In 1971 I received a letter from the Northern Territory Administration informing me that I had been appointed to serve three years on the Northern Territory Tourist Board. This was the board that managed the NT Tourist Bureaus throughout Australia. The tone of the letter was like I had no choice and I wondered what would happen if I had refused but I didn’t.
The Board met once a month most times in Darwin and I got paid the handsome sum of $35.00 for each meeting which took about eight hours but to attend a meeting in Darwin, including travelling time, took three days. The Mayor of Darwin, Tiger Brennan, was the chairman and he held the meetings in his Mayoral offices which was very comfortable although very cold. All government offices in Darwin always had their air conditioning set so cold that public servants had to keep a cardigan or jumper in their office to wear while at work. This seemed to me to be a gross waste of energy.
The board elected me to go to Melbourne and set up a Tourist Bureau there which was very cheap for them because they got a member of the board and an architect in one. I did the job as a board member and donated my skills because it would have been unethical to take it on as a commission.
I found at that time (1972) that it was very quick and easy to get things done in Melbourne.
The board had already rented a shop and installed a phone so I set up a temporary office.
I phoned four shop fitting contractors and asked them to visit me at different times at the shop to receive a brief and gave them 24 hours to submit a price with drawings for fitting up a Tourist Bureau.
They all brought in their drawings and price on time.
I selected one and gave him a contract to proceed.
I also interviewed respondents to an advertisement for a bureau manager that we had placed in the papers a week before.
The whole project took me three days.
I returned three weeks later to inspect the completed bureau with the Victorian manager who we had appointed during this time. This Melbourne bureau was very successful and the NT got a lot of business through it thanks to the Melbourne manager, Robert Doyle.
Alice Springs was definitely the tourist centre of the Northern Territory and Darwin at that time was definitely not. So Alice had three members on the board and Darwin had only the chairman and one other. The manager of the Alice Bureau was really managing the whole of Australia and he suggested to the Alice members that the Board should be based in Alice not Darwin.
We asked him to prepare a written case which we would submit to the Legislative council.
Bernie Kilgariff was the member for Alice Springs and we asked him to submit it to the Legislative Council but because Tiger Brennan was also on the Legislative Council, to time his submission so Tiger had no opportunity to lobby other members and get them on side against our proposal.
Bernie Kilgarriff’s timing was not good enough and Tiger Brennan succeeded in his lobbying and we lost our case.
When my three year term was up Tiger Brennan phoned me and said “your reappointment for another three years on the tourist Board is due do you want to serve again?”. I said “yes”.
He said “OK I will nominate you myself”. “Thanks Tiger” thinking “if the chairman nominates me I am sure to get it.”.
After the new board was chosen the accountant of the board phoned me and said “why didn’t you nominate for reappointment, I wanted you on the board?” I replied “the chairman told me he was going to nominate me”.
He said “ and he told all the other members the same and then didn’t.’ I replied “ well I suppose that would be called successful politicking.”
That was the end of my career on the Northern Territory Tourist Board, Tiger had found out that I was part of the attempted coup.
Tiger Brennan was still the mayor of Darwin when cyclone Tracy hit and he slept through it and so immediately resigned.
When the Whitlam Labor government decided to introduce local government to the Northern Territory in 1972 I stood and was elected on the first Alice Springs council.
Previously Alice was managed by the Town Management Board, an advisory board to the NT Administration, of which Brian Martin was the chairman.
Those elected on the first council were:
Jock Nelson Mayor. The mayor was elected by the people.
Marlene Brown
Brian Martin
Paul Everingham
Len Kittle
Dave Baldock
Andrew McPhee
Peter Leunig
Alan Dunstan
Reg Harris who was a major and long time business man and was once a well known football player in Alice stood for election as mayor and many people thought he had the best chance. He made the mistake of under estimating the political knowledge and intelligence of the electorate. He put himself up as mayor with his choice of aldermen forming a team. The electorate was not going to be told who to vote for.
The Commonwealth government supplied an experienced Town Clerk (now called CEO), Charles Ryan, and a secretary to guide the new council until we could organize our own staff.
The first council chamber was an old government house in Hartley street where we had functions like nationalization ceremonies in the back yard with the queen’s portrait hanging on a gum tree.
We were at first amazed at how much the ‘local government ordinance’ controlled every thing the council could do and having two lawyers on council ensured that we strictly obeyed the ordinance although it was obvious that many councils did not.
Brian Martin, as chairman of the Town Management Board had negotiated what appeared to be a thorough plan to hand-over to council and almost everything went smoothly except on the first day of council rule it was discovered that although all plant, equipment, workers and vehicles were transferred, no one thought to transfer over the vehicle registrations and insurance. There was panic and pandemonium until it was sorted.
The next bombshell was in the form of a letter from the commonwealth Department of Health which had about ten pages of things that had to be done at the town rubbish dump to make it conform to the health standards of that department. The cost would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Naturally we wrote back asking why we had to conform to these standards when they had managed the dump for years as it is?. The reply was “we make the rules, we do not have to comply with our rules, but you do”.
The council appointed me as their representative on the Town Planning Board, a Territory government authority not local government as it is in the states.
The Alice Springs town plan was a joke which had a separate zone for every activity. For example there was a block of land zoned for a florist shop another for a funeral parlour another for a delicatessen etc. The existing funeral parlour was not on the correct zoned site and was supposed to move to the correct site within a ten year period. Applied to every business, this would have been a commercial disaster.
There was an authority in Canberra called the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) who appeared to be cutting edge planners and I heard that they had little to do these days. I got a motion through council to invite the NCDC to do a totally new town plan for Alice Springs at no cost to the council and they agreed.
The new town plan was what a town plan should be except, I thought, they devoted far too much of it to ‘Development Control’ which gave the planner too much power. Then the young graduate town planner and his assistant they sent to administer the plan were so left wing that they almost went into a rage if you mentioned the word ‘developer’. You could see their hackles rise and a look on their face that said “this bastard is not getting any approvals”.
In a way it was good that they were so prejudice because it soon became obvious to the politicians that they had to change their attitude or go, no developing was happening in The Alice. In less than a year they were replaced. I thought for a while that I had caused a monster to be released into the community.
The reason I stood for election on the Alice Springs first council was that I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong in the way councils related to their community. Their attitude was overbearing, bureaucratic and very unfriendly. I found that this attitude stems from the ‘local government ordinance (or Act)’ which spells out exactly what and how councils go about executing their responsibilities. However I believed that councils did not have to perform in that way.
For example, Alice Springs had been totally sewered before council took over from the Northern Territory Administration. Most people had had their premises connected to the sewer but their were fourteen houses in the Gap Area that belonged to people who could not afford to have the sewer connected. Council had to therefore keep operational a ‘dunny can’ service just to service these fourteen houses at a cost of about $50,000 a year. I said it would be cheaper for council to pay to have these houses connected to the sewer so we could then abolish the ‘dunny can service’ and save $50,000 a year.
