It was a cool, clear April day when John Dunn was dispatched to a grain mill outside the town of Guyra, in the New England region of NSW. The Tamworth tow truck driver could not have imagined he was about to prompt a dispute that, two-and-a-half years later, would throw the Australian Senate into chaos and play out on the national stage.
Awaiting Dunn at the mill's gate was Rodney Culleton, a floundering farmer and businessman from the other side of the country. He had entered an arrangement with the mill's local owner, Jack Vivers, to buy grain and use the mill to make horse feed. But Culleton was experiencing financial difficulties and Dunn's Recovery Service had been ordered to repossess his leased truck.
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In his unique style, One Nation Senator Rod Culleton responds to news his election win will be challenged in the High Court. Courtesy ABC News 24.
Dunn waited, watching Culleton potter back and forth from the nearby petrol station, until the repossession agent arrived. What transpired was unlike anything Dunn, a 40-year industry veteran, had ever witnessed. "I've never struck anyone with his strange attitude, I'll say," he tells Fairfax Media. "Not everyone complies, but most people you can talk to. They know well before it happens."
Culleton, however, put up a fight. "I got down out of my truck and Culleton was at the gate to the property," Dunn recalls. "As I've had my back turned, he's jumped in my truck and grabbed the key! He refused to give the key back, the police were called [and] later on obviously charges were laid."
Those charges, over the theft of a supposedly $7.50 key, now threaten to end Culleton's brief stint as a One Nation senator for Western Australia. He was convicted of larceny in March and was awaiting sentencing at the time of the election, and the government has obtained advice indicating he may have been ineligible to stand.
Culleton had the conviction annulled in August and then pleaded guilty, with the case dismissed and no conviction recorded. But the events of that April 2014 day cannot be erased so easily.
Fairfax Media reached Dunn, 64, by telephone as he was driving home from Western Australia after buying a new truck. Unfussy, straightforward and country born-and-bred, Dunn's Facebook page teems with pictures of freighters but none of himself. He would not be photographed or supply so much as a headshot, but happily agreed to talk about his run-in with Culleton for the first time.
In Dunn's telling, Culleton resorted to subterfuge, insisting to police he "never had the key" and that Dunn must have "thrown it away". Dunn believes that Culleton later on showed the key to a worker at the mill and said "hey, do you want this?".
![A truck outside John Dunn's business near Tamworth.](/web/20161105175905im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/h/4/b/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsh3af.png/1478243422728.jpg)
The two men have divergent accounts of the rendezvous. At a rambling press conference on Wednesday, Culleton said he got into a "good old punch-up" with Dunn. Outside Armidale court last week, he offered this summary: "There was - what can I say - a hairy back tow truck driver that appeared on my property. And look, there was an altercation, and one that went on too long, but that's what happened."
Dunn insists there were no fisticuffs. Rather, he says Culleton tried the lawyerly approach. "He uses a lot of big words. He wasn't violent. But he was doing things to make you fire up, he was saying things to make you try and attack him," Dunn says. "There was no punch-up. If there had been a punch-up it probably wouldn't have ended in his favour.
![One Nation senator Rod Culleton arrives at Armidale court in August.](/web/20161105175905im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/n/b/f/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsh3af.png/1478173665453.jpg)
Culleton played down the whole incident on Thursday, claiming he had been "exonerated" by the courts and that stealing the tow truck key was "no different to taking a scone off someone's plate". He also said he had offered to buy Dunn a new, more expensive key. "I actually offered him to buy him a brass one. It was a silver one, off memory," he said.
Dunn says he never heard a word from Culleton following their fracas at the Guyra mill, and he doesn't want to. In the end, magistrate Michael Holmes ordered Culleton to pay Dunn $322.85, for the key and service expenses. As far as the tow truck driver is concerned, the matter is over.
There was no punch-up. If there had been a punch-up it probably wouldn't have ended in his favour
"He's a different piece of work," Dunn says of Culleton. "I'll be curious to see where he ends up. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy."
- with Breanna Chillingworth
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