‘He never pleaded guilty … but he never pleaded innocent, either’

When NSW farmer Ian Turnbull murdered environmental compliance officer Glen Turner in July 2014, he shot him in the back.

Indeed, Turnbull gunned Turner down as the wounded man ran for the safety of the tree line, yet according to the author of a new book about the sensational crime, the convicted killer emerged from the episode feeling like a “persecuted martyr”.

“He never pleaded guilty to anything, but he never pleaded innocent, either,” says Kate Holden, author of The Winter Road, a powerful read about the killing of Turner in Croppa Creek, nearly 70 kilometres from Moree in north-west NSW, for which Turnbull was later sentenced to 35 years in prison. “He said, ‘Of course I’m sorry I shot the man’, but he kept framing his act as provoked. That he’d been under duress. He remained quite defiant.”

The context here is that Turnbull was a vast patriarchal landowner, while Turner was the officer investigating his illegal land-clearing activities, and that often bitter gulf between rural development and wildlife preservation is one of the central themes explored by Holden in her Good Weekend feature story this week: “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE, TURNER. YOU’RE GOING TO DIE.”

Holden, speaking on the latest episode of Good Weekend Talks, explains how the murder of Turner has even been described as a “terrorist act” in the name of a cause, namely railing against unjust or overly presciptive land management laws. “It was astonishingly reframed by certain parties, that the laws were the problem.”

Tragically, this notorious case had apparently little impact on the rate of land-clearing. Moderating the podcast discussion, Good Weekend deputy editor Greg Callaghan points out that the 2017 repeal of the state’s native vegetation act (after the murder) has seen the rate of bush cleared in the Moree area nearly tripled.

“This is an absolute holocaust to biodiversity,” Holden says. “I’ve been up to that country, and it’s scraped bare. Areas the size of greater Melbourne are going under the dozers.”

Holden points out that Turner’s widow, Alison McKenzie, has made her feelings known. “This makes a mockery of my husband’s death,” she has said. “What did he die for, if this is where we ended up?”

For the full feature story, see Saturday’s Good Weekend, or visit The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.