From the halls of power to a prison cell: Inside the fall from grace of Geoff Clark
Geoff Clark stole so much for so long, victimising such a small group of people — most of them related by blood or marriage — that it was a form of extended-family abuse. You could call his victims the Stolen From generation.
Andrew Rule
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In the district that Geoff Clark terrorised for years, the locals call him “Borer” but there’s no affection in the nickname.
Anyone who knows Geoffrey Wayne Clark now tends to avoid admitting links with the disgraced “Indigenous leader,” convicted fraudster and thief, accused multiple rapist, bash artist, football thug and standover man.
The reality, of course, is that some people in southwestern Victoria were once happy to profit from Clark’s criminal streak.
Leaving aside his entourage of jailbirds, brawlers and rapists – most now dead or close to it – there were others who should have known better. Instead, they played along with Clark’s rackets to get a piece of the action.
They know who they are. Certain stock agents and contractors and government employees, opportunists who picked the taxpayer’s pocket as Clark played Aboriginal politics like a fiddle, siphoning funds for his own ends.
He stole so much for so long, victimising such a small group of people, most of them related by blood or marriage, that it was a form of extended-family abuse. You could call his victims the Stolen From generation. Some of them gathered outside the County Court last week to see the bully get his right whack.
The Stolen From are entitled to look long and hard at those who profited from Clark’s habitual exploitation and intimidation while milking public funding for private spending.
Clark was convicted of stealing close to a million dollars but no one doubts the real figure could be much more and that the court wasn’t hearing the full story despite the sustained brilliance of the investigators who finally nailed him.
There were multiple houses, properties, cars and, if rumours mean anything, expense rorts in pubs and massage parlours and strip joints. Gossips say “Borer” played up like a union boss on a Thai sex tour.
And then there was the dark side of the man who once tried to bring an illegal semiautomatic military carbine into Australia through Darwin airport.
The man who once pointed a gun at the head of a terrified reporter to stop him exposing Clark’s firewood-stealing racket in the Framlingham state forest.
The man who once smashed up a room at a Halls Gap motel and stood over state government staffers too nervous to complain or even go on the record about it later.
The man who once lured a South Australian drug courier to a Warrnambool motel, savagely assaulted and robbed him and raped his girlfriend, a crime worth 10 years jail that was written off.
The same man who in 2022 was given a good behaviour bond for threatening a site manager with a weapon and abusing him and another as “white f--king peasants” when they refused to give him the keys to a ute, which he then took by force.
The same man who offered armed robber and reputed hit man Amos Atkinson a Toyota HiLux and the salary from a “phantom” job at a taxpayer-funded goat farm if he killed a woman who was levelling rape charges against him.
The target was Clark’s cousin Joanne McGuinness, who brought the rape case to court only to see it dismissed. Witnesses lose their nerve when hit men are on the case.
To be fair to Atkinson, he always swore he refused the hit on principle (“I wouldn’t do that – kill a ‘sister’,” he told this reporter) and in any case didn’t fancy the goat farm job because it was at Balranald. He seemed insulted that Clark thought he could be bought so cheaply.
When several thousand locals and visitors hit Warrnambool racecourse last Sunday for the sixth edition of country racing’s new classic, the Jericho Cup, Clark’s recent jailing was a big topic of conversation.
He has gone inside for close to four years, with a maximum of more than six, on 25 fraud and theft charges. That’s no small thing for a man of 72, but no one suggests it was enough.
The consensus is that he got off lightly for those crimes for which he has been convicted, let alone everything he got away with.
It was always obvious to Warrnambool people that Clark was a suspiciously big spender.
Regular racegoers pointed out the spot where he paid for a corporate marquee at the annual May carnival one year, handing out free food and booze as if cost were no object. Bad Santa in a possum skin coat.
The marquee would have been fine if he weren’t stealing public money to do it. And, directly or indirectly, killing protected wildlife to play dress-ups as a pretend tribal chief.
