Being the third ripping yarn in our (Inter)National
Lampoon Christmas/Chinese New Year Holiday Vacation series.
The Northern Territory of Australia used to have a reputation as being a place where men who ran away from their wives and others with criminal backgrounds went and started a new life , often changing their names .
You are surprisingly reminded of this dodgy past when you go to pick up luggage from the carousel at the Darwin Airport and are confronted by a large advertisement for the WardKeller legal firm , featuring a drawing by Northern Territory News cartoonist Wicking .
Ward derives from the late Mr Justice Dick Ward , an ALP politician , regarded as the Territory's equivalent of the famous American lawyer Clarence Darrow , who with his first wife to be dived into a trench during the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942 . Because of his enlightened views , when he lived in Alice Springs and attended a Peace Council meeting , conservatives dubbed him "Red Richard" or "Richard the Red ."
Driving about the Darwin waterfront over the Christmas period this scribbler , with a number of aliases, including Cyclops, came across a large rock in a fenced off block of land bearing the message never to trust a lawyer . Similar advice was scrawled across a boarded up shopfront.
