Speaker 1: He was a tough, knock about politician who understood how
Speaker 1: to talk to both sides of politics, liberals and labor.
Speaker 1: He could appeal to people on their own terms. He
Speaker 1: could be more of a knock about than any knock
Speaker 1: about politician because he was. This reporter has got his
Speaker 1: little notebook and he's got his little pen, and he's
Speaker 1: standing there and he hears a clique, and he turns
Speaker 1: around and there is Jeff Clark with a gun held
Speaker 1: to this blog's ear. I'm Andrew Ruhle, and this is
Speaker 1: life and Crimes Today. We're going to go back in
Speaker 1: time and look at the life and crimes and alleged
Speaker 1: crimes of Jeffrey Wayne Clark, the man better known as
Speaker 1: Jeff Clark, former head of AT SICK. That would be
Speaker 1: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. In fact, there
Speaker 1: is no longer an at SICK, and the reason for
Speaker 1: that is that Jeffrey Clark, Jeff Clark, disgraced himself with
Speaker 1: his gross misbehavior allegedly. And I know about this because
Speaker 1: I wrote a story back in two thousand and one
Speaker 1: which was headlined something like Jeff Clark, Power and Rape,
Speaker 1: and that story covered two or three broadsheet news pages,
Speaker 1: and it detailed, among other things, how Clark had allegedly
Speaker 1: raped at least four women and perhaps more. And that
Speaker 1: long involved story was based legally at least on the
Speaker 1: sworn statements statutory declarations of four women. They were Carol Stingle,
Speaker 1: Kate Heay, Joanne McGinness, who is Clark's cousin, and a
Speaker 1: woman called Sharon Handley who was also some sort of
Speaker 1: in law or some connection with the Clark's family somehow.
Speaker 1: And there were other potential victims, and there were other
Speaker 1: victims who came four forward and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: But the story that I did was based on the
Speaker 1: very detailed allegations made by those four women, independently of
Speaker 1: each other. In fact, I traveled around Australia to interview them.
Speaker 1: I went to a Chuker for one, I went to
Speaker 1: I think the Gold Coast or in that area the
Speaker 1: Sunshine Coast for another, and I went to Darwin for
Speaker 1: another one. And so they were scattered across three or
Speaker 1: four states. And it was a story with enormous impact
Speaker 1: and consequences because immediately Jeff Clark, who was then chair
Speaker 1: of at SICK, was under pressure and under the pump
Speaker 1: and ultimately, although he was never convicted of rape, he
Speaker 1: was tried on one charge of rape against his cousin
Speaker 1: Joan McGinnis, and a magistrate in his wisdom decided that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't stand up in front of a jury and
Speaker 1: so it was dismissed. That is not to say that
Speaker 1: the accuser was not believed. I think the accusers were believed.
Speaker 1: But it's hard to get convictions in sexual assault cases,
Speaker 1: as we know from other cases we've had, of course
Speaker 1: the George pel case and many others where a jury
Speaker 1: is not going to convict probably or if there is
Speaker 1: a conviction, it won't stand appeal, but where the jury
Speaker 1: of public opinion is something else. Again, So who's Jeff Clark?
Speaker 1: Well interesting story. Jeff Clark's mother was a girl from
Speaker 1: and she was once a girl, so she was a
Speaker 1: girl from Framlingham, which is an Aboriginal settlement or community
Speaker 1: which is down in the west of Victoria near Warnablle,
Speaker 1: and it is to the Warnable District in the Western
Speaker 1: district what Lake Tires is to the east of the state.
Speaker 1: Lake Tires Aboriginal settlement, was where I went to school
Speaker 1: and where my family grew up and had a lot
Speaker 1: to do with it. For all his bluster and he's
Speaker 1: bullying and this sort of bikey boss stuff, deep down,
Speaker 1: Jeff Clark knew from the time he was a little
Speaker 1: boy that he was different from the rest of the
Speaker 1: mob down at Framlingham. One of his black female cousins,
Speaker 1: not the one he raped, he whose name is Joanne mcginner's,
Speaker 1: she told me that she recalls young Clark arriving at
Speaker 1: the settlement from the city as a little boy. This
Speaker 1: is Jeff Clark as a little boy back in the fifties.
