Bowraville Memorial Print Page

The monument commemorates three indigenous children who were victims of the Bowraville murders in 1990 and 1991. The unveiling of the Bowraville Memorial delivers a key part of Recommendation 15 of the New South Wales Parliament’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice Report ‘The Family response to the murders in Bowraville’. 

Three existing plaques currently located at Bowraville Memorial Park were removed, having been erected without proper community consultation, and replaced with a new structure which provides a sheltered memorial and place for reflection.

Despite two trials and much publicity, there have been no convictions for the murders.  On 26 May 2016, after the tireless efforts of the families over many years, and two refusals from New South Wales Attorneys` General, the current Attorney General announced that the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal would hear the case. Publicity generated by a popular podcast from The Australian possibly helped finally create enough public pressure to force the Attorney General in this decision.

A man who has previously been tried and acquitted of the murders of two Aboriginal children at Bowraville, on the NSW mid-north coast in the early 1990s, has once again been charged with their murder.  The man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, appeared at Newcastle court on Thursday, over the deaths of four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and 16-year-old Clinton Speedy-Duroux. Their bodies were found in bushland on the outskirts of the Bowraville Aboriginal Mission in northern NSW.

Whether the case proceeds any further will depend on an application to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal by the Attorney-General, who is seeking to have the man re-tried. Their deaths have been among the state's most high-profile unsolved crimes, and the subject of significant media attention for the past quarter of a century.

The man who was charged on Thursday has already been acquitted of these murders at two separate trials in the past 20 years. He stood trial for Clinton's murder in 1994 and Evelyn's murder in 2006 but was cleared both times.

NSW Police have alleged Evelyn and Clinton, along with 16-year-old Colleen Walker, were murdered by the same person within the space of a few months. The three children disappeared within a five-month period from houses on the same street following parties at a section of Bowraville known as "the mission". No-one has been charged over the suspected murder of Colleen, although a coroner has ruled she is dead.

The families of the three children have campaigned for 25 years to have all three cases heard together in a re-trial, but the state's double jeopardy laws have previously proved a stumbling block.

A major breakthrough came in May 2016, when NSW Attorney-General Gabrielle Upton made the decision to refer the application for a re-trial to the Court of Criminal Appeal, after NSW Police handed over a lengthy brief of evidence for the three cases to be heard together.
ABC News, 9 February 2017.

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