Ms Haynes took the hotel to the Equal Opportunity Tribunal for refusing to sell her take-away alcohol in the hotel’s drive through bottle shop in November 2009.

Ms Haynes, who is a non-drinker, told the tribunal that she had agreed to give a Koonibba woman a lift home when the woman asked her to take her to the bottle shop.

The woman wanted to buy a cask of wine for her partner, also a Koonibba resident.

A bottle shop staff member refused to sell the alcohol to Ms Haynes.

He said that licence conditions brought into force two weeks before the incident meant he could not sell take-away alcohol to people who he thought might take it to dry communities at Yalata and the Maralinga Tjarutja Lands.

Following the incident Ms Haynes and the woman purchased wine from a nearby walk in wine bar.

Ms Haynes told the tribunal that it was not easy for her to come forward and put her case to the tribunal.

“I thought I’d got myself in a situation where I could rely on the white community accepting me as an equal and I felt comfortable in it and it took me a long time to get to that stage but when he did that he took away all of that again and put me back to square one,” she said.

“So it’s been a bit of a traumatic thing for me and it took me a while to actually report it to Equal Opportunities - I didn’t go there straight away, I hummed and hawed over it and I kept getting psychologically pushed all the time; “You’ve got to do something about this, you’ve got to do something about it”.

“So I did and it wasn’t easy and it’s still not easy being here even.”