The Town Clerk said “council does not have a by-law to force people to connect to the sewer”.
I replied “I am not saying we force them to connect, I am saying that we ask them if council could connect their premises to the sewer at no cost to them” and I put a motion to that effect to the council which was accepted. All Fourteen house owners agreed and it was done.
The Northern Territory Administration (an executive of the commonwealth government) still sub-divided land, being crown land, when it was required for more housing or industrial development. Their contractors used to clear the entire area of all scrub, bushes and grass giving the new occupants a nice clear level block of land. After the completion of one such sub-division complete with roads, kerbs and gutters, water, sewerage and power, some windy weather occurred and the red soil shifted and totally buried all roads, kerbs and gutters. The sub-division had been handed over to the council so it was council’s responsibility to excavate the roads, a costly job.
I got a motion through the council to request the NT Administration to specify that no natural vegetation be removed during the construction of sub-divisions, except on the proposed roads.
NTA replied that they already instruct contractors to leave any significant trees but there are very few of these in Alice Springs. I replied that it was important to leave even dead grass to stop soil erosion and they did while I was on the council.
The next sub-division they constructed after I left the council was back to a bare earth policy.
These sorts of problems occur because such decisions are made by public servants in Darwin, a totally different environment to that of The Alice.
While an alderman on the council I was invited to meet most of the world dignitaries who visited Alice Springs during that time like; Princess Dian and Prince Charles, Princess Ann and Mark Philips, The High Commissioner for India who washed his hands after shaking hands with each person and even PM Goff Whitlam and Malcolm and Tammy Frazer. I was lucky not to be invited to Dian and Charley’s farewell lunch because everyone who did and ate a sandwich got shigella, a nasty stomach wog that caused some Alice People to be hospitalized. We heard later that Prince Charles caught it and was spewing and shitting on the Royal Plane all the way to England.
When I went to a reception held in the back yard of the council chambers for Joh Bejelke Petersen, premier of Queensland, Charley Perkins arrived with about twenty aboriginals (some, if not all, drunk) who stood in a group and shouted abuse at each of us individually for associating with the premier because he considered him racist.
Charley would shout “look there’s Andrew McPhee with that racist bastard Bejelke Petersen so he must be a racist too, three boo’s for Andrew McPhee. It was a very unpleasant experience.
Why do these bloody activists think you have to follow their rules, being there doesn’t prove that I supported the premier’s policy on aboriginal affairs.
On Boxing Day 1974 we were watching the news on television to see what cyclone Tracy was doing when an announcement came on the screen:
Would all aldermen on the Alice Springs council please report to
the council chambers immediately for an emergency meeting
– The Mayor.
I rushed in and the mayor, Brian Martin, announced that the last heard from Darwin was that a direct hit by cyclone Tracy was imminent.
Now there is no communication with Darwin at all, no telephone, no telegraph, no radio can get through not even emergency services and the new ABC short wave radio station is off air, Conellan Airways who maintain radio links with Darwin can’t make contact.
Darwin appears to have disappeared so we have to assume that the worst has happened.
While we discussed what could be done the local sergeant of police came in and said “we do not have a commander so Mr Mayor we offer our services to you, is there anything we can do to help?.”
Then the manager of the local radio station phoned and said “our mobile radio broad-casting unit is on it’s way to your office please use it to communicate with the people of Alice Springs as you see fit”. Mayor Brian Martin said to the police sergeant “stay here and we will establish an emergency co-ordination post”
We phoned Connellan Airways who said they have a plane in Catherine that they can send to Darwin at first light and it can report by radio.
The meeting decided to tell the Alice Springs people to stand by but do nothing until we had a report, we want to make sure that our assistance is effective, we asked Connellan Airways to try to find out what they most want in Darwin.
Soon after day break we received a message that Darwin was all but demolished, there were large boats on the beach, planes upside down at the airport and most houses appear to be wrecked. What they want most urgently is canned baby food, tarpaulins and tents.
The mayor passed on this information over radio 8HA and within four hours four tons of canned baby food, tarpaulins and tents, as much as a DC3 can carry, was donated and Connellan Airways flew it to Darwin.
In addition within twenty four hours the people of Alice Springs had donated $150,000 to help the people of Darwin and our population was only about 11.000 men, women and children.
The service clubs met together and each took on a different task.
The Apex clubs who had a few mechanics in their membership set up a road block on the road to Adelaide out of Alice Springs,
The Rotary clubs set up rows of trestle tables in the Youth Centre Gym with clothing and food for refugees from Darwin to take what they need,
The Probus club set up an information desk at the airport to register names of missing persons.
A few refugees started coming through Alice after about 24 hours and rapidly increased to a flood.
They seemed to be in a daze, and I thought “wouldn’t anyone”
Some headed straight through Alice and were luckily stopped by the Apex road block because they would be heading down the South Road with insufficient fuel to reach the next fuel stop some 400 Km through the desert, some had tyres that would never make it and some needed mechanical repairs.
The Apex Club supplied fuel, new tyres and fixed their cars for free.
Those that wanted to rest or stay in Alice were found accommodation.
I was very proud to be a member of that Alice Springs community.
I wrote the above about cyclone Tracy on Sunday afternoon June 17-2007 and on Sunday evening Kay Rose phoned from Lyndock to tell me that Paul Sitzler died yesterday, June 16.
Peter Sitzler had died about ten years before from cancer. Peter and Paul had built up a large and professional building company and I had worked with them on many building projects.
They had donated $10,000 to the Darwin Cyclone Tracy appeal.
Keith and Kay Rose had lived across the road from us on Wallis street Alice Springs.
Refugees reminds me of a story that makes you think that perhaps there is always an ecological solution to a problem.
At a council meeting the Town Clerk presented two problems to be resolved.
One was that refugees from Vietnam were arriving in Darwin and the local Alice Springs catholic priest had offered to take an extended Vietnamese family into Alice Springs and had appealed for locals to offer them work. There were some bad public objections to accepting Vietnamese refugees into our community and how did the council stand in relation to employing some of them.
The second was a potential problem that the council engineer reported that could cause the whole town to be flooded. Alice Springs is in the McDonnell Ranges some 750 metres above sea level, the spine of the range, South of Alice, runs East-West and access is through a gap in the range called Heavey Tree Gap. The Todd river, the railway line and the road all squeeze through the Gap, if the Gap was blocked it would make a dam and Alice would be at the bottom of the water.
Some-how bull rushes, a plant exotic to the area, started to grow in the river right in the Gap and were getting so thick and tall that the engineers predicted that the next time the Todd River flooded the bull rushes would cause debris to pile up and dam the Gap. These problems would be examined and the council would decide at the next meeting.
At the next meeting the Town Clerk announced that both problems had been solved.
