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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lThe resurrection of a condemned man19 August 2002 - In 1958, when an Aborigine was a non-citizen and a man could hang for murder, the killing of a little girl near a beach showground attracted national headlines. Penelope Debelle meets the accused.
The second life of Max Stuart, that of a respected tribal Arrernte man and former chairman of the Central Land Council, seems barely to relate to the first. The bewildered face of the young Stuart, condemned to the gallows for the rape and murder of Mary Olive Hattam at Ceduna in December 1958, shows a confused and illiterate young Aborigine. The Max Stuart of today is an official and an elder who welcomed the Queen to Alice Springs two years ago and presented her with a painting of the dreaming of his land, the Yeperenye, or giant caterpillar. "I went a long way from where I used to be," Stuart says. "The Queen, she was like ordinary people. I thought she'd talk in big language but really like one of us, really like a bush woman." After all this time the two lives of Max Stuart are being increasingly drawn into one. His story - how he was convicted, sentenced to death, then given a commuted sentence, though without ever being officially cleared of the murder - is the subject of a new book and a film. In The Stuart Case, author Ken Inglis retraces the case that tore Adelaide's establishment asunder and helped save the young Aborigine from the gallows. Louis Nowra's film, Black and White, which opened the Sydney Film Festival in June and will have a general release next December, presents to a new generation the "did he or didn't he?" story of Rupert Max Stuart. The film shows Stuart in 1958 running a fair stall at Ceduna near where Mary Hattam was killed, staying on after the fair leaves, and being taken in and signing a confession, which was used to convict him. But the confession, which Stuart said last week was accompanied by a police beating, used formal language that Adelaide's then fledgling media baron Rupert Murdoch, his editor Rohan Rivett and others concluded could not possibly have been Stuart's. As the ambitious new owner of The News, Murdoch used his paper to query Stuart's innocence, forcing a celebrated royal commission that polarised opinion among those who ruled the only Australian city on the edge of the outback. "He wanted the truth, you know," Stuart told the Herald. "I could see him out in the court, I was with the policemen, my lawyer told me it was him." Neither man - Stuart is 70, Murdoch is 71 - has forgotten. Inglis says Murdoch, the billionaire mogul with an infant child, recently sent a message from New York to the Central Land Council in Alice Springs asking how Stuart was faring. "The answer is that, no less than the inquirer himself, he has lived a life virtually unimaginable in the Adelaide of 1959," Inglis writes. After the royal commission, Stuart's sentence was commuted to life. In 1974 he was released, but still in the grip of drink he was in and out of jail until 1984. The film concludes with footage of the real Stuart, driving near the Alice, wearing his cowboy hat, making an enigmatic comment about Elvis. "Yeah, some people think that I'm guilty and some people think I'm not. Some people think Elvis is still alive, but most of us think he's dead and gone." Stuart was flown to Adelaide earlier this year by the producers and watched himself brought to life on the big screen. It was a long time to go without a smoke, he observes, but is otherwise he is remarkably relaxed about the very public revival of what others might see as a dark secret from the past. "It didn't hurt me at all," he said in Alice Springs. "I think that fella who acts as me [David Ngoombujarra], I think he's doing a good job. I've got nothing against him. They wanted to cut it, I said 'no'. People already know, it's all written in the newspapers so why cut it off? Let it go." Now an old man with grey hair, fading eyesight and a hacking smoker's cough - the doctor has given him a puffer but he does not use it, he says - Stuart is at peace with himself and his past. His wife died almost 20 years ago and he lives alone in a caravan on a property just out of Alice Springs, dividing his time between there and land he owns near Kings Canyon, four hours away. He makes the trip alone in a beaten-up old car whose tyres need air. Despite his well-paid job as head of the Central Land Council, a job given to him by Pat Dodson, he is still "paddling", he says. "If you want an Esky full of lemonade, you're paddling to get the money, aren't you?" he says. "Put it that way." Drink has not been a problem for the past 15 years, but with two sons and a daughter and countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the money has to be shared around. If he had the money, he says, maybe millions of dollars or a nugget of gold from the MacDonnell Ranges up there, he would re-open the old case so justice could be done. "I don't want a pardon first," he said. "I just want the case to start again and talk about a pardon after, yeah. And they've just got to pay me from the day they arrested me and that is going to cost them a million. But language is money. You can't force them without money." He talks openly and without shame or bitterness about who he was. When shown a picture of himself on release from Yatala jail in August 1972, he chuckles affectionately at the man looking back at him. "I was a fat-faced little fella back then, wasn't I," he says with amused interest. His nickname in the tribal community was Yatala, and according to Inglis, Stuart's wife used to call him "Bloody Yatala" by way of affectionate reprimand. He has never hidden who he was and yet for 15 years most people missed it. In his book, Inglis speculates about why for so long everyone assumed Rupert Max Stuart was long dead and why no-one made the connection, even when Stuart was presenting himself to the former governor-general, Sir William Deane, or the Queen. "Among people who remembered the case, many assumed Rupert Max had died - as in the collective memory he had," Inglis writes. In Alice Springs he is a tribal man so senior that he is custodian of stories, dances and songs few others know. When he came back home in 1984 to a waterhole on Aboriginal land at Jay Creek, where the now derelict former home of linguist Professor Ted Strehlow can still be seen, his grandmother's brother spent a year with him, passing on the secrets from this part of the land. "You're in charge now," Stuart said his great uncle told him. His dream now is to find money to put another Yeperenye Festival at Alice Springs. The last one, held in 2001 as part of the Centenary of Federation celebrations, saw Stuart at his finest, singing songs and doing dances Inglis believes had not been seen since anthropologists recorded them at the start of the century. Stuart has made tapes of his own singing to give to others when he goes. He wants another festival to be held, so people from around the world can learn about Alice Springs. "I always wanted to be involved in nothing, you know, just a stockman and drover's boy," Stuart says. That changed, partly because of his time in prison. "I learned bush laws and whatever when I was inside the prison, how to respect people, how to speak to people when you're spoken to. I used to be a bad fellow before that." Rupert Max Stuart is at the final stage of his extraordinary life, on the surface another elderly, almost toothless Aboriginal man like so many in Central Australia. But he compares himself with Nelson Mandela - that African fella was in jail once too - and has pride in who he has become. Welcoming the Queen was one of the best days, he told Inglis, an old crim welcoming the Queen to his country. Inglis says that whether Stuart committed the murder or not - Stuart told him another Aboriginal did it while others like the late Ted Strehlow always believed a white man was the killer - what he has become is remarkable. "Some people use the word redemption," Inglis says. "What has become of him, what has remained, what he is now it quite astonishing." Stuart is ready for death, having found faith in God when he faced the gallows 42 years ago. "Because when I was in the condemned cell I was a non-believer," he says. "So when people around the world started praying for me, I didn't hear them talking but it comes in my mind. The day before I got hung they were all there. Whichever way the wind blows, I didn't give a damn." Now he is happy to die where he is, with his caravan, a picture of his wife on the wall and his old dog panting on the dirt. When the old fellow upstairs decides he wants him up there rather than down at the bottom, he is ready to go. "I'm only living on a borrowed life anyway," he chuckles. "You got to go one day." Source: Sydney Morning Herald related links:
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