THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF QUEENSLAND
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Issue 98: December 2024
About Us

Author: Stephen ZagalaPublisher: NewsouthReviewer: Franklin Richards*

Imagining a Real Australia deserves to be a much bigger book than it is. Its A4 size a reflection of the cost of production rather than the worth of its contents.

It is more than a book of pictures. Rather, it is a collection of images that tell stories, provoke thought and stir emotion. Mostly black and white, they are beautiful, some so engaging they make it difficult to turn the page.

The author, Stephen Zagala, was principal curator at the Museum of Australian Photography between 2006 and 2017 and a research fellow at the South Australian Museum between 2017 and 2024. He has curated more than 60 exhibitions.

Zagala has arranged his work into five parts: Real Style, Real Space, Real People, Real Movement and Real Futures. His writing is sparce, but informative, and complements the true stars of the work, which, of course, are the photographs.

The book includes works of iconic photographers such as Max Dupain and those of lesser-known artists such as Wolfgang Stevens, Ricky Maynard and Ruth Maddison.

Max Dupain is represented not by his popular image Sunbaker, but by Meat queue and Sandwich girl. Meat queue portrays dour, war-weary women, queueing to use their ration tickets. Zagala writes:

In many respects, Meat queue is an atypical image of Dupain, with its overt sociological subject matter and airless composition. Nevertheless, the use of candid gestures in a relatable social setting serves to demonstrate Dupain’s mastery of the documentary style, and this image is often cited as one of his best photographs.

Dupain is also represented by his light infused, industrial image of concrete beams supporting the Sydney Opera House and his quirky image of the Sandwich girl. Of this last image, Zagala writes:

Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and, by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they create and live.

The images span the nation and decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. They capture people, places and activities that are gone, but resonate still with beauty and warmth. There is Jeff Carter’s Hop pickers of Rostrevor hop garden in Victoria’s picturesque Ovens Valley. A rugged man and woman, we imagine, husband and wife, standing in a corridor of towering hop vines. Zagala tells us that:

Jeff Carter (1928-2010) forged a down-to-earth career as a roaming photojournalist when he set off hitchhiking around Australia in 1946. With a typewriter and camera in his backpack, Carter collected stories about the people he met, and turned his adventures into episodic yarns.

A more modern rendition of this approach is the colour ‘shot through the windscreen’ style, of Wesley Stacey’s The Road series. Snapshots of roadside fast-food shops, cinemas and bus stops from around the country. Stacey is also represented by the futuristic looking image, Surfboards, Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross. A picture in which upturned surfboards on a car roof rack appear transformed into spaceships.

There are intimate domestic images by Ruth Maddison, unflinching self-portraits by Sue Ford and the iconic feminist image, Vale Street, by Carol Jerrems. Add to all this the raw images of and by first nations people, and Imagining a Real Australia, does just as the name suggests.

This is a book to be savoured. Within it are images to make you think and feel, as well as others that you will simply love.

*Franklin Richards is a Legal Aid Queensland Assistant Public Defender based in Townsville. He was admitted to the Bar in 1997, has worked in private practice with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service and the with Qld ODPP.

The Opening of the Law Year ceremony – Cairns, 15 July 2024

Hope lives.

The sad, unrelenting work of a criminal defence lawyer takes its toll. It dulls the senses, dampens emotion and I have come to believe, tarnishes the soul. Too long in the profession makes hope hard to find, or at least hard to see.

In past years I attended traditional Opening of the Law Year ceremonies in search of a little hope. These church services provide an opportunity for legal practitioners and judicial officers to solemnly reflect on their professional obligations and their shared mission of delivering justice according to law. They offer a time and place to pray for guidance. For me, the ceremonies failed to resonate. Though there was one service in Rockhampton, memorable for the crow that found its way into the Church’s rafters and offered irreverent commentary on the proceedings below.

This year I attended an Opening of the Law Year ceremony that did resonate. This ceremony in Cairns was unlike any other I have attended. It was a powerful and moving secular ceremony. The ceremony owes its existence to the leadership of His Honour Justice Henry, in cooperation with other judicial officers, lawyers and First Nations Peoples. Its power came not from an elevated authority figure speaking down, but from people coming together as equals; its capacity to move came not merely from the words spoken, but from the symbolic reconciliation played out by First Nations People on one side, and judicial officers and lawyers on the other. The descendants of foes, looking each other in the eyes and exchanging possessions.