Speaker 1: He was so embarrassed, she told me by the sandy
Speaker 1: red hair and the blue eyes that he'd inherited from
Speaker 1: his Glaswegian father, that he is his father was a
Speaker 1: Scottish fellow from Glasgow. That to fit in with the
Speaker 1: local kids at Framlingham, the little Aboriginal kids, he would
Speaker 1: rub mud on his face. Now I have to say,
Speaker 1: and I absolutely mean this serious about this. Nothing else
Speaker 1: about Jeff Clark makes me sorry for him, But that does.
Speaker 1: That crisis of identity for a little kid might explain
Speaker 1: what turned him into a bash artist, a rapist, a misogynist,
Speaker 1: and a calculating and brazen thief, not that any of
Speaker 1: this sort of nature or nurture, handwringing stuff his victim's anguish.
Speaker 1: His criminality now seems as ingrained as that sneer that
Speaker 1: we see on his face at all times. I knew
Speaker 1: men in the past. They're all dead now, but I
Speaker 1: knew men who did time in Penridge. With Jeff's biological father,
Speaker 1: Ginger Macintosh. He was a standover man, a street fighter
Speaker 1: and an armed robber. He is a Scottish hardman who
Speaker 1: ended up in Australia as many scaleybags did, and he
Speaker 1: would occasionally visit Jeff and his mother Jeff's mother former
Speaker 1: girlfriend of Macintosh, at Framlingham after she'd quit working the
Speaker 1: streets of Fitzroy. Macintosh drove a Pontiac, which is a
Speaker 1: large American car for those who don't know, with a
Speaker 1: pistol in the glovebox. According to that same cousin, who
Speaker 1: was a daughter of the well liked and respected Framlingham elder,
Speaker 1: the late Banjo Clark, was Banjo Clark's daughter, one of
Speaker 1: many who told me that story, and she was an
Speaker 1: eyewitness to the Pontiac, the gun, the whole muzzle, and
Speaker 1: they're all related somehow to Jeff Clark. Was an interesting
Speaker 1: job for me to do a profile of Jeff Clark.
Speaker 1: To be asked to do a profile of Jeff Clark
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, and I think I was
Speaker 1: asked to do it because various people at the newspaper
Speaker 1: where I then worked had heard unsavory rumors, gossip and
Speaker 1: allegations about Jeff Clark, quite detailed allegations, and it was
Speaker 1: considered a very hard story to do because he was
Speaker 1: the darling of the sort of intellectual left and the
Speaker 1: Greens and the Labor Party and so on and so on,
Speaker 1: and so it was tricky for a lot of people
Speaker 1: to get their head around that story. And they knew
Speaker 1: about it, and they knew that he was a bad
Speaker 1: who did bad things, but they didn't really have the
Speaker 1: stomach for the writing of the story. And I was
Speaker 1: asked to have a look at him. I had no
Speaker 1: real preconceptions about Jeff Clark. I went to the Western
Speaker 1: District to Warnablee and I spoke to people and I
Speaker 1: just asked them, you know, do you know Jeff Clark.
