Inaudible Cries. "The Stuart Case" by K.S. Inglis. [review]

Abstract

On the afternoon of Tuesday 23 December 1958, all work in the remote South Australian coastal towns of Thevenard and Ceduna came to a halt for the funeral of nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam, who on the previous Saturday afternoon had been violently raped and then bashed to death in a little cave on the beach between the two towns. On the morning of her funeral, a 27-year-old Arrernte man called Rupert Max Stuart had been formally charged with her murder; he had arrived in Ceduna with a small travelling funfair on the night before her death. Mary Hattam's death sparked one of the bitterest legal controversies in Australia's history. This new edition of "The Stuart Case" was published around the same time that "Black and White", the movie dramatisation of the case, was released in 2002; there was talk in South Australia of the possibility that an appeal might be launched to have Stuart's conviction reviewed and overturned by way of drawing a line, within his lifetime, under the process of survival and rehabilitation.