in order to raise money for security cameras to be installed at Nardia's house. [If you would like to donate to this fund, please click here].

"I can't understand how anyone is their right mind moves to an apartment next door to where you've murdered someone," Ashlee says. "I can’t understand how the judicial service or whatever it was, allowed him to be so close to Nardia, when they know where she lives. Because the reality is, he killed her daughter and grandson. What makes the powers that be believe he isn’t capable of killing Nardia?"

Understandably, Nardia struggles to articulate her anger and grief. "Don’t get me wrong when I say this, but I just believe that this country is so full of racism of some sort when it comes to Aboriginal women and children. When an Aboriginal woman dies, there's hardly ever any type of media about that," she says.

"Most times, if it's an Aboriginal man that's killed an Aboriginal woman, again, it’s not publicised. And that man will get life [in prison]. You get a white man that kills a black woman, and it's not even looked at. Nine years. How do you get nine years after killing someone?"

Ashlee agrees.

"Aboriginal women are deemed aggressive and angry," she says. "If you're a police officer, and you're just new in the police force, and you're sent out to an Aboriginal person's home or community, and you've never engaged with Aboriginal people before, and if the woman is there saying, 'Oh, he's done this'... Because there's high anxiety - and I know exactly what this feels like because it's happened to me - you get this kind of bravery when the police are around and you'll say things and do things.

"So if they do a report, and they're asked, Well, who was screaming? 'The woman was.' Who was being aggressive? 'The woman was.' So then she gets arrested. They showed it on television with [SBS documentary] Look What You Made Me Do. That woman covered in blood; she was telling the police officers, 'He's going to kill my child.' The police officers arrested her.

"What more proof does Australia need than that to show the difference between an Aboriginal woman pleading for her life and her child's life as opposed to a non-Aboriginal woman? Aboriginal women’s stories don't make the front pages. They make social media but that's because Aboriginal women are leading that.

"We all fight for equality, right? All women want to be equal to men. Well, white men really. But Aboriginal women aren't even considered equal to white women in this country."

There isn't a day that goes by that Nardia and her family don't talk about Allira. It has been nine years, but she is as alive in their hearts as ever.

"My two little grandchildren, who I'm raising, didn't even meet Allira. They never got to meet their aunty. We'll be sitting in the back of the house watching the stars, and I’ll go, Oh, there’s Nanny Jojo, and there's such and such, and there's Aunty Allira and Jai Jai... that's their way of sort of knowing about their Aunty. She is here with us. We’ve got her urn, her ashes, here with us. She sits in a beautiful cabinet with her nan now. It broke my mum’s heart. My mother was never the same. She got really sick, really quick. She went on the decline, basically straight away after [Allira died]," Nardia says.

"Allira's photos are on our walls. She's everywhere in this house. I will never not have her photo, will never not speak of her because it's just how we are. [Anderson] had her for eight, nine months. We had her in our lives for 23 years. And then all of a sudden, she's gone. But I'm okay. I get better and better because I do it for my baby girl. I'm her voice. And if I don't do it, then she's forgotten. I don't think any woman or child, that died at the hands of men, should be forgotten.

"Change needs to happen now. Not 10 years down the track. We've been waiting for years and years. When is it ever going to change?"

Allira as a child, with her mum Nardia. Image: Supplied.

If you would like to donate to Nardia Green's GoFundMe in order for security cameras to be set up around her home, please click here. Or you can go to https://www.gofundme.com/en-au and search for Nardia Green.

Mamamia recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are the unheard victims of domestic violence and want to break the silence. This year, we have made a commitment to tell more of their stories, amplify their voices, raise awareness of the issue, and be united in our conversations about how we end violence against women for good.

If this post brings up any issues for you, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service. It doesn’t matter where you live, they will take your call and, if need be, refer you to a service closer to home.

You can also call safe steps 24/7 Family Violence Response Line on 1800 015 188 or visit safesteps.org.au for further information.

Feature Image: Supplied.