The Vietnamese being industrious and inventive immediately noticed that most people in Alice had a swimming pool and that a nice gazebo next to a pool would set it off and be useful. They talked a local business man into letting them build a prototype at his pool and they immediately received a lot of orders. The gazebos were roofed with thatch made from bull rushes cut from the river.
The Vietnamese family had created their own business, were doing very well, soon had cars, became an integral part of the community and the river bed was being kept clear of bull rushes at no cost to the rate payers.
Heather was a member of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) which had done a lot for many years to help women who lived in isolated places. They had hostels in all capital cities and many regional towns where country women could stay if they had to go to town for medical treatment, have babies or whatever. They also had holiday houses where country women and their families could have a holiday without it costing a lot of money.
In Alice the CWA operated from an old house which they owned and every Saturday they sold second hand clothing, most of their customers were aboriginal women. When it was Heather’s turn to run the store and Andrew was pre-school she would take him with her. Andrew told me years later how he was mystified when Heather caught an aboriginal woman stealing clothes and told her off and that she should not steal and said “why did you steal them anyhow, they are so cheap you should be able to afford them?” The reply was “I haven’t got any money at all” Heather said “well here take them but don’t steal again”
Heather was also on the board of directors of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) which owned and managed a substantial hostel in Alice.
On a flight from Canberra to Alice Springs I was seated next to a woman probably in her mid thirties who was engrossed in a book and obviously didn’t want to talk. I noticed that she was reading a chapter titled:
HOW TO DISRUPT A MEETING
AND TAKE CONTROL OF IT
I thought “hummm, must be one of Whitlam’s little red soldiers, better not start a conversation”
A few days after Heather came home from a YWCA meeting and said “well I’m not on the YWCA board any more and Shirley Hewitt is no longer the president”.
“Why, What happened?” I asked.
“This new member on the board brought two of her friends to the meeting. Shirley Hewitt who is a really lovely kind woman got the meeting started and one of these visitors started asking questions that appeared to me to have nothing to do with running the hostel. Shirley couldn’t answer these questions and neither could any other members of the board. She harassed Shirley until she was in tears. The woman who was a member said that Shirley was incompetent and demanded that she resign now. Any one who tried to speak up was insulted like you wouldn’t believe. Shirley resigned on the spot and so did I and two others”. The intruders took over the meeting.
I said “the woman who started the harassing, I will bet that I sat next to her on the plane. This was obviously orchestrated, resigning was what they wanted you to do, “. Heather said “I don’t get involved in these organizations to be insulted nor to fight.”
The new board made the YWCA hostel available to bus loads of women who came to Alice every year to demonstrate against Pine Gap, the American Space Research Facility, being in Australia.
At a council meeting the Town Clerk brought up the subject of the council rates for the Country Women’s Association (CWA) who operated out of an old house that had been willed to them sometime in the past.
The town had grown and caught up to this old house so the value increased making the rates so expensive that the CWA, a voluntary organization, could not afford them. The council had the power to waive or reduce the rates for charitable organizations.
This seemed like a simple problem, we just had to declare them a charitable body but Alderman Grey, the labor member would not agree. Surprisingly the Town Clerk stuck to it like a dog with a bone and eventually got the council worried enough to refer it to our solicitor.
The Town Clerk who I liked and was a friend turned out to be a labor supporter too and he told me that an order had gone throughout Australia to all labor members to use their influence to destroy the CWA. Somewhere a CWA had refused to use their premises as a refuge for women escaping domestic violence.
The interesting thing is that the two labor aldermen on the council had previously moved and seconded a motion that the council not allow party politics to influence council decisions.
Is that good politics?.
The opinion came back from the solicitor:
The definition of a charitable body is – ‘seventy five percent or more of the bodies’ income has to be spent on charities’. Eighty percent of the Alice Springs CWA’s income is spent on council rates, so if you define the council as a charitable body then the CWA can be defined as a charity.
However if the council decide to waive their rates for the CWA then they can be defined as a charitable body.
The other aldermen and I were tired of this game and someone moved a motion that the council waive the rates of the CWA and it was passed.
Everyone wondered how Alderman Grey got elected more than once but it was because he had the labor party behind him and he made some smart political moves.
The council had been working with the commonwealth department of Works to redesign the road system at the entrance to Alice Springs where the road comes through the gap in the McDonnell Ranges. After nearly two years of negotiations, the design was all agreed, and construction was about to start.
At the council meeting where the council discussed and passed the motion to begin construction, in general business Alderman Grey said “ I think the council should reconstruct the road system where it comes through the Gap, it’s dangerous as it is”.
I thought “where has he been for the last two years, he doesn’t even know that we just passed a motion to begin work on it?”
But in the paper next day head-lines read “Alderman Grey says the council should reconstruct the road at the Gap”. Construction started soon after and people said “that Alderman Grey gets things done”.
Jury Duty
Every Australian citizen over the age of eighteen, unless there is a reason why they can’t, can be called to serve on a court jury. Without warning you can receive in the mail a notice which will tell you to report to the Law Courts at a given time and date. All of your plans and commitments have to be suspended until your Jury Duty has been served. Business or work commitments, duties as a mother or home keeper or arranged holidays are not acceptable excuses to get out of your obligations as a juror. The law sees Jury duty as a privilege that you should not try to avoid.
The court will call twenty four potential jurors who have to report at the beginning of a trial. In the old court house in Alice Springs the jurors had to wait on the footpath outside of the front door. Names will be pulled out of a box and if your name is called you have to walk across the court floor and take your seat in the jury box. During that walk the council for defence or prosecution can ‘challenge’ you in which case you do not take your seat in the jury box but you remain on the jury list for the duration of that court sitting and may be called for the next trial.
While living in Alice Springs I was called up for Jury Duty.
I thought “with all of the things at the office demanding my attention how am I going to concentrate on these proceedings”. But I found that having accepted the fact that I was stuck there and could do nothing about it I relaxed and gave the trial my total attention.
The first trial was of a young man who was accused of being one of two who had murdered two young men near Tennant Creek a few years earlier. The other young man had confessed to the murders and so did not need to be tried. Two young women were involved with the four young men but were not involved in nor knew about the murders at the time.
The council for prosecution gave a very detailed account of the events that lead to the murders and I was impressed with the thoroughness and clarity of the story. I will try to tell the storey without using the names of the persons involved.
The story began with two young women who were friends and lived in the suburbs of an East Coast capital city. They were bored with their life and planned to run away from home and hitch-hike around Australia. The storey followed their adventures in great detail, what lifts they got where they stopped and worked for a while and who they befriended. Somewhere on the Barkley Highway across Queensland they were given a lift by two nice young men driving an old station wagon.
The storey then told the details of these young men who were also bored with their life and planned a ‘round Australia’ trip but they had saved their money, bought the station wagon and accumulated cash to pay their way.
The four of them made their way across the Berkley Highway into the Northern Territory camping and generally having a good time.
When they reached the Stuart Highway (Darwin to Alice Springs Highway) they decided to turn South and visit Tennant Creek. They made a camp on a creek just north of the town.
