NOTORIOUS TOWNSHIP.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 September 1924, Page 11

NOTORIOUS TOWNSHIP.

DISORDER AND SLY-GROG. PROBLEMS OF THE “OUT-BACK.” Sydney, August 28. For a long time things had been going from bad to worse at the wild little North Queensland township of Banyan—supposed to be “dry” in the sense in which the word is understood in liquor parlance, as it is without question in the climatic sense—but a crisis came last week when a spirit•pddened resident raced up and down the main road terrifying the inhabitants with shot after shot from an ai'tomatic pistol. .Suspected sly-grog shanties were raided, and several guilty purveyors of spirits were haled to the Court at Innisfail. The evidence showed what things can come to when the wild characters who gather in some of the remote and isolated townships determine to run things in t'heir own way and are not held sufficiently in cheek owing to the difficulty of thoroughly policing the vast territories of Australia. The magistrate had given severe warnings' to wrongdoers from the notorious little township. And now he would listen to no appeal for leniency in the form of a fin© instead of imprisonment. “To prison they must go,” he declared, and “sent along” the grog-sellers for periods ranging from three to six months’ imprisonment.

“Banyan,” declared Mr. O’Kelly, the magistrate, “is an isolated locality, and it has been a veritable cancer on industrial peace ever since I have known the •place. There is a type of men down there of the extremist element who do not require any grog to make them attempt to break the law, as they have done in the past. There are individuals there who want to take the reins of law and order in their own hands, men who want to run any particular township in their own particular way. It is the shocking happenings that have taken place at Banyan which prompt me to impose imprisonment in these Madness ami orgies have characterised Banyan in the past, but I can tell tiie people who have been responsible for these things that they w*ill have to fall into line with other places, and keep the law, and behave as any decent British community behaves.”