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A tale of two Ruperts: the media mogul and the man he saved

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Rupert Max Stuart, 72, was sentenced to death in the 1950's for murder, but later won a reprieve. A new film and a book have revived interest in the celebrated case.

30 October 2002 - It was a crime that shocked Australia almost half a century ago -- the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in the isolated South Australian town of Ceduna.

Police detained an illiterate Aboriginal carnival worker and secured a confession, allegedly dictated in perfect English.

The conduct of the case against Rupert Max Stuart caused an uproar in South Australia -- fanned by then-fledgling newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

Stuart's death sentence was finally commuted to life imprisonment.

The Stuart case is now the subject of a feature movie, Black and White which will be released nationally on Thursday.

As Murray McLaughlin reports, the movie will likely stir up old arguments about how the judicial and political systems dealt with the case.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Rupert Max Stuart is back in Adelaide, the city where in 1959 he was imprisoned for 14 years for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl.

He's down from his home near Alice Springs for a preview of a movie which tells a story of how he was saved from the gallows, and how his trial and a string of appeals so disturbed a cloistered establishment.

The actor David Ngoombujarra plays a 27-year-old Max Stuart.

POLICEMAN (FROM 'BLACK AND WHITE'): Now, I want you to tell me the truth, Max.

DAVID NGOOMBUJARRA (PLAYING MAX STUART IN 'BLACK AND WHITE') What you ask me to say?

POLICEMAN (FROM 'BLACK AND WHITE') How you killed the girl.

DAVID NGOOMBUJARRA: I never seen a little girl.

MAX STUART: I never met him but I think his acting really good.

And I'm very proud to meet Dave and shake him by the hand.

He done a good job.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: The release of the movie 'Black and White' will rekindle the controversy that swirled through Adelaide and across the land after Max Stuart's conviction in April 1959.

Central to the conviction was a confession allegedly dictated in the company of six police officers.

Max Stuart maintains it was beaten out of him.

TOM FARRELL, FMR 'SYDNEY MORNING HERALD' JOURNALIST: It was a piece of quite good English -- all the verbs and nouns in the right place and not the sort of language that an Aboriginal would use anywhere.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: And so thought a Catholic priest, Father Tom Dixon -- played in the movie by Colin Friels.

Max Stuart was not a Catholic, but Father Dixon gave him comfort before his scheduled execution -- one of seven appointments with the hangman which Stuart would avoid.

Father Dixon spoke Stuart's Arrernte language and became convinced that Stuart could not have written the confession.

Tom Farrell, on assignment from the 'Sydney Morning Herald', convinced the priest to go public.

The definitive history of the Stuart case credits Farrell and the publicity which ensued for saving Stuart's life.

TOM FARRELL: When the newspaper publicity started to bite, the Government really dug in, but they were forced by public opinion really to postpone the execution.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Tom Farrell's stories were picked up with gusto by the 'Adelaide News', an afternoon daily which had just been inherited by a young Rupert Murdoch.

The 'News' and its editor Rohan Rivett campaigned on Stuart's behalf.

Their attack on a royal commission set up to examine the worth of new evidence in the case would land Rivett and Murdoch's company in court on a string of charges, including seditious libel.

The charges failed and Rupert Murdoch remembered this month just how savagely his paper had shaken the Adelaide establishment.

RUPERT MURDOCH, NEWS CORPORATION: Well, I remember being tried for treason.

We were very proud of the 'News' for the constant circulation -- it was not a popular cause to take up the case of an Aboriginal who we felt, without making any judgment on whether he was guilty or not guilty, we said that he had not had a fair trial.

And we forced a change in that.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: 'The News' would pay Father Dixon to travel to Far North Queensland to track down a couple who employed Max Stuart before his arrest..

Their statements put Stuart at work during the alleged time of the murder, but they were discounted by a royal commission.

But such was the public disquiet that the South Australian Government, led by Sir Thomas Playford, commuted Stuart's sentence to life imprisonment.

Max Stuart thanks Rupert Murdoch for that.

MAX STUART: He done a good one in my case, in that royal commission.

I think he done a good thing.

Otherwise, if we hadn't had Rupert Murdoch, I would have been down Adelaide jail now, been buried there in unmarked grave.

But thank Christ he come in.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Arguments over 'Black and White', especially its portrayal of Rupert Murdoch, have already broken out.

Critics say Murdoch's contribution to the 'News' campaign has been inflated in the movie at the expense of his editor Rohan Rivett, whom Murdoch fired soon after.

The argument over Murdoch's role is an echo of the divisions in Adelaide society wrought by the conviction of Max Stuart.

The Supreme Court of SA, where he was tried and where the subsequent royal commission sat, is this week mounting an exhibition of memorabilia.

Most of the players have since died, but Len King, former Attorney-General and Chief Justice of SA, well remembers how the legal profession reflected the general agitation of the time.

LEN KING, FORMER SA ATTORNEY-GENERAL & CHIEF JUSTICE: It led indeed to personality rifts and animosity, some of which were never healed.

There were those who felt that the duty of the legal profession and the Law Society as its governing body was to stand up for the judiciary and protect the established order of things.

