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