Wheels of justice finally turn for Geoffrey Clark after his vile crimes
As Geoffrey Clark awaits sentencing for crimes including perjury and serious fraud, people he has hurt or threatened along the way are happy to see him get what they view as a long overdue comeuppance from the law.
Andrew Rule
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As Geoffrey Wayne Clark faces the next day of the rest of his life, people he has hurt or threatened along the way are getting on with theirs.
One of Clark’s many rape victims, Carol Stingel, was on Friday making curtains in the garage of her tiny unit in Maroochydore as she reflected on her brave move to take him on a long time ago.
It is almost exactly 24 years since she got the courage to lay charges over the rape at Warrnambool, an ordeal endured when she was a teenager in 1971.
She and three other women went public with their rape allegations the following year, and in 2007 Stingel was awarded damages in a civil action that established Clark had raped her.
It was only $20,000 – which she never got because Clark and his well-paid advisers frustrated the process – but she felt vindicated. A court believed her testimony that Clark was a liar and a rapist.
Now nudging 70 and still working hard to support a modest life, Carol Stingel would like clever legal people to organise for at least some of Clark’s four (or is it five?) properties to be sold to pay her that phantom $20,000, plus compound interest.
Even if Clark is likely to be fed at taxpayer expense for the foreseeable future, it seems to Stingel that just half the price of just one of the properties he has mysteriously accumulated would allow her to eat when she can no longer do piece work with her sewing machine.
Stingel is not the only one happy to see Clark get what they see as a long overdue comeuppance from the law. Among them is a 69-year-old man who drives a bulldozer in the family quarry at Panmure, a few kilometres from Clark’s home base at Framlingham outside Warrnambool.
His name is John Bant, and he is a rough-hewn legend of local sport and community in the district where his grandparents were born in the 1880s.
Bant stopped his bulldozer on Friday morning for a yarn about events in the 1980s that locals still talk about.
The true story, he says, is that Clark organised his gang – a convicted criminal called “Wordy” Lowe and others – to bash a local named Kelly over a drug-dealing grievance.
But the gang that couldn’t think straight got the wrong man, an innocent fellow named Jack Kelly, smashing him so badly he had to have a knee replacement.
This ugly incident caused massive resentment. Bant, a friend of Jack Kelly, warned one of Clark’s followers there would be repercussions. Clark bristled at this and confronted Bant, threatening him.
Bant took it seriously, even more so when he got a late-night warning call from one Pat O’Sullivan, a drinker at the Bush Inn Hotel, about 10km from his farm.
“They’re coming out to get you,” said O’Sullivan, who had overheard Clark’s crew in the bar.
Bant took the threat seriously. He sent his pregnant wife and their small children to stay with her mother, and phoned Warrnambool police. He and his brother armed themselves with shotguns and waited outside in the dark.
Clark’s gang arrived long before the police, who were delayed at a pub brawl at the same Bush Inn, a convenient diversion.
The waiting Bant brothers heard a car approach through the back gate of the farm. It had its lights off, approached slowly and quietly and stopped about 100m from Bant’s home. But when the four occupants got out, the interior lights lit them up.
Bant recognised Clark and his right-hand man, the criminal Wordy Lowe. Both walked towards his house. Bant challenged them. When Lowe kept walking towards him, Bant fired a shot in the air.
Clark yelled: “Don’t shoot! We only want to talk!” When Bant warned him to leave, they ran to the car and drove off far faster than they had arrived.
When police finally arrived, Bant told them what had happened and laid trespassing charges against Clark. He later responded with allegations that Bant had threatened to kill him.
Legally, it was a nil-all draw, as the well-schooled Clark knew it would be. Neither prosecution proceeded.
Bant is one of few people in the Warrnambool district who stood up to Clark and intimidated him. Mostly, it went the other way.
Now, as Clark awaits sentencing for crimes as serious as perjury and serious fraud, it’s a reminder that the wheels of justice might turn slowly, but they do turn.
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