How Rupert Murdoch saved a life

The film, Black and White, stars Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn as the young Murdoch, and David Ngoombujarra, an Aborigine, as Mr Stuart, as well as British stalwarts Charles Dance and Robert Carlyle.

After being arrested for the rape of Mary Hattam in the small coastal town of Ceduna in 1959, the 27-year-old Mr Stuart, an itinerant fairground worker, allegedly confessed to the killing and was sentenced to death by hanging.

But many people smelt a rat, noting that the confession was dictated in almost perfect English.

Mr Murdoch had just inherited an afternoon daily, the Adelaide News, and was persuaded to take up the case by editor Rohan Rivett.

A Catholic priest, Father Tim Dixon - played in the film by Colin Friels - also believed the conviction was suspect. Father Dixon ministered to Mr Stuart as his case went through no fewer than seven appeals. Mr Stuart himself said the confession had been beaten out of him.

As his life hung in the balance he accepted his situation with remarkable equanimity.

'From the day I got sentenced to be hanged by my neck I just didn't worry about it,' he said recently. 'When it's got to come, it's got to come in the end.

'I was a bit frightened, a little bit. But I knew then somebody was beside me. Everybody doesn't believe it, but I know God was beside me. I thought to myself I might as well take it like a man and die like a man.'

The newspaper's concerted attack on a Royal Commission set up to examine the case landed Mr Murdoch and Mr Rivett in court on a range of charges, including seditious libel.

Earlier this year, Mr Murdoch, now the head of the News Limited media empire, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: 'It was not a popular cause to take up the case of an Aboriginal who we felt, without making any judgment on whether or not he was guilty, had not had a fair trial.'

Eventually Mr Stuart was spared the gallows. He spent 14 years in jail with hard labour.

In subsequent years, he thanked Mr Murdoch for the campaign. 'I think he done a good thing. Otherwise, if we hadn't had Rupert Murdoch, I would have been down Adelaide jail now, been buried there in unmarked grave. But thank Christ he come in,' he said.

While in prison, Mr Stuart learned to read and write and corresponded regularly with Father Dixon. He sought comfort in singing the traditional songs of his tribe, the Arrernte, who once roamed the deserts of central Australia.

He was released from jail in Adelaide in 1973, only to be returned six times over the following decade for breaking his parole conditions. It was only in 1987 that he was unconditionally freed.

Now 72 and with thick white hair, Mr Stuart is a respected elder in Alice Springs, in central Australia. From 1998 to last year, he served as chairman of the Central Land Council, which adjudicates on Aboriginal property issues.

Two years ago, during a visit by Queen Elizabeth to Australia, Mr Stuart was chosen to present her with a painting.

His guilt or innocence has never been established categorically. Even the makers of Black and White disagreed over whether he killed Mary Hattam.

The truth will probably never be known.

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