>> Go Back - page - >> List of Entriess
His academic distinctions included membership of Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Sigma Rho honorary scholastic
fraternities.
Kriewaldt returned to Adelaide in 1923 where he completed his legal studies at the University of Adelaide,
graduating Bachelor of Laws in 1925 and being admitted to the South Australian bar in 1926. Unlike his immediate
predecessor on the bench in Darwin, T A Wells, he was a leader at the bar in Adelaide with an established reputation
as a diligent practitioner and a conscientious enquirer into the operation of the legal system and its social effects.
For 15 years, he was Independent Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Adelaide, where he lectured
mainly in Property, and he was a foundation member of the Australian Law Schools Association. During the Second
World War, he served in the Legal Branch of the Royal Australian Air Force as a Squadron Leader between 1942
and 1946, spending some time on duty in New Guinea and participating in Japanese war crimes trials. His first
marriage was in Adelaide on 5 June 1925 to Mary Finlayson. It was dissolved on 31 January 1947 and he married
again on 5 February 1948 Edith M, daughter of O E G Trudinger, well known in Adelaide commercial circles.
In 1951 Kriewaldt was appointed the Acting Judge of the Northern Territory Supreme Court because of the
illness of Judge Wells. After Wells’s retirement in 1952, Kriewaldt was appointed Judge and took up his duties in
April 1952. After he was sworn in by the Administrator, F J S Wise, he was welcomed to his court by the Darwin
legal fraternity, which included the Crown Law Officer, Keith Edmunds, who used the occasion to speak of
Wells’s bravery in sticking to his post during the air raids of early 1942. In June 1953, Kriewaldt was awarded a
Coronation Medal.
During the years he spent in the Territory Kriewaldt although ‘very much a professor manque’ worked as
hard as Wells, enduring the same difficulties, except he was more reflective about his decisions and upon the
circumstances surrounding the cases of Aborigines confronting the criminal justice system. Kriewaldt went back
over Wells’s judgements (largely kept in shorthand) trying to find reasons for the larger number of acquittals in
murder cases tried by Wells compared with those cases he had tried. Kriewaldt heard 23 murder cases between 1951
and 1956 of which four were proved, with eight reduced to manslaughter, one jury disagreed, one not continued,
one insane and eight acquitted. Wells heard 24 murder cases between 1944 and 1950 of which three were proved,
16 acquitted, four reduced to manslaughter and one not continued. In his nine years as Acting Judge and Judge
Kriewaldt presided over 39 murder trials of which 24 involved Aborigines.
Kriewaldt concluded that acquittals of Aborigines on murder charges came about because of the white juryman’s
belief that he should not concern himself with crimes committed by blacks. He saw this attitude as typical of a
white society living in close association with Aborigines as in Alice Springs where the acquittal rate was greater
than in Darwin for cases heard by both Wells and Kriewaldt. It was Kriewaldt’s view that a jury should be free of
bias but should be able to tell if witnesses were telling the truth. He perceived, though, that this was a task beyond
the powers of a white jury in Aboriginal cases where a high degree of mutual unintelligibility prevailed.
In the 1940s, the problem of white juries empanelled to try Aborigines on murder charges (jury trials were
abolished, except for murder, in the Northern Territory in 1921) was seen at large as a violation of the principle
of trial by equals. Kriewaldt denied the validity of such a principle since ‘equal’ was a vague term and juries
elsewhere were not composed of the social ‘equals’ of the defendants. Pressure was applied to the Administrator
for the creation of ‘Native Courts’ and legislation was enacted but never promulgated since the coexistence of two
racially divided legal jurisdictions was repugnant to the executive charged with the guardianship of Australia’s
democratic processes. Both Wells and Kriewaldt were opposed to such a duality and the latter put his view in 1958,
when summing up in the case of Leo’s murder of Namagu in Borroloola. The white man, he said, ‘had decided
to use the law as a civilising medium on the aborigines. The only alternative would mean giving up attempts to
assimilate the natives and relegating them to live on reservations.’
The first murder trials Kriewaldt heard involved white men. Two Czech migrants aged 19 and 20 had brutally
murdered a Darwin taxi driver in order to take his money. They were found guilty and sentenced to death by
Kriewaldt on 13 June 1952 and hanged at Fannie Bay Gaol on 7 August 1952. The judge was shocked by the
executions and his opposition to capital punishment was strengthened by this experience and precipitated the
anxiety he felt when he had to deal with another case of homicide not involving Aborigines. Terence Stapleton,
aged 23, who had a history of mental illness, after a drinking bout shot dead Constable Condon at Katherine. After
his trial Stapelton was sentenced to death by Kriewaldt on 7 August 1952 but the judge felt constrained to give his
reasons for his decision in Stapelton’s case to the Commonwealth Attorney General, Senator J A Spicer. He stated
his mind was preoccupied by the fact that the two men he had most recently tried had just been hanged. But he
explained that he had attempted to discount the effect of this earlier case, his ‘instinctive desire for vengeance
when a police officer is killed’ and his opposition to capital punishment. After two further trials Stapelton was
acquitted on grounds of insanity on 6 May 1953 when Kriewaldt committed him to jail ‘during the pleasure of the
Governor-General’ under Section 381 of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act.
The problem of applying the law in Aboriginal society was evident in cases where Kriewaldt presided in
Alice Springs during 1953. Three Aborigines, Charlie, Captain and Tiger, were charged with the murder of Selby
at Areyonga during what the press termed a ‘killing corroboree’. Kriewaldt considered this was the sole occasion
in his experience where tribal custom prevailed over individual motive. He thought Charlie had little idea that
he was breaking the white man’s law but Kriewaldt decided he had to be punished as an example to the other
Aborigines at Areyonga and averred that ‘wherever white people impose their civilisation upon coloured peoples,
the white man’s law must prevail.’
Aborigines were not always defendants. In September 1955 the Chambers brothers, Jack and Colin, who were
part owners of Eva Downs Station, mistreated a group of four Aborigines. Jim and Dolly Ross, Isaac and Munroe
were assaulted by the Chambers with stockwhips. When Dolly Ross gave her testimony, she lowered her dress to