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...Gribble's Dark Torment" in Quadrant, September 2002.
The paradox of these reviews is that Moran mauled the writer who contributed greatly to his own attempts to demonise a priest who has been dead more than forty years. His obsession with Ernest Gribble is reminiscent of Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. Ahab's motive was revenge, but what drives Moran to pursue a ghost?
In May 1926 Fred Hay, a pastoralist, was murdered. A police patrol left Wyndham on June 1 to hunt for the killer and in the first week of July, Lumbia, the accused man, was brought into Wyndham. In the months that followed there were allegations of murders committed by the police party. Royal Commissioner Mr G.T. Wood conducted an inquiry and gave a figure of eleven people murdered. In May 1927 Constables James St Jack and Denis Regan were charged with the murder of Boondung, one of the eleven. At a preliminary hearing Magistrate Kidson found there was insufficient evidence to go to trial. The suspicion was never removed by a clear acquittal.
In arguing that there was no massacre at the Forrest River in 1926, Moran sought an explanation for the rumours that persist to this day. He attributed these to Ernest Gribble, then superintendent of an Anglican mission on the Forrest River, north-west of Wyndham, now renamed Oombulgurri.
In Massacre Myth (1999) Moran cited Halse's thesis twenty times, declaring that it was "an excellent biography of Gribble". Halse gave him an insight into Gribble's early life and sufficient material to set him in a morally flawed family.
When I interviewed James St Jack in 1989 he hinted that Gribble was having an affair with Dinah, said to be the Aboriginal wife of Ernest Unbah. The transcript, modified by St Jack, was read by Moran and with Halse's thesis at hand he constructed a paradigm of an evil priest who would send good men to the gallows to conceal his sexual indiscretions.
Halse cited Moran's book only once; and then in unflattering terms. She accepted reports about the Durack River murders in 1922 and subscribed to the historical version of the 1926 Forrest River massacre. These murders are denied by Moran and by revealing that which he chose to reject, her "excellent biography" became "a flawed project".
The vilification of Ernest Gribble was the strategy used by Walter Nairn, the solicitor representing the police party, in order to weaken Gribble's role as a key witness and gain public sympathy for the police. Halse described Nairn's public statements as "an unprecedented move for a defence attorney appearing before a Royal Commission". Nairn's campaign alienated Gribble, and people applauded the police "for shooting a few useless niggers".
Moran rekindled this hatred of Gribble in...
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