How the fuck did this story happen: Uncle Robbie sues King Charles III

Publication: The Canary UK
Published: 28 July 2026
Paid: 150 GBP

This series explains the reporting process behind my stories for accountability and for people to learn how journalism works. 
This story: Indigenous elder Uncle Robbie is going through the courts to sue King Charles III for genocide against First Peoples of Australia. 

The story idea

Long story short, the press release landed in my inbox sometime in early June 2026. And I read it and spent half an hour laughing at the absolute cheekiness in the notion of suing King Charles III.

At the time, Djuran Bunjileenee Uncle Robbie’s press release highlighted that he was about to head to court for an appeal hearing.

I clicked through to Crime Scene Australia, Uncle Robbie’s site, and found every single court document for nearly the entire time Uncle Robbie has been pursuing justice through the Australian courts.

I then googled to see if anyone else had covered the story. SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) and the National Indigenous TV (NITV) in Australia had covered previous aspects of the court case but no one else in mainstream media seemed to know what was happening.

I could not attend the appeal hearing and I wondered whether not being a First Nations person myself, whether I was the appropriate person to cover the story. So I sent it out through the union networks.

In the days following, only SBS/NITV covered the latest update with the appeal hearing. I then figured if Australian mainstream media wasn’t going to cover it, maybe other places might be keen. The question was where?

The callout

Months earlier, I had joined a travel writing network – The Travel Writing Skool – run by James Durston who also regularly puts out a massive weekly list of callouts for stories from publications across all beats.

Trawling through the list on a late Monday night/early Tuesday morning when it hits my inbox (James is in the UK), has become a habit and that was where I saw a link to a LinkedIn post.

It was by a journalist in the UK wanting to help more diverse writers pitch stories to The Canary UK. They offered to have a chat over LinkedIn messages and they were absolutely thrilled when I told them about my story ideas. One of which was the story on Uncle Robbie.

The pitch

I duly emailed the pitch off to the editor of The Canary UK. I had no idea of the rate at the time but I had looked at the site and I thought if anyone was going to be excited about this story, it was going to be a left wing publication who wants to call a spade a spade and a genocide a genocide.

And then? Crickets.

I followed up once a couple of weeks later. And then a few days later just as I was about to give up, the editor replied.

There had been chaos. The Canary UK had reported that it had Lloyds Bank had stopped access to its accounts hence the editorial silence. The situation was finally resolved though and they wanted the story.

So now I had to write it.

The initial reporting plan

I clicked back into Uncle Robbie’s site and thanked my stars I worked a night shift on Australian time because I would have otherwise missed that Uncle Robbie was due to attend court again that very day.

At 6 am I fired off an email and texted the phone numbers on the site, explaining who I was, that I had not wanted to ask for an interview till I had a publication keen because I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time but now I did and that The Canary UK wanted a story. I said I would attend the court hearing for what was a separate case Uncle Robbie was bringing to the court about trespassing.

About the Victorian Governor-General trespassing on Government House in Victoria which was a former Aboriginal reserve.

The plan was to only interview and report the story IF Uncle Robbie agreed. I did not want to turn up and report on the hearing even if he didn’t give me permission. So I also said in my email to him that I would come to support him and that he was not obliged to talk to me just because I showed up. I felt that was an important thing to do ethically even if he refused me and I had to turn around and tell The Canary UK editor that there was no story.

The reporting process

I laughed at the absolute cheekiness and in the afternoon, I stepped out onto the pavement and was promptly hugged by Uncle Robbie who had never met me before in his life. He told me to watch out for the cyclists.

I interviewed him on the pavement after local community radio station 3CR did, just an Android phone with the recorder app and a hope that the traffic noise would not overshadow Uncle Robbie who can be rather soft spoken. There were no other journalists but a bunch of friends and supporters had shown up.

He told me he was waiting for the Victorian Governor-General to show up. She never did but she sent a General Consul and a State Solicitor instead. We went in and sat down for the hearing but the magistrate had to go on break so suggested the lawyers work out a schedule for what they wanted to happen and come back in to be heard by the next magistrate.

That left us all spending an hour in the lobby. Someone gave me a magnetic pin with the Palestine and Aboriginal flag on it. I attempted to explain as best I could what I understood of the legal situation to some of them.

We then went into the next hearing and the magistrate approved another date for the Victorian Governor-General to appear on August 20 with an October date for the hearing to allow Uncle Robbie enough time to collect evidence from and consult with First Nations elders and communities. And also to not move into the caretaker period when Victoria goes to the polls in November.

As a group, we then promptly took trams and walked to Jimmy Watson’s in Carlton to discuss the result.

Writing the piece

I pulled the recording into Audacity and transcribed it. I wrote the draft in Obsidian trying to keep to the guidelines the Canary’s editor had sent me when she agreed.

Starting the piece was fine. What was difficult was working out how to thread the two cases together, one with a lot of legal back and forth and the other new without confusing the reader. I also had an upper limit of 800 words and a lot of things to explain to a primarily UK-based audience.

I wrote from memory first. What I understood was happening, what I had read in the long list of court documents on the site, and where I could I put in placeholders for bits of the interview that had stood out to me. Places I knew I wanted tethered together with quotes.

And then I went back and fact checked each line and added in links for each claim. The apology happened in 2008, here is a link. Uncle Robbie claimed this in court a year ago, here is the court document from the Crime Scene Australia site. That sort of thing.

Despite that I still missed one and so did the editor. I found out after it was published and had to email them the correction and they immediately fixed it.

There was a lot of fiddling with subheadings and the like. And then I put it into a Google doc and shared the link to the editor. Within a day I had edits to accept and they had moved things around to make it flow better.

When they were done they sent me an email and I replied saying it looked good. So they sent it off and I sent them an invoice.

The moment it was published, I scheduled posts in Buffer and Later and then posted it myself on Threads and sent it on to people through WhatsApp and Messenger and to email networks.

The pay

Part of being the freelancer is handling the payment end yourself. I sent off an invoice as instructed and then waited. Then on a Sunday I got an email asking for an IBAN.

I had to reply and say an IBAN wasn’t necessary because that only exists for transfers to European countries and I am in Australia. A Swift code is sufficient and I sent it through.

They sent an email back basically saying oops, we have never paid an Australian before. But the pay hit my account the next day minus a transfer fee that my bank takes so roughly about $285 AUD.

I also made sure to add the story to my Copyright Agency account in case it generates some revenue that way.

The impact

Reddit, TikTok and X had the highest engagement with the story whether they liked or hated it (both depending on which subreddit it was posted in). The numbers for me on certain social media sites were different to the numbers from when The Canary UK itself promoted the story. That would point to them having built an audience they can reach on specific sites versus other sites where perhaps I have a bit more access to people interested in such stories.

I don’t have visitor numbers from The Canary UK’s end but I do know the story got 254 upvotes from logged in members on the site.

Lessons learned

1. Fact check everything far more closely. It was one line I did not check and I should have. So I will do better.
2. There are people who wanted to read this story. From non-activists across three countries to fellow freelancers across my own networks who read it and thought it was an extremely important story to write. So it didn’t matter if the mainstream media missed it or didn’t want it – that’s their misread that the audience isn’t there or is not important enough for them to report on it.
3. There are sites that regularly collate activism news to assist other activists globally. So much to my surprise another travel network I was part of automatically scraped the web for my name and sent me a notification to ask if these two stories were mine – one from The Canary UK and a repost from another site collating the news. I said yes and added them to my profile.
4. One error doesn’t make you a bad journalist. I emailed the editor as soon as I spotted the missed fact check situation and they emailed me back to say it was a shared burden because they should have caught it too. But I did feel bad for a whole evening.

What next?

We now have something that can be a future story – the upcoming hearing and court appearances.

But now you can choose what to do next. You can read the story, commission me or even donate to Uncle Robbie’s fund so that they can cover costs for all these cases.