Underbelly 6 Read online

  It happened on Australia Day, 2001. Clark, his white adviser and about a dozen Aboriginal people were flying back to Darwin from the Tiwi Islands when the door of their Cessna 402 flew open.

  Clark, once a feared football enforcer and streetfighter, wasn’t sitting close enough to the door to show the leadership qualities that might be expected of an ATSIC chairman. It was his adviser, Brian Johnstone, a quiet former journalist, who leant out into the slipstream and pulled the door shut.

  Clark, shaken and characteristically angry, later praised Johnstone’s bravery and demanded better air safety standards in remote areas. As aviation mishaps go, it was unnerving rather than dangerous. All the more so because it happened the day after another incident, when the engine on Clark’s chartered aircraft caught fire.

  What neither Clark nor his minders knew was that the real danger to the chairman was far below, in the steamy heat of Darwin. There, on the outskirts of the city, lived a woman who had finally decided to tell her story.

  KATE Healey is her real name. She is almost middle-aged now, with grey-streaked hair. In mid-2001 she shared a cyclone-proof bungalow on the rural outskirts of Darwin with her partner and a jumble of children, dogs, cats and a white cockatoo.

  Healey is shy and speaks quietly. In April, 1984, an Age reporter persuaded her to take part in a story on home birthing, when she had her second child in an outer Melbourne suburb. The reporter wrote about the birth, but was asked not to identify the suburb, the woman’s surname, or her doctor. But, 17 years on, Healey has another story, one in stark contrast to the joys of a successful birth. This time, she is prepared to use her surname as a matter of principle, even though it identifies her as a rape victim.

  She was only 18 when it happened, and time hasn’t dulled the anger this slender, softly spoken woman has carried for 24 years.

  For most of that time she hid it from almost everyone, a secret that explained her moods and her decision to move as far from western Victoria as possible. But when she saw television coverage of a court case late in 2000, in which Clark was accused of raping a teenage girl in 1981, it all came back to her. In that case, a magistrate at Warrnambool found there was not enough evidence to send Clark for trial.

  When a cousin called to ask if Healey, too, would make her story public, she said she would.

  On her mother’s side, Healey’s family were long-time farmers on Victoria’s west coast. As she grew up, her parents moved from Warrnambool to Mount Gambier and back to Port Fairy. She spent her last three years of secondary school at a Catholic school in Mount Gambier, one as a boarder. At the end of 1976, she moved to Port Fairy to be with her parents, who were by then running a caravan park there. Healey had grown up knowing most of the Aboriginal families from the Framlingham reserve and around Warrnambool. She knew Geoff Clark by sight and reputation.

  That year, she had a casual relationship with a young fisherman who shared a rented farmhouse with his mates a few kilometres out of town. One night early in the new year of 1977, Healey and others gathered at the Tennyson Hotel, known locally as Hearn’s Pub. There were tourists in town and, as the beer flowed, a fight broke out in the beer garden. The locals, mostly fishermen, won the fight. They celebrated by retiring to the old farmhouse – ‘rats in the ceiling, possums on the roof, 30 bucks a week,’ Healey recalls wryly – to have a party.

  Healey was vaguely aware that Geoff Clark was home from Perth (where he played football) for Christmas.

  She could not later recall seeing him at either the hotel or the party. As a footballer and fighter of note, Clark was well-known in Port Fairy.

  The party ended late. Healey stayed at the farmhouse. Her boyfriend got up at dawn to go fishing. She didn’t know who was left in the house, if anyone. She was dozing, lying on her stomach, when woken by a man coming into the bedroom.

  Before she was properly awake he pinned her down. He was strong and he was rough, putting one hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream and another around her throat. She says that he ordered her to ‘shut up’, jerked her head back, forced her legs apart with his knees and raped her from behind.

  Afterwards, he stood up and dressed himself and she saw him silhouetted in the light from the kitchen. As soon as he left the room the shaking girl wrapped herself in a sheet and ran through the kitchen into the hall, screaming for help. In a bedroom at the other end of the house she woke a man she then knew only as ‘Salty’.