They visited the Tennant Creek pub where they had a meal and a few drinks and while playing pool they met two other young men who seemed to be a lot of fun.
These new friends were staying in a shed in some back yard and they invited the travellers to their shed where they proceeded to partake of hard drugs. The girls joined in some of the drug taking but the two young men who owned the station wagon declined and when they returned to their camp the girls stayed with the drug takers.
The council for defence then started to track along the lines of ‘diminished responsibility’, hinting that if the murderers were under the influence of drugs they could not be held responsible for their actions. This threw the council for prosecution into frenzy of submitting evidence against such a defence and when he proved his point the council for defence dropped that line of argument.
The drug takers and the girls slept till late the next morning and decided to go to the camp and ‘rip off’ the other two young men. (Steal all they had) The girls said that the boys had at least three hundred dollars as well as their station wagon.
Posing as friends, the girls took the two to the camp where they had a meal together after which the two young men with the station wagon decided to move on and packed up their camp. The driver with his door open said to the two girls “are you coming with us?”.
The driver kept a Browning pump action .22 rifle jammed between his seat and the door sill.
The man on trial walked up and said “can I have a look at your rifle?” and picked it up, pumped a bullet into the breach and fired a shot into a nearby tree.
He then turned the rifle onto the driver and said “get out of the car”.
They told the girls that they were going to take them along the creek bed, tie them up and when they were in Alice Springs ring someone to tell them where they could find them.
According to the man on trial while marching them along the creek bed one of them stumbled and he thought he was going to tackle him so he shot him in the head.
The other murderer said “you will have to shoot the other one now”
But he hesitated and so he grabbed the rifle from him and shot the other one in the head four times.
He then fired four more bullets into the head of the first victim.
They dragged the bodies against the eroded bank of the creek where they were able to collapse the bank over and cover them with earth.
When they got back to the camp the girls said “what were the shots we heard?”.
They said “we tied them up and fired a few shots near them to warn them what would happen if they told anyone who we were”.
I guessed that the girls would have to at least pretend to believe them or they would have also become victims.
Two or three years later a teacher from the Tennant Creek School was taking her class for a nature study tour along this creek and found the skeletons which had been uncovered when the creek flowed..
This grizzly find was published in a national paper.
One of the girls, now back in her home town, saw the article and phoned the police.
The court had the skulls of the two victims in cardboard boxes for us to examine if we wished but none of us wanted to see them. We were instead shown life sized photos of the skulls into which a medical expert had placed glass rods to show the path of each bullet.
On a table in the jury room was displayed all of the items of evidence including the skulls and the rifle used in the murders.
The rifle was the same type as the one that I had shot the big red kangaroo with while camping with Harry Fleming on the Darling River in 1949.
The medical expert was apparently able to tell in what order the bullets were fired.
He said that the first bullet fired by the defendant would have severed the garrotted artery and would have resulted in death in four minutes.
However, he argued, before four minutes had passed, the other murderer had grabbed the rifle and fired four more bullets into his head, which would have caused instant death.
So the defence was that the first victim was still technically alive when he was killed by the second murderer.
None of the jury was convinced by that argument.
I thought, assuming that four minutes had not passed, the first victim would have died in a couple of minutes in any case.
Also, as the judge clarified, if two or more persons, while committing a crime together, one kills someone intentionally or un-intentionally they are all guilty of murder.
The jury brought down the verdict of ‘Guilty of Murder’.
After the trial I went to a café for a coffee.
The father of the accused came in, approached me and asked, “would you mind telling me why you thought my son was guilty?”.
With him was his daughter, the murderer’s sister, who was looking at me with such hatred like I have never seen before.
I simply told him the two reasons I stated above and left.
The two murderers had served about two years of their sentence when they escaped.
I have never heard if they have been recaptured.
The second trial of that court sitting was of an aboriginal man who was charged with the murder or manslaughter of his mother.
The story was that he and his mother were sitting around a camp fire drinking when an argument broke out. The man hit his mother on the head with a Traeger battery (used now instead of the peddle radio) which has two 18 mm diameter bolts projecting from one end as terminals.
One of these terminals penetrated the skull of the mother.
She was treated in hospital but developed meningitis which caused her death.
At the one trial the aboriginal man was charged with murder or manslaughter.
It was a short trial but it took the jury about eight hours to all agree on a verdict and we were not permitted to leave the jury room until we had.
Although I did not want to be foreman of the jury the others persuaded me to do it.
It took about one hour for the jury to agree on a ‘not guilty’ verdict for murder and another seven hours for nine of them to agree to a verdict of ‘manslaughter’. Three jury members would not agree to manslaughter so I got them together. I soon found that one was a spokesperson for the other two who could speak very little English. The spokesperson was Spanish and the others were either Spanish or Italian.
So I said “do you three agree that he is not guilty of murder?”. After conferring with the other two he said yes.
Then I said “But you agree that he did kill his mother so why do you not agree that he is then guilty of ‘manslaughter”.
The spokesman said “because he did not mean to kill her, and the others nodded.”
I thought “Ah, the problem is the definition of manslaughter” and so told them that manslaughter is when you kill someone but did not mean to do it. After the spokesperson explained what I had said they all agreed to the verdict of ‘manslaughter’. But I said “you should not take my word for it , we can get the judge to get us back in court and you can ask him to explain”. The spokesman said “if the other jurors agree with you then we will”.
So I had to deliver the verdict of NOT GUILTY for the murder charge and GUILTY for the manslaughter charge and did not feel at all good about it.
I wondered if a prerequisite for serving on a jury should be that you have to understand the English language.
The next trial coming up was expected to take about a week and I was due for one of my monthly one week visits to my office in Cairns on Friday. If I was selected to serve on this jury my visit to Cairns would have to be postponed until the following Friday.
My name was pulled out of the box and while walking across the court room to the jury box I’m thinking “come on one of you challenge me”. I got to my seat and just before my bum hit the seat I heard the word “challenge” and so went back to my office and prepared to leave for Cairns.
I spent the week working in Cairns and decided to return to Alice Springs via Adelaide to spend the weekend there where Heather was also visiting.
Next morning I was woken by Heather throwing the morning paper onto the bed saying emotionally “You could have been on that Plane”.
The front page headlines were about how the Alice Springs to Cairns flight had arrived in Cairns during a fierce rain storm and had crashed into a cane field. Everyone on board was killed.
If I had not been challenged and therefore served on that jury I would have been on that flight.
At the end of that court sitting the judge said to the jury “You have had some extremely difficult trials so I am giving you two years exemption from jury duty”.
After about three years I was called for jury duty again but this time the judge was a friend so I went to the court house, now a grand big new one, to apply for an exemption because of my friendship with the judge. On arrival I found a long queue which I had to get on the end of to make the application.
After about one minute the judge’s wife came along, she greeted me with a hug and kiss, then the Clerk of the Court came along and said “Mr. McPhee, would like to come to my office and fill in a form that will give you exemption from jury duty because of your friendship with the judge and his family”.
