The point and the appeal of the murder narrative was that the setting was unpeopled. But that wasn’t true. I was given an instruction in myth and geography by Paul Toohey, one of the greatest essayists and journalists in Australia. He attended the trial. He stood out: he was cool. I’d see him tooling around the streets of Darwin in his Chev Impala. He later wrote a brilliant book about the Falconio murder, The Killer Within: Inside the World of Bradley John Murdoch. The subtitle said it all. Toohey’s book was much less any kind of hard-boiled murder inquiry than an intimate and scary guide to the lawless society of the Top End. He said to me, ‘Murder is just murder. We like to romanticise death in the north, but we sometimes forget that it’s not a great death just because it happened in the north. It’s just another murder. But for some reason it interests people. The setting is vast, and it is empty, but it’s not necessarily lonely. It’s just that people are able to get away with things easier up here.’
Murdoch ran drugs, hauling kilos of dope on long-distance drives between Broome and Adelaide. He took speed to keep himself awake. He took his dog, Jack, for company. He took a gun.
Toohey wrote in his book, ‘Brad Murdoch is not just Brad Murdoch. He’s a breed, a type. There are Murdochs all across northern Australia and they run to kind. White or beige Toyota Land Cruiser HZJ75 utility. Six-pack foam esky for up front of the cab on long drives . . . Weapons of various types — revolvers, pistols, rifles.’
I didn’t know anyone like that, and I didn’t know anything about that whole scene. I doubt I was alone in that among the press at the Supreme Court. There were a lot of Australian journalists, and also a squad sent out, with seemingly little pleasure going by their steady litany of complaints about Darwin life, from England. They kept apart. The twain did not meet between Australia and England. It was a strange, unspoken apartheid. Most of the English were sequestered in a room with CCTV of the court proceedings. They could have chosen to sit in court; there were usually spare seats on the press bench. I went to and fro, stateless, bewildered at the weird division in attitudes. I found it hard to regard the trial as any kind of whodunit, only a wheredunit — Falconio’s body has never been found. In general, Australian journalists were confident that Murdoch was guilty as charged. Almost unanimously, the English had it in for Joanne Lees. They suspected her of something. Either Falconio was dead, and she knew more than she let on; or he was alive, and she was complicit in that, too. They hated everything about her — her manner, her clothes. They talked of her as aloof and snooty, a hard-faced bitch. They remained in a state of scorn at her decision a few days after the murder to give a press conference wearing a T-shirt with the words CHEEKY MONKEY.
The powerful dislike, the baseless suspicions . . . Darwin’s newspaper, Northern Territory News, marked a civic anniversary during the trial by running old photos of memorable moments in the Top End. There was one of the biggest crocodile ever captured and killed; kids played in its vast open jaws. There was also a fullpage photo of a couple walking up the front steps of the Darwin Supreme Court in 1975. The husband wore a white shirt and tie. The wife wore a thin sundress. The bright light of Darwin burned their black shadows onto the courthouse steps. I still have that photo of Michael and Lindy Chamberlain.
2
Until I got to Darwin, the biggest person I’d ever seen at close quarters was Jonah Lomu. It was over lunch at the All Blacks training headquarters in Palmerston North before the 1999 World Cup. He ate an omelette scrambled from approximately 4000 eggs, and drank milk straight from the cow, draining it in one gulp, and then he said: ‘More.’ Certainly he was very big. But he was as a will o’ the wisp compared to the giant accused of murder in the Darwin Supreme Court. Lees had said of Murdoch’s attack that night in 2001: ‘He just seemed to be all around me and over me.’
I looked at him a lot in the dock. He was 47 years old and 6’ 5” with a large face, broad chest, and enormous hands. The skin was drawn tight over his bones. His mouth was a narrow, bitter slot. His spectacles gave him the plausible appearance of scholarship as he studied maps and underlined transcripts. He listened closely to evidence and filled out exercise books with a ballpoint pen that looked like a toothpick held in his great fist. When he stood, soaring above his two security guards, he picked up a briefcase and would leave the courtroom like a man rushing towards his next appointment.
He had nowhere to go. Only downstairs to the cells, munching on salad rolls for lunch, and then he was escorted to the nearby Berrimah Prison each night. In court, he peered over his spectacles at prosecutor Rex Wild QC, at his defence barrister Grant Althie, at the jury, and sometimes at the public gallery. In the front row, there were Falconio’s parents, Luciano and Joan, a small, forlorn couple who trudged the hot pavements of Darwin every afternoon back to their room at the