  She remembers him taking her to the kitchen and trying to comfort her. As they stood there – she sobbing, he embarrassed – her attacker stepped through the back door into the kitchen, walked into Healey’s bedroom and picked up his shoes. They both recognised him. It was Geoff Clark.

  Healey remembers that he pointed at her, laughed and said something derogatory. ‘Salty’ stepped in front of her protectively, although they all knew he couldn’t stop Clark if he turned nasty. But Clark left by the back door and drove away. He left behind a woman who tried to forget, but who has never forgiven him.

  The man known as ‘Salty’ did not want his name published. He still had friends and relatives in the district and, like many who live there, they are nervous about Clark and his associates. ‘Salty’ knew he would be easily disparaged as a witness in court because of the fact that he suffered head injuries – and subsequent mental problems – after a motorcycle accident within days of the rape. But he said he clearly remembered the events of that morning, that they had worried him half a lifetime, and he wanted to tell the truth about what happened. His family members say that his memory of detail from the distant past was better than most people’s, but that they didn’t want him involved in anything against Clark because they fear reprisals.

  He had been living at the farmhouse in Toolong Road for a few months when the rape happened. ‘It was a rundown weatherboard place with cypress trees along one side, two bedrooms at the front and another at the back near the kitchen. At the time I had a white 1964 Falcon station wagon and a 1970 Yamaha 650 motorbike.

  ‘I think the rape was on the morning of Thursday, January 6. The night before there were a few people around, drinking and probably smoking dope. I went to bed early, while the others were still up. Before I went to sleep I heard this girl ask if she could sleep over. I think Paul Terjeson (also known as ‘Percy Tyson’) said she could stay in his room.

  ‘Early next morning, around daylight, I heard a car pull up outside. I didn’t hear any voices. Someone came to the front door, next to the bedroom where I was sleeping. I heard heavy, male footsteps go down the hallway to the bedroom at the back of the house. Then I heard a female voice say, “G’day. What are you doing?” It sounded as if she knew who it was.

  ‘Then she started screaming out: “Help! Rape! Help!” several times. Because I was the furtherest away I expected others to get up and help her. I soon found out there was no one else there. For some reason I couldn’t work out, they’d all gone.

  ‘I heard lighter footsteps come up to my room. It was the girl from the night before. She was slender and tall with dark hair. She said she’d just been raped. She said: “He’s down here.”

  ‘I went down and had a look. There was a bloke in the bathroom with his back to me. It looked like he was washing his dick. He did up his zip and turned around. It was Geoff Clark. I wasn’t going to fight him. I’d seen him fight at the Noorat Show in Jimmy Sharman’s boxing tent. I told her to tell the police and I’d back her up.’

  Two days later, ‘Salty’ had the motorcycle accident that left him in a coma for several days. He said years later he believed he spoke to two local policemen about the rape while he was recovering in hospital, but there is no record to confirm that he did and he conceded he might be mistaken.

  Kate Healey didn’t go to the police, either. She got angry, she says, but she didn’t get even. She took out her anger on men for years afterwards. Her gentle voice belies the bitter words. ‘I chewed them up and spat them out. It (being raped) gave me a hard attitude – if tha
t’s how a man could treat a woman then I would use men the same way. But the fear didn’t go away. I couldn’t even go to a funeral if I knew Geoff Clark would be there.

  ‘When I see him on the news now, him and John Howard together, I think, “Drop dead.” I couldn’t care less what happens to him when people know what he’s done. What goes around comes around.’

  Why didn’t she report it? For the same reason few of her contemporaries reported rapes – the same reason many women still don’t report sex offences, she says. They are gagged by shame and fear. Ashamed to admit what has happened because of the cruel double standard that blames the victim for the crime. And afraid of reprisals.

  The fear is so strong that Healey and three other women who have told their stories have done so only because they have moved a long way from Warrnambool.

  For years Healey also wanted to protect her family. But her parents also moved far away, and the death of her 92-year-old grandmother – ‘the most important person in my life’ – cut her last tie with her home town. She hadn’t wanted to distress the old lady by admitting she’d been raped by a man related to a family friend, an Aboriginal elder called Banjo Clarke, a regular visitor to the Healeys when Kate was growing up.