I have not been called for jury duty since.
The Board met once a month most times in Darwin and I got paid the handsome sum of $35.00 for each meeting which took about eight hours but to attend a meeting in Darwin, including travelling time, took three days. The Mayor of Darwin, Tiger Brennan, was the chairman and he held the meetings in his Mayoral offices which was very comfortable although very cold. All government offices in Darwin always had their air conditioning set so cold that public servants had to keep a cardigan or jumper in their office to wear while at work. This seemed to me to be a gross waste of energy.
The board elected me to go to Melbourne and set up a Tourist Bureau there which was very cheap for them because they got a member of the board and an architect in one. I did the job as a board member and donated my skills because it would have been unethical to take it on as a commission.
I found at that time (1972) that it was very quick and easy to get things done in Melbourne.
The board had already rented a shop and installed a phone so I set up a temporary office.
I phoned four shop fitting contractors and asked them to visit me at different times at the shop to receive a brief and gave them 24 hours to submit a price with drawings for fitting up a Tourist Bureau.
They all brought in their drawings and price on time.
I selected one and gave him a contract to proceed.
I also interviewed respondents to an advertisement for a bureau manager that we had placed in the papers a week before.
The whole project took me three days.
I returned three weeks later to inspect the completed bureau with the Victorian manager who we had appointed during this time. This Melbourne bureau was very successful and the NT got a lot of business through it thanks to the Melbourne manager, Robert Doyle.
Alice Springs was definitely the tourist centre of the Northern Territory and Darwin at that time was definitely not. So Alice had three members on the board and Darwin had only the chairman and one other. The manager of the Alice Bureau was really managing the whole of Australia and he suggested to the Alice members that the Board should be based in Alice not Darwin.
We asked him to prepare a written case which we would submit to the Legislative council.
Bernie Kilgariff was the member for Alice Springs and we asked him to submit it to the Legislative Council but because Tiger Brennan was also on the Legislative Council, to time his submission so Tiger had no opportunity to lobby other members and get them on side against our proposal.
Bernie Kilgarriff’s timing was not good enough and Tiger Brennan succeeded in his lobbying and we lost our case.
When my three year term was up Tiger Brennan phoned me and said “your reappointment for another three years on the tourist Board is due do you want to serve again?”. I said “yes”.
He said “OK I will nominate you myself”. “Thanks Tiger” thinking “if the chairman nominates me I am sure to get it.”.
After the new board was chosen the accountant of the board phoned me and said “why didn’t you nominate for reappointment, I wanted you on the board?” I replied “the chairman told me he was going to nominate me”.
He said “ and he told all the other members the same and then didn’t.’ I replied “ well I suppose that would be called successful politicking.”
That was the end of my career on the Northern Territory Tourist Board, Tiger had found out that I was part of the attempted coup.
Tiger Brennan was still the mayor of Darwin when cyclone Tracy hit and he slept through it and so immediately resigned.
When the Whitlam Labor government decided to introduce local government to the Northern Territory in 1972 I stood and was elected on the first Alice Springs council.
Previously Alice was managed by the Town Management Board, an advisory board to the NT Administration, of which Brian Martin was the chairman.
Those elected on the first council were:
Jock Nelson Mayor. The mayor was elected by the people.
Marlene Brown
Brian Martin
Paul Everingham
Len Kittle
Dave Baldock
Andrew McPhee
Peter Leunig
Alan Dunstan
Reg Harris who was a major and long time business man and was once a well known football player in Alice stood for election as mayor and many people thought he had the best chance. He made the mistake of under estimating the political knowledge and intelligence of the electorate. He put himself up as mayor with his choice of aldermen forming a team. The electorate was not going to be told who to vote for.
The Commonwealth government supplied an experienced Town Clerk (now called CEO), Charles Ryan, and a secretary to guide the new council until we could organize our own staff.
The first council chamber was an old government house in Hartley street where we had functions like nationalization ceremonies in the back yard with the queen’s portrait hanging on a gum tree.
We were at first amazed at how much the ‘local government ordinance’ controlled every thing the council could do and having two lawyers on council ensured that we strictly obeyed the ordinance although it was obvious that many councils did not.
Brian Martin, as chairman of the Town Management Board had negotiated what appeared to be a thorough plan to hand-over to council and almost everything went smoothly except on the first day of council rule it was discovered that although all plant, equipment, workers and vehicles were transferred, no one thought to transfer over the vehicle registrations and insurance. There was panic and pandemonium until it was sorted.
The next bombshell was in the form of a letter from the commonwealth Department of Health which had about ten pages of things that had to be done at the town rubbish dump to make it conform to the health standards of that department. The cost would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Naturally we wrote back asking why we had to conform to these standards when they had managed the dump for years as it is?. The reply was “we make the rules, we do not have to comply with our rules, but you do”.
The council appointed me as their representative on the Town Planning Board, a Territory government authority not local government as it is in the states.
The Alice Springs town plan was a joke which had a separate zone for every activity. For example there was a block of land zoned for a florist shop another for a funeral parlour another for a delicatessen etc. The existing funeral parlour was not on the correct zoned site and was supposed to move to the correct site within a ten year period. Applied to every business, this would have been a commercial disaster.
There was an authority in Canberra called the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) who appeared to be cutting edge planners and I heard that they had little to do these days. I got a motion through council to invite the NCDC to do a totally new town plan for Alice Springs at no cost to the council and they agreed.
The new town plan was what a town plan should be except, I thought, they devoted far too much of it to ‘Development Control’ which gave the planner too much power. Then the young graduate town planner and his assistant they sent to administer the plan were so left wing that they almost went into a rage if you mentioned the word ‘developer’. You could see their hackles rise and a look on their face that said “this bastard is not getting any approvals”.
In a way it was good that they were so prejudice because it soon became obvious to the politicians that they had to change their attitude or go, no developing was happening in The Alice. In less than a year they were replaced. I thought for a while that I had caused a monster to be released into the community.
The reason I stood for election on the Alice Springs first council was that I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong in the way councils related to their community. Their attitude was overbearing, bureaucratic and very unfriendly. I found that this attitude stems from the ‘local government ordinance (or Act)’ which spells out exactly what and how councils go about executing their responsibilities. However I believed that councils did not have to perform in that way.
For example, Alice Springs had been totally sewered before council took over from the Northern Territory Administration. Most people had had their premises connected to the sewer but their were fourteen houses in the Gap Area that belonged to people who could not afford to have the sewer connected. Council had to therefore keep operational a ‘dunny can’ service just to service these fourteen houses at a cost of about $50,000 a year. I said it would be cheaper for council to pay to have these houses connected to the sewer so we could then abolish the ‘dunny can service’ and save $50,000 a year.
The Town Clerk said “council does not have a by-law to force people to connect to the sewer”.
