Review: Bowraville by Dan Box

Written by contributor Verushka Byrow

Bowraville is based on the podcast of the same name and journalist Dan Box, of The Australian, is behind both of them. I still don’t know how to review this book. This is about the Aboriginal families that have been searching for justice for the deaths of their children, and the justice system that let them down.

Colleen, Clinton and little Evelyn, who was four when she died, are the three Aboriginal children who were murdered in Bowraville 30 years ago now. After finishing the book, I freely admit there’s no way for me to have any sort of objectiveness about this book — and perhaps the genre of true crime as a result.

The Families and Their Search For Justice

There’s a scene in the book that encapsulates how their murders and their families were treated: when Box goes back to his newspaper and tells a colleague that he’s going to do a podcast and investigation into the Bowraville murders, the colleague hears him say: the Beaumont murders.

Literally, that’s what the colleague heard. Box had to correct him and discovers the colleague had never heard of the Bowraville murders. However, the Beaumont children are three white children (siblings) who disappeared from a beach in Sydney in 1966. The Bowraville children were murdered in 1990, and still their names were not known.

Colleen, Clinton and Evelyn disappeared within months of each other, and while the bodies of two of the children (Clinton who was 16 and Evelyn who was 4) were found, Colleen’s was never found. If the Bowraville children were three white children, I don’t doubt that they would have been easily remembered by that colleague in the newsroom.

The book begins with an introduction to the case through Gary Jubelin, a homicide detective who introduced Box to the Bowraville murders. At that point, the case needed publicity and Box was it.

From there, Box takes readers to the past, to the moment when Colleen’s mother walked into a police station to report her child missing, and was told that her daughter must have gone on walkabout (a derogatory use of a word that has a deep meaning in Aboriginal culture) by the police instead of them going out to actually investigate.

From there, things got worse and two more children murdered. Box got to know these families well, and it shows in the book, takes readers into their grief over decades — and the things in their lives that marked the passage of time with no answer to who murdered their children. Because time does go on, even if their grief remains palpable.

The Suspect

Oh there’s a suspect, and there’s evidence that was never properly examined or treated, and said suspect had enough time to get rid of evidence because the investigation was just that screwed up. He’s still free, by the way.

Box does wonder if he was too close to the families and the case when doing his podcast to miss certain things — like the suspect’s innocence. He does his best to get the suspect to talk to him, and while he does, the man never does proclaim why he is innocent — he only explains away the evidence against him.

I listened to this book on Audible with a growing sense of disbelief at the loss of these children and the treatment of their families. The families in turn banded together and worked to get the justice system to acknowledge them and their losses — to the point that they overturned the double jeopardy law in NSW. To no avail.

These families are the heart of the book, as is their strength against a system and a society that really didn’t care about what they were going through.

Aboriginal Culture

Box also details the Aboriginal culture, and the societal cues no cop, judge, jury or lawyer understood. Long silences, for instance, are not uncomfortable in Aboriginal culture, nor are they indications that the person you are speaking to doesn’t know what to say. Family is more than your mother, father or brother, it is the elders around you. An address might not stick in someone’s memory, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know exactly what they’re talking about.

Read An Excerpt From ‘No Second Chances’ by Rio Youers

These are the cues and the behaviour from Aboriginal witnesses that no white jury or lawyer could understand — and no one bothered to understand or recognise would be different.

It’s 30 years since these children were murdered, and their families are still searching for justice. In all likelihood, they will never receive it.

But Australia should know these childrens’ names and the town where they were murdered: Bowraville.

Bowraville is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.

**Will you be picking up Bowraville? Tell us in the comments below!**

Synopsis | Goodreads

A true crime story cannot often be believed, at least at the beginning. In Bowraville, all three of the victims were Aboriginal. All three were killed within five months, between 1990 and 1991. The same white man was linked to each, but nobody was convicted.

More than two decades later, homicide detective Gary Jubelin contacted Dan Box, asking him to pursue this serial killing. At that time, few others in the justice system seemed to know – or care – about the murders in Bowraville. Dan spoke to the families of the victims, Colleen Walker-Craig, Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, as well as the lawyers, police officers and even the suspect involved in what had happened. His investigation, as well as the families’ own determined campaigning, forced the authorities to reconsider the killings. This account asks painful questions about what ‘justice’ means and how it is delivered, as well as describing Dan’s own shifting, uncomfortable realisation that he was a reporter who crossed the line.