Speaker 1: Did you know him when he was a kid? You know,
Speaker 1: what was he like? Did he play footy, Did he
Speaker 1: play cricket? Did he do this? Do that? The things
Speaker 1: that you ask about almost anybody that you're trying to profile,
Speaker 1: you find out who they are, who they know, and
Speaker 1: what they used to do, and you're fishing sort of
Speaker 1: for the anecdotes that illustrate somebody's character. And to me,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter really what his character was or wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was just another story to write. But the more
Speaker 1: I asked and the more people I spoke to, the
Speaker 1: more bad things they told me, and the more I knew,
Speaker 1: and the more I followed it, the more bad things
Speaker 1: other people told me. And so after a few days
Speaker 1: of this, I realized that when I went back to
Speaker 1: my city office back in two thousand and one, that
Speaker 1: this was a story that was taking on a very
Speaker 1: dark and nasty edge. That the stories about Jeff Clark
Speaker 1: were well founded. It wasn't just one loose allegation of
Speaker 1: rape that had been thrown out by a court. There
Speaker 1: were multiple allegations from multiple people who were by this
Speaker 1: stage scattered all over Australia and who did not necessarily
Speaker 1: know each other or certainly not know each other in
Speaker 1: any sort of cohesive way. And so I came back
Speaker 1: with a notebook full of tough stuff, and this caused
Speaker 1: very long faces at the paper where I then worked,
Speaker 1: because many people there had invested a lot of time
Speaker 1: and effort and affection and love and professional interest in
Speaker 1: the rise and rise of Aboriginal politics in general, and
Speaker 1: Jeff Clark in particular, because he was a tough, articulate,
Speaker 1: capable Aboriginal politician. To get to be chair of at SICK,
Speaker 1: he didn't have to get a lot of votes, So
Speaker 1: I have to say that you could become the chair
Speaker 1: of at SICK with a handful of votes, which he
Speaker 1: was easily able to organize. But having got there, he
Speaker 1: was one tough hombre. He knew a lot about how
Speaker 1: to be a barnyard politician. He was a tough, knock
Speaker 1: about politician who understood how to talk to both sides
Speaker 1: of politics, liberals and labor. He could appeal to who
Speaker 1: people on their own terms. He could be more of
Speaker 1: a knock about than any knock about politician because he was.
Speaker 1: He was a former very good footballer, not good enough
Speaker 1: to have played at the highest level necessarily, but well
Speaker 1: known to those who did. And he went over to
Speaker 1: South Australia and I think to the west of Perth
Speaker 1: and played professional football. He was also better than average boxer.
Speaker 1: He could fight like a thrashing machine. He was genuinely
Speaker 1: tough and he was genuinely feared by a lot of people,
Speaker 1: not only his own people who he dominated effortlessly, but
Speaker 1: a lot of people down in the west of Victoria
Speaker 1: where he lived and grew up, were basically nervous of
Speaker 1: him and now nervous of him personally because he was
Speaker 1: a tough guy. He was brutal, he was aggressive, he
Speaker 1: was a standover man. And also there was a darker
Speaker 1: edge to him than all those things. There were those
Speaker 1: who said, if you get in Jeff's way, or you
Speaker 1: oppose him or criticize him, you run into bad luck.
Speaker 1: Your house might burn down, or your car might burn
Speaker 1: or your hay sheds or you know, one family I
Speaker 1: said that he and his mate's sister steal that family
Speaker 1: sheep and things like that. So he had on the side,
Speaker 1: essentially a little crime gang of people who would do
Speaker 1: what he suggested. And if he didn't want to actually
Speaker 1: get his own hands dirty, he had a few people
Speaker 1: around him who would. And these were guys that had
Speaker 1: criminal records and were pretty bad dudes. And so this
Speaker 1: is the story that I wrote in two thousand and
Speaker 1: a month Jeff Clark, head of ad Sick, a man
Speaker 1: who's was then earning on the public purse, a big
Speaker 1: salary in the mid two hundredths I think was two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand, which nearly quarter of a century ago,
Speaker 1: was the sort of money paid to a state premier,
Speaker 1: and not a hell of a lot less than perhaps
Speaker 1: the prime minister was on or a cabinet minister was on.
Speaker 1: So there was a very heavyweight Aboriginal politician who was
Speaker 1: dutchess by both sides of politics, who knew his way
Speaker 1: around Australian politics and also used to have four ways overseas.
