by Kate Holden
‘Anything that reduces that ownership is an affront’: In 2009, a sad saga commenced in southern New South Wales when grazier Peter Spencer claimed he was refused permission to clear native vegetation on his property and wasn’t compensated. His 52-day hunger strike up a pole drew national attention. He was the star attraction at a 2000-strong rally in Canberra, attended by Alan Jones and Tony Abbott, against the Rudd government’s alleged suppression of property rights, despite the situation being a state matter and Spencer’s family suggesting his issues had deeper origins. His grievance, however disordered, was evidently shared by others.
‘… a pushing and shoving over boundaries …’: Bartel & Graham.
‘Property Rights Australia is an illustrative Australian lobby group …’: See www.propertyrightsaustralia.org.au
‘In times of natural disaster …’: In 2019, for example, Gwydir Shire Council hosted family gatherings with drought assistance services for farmers in Warialda, North Star and Croppa Creek, all within the wealthy Golden Triangle.
“I’m an old man …”: R v Turnbull (No. 26), 2016.
“just shook his head”: Holden, ‘Notes on Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
‘Financial penalties, rather than jail time …’: Some new terms are entering legal spaces. ‘Environmental crime’ or ‘offences’, still evolving concepts, transgress regulations or laws. ‘Environmental harm’ comprises acts that damage the environment but aren’t actually against the law; ‘environmental problems’, paler still, are what a community perceives as concerns. Penalties have risen – though the total penalties awarded are lower than ever, as prosecutions have failed to eventuate (see Barclay & Bartel, pp. 188–89).
‘… one of the most commonly recognised environmental crimes is trespass’: Examples and quotations in ibid.
‘Nearly 60 per cent of landholders in their survey …’: Figures and examples in ibid, p. 194. Quotation from Farmer, also p. 194.
Chapter 7
“It becomes boring …”: Tan, p. 66. Subsequent quotation p. 69.
‘Phil Spark was in touch with the Environmental Defenders Office …’ Spark, ‘Submission Requesting a Coronial Investigation’, p. 12.
“That was always our cry”: Spark, 2017.
‘In the New South Wales parliament …’: General Purpose Standing Committee No. 5, p. 29.
‘The Environmental Defenders Office helpfully wrote …’: Correspondence from Kirsty Ruddock at EDO to Phil Spark on 10 October 2012 in Spark, ‘Submission Requesting a Coronial Investigation’.
‘Jeff Angel of the Total Environment Centre …’, ‘The OEH … said that a prosecution was imminent’: Cubby.
‘The OEH launched the prosecution …’: Chief Executive v Turnbull, NSWLEC150, 2014, section 13.
‘… trees were being torched …’: Description of fire and response in correspondence from Phil Spark to Fairfax Media on 7 December 2012 in Spark, ‘Submission Requesting a Coronial Investigation’.
‘They were allegedly seen to burn stacks on days of total fire ban’: Correspondence from Alaine Anderson to Mark Coulton on 25 January 2013 in ibid.
‘Anderson was putting water out …’: Description of dozer incident and koalas fleeing in ibid.
“All the best for the coming year”: Correspondence from Mark Coulton to Alaine Anderson on 25 January 2013 in Spark, ‘Submission Requesting a Coronial Investigation’.
“a very poorly designed piece of legislation”: Smith.
‘Turnbull was entering a guilty plea …’: Chief Executive v Turnbull, NSWLEC150, 2014, s. 164.
“Crop extends … to the fence running North–South …”: ‘Notes from Typed Edition of Glen Turner’s Compliance Notebook’, s. 200, entry dated 21 June 2013.
‘Nadolny read a novel in the park …’: Description of events in September 2013 in Nadolny, 2020.
‘The two officers had permission to enter …’: Cornwall.
“I felt pretty exposed …”: Events of December 2013 visit to ‘Colorado’ in Nadolny, 18 February 2018.
‘The work was back on …’: Witnesses’ accounts provided to Turner in Chief Executive v Grant Wesley Turnbull, 2019.
‘Luc Farago testified …’: Farago’s testimony in Chief Executive v Cory Ian Turnbull.
“I was on the stand for a day and a half”: Nadolny, 18 February 2018.
“Your Honour …”: Todd Alexis quotations in Chief Executive v Cory Ian Turnbull.