I replied “I am not saying we force them to connect, I am saying that we ask them if council could connect their premises to the sewer at no cost to them” and I put a motion to that effect to the council which was accepted. All Fourteen house owners agreed and it was done.
The Northern Territory Administration (an executive of the commonwealth government) still sub-divided land, being crown land, when it was required for more housing or industrial development. Their contractors used to clear the entire area of all scrub, bushes and grass giving the new occupants a nice clear level block of land. After the completion of one such sub-division complete with roads, kerbs and gutters, water, sewerage and power, some windy weather occurred and the red soil shifted and totally buried all roads, kerbs and gutters. The sub-division had been handed over to the council so it was council’s responsibility to excavate the roads, a costly job.
I got a motion through the council to request the NT Administration to specify that no natural vegetation be removed during the construction of sub-divisions, except on the proposed roads.
NTA replied that they already instruct contractors to leave any significant trees but there are very few of these in Alice Springs. I replied that it was important to leave even dead grass to stop soil erosion and they did while I was on the council.
The next sub-division they constructed after I left the council was back to a bare earth policy.
These sorts of problems occur because such decisions are made by public servants in Darwin, a totally different environment to that of The Alice.
While an alderman on the council I was invited to meet most of the world dignitaries who visited Alice Springs during that time like; Princess Dian and Prince Charles, Princess Ann and Mark Philips, The High Commissioner for India who washed his hands after shaking hands with each person and even PM Goff Whitlam and Malcolm and Tammy Frazer. I was lucky not to be invited to Dian and Charley’s farewell lunch because everyone who did and ate a sandwich got shigella, a nasty stomach wog that caused some Alice People to be hospitalized. We heard later that Prince Charles caught it and was spewing and shitting on the Royal Plane all the way to England.
When I went to a reception held in the back yard of the council chambers for Joh Bejelke Petersen, premier of Queensland, Charley Perkins arrived with about twenty aboriginals (some, if not all, drunk) who stood in a group and shouted abuse at each of us individually for associating with the premier because he considered him racist.
Charley would shout “look there’s Andrew McPhee with that racist bastard Bejelke Petersen so he must be a racist too, three boo’s for Andrew McPhee. It was a very unpleasant experience.
Why do these bloody activists think you have to follow their rules, being there doesn’t prove that I supported the premier’s policy on aboriginal affairs.
On Boxing Day 1974 we were watching the news on television to see what cyclone Tracy was doing when an announcement came on the screen:
Would all aldermen on the Alice Springs council please report to
the council chambers immediately for an emergency meeting
– The Mayor.
I rushed in and the mayor, Brian Martin, announced that the last heard from Darwin was that a direct hit by cyclone Tracy was imminent.
Now there is no communication with Darwin at all, no telephone, no telegraph, no radio can get through not even emergency services and the new ABC short wave radio station is off air, Conellan Airways who maintain radio links with Darwin can’t make contact.
Darwin appears to have disappeared so we have to assume that the worst has happened.
While we discussed what could be done the local sergeant of police came in and said “we do not have a commander so Mr Mayor we offer our services to you, is there anything we can do to help?.”
Then the manager of the local radio station phoned and said “our mobile radio broad-casting unit is on it’s way to your office please use it to communicate with the people of Alice Springs as you see fit”. Mayor Brian Martin said to the police sergeant “stay here and we will establish an emergency co-ordination post”
We phoned Connellan Airways who said they have a plane in Catherine that they can send to Darwin at first light and it can report by radio.
The meeting decided to tell the Alice Springs people to stand by but do nothing until we had a report, we want to make sure that our assistance is effective, we asked Connellan Airways to try to find out what they most want in Darwin.
Soon after day break we received a message that Darwin was all but demolished, there were large boats on the beach, planes upside down at the airport and most houses appear to be wrecked. What they want most urgently is canned baby food, tarpaulins and tents.
The mayor passed on this information over radio 8HA and within four hours four tons of canned baby food, tarpaulins and tents, as much as a DC3 can carry, was donated and Connellan Airways flew it to Darwin.
In addition within twenty four hours the people of Alice Springs had donated $150,000 to help the people of Darwin and our population was only about 11.000 men, women and children.
The service clubs met together and each took on a different task.
The Apex clubs who had a few mechanics in their membership set up a road block on the road to Adelaide out of Alice Springs,
The Rotary clubs set up rows of trestle tables in the Youth Centre Gym with clothing and food for refugees from Darwin to take what they need,
The Probus club set up an information desk at the airport to register names of missing persons.
A few refugees started coming through Alice after about 24 hours and rapidly increased to a flood.
They seemed to be in a daze, and I thought “wouldn’t anyone”
Some headed straight through Alice and were luckily stopped by the Apex road block because they would be heading down the South Road with insufficient fuel to reach the next fuel stop some 400 Km through the desert, some had tyres that would never make it and some needed mechanical repairs.
The Apex Club supplied fuel, new tyres and fixed their cars for free.
Those that wanted to rest or stay in Alice were found accommodation.
I was very proud to be a member of that Alice Springs community.
I wrote the above about cyclone Tracy on Sunday afternoon June 17-2007 and on Sunday evening Kay Rose phoned from Lyndock to tell me that Paul Sitzler died yesterday, June 16.
Peter Sitzler had died about ten years before from cancer. Peter and Paul had built up a large and professional building company and I had worked with them on many building projects.
They had donated $10,000 to the Darwin Cyclone Tracy appeal.
Keith and Kay Rose had lived across the road from us on Wallis street Alice Springs.
Refugees reminds me of a story that makes you think that perhaps there is always an ecological solution to a problem.
At a council meeting the Town Clerk presented two problems to be resolved.
One was that refugees from Vietnam were arriving in Darwin and the local Alice Springs catholic priest had offered to take an extended Vietnamese family into Alice Springs and had appealed for locals to offer them work. There were some bad public objections to accepting Vietnamese refugees into our community and how did the council stand in relation to employing some of them.
The second was a potential problem that the council engineer reported that could cause the whole town to be flooded. Alice Springs is in the McDonnell Ranges some 750 metres above sea level, the spine of the range, South of Alice, runs East-West and access is through a gap in the range called Heavey Tree Gap. The Todd river, the railway line and the road all squeeze through the Gap, if the Gap was blocked it would make a dam and Alice would be at the bottom of the water.
Some-how bull rushes, a plant exotic to the area, started to grow in the river right in the Gap and were getting so thick and tall that the engineers predicted that the next time the Todd River flooded the bull rushes would cause debris to pile up and dam the Gap. These problems would be examined and the council would decide at the next meeting.
At the next meeting the Town Clerk announced that both problems had been solved.
The Vietnamese being industrious and inventive immediately noticed that most people in Alice had a swimming pool and that a nice gazebo next to a pool would set it off and be useful. They talked a local business man into letting them build a prototype at his pool and they immediately received a lot of orders. The gazebos were roofed with thatch made from bull rushes cut from the river.