The ceremony, in the courtyard of the Cairns Court Complex, is the result of cooperation between the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji people, and members of the judiciary and legal profession.

The Invitation to the ceremony states:

In the middle ages, when the only law in operation at the land now occupied by the Cairns Courthouse was that of First Nations People, Judges in England would gather at Westminster Abbey to pray for guidance for the year ahead at a service marking the opening of the law year. In the modern age, here on the traditional land of the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji, we conduct an opening of the law year ceremony at which the judiciary and lawyers join with the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji in a ceremony of annual –

The elements of the ceremony are:

For me, the smoking ceremony in particular was transformative. Three young Gimuy Walabara Yidinji men crouched together and made fire and then smoke. The men offered the smoke, aromatic with lemon myrtle, and in it, the audience bathed. So we were welcomed and cleansed. The call out, loudly spoken in language, summoned and prepared the spirits for the ceremony to come.

Next, Dr Henrietta Marrie AM spoke movingly of her connection to her traditional home, the place upon which Cairns now sits. She spoke of the authority, power and place of her ancestors and the coming of the colonists. The insight and story she offered is a testament to her generosity and that of the Gimuy Walabara Yidinji people.

Her Honour Judge Fantin (DCJ) offered some thoughts of particular relevance to criminal law practitioners in the audience. A link to Her Honour’s speech appears on her judicial profile on the Queensland Courts website.

Her Honour’s speech contemplated the meaning and importance of the judges’ oath of office, and the legal practitioners’ oath of admission. Her Honour referenced a recent lecture by Baroness Carr Of Walton-On-The-Hill, Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales. The lecture was entitled ‘To know the Law and Observe It Well – Magna Carta and Criminal Justice’. Her Honour Judge Fantin observed that Her Honour the Chief Justice made three points. Firstly, judges and legal practitioners must know the law and how to observe it well. Secondly, they must know its spirit. Thirdly, they must observe the law with moral courage.

Describing the second point, Her Honour Judge Fantin said:

Second, to know the law requires us to know its spirit. And the spirit of our law has always been one that draws on a diversity of experience. The common law is one that is made of many threads, and we have drawn them historically from many sources.

The spirit of the law must be one based on a recognition of and learning from diverse experiences and a proper understanding of our nation’s history and the consequences of colonialism on our First Peoples.

What does this mean for us?

I think that being true to our oaths requires us to reckon with the history of our nation. …

To be true to our oaths we must educate ourselves about the richness and complexity of our First Peoples’ history, culture and laws.

We must educate ourselves about our colonial settler history and its consequences for our First Peoples.

About the frontier massacres which occurred at the hands of the Native Police, a semi-military force which operated without the intervention of judge, jury or the law and whose role it was to ‘dispense’ (which became a euphemism for kill) Aboriginal people.

In Far North Queensland this history is painfully close to home, and relatively recent.

We must educate ourselves about what followed that: the system of reserves in Queensland that subjected Aboriginal people to total, arbitrary control for the next seventy years, and lasted into the 1970s.

We have become a carceral culture. Like every other jurisdiction across Australia, Queensland continues to disproportionately imprison First Nations adults and children.

The overrepresentation of First Nations people in Australia and Queensland prisons is evidence of a chronic failing in the administration of justice.

We know from the research that how likely someone is to end up in jail depends on a number of factors, underpinned by structural causes: being in foster care, poor education, early contact with police, unsupported mental health or cognitive disability, alcohol and drug problems, unstable housing and homelessness, coming from a poor and disadvantaged neighbourhood – and being Indigenous.

We know from the research that addressing these factors, and the underlaying structural ‘caused of these causes’ – such as early abuse, racism, discrimination and poverty – with early intervention and support materially reduces the risk of someone offending and ending up in jail.

Following the failed referendum on constitutional recognition and a Voice to Parliament we must strive to meaningfully recognise First Peoples and their rights.

We must continue to provide First Peoples with meaningful roles and decision-making power in matters that uniquely affect them.

A representative reciting of the practitioners’ oath of admission and a representative reciting of the judicial officers’ oath of office followed. Next the Law Year was declared open by representative elders of the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji.

