The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  His measurements were taken. In death, height is measured as length.

  He had a little coronary artery atheroscolerosis, some lung damage from smoking. Some THC in his bloodstream.

  He had grazed the left side of his forehead as he fell under the final shot, as well as his knee.

  Turnbull had a .22, which fires small bullets. The first shot went through the side of Turner’s jaw, out the back of his neck. The second hit his chest, up near his shoulder. The third didn’t penetrate his body, only grazed his skin. Then Turnbull fired a bullet that lacerated Turner’s aorta. He bled out into his chest. Four litres of blood.

  A WEEK AFTER THE killing, Robert Strange was at Tamworth police station, flicking through images of twenty men, one of whom was Ian Turnbull. He signed the image of Turnbull, formally identifying the man who’d raised the gun and killed his colleague. In the black-and-white mugshot Turnbull’s face is grained and marmoreal, mouth steady, eyes steady, staring straight out. Strange had already been questioned about Turnbull’s demeanour during the killing. He was ‘focused and determined, in all honesty’, Strange said. ‘He understood everything I said to him and dismissed everything I said to him.’

  Meanwhile, Detective McCarthy drove to Turner’s office in Tamworth. It had been locked since his death. McCarthy got Arthur Snook to open it; he took Turner’s compliance notebooks, an external hard drive, a folder containing Turner’s affidavit about Turnbull’s threat on his life. He already knew about the death threat. Turner had mentioned it to Strange: ‘Glen told me on at least one occasion, as he had a habit of repeating himself. It was common for Glen to tell me a story he had already told me previously like it was the first time he told it.’

  Similarly, Robert Strange would be condemned to repeat the story of Glen’s death over and over. He told it to the police on the night of the murder; he told it to the detectives at Talga Lane; he would tell it in the witness box. It was the longest story he’d ever tell.

  ALISON MCKENZIE COULD NOT see her husband’s body until ten days after he died. It took that long for his body to be released. ‘Ten days of wondering where he was, what was happening to him and what would he look like when I saw him,’ she said. She spent the time imagining his death, without her there for comfort; his body, alone in the dark. ‘This is something that haunts me to this day,’ she would one day tell a court. ‘I cannot bear the thought of him being out there in the cold by himself. I should have been there to hold him.’

  During that period of intense grief, she and Pearce lay awake each night, crying and comforting Jack and Alexandra. They worried about funeral costs. They made list after list of things to be done. The two would drive into Tamworth for appointments. McKenzie suppressed her tears before the children, but wept all the way in the car.

  The day they learned that Glen was killed not with one clean shot but several, they collapsed. He had been stalked for forty long minutes, he had pleaded for his life as he crouched behind his work vehicle. They fell to the floor, clutching each other.

  Glen Turner was cremated at a small service, attended by his friends and family. The pathologist had dissected his jaw, where Turnbull’s bullet had hit him. For the funeral service his face was covered with wattle leaves, to hide the injury.

  Alexandra needed cremation explained to her.

  The next day there was a memorial service. Hundreds came. Stories were recounted. Glen had been president of the primary-school parents and citizens association, as well as volunteering at the school canteen and starting up a scheme with native gardens. He coached kids in touch rugby. Alison and the children planted a jacaranda in their garden, in front of friends, in his memory. Watered it with Turner’s own home brew.

  Jack Turner cried in his bed that night. ‘But mummy,’ he mourned, ‘I’m only nine.’

  IAN TURNBULL HAD TOILED on the bare fields of ‘Colorado’ for weeks. Now he had the long days of incarceration to sit and rest, and contemplate his deeds.

  The traditional legal definition of crime is ‘the combination of a harmful act with a guilty mind’. Out on the land, in those bare paddocks, farmers might see no ‘crime’ even when a law has actually been broken. Or a grievance can occur, beyond the capacity of any lawyer to articulate.

  Country communities talk. Shame is their instrument. ‘A quiet word’ or ‘keeping the peace’ is preferable to bringing in the authorities. A little gossip is judiciously applied to send a message. Or the traditional Australian indulgence of a whinge behind someone’s back, and a compensatory shrug that you don’t always do right yourself.

