Just Cases | Season 1 | Episode 1 | A dagger at the heart of society

In the middle of WW1, the Australian government launches a stinging attack on an international 'extremist' network of German sympathisers.

When a policeman is murdered in a small country town, the stage is set for a showdown between his killers and a political system with everything to lose.

Find the transcript for this episode here.

Music in this episode:

- 'Felt Lining' by Blue Dot Sessions (CC BY-NC 4.0 license)

- 'Attempt 1' by Jared C. Balogh (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license)

- 'Tracers' by Podington Bear (CC BY-NC 3.0 license)

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Transcript | Just Cases | Season 1 | Episode 1 | A dagger at the heart of society

Stephen Gray: [00:00:00] Roland Kennedy seems to have welcomed death. Goodbye boys were his only words on the

scaffold. From Monash Law School. This is just cases, the backstory to the biggest court cases you've never heard of. On just cases we explore cases that have changed the way we live our lives and the stories of those caught in the crossfire.

Your host is Melissa Castan and your storyteller Today is Stephen Gray.

Stephen Gray: It's no use treating these people like a tame cat said Prime Minister Billy Hughes. They must be attacked with the ferocity of a Bengal tiger.

Melissa Castan: Welcome to Just Cases. Today, we rewind a hundred years to a time when democracies around the world were gripped by fear of violent extremism. In January, 1916, Australian Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes launches a stinging [00:01:00] attack on the international workers of the world. In the months that follow, a policeman will be shot dead and two men in their twenties will be duped by their government and executed on the scaffold.

Today we explore the story of how a small protest group in the United States grew into a movement whose tentacles reached all the way to the far-flung corners of rural Australia and how as it was put by a politician at the time. Weak-minded Australians were drawn into nets cast by foreign intrigues, Dr.

Steven Gray's, lecturer at Monash Law School and he joins me now. Welcome Steven.

Stephen Gray: Thank you. Melissa,

Melissa Castan: you've been researching this story for a very long time, and you've written extensively on it, including a piece which we've put on the Just Cases website. Could you kick us off by reading from that piece and set the scene for us?

Stephen Gray: Thanks, Melissa. Sure. So it's late 1916. It's just over a hundred years ago. Three men were accused of shooting dead, an unarmed police officer in the New South Wales town of Tottenham, 400 miles from Sydney. [00:02:00] Two of the men were Roland Kennedy and Frank Franz. They were members of the radical anti-war industrial workers of the world, or the IWW.

Otherwise known as the Wobblies. Tottenham was a mining town with a strong, wobbly element and a reputation for disorderly conduct. In the eyes of the police, amongst the most prominent was Roland Kennedy. He was a Tottenham local. His IWW Agitation had cost him his job at Mount Royal, the local mine. He had a friend of part German extraction, Frank Franz, who also had joined the Wobblies in late 1915 together with other members.

They distributed wobbly pamphlets at street meetings and they'd gone kangaroo shooting when they'd been out of work. Possibly. They also organized sabotage at local mines that employed scab labor, or mines that had sacked workers. Who are I ww in? By about mid 1916, local authorities had become worried about a turbulent element, and so they requested extra [00:03:00] police protection for the town In late September, it arrived in the form of Constable George Duncan.

Duncan was a policeman of fearsome reputation on a mission to clean up the town.

Melissa Castan: Steven, who were the wobblies and where did they come from?

Stephen Gray: So the wobblies had grown out of the American labor movement in around 1905 in Chicago. There'd been considerable unrest against exploitative conditions, and workers had formed the idea that it was better to act against capitalism directly through direct action rather than to try and change things through the parliamentary system, or by influencing politicians or lobbying the bosses or through the unions.

They believed in. Radical action, revolutionary action, really. And so they advocated things like sabotage. They'd been framed for things along these lines in America. In fact, in America, at around the same time a guy named Joe Hill had been hanged for. Allegedly for the murder of a of a person in the US in Utah.

They had a bit of a [00:04:00] reputation, these guys for working around the system, not believing, not through the system. And that's really why they formed a convenience scapegoat for the politicians in Australia at the time.

Melissa Castan: How did they end up coming to such prominence? In Australia?

Stephen Gray: I dunno, they word, it's so prominent to begin with at the most, they probably numbered about 2000 people all around Australia.

They really shot to prominence on the back of publicity given to them by the pro war and the pro conscription group, including the Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He needed a. A scapegoat. He needed to brand the anti transcriptionists with a nasty tag and seeing them as anti German, as pro German, I should say.

