A Marked Man
- Will Halliday
- Sep 7
- 1 min read
by Carlotta McIntosh (2025) - available at GleeBooks
Review - Antonia Rutherford
"I have just finished reading your account of Phuong’s trials and want you to know how impressed I am.
It gives an honest portrait of a proud, secretive, intelligent, successful, ambitious man of faith who was smart but not always wise in his dealings with the police. Your conversations with him in prison and his letters to you are especially poignant.
You give a devastating account of how justice operates in NSW. With evidence elicited by carrots (immunity from prosecution) and sticks (threatening witnesses whose evidence will send them to gaol) to get defendants to roll over; or to change evidence mid stream when it’s factually incorrect; not to mention the lazy and racist policing that immediately went for the Asian crime angle.
It has all the key evidence from the trials which you are uniquely placed to report on as you were there for all of them.
And you have put yourself in there trying to make sense if it all, including your both your doubts as well as the conviction that what was being argued was just not right. And by putting yourself in the story you brought this reader along on the journey with you.
The last chapter picking holes in the case against Phuong is brilliant and utterly convincing.
I sincerely hope that this will change things for Phuong - that at the very least he will be transferred to Vietnam and freed in a few years time.
Congratulations on sticking with it to produce such a fine piece of work.
Noni Rutherford
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