She's a warm, infectiously friendly 20-year-old with a generous smile - it seems absurd that anyone could ever think she was dangerous.

But when going about her business in town, she is on the receiving end of constant reminders that dangerous is exactly how some view anyone with her skin colour.

"Walking down the street, being in a group with your friends and family, people don't want to walk past that particular area because they might feel threatened or frightened," she said.

"Especially if I'm wearing Aboriginal clothing, I find people are a lot more hesitant than they should be to approach us or walk by us. If they were to come up and talk to us, they would get a completely different reaction to what they're expecting.

"I don't know what some people are expecting us to do sometimes," she laughed.

"From my perspective, my people are more frightened to walk past a group of non-Indigenous people than we are to walk past a groups of our fellas."

Carleeta was the last baby born on Cape Barren Island. She lived there until she was 12, when her parents moved to Hobart to support family in a time of grief.

Cape Barren Island, as she describes it, is the sort of place that one assumes doesn't exist in Australia anymore.

It's a settlement of about 100 people, almost all Aboriginal, where a police officer visits once a week and the children spend their time exploring the bush and the sandy beaches.

When she was growing up, she would rarely be indoors during daylight hours if she wasn't at school.

One teacher taught across grades for about 10 students and everyone was considered family: it was an "unreal childhood," Carleeta said.

Cape Barren and the Furneaux Islands are deeply important to the Tasmanian Aboriginal story. It's through them that Aboriginal ancestry was able to survive. Women who lived with white sealers and farmers in the Bass Strait passed on their culture and genes to their children, even as other Tasmanian Aboriginals died.

Moving to mainland Tasmania, where she suddenly found herself in the minority, was a shock.

"It took me a really long time to get used to it - two classes of 30 kids were the same amount of people as the whole community on Cape Barren," she said. "I was so nervous going into my first school assembly."

"It was really weird going from [Cape Barren] to ... being looked at - especially when I was with my mum, because she is a lot darker than I am. People would look us up and down when we went out somewhere - but mum didn't care."

Carleeta was one of hundreds of people who rallied in Tasmania last Saturday for Black Lives Matter, which has erupted into protests worldwide after black American man George Floyd was killed by police.

In Australia, the protests and ensuing media attention - especially on social media - have brought a renewed focus to challenges Aboriginal people face at home.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Protesters across the world have chanted George Floyd's last words, "I can't breathe". They were the same last words spoken by David Dungay Jnr, who died in Sydney's Long Bay Jail in 2015.

Mr Dungay Jnr was three weeks from release after serving time for assault, aggravated attempted sexual intercourse and party to robbery.

He was eating a packet of biscuits in his cell and was told to stop. When he didn't, five prison officers stormed the cell, forced him into another cell and held him face down, and then injected him with a sedative.

None of the officers faced disciplinary action.

Mr Dungay Jnr was one of at least 434 Indigenous people who died in custody between 1991 and 2020.

Over the same time period, the percentage of jailed men who are Aboriginal increased from 14.3 per cent to 28.6 per cent. They are three per cent of the general population.

Carleeta hasn't been able to stop thinking about those last words.

"How long it takes for someone to be suffocated to death, how long it actually takes for the body to be shut down ... I was heartbroken to hear what was happening," she said.

"Those people who did die at the hands of white police officers - they still didn't have a voice in their last words."

Aboriginal man Justin Stonehouse, 43, had almost the opposite experience of childhood as Carleeta's idyllic upbringing on Cape Barren Island.

He was taken away from his mother as a baby and grew up in a children's home at Deloraine.

When he was about eight - "old enough to understand" - he learned that he was Aboriginal, and he was "proud as punch."

He set off to school to brag about what he saw as impressive new knowledge about himself.

The other children didn't see it that way.

"All kids are nasty little buggers," he laughed. "They want to tease each other, pick on each other, see who can stand their ground - all kids do it. What we didn't grow up knowing is what we know now, which is that it can actually do a lot of damage."

For a long time, he kept his heritage to himself. He would steer clear of getting involved in any conversations about Aboriginal issues.

He met his mother, and the rest of his 14 brothers and sisters, at about age 13.

"I got to meet the Aboriginal community - they opened up their arms and accepted me, it was like I was automatically part of a community - that was so different to what I had grown up in," he said.

"The amount of times I'm sitting here just watching TV, or talking to my brother, not about anything in particular, and I'll just suddenly think, 'God, I wish I had grown up with mum'.

"All these stories [my siblings who grew up at home] have told me, they told them that many times, and it never, ever got boring.