The Vietnamese family had created their own business, were doing very well, soon had cars, became an integral part of the community and the river bed was being kept clear of bull rushes at no cost to the rate payers.
Heather was a member of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) which had done a lot for many years to help women who lived in isolated places. They had hostels in all capital cities and many regional towns where country women could stay if they had to go to town for medical treatment, have babies or whatever. They also had holiday houses where country women and their families could have a holiday without it costing a lot of money.
In Alice the CWA operated from an old house which they owned and every Saturday they sold second hand clothing, most of their customers were aboriginal women. When it was Heather’s turn to run the store and Andrew was pre-school she would take him with her. Andrew told me years later how he was mystified when Heather caught an aboriginal woman stealing clothes and told her off and that she should not steal and said “why did you steal them anyhow, they are so cheap you should be able to afford them?” The reply was “I haven’t got any money at all” Heather said “well here take them but don’t steal again”
Heather was also on the board of directors of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) which owned and managed a substantial hostel in Alice.
On a flight from Canberra to Alice Springs I was seated next to a woman probably in her mid thirties who was engrossed in a book and obviously didn’t want to talk. I noticed that she was reading a chapter titled:
HOW TO DISRUPT A MEETING
AND TAKE CONTROL OF IT
I thought “hummm, must be one of Whitlam’s little red soldiers, better not start a conversation”
A few days after Heather came home from a YWCA meeting and said “well I’m not on the YWCA board any more and Shirley Hewitt is no longer the president”.
“Why, What happened?” I asked.
“This new member on the board brought two of her friends to the meeting. Shirley Hewitt who is a really lovely kind woman got the meeting started and one of these visitors started asking questions that appeared to me to have nothing to do with running the hostel. Shirley couldn’t answer these questions and neither could any other members of the board. She harassed Shirley until she was in tears. The woman who was a member said that Shirley was incompetent and demanded that she resign now. Any one who tried to speak up was insulted like you wouldn’t believe. Shirley resigned on the spot and so did I and two others”. The intruders took over the meeting.
I said “the woman who started the harassing, I will bet that I sat next to her on the plane. This was obviously orchestrated, resigning was what they wanted you to do, “. Heather said “I don’t get involved in these organizations to be insulted nor to fight.”
The new board made the YWCA hostel available to bus loads of women who came to Alice every year to demonstrate against Pine Gap, the American Space Research Facility, being in Australia.
At a council meeting the Town Clerk brought up the subject of the council rates for the Country Women’s Association (CWA) who operated out of an old house that had been willed to them sometime in the past.
The town had grown and caught up to this old house so the value increased making the rates so expensive that the CWA, a voluntary organization, could not afford them. The council had the power to waive or reduce the rates for charitable organizations.
This seemed like a simple problem, we just had to declare them a charitable body but Alderman Grey, the labor member would not agree. Surprisingly the Town Clerk stuck to it like a dog with a bone and eventually got the council worried enough to refer it to our solicitor.
The Town Clerk who I liked and was a friend turned out to be a labor supporter too and he told me that an order had gone throughout Australia to all labor members to use their influence to destroy the CWA. Somewhere a CWA had refused to use their premises as a refuge for women escaping domestic violence.
The interesting thing is that the two labor aldermen on the council had previously moved and seconded a motion that the council not allow party politics to influence council decisions.
Is that good politics?.
The opinion came back from the solicitor:
The definition of a charitable body is – ‘seventy five percent or more of the bodies’ income has to be spent on charities’. Eighty percent of the Alice Springs CWA’s income is spent on council rates, so if you define the council as a charitable body then the CWA can be defined as a charity.
However if the council decide to waive their rates for the CWA then they can be defined as a charitable body.
The other aldermen and I were tired of this game and someone moved a motion that the council waive the rates of the CWA and it was passed.
Everyone wondered how Alderman Grey got elected more than once but it was because he had the labor party behind him and he made some smart political moves.
The council had been working with the commonwealth department of Works to redesign the road system at the entrance to Alice Springs where the road comes through the gap in the McDonnell Ranges. After nearly two years of negotiations, the design was all agreed, and construction was about to start.
At the council meeting where the council discussed and passed the motion to begin construction, in general business Alderman Grey said “ I think the council should reconstruct the road system where it comes through the Gap, it’s dangerous as it is”.
I thought “where has he been for the last two years, he doesn’t even know that we just passed a motion to begin work on it?”
But in the paper next day head-lines read “Alderman Grey says the council should reconstruct the road at the Gap”. Construction started soon after and people said “that Alderman Grey gets things done”.
Jury Duty
Every Australian citizen over the age of eighteen, unless there is a reason why they can’t, can be called to serve on a court jury. Without warning you can receive in the mail a notice which will tell you to report to the Law Courts at a given time and date. All of your plans and commitments have to be suspended until your Jury Duty has been served. Business or work commitments, duties as a mother or home keeper or arranged holidays are not acceptable excuses to get out of your obligations as a juror. The law sees Jury duty as a privilege that you should not try to avoid.
The court will call twenty four potential jurors who have to report at the beginning of a trial. In the old court house in Alice Springs the jurors had to wait on the footpath outside of the front door. Names will be pulled out of a box and if your name is called you have to walk across the court floor and take your seat in the jury box. During that walk the council for defence or prosecution can ‘challenge’ you in which case you do not take your seat in the jury box but you remain on the jury list for the duration of that court sitting and may be called for the next trial.
While living in Alice Springs I was called up for Jury Duty.
I thought “with all of the things at the office demanding my attention how am I going to concentrate on these proceedings”. But I found that having accepted the fact that I was stuck there and could do nothing about it I relaxed and gave the trial my total attention.
The first trial was of a young man who was accused of being one of two who had murdered two young men near Tennant Creek a few years earlier. The other young man had confessed to the murders and so did not need to be tried. Two young women were involved with the four young men but were not involved in nor knew about the murders at the time.
The council for prosecution gave a very detailed account of the events that lead to the murders and I was impressed with the thoroughness and clarity of the story. I will try to tell the storey without using the names of the persons involved.
The story began with two young women who were friends and lived in the suburbs of an East Coast capital city. They were bored with their life and planned to run away from home and hitch-hike around Australia. The storey followed their adventures in great detail, what lifts they got where they stopped and worked for a while and who they befriended. Somewhere on the Barkley Highway across Queensland they were given a lift by two nice young men driving an old station wagon.
The storey then told the details of these young men who were also bored with their life and planned a ‘round Australia’ trip but they had saved their money, bought the station wagon and accumulated cash to pay their way.
The four of them made their way across the Berkley Highway into the Northern Territory camping and generally having a good time.
When they reached the Stuart Highway (Darwin to Alice Springs Highway) they decided to turn South and visit Tennant Creek. They made a camp on a creek just north of the town.
They visited the Tennant Creek pub where they had a meal and a few drinks and while playing pool they met two other young men who seemed to be a lot of fun.