  Sometimes, silence descends. The wry nod and momentary hush at the pub counter. The raised eyebrow and shrug; the turning away. And if pushed for a response: ‘I couldn’t possibly say’, ‘I’d rather not comment’, or ‘Oh, well, you know.’

  In Croppa Creek, they didn’t speak of clearing. The white utes and four-wheel drives drove up all day long to the little general store for bacon-and-egg rolls and toasted sandwiches, clustered in the golf club car park in the evening, parked along the road at the school fete on the weekend. The men got out of their vehicles, washed clean of twigs and dirt, of blood from their scratches and tractor diesel oil, of smoke from burning stacks. They nodded and drank and muttered together. They talked about grain and crops and drought. The women spoke of drought and school and taxes and their husbands’ moods. But few spoke of the clearing.

  Now they had to learn how to do it, in their familiar sitting rooms and club foyer, the courtyard of the general store, from ute window to ute window stopped in the road. To speak of the death of Glen Turner. To parse the distinction between guilt, the acknowledgement of a true accusation, and guilt, the inhabiting of remorse. How might they speak of the guilt of Ian Turnbull, who had been one of them, sitting in these same rooms, and now taken far away?

  Years later, these people were still unable to talk of it. You have to understand, they pleaded. It’s too painful. It is just too difficult.

  Ian Turnbull never pleaded innocent to any of the charges brought against him: not for the illegal land clearing, not for the killing of Glen Turner. He never denied he’d done those things, but he couldn’t say he was guilty of crimes, either. He had his reasons. He wouldn’t concede that he knew his acts were wrong. He’d been pushed into them. He was the victim; he’d been harassed.

  Turnbull couldn’t imagine himself culpable. It was the rest of the world who hadn’t understood.

  IN THE WEEK AFTER he raised a gun to Glen Turner, Ian Turnbull was moved to the recently refurbished Cessnock Correctional Centre, north of Sydney, among 750 other inmates either on remand or serving sentences. His cell was shiny and white. Its chair and bed were fixed, glossy, the walls laboratorial. Outside the thick-walled, heavily surveilled building, thousands of native seedlings had been planted for some softening green.

  Turnbull was in custody there on 5 August when his lawyers walked into Moree Courthouse to announce that the family would offer more than $5 million for bail. His barrister that day, Hament Dhanji SC, offered a ten-point proposal for Turnbull’s bail. The defendant could stay with relatives at secluded Castle Cove on Sydney’s North Shore, the lawyer said, and could appear daily at Mosman Police Station.

  Five million dollars was the amount that Grant Turnbull had said in the Land and Environment Court would bankrupt the family.

  Magistrate Darryl Pearce refused bail. The crime was serious, the likelihood that the defendant would, if convicted, serve out the rest of his life for murder. Turnbull was charged, additionally, with the detaining for advantage of Robert Strange. He peered down the monitor of the video link from Cessnock, but said nothing.

  THE DAY BEFORE TURNBULL’S bail application, Phil Spark had taken a journalist down County Boundary Road. There was a large yellow dozer, with a wide-toothed blade at the back to scrape up trunks, trundling in the soil, kicking up dust below the blue winter sky. The clearing was finishing up on ‘Colorado’. The journalist took photos. In the foreg
round, short, fresh green crops; in the background, a duller smudge, the native vegetation. The dozer went around and around.

  12

  The first Chief Judge of the Land and Environment Court of NSW, Justice Jim McLelland, described the role of the Court as being to ‘balance the aspirations of those who wished to turn Pitt Street into a rainforest and those who wished to turn a rainforest into an industrial estate’.

  —Nicola Pain and Sarah Wright, ‘The Rise of Environmental Law in New South Wales and Federally’, 2003

  They are all thinking of you.

  They hope you are okay.

  Keep strong and do your prison exercises.

  I hope he’s warm and he has something to eat.

  Please tell Ian to stay strong.

  Yes, I’ve been telling them that all the family’s strength is funnelling through me to Ian.