“We never intended to clear it all”: Ian Turnbull and prosecutor quoted in Holden, ‘Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
‘Turner had his colleague Robert Strange …’: Chief Executive v Grant Wesley Turnbull, 2017.
‘In April 2014, there was big news in the district’: Greenacre’s property listing and asking price for Milton Downs in Cranston, 2016.
“This is succession planning”: Cranston, 2014.
‘… Turnbull told Roger he’d dug two graves for Turner’: Cornwall.
Chapter 8
“There are three characteristics peculiar to the farmers …”: Joseph Jenkins quoted in Barr & Cary, p. 34.
“It came up so quickly”: Rolls, 1994, p. 30.
‘… white, dead stalks’: Bonyhady, p. 179.
‘So when the soil was wet again …’: ibid., p. 285.
“The stump …”: Lines, p. 41.
‘Nor would they set aside fodder for bad times …’: Bonyhady, p. 285.
‘He’d moved farm equipment onto the property …’: Turnbull v Turnbull, 2017.
‘There had been remediation orders …’: Penalties and Roger’s response to the OEH officers in June 2014 in Guilliatt.
“Roger wasn’t formally indicted …”: Nadolny, 18 February 2018.
“My grandfather is eighty …”: Quoted in Guilliatt.
“There’s every farm in the 30 kilometres …”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
‘Justice Preston … ruled …’: Justice Preston’s quotations and details of ruling in Turnbull v Director-General, 2014.
‘Pastoralism seemed finished’: Cameron Muir describes the ‘horror of the interior’: ‘Whenever the coast-hugging settlers turned their gaze towards the great interior plains, they glimpsed broken country, bloodshed and extinction. They saw skulls pierced with blunt lead bullets, ribcages cracked open with heavy spears, red country littered with ringbarked timber and the desiccated carcasses of millions of sheep; they saw clay-pans, silted creeks and sagging slab huts; they saw the material remains of initial hopes and land-lust bleached by an unrelenting sun. For governments, the frontier quickly became a liability; for pioneering colonisers, it was a path to ruin.’ See Muir, pp. 3–4.
‘By 1891, there were about 13.5 million sheep …’: ibid., p. 30.
‘Victoria and South Australia … had already surged their agricultural efforts’: ibid., p. 43.
‘Wheat would feed and build the country’: Muir charts spectacularly what happened next: enthusiasms of various government and leadership programs, new departments of agriculture, prizes awarded to farmers for yield and quality and even the ‘cleanliness’ of their operations. Against a background anxiety about ‘degeneration’ in the bush, a kind of atavistic regression into horror and unshaven lawlessness, ‘agriculture promised to bring civilisation even to the frontier’. See Muir, p. 4.
“Where golden grain is golden gain”: ‘Australian Agriculture and Rural Life’, State Library of New South Wales, 2021, www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/australian-agricultural-and-rural-life/settlers-guides-and-emigrant-publications
‘… unlike the rice cultivated by the non-whites to the north’: As Australia, cutting loose from the empire, contemplated its new vulnerability in the Pacific, there was an anxiety that rice-eating people might see our unused, ‘wasted’ lands in the interior and invade, just as the British had moved upon the apparent absence of Indigenous cultivation. See Muir, p. 4.
“Wheat created the white race”: Quoted in ibid., p. 96.
“He
had this belief …”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Notes on Ian Turnbull’s Psychiatric Testimonies’.
‘He was overheard saying he was willing to do something …’: McKenzie, 2017.
‘… his name was on an affidavit …’: R v Turnbull (No. 26), 2016.
“The fact that Cory Turnbull was indicted …”: Nadolny, 18 February 2018.
“This will finish us …”, “He was at a point of despair …”: Quoted in Crawford.
‘Turnbull instructed his lawyer to file a complaint …’: Sylvester Joseph’s letter and the OEH response in Cornwall.
‘… Ian and Robeena hosted their old friends …’: Holden, ‘Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
“If by shooting Glen …”: Nadolny, 18 February 2018.
“If anything happens to me …”: Cornwall.
‘The incantation … was taken up’: Barr & Cary, p. 175.
‘With this knowledge …’: Rolls, 2011, p. 220.
‘Diesel-engine tractors with rubber tyres …’: Rolls, 1994, p. 32.
