Thursday, January 15, 2026
Does Crocodile Dundee have an (unlikely) heir-apparent in the NT?
So possibly said the then Public Trustee for the NT, John Flynn (1943-) to the young Melbourne solicitor (and later ABC broadcaster) Jon Faine, sometime between April 1982 and March 1983 (Note: “botched will” is quite a misnomer here. As outlined below, the testator was not at fault, especially in the case of the second and larger botching. But the more accurate “botched administration of a deceased estate” hardly rolls off the tongue).
Faine had met John Flynn in Darwin in April 1982 over a mutual professional matter – a (sort of) botched will involving an estate worth that I’m guessing was worth about $500,000 at the time (then an amount sufficient to buy you ten decent houses in Melbourne), after external debts had been paid (here not including the legal fees of Faine and Flynn, which would have consumed a substantial chunk of the ~ $500,000 before the beneficiaries were paid out). The will itself wasn’t particularly botched, but a combination of other circumstances meant that that its administration was unusually messy and prolonged. You can read up on many of the details here in Faine’s book “Apollo & Thelma” (2022); the estate – that of Thelma Hawks, a Melbourne showgirl turned outback publican – was finally wound-up in c. late 1985, by which time Faine had carried his client’s file – a trio of major beneficiaries – with him through three law firms.
Colourful as this thread within “Apollo & Thelma” is, my own main interest lies elsewhere – with an estate whose administration was even more messy and prolonged than Thelma Hawks’: that of the celebrated Western Arrarnta artist Albert Namatjira, who died in 1959 leaving behind a perfectly valid will, and/but whose estate was only finally wound-up – by (you guessed it) NT Public Trustee John Flynn – almost 34 years later, in March 1983.
Despite Faine at that time having been in the intense first year of a more than four-decade long bromance – professional, then personal – with John Flynn (1), for Faine, a strange firewall apparently exists between the two botched deceased estates. His book mines that of Thelma Hawks for anecdotal and archival content over years far beyond Faine’s actual professional involvement (which more-or-less ended in 1985), while the estate of Albert Namatjira is not even hinted at in “Apollo & Thelma” – albeit Faine was not (as far as is known) professionally involved with this matter in 1982-1983, but which, as far as I am aware, he stayed almost entirely aloof from as an ABC broadcaster during 2017-18, a period of considerable national media focus on Namatjira’s estate.
The reason I call this strange centres on Faine’s long-term friend John Flynn having been at the epicentre of this media focus on Namatjira’s estate, and in turn the very strange cumulative trio of facts that: (i) in 2017, John Flynn more or less confessed to an act of professional negligence – having back in 1983 sold the late artist’s copyright (which was – or should have been – the main asset of the estate) at a significant undervalue, (ii) in 2018 the NT government paid a confidential, but six-figure sum to the Namatjira family (or interests associated with them) in settlement of their claim over John Flynn’s ostensible professional negligence (2), and (iii) John Flynn’s ostensible professional negligence was an almost complete fiction, apparently invented to whitewash an earlier assignment of Namatjira’s copyright, in June 1957, which by scale of significant undervalue, and other machinations, rendered Flynn’s 1983 deal a minor infraction, at worst (3). Talk about colourful!
Although mostly from behind the scenes, Jon Faine was well aware of the national media focus on his friend John Flynn in 2017-18 (4). While at first glance, he would have obvious good reason for keeping this insalubrious time in Flynn’s life away from fresh attention via “Apollo & Thelma”, close attention needs to be paid to the salient twist that John Flynn’s ostensible professional negligence was in substance no such thing, and in fact, Flynn actually took a dive.
Flynn’s dive in 2017-18 was most obviously to protect the posthumous reputations of John Brackenreg (1905-1986), a Sydney art-dealer who purchased 87.5% of Namatjira’s copyright for the grand-total of £10 in June 1957, and Neil Hargrave (Nathaniel Charles Hargrave, 1915-2002), the Alice Springs solicitor who acted for Brackenreg in this transaction, while holding Namatjira’s will in his filing cabinet – a gross conflict of interest, and one that predictably resulted in Namatjira’s will being kicked down the road after the artist’s death in 1959, to end up with the NT Public Trustee, where it would then languish for 34 years.
