Jet Long: Bulla camp man’s jailing for DV bashing, remote housing arson a depressingly familiar tale

A young Aboriginal man from a camp off the Victoria Highway has been jailed for bashing his partner and torching his grandmother’s house. His backstory of abuse, poverty and neglect is depressingly familiar.

Jet Long, 23, a DV offender and arsonist from the camp of Bulla, at Baines. Picture: Facebook

A young Aboriginal man from a camp off the Victoria Highway has been jailed for bashing his partner and torching his grandmother’s house.

The violent, gratuitous offending of Jet Long, 23, who is from the Bulla camp at Baines, west of Timber Creek, is far too common in the Territory, Supreme Court Justice Judith Kelly said at Long’s sentencing hearing on Wednesday.

Far too common also is the tale of woe, neglect and abuse that made up Long’s childhood and early adulthood: domestic violence between his parents, an absent father, irregular meals, overcrowded accommodation and alcohol abuse.

In many ways, Long, who has a criminal history featuring multiple burglaries and thefts, never had much chance of avoiding the criminal justice system.

The offending for which he was jailed was committed on the afternoon of August 5 last year.

Long and his partner had spent the afternoon drinking, but she called it quits early, angering the defendant, who locked herself in the toilet when he came home about 8pm, fearing his wrath.

Northern Territory Supreme Court Justice Judith Kelly. Picture: Facebook

He forced the door, then slammed it shut on her hand, dislocating a finger of hers, before then punching her twice while she cowered on the floor, the court heard.

Long then tore up bedding in the house and set it alight, as well as a couch on the front verandah.

The estimated cost to repair and refurbish the house was between $167,533 and $321,101, and the NT government has been unable to claim the $200 weekly rent on the property since then.

Long was arrested on August 7 last year.

He was remanded in pre-sentence custody, where he remained between then and his sentence on Wednesday.

In sentencing Long, Justice Kelly set out the defendant’s personal circumstances at length, and to say they are a Dickensian tale of disadvantage would be an exercise in understatement.

Long, the middle child of his parents, never had much to do with his father, who is now back in prison again.

His mother, who he witnessed bashed repeatedly at the hands of her father, died when he was seven.

Long then lived with his grandmother in a chronically overcrowded Bulla camp home: seven children and two adults in a three-bedroom home.

There was no airconditioning and the washing machine was frequently broken.

Long often had no shoes to wear when he attended school at Bulla Camp Primary School, nor at football, and he was lucky enough to have dinner only when the family had hunted a kangaroo for tucker.

He had no education past Year 8.

By 14, Long was smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, influenced by his older cousin-brothers, and by 18, he was using those substances heavily.

Long had never worked a paid job, although he had about two years’ experience under the soon to be reformed Community Development Program, in which he obtained forklift and chainsaw certificates.

Of the violent crime perpetrated by Aboriginal men against Aboriginal women, Justice Kelly said there was “far too much”; of destroying community housing in remote NT, this was also “very common”.

She was silent on the other aspect of the case that makes it depressingly familiar to the Territory: kids growing up with little support and even less hope, leading them almost inevitably to jail.

Long was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, backdated to his arrest and remand in custody, with a non-parole period of three years.

Upon his release, he has nowhere to live, Justice Kelly told the court.