Speaker 1: He'd go to Canada and the United States and New
Speaker 1: Zealand and elsewhere, sort of riding the wave, the first
Speaker 1: wave of the sort of post colonial trend in identity
Speaker 1: politics of indigenous peoples, which is in itself a pretty
Speaker 1: good thing. But I think it's fair to say that
Speaker 1: Jeff Clark used a lot of those things to his
Speaker 1: own ends. And we can say those things now because
Speaker 1: it has become more and more apparent over the years
Speaker 1: over the intervening years that Jeff Clerk was a bad
Speaker 1: dude who did bad stuff, and he did a variety
Speaker 1: of bad stuff. It's worth pointing out that although accused
Speaker 1: by four different women in one block of multiple rapes,
Speaker 1: that he denied the rapes, but he never ever sued
Speaker 1: over it. He said he was going to go to
Speaker 1: the Press Council, which would cost nothing, of course, and
Speaker 1: complain about the story. He never did. He did wing
Speaker 1: and wine to a shrinking number of sympathetic journalists, reporters
Speaker 1: and the odd author, but their numbers gradually crumbled away.
Speaker 1: There was initially a ground swell of support for him
Speaker 1: from the sort of do gooder intellectual left, let's say.
Speaker 1: In fact, people such as the head of the Civil
Speaker 1: Liberties Union in Victoria, who was a prominent barrister and
Speaker 1: others were very vocal for a while about it. The
Speaker 1: Clerk expose that was attacked by the people I've just
Speaker 1: described and all their fellow travelers, including you know, people
Speaker 1: I worked with at different times, gan as a neutral
Speaker 1: profile of a powerful political figure, a figure who was
Speaker 1: then highly paid, an influential and part of an institution
Speaker 1: that had a lot of influence with politicians on both sides,
Speaker 1: with governments. This man who pretended to represent them was
Speaker 1: actually exploiting and robbing his own constituents in a position
Speaker 1: that he'd nailed down with the votes of a handful
Speaker 1: of people. This was absolute Tammany Hall stuff, right down
Speaker 1: to the bribes, the guns, and the violence. By that
Speaker 1: Tammany Hall, I'm referring to the bad old days in
Speaker 1: New York when crooks and crooked politicians and gangsters and
Speaker 1: all sorts of people could run New York by the
Speaker 1: influence they wielded at the town hall known as Tammany Hall.
Speaker 1: The fact is, I have to say that guns and
Speaker 1: violence always appealed to Clark. When a Warnable Standard reporter.
Speaker 1: Warnable Standard is a newspaper still published in Warnable years ago.
Speaker 1: A reporter working for that paper many years ago went
Speaker 1: to Framlingham to do a story about Jeff Clark's gang
Speaker 1: illegally pinching firewood in the state forest to sell. They
Speaker 1: were just pinching, would to sell it for cash. This
Speaker 1: reporter has got his little notebook and he's got his
Speaker 1: little pen, and he's standing there and he hears a click,
Speaker 1: and he turns around and there is Jeff Clark with
Speaker 1: a gun held to this bloke's ear. Now he was terrified.
Speaker 1: He's staring down the barrel of a gun. We all
Speaker 1: would be. And Clark is cloating, and Clark says, you're
Speaker 1: going to write a nice story, aren't you. And the
Speaker 1: reporter nodded and quietly backed away and went back to
Speaker 1: warnable and probably wrote a very tame story. Now that
Speaker 1: happened way back, way back. That'd be the late seventies,
Speaker 1: early eighties. But when the same reporter, by this time
Speaker 1: no longer a young country reporter, but a senior sub
Speaker 1: editor on Melbourne newspapers. And I worked with this guy
Speaker 1: and I knew him well when in two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: so this is maybe twenty years later, he was urged
Speaker 1: to write that story to outline what had happened to him.
Speaker 1: He refused, not because it wasn't true, but because it
Speaker 1: was He was still scared that Jeff Clark would reach
Speaker 1: out and hurt him. This is a chief sub editor
Speaker 1: on a Melbourne newspaper who lived in a Melbourne suburb
Speaker 1: was still scared in the year two thousand and one
Speaker 1: that Jeff Clark would do him some harm. He wasn't alone.
