Aboriginal Justice Needs No Courtroom

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday February 4, 1989

By ROBERT HAUPT and TONY HEWETT

In just over a week, a Northern Territory court will begin dispensing white justice to a young Aboriginal man charged with murdering his family.

What it will not do is satisfy the demands of the relatives of the dead for justice in the Aboriginal way.

In the outback town of Jabiru recently, the Djandjomerr family - still grieving over the death of their uncle, Dick Murrumurru, a famous artist, and four others - told The Sydney Morning Herald their demands: four women, to be taken as wives, a bundle of spears, a ceremony for the dead and $500.

The demands were delivered to the family of the accused, Dennis Rostron, at Oenpelli during the funeral on November 6 last year.

Mr Mark Djandjomerr told the Herald: "We want bundle of spears to pay us because of what happened ... and we want some female to be paid (to us), and if not we'll carry on and kill them."

"We just don't go and shoot them like he did. We do it secret way. Someone will do it for us. If it is paid, that's enough.

"If they give us a couple of women, maybe two, three or four, for good because we keep them as pay as wives, and a bundle of spears, and the ceremony, then we say that's enough.

"If we don't see any women from him or bundle of spears, we say you finish. Take a while, could be two, three, four, five, six people - it'll go on for a long time. It'll just go on until they pay. Five hundred dollars also to be paid."

Beginning in Jabiru on February 14, a committal hearing of five murder charges against Dennis Rostron, 25, will attempt to discover what happened at Marlgawo, an outstation settlement in the Bolmo country, near the headwaters of the Liverpool and Mann Rivers, on September 25 last year.

Rostron, the 12th son of a great artist called Mandarg, allegedly murdered his father-in-law, Dick Murrumurru, 67; his mother-in-law, Dolly, 26; his wife, Cecily, 23; and his children, Preston, 3, and Zorac, 21 months. Another man, Andrew Narrorga, died of a heart attack feeling from Marlgawo.

Five survived the massacre. Esau Djandjomerr and his cousin Abraham, both 12, two 16-year-old girls, Shirley Djandjomerr and Patricia Narrorga, and Patricia's elderly aunt, Lena Narrorga, set off without food or water for Jabiru, 130 kilometres away across the Arnhem Land escarpment.

They emerged 3 1/2 days after the killings at a mining camp on the upper Goomadeer River, 80 kilometres away.

GOOD WEEKEND: Death in the Stone Country.

© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald

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