And there were others in the profession who felt that the primary responsibility of the profession was to justice, and they perceived that there was a risk of injustice being done to this semiliterate Aboriginal man.

MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Max Stuart was released from Adelaide's Yatala jail in 1973, only to be returned six times over the following decade for breaking his parole conditions.

Not till October 1987 was he unconditionally freed.

Since then, he's been chairman of the Central Land Council and was among the official party which received the Queen in Alice Springs in 2000.

And last year there he was again on national television among the official party at the sod-turning ceremony for the Alice Springs-to-
Darwin railway line.

Now in his 70s, Max Stuart has no regrets about those long times spent in jail.

MAX STUART: That's where I went to school -- in prison.

I studied every law book in that prison library, and here I am now, very proud of me.

Source: ABC TV: The 7:30 Report

Black and White

Reviewed by Sandra Hall

Directed by Craig Lahiff
Written by Louis Nowra
Rated M

October 31 2002 - The biggest question posed by Craig Lahiff's film about the 1958 Max Stuart case is: why hasn't the story reached the screen before now? It has everything a dramatist could wish for: heinous crime, racial injustice and a bunch of idealistic crusaders incited by - of all people - the young Rupert Murdoch.

Robert Carlyle as legal aid lawyer David O'Sullivan in Black and White

Then again, Murdoch is one of the film's problems; but it's not, as you might expect, his role as a do-gooder which fails to ring true. Given the thankless job of having to play Mr Global Conglomerate, Ben Mendelsohn successfully reflects the nature of his youthful idealism because he catches the pragmatism that went with it.

Also present and correct is the breezy arrogance and the urge to upset. In hindsight, Murdoch's part in the Stuart trial, involving as it did an invigorating battle with Adelaide's old-moneyed oligarchy, turned out to be the perfect rehearsal for the tussles he was to have with the British establishment 20 years later when he decided to eat up Fleet Street.

His natural gifts as a stirrer come through clearly here. Not nearly as persuasive are the details of Mendelsohn's performance.

For one thing, he looks too tidy. It's odd to think of it now, but the pared-down Murdoch of today, with his grooved cheeks, impeccable tailoring and feverish fitness regime, was once a chubby character who had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in.

Or maybe the problems lie in the inescapable fact that he's still very much with us. Given the overbearing presence of the real thing, I doubt that any actor could really convince.

But Murdoch is not the focus of the film. That centres on David Ngoombujarra's haunted yet unreadable Stuart, the young Aboriginal fairground worker arrested in 1958 for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl on a beach in the South Australian town of Ceduna. It's his story. It's also the story of David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) and Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox), the legal aid lawyers who defended him.

At first they're reluctant. But once O'Sullivan learns that Stuart's confession - on which the police case rests - was beaten out of him, he takes hold of the case and keeps tugging at it until it begins to fall apart.

Not that Sir Thomas Playford's implacably conservative government will admit that it's unravelling. Playford (Bille Brown) and his prosecutor, Roderic Chamberlain (a heavily patrician Charles Dance), are determined Stuart will hang, which is where Murd-
och comes in. He and his editor, Rohan Rivett (John Gregg) mount a newspaper campaign, demanding a retrial.

It's such a seminal tale that I suspect it could have been played on autopilot without sacrificing any of its impact, but the film's director, Craig Lahiff, unwisely insists on melodrama, heightened by a hyperventilating performance from Carlyle.

He's an itchy actor at the best of times. The wide mouth, the knittable eyebrows, the bouncy walk and the ever-present cigarette ensure there's always something going on when he's in the frame. This time, he's never still.

With a broad-brimmed hat of the period clamped so firmly on his forehead that he seems scarcely able to see, he whirls through the role like a flying saucer fuelled on tobacco. You wince for him in court because he fulminates so fiercely and to so little effect, tossing his head and rolling his eyes as Dance ladles on the sarcasm.

Can O'Sullivan really have been so inept? The answer, I suppose, is that he may well have been. Louis Nowra's streamlined, clear-headed script makes the point that he and Devaney were doing the work of both solicitors and barristers on next to no money and even less time. Yet Carlyle gives you a man so lacking in patience you can't believe he could have knuckled down long enough to get the job done.

Dance's Chamberlain, too, is overdrawn. If Carlyle is fit to explode, Dance seems in imminent danger of icing over - especially in the scenes where he and his friends sit down at club and dinner table to discuss the case.

Fox's Devaney, on the other hand, is wonderful. Crammed into a two-piece suit with her hair in tight curls, she looks as if the constraints of the time have colonised her soul so thoroughly she's going to have trouble getting back to the future.

Then there's the landscape. Ravishingly photographed by Geoffrey Simpson, it presents a dazzle of orange cliffs and electric blue skies so sensuously at odds with the stitched-up people who have made their home in it that it's almost indecent. So disregard the melodramatics and see the film, anyway.

It's worth it for Fox and for Ngoombujarra's Stuart as he moves from being a man consumed by terror to a stoic dignified in the knowledge that he's already experienced the worst that can happen.

See it, too, for its glimpses of the Australia we used to be and, in all sorts of ways, still are.

Source:Sydney Morning Herald

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