Photo by Katrina Beavan, ABC Alice Springs This is a guest post by Frank Baarda, a long-term resident of Yuendumu, NT. Yesterday hundreds of Yuendumu residents marched on the Yuendumu police station. The police station was going to be opened to allow the station to be swept. Sweeping is a ritual whereby after a death [...]
The story this woman tells is the story of their being imprisoned there. The men are only allowed out to work; they cannot get visitors and they cannot visit other people. I find it extraordinary that people could behave so savagely in 1989 against fellow human beings. Justice Nader, NT Supreme Court.
By late 1976 Csidei was in real financial and legal trouble, with debtors—including the Bartons—and corporate regulators on his tail. Around this time, while on one of his occasional trips to Sydney, Harald Paech, manager of Csidei's Wollogorang Station, suggested—half-heartedly and after a few too many drinks—that Csidei might investigate the possibility of growing a cannabis crop to raise some cash.
Darwin has always been a haven for desperados, chancers, carpet baggers and those trying to run away from the dark shadows of a previous life. I'll admit to being one of the latter when I turned up in mid-1984. From the long-lens-view of the populated south-east of the country, Darwin was an attractive bolt-hole, not least because it was about as far away as you could get from your southern ghosts. Not that there was any lack of opportunity for new troubles in the Top End.
Loftus Rule: A rebuttable presumption that where an NT government decision is questioned it is more likely to be a fuck-up rather than an innocent mistake. (Syn: snafu - situation normal, all fucked up)
Other African gang members have snuck into the health care system, working at the local hospital as nurses and also as disability and mobility support workers, at the Aboriginal aged care centre and at local Aboriginal hostels. Taxi and bus drivers, university and TAFE students, checkout chicks and guys, pizza shop owners, cleaners and receptionists at the local casino, bank tellers, senior public servants, business operators and real estate agents. The list goes on.
To ensure the adversarial system works as well as it can, the accused must have counsel at least on par with that of the Crown. Mismatches of lawyers at trial is the stuff of Deep South murder trials in the USA. There some accused, unable to afford sufficiently experienced lawyers in an environment of little or token legal aid, can be represented by law students or destitute lawyers willing to appear for all in fees of a thousand bucks to defend an alleged killer heading to the electric chair.
Graeme Lewis was part éminence grise, part bagman and part trouble-maker—as often within as without—for the NT's Country Liberal Party for more than forty years. Lewis passed away in early April while speaking from the floor of the 2018 annual conference of his beloved CLP. For all his apparent successes and failings—I'll leave the hagiography and excoriation for others—Graeme Lewis never held publicly elected office but nonetheless deserves respect as the Northern Territory's long-term political player par excellence. Lewis was also a prominent player in the Darwin Shuffle, the avoidance scheme that operated in the NT from at least the early 1970s through to the 1980s.
From time to time there may be instances of inappropriate judicial conduct falling short of misconduct warranting removal. Sometimes these are matters which may be addressed and remedied by way of appeal. In such cases the appellate court will generally make comment designed to prevent, so far as possible, any repetition of the inappropriate conduct.
But, hey, this is Larrimah. One expects things to go twirly. A decade ago, the blokes behind the "Highest bar in the Territory" were Graham Doyle and Syd Worrell. Syd had a French girlfriend, Jacquie, who liked a drink, cooked when she damned well felt like it and had such an aversion to the heat she'd shower fully clothed and return to the bar wringing wet. She and Syd were married at the pub in a ceremony the celebrant will never forget. The bride wore black and had to be assisted down the aisle. The best man, Mad Mick from Maryfield, was so shickered he couldn't find the ring.