  There were other reasons for her long silence.

  Around the time Healey was assaulted, another local girl was abducted and raped; she had been dragged through barbed wire as she tried to escape, and her arm was broken, but the men responsible were not convicted.

  Healey, at 18, was frightened not only of reprisals but of a court hearing in which the defence counsel would put her on trial. She came from a devout Catholic family and she felt that to face a court would be like being raped twice.

  Instead, she kept it inside. I spent too long beating myself up about it. I still think about it now.’

  She describes an undercurrent of fear. Watch out for Geoff Clark’s crew, was the message.

  ‘Some of them were from Framlingham, some from Melbourne,’ she says, ‘but Geoff was the rooster.’

  IF a man is judged not just by how far he gets, but from where he starts, then Geoff Wayne Clark has come further than most. The journey that landed Clark the most powerful role in Australian black politics did not start in the bush but on the streets of Fitzroy, and the early influence on his life was not Aboriginal spirituality, but European vice. As a child, his most obvious tribal connection was not the distant one with his great grandmothers’ ancestors, but with an inner-suburban gangland that had more in common with the slums of Glasgow and London’s East End.

  Clark’s father was a Scottish-born criminal known on the Melbourne waterfront as Geoff Macintosh. An associate of those who ran the notorious Painters and Dockers’ Union at the height of an underworld war in which dozens of men vanished, presumed murdered, Macintosh was an active thief in the 1950s and 1960s, and served time in Pentridge Prison.

  A big, ruddy-faced man, with the strawberry blond hair inherited by his son, ‘Ginger’ Macintosh was well-liked by other criminals and survived to die of natural causes in middle age in an era when many didn’t.

  The once-feared gunman Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley recalls Clark’s father as a ‘quiet bloke who minded his own business’. Such judgments are relative. Coming from Longley, it meant that although Macintosh was known to carry a pistol in his car glove box, he was less likely to use it than some painters and dockers.

  Macintosh worked on the docks at a time when practices such as ‘ghosting’ were rife. This was organised fraud whereby criminals who turned up only on paydays were drawing full wages, and where bogus identities created ‘ghosts’ on the payroll so that one man (or gang) could steal several wages. Whether Macintosh played any part in this racket is hard to know, but he reputedly had enough influence to get his teenage son, Geoff junior, a job on the docks for a while.

  Clark took his surname from his mother, Maisie Lorna Clark, grand-daughter of a white New Zealander, William Clark, who had married Georgina Winter, a Gunditjmara Aboriginal woman from Lake Condah, at St Stephen’s church in Portland in April, 1905.

  William and Georgina’s son, Bert Clark, had married a woman from the Framlingham mission, near Warrnambool. This was Alice Clarke, sister of Henry ‘Banjo’ Clarke, and daughter of Norman Clarke and Mary Maud Edwards, who was descended from the Yorta Yorta clan. Marriage shortened Alice’s surname by one letter and explains the confusing fact that the Clarks are related to the Clarkes, a relationship that has not prevented a simmering feud between the two clans over the past decade.

  Soon after leaving primary school, the teenage Maisie Clark gravitated to the bright lights of Fitzroy, where she became well-known on the streets. She gave birth to the boy she called Geoffrey, after his father, at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Carlton on August 22, 1952. She also had two daughters to different men.

  The baby’s great-uncle, Banjo Clarke, an Aboriginal elder respected in both white and black communities, later spoke candidly of how the young Geoff Clark had been rescued from a sordid life on the Fitzroy streets. Banjo Clarke didn’t think he could do much to influence his wayward niece, Maisie, but the story goes that he sent for her son when the boy was of school age.

  Geoff arrived on the train to be raised at Framlingham by his grandmother, Alice. But, Banjo Clarke was to suggest much later, it was already too late to alter a character affected by the brutal realities of the Melbourne slums. Forty years later, after the two had become implacable enemies, the old man often said that instead of bringing the young Geoff Clark to Framlingham on the train, ‘I wish we’d thrown him off it.’