Afterwards, those gathered to watch and learn mixed with those involved in the proceedings. There were handshakes, quick catch ups and thanks. Then, those gathered there gradually dispersed: to courtrooms and chambers, to offices, businesses and homes.

Soon, all that remained in the courtyard was the smoky scent of lemon myrtle and a little hope. That in future things will be different, that over time things will be better.

*Franklin Richards is a Legal Aid Queensland Assistant Public Defender based in Townsville. He was admitted to the bar in 1997 and has worked in private practice, with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service and the Qld ODPP.

Author: Iain McCalmanPublisher: NewSouth PublishingReviewer: Franklin Richards

Flying from Townsville to Cairns, recently, I was reminded of the uniqueness of the coastal land and sea below. Nowhere else in the country, does tropical rainforest tumble down from the mountains to the coastal plain and, in few places on earth, do such rainforest shade beaches fringed with coral.

Growing up in North Queensland, barefoot and brown, it never occurred to my siblings and me that things could have been different. We felt lucky to have the pristine forests and reefs to explore. And that was it.

I have since learned that the preservation of these environments has little to do with luck and everything to do with the passion, persistence and hard work of a few. John Bússt, along with Judith Wright and Len Webb, deserve much of the credit for saving North Queensland rainforest and reef. Of these three, the latter two university educated activists have tended to get most of the credit. Award-winning historian. Iain McCalman, admitted that he too, initially, thought Bússt, ‘the cheeky Bingil Bay Bastard seemed a less serious figure.’ McCalman’s book, John Bússt. Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest, is his effort to redress that error.

The biography tells the story of how Bússt abandoned formal education and privileged family in Victoria and became an artist and activist in North Queensland. Like all such transitions, it was not strictly linear and included false starts and curious asides.

Whatever the wayward path to ‘saviour of reef and rainforest’, it began definitively enough. McCalman writes: ‘In the summer of 1929-30, John Bússt, aged twenty, and his sister, Phyllis Victoria May Bússt, aged twenty-eight, suddenly, and without consulting their parents, abandoned their Melbourne University degrees.’

What followed were several years of bohemian life, in and around Melbourne. The Bússts took up painting and, for a time, fell under the spell of Colin Colahan, a rebellious but successful artist. The association led them to join with Justin (Jorgey) Jorgensen to help build Montsalvat, an artists’ village in Eltham, in the hills outside Melbourne. The experience helped to make Bússt a tough, resourceful and resilient man. He learned how to grow food crops, tend farm animals and build in stone and timber. These skills he would put to good use when living a beachcomber lifestyle on Bedarra Island and later at Bingil Bay in North Queensland.

It was a visitor to Montsalvat who inspired the Bússt’s move northward. An invitation from Noel Wood, a flamboyant and talented painter of the tropics, was hard for John Bússt to ignore. It wasn’t long after the visit, that Bússt, now the beneficiary of an inheritance, joined Wood on Bedarra Island. He lived on the island for some years. In 1957, now married to Alison Shaw Fitchett, Bússt moved with his wife to the mainland, buying a substantial rainforest block at Bingil Bay.

During his time in the north, Bússt developed a deep appreciation of the place. He recognised the uniqueness of the rainforest, the coastal islands and reef. He also developed a deep affinity for the Djiru, the First Peoples, who were initially rounded up at Mission Beach and later transported to Palm Island. He recognised that these First Peoples had managed to live in the environment, protecting it: rather than living precariously upon it as settler populations tended to do. He tried to emulate their example. By 1965, Bússt had become a knowledgeable citizen-scientist and enthusiastic environmentalist and so began his battles against those who would exploit or destroy the forest and reef he loved.

During the next six years, Bússt fought to save the forests and reef. He helped to stop or minimise exploitation of and damage to the environment. He used intellect and persuasion and recruited the support of new and old friends, including Harold Holt. He fought many, including an army who wanted to test defoliants in the forest, graziers who wanted to mine a reef for fertiliser and AMPOL who wanted to drill for oil.

John Bússt is remembered and celebrated by many North Queensland artists and environmentalists. McCalman writes that, at the beginning of his research for this book, he was introduced to something amongst the granite rocks below where John Bússt built his mainland house. He writes: “Attached to one of these was a metal plaque weathered by sun, wind, rain and sea-spray. A fine grey-green patina of algae blended with adjacent bushes and mosses, making it easy to miss. I knew the plaque’s contents because of its mention in Judith Wright’s classic book, The Coral Battleground. Even so, her heartfelt words viewed in these wild surrounds moved me once again.