These new friends were staying in a shed in some back yard and they invited the travellers to their shed where they proceeded to partake of hard drugs. The girls joined in some of the drug taking but the two young men who owned the station wagon declined and when they returned to their camp the girls stayed with the drug takers.
The council for defence then started to track along the lines of ‘diminished responsibility’, hinting that if the murderers were under the influence of drugs they could not be held responsible for their actions. This threw the council for prosecution into frenzy of submitting evidence against such a defence and when he proved his point the council for defence dropped that line of argument.
The drug takers and the girls slept till late the next morning and decided to go to the camp and ‘rip off’ the other two young men. (Steal all they had) The girls said that the boys had at least three hundred dollars as well as their station wagon.
Posing as friends, the girls took the two to the camp where they had a meal together after which the two young men with the station wagon decided to move on and packed up their camp. The driver with his door open said to the two girls “are you coming with us?”.
The driver kept a Browning pump action .22 rifle jammed between his seat and the door sill.
The man on trial walked up and said “can I have a look at your rifle?” and picked it up, pumped a bullet into the breach and fired a shot into a nearby tree.
He then turned the rifle onto the driver and said “get out of the car”.
They told the girls that they were going to take them along the creek bed, tie them up and when they were in Alice Springs ring someone to tell them where they could find them.
According to the man on trial while marching them along the creek bed one of them stumbled and he thought he was going to tackle him so he shot him in the head.
The other murderer said “you will have to shoot the other one now”
But he hesitated and so he grabbed the rifle from him and shot the other one in the head four times.
He then fired four more bullets into the head of the first victim.
They dragged the bodies against the eroded bank of the creek where they were able to collapse the bank over and cover them with earth.
When they got back to the camp the girls said “what were the shots we heard?”.
They said “we tied them up and fired a few shots near them to warn them what would happen if they told anyone who we were”.
I guessed that the girls would have to at least pretend to believe them or they would have also become victims.
Two or three years later a teacher from the Tennant Creek School was taking her class for a nature study tour along this creek and found the skeletons which had been uncovered when the creek flowed..
This grizzly find was published in a national paper.
One of the girls, now back in her home town, saw the article and phoned the police.
The court had the skulls of the two victims in cardboard boxes for us to examine if we wished but none of us wanted to see them. We were instead shown life sized photos of the skulls into which a medical expert had placed glass rods to show the path of each bullet.
On a table in the jury room was displayed all of the items of evidence including the skulls and the rifle used in the murders.
The rifle was the same type as the one that I had shot the big red kangaroo with while camping with Harry Fleming on the Darling River in 1949.
The medical expert was apparently able to tell in what order the bullets were fired.
He said that the first bullet fired by the defendant would have severed the garrotted artery and would have resulted in death in four minutes.
However, he argued, before four minutes had passed, the other murderer had grabbed the rifle and fired four more bullets into his head, which would have caused instant death.
So the defence was that the first victim was still technically alive when he was killed by the second murderer.
None of the jury was convinced by that argument.
I thought, assuming that four minutes had not passed, the first victim would have died in a couple of minutes in any case.
Also, as the judge clarified, if two or more persons, while committing a crime together, one kills someone intentionally or un-intentionally they are all guilty of murder.
The jury brought down the verdict of ‘Guilty of Murder’.
After the trial I went to a café for a coffee.
The father of the accused came in, approached me and asked, “would you mind telling me why you thought my son was guilty?”.
With him was his daughter, the murderer’s sister, who was looking at me with such hatred like I have never seen before.
I simply told him the two reasons I stated above and left.
The two murderers had served about two years of their sentence when they escaped.
I have never heard if they have been recaptured.
The second trial of that court sitting was of an aboriginal man who was charged with the murder or manslaughter of his mother.
The story was that he and his mother were sitting around a camp fire drinking when an argument broke out. The man hit his mother on the head with a Traeger battery (used now instead of the peddle radio) which has two 18 mm diameter bolts projecting from one end as terminals.
One of these terminals penetrated the skull of the mother.
She was treated in hospital but developed meningitis which caused her death.
At the one trial the aboriginal man was charged with murder or manslaughter.
It was a short trial but it took the jury about eight hours to all agree on a verdict and we were not permitted to leave the jury room until we had.
Although I did not want to be foreman of the jury the others persuaded me to do it.
It took about one hour for the jury to agree on a ‘not guilty’ verdict for murder and another seven hours for nine of them to agree to a verdict of ‘manslaughter’. Three jury members would not agree to manslaughter so I got them together. I soon found that one was a spokesperson for the other two who could speak very little English. The spokesperson was Spanish and the others were either Spanish or Italian.
So I said “do you three agree that he is not guilty of murder?”. After conferring with the other two he said yes.
Then I said “But you agree that he did kill his mother so why do you not agree that he is then guilty of ‘manslaughter”.
The spokesman said “because he did not mean to kill her, and the others nodded.”
I thought “Ah, the problem is the definition of manslaughter” and so told them that manslaughter is when you kill someone but did not mean to do it. After the spokesperson explained what I had said they all agreed to the verdict of ‘manslaughter’. But I said “you should not take my word for it , we can get the judge to get us back in court and you can ask him to explain”. The spokesman said “if the other jurors agree with you then we will”.
So I had to deliver the verdict of NOT GUILTY for the murder charge and GUILTY for the manslaughter charge and did not feel at all good about it.
I wondered if a prerequisite for serving on a jury should be that you have to understand the English language.
The next trial coming up was expected to take about a week and I was due for one of my monthly one week visits to my office in Cairns on Friday. If I was selected to serve on this jury my visit to Cairns would have to be postponed until the following Friday.
My name was pulled out of the box and while walking across the court room to the jury box I’m thinking “come on one of you challenge me”. I got to my seat and just before my bum hit the seat I heard the word “challenge” and so went back to my office and prepared to leave for Cairns.
I spent the week working in Cairns and decided to return to Alice Springs via Adelaide to spend the weekend there where Heather was also visiting.
Next morning I was woken by Heather throwing the morning paper onto the bed saying emotionally “You could have been on that Plane”.
The front page headlines were about how the Alice Springs to Cairns flight had arrived in Cairns during a fierce rain storm and had crashed into a cane field. Everyone on board was killed.
If I had not been challenged and therefore served on that jury I would have been on that flight.
At the end of that court sitting the judge said to the jury “You have had some extremely difficult trials so I am giving you two years exemption from jury duty”.
After about three years I was called for jury duty again but this time the judge was a friend so I went to the court house, now a grand big new one, to apply for an exemption because of my friendship with the judge. On arrival I found a long queue which I had to get on the end of to make the application.
After about one minute the judge’s wife came along, she greeted me with a hug and kiss, then the Clerk of the Court came along and said “Mr. McPhee, would like to come to my office and fill in a form that will give you exemption from jury duty because of your friendship with the judge and his family”.
I have not been called for jury duty since.
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