“Borer” is not just a fraud and a thief, of course. If he was lucky not to be jailed for serial rapes and assaults in the western district over many years, it was a case of making his own luck by cultivating favours.
At the Jericho Cup, locals at last felt free to talk openly to outsiders about a man whose malign influence has lingered over the district in general (and Indigenous people in particular) since the late 1970s.
Clark’s undoubted ability as a country and suburban footballer and feared “king hitter” effectively scored him a “do-not-go-to-jail card” from an old-school policeman involved in the team he played for over several seasons. The team was South Warrnambool, known as “the Roosters”; the old-school cop was the late Jack Manley, a “legend” who could make assault and sex offences vanish.
Racegoers shook their heads at Judge Michael O’Connell’s comments last week promoting Clark’s “otherwise good character” and “fearless advocacy” for the Aboriginal community as mitigating factors in sentencing.
Locals recall Clark brazenly abusing funds intended for the welfare of “his people” to bankroll his lifestyle. But theft and fraud was never the most sinister thing about him.
The sister of one former Clark teammate had a narrow escape from being pack raped by Clark’s gang in the 1970s.
“She was walking through the cutting from the beach and there was a car load of them waiting,” a close friend of the woman told me on Sunday. “She was terrified — but then ‘Borer’ recognised her and told the others to leave her alone because she was (the footballer’s) sister.”
It took years for that young woman to tell her family how close she came to being one of the many victims abducted and raped by Clark’s gang, some being schoolgirls as young as 14.
So when the kindly Judge O’Connell pronounced that Clark’s million-dollar fraud was “profoundly disappointing” because of his “achievements” and his previous “good character,” Warrnambool people rolled their eyes.
The fact that Clark’s older son Jeremy was convicted but not jailed for related theft and fraud offences also disappoints the court of public opinion.
Whenever Clark couldn’t avoid charges by being an enforcer on the football field or a police informer off it, he could afford the best legal advice. There was a time when he could even rort and extort enough money to pay the great 20th century defence counsel Robert “The Red Baron” Richter to act for him.
Unluckily for Clark, one of the extensive and expensive Richter team had an attack of conscience and leaked information against him in 2001.
When Clark’s lawyers asked privately if there could be any more rape victims other than those who had already sworn affidavits against him, he couldn’t give a straight answer. He eventually admitted there were so many he couldn’t remember them all.
Richter pretended to box on gamely but was no doubt privately disappointed at this. His fashionable client, darling of Clifton Hill and Canberra cultural cliques, had turned out to be the Chernobyl of toxic masculinity. No one knew how many victims the defence might find. Any chance Clark had of suing for defamation evaporated.
Almost a quarter century later, the once barrel-chested, sneering and snarling Clark cuts an increasingly strange figure.
His hair, once sandy red, is as long as his unkempt biker beard and both have turned the faded shade of a dried tea bag. The big chest has given up the fight against an even bigger belly covered with tentlike T-shirts featuring faux tribal designs under a coat that homeless people could sleep under.
Like the judge who sentenced him, Clark seems profoundly disappointed at the way things have turned against him. After all these years of getting away with it, he is now behind bars for the first time since he did several months for assault as a dangerously violent teenager.
But whether he will serve out his time in a real prison is another thing. Even before his sentence had been handed down, city lawyers noticed the ostentatiously oddball figure shambling around the court precinct, muttering to himself and looking up at the sky like some biblical figure in the wilderness. McMoses on ketamine.
It’s possible Clark might have reached breaking point. But that doesn’t sound like the hard man that people have feared for 50 years. Cynics might think he’s showing easily-faked signs of mental decline that could ease the way to a reduced sentence and softer prison conditions. That cunning old killer Roger Rogerson tried exactly the same ruse and so did heavyweight champion conman Alan Bond.
Sad and mad or just bad? Watch this space. Borer was never one to resist a rort.
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