Max Stuart

Rupert Maxwell (Max) Stuart ( – 21 November 2014 ) was an Indigenous Australian who was convicted of murder in 1959. His conviction was subject to several appeals to higher courts, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and a Royal Commission, all of which upheld the verdict. Newspapers campaigned successfully against the death sentence being imposed. After serving his sentence, Stuart became an Arrernte elder and from 1998 till 2001 was the chairman of the Central Land Council. In 2002, the feature film Black and White was made about the Stuart case.

Early life

Stuart was born at Jay Creek in the MacDonnell Ranges, 45 kilometres west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, probably in 1932. It was a government settlement which for a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s included 45 children from a home named "The Bungalow" (37 of whom were under the age of 12) who were all temporarily housed in a corrugated shed, with a superintendent and matron housed separately in two tents. Jay Creek was home to the Western Arrernte people. In 1937, Jay Creek was declared one of three permanent camps or reserves for the Alice Springs Indigenous population. It was intended as a buffer between the semi-nomadic people living in far western regions and the more sophisticated inhabitants of Alice Springs and environs, in particular for the non-working, aged and infirm around Alice Springs.

Legally, Stuart was a "half-caste" as one of his maternal great-grandfathers had been a white station owner. Stuart's paternal grandfather had been a fully initiated Arrernte and leader of a totemic clan. His father, Paddy Stuart, was also fully initiated, but as he had assumed an English surname and worked on cattle stations had not had all the secret traditions passed on to him. Max Stuart himself was fully initiated which, in 1950s Australia, was very rare for an Indigenous Australian who worked with white people. Although his sister attended the mission school, Stuart refused and had very little "western" education or knowledge of Western religion. At the age of 11, Stuart left home to work as a stockman around Alice Springs. As a teenager, he went on to work as a bare-knuckle boxer and for Jimmy Sharman's boxing tents. In late 1958, he was working on the sideshows of a travelling fun fair. He was mostly illiterate and had problems with alcohol.

In late 1957, Stuart had been convicted of indecently assaulting a sleeping nine-year-old girl in Cloncurry, Queensland. In that case, he had covered his victim's mouth to prevent her screaming when she awoke; he confessed to police that he "knew this was wrong" but he did not "know any big women", and that when he had liquor he could not control himself.

The crime On Saturday 20 December 1958, Mary Olive Hattam, a nine-year-old girl, disappeared near the South Australian town of Ceduna (pop: 1,200), from Adelaide. Hattam had been playing on the beach between Ceduna and Thevenard with her brother Peter and their friend Peter Jacobsen. The two boys had left at 2:30 pm to collect a tub to use as a boat but had been distracted and failed to return. At 3:45 pm Jacobsen's father, who had been fishing, pulled his boat up at the beach where Hattam had been playing but there was no sign of her. Hattam's father went to the beach at 4 pm to collect her and then called on some neighbours to help search without success. As evening fell, Roger Cardwell, who ran the local deli and was married to Mary's cousin, alerted the local police and Ceduna citizens, who were watching Dial M for Murder in the local Memorial Hall. The film was stopped mid reel, The following day police brought to the site another black tracker, Harry Scott, who came to the same conclusions as Sonny Jim. Both trackers claimed that the footprints had been made by a member of a Northern Australian tribe who had spent some time living with white people.

The local Aboriginal community lived at the Lutheran mission at Koonibba, around from Ceduna. As there was little work near Koonibba, many families had moved to a block of land near Thevenard, where around 200 people lived in bark huts. Many had visited the funfair and were questioned by police. Several suspects were brought to the beach but were discounted from being responsible for the footprints by the trackers.

Suspect The 27-year-old Rupert Max Stuart, an Arrernte man, and teenager Alan Moir had been in Ceduna on 20 December, running the darts stall for the funfair operated by Mr and Mrs Norman Gieseman. Both had gone out drinking during the day and Moir returned late that night, losing consciousness several times due to intoxication. Stuart had been arrested for drinking alcohol at 9:30 pm and was in police custody. This was because, at the time, "full-blooded" Aboriginal people were forbidden by law to drink alcohol. In 1953 a federal ordinance had been passed that permitted "half-castes" to drink, but they were required to apply for a "certificate of exemption". These were commonly referred to as "dog licences" by Aboriginal people. Stuart had been jailed on more than one occasion for supplying alcohol to "full-bloods". The ban was rarely enforced in rural towns. However, since 1958, Ceduna had been combating a perceived alcohol-related "native problem" and was enforcing the alcohol ban. Although he was not drunk, Stuart had not renewed his certificate, and when arrested for drinking, was facing a sentence of 6 to 18 months in jail. He was released without charge as police resources were being dedicated to the Hattam investigation.