‘Rolls gives a dreamlike description …’: Rolls, 2011, p. 220.
‘Then, the Depression crashed the wheat price’: Barr & Cary.
‘The phrase “balance of nature” was in people’s mouths’: Muir, p. 157.
‘Good seasons boosted confidence …’: Robin, 2007, p. 161.
“I just wanted to get that [clearing] …”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
“The second and third generation on the land before I retire”: Quoted in ibid.
Chapter 9
‘Ian’s mother Beryl had been so stricken …’: Quoted in Holden, ‘Notes on Ian Turnbull’s Psychiatric Testimonies’.
“I had the feeling that I had to get things done”: Quoted in ibid.
‘Some called the parching of 2014 …’: Bureau of Meteorology rainfall records at nearby Crooble Station showed 431 millimetres for 2014, compared to a median of 571 millimetres. It was low, but not the worst ever. The year 2018 showed only 348 millimetres.
“Turner in my mind. Turner”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Notes on Ian Turnbull’s Psychiatric Testimonies’.
“They have to be resilient and stoical”: Quoted in ibid.
“I’m virtually finished”: Quoted in ibid.
‘They rouse with martial talk of a “clash” …’: Main, p. 151.
‘Turnbull’s father …’: Robin, 2007.
“… agriculture … as an engineer might conceive it to be”: Quoted in Main, 2005, p. 123.
“They don’t hop out of the airconditioned cab”: Anderson.
“If the community wants farmers …”: Quoted in Bartel & Graham, p. 273.
‘… constant vigilance and maintenance of order’: Some ecologists point out that even highly managed agricultural landscapes include biodiversity, in the sense that soil formation, nutrient cycling and pollination of crops continues, albeit mostly through human agency. And biodiversity persists even despite exclusion controls: paddock trees host birds, insects, small mammals, reptiles; woodland birds nest and explore the landscape; deep roots draw nutrients back to the surface. It is uncomfortable, for some environmentalists and deep ecologists as well as colonial-heritage landholders, to remember that nature is not divisible, and human action is ineluctably part of, not apart from, nature.
“If you’ve got a neighbor …”: Quoted in Leonard.
‘Another yet might … send in a gang of workers’: Feneley.
“They’re in the tips of the trees”, “Pretty paltry out here”: Anderson.
“Waste … ravage, damage, injury”: Griffiths, Jay, p. 218.
‘The scrub-covered land …’: Bellanta, p. 16.
‘The plants of the scrub are imagined …’: Muir, p. 66.
‘It became a metonym …’: Muir, p. 66.
“I wish I wasn’t going to Moree”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Notes from Victim Impact Statements’.
“Arthur, we’re on the road at ‘Strathdoon’ and ‘Colorado’”: Conversation between Glen Turner and Arthur Snook in Snook.
“one immense crime scene”: Ross Gibson writes that settlers, in the aftermath of dispossession and murder, living on land figuratively and literally scattered with unburied bones, ‘[w]ith no professional mourners to help them live on this funeral-ground’, tried to ‘regard the place as new and unstained, as if there were nothing residual to see, touch, feel and believe. But they were overwhelmed by the fact that death had been recently and prodigiously abroad. Fear and denial have ghosted Queensland ever since.’ See Gibson, p. 83.
“No man who disappears …”: Muir, p. 67.
‘When Ian Turnbull spoke of digging graves …’: Nadolny, 19 August 2019.
‘Only one of the three properties …’: Nadolny, 19 August 2019 and Snook.
‘He had been with the OEH for a while …’: Strange, 2014.
“Okay. Talk to you in the morning”: Call between Glen Turner and Arthur Snook in Snook.
Chapter 10
Events and quotations in this chapter are taken from the various witness statements contained in the Supreme Court archives. I used the statements of: Andrew Uebergang, Scott Kennett, Nicola Kennett, Robbie Maas, Ivan Maas, Adam Baxter, Felicity Whibley, Arthur Snook, Detective Timothy McCarthy and Terrence Bailey. The material relating to Robert Strange is taken from Holden, 2014 and Strange, 2014.
Chapter 11
‘Turnbull was already walking towards his ute …’: Holden, ‘Notes on Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
‘… Turner asked his colleague to pull over’: Strange, 2014 and Holden, 2014.
