Why Robert and Kathryn Crowther copped gun ban

ROBERT Crowther is a man who likes to get things done. The only problem is he tends to upset people when he does them.

Robert Crowther has been described as ‘more Australian than Crocodile Dundee’. Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

ROBERT Crowther is a man who likes to get things done. The only problem is he tends to upset people when he does them.

And now the police have taken away his guns.

Robert’s wife Kathryn, 76, admits her husband, 73, can be a bit headstrong but told news.com.au: “I can normally talk him out of things.”

The police have taken away her gun too.

The reasons for this stretch back through a series of unfortunate incidents involving the Crowthers — humble sheep farmers in northern NSW — and their various neighbours, past and present.

One of his in-laws described him as “more Australian than Crocodile Dundee”. A lawyer who read his case imagined him more as Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.

Clearly, Mr Crowther is a man on fire.

Unfortunately this is a descriptor that could also be applied to his neighbours’ properties from time to time.

The incidents in question include Mr Crowther ramming one neighbour’s gate with his ute, possibly poisoning another neighbour’s dog and once starting a fire that accidentally burned through 10 acres.

In his defence, Mr Crowther, a fifth generation Australian, says he simply “bumped” the gate, that he was merely spraying pesticide into the eyes of dead lambs to keep wild dogs away and that he had only left the fire for 10 minutes to go and get some water. There had also been other fires.

“I usually just bash it out with some brush,” he explained.

Robert Crowther have got their neighbours offside over various ‘incidents’ but feel they have been hard done by. Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

Robert Crowther and his wife Kathryn Crowther. Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

All of this and more emerged in a case before the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which ended up deciding, on balance, that it was probably best if Mr and Mrs Crowther didn’t have access to firearms.

In fact, access to firearms was also central to the tribunal’s decision. During a visit to the Crowthers’ Northern Rivers home in 2015, local policeman Shaun Phillips and another officer found a .22 rifle lying on a shelf next to the bolt with a live round of ammunition affixed to it.

Mrs Crowther told police her husband had been shooting at a snake “a couple of days before and had forgotten it”.

As seems to be common with the Crowther case, there was a degree of confusion about precisely how long the gun had been left out for. However the tribunal ruled the rifle had been left unattended on at least one occasion, namely while the couple went to church.

In the end Mr Crowther was found guilty of breaching gun storage rules but with no conviction recorded.

There was also the matter of the gate, which bestrode a Crown road that ran through a neighbour’s property and which the Crowthers needed to go through to get to theirs.

The neighbour had been concerned about goats crossing the cattle grid and getting on to the road, and so decided to close the gate. Later that day, however, he found it opened again and so he closed it once more.

Then, late that afternoon, he found the gate opened a third time, except it was now “bent as though it had been rammed with a car”.

The gate that was bumped. Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

The Crowther shearing shed. Picture: David Doyle for news.com.au

At this point Civil and Administrative Tribunal senior member Kay Ransome astutely captured the essence of many a marital dynamic.

“Mrs Crowther, in response to being asked whether she raised any objection to the ramming of the gate, is recorded as saying that once her husband thinks he is in the right, there is no stopping him.”

Speaking to news.com.au after the tribunal’s decision, Mrs Crowther said the ramming of the gate — of which Mr Crowther was also found guilty but with no conviction recorded — was something of a misunderstanding.

“He went up gently to bump it,” she explained. “He expected it to open and it didn’t and so he bumped it a bit harder.”

Even so, she admitted that her husband could be a tad headstrong at times, summing up their relationship thusly: “Robert thinks, ‘I’m going to do this,’ and I say, ‘Don’t be bloody silly.’”

Sadly, it appears Mrs Crowther did not always get to her husband in time.

In one of those rare passages of history that cannot really take any form other than how it was written, Senior Member Ransome produced the following immortal paragraph:

“Senior Constable Phillips told the Tribunal that, in addition to letting his stock roam onto other properties, Mr Crowther enters those properties and, in rounding up his stock, includes stock belonging to the owners. He also alleged that Mr Crowther takes feral goats from others’ properties and sells them. Senior Constable Phillips also stated that because of disputes with Mr Crowther, one of his neighbours had installed surveillance cameras to monitor the boundary between the properties. These cameras had been shot at by unknown persons.”

But again, she fairly noted in Mr Crowther’s defence: “In relation to the goats, they do not belong to anybody.”

Still, the tribunal upheld a decision by the NSW Police Commissioner to revoke both the Crowthers’ firearm licences, citing “an inability to rationally deal with conflict between neighbours”.

This has struck Mrs Crowther as deeply unfair, not least because hers was one of the guns actually in the safe.

“To me we’re living in a police state,” she told news.com.au.

They are still not talking to the neighbours.

Originally published as Why Robert and Kathryn Crowther copped gun ban