Speaker 1: Nearly everyone I spoke to about Clark down in Western
Speaker 1: Victoria back in those days was nervous of him, and
Speaker 1: guns weren't all. As I've mentioned before, they feared that
Speaker 1: their houses, or their farms, or their sheds or their
Speaker 1: fences would be burned out. Jeff Clark loved firepower, not
Speaker 1: just a pistol in the glove box. Like his father,
Speaker 1: the Glaswegient. He once tried to bring back an illegal
Speaker 1: automatic military rifle. I think it was an AK forty
Speaker 1: seven from memory, and if it wasn't an AK forty seven,
Speaker 1: it was the American equivalent them sixteen anti personnel high firepower,
Speaker 1: highly illegal in Australia for ordinary shooters. He was bringing
Speaker 1: it back from North America, I think it was, and
Speaker 1: he got angry when customs confiscated in Darwin. Like too
Speaker 1: many thugs the world over, Jeff Clark posed as a
Speaker 1: freedom fighter, but in truth he was a bandit. As
Speaker 1: the years went on, it appeared that Jeff Clark's fingerprints
Speaker 1: appeared in things other than rape cases. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, it was finally decided by a civil court
Speaker 1: a civil court in an action brought by one of
Speaker 1: his victims Carol Stingle, who was very a simple woman
Speaker 1: that I really liked and got on well with. She
Speaker 1: bravely brought a civil action against Clark, suing him for
Speaker 1: the pack rape of her when she was a teenager.
Speaker 1: That Clark and others other people that he led had
Speaker 1: all raped her, she said, And in fact the civil
Speaker 1: court upheld her action and said that she had been raped,
Speaker 1: and she was awarded a sum of money which Clark
Speaker 1: was meant to pay her. Clark claimed at the time that,
Speaker 1: you know, he was a victim of all sorts of
Speaker 1: terrible things. He was the victim of entrench racism. And
Speaker 1: where would he get the sort of money. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a lot of money either, he said, you know, where
Speaker 1: would he get the sort of money to pay out
Speaker 1: that this alleged victim, And so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: He forgot conveniently that even at that stage he owned
Speaker 1: various properties, either in his own name or in the
Speaker 1: names of proxies, and so there was no doubt had
Speaker 1: he wanted to put his hand on money, he could,
Speaker 1: And indeed, in subsequent years he did put his hand
Speaker 1: on quite a lot of money. He put his hand
Speaker 1: on money that wasn't actually his. He put his hands
Speaker 1: on money that belonged to various aboriginal bodies that he
Speaker 1: had access to. Despite the fact that he was notionally
Speaker 1: in disgrace, through his connections his family, his very dominant family,
Speaker 1: he was able to exert control, actual control or proxy
Speaker 1: control over aboriginal bodies that had access to taxpayers money.
Speaker 1: And so over the years Jeff Clark and one of
Speaker 1: his sons at least was able to and actually his
Speaker 1: wife was charged with some of these offenses, but the
Speaker 1: charges against so were later dropped. I note I suspect
Speaker 1: because it was felt that she might have been acting
Speaker 1: under his influence and perhaps it was better to stick
Speaker 1: with charges against him and one of their sons, who
Speaker 1: was a pretty smart cookie. These are not ignorant people.
