Beside a waterhole in his birthplace, Jay Creek, convicted rapist-murderer Max Stuart is at ease with the thought of death. Picture: Bryan Charlton |
Forty years ago, an illiterate young Aborigine faced the gallows. His notorious story is told in a film and a book. Penelope Debelle reports.
Rupert Max Stuart, found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged, saw young Rupert Murdoch watching him in a courtroom in Adelaide more than 40 years ago. Murdoch, ambitious new owner of The News, used his paper to query Stuart's guilt, forcing a celebrated royal commission that divided the establishment and helped save the young Aboriginal man from the gallows.
Neither man - Max Stuart is now 70, Mr Murdoch is 71 - has forgotten.
In a new publication, The Stuart Case, author Ken Inglis says Mr Murdoch, the billionaire mogul, recently sent a message from New York to the Central Land Council in Alice Springs asking how Max 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," Mr Inglis writes.
The second life of Max Stuart - as a respected tribal Arrernte man and former chairman of the Central Land Council - seems barely to relate to the first.
An early photo of a bewildered Aborigine, condemned to the gallows for the rape and murder of Mary Olive Hattam, 9, near Ceduna in December, 1958, showed a confused, illiterate young man.
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," he 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."
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After all this time the two lives of Max Stuart are being increasingly drawn into one. Along with the Inglis book, the Louis Nowra film Black and White, which opened the Sydney Film Festival in June and will be released into cinemas in December, presents to a new generation the "did he or didn't he?" story of Rupert Max Stuart.
The film shows him in 1958 running a fair stall at Ceduna near where Mary Hattam was killed, staying on after the fair leaves, being taken in and signing the confession that was used to convict him.
But the confession, which Max Stuart said last week was accompanied by a police beating, used formal language that Rupert Murdoch, his editor Rohan Rivett and others concluded could not possibly have been the accused's.
A royal commission was held and Max Stuart's sentence was commuted to life. In 1974 he was released. But he has never been pardoned.
He was in and out of jail until 1984, when he was paroled for the sixth and final time.
The film concludes with footage of the real Max Stuart, driving along a red-dirt highway near the Alice, wearing his cowboy hat, saying: "Yeah, some people think 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."
Max Stuart was flown to Adelaide this year by the film's producers and watched himself brought to life on the big screen. It was a long time to go without a smoke, he observed, but is otherwise remarkably equanimical 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 (David Ngoombujarra) who acts as me, 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 - Max Stuart is at peace with himself and his past. His wife died almost 20 years ago. 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.
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 from the Macdonnell Ranges up there, he would reopen the old case so justice could be done.
"I don't want a pardon first," he says. "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. Shown a picture of himself on his 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.
His nickname in the tribal community was Yatala and, according to Mr Inglis, Max 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.
Mr Inglis speculates in his book 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 then Governor-General Sir William Deane or the Queen.
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 home in 1984 to a waterhole at Jay Creek his grandmother's brother spent a year with him, passing on the secrets from this part of the land.
His dream now is to find money to put on another Yeperenye Festival at Alice Springs. In the last one, held last year as part of the Centenary of Federation celebrations, he was at his finest, singing songs and doing dances Mr Inglis believes had not been seen since anthropologists recorded them at the start of the century.
"I always wanted to be involved in nothing, you know, just a stockman and drover's boy," Max Stuart says. That changed, partly because of his time in prison. "I learnt 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."
Max Stuart is at the final stage of his extraordinary life, another elderly, almost toothless old Aborigine. But he compares himself with Nelson Mandela - who was in jail once, too - and has pride in who he has become. Welcoming the Queen was one of the best days, he told Mr Inglis.
Mr Inglis says that whether Stuart committed the murder or not, what he has become is remarkable. "Some people use the word 'redemption'," the author says. "What has become of him, what has remained, what he is now, is quite astonishing."
Max Stuart is ready for death, having found faith in God when he faced the gallows 42 years ago. "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, he is ready to go.