And as, as anti-war and anti British empire. All of these things were really convenient to have a radical group and a group that opposed capitalism and opposed imperialism as well as the war to be able to, to. To lump all of these things together in one big mass was really convenient politically for a man who wanted to support the British Empire like Billy [00:05:00] Hughes.

Melissa Castan: Do you think they actually posed a very tangible threat in Australia?

Stephen Gray: I think they talked big. I. They made some fairly inflammatory speeches, but I think most of what they did was very much in the way of speech and not in the way of action. At around the same time in 19 15, 19 16, there were things like some warehouse fires in Sydney.

There was a bit of a forgery investigation going on in Sydney at the same time, so they'd done some. They'd done some like they, it seems they'd done some I guess not legal things. And they certainly didn't support legal action. But they hadn't gone as far as killing people or the sorts of things that they were branded as doing by the politicians.

They, I don't think they were guilty of those things.

Melissa Castan: And I guess it's important to remember that this is occurring in the middle of the first World War, with the. The more familiar events that we know of in Gallipoli or, in Europe ly at their worst.

Stephen Gray: Absolutely. This was a time when the British Empire seemed in real danger of losing the, this is the Darden nails.

This was the som. There were millions of people being killed. This is the Anzac [00:06:00] Cove and. And Billy Hughes was desperate to support the British Empire in whatever way that he could. And he'd promised the British 50,000 extra men to go to the front in Europe. And so he'd made these promises to the British, he'd come back from a meeting in England with, the, these, the prominent British politicians and the Prime Minister and so forth.

And he'd, and it was straight after that, that he actually attacked the Wobblies.

Melissa Castan: Can I take you back? Then to the story of Roland and Constable Duncan. Can you tell us what happened next in that episode?

Stephen Gray: Sure. So this is a very local story and and so way out in the, in this mining town it was a very wet spring and George Duncan's just arrived in the town and he's on his second day on the job.

And this is late November nine, late September, I should say 1916. And he arrested a, i, WW member a German named George won straight away for offensive language and he'd done that in the street, in the public street and one had violently arrested, resisted the arrest. And there was a crowd. One was an i ww man that they'd hooted the policeman in the [00:07:00] sort of quaint terms of the day.

And Roland Kennedy was in amongst that crowd, and there'd been some kind of altercation between Kennedy and George Duncan and about abusive language and what had happened. And Duncan had asked Kennedy for his name as he had a right to do. He can ask somebody for their name and address and.

Kennedy said, I'll write it down for you. It seems that suggested that I guess the policeman was illiterate. It may have been the other way around, but anyway, there was some bad blood going on between these two and the very next day very wet day and it's almost flood conditions in Toten.

At the time, Duncan had to ride 18 miles with the man that he'd arrested George one out to the nearest police jail at Dander Lou. And this was an all day trip and when he returned, he was soaked. He was probably reading between the lines in a bad mood. And so he's gone to the local pub to look for Roland Kennedy.

This guy that he's just had an exchange with the day before and he wanted to summons him apparently for offensive behavior and indecent [00:08:00] language. Kennedy wasn't there at the time. So Duncan retires to the police station and he's actually writing up a report in the evening.

Melissa Castan: I'm just gonna stop you there.

It sounds like the offensive language and the rude behavior was a bit of a prominent charge in those days. Is that a way of controlling people without, when they hadn't actually done anything that serious?

Stephen Gray: It's a classic technique, of of police against people that they don't like. It's and it seems to be in the case here, there's a bit of provocation going on both sides and I guess to to arrest somebody, to provoke that sort of behavior.

And then you can put them, you can possibly end up with them in more serious charges. And that's very much what happened here.

Melissa Castan: So then what happened that evening?

Stephen Gray: So it's nine o'clock. At night. Kennedy's heard that the policeman's out looking for him exactly what happened between Kennedy and Franz and actually Roland Kennedy's brother, herb Kennedy an older man, he was 10 years old and may have been involved as well.

What exactly happened between them is not entirely clear. They gave conflicting stories later, [00:09:00] but in any case, at nine o'clock at night. Duncan is sitting at a typewriter at the police station. He's working on a report as it happened about disease cattle when he was struck and killed through the window by 2 32 caliber bullets.

Those first two bullets being fired at the same time, both of them passed through his body. About three seconds later, a third bullet, a different caliber of 38 caliber bullet was also fired, but this bullet missed. Duncan, but to any case, those wounds were fatal. He died very shortly afterwards.