"But at the same time, my life would be completely different. Would I be sitting in a nice little unit? Probably not. I'd probably be in jail. Most of my brothers have spent time in jail, and I've never been in jail in my life."

He said his brothers "arc up" in the presence of authority figures, including the police, lawyers and judges.

But it can be a mutually destructive relationship.

He recounts one of his own experiences with police, in a mainland Australian city while he was homeless, that occurred about 2am.

"I was walking up the street, and they came round, got out of the car, and then they literally threw me to the ground, face first, broke my glasses, put their knees in my back, put my hands behind my back and put me in handcuffs," he said. "When they sat me back up, my face was all bleeding - and then they started asking me questions."

"I went to the police station a few hours later - the blood was still dry on my face, no glasses - and made a complaint. But it just so happened that where I was standing there were no cameras. They still took photos and took a statement, but they never got back to me and they never replaced my glasses.

"I was just walking along with my bags, and they had to slam me to the ground and put me in handcuffs? I was just walking. Guess they might have been in a bad mood.

"Here in Tasmania, they're pretty good. At least they don't slam you to the ground."

He would like to see the way police forces operate nationally reviewed,

But only if the voices of those who interact with the police were heard.

"The thing is, when they get a panel to tick off what they can and can't do, it's a bunch of whitefellas picking a bunch of whitefellas," he said. "All upper class."

"Pick a few other people. Pick someone who's been to jail a few times. Put him in the mix. Get his point of view.

"Get someone's who's slept on the damn streets. Get his point of view. He still has a say.

"Chuck some of those people onto a panel, stir up the pot and get a whole different point of view."

Tasmania Police Deputy Commissioner Scott Tilyard strongly refutes the idea that there is police targeting of Aboriginal people, or systemic excessive force towards Aboriginal people, in Tasmania.

"We would not tolerate any targeting of Aboriginal people or Aboriginal communities by police, under any circumstances," he said.

"That does not occur, in my view. There's no evidence or information that we have that that happens, certainly here in Tasmania.

"We, in Tasmania, have a very positive relationship, in my view, with the Aboriginal communities around the state. There's a lot of liaison, especially at the local level."

But there are still stories.

Bianca Templar, the 25-year-old Aboriginal woman who organised Launceston's Black Lives Matter protest, said excessive force towards Aboriginal people is talked about in the community.

She mentioned children being strip-searched and detained without a guardian, and rough treatment when houses are raided.

"In my experience, from what I've seen, police have been a lot more aggressive towards Aboriginal people - especially if you've got a certain last name," she said. "If you've got a certain last name, then you're automatically stigmatised. And it doesn't matter what you say or do."

"It scares us. As an older cousin to little cousins in the system, I don't know if I'm going to see them again, I don't know if I'm going to hear from them when they get picked up.

"There's a lot of anxiety within the community, because of the unpredictability that some police officers can have.

"What parent wants to let their child play on the street if they don't know what's going to happen to them?"

Carleeta Thomas brought up the 1996 case of Gig Mansell, who was kicked by police while another woman was put into a chokehold, neither of whom were resisting arrest. The interaction was documented by teenagers there to video themselves skating, who police did not realise were filming.

"In Tasmania, being such a small place, it's been pushed under the radar especially with stuff that has happened to people that I know that has not been spoken about," she said.

All three said they were deeply proud of being Aboriginal: of the strength, community, connection to country, and culture stretching back millennia.

"We are wanting justice, and peace," Carleeta said. "Our community - we've always wanted peace."

"Hopefully, within my time, within my kids' time, things will get a little bit better than what they have been for my family and all our people who have been fighting for this long to get a voice. That's all we want."

"Look at Germany," Justin Stonehouse said. "They've taken responsibility for what happened during World War II, and their country has now been able to move on.

"They have this big Sorry Day, but the Australian government has still not taken responsibility for what they've actually done, because they're not listening to the Aboriginal people's voice."

For Mr Stonehouse, he is nostalgic for a time he never experienced.

When comparing his life to the life he has heard about, the one lived by his ancestors, he knows which once he would rather pick, if he could.

"Our ancestors survived through two ice ages," he said.

"They knew what they were doing. They didn't have governments, and they didn't have to deal with the rest of the world.

"Kids these days, they grow up and they have to deal with a lot of stuff. For my ancestors, Tasmania was a little world all on its own. To them it was a big world. They knew what was acceptable and what wasn't acceptable.

"If you were get the kids from back then and put them in the world of today, they'd say, what the? Who am I listening to? Am I listening to the TV? Social media? Our ancestors didn't have to think about any of that. And now look at us."