It was Nathaniel that Stacey Train first fell in love with in the mid-1990s when they met through a Baptist church in Toowoomba. He was calmer and nicer than his strong-willed and hot-headed older brother Gareth. They married in their late teens. His father presided over the service. They had two children, and although they became estranged from both families soon after, they remained close to Gareth, who lived with them. At some point, the relationship changed; Stacey left Nathaniel for Gareth. Nathaniel moved away from the couple, achieved professional success and met another couple. Stacey, a teacher, moved with Gareth around regional Queensland to towns such as Camooweal, near the Northern Territory border, and Mount Isa.
In the west, the locals found Gareth, who worked for a time as a school gardener, domineering and strange. One of them told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he would eviscerate the feral pigs in his yard overlooking the school, so the blood and offal ran onto the football oval. He would discipline the children by taking them home to their parents with their arms twisted behind their backs. One also said he saw Gareth dragging Stacey by the hair, who was “completely subordinate” to him. A relative of Stacey’s said her estranged mother would call and leave a message on her birthday, but if she “checked” Gareth would answer, she would hang up.
Away from Gareth and Stacey, things were going well for Nathaniel. He had met another woman and they had hired an architect to build their dream house in Moruya on the NSW south coast. They were often seen walking their dog together. In mid-2020, he was hired by the NSW Department of Education to head Walgett Community College Primary School, which is hard-staffed due to violence at the secondary school and bitter city politics. His partner also moved there and took a teaching job.
He used the same teaching methods that underpinned his success in Queensland; setting rules and enforcing them, cracking down on staff who felt they weren’t pulling their weight and telling nosy parents to stay out the door. He also favored rote learning and direct instruction; one of his strategies at Innisfail had been to get the students to memorize through chants at the start of the day.
This approach can be divisive wherever it is used, and Walgett was no different. Some parents, elders and teachers were fans of his drive to raise student learning outcomes. “He was wonderful. He was making some really big changes,” said one, who, like other Walgett residents, did not want to be named because of city politics. Others were furious. “He wasn’t a very nice person,” someone who worked at the school told this masthead, adding that he refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19. “Their way of trying to improve results was to be very strict, a lot of suspension.”
Most principals are forced out of Walgett because of a similar conflict: Over a 23-year period, the high school next door had 29 leaders, but that didn’t end Nathaniel’s tenure. He had a massive heart attack in reception in August last year and had to be resuscitated by a school counselor and deputy headteacher.
Elementary school principal Nathaniel Train did not return to work after a heart attack. Credit: Facebook
It took time to recover, but he never went back, becoming a man of no fixed address. Nathaniel harbored a growing resentment towards the NSW Department of Education for, in his view, failing to support him when he came under attack from a powerful faction in the city. In March, he launched a barrage of emails to the department’s secretary, Georgina Harrisson. He reported to the Ombudsman and his local deputy. One Nation MP Mark Latham raised his concerns in parliament.
Maybe it was trauma, resentment, or even brain damage from lack of oxygen during the heart attack, but Nathaniel’s personality seemed to change. When someone from Walgett asked her partner how she was doing, she would leave. In Moruya he took charge of the construction project. Nathaniel told those he was in contact with