Melissa Castan: So he's been shot by two bullets at the same time or successively, and then a third separate gun was shot, but missed him.

Stephen Gray: Absolutely. Yeah. So the first two bullets at more or less, exactly the same time. Yeah. And the ballistics evidence was quite important in the case.

Melissa Castan: So what happened the next day?

Stephen Gray: So the next day police officers have come from everywhere. All the nearby towns they'd come, transport's difficult, they come by male [00:10:00] coach, goods, train and horse.

There was even a doctor as well who struggled in by motor car and got bogged in the mud on the way. They've. They, the people that they suspect are put under arrest and questioned. And so they would've been taken to the Tottenham Police locker, which was a very primitive place. Suspects were held into wooden cells in the backyard of station, and another one was held under guard in the office where they could overhear the police talking and the police could overhear them.

And, to set the picture as well. They'd had to share this office. The police had to share their office with Duncan's corpse was there

Melissa Castan: no better place. They could have apparently not deposited. Mr. Duncan apparent.

Stephen Gray: He was kept there for about four or five days, it seems very wet conditions.

In fact, when they tried to bury Duncan a few days later in Tottenham, they couldn't do so 'cause his grave kept on filling with water. And he was eventually buried a week or so later in the Presbyterian cemetery in a nearby town parks. So CIB detectives came from Sydney to [00:11:00] investigate, and they picked up Kennedy and Franz, and initially both of them denied involvement in this killing in the murder.

But a couple of days later on September the 30th, Franz confessed.

Melissa Castan: And to tell us what happened next. Can you take us back to your piece?

Stephen Gray: According to the police, he confessed because he'd been unable to sleep and had to clear his conscience. Fran blamed Roland Kennedy along with Kennedy's older brother, herb Fran said that he'd been pressured into it by the Kennedys and only fight the later shot, the one fired by the 38, and he'd fired without aiming and he'd fired nowhere near the victim, however.

There was another reason behind Fran's confession, as he later said. It was stated to him that if he made a confession and he gave evidence for the crown in court, his life would be spared and he or his family would probably receive the reward of some 200 pounds.

Melissa Castan: Steven, what would we call that kind of confession [00:12:00] today?

Stephen Gray: You would call that an inducement or a threat? Both threats and inducements. Under the law that relates to confessions are illegal. The basis on which confessions ought to be actually excluded from evidence in court.

Melissa Castan: And would that have been the same at that time, a hundred years ago?

Stephen Gray: I. It would've been technically the same.

Yes. I think that, those are phrases that are quite open to interpretation and clearly the police and the judges of the day had perhaps lacks some attitudes towards these issues than we might have today.

Melissa Castan: Was that confession put to Kennedy then?

Stephen Gray: Yes, it was. And initially Kennedy denied it.

Apparently he said it's all lies. But then according to the police report, he turned very white. Beads of perspiration came out on his forehead. He was trembling all over. He asked for a drink of water. He then also confessed.

Melissa Castan: That's a very evocative description of someone under pressure.

Stephen Gray: Absolutely. It sounds like Sherlock Holmes finding the true murderer.

A couple of days later, on the 2nd of October, [00:13:00] these men were asked to reenact the murder. And that's also something that doesn't classically take place in Australia these days. In fact, probably the modern audience would be most familiar with it happening in Bali. Quite recently, in any case, they were asked to reenact the murder.

Franz placed three pegs on the ground outside the police station window to show where the shots had been fired from. Roland Kennedy then placed a peg for himself and another one for Franz, but refused to place a third peg as he said that his brother Herb had no involvement. There was a coronial inquest a few days later, and the coroner James Patterson investigated and returned a verdict of murder.

Felonious and maliciously committed by Roland Kennedy, Frank Franz and Herbert Kennedy. And again, it's interesting that language, felonious and maliciously, there's no verdict of unlawful killing, no neutral language as might be more typical with a coronial inquest. In any case, the men were then committed for trial, and their trial [00:14:00] began in Bathurst a couple of weeks later on the 16th of October.

Melissa Castan: You are listening to just Cases, Melissa Castan here, and today you're joined by Dr. Steven Gray. We're exploring the untold story of Roland Kennedy and Frank France. A couple of young men who found themselves at the center of a global fight against the International Workers Organization or an extremist organization depending on your point of view.

So Steven, these men are on trial for the murder of this policeman, Constable Duncan. How did the trial unfold?

