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| home | news lAustralia Revisits a 'Black and White' Murder CaseCanberra Journal 14 December 2002 - A celebrated murder case involving race and sexual assault, in which the young Rupert Murdoch and his feisty editor saved a semiliterate Aboriginal man from execution, has sprung back to life here.
A film, "Black and White," and the reissue of a book by a historian who lives here in the national capital have recalled the 1958 case of Rupert Max Stuart, then a 27-year-old itinerant worker at an amusement park who became the first Aboriginal to enter the Australian consciousness through television. The updated book, "The Stuart Case," ends with a portrayal of Mr. Stuart as he is now: an aging, honored elder of the Aboriginals in outback Australia who greeted Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to Australia two years ago. In the 1950's, the country was still cocooned by a "white Australia" policy that barred Asian immigration, its government years away from the later attempts at reconciliation with the Aboriginals. The conservative population, leavened with pockets of urban liberalism, was riveted by a crime involving the rape and murder of a 9-year-old white girl in a town on Australia's stormy southern coast in which the prime suspect was an Aboriginal. Rupert Max Stuart, who liked to drink and who could barely read, was arrested and accused of killing the child, Mary Hattam. Shortly afterward, he signed a confession. The confession was written in stilted, though coherent English, using words that a white colonial man might choose to impress his superiors. At the trial, the six policemen who had interrogated Mr. Stuart insisted that the confession was an accurate transcription of what Mr. Stuart had told them. He was sentenced to the gallows. While, the legitimacy of the confession became one of several aspects of the trial that raised questions about Mr. Stuart's guilt, there were other matters that helped give the case top billing in Australia in the late 1950's. First, a Catholic priest, the Rev. Tom Dixon, who was sympathetic to the Aboriginals and ministered to Mr. Stuart in jail through seven execution dates, believed that Mr. Stuart was innocent. His statements about his belief in Mr. Stuart helped stir the public. Second, Rohan Rivett, the antiestablishment editor of Mr. Murdoch's newspaper, the Adelaide News, began a crusade on Mr. Stuart's behalf. Mr. Rivett, persuaded Mr. Murdoch to take up the Stuart cause. Mr. Murdoch, fresh from Oxford University in England and just starting his publishing career, saw an opportunity to increase his newspaper's circulation with a good yarn. In the end, Mr. Stuart's death sentence was commuted to life in prison — in part because the government found the international coverage of the imperfect judicial proceedings too embarrassing. The case also set off political debates that eventually led to the abolition of capital punishment in Australia. Mr. Stuart served 14 years of his sentence but was back in jail on numerous occasions until 1987 for breaking the provision of his parole that demanded no consumption of alcohol. Earlier this year, Ken Inglis, a prominent historian and the author of a well-received account of the case that was published 40 years ago, revisited Mr. Stuart. The last time they had seen each other was in 1959, when Mr. Inglis attended an appeals proceeding as a journalist, and Mr. Stuart, with his thick head of black hair and broad, uncreased face, appeared briefly as the defendant with the death penalty still hanging over him. "He was a completely transformed character," said Mr. Inglis, of his interview with Mr. Stuart earlier this year in Alice Springs, an outback town. "I kept pinching myself about whether this was real," Mr. Inglis said. Their encounter was set for a weekday, Mr. Inglis recalled, because Mr. Stuart insisted that his Sundays were reserved for "roo shooting." (Shooting kangaroos is legal because Australian officials say their numbers have become so high that they are harmful to the environment.) Now 72, and with thick white hair, Mr. Stuart was regarded among his own people as if he were royalty, Mr. Inglis said. "He walks into the Central Land Council like a prince," he said. Mr. Stuart served from 1998 to 2001 as chairman of the council, a prestigious group that rules on land disputes between Aboriginals and the white population, and among Aboriginals themselves. For the queen's visit to Alice Springs, Mr. Stuart was chosen to present her with a painting. Afterward, Mr. Stuart cheerfully told a reporter: "The queen, she was just like ordinary people. I thought she'd talk in big language but really like one of us, really like a bush woman." The question of Mr. Stuart's guilt or innocence remains a volatile issue in Australia. The makers of the movie disagreed among themselves about whether Mr. Stuart had killed Mary Hattam. They managed, though, to add one piece of new information to the case. One of the policemen who interrogated Mr. Stuart told the scriptwriter, Louis Nowra, that the police had "laughed" the confession out of Mr. Stuart. Det. Sgt. Paul Turner recalled that to get Mr. Stuart to confess, he had said lightly that he was sure everyone had "done dumb things" when drunk. The detective said that "once the laughing stopped," the police had beaten Mr. Stuart, according to Mr. Nowra's account. In his original version of "The Stuart Case," Mr. Inglis wrote that he believed that Mr. Stuart "probably" killed the girl. The weight of evidence, he said, tilted toward guilt rather than innocence. He stands by that conclusion today. But the truth will probably never be known. A crucial clue that could have helped unravel the case — hairs that were found in the girl's fingernails but never tested for DNA — was thrown away some years ago, Mr. Inglis said, by the South Australian authorities. Source: The New York Times related links :
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