  Banjo Clarke died in March, 2000. The picture painted by his family and friends is that he died broken-hearted and angry because of the treatment he had suffered at the hands of Geoff Clark, Clark’s wife, Trudy Lear, their oldest son, Jeremy, and a group of followers easily recognised because they live in new houses at what Clark boasts is the ‘Paris end’ of the Framlingham settlement.

  Grass-roots Aboriginal politics is a labyrinth of shifting allegiances and family loyalties. Clark himself has dismissed the feud with Banjo Clarke’s family as ‘typical blackfella stuff’, but Banjo’s daughter, Bernice, and her brother, Lenny, cite a long list of grievances. The origins of the feud might be unclear, but its results are not. An outsider swiftly gets an impression that, on his way to the top, Clark has turned Framlingham and the trust that runs it into something like a personal fiefdom, that the losers in this arrangement are Banjo Clarke’s family and friends, and that they resent him.

  It’s a point not lost on Clark himself. When he walked free from court after rape charges against him were dismissed late in 2000 he was quick to say he had a ‘lot of enemies’ and that attacks on him were politically motivated.

  HE was right about having enemies. There have been stories about Geoff Clark for years. As he has grown more powerful, straddling the scattered factions of black politics, the gossip has spread from his home base in western Victoria to a wider audience.

  It wasn’t until June, 2000, that the gossip tipped the scales and became public. It happened because Clark’s cousin Joanne McGuinness had told a sexual assault counsellor about an incident she’d bottled up for nearly 20 years. McGuinness grew up at Framlingham and has known Clark all her life. She left the ‘mission’ in 1982, not long after an assault that she says was the underlying reason that she drank and smoked heavily for years.

  For a while, she worked at the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service in Fitzroy, helping midwives. There she met a woman who was an Aboriginal liaison officer at the Royal Women’s Hospital.

  ‘One day last April I said to her, “I need help here. What’s wrong with me?”,’ McGuinness said, reliving the moment she decided to press the charges that have changed her life.

  Joanne McGuinness’s year of living dangerously began when she was referred to a sexual assault clinic in Carlton. There, she told her story to a counsellor and, later, to the police.

  It begins on a summ
er night, February 14, 1981, when McGuinness was 16. McGuinness and another girl she knew as ‘Angie’ had gone to the Warrnambool speedway together. There they saw Geoff Clark, then aged 28, with two Aboriginal men, Frankie Abrahams and David Herbert ‘Mad Charlie’ Clark.

  (‘Charlie’ Clark, then his cousin Geoff’s constant companion, was a known criminal with a history of theft and violence. Only five weeks earlier he had been arrested and bailed with two others, Gregory Douglas Edwards and Peter Alexander Zabadeal, for the pack rape and buggery of a woman who had been asleep in a camper van parked in a Warrnambool street. The three men, all known to Geoff Clark, were subsequently convicted and jailed.)

  According to Joanne McGuinness, Geoff and Charlie Clark and Abrahams were drinking whisky from a shared bottle. She said Geoff Clark offered them the bottle and she and Angie had ‘just a few sips’.

  Then, she said, the two girls went their own way and didn’t see the men again until later. But when they left the speedway late that night the men offered them a lift. It was Abrahams’ wife’s car, but Geoff Clark was driving. What stuck in McGuinness’s mind later was that ‘there was no conversation whatsoever in the car, it was really quiet’.

  Clark drove towards Logan’s Beach where, in daytime in winter, people go to watch whales. After midnight in summer they go there for other reasons. McGuinness says she was puzzled by the detour, but said nothing. As soon as Clark stopped the car, Angie got out with ‘Charlie’ Clark and went for a walk. Joanne McGuinness assumed that she and the others would wait in the car.

  ‘I didn’t feel strange or frightened or anything (because) they were my cousins,’ she stated later. ‘My door was open and I was just sitting there. That’s when Geoff … came around to where I was. It was just like he snapped. I had my feet out of the door and on the ground and I was sitting there. Geoff grabbed me by the tops of my arms … and just pulled me out of the car. He didn’t say nothing to me … He threw me down on the ground … That’s when I started kicking him and that … I was screaming at Geoff and kicking at his legs. When he forced my jeans off all I remember is him standing at my feet and pulling me jeans off from the bottom … I think my bloomers came off when he pulled my jeans off.’