Stephen Gray: Roland Kennedy initially pleaded guilty. It seems that he did so because he misunderstood the trial process and the judge after he made that plea and in front of the jury the judge then pointed out that he would only have a chance to explain his actions and what actually happened if he pleaded not guilty.

And so he then possibly after the horse had [00:15:00] bolted asked to change his plea. Kennedy essentially then blamed Franz. He said that he and Franz alone, not his older brother went to the station. Franz was leading the way. Franz had instigated the whole thing. Franz called out, count to three, and he said they then fired simultaneously at Duncan through the window.

And so

Melissa Castan: that's quite opposed to what Fran's confession was, which was that he was the less culpable party who'd just been dragged along and made these inept shots after the fact.

Stephen Gray: That's right.

Melissa Castan: So they're actually testifying

Stephen Gray: completely at odds with each other. Absolutely. And they've blamed each other really.

And Fran story's exactly opposite. He said that it was Roland Kennedy and Herb as well, the older brother who had led. The whole thing. And he claimed they threatened him actually, if he didn't, if he didn't go along with this plan to shoot the policeman.

Melissa Castan: So how did the prosecution tackle this conflicting stories and the testimony of these men?

Stephen Gray: Yeah. So the prosecution had a choice. Julie. [00:16:00] They could have treated this case as one of. Very much local interests and local grudges and feuds and that they could have said that the Kennedys were, that Roland at least was unhappy because of what had happened with the policeman and George one the day before in that altercation.

And I think there's certainly a subtext that alcohol may have been involved in the decision of. The Kennedys, these guys to go ahead and with their quite foolish plan to shoot the, to put it mildly, to shoot this policeman. But actually they didn't do that. They didn't emphasize those local elements at all.

Rather, they blame the IW. And they put it in very strong terms. They said that these men had their minds inflamed and saturated by the pernicious literature of that body, which was found at their residences so that the detectives had actually searched the men's houses and had found I ww literature in their place, particularly Kennedy's place, not so much in Fran, Fran was really only a peripheral member of the wo blizz.

Melissa Castan: So was the prosecution adopting a very politicized approach towards the [00:17:00] conduct of this trial?

Stephen Gray: It certainly seems like it, yes. Definitely.

Melissa Castan: And then what happened with the trial and the result?

Stephen Gray: The jury had heard these quite prejudicial stories and they'd heard the two men blaming each other.

And so they took only an hour to find Kennedy, Roland Kennedy and Frank Franz, guilty of murder and the judge who's New South Wales Chief Justice. So William Cullen then sentenced both men to death. Roland's older brother Herb, and it's interesting that he was treated differently and tried at a different time and place.

Was tried separately a month later. The only evidence that was against him was that of Frank Franz, although possibly the ballistics evidence might have well, clearly suggested that there was a third man involved. In any case, the prosecution took a very different tack with him. They didn't press the case against him.

The fact was he was a family man and that seems to have made a difference. He had kids and a wife to who needed support. And the judge actually directed an acquittal of the older brother. I. So

Melissa Castan: it sounds [00:18:00] to me from what you're saying that Roland Kennedy's known reputation as being one of the IWW underpinned this kind of political case against him above and beyond what the facts of the, or the evidence of the actual case presented.

Stephen Gray: It certainly dictated the prosecution's approach, so I think it was, obviously this was a case that received great media coverage and the media coverage was prejudicial in the sense that the IW W's role in the whole thing was really strongly emphasized. And this whole trial, of course, took place in the shadow of the referendum conscription, which was coming up almost immediately after the trial.

I think it was the 28th of October. And it certainly suited the powers that were to have a trial like that taking place and have the I ww and the inconsist and this whole sort of set of issues all bundled up together with the tag murder. And that was, that, that was the approach of the prosecution.

Melissa Castan: [00:19:00] Steven, what was the, I ww in Australia's response to this political campaign that was tied up with a criminal trial?

Stephen Gray: Initially the IWW assumed that the men were innocent, that it was a political frame up. They seemed to have changed t after they realized that the facts were actually quite incriminating, particularly of Roland Kennedy.

But they, once the men were sentenced to death, they then mounted a public campaign to have those death sentences commuted to have the men's lives spared. And it did seem as though they had good prospects for success. They'd actually been nobody executed in New South Wales for several years beforehand in the New South Wales premier at the time.

Holman had always opposed capital punishment and he'd commuted death sentences that been had been imposed when he'd been Attorney General himself. On that evidence, you'd think that they would've had a good chance for success in having the sentences commuted and added to that at least in Franz's case, is the fact that there'd been this deal made with the prosecution.

