In the end, the attention was on the man who wasn’t there. All two metres of Ben Roberts-Smith was glaringly absent from the packed, anxious room in Sydney’s federal court building, as a judge quietly explained that the man once revered as the most famous soldier of his generation was, on the balance of probabilities, a murderer who callously killed unarmed civilians while serving in Australia’s military in Afghanistan.
As the judgment came down, the Victoria Cross winner was far away on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
Roberts-Smith had sued three Australian newspapers – the Age,