When Stuart returned to the fair after being released the next morning, he had an argument with the Giesemans over getting 15-year-old Moir drunk and was fired. News of the murder had not reached the funfair, which packed up on Sunday morning and moved on to Whyalla, where police interviewed the workers that night. Police interviewed Moir, who claimed that he and Stuart had been drinking with several "half-castes" in Ceduna on Saturday morning. He had returned to the funfair at 10 am then left again at 1 pm. He told police he had seen Stuart, drunk, outside the Memorial Hall with "some other darkies". Police contacted Ceduna to question Stuart about the murder.

O'Sullivan suggested that police had forced Stuart into the confession, due to Stuart's poor command of the English language. However, the jury was unconvinced by the argument and Stuart was convicted. In line with the law, Judge Reed sentenced Stuart to death on 24 April 1959. Stuart's application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of South Australia was rejected in May 1959. There was further reporting on the case in The Sydney Morning Herald and then Adelaide afternoon newspaper, The News, took up the issue.

Had police claimed the typed confession summarised what Stuart had said there would have been little controversy; however, the six policemen who had interrogated Stuart testified under oath that the document was Stuart's "literal and exact confession, word for word." One of the policemen who interrogated Stuart, chief inspector Paul Turner, stated on his deathbed in 2001 that police had "jollied" and joked the confession out of Stuart, and that once they had it, they bashed him. Fellow police officers denied Turner's claims, and insisted that the confession was verbatim, "Yes, we altered it a bit....but the substance is Stuart's." Stuart's guilt is still debated.

It has been suggested that in Black and White, a 2002 film of the case, the role of Murdoch was magnified, and the part of his editor, Rivett, was minimised. Murdoch himself believed Stuart guilty: "There's no doubt that Stuart didn't get a totally fair trial. Although it's probable that he was guilty, I thought this at the time. In those days – although less so now – I was very much against the death penalty." Bruce Page, Murdoch's biographer, said the case was pivotal in his career. "It was the very brief period of Rupert's radicalism, which was a very good thing for Stuart, as it got him out of the hangman's noose. Murdoch galloped into action, but it was a bad fight for him. The truth is it scared him off from ever taking on governments again. He reverted to his father's pattern of toeing the line."

Stuart says of Murdoch that "He done a good one in my case" He was then in and out of jail for breaking provisions of his parole that banned consumption of alcohol until 1984, when he was paroled from Adelaide's Yatala Labour Prison for the sixth and final time. During his time at Yatala Prison, Stuart learned proper English, became literate, began painting in watercolours and acquired other work skills. When visiting him in 1972, journalist Stewart Cockburn asked him to sign a piece of paper, Stuart wrote, "I can write very good now." Cockburn pasted that note into his copy of Inglis' The Stuart Case. In between being returned to prison a number of times for breaches of his parole between 1974 and 1984, he married and settled at Santa Teresa, a Catholic mission south-east of Alice Springs.

Significance of the case Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said of the case: It was a dramatic and very important case because it alerted Australia to the difficulties that Aborigines, who then weren't even counted in the census, encountered in our courts. It alerted us to the appalling feature of capital punishment of the death sentence that applied to people who may well be innocent.

Indigenous politics In 1985, Patrick Dodson, then director of the Central Land Council, appointed Stuart to a part-time job. This appointment transformed Stuart, giving him respect and giving rise to his successful rehabilitation. Stuart shared his knowledge of Aboriginal law and tradition, which he had gained from his grandfather as a youth, and became an Arrernte elder.

Stuart was chairman of the Central Land Council (CLC) from 1998 to 2001. In 2000, as chairman of the CLC, Stuart welcomed the Queen to Alice Springs and made a presentation to her. a role derived from his employment with the Central Land Council.

Publications on the case Books on the case were written by Ken Inglis, one of the first to publicise the doubts about the case; Sir Roderic Chamberlain, the crown prosecutor; and Father Tom Dixon, the priest who raised concerns about Stuart's confession.

Docudrama The first chapter of the 1993 four-part Blood Brothers documentary series, Broken English – The Conviction of Max Stuart was directed by Ned Lander. It is a docudrama which contains interviews with key figures in the Stuart case that alternates with dramatised recreations. Lawrence Turner plays Max Stuart with Hugo Weaving, Noah Taylor and Tony Barry co-starring.

Originally intended to be a documentary on the case based around Father Tom Dixon, Dixon died during production and the film was restructured as a docudrama. Historian Ken Inglis, who participated in the Stuart case as a journalist and wrote an account of the trial and appeals, praised the documentary as accurate, but noted that "anything which could have suggested that Stuart was guilty... was left out of the film."

The Supreme Court of South Australia provided assistance to the producers of the film with the Court's Historical Collection Library producing an exhibition on the case that coincided with the Adelaide screening of the film.

The film's producer, Helen Leake has reported that Stuart's response to seeing the film was, "It ain't half bad, but it's a long time to wait between smokes."