Both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian have withdrawn the suggestion that Rex Wild addressed the NT’s chief justice as “Brian.”
We
decided to retract after a Fairfax lawyer listened to an audio tape of
proceedings and was unable to pick out any such reference. The piece
was written in good faith and I accept that I may have misheard Wild –
it remains one of life’s mysteries that eight other journalists appear
to have misheard him in the same way.

The correction applies to
one word of a 1,200 word article. The other 1,199 words still stand.
This feels a little like a Monty Python film – it has taken six
lawyers, nine journalists and a judge five days to decide whether one
bloke called another bloke “Brian.”

I am sorry if I upset Mr
Wild. The judge’s suggestion that I “scarpered” from Darwin to avoid
him is nonsense – I left, as scheduled, after the first week of the
case. I’m hoping to go back later in the trial and I will offer to buy
the chief prosecutor a glass of port to make it up to him.