And so if he had, [00:20:00] if he was to go ahead and be executed, then that would be in contravention clearly of this deal about giving evidence, which was really the basis of the whole prosecution case. 'cause the defense case fell apart once Franz had blamed. Roland Kennedy.

Melissa Castan: So in terms of the politics, how did the Prime Minister respond to this notorious case?

Stephen Gray: So the Prime Minister was already well known as a fierce opponent of the industry, workers of the world back in January, 1916. He had denounced them as foul parasites. Who've attached themselves to the vitals of labor. Adding that it's no use treating these people like a tame cat. They must be attacked with the ferocity of a Bengal tiger.

And there was no love loss between these opponents. The wobbley had returned fire. They called him the dwarfish. Poppen Jay, who is labor prime minister of Australia and whose sole claim to eminence and notoriety is the gift of the gab. But [00:21:00] Hughes had powerful weapons at his disposal, especially the War Precautions Act, which had been passed immediately after the beginning of the war in, and there was a history of the use of the act against political opponents.

Wobbly leader Tom Barker was. Jailed in early 1916 for printing a cartoon of a gigantic field gun with a soldier crucified on it and top hatted person's businessmen collecting his dripping blood in bowls. Barker was charged and convicted for prejudicing recruiting under regulation 28 of. The War Precautions Act.

At the same time, a counter espionage Biro was established initially to look for Germans in the, in, in Australia, but became focused in the absence of any kind of enemy aliens or evidence of those people at work became specially engaged in unraveling the schemes of the I ww the, i, IW 12 were arrested in September, so very [00:22:00] much at the same time as the murder trial.

This was in Sydney, and these were a group of men who were charged with treason and tried for sedition and conspiracy following several factory fires in Sydney. The prosecution was able to characterize the IWW as an octopus of German sympathizers and fifth columnists, and they actually called this trial their actions, a gigantic conspiracy to Levy war against the King within the state of New South

Melissa Castan: Wales.

So with that kind of characterization, what hope was there for the men's sentence to be commuted?

Stephen Gray: Events took their course very quickly. The, they appealed to the executive counsel to the court of criminal Appeal, and those appeals were very swiftly rejected. Holman. The chance of having those sentences commuted were, was he rejected the, their appeals.

Kennedy and Franz were executed at Bathurst jail on the 20th of December, [00:23:00] 1916, and that this was extraordinary. Extraordinarily quick, less than three months after their crime.

Melissa Castan: And France was executed in breach of the deal that he'd actually arranged, the payment for his confession. Was that a common thing that,

Stephen Gray: No, absolutely not.

It was unique. The Working Class Weekly Truth argued and pointed out that this was something that had never happened before, as. As far as they could see in Australian history or indeed in British legal history. And I've certainly not been able to find any cases either in which this has happened.

So it's really something extremely unusual in, in fact, unique.

Melissa Castan: So I guess this puts the blame for the shooting in this case squarely, at the feet of the I ww as much as to the actual actors here. That seems to be the way that the prosecution and the politicians cast it.

Stephen Gray: Yes. It very much suited the politicians, it suited Billy Hughes.

It suited all of those people who were in favor of conscription and in fact, conservative and pro-war forces in Australia [00:24:00] generally in the conservative press, the I ww was regarded as squarely to blame for the shooting. A legislative council member, a conservative. Man Fitzgerald summed it up as a case in which weak minded Australians were drawn into nets cast by foreign intrigues.

And after this is after the conscription referendum, which failed. Hughes was willing to try again though, and he did try again in 1917. And he clamped down further upon the I ww in. December, 1916, just a few days before the executions, when he passed or had passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which effectively made the IWW illegal and in parliamentary debates.

During the course of that act going through parliament, politicians referred repeatedly to the shooting of the policeman. Tasmanian senators said policemen had been shot down at their desks, and Billy Hughes himself used stronger language, said that. This [00:25:00] organization holds a dagger at the heart of society, and we should be referent to the social order.

If we did not accept the challenge that it holds out to us as it seeks to destroy us, we must in self-defense, destroy it.

Melissa Castan: And Roland Kennedy seems to have welcomed his death.

Stephen Gray: Yeah. Shades of Ned Kelly. It said that he never showed remorse or attempted to justify himself, and his only words on the scaffold were Goodbye boys.

Melissa Castan: Steven, this case to me has a lot of resonances with. Certain political debates we have today and that we've actually had consistently through Australia's legal and political history. I feel like the Unlawful Associations Act was replicated in the Communist Party dissolution act in 1950. I feel like it, it looks, a lot like some of the anti-terrorism laws that we see today.

