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At the time of Tuckiar’s appeal arrangements were made for the transfer of the judicial and legal functions of
the Northern Territory from the Department of the Interior to the Attorney General’s Department which would
have given Wells the opportunity of by passing the Administrator on professional matters.
In November 1934, Wells’s wife and their three children arrived from Sydney on Marella and the
judge’s household was established in a new residence built for the government on the Esplanade at a cost of
3 000 Pounds.
After a brief respite from criminal proceedings Wells set off for Alice Springs, travelling by train to Birdum and
on by aeroplane to his destination where he heard a case in which two Aborigines were accused of killing another
Aborigine raising the issue of tribal law. At the trial Wells complained of the absence of anthropologists as expert
witnesses, indicating that this was an occasion when it would have been useful to have their advice. Wells made
his own ethnographic observation when sentencing the two Aborigines to 10 years in jail, saying ‘the killing was
not carried out in accordance with ancient tribal custom. Such customs lost their force among young men who had
contact with white people’.
Back in Darwin in April 1935, Wells found that there were no murder cases. After dealing with cases in Katherine
during October, Wells delivered judgement the following month in a civil matter that had occupied 26 sitting days.
This was the general pattern of Wells’s judicial work: Supreme Court sittings in Darwin in April and lower court
hearings followed by excursions to Katherine and Pine Creek and then taking the Supreme Court to Alice Springs
at the beginning of the year.
Wells had trouble in paying his Commonwealth and Northern Territory income taxes for the financial year
1935/1936. In February 1937 the Commissioner for Taxation wrote to the Attorney-General’s Department setting
out the facts of the judge’s debt to the Commonwealth amounting to 39 Pounds, two Shillings and five Pence and
his refusal to deal with the Deputy Commissioner for Taxation at Darwin together with his threat to appeal to the
High Court if the Department of the Interior deducted the arrears from his salary. Wells’s money problems were
evident in 1941 when it was recommended that the judge’s annual salary should match that paid to the judges in
New Guinea and be increased from 1 200 Pounds to 1 400 Pounds per annum. This meant Wells’s annual salary
would exceed that of the Administrator by 150 Pounds. He had reduced his superannuation contributions only to
a point where his annual pension would have been 52 Pounds. Wells’s financial problems arose from his having to
support his invalid wife, who had returned to Sydney and who required a full time paid companion, their daughter
Jean, a trained nurse. In April 1941, the Attorney-General, W M Hughes, pointed to the inequity of the situation
requiring judges of the Territories to contribute to their pension scheme whereas the judges of the High Court and
the Arbitration Court enjoyed non contributory retirement benefits.
As an example of Wells’s literal mindedness, he remarked in a hearing for the custody of a part Aboriginal
child that the word ‘Aboriginal’ was concocted by someone with a ‘liking for high-sounding words but it had no
meaning.’ Again, Wells’s refusal to accept evidence given by Aborigines was seen when he sentenced Charles
Priest to nine months’ jail for criminal libel. Priest had published a pamphlet accusing Constable Don of seducing
an Aboriginal housemaid. The judge dismissed the evidence of the Aborigine as untrue and so protected the
policeman’s reputation. In April 1937 Wells’s Associate, the 22-year-old Eileen O’Neil, was badgered in court by
a solicitor when she was the Acting Registrar in Bankruptcy. She put her plight to the judge, who promptly denied
the solicitor the right to appear in the court. These excerpts from the history of Wells’s behaviour show that he
shared with his predecessors Bevin, Roberts and Mallam a high measure of eccentricity.
The new Administrator, C L A Abbott, arrived in Darwin in April 1937 and he was to maintain a stormy
relationship with Wells until his departure in 1946. Both men had similar perceptions concerning Aborigines and
the way they should be treated but this seems one of the few points of view they shared. When Abbott’s handling
of the North Australian Workers Union had worsened a waterfront dispute in Darwin, however, Wells was one of
those who signed a document showing they would volunteer to unload cargo from Marella.
The local newspaper announced on 17 September 1937 the engagement of Jean Wells, then aged 24,
to John Kearney, the Manager of the Commercial Bank in Darwin. This announcement was accompanied by the
cryptic comment that Wells was always in the best of moods when HMAS Moresby was in port.
An Aborigine, Jacky, was convicted by Wells in September 1937 on a charge of indecent assault upon a
white woman at Myilly Point. In passing sentence of 12 months’ jail Wells lamented, ‘What the boy required
was a good flogging, but unfortunately the court could not order such a punishment’. Northern Territory law
did not prescribe corporal punishment for indecent assault unless this offence was joined with attempted rape.
In April 1938, Wells sentenced a Melville Islander, Packsaddle, to four years’ jail—not the maximum penalty—
for the attempted rape of a white woman. Unlike the law in the Territory of New Guinea, no racial distinction
was made in the offences specified in the laws of the Northern Territory. Wells commented from the bench that
the only punishment Aborigines could understand was flogging. He went on to say that W E H Stanner, the
anthropologist, had suggested in his court on an earlier occasion that jail was not the proper punishment and the
Reverend Dyer had, as indicated earlier, supported this view in concert with the suggestions of the 1935 report
by the Parliamentary Committee on Aboriginal Affairs regarding corporal punishment. Packsaddle’s conviction
outraged the Reverend Morley, who wrote to the Minister for the Interior protesting at the lack of evidence, the
circumstances in which the confession was obtained and Wells’s remarks about the Aborigines ‘getting cheekier’
because of government policies—remarks calculated to feed the local Darwin ‘anti native hysteria’. In June 1938,
Wells sentenced an Aboriginal, Toop Toop, to four years’ jail on a charge of carnal knowledge of an eight-year-old
girl. The judge repeated his contention that imprisonment for Aborigines was no punishment since ‘most of the
natives like it and seem to thrive and get fat. People have to be protected from such crimes as Toop Toop has
committed. It is unfortunate that we can do nothing else except order him to gaol.’ Wells argued that flogging