  I’ve received 40 letters, it’s all just support.

  We just want you to know that your family have our support.

  You look after that man, he’s a special person to me.

  If there is anything I can do to help, I’m only too willing.

  In Moree Courthouse, preparations began for the trial for Glen Turner’s death. There was discussion about whether a fair trial could be held in Moree, given the high public feeling in the district.

  As long as you [are] keeping strong there’s people behind you.

  They think of you every day.

  They’ll send you a birthday card.

  You keep strong and keep well.

  I saw two people in town and they both wanted to know if they can write to you.

  Saw them in the street and they shook my hand and they said they have been thinking of you.

  She said Mum wants to ring you but she’s afraid she’ll cry.

  She said we think of Ian every day.

  He’s thinking of you.

  He just wanted to know how you were.

  Sylvester Joseph quoted transcripts from phone calls Turnbull received in prison, as well as the encounters Robeena reported as the rural community reacted to the news. They were, he said, simple messages of ‘general concern about his health and welfare in custody at eighty-one years of age and reflects their feeling that the shooting was and remains an inexplicable event, in light of Mr Turnbull’s age and prior good character’.

  ‘Give Ian our best, tell him we’re thinking of him and we’re praying for him,’ and he gave me a hug and got emotional.

  Would you please give Ian our love.

  They just want to give their best to you and tell you their [sic] thinking of you.

  IT WAS ONLY TWO days after Glen Turner was killed that the New South Wales Land and Environment Court gave the final directions for Grant, Cory and Donna to remediate their blocks. Travelling to court in Sydney, they were all still in shock. The directions issued to Grant ran to twenty-nine pages, many of them blank, for Grant to fill in details of weeds removed, seedlings planted, native vegetation remaining. They would remain blank, as the Turnbull family turned its energies to protecting their patriarch.

  MEANWHILE, THE MURDER OF Glen Turner and the land-clearing saga was splashed across the news. Both The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald ran major features on 31 July. Reporters had flown into Dubbo and Brisbane and clambered into hire cars, got talking to locals. Moree’s wealth was remarked on, the quiet aristocracy of land developers up there in the Golden Triangle, and its welter of more agitated citizens eager to comment on Turnbull’s deed.

  The small community where Turner died was, a Croppa Creek citizen told a journalist, ‘ripped apart’ by the crime. ‘We just want some good to come of it. We didn’t know him very well, but he’d been in this district on and off for some time and everyone would have known of Glen.’

  Bec Morrissy, who was involved in the local Landcare group, began a fund to help Turner’s family. ‘He has done different work with different landholders in the area,’ she was quoted saying, ‘but it’s really a case of the Croppa Creek community being shocked at what’s happened in their own backyard and really wanting to rally and help Glen’s family.’

  The New South Wales environment minister, Rob Stokes, near tears, offered his sympathies to Turner’s family and the OEH in parliament, saying, ‘Glen was clearly a beautiful man who led a beautiful life and leaves a beautiful family and legacy. We thank him for his service, we grieve his loss.’ Flags, he added, would fly at half-mast on all department buildings that weekend. Along with OEH boss Terry Bailey, he would later hand-deliver a book of work colleagues’ memories of Turner to his parents in Port Macquarie.

  Meanwhile, the NSW Farmers Association and the deputy mayor of Tamworth expressed sentiments of sympathy. Kevin Humphries put out a statement offering his condolences. ‘This is a terrible tragedy,’ he wrote. ‘It is distressing to think there are young children who will grow up without a father after this incident, and I hope the community will rally around them during this difficult time. This is a devastating and traumatic time for many people.’

  Someone else in Croppa Creek spoke to the media anonymously:

  That millisecond has affected so many people. It’s total sadness. I’ve known the family for a long time and we’re good friends. I just can’t put the jigsaw together. It’s beyond belief. The environmental laws didn’t cause this. Road laws don’t cause accidents. I feel so sorry for him and his family, but there’s no reason for it to have happened. People have to respect the law … There is just so much pain on both sides, for everyone involved, for those that knew them or didn’t.

  Others emphasised the pressures Turner had personified, even as they condemned the killing. What could you expect, they said. A terrible business. They pushed him too far.

  The Telegraph interviewed Moree Plains Shire mayor Katrina Humphries. She was troubled by the case – she took pride in Moree and its prosperity, its local advantages and its recent development; it was she who’d obtained the glossy granite paving for the centre of town. Humphries is hands-on in the district, accessible to all from her fish-and-chip shop in the Moree main street. ‘Ian is a well-known and respected member of the community,’ she told the paper. ‘He has been a part of the community forever. I’m horrified that things have broken down so badly.’

  As mayor, Humphries had to speak for both the landholders who were friends with the Turnbulls and the individuals sharing their distress at the violence. ‘Violence was always going to happen,’ she said. ‘I thought it would happen over coal or gas or water … the frustration is so great but obviously to have an outcome like this is so horrible. What are we doing as communities, as Australians, what are we doing that a tragedy like this happens through absolute frustration?’

  She spoke of the ‘toxic well of anger’ between government, miners, farmers and environmentalists. Native vegetation was a hot-button issue, as was coal-seam gas, water rights and the whole concept of government regulation on private property. Humphries was trying to reflect the concerns of her constituents, but her words sounded partisan, as Turnbull supporters pushed the image of a hounded man – as The Daily Telegraph put it in a headline, ‘pushed to despair’ by a ‘feud’ that ‘consumed a hardworking man of the land’. Everyone now recalled radio broadcaster Alan Jones having fulminated, back in 2010, that supposedly oppressive enforcement of the Native Vegetation Act 2003 was ‘the kind of behaviour that leads people to murder’.

  Within days of raising his gun, Turnbull was a martyr. Suffering rose around his reputation like vapour. He was harried, persecuted; an elderly man relentlessly pursued, prosecuted and broken by government authorities who spied on him with surveillance and came onto his property constantly, sometimes with no warning. He’d been provoked into the act. Members of the Turnbull family gave interviews, under condition of not being specifically named, about how ‘Dad’, in between collecting trampolines for school fetes and delivering Meals on Wheels, had been driven to the brink of despair.

  Quickly, the idea
circulated that Turner had been trespassing on ‘Colorado’ when accosted; that he’d been in the process of serving yet another prosecution notice to the family in an unannounced visit. It took a week before Fairfax papers got confirmation from the Moree police that neither of these rumours was true.

  Others pushed for a more complete picture of what had happened. ‘It makes us look like rednecks,’ a Moree businessowner told Sydney Morning Herald journalist Rick Fenely. That was the apprehension he was hearing voiced by customers in his cafe. ‘We understand the Native Vegetation Act can be harsh, but I haven’t spoken to anyone today who thought it was inevitably going to lead to violence.’

  Fenely went to Humphries for comment. ‘No one, but no one,’ she said to him, ‘is condoning what’s happened, but my goal is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We can’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend there isn’t a problem because there bloody is. I’m fed up to the back teeth with politicians who won’t stand up and talk about this … We’ve all got some blood on our hands. We’ve all known this has been an issue for quite some time, and it’s not been addressed.’

  As the coverage gained momentum, politicians, state and federal, hastened to explain the scenario. ‘It’s a tragic event that I think has been brought about by bad legislation,’ Coffs Harbour MP Andrew Fraser told The Daily Telegraph’s sympathetic Ben Pike, who, despite lamenting the loneliness of Talga Lane as a place to die, added that the law required ‘strict and cumbersome consents’. The Nationals state leader, Andrew Stoner, was eager to use the moment to prise apart New South Wales’ land-clearing laws, ‘enforced by Big-Brother-style satellites’, as Pike put it. Federal minister for agriculture and prominent Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce characteristically appealed for ‘commonsense’ justice for ordinary individuals enduring the authority of the state – overlooking the fact that he himself embodied such authority. ‘You have this crazy situation where you don’t own the vegetation on your land, the state government does,’ he said, ‘and many people have had enough.’