But the episode that you've described to us is almost forgotten in Australian history, and yet it seems so [00:26:00] prescient for so many things that have come afterwards.

Stephen Gray: Yeah, it's extraordinary. It's really interesting that it has been forgotten. We've had so much debate in the last few years or so much discussion.

I guess pro-war commemoration and rightly but I think it's also important to remember how much opposition there was amongst. The general Australian community to Australia's involvement in the First World War. But then beyond that, the I ww was obviously a very radical group, but a tiny group which didn't cause a lot of, they had these revolutionary aims that they didn't do a lot of.

Real damage in Australian society, in practical terms. But it was what really stands out about it is how utterly convenient the existence of these groups of idealists of young men, and per perhaps some might say, foolish young men. Others would say, ideal idealistic people who really wanted the best for the world as they saw it, how convenient it was for the powers to tag them with.

Terrible things to, to have them regarded as German [00:27:00] sympathizers, which I don't think they were. And as murderers and the lengths to which government was prepared to go to, to demonize these people and to put them in jail and to, in this case, put them on the scaffold.

Melissa Castan: And to use a case which seems, from the records that you've found to be about an altercation between, a police officer and a rabble rouser over some rude language and, possibly a little tired and emotional.

A an afternoon at the pub turned into a huge political story. That then leveraged off into, this kind of pro conscription and pro-war and pro-government agenda.

Stephen Gray: Yes. So there was absolutely, there was some very powerful forces that worked behind the scenes here. And that's not to suggest that Billy Hughes or were directly interfering but.

With the case, but the people the prosecution, the police, they knew the context. That's why their decisions were taken [00:28:00] to, to have to proceed against the men in these ways. And I think you can see that the influence of politics as well in the sentences and probably more clearly in the decision not to have the death sentences commuted and.

I think it's really interesting that this petty local set of events took place against events of the hugest significance in Australia and world history against the background of the slaughter and of the som and in Gallipoli and the data nails and a war that's going so badly at the time for the, for Australia and for the British Empire.

And so in, in against that backdrop, there's nevertheless such an extraordinary. Expenditure of official energy on having these men charged and having them dealt with and having the whole case ventilated before the media so incredibly publicly. So it is interesting and I think that there some lessons for today, or some parallels for today and the fact that the I ww this tiny [00:29:00] protest group.

Was important enough in this context to merit the government's closest attention. Billy Hughes talked about attacking the I ww with the ferocity of a Bengal tiger, and it's interesting that the wobblies like to refer to themselves as. Using the saca the saot being the wooden shoe of sabotage the Dutch textile workers used to throw into the machines.

So the government was attacking this saca of the wobblies with the ferocity of a Bengal tiger. Or. Maybe to use some more modern phrase, using the sledgehammer of the state to crack a nut. I'll just read a short extra from my article in the Alternative Law Journal, which is on the Monash website.

It concerns a something that occurred to me when I read an account by the historian Rowan Day, who wrote that the I ww. He compared the IWW men to the Russian radical Nev as portrayed in Dostoevsky's Devils. And that reminded me of [00:30:00] a book by James Curtsey, the South African and Australian writer called The Master of Petersburg.

And that's a fictionalization of Dostoevsky's story or part of the story in Dostoevsky in real life. Lost his stepson. And was traumatized by this and went to try to find out. And so in, in CURT's novel a fictional Dostoevsky goes to the police to ask for his dead son's effects. And they tell him that his son was an associate of a famous radical Mackay of himself.

How deeply says the police officer he had fallen under the influence of the nites who have led astray. Heaven knows how many of our more impressionable and volatile young people. Explain to me again, why are dreamers, poets intelligent young men like your stepson drawn to bandits like Nev? I do not know Response Dostoevski perhaps because in young people there is something that has not yet gone to sleep, to [00:31:00] which the spirit in Nev calls us.

Perhaps it's in all of us. Something we think has been dead for centuries, but has only been sleeping.

Melissa Castan: Steven, that sounds like a good place to leave the story now. But as I said, the written version is on the website. Thank you so much for joining us today to tell us this story from history, but still with so many reasons with today's political and legal environment.

Stephen Gray: Thank you, Melissa.

Just Cases is a production from Monash Law School. Music today by Blue Dot Sessions Podington Bear and Jared C Balogh. And visit us online head to just cases [00:32:00] podcast.com.