IN MEMORY OF JOHN H BÚSST DIED 5-4-1971. ARTIST AND LOVER OF BEAUTY WHO FOUGHT THAT MAN AND NATURE MIGHT SURVIVE.

This book is a lovely tribute to John Bússt and to all those who have fought to save what is left of the natural world.

Editor: Nadia WheatleyPublisher: NewSouth BooksReviewed by Franklin Richards

Charmian Clift stares from this book’s cover, her chin resting upon a ramrod arm and clenched fist, looking as defiant and strong as Rosie the Riveter. Even before reading a word of her prodigious body of work, you sense that she was an extraordinary woman. A revolutionary, born brave, who, unashamedly, blazed through life at a time when a woman was not expected to live unashamedly or to blaze.

For her twenty-five adult years, she somehow managed to combine her art, work, love and duty. That she managed to combine these competing elements at all, let alone for as long as she did, until her death by suicide in 1969, is a cause for celebration.

Clift’s life was one of diverse and intense experiences and achievements. There were setbacks of, course, but she kept at it. Editor, Nadia Wheatley, sets the scene, beautifully, in her introduction to Clift’s essays.

Born on 30 August 1923, in the last of a straggle of weatherboard workers’ cottages on the outskirts of the New South Wales coastal township of Kiama, Charmian Clift was bequeathed a double legacy by her birthplace. On the one hand, her consciousness was shaped by the wild beauty and freedom of living so close to the beach that there would be seaweed draped on the front fence of the family home after a storm. On the other hand, she grew up with a sense of living on the outside – at ‘the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere’. Rebellious, ambitious, and fiercely intelligent, she was desperate ‘to get out into the big bad world and do something better than anyone else could do’.

Clift achieved a lot. At just nineteen, she bore and was pressured to adopt out her illegitimate child, she served in the Australian Women’s Army Service, worked for Melbourne’s Argus newspaper, was dismissed for her affair with George Johnston, an older married colleague, and persisted in that partnership that would endure for twenty-three years and produce three children and thirty books.

The couple lived and wrote in England and on the Greek Islands of Kalymnos and Hydra before returning to Australia in 1964. By then, her husband had completed his classic work, My Brother Jack. Though a deeply collaborative work, and despite her own literary career and achievements, it was Johnston who was lauded. Clift, it appeared at the time, was destined ‘to be treated as her husband’s helpmate.’

The opportunity for Clift to disentangle her career from her husbands came in the form of an idea from a senior editor for the Melbourne Herald. He invited her to write some regular pieces for the paper. Johnston later noted that the editor ‘… explained that he was not looking for a women journalist, but a writer. The daily press needed some writing, real writing, from a woman’s point of view.’

Wheatley writes that ‘From her very first “piece”, the essayist found her voice: intelligent, conversational, and intensely personal.’ Charmian Clift’s ‘sneaky little revolutions’, as she once called them, had begun. For the next five years, she produced wonderful essays, published regularly in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald.

What impresses when reading Clift’s essays is that, though written over half a century ago, they remain relevant. Some remind us of how things once were, others disclose how far we have come, or not come, while still others are marked by their prescience. That’s what impresses the reader, but what smacks, really smacks, is the sharpness of her observations and beauty of her writing. The essays deliver the sort of exquisite turn of phrase that checks the breath and brings a smile.

For example, ‘What are you doing it for’, says this about hubris and our inevitable end.

It is the most pretentious nonsense to believe that the work you do will live after you. It might, but then again it might not, and history will be the judge of that, not you. What most of us leave to posterity are only a few memories of ourselves, really, and possibly a few enemies. A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.’

Clift had something smart to say about everything. She wrote about the big issues of the day such as conscription, American colonialism and Australia’s place in Asia. She wrote about social issues like ageing, the generation gap and antiquated licensing laws. She wrote movingly of her personal world, about caring for a dying partner, raising children and her happy childhood – ‘when you’re young it’s mostly summer. Endless. Golden’. She created sharply focused portraits of places, far away and close to home. Places like Hydra, central Australia and suburban Sydney.

Of North Queensland, my birthplace and home, she wrote.

