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How Rupert Murdoch saved a life

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It was a crime which shocked Australia. Nearly half a century ago, an illiterate Aboriginal man was accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old girl on an isolated beach in South Australia.

Rupert Max Stuart seemed certain to hang until the intervention of a young newspaper proprietor named Rupert Murdoch.

Now the case has been made into a film, which is stirring uncomfortable memories of the kind of country Australia was in the 1950s - conservative, inward-looking and deeply racist.

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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.

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

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