Speaker 1: These are pretty well educated, pretty sharp blokes. They systematically
Speaker 1: roughted these aboriginal bodies of money, and in the end
Speaker 1: it turns out that Jeff Clark owns a royal flush
Speaker 1: of properties. He owns either four or five properties, most
Speaker 1: of them in Victoria, but one not at Fitzroy Crossing
Speaker 1: in the Northern Territory. They are worth a considerable sum,
Speaker 1: particularly one at Hall's gap, I believe, and the blocks
Speaker 1: of land there and all sorts of things. Came a
Speaker 1: time when a vary astute and hard working policeman, Detective
Speaker 1: Inspector Mark Collins, decided to look deeply into Jeff Clark
Speaker 1: and the Clark family's affairs. And as I had in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, a decade later or thereabouts, Detective
Speaker 1: Inspector Collins found that the more he looked, the more
Speaker 1: he found. To make a long story short, over a
Speaker 1: number of years, he and other investigators, quite sophisticated fraud investigators,
Speaker 1: were able to build a case against Jeff Clark and
Speaker 1: at least one of his sons, if not other people, which,
Speaker 1: to put it simply, showed that they'd been involved in roots,
Speaker 1: multiple roots, lots and lots of roots, which added up
Speaker 1: to something like a million dollars total. And the result
Speaker 1: of this was that Clark and at least one of
Speaker 1: his sons, Jeremy, were charged with all these offenses, and
Speaker 1: they went to court and went through trials which were
Speaker 1: actually suppressed. These were secret court cases in order to
Speaker 1: preserve something. The law decided that as happens in Victoria,
Speaker 1: we have in this state Victoria, more than double the
Speaker 1: number of cases suppressed pro rather than any other state.
Speaker 1: We're very good at it here, and almost anybody can
Speaker 1: get something suppressed if they wish, and Jeff Clark clearly
Speaker 1: wished to get his suppressed, and they were, and there
Speaker 1: was a number of trials suppressed, and therefore the general
Speaker 1: public knew nothing about them, apart from an initial flurry
Speaker 1: of low level publicity about charges being lone. And so
Speaker 1: this year twenty twenty four, we've seen those charges go
Speaker 1: through the system and Clark actually be convicted and it's
Speaker 1: the suppressions have been lifted, and now we can all
Speaker 1: find out as we have that convicted, over it something
Speaker 1: like a million dollars worth of roots and of perjury.
Speaker 1: They're saying that Jeff Clark told porkies that is untrue,
Speaker 1: that is lies under oath, that he put the Bible
Speaker 1: or whatever he raised in his right hand and swore
Speaker 1: to tell the truth, and he did not do so.
Speaker 1: Now I think it's allowable for fair opinion commentary here
Speaker 1: that a judge sometimes in the near future will decide
Speaker 1: what penalty Jeff Clark should suffer for these crimes. And
Speaker 1: that's fair enough for a judge to have that call.
Speaker 1: But I think it's fair to say that judges take
Speaker 1: a dim view of two things. One is where people
Speaker 1: in positions of trust abuse that trust and steal the
Speaker 1: money or the goods or the property of the poorer
Speaker 1: people around them, which is what he did. And judges
Speaker 1: also take a very dim view of perjury, because people
Speaker 1: who perjure themselves are willing to purgure themselves undermine our
Speaker 1: entire system of the rule of law. If we don't
Speaker 1: have a very tough anti perjury stance, it means that
Speaker 1: people will routinely get up in court and tell lies,
Speaker 1: and at this stage of the game, very few people
Speaker 1: are willing to get up in court and tell lies
Speaker 1: under oath. I think some police are pretty good at
Speaker 1: it in the past. The odd lawyer might give it
Speaker 1: a bit of a tickle if they're willing, but I
Speaker 1: don't think the general public's very good at it or
Speaker 1: keen on it. Some old time crooks might have memory
Speaker 1: lapses under a cross examination, but there's no doubt that
Speaker 1: Jeff Clark was charged with perjury and he's been convicted
Speaker 1: of it, and a judge at some point is going
Speaker 1: to hand down a sentence, and if there is any
Speaker 1: fairness in the world, he will end up behind bars,
Speaker 1: even though he is seventy two years old. There are
Speaker 1: very few mitigating circumstances here. This is an intelligent man,
Speaker 1: clearly a capable man, clearly a personally robust, tough man. Obviously,
Speaker 1: all those things mean that Jeff Clark is not actually
Speaker 1: a victim. Jeff Clark is a perpetrator. Jeff Clark is
Speaker 1: not a sheep. Jeff Clerk is a wolf or perhaps
Speaker 1: a dinger. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a
Speaker 1: Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia is Johnty Burton.
Speaker 1: For my columns, features and more, go to Haroldson dot
Speaker 1: com dot au, forward slash Andrew rule one word. For
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