People seem more like real people in the northland. Perhaps because there are so very few of them, and each one of the few has so much space to move in that everybody is quite distinct, individual, a figure in a landscape. It is not that the people are really larger than life, or even, I think, unduly eccentric. It is more the feeling that nobody in the north is anonymous.

Charmian Clift was a self-described ‘Yay-sayer’. This and her gusto for life has caused many to wonder whether she took her own life by accident or design. Whatever the truth of it, in her sneaky little revolutions, she has left a shimmering reflection of herself and her world.

 For that she ought to be remembered, fondly, and thanked.

Author:     Tom Frame

This is not a book about what the media call massacres. It is not about those tragic incidents where someone shoots and kills multiple strangers in a short time. It is not about Hoddle Street, Queen Street or Port Arthur. These and other examples of gun violence are mentioned or detailed only to the extent necessary to achieve the author’s purpose: to explore and score Australia’s response to gun violence generally.

In tackling this purpose, Tom Frame argues that it is necessary to consider not just the well-known examples of gun violence but also less publicised examples involving few victims or occurring within families. It is with these examples in mind, and a broader consideration of violence, that he argues Australia’s response might have been better.

Frame declares his interests early, at the same time defending against any notion he may harbour unrestrained bias. He writes:

‘I am a licensed firearm owner but don’t believe that keeping firearms is a right. I was a member of the Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia but have no time for America’s National Rifle Association. I am a farmer with a cattle property near Goulburn in New South Wales but don’t vote for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. I think Australian governments intrude too much on everyday life but accept the need for highly restrictive firearm legislation. I would probably own an AR-15 semi-automatic centre-rifle if the law allowed but fully endorse the restrictions preventing me from having one.’ [1]

All that said, Frame’s description and assessment of the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) and other gun control measures provide an interesting and worthwhile contribution to the debate. He begins by describing the practical and political dimensions of the Howard government’s response to Port Arthur. He compares this to earlier unsuccessful attempts to curb gun violence. He says that gun violence has continued since the NFA and notes that knife violence and domestic shootings, though often fatal, have not attracted the same attention as so-called mass shootings. Ultimately, he argues that Australia’s response was not sufficiently based on evidence, lacked enough (or any) consultation and has resulted in an inconsistent and less effective response than it might have achieved.

A perusal of the book’s contents delineates the book’s structure and foreshadows its ultimate conclusion: that something different might have been done. The introduction contains Frame’s disclosure and a thumbnail sketch of the landscape of the debate and his view of the way forward. There is a glossary about weapons and ammunition. This is necessary because Frame’s discussion questions the wisdom and effectiveness of prohibiting or restricting certain firearms. For example, he asks ‘And why should the magazine capacity of a firearm determine its acceptability? Does the use of a 17-round magazine rather than a ten-round magazine make any difference to public safety? That an assailant needs to change magazines, more often, hardly seems sufficient grounds for such restriction.[2] 

The chapters are: A Day Like No Other; Penalising the Law-abiding; A Nation Divided; Restricting Freedoms, Saving Lives; A Problem in the Making; Elusive Solutions; A Deadly Debate; A Strange Alliance; The Best Thing He Ever Did, and Conflict Without Resolution.

Frame concludes his book by considering how New Zealand, in the wake of the Christchurch tragedy, might learn from Australia’s experience. He writes:

‘Evidence-based firearms policy, something Australia has struggled to embrace, will unite rather than divide a nation that has shown a remarkable solidarity since the outrage in Christchurch.’

In the end, Frame’s argument that Australia’s response to Port Arthur, though popular, was emotional rather than a rational and analytical, is persuasive. The conclusion is sad, because another approach might have resulted in a deeper understanding of such violence and a national response that better prevents it.

[1] xvii[2] Page 166

Author: Jeremy Gans 

Publisher: Waterside Press 

Reviewer: Franklin Richards 

The Ouija Board Jurors is a mystery, a history, an exposé and an exploration. Jeremy Gans, a Professor at Melbourne Law School, uses the& 1994 murder trial, R v Young, as a prism through which to critique the jury system. His work explores in detail how the jury system, initially, faltered but, ultimately, succeeded in delivering justice in this troubling case. The process exposed vulnerabilities in the jury system and the law and brought into focus the particular pressures endured by jurors.

The story begins, as do so many legal stories, with tragedy. ‘Flash’ Harry Fuller, an Arthur Daley type businessman and his new (third) wife, Nicola, are killed in their cottage in Wadhurst, a village in Sussex, England. Harry was shot through the heart downstairs and Nicola shot several times in the head, in their upstairs bedroom. The fatal last shot was fired through a duvet as she lay wounded, speaking to a 999 emergency services call operator.

Suspicion eventually settled upon Steven Young who would face three trials, the first aborted, the second and third delivering guilty verdicts. It is the second trial that is Gans’ subject.

The evidence implicating Steven Young was strong. He had motive, means and opportunity. Young, an insurance broker from Pembury, another small town, was in financial difficulties and had arranged to meet Fuller on the day of the murders and paid some of his debts in cash, the day after. Crucially, Young had a secret arsenal and the bullets found at the crime scene were linked to ammunition and reloading equipment found at his home. Still, in many respects, he was an unlikely killer: family man and active and respected community member.

The task of deciding the matter could not have been easy, particularly, given the nature of the evidence, including the 999 emergency call recording Nicola’s garbled last words and the shot that killed her. Deliberations exceeded one day and the jury were locked up overnight at The Old Ship, a Brighton seafront hotel. So it was that four jury members had a few drinks, fashioned a makeshift Ouija Board and sought guidance from dead Harry Fuller. The whole affair might have remained secret had it not been for a fifth jury member writing to the News of the World to express his disquiet about the episode and the verdict.

Gans describes the judiciary’s discomfort and ruminations that followed the revelation, and the appeal process that finally ordered a new trial. The task facing the Court of Appeal was complex and two troubling questions resonated: how was the matter to be investigated and on what basis should the appeal be decided? In the end, the Treasury Solicitor would supervise the investigation into what had happened at The Old Ship. And the question to be decided was whether there had been a ‘material irregularity’ rather than whether the jury got the verdict wrong.

Resolving the relevant issue left counsel struggling for guidance from past cases. One Court of Appeal case from the previous year concerned a juror making a mobile phone call from the jury room. The call was ongoing but solely business related and no ‘material irregularity’ was identified. But what of a ‘call’ made by a few tipsy jurors, to a deceased victim, seeking guidance about the facts of the matter? Finally, and not much assisted by precedent, the Court found ‘material irregularity’, quashed Young’s convictions and ordered a new trial.

Gans has a charming sense of humour that he occasionally exercises in his otherwise sober discourse. For example, he gives a history of spiritualism and the Ouija Board, lamenting the Court of Appeal’s too brief treatment of the subject.

‘The history of Ouija boards, a topic almost entirely neglected in the Court of Appeal’s judgement, commences with the growth in spiritualism among middle-class and upper-class Americans in the mid-19th-century, in part as a response to civil war casualties … The Court of Appeal’s account never mentions that the 1994 owner of the trademark ‘Ouija’ was a familiar name, Parker Brothers, best known for Monopoly, Cluedo, Risk and Trivial Pursuit.’

Gans also has an eye for the absurd, canvasing the myriad ways jury conduct has gone awry over the years and how various jurisdictions have dealt with it. In one such case, a Colorado jury decided not just guilt but also settled upon the death penalty for a rapist and murderer. On appeal, it came to light that a juror brought a bible to deliberations in order to ‘show Jesus the scriptures I had looked up’. Gans mischievously explains, ‘The “Jesus” to whom she showed the passages was not the Christian Messiah but rather a fellow juror, Jesus Cordova.’ The scriptures ‘looked up’ were Leviticus 24:20-21: ‘fracture-for-fracture, eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth … whoever kills a man must be put to death.’ The death penalty was belatedly, but not too belatedly, commuted to something less final.

At the heart of this book is Gans’ consideration of the heavy burden carried by jurors in criminal trials: deciding facts and, ultimately, the question of guilt, based upon the evidence before them. It is a very big task and it takes a toll.

In this context, & Gans references Modern Times, a BBC documentary that included recollections of anonymous jurors. A juror from Steven Young’s third and last trial recalled the end of one distressing day: ‘The journey home on the train was very quiet. Very quiet. It just … I didn’t read…I didn’t say …I didn’t think but just one thought was on my mind and you couldn’t think of anything else. Nothing was allowed in, you know, it was …just … you went over and over and over again …’ At home, he showered and shivered in a room his wife found too hot. Later, he drank to forget and to sleep. ‘It worked,’ he said.

In the end, Gans concludes that trial by jury is imperfect, not that the system is hopelessly unworkable or should be replaced. The lesson of this case is that a juror’s task is hard and often thankless, and that this fundamentally important system can be improved. Of the Ouija Board Jurors, Gans writes, ‘Not only should we be prepared to approach their seemingly outlandish behaviour with sympathy but we should always ask: what might we have done if we had to bear their burden?’

Author: David Grann

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Reviewed by Franklin Richards

Travelling somewhere to appear in something, I made a last-minute purchase from an airport bookshop. This is a habit that so often results in a paperback that tours with me, before being passed on, half-read. Killers of the Flower Moon turned out to be anything but the ‘passed-on paperback’. David Grann’s book is terrific, telling its grim, true story beautifully.

At its core is the sad old story of Indigenous people dispossessed of identity and land by powerful new arrivals. Here it is the Osage Indians of America’s Great Plains who were beaten by cavalry, overwhelmed by settlers and subjected to unfamiliar governance. However, this story is different because the Osage become both blessed with unimaginable wealth, and cursed by it. By the 1920s, murder and mayhem is visited upon their community. Inexplicably, in ever increasing numbers, Osage Indians disappear or die.

Grann tells this compelling story through the eyes of Molly Burkhart, an Indian woman who witnesses her sisters, friends and supporters die around her. They go missing, are shot or poisoned. Two, Rita and Bill Smith, are destroyed in an explosion so powerful it reduces their substantial home to splinters and rubble. Despite the efforts of local law enforcement officers and hired private detectives, the deaths mount.

Grann uses the unexplained execution-style shooting of Molly’s sister, Anne, as a central point in his book. He tells the Osage story to this point and describes the aftermath.

The Osage’s story is one of passage from defiant warriors to dispossessed wanderers who finally settled upon Indian Territory in an area that would become Oklahoma. One Indian Affairs agent described the land as ‘broken, rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation’. Osage chief, Wah-Ti-An-Kah, saw it differently: ‘My people will be happy in this land. White man cannot put iron thing in ground here. White man will not come to this land. There are many hills here … white man does not like country where there are hills, and he will not come.’ So the Osage bought the land for seventy cents an acre and arrived in the early 1870s. But the white man did come – because of the curse.

The curse lay in the unique deal struck by the Osage over their apparently barren land. When they settled, the Osage negotiated what would come to be called the underground reservation. Each individual received an allotment of 657 acres and had the benefit of what was a curious provision at the time: ‘… the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands … are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe’. The rights to the underground reservation were to be passed by birth or marriage through the generations.

When oil fields were discovered and developed, the Osage Tribe reaped the rewards in royalties. They became materially rich, some of the richest Americans and, certainly, the richest Indians. Unable to live traditionally, caught between worlds, they dressed, traditionally, as they recalled it, and built mansions and drove luxury cars. Their new and strange affluence attracted jealousy and worse.

The Osage began to die. Some were shot, others wasted away as if victims of mysterious disease. When the deaths were recognised as suspicious, local law enforcement and private detectives tried to identify the killers. Later, it was discovered that the investigations were always doomed, marred by incompetent officials and meddling and misdirection by those who knew the truth.

It was only when a young J Edgar Hoover became involved that things changed. Hoover was the head of the Bureau of Investigation. Anxious and driven, he used the Osage murder investigation to build his and the Bureau’s standing. The Bureau would develop into the Federal Bureau of Investigation we know today.

Shrewdly, Hoover entrusted the investigation to one Tom White, ex-Texas Ranger. White was big and honest and led a small team that returned results. Gradually, he revealed the many deaths for what they were, cruel and artful murders.

The perpetrators were many: some merely drifters and musclemen, others white men married into or otherwise embedded in the tribe. Some were particularly heartless, willing to destroy the lives of blood relatives for money.

The motivation was the oil riches flowing to the tribe members. For at least two of the worst offenders, the road ended with prison. This was small justice for a large crime.

Scholars estimate that scores if not hundreds of Osage died between 1907 and 1923, the period the Osage call the Reign of Terror. Only a fraction of the mysterious deaths were solved.

Killers is a sobering and thrilling ride. It leads the reader to peek into the dark greedy hearts of murderous men but, also, to celebrate the Osage people who have survived.