“Sir, put the gun down …”: This scene is based on Robert Strange’s witness testimony, given in a police walk-through and in the stand at the Supreme Court. This paragraph in particular is paraphrased closely from his own words. Some additional details are taken from Ian Turnbull’s testimony under cross-examination in his murder trial in Holden, ‘Ian Turnbull Witness Statement’.
‘And about a kilometre along …’: Uebergang’s testimony in Holden, ‘Notes on Witness Statements’.
‘He had gone to the police a few weeks earlier …’: Alleged in Nadolny, 19 August 2019.
‘Meanwhile, in Tamworth …’: Holden, ‘Notes from Victim Impact Statements’.
‘Nadolny knew immediately who it was …’: Nadolny, 24 October 2019.
‘Media outside the court clustered …’: Pike, 30 July 2014.
‘At the morgue, Glen Turner’s body was autopsied …’: Holden, ‘Notes on Autopsy Report’. There was evidence of cannabinoids in his bloodstream. In his request for a coronial inquest, Leslie Slater states: ‘Mr Turner had illicit substances in his blood stream and one or more administered close to his time of death, The Toxicology Report showed “Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinal” at 0.013mg/l and “Delta-THC Acid at 0.030” Canabis / Marijuana. I have proof that Mr Turner was a habitual drug user.’ But Matthew J. Atha’s study suggests that passive smoking of marijuana can give blood results up to 20 ng/ml up to four days later (‘It was concluded that presence of cannabinoids in urine or blood is not unequivocal proof of active cannabis smoking’) and notes that other studies have ‘recommended a threshold of 65ng/ml to differentiate between active and passive smoking of cannabis’ (see Altha, Matthew J., ‘Blood and Urine Drug Testing for Cannabinoids’, Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, Wigan, United Kingdom, both quotations p. 4). Note the measurement is ‘ng/ml’, not ‘mg/ml’, as Slater has it.
“focused and determined …”: Holden, 2014.
“Glen told me on at least one occasion …”: ibid.
“Ten days of wondering where he was …”: Quoted in Holden, ‘Notes from Victim Impact Statements’.
‘McKenzie suppressed her tears …’: Burton.
“the combination of a harmful act …”: Barclay & Bartel.
‘There was a large yellow dozer …’:
‘The journalist took photos’: Lamacraft.
Chapter 12
“They are all thinking of y
ou …”: All comments of support in Holden, ‘Notes on Court Debate on Holding Turnbull Trial in Moree’.
“Travelling to court in Sydney …’: Chris Nadolny, 24 October 2019. He wrote: “It was Sydney; I don’t know who attended. I think the main ruling was earlier, before Glen was murdered.”
“We just want some good to come of it”: Quoted in Tyson.
“He has done different work …”: Quoted in ibid.
“Glen was clearly a beautiful man …”: Pike & Godfrey.
“This is a terrible tragedy”: Quoted in Tyson.
“That millisecond has affected so many people”: Quoted in ‘Moree Shooting: The Reaction’.
“Ian is a well-known and respected member of the community”: Quoted in Pike, 30 July 2014.
“Violence was always going to happen”: Quoted in Levy & Hall, 2014.
“pushed beyond despair …”: Pike, 31 July 2014.
“the kind of behaviour that leads people to murder”: Quoted in Olding, 30 July 2014.
‘Members of the Turnbull family’: see Pike, 31 July 2014.
“‘No one, but no one …’: Quoted in Feneley.
“It’s a tragic event …’: Quoted in Pike, 31 July 2014.
“enforced by Big-Brother-style satellites”: ibid.
“You have this crazy situation …”: Olding, 5 August 2014.
‘… Governors Hunter and Collins …’: Bonyhady, pp. 3–6.
‘The tenant argued …’: ibid., p. 161.
“an almost pet-like status”: Trees were given personas and names, either of their own or of their protectors. They were sung at, decorated, pressed with coins for luck, assigned emotions. People sensed a proprietorial custodianship. ‘They cherished their associations, their antiquity, their link with the past,’ writes Keith Thomas. Eighteenth-century writers such as William Marsden mourned that the felling of an aged tree ‘appears a violation of nature, in the exercise of a too arbitrary right’. See Thomas, p. 213.