Indirect corroboration for the fact that Flynn took a dive to protect others lies in the conspicuous lack of other professionals apparently consulted in the lead-up to far-from-everyday deal in March 1983; publicly, Flynn has cited only an unnamed actuary, but it is hard to conceive that he wouldn’t have consulted a major southern law firm regarding this assignment of intellectual property. There is also the related aspect of the deal’s timing: at 34 years and counting, the winding-up of the estate was, in early 1983, palpably not an urgent matter, but coincidentally or not, dealing with a major southern law firm (Jon Faine’s then-employer) at this time about another messy estate – that of Thelma Hawks – perhaps prompted Flynn to bite the bullet and retrieve the Namatjira estate from its decades of dormancy in the too-hard basket.
As to why the living John Flynn took a dive in 2017-18 to protect the reputations of two long-dead minor public figures – and possibly others (I note here that there was also at least one CW government figure, NT Administrator James Clarence Archer (1900-1980), who expressly approved the 1957 Brackenreg deal, and may or may not have known about Hargrave’s conflict of interest) – is remarkably opaque. But one person stands out for me – quite ironically – as holding the key to solving the mystery around Namatjira’s estate: Jon Faine.
“Apollo & Thelma” heaves with flawed characters, including Faine himself (5), but with the stand-out exception of John Flynn. From his shorts with long-socks and shoulder-epaulettes stylish presence in 1982, to his competence and diligence as a lawyer, through to his community-mindedness and admirable Catholic piety, and yet his being one of the hard-drinking boys (6), John Flynn is rendered as a modern, impeccable Darwin alpha-male, a white-collared (and -socked and -skinned) version of the 1980s Hollywood crocodile-wrestler.
Perhaps John Flynn (who I have never met) is indeed all this, but more likely, I think, Flynn is just an ordinary Darwin (now retired) lawyer, and Jon Faine’s 2022 book thus doth praiseth John Flynn too much – and does so for murky reasons that can be speculated as quid pro quo for the dive that Flynn took, for an unknown team, back in 2017-18.
Footnotes
(1) Jon Faine, “Apollo & Thelma” pp 56-57, 76-92 (April 1982 trip), 227 (October 1994 trip) and 313 (2016 trip). See also Acknowledgments pp 366-367.
(2) Rosemary Neill, “Painter Albert Namatjira’s family in copyright compo victory”, Australian 25 August 2018.
(4)
Extract from PW Notes of Scott Rankin interview with Jon Faine, ABC Radio 770, 5 July 2018
Was apropos of the upcoming TV premiere of the “Namatjira Project” feature film on ABC on Sunday evening (8 July 2018).
NB that this July 2018 soft interview apparently was Jon Faine’s first – and so rather belated – on-air foray into the whole saga of the Namatjira copyright.
…
Unprompted, Jon Faine asked Scott Rankin whether Big hArt was still going after John Flynn, the NT Public Trustee who had sold the copyright in the first place [PW Note Jan 2026 – Jon Faine did not disclose here that he knew John Flynn quite well, per “Apollo & Thelma”].
(5) Talking of flawed characters in “Apollo & Thelma”, perhaps no one is as flawed, in Faine’s assessment, as Darwin author Charlie Ward, who is a sort of anti-John Flynn cypher. In the course of exploring a lengthy tangent – re Frank Hardy, the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off and its aftermath – to his main thread (re the estate of Thelma Hawks, interspersed with a John Flynn hagiography), Faine venomously dismisses Charlie Ward as a “local historian” (“Apollo & Thelma” p337). That Faine thus avoids even naming Charlie Ward’s scholarly, and highly germane to Faine’s tangent, book “A handful of sand” (2016) – re the aftermath of the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off – is unsurprising. But more surprising is that, to put some meat on an otherwise airy dismissal of Ward, Faine then goes on to quote Ward, whose words are obviously (I would have thought) a third-hand paraphrasing of Kim Mahood’s titular riffing on the words originally spoken by an unnamed Western Desert Indigenous woman, in Mahood’s well-known 2012 essay, “Kartiya are like Toyotas”. While perhaps oblivious to the existence of Mahood’s essay, Faine’s incuriosity about the context of Ward’s quote, plus its lack of logical connection to the (valid) broader point that Faine was making – whitefella short-term visitors to the remote Indigenous domain in the NT, such as Faine himself, can only ever scratch the surface – further suggests a frothing spite on Faine’s part. It would be interesting to know what Ward has said or done to Faine to provoke such a visceral reaction.
(6) See FN 1.
