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Rupert Stuart: Guilty by Colour – or Just Guilty?

When the brutally battered naked body of 9-year-old Mary Olive Hattam was discovered near the tiny South Australian township of Ceduna on a summer afternoon in 1958, a mob of locals quickly formed and went looking for someone to blame. They came up with 27-year-old Aboriginal carnival worker Rupert Max Stuart and before he knew what had happened, Stuart was tried, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging.

Given the circumstances of the murder, the mob mentality wasn’t hard to justify. On the afternoon of 20 December 1958, Mary and her 11-year-old brother Peter had left home to walk to the local beach for a swim. They teamed up with a bunch of other kids and Mary was left on her own while the other children went in search of material to make a raft. When they came back about half an hour later Mary was gone.

A huge search party formed and later that evening her body was found in a nearby cave. Her bathing costume had been removed and was found in bushes nearby. A rock that had been used to kill her was found lying beside her head.

The searchers went on the rampage looking for the killer. He couldn’t have gone far as there was only one way in and out of Ceduna. He had to have been seen leaving town or hadn’t left at all. Within two days Rupert Stuart was arrested and charged with the little girl’s murder.

A month later Stuart stood before a simmering mob in the packed local courthouse as the prosecutor told the court that the evidence before them would clearly show that Stuart had enticed little Mary into the cave at the beach where he had taken advantage of her and then, in fear of his life should she tell the police what happened, had beaten her to death with a rock and left her body where he killed her.

The court was told that Stuart was a nomadic labourer who had taken work at a funfair which was visiting Ceduna at the time of the little girl’s death. The court heard that Stuart had been questioned at length and had eventually signed a confession. When it was decided that Stuart would be bound over for trial for murder before the South Australian Supreme Court in Adelaide, the mob erupted and he was lucky to get out of the court alive as the locals tried to get past the police and tear him apart.

Amid cries of ‘hang the bastard’ from the huge crowd that gathered out the front, Rupert Stuart appeared before a jury in Adelaide on 24 April 1958. The Crown’s case was based totally on Stuart’s alleged confession. Stuart, a proud tribesman from the Aranda tribe, denied that he had murdered the girl and said that he was intimidated into making the confession.

But his objections in broken English counted for nothing. After the formalities of a trial were finished, Stuart was found guilty as charged and sentenced to be hung by the neck until he was dead. But that was not the end of it. What followed caused a sensation around the world, which was just starting to wake up to the injustices inflicted upon black people just because of the colour of their skin. The world was now watching every move of the Rupert Stuart case with great interest.

Rupert Stuart’s champion was a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Dixon, who had been requested to visit Stuart and hear his last confession as the hanging date drew closer. What Father Dixon heard from the illiterate tribesman who could neither read nor write was that he was told that if he didn’t sign a document saying that he had committed murder then he would be taken out to the nearest tree and lynched there and then.

Father Dixon went immediately to Stuart’s solicitors and pleaded with them to get a stay of execution while he investigated the possibilities that Stuart may have an alibi to his whereabouts at the time of the murder – which was something that the police never bothered to investigate. The solicitors went to the judges at the High Court but they would have none of it. Rupert Stuart would hang on the scheduled date.

With no time to lose, Father Dixon located the carnival – which had now moved on to Queensland – and hurried there to find that three accountable people – which included the carnival’s owner and his wife – were only too happy to give statutory declarations saying that Rupert Stuart was in their company working in one of the stalls at the time that the murder had occurred. They said that they would have given these details to the police but the police didn’t want to know about it and while Rupert Stuart was in custody – and in the belief that he would be released – they had moved on to new towns.

Armed with the statutory declarations, and with his movements being monitored by the national papers, Father Dixon arrived back in South Australia in the nick of time to lodge the papers with the Privy Council. But the application was rejected. The hanging would go ahead. Then, as a nation held its breath and rallies on Stuart’s behalf were held all over Adelaide, the South Australian premier interjected and ordered that the hanging be stopped and that the case should be re-investigated immediately.

Stuart’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment while a Royal Commission of three High Court Judges heard all of the evidence. Two months later, and after the Stuart defence counsel withdrew after four days claiming that his client wasn’t getting a fair hearing, the Commission upheld the conviction and Rupert Max Stuart stood guilty as charged. He was released from jail in 1973 after having served 25 years for the murder of Mary Olive Hattam.

Rupert Stuart maintained his innocence all those years. No one else ever came under suspicion for the murder.