Australian author Hughes fined over near-fatal Outback crash

The author and international art critic Robert Hughes pleaded guilty yesterday to causing grievous bodily harm in a car crash in the Outback that left him in a coma for five weeks and seriously injured three other men.

Hughes was fined 2,500 Australian dollars (£1,000), ending a four-year legal saga for the author of The Fatal Shore, a history of Australia's convict era. The charges against Hughes, an expatriate Australian and long-term New York resident, were dismissed three years ago but reinstated on appeal.

The art critic for Time magazine was prosecuted after his rental car collided with a car near Broome, in Western Australia, in May 1999. He was driving on the wrong side of the road, but his lawyer, Mark Trowell QC, told Perth magistrates' court yesterday that there was no suggestion he was speeding or drunk.

Hughes, 67, says he has no recollection of the crash, which happened late at night as he returned from a fishing trip. He was excused from attending the trial on the ground that he was still too sick to travel.

Hughes alienated the public when, after being acquitted in 2000, he described the occupants of the other car as "low-life scum". Witnesses say he derided Lloyd Rayney, a prosecution lawyer of Indian descent, calling him a "curry-muncher", which Hughes has denied. He claimed the firemen who cut him out of the wreckage of his car stole the tuna he had caught that day and was also quoted as saying that, as far as he cared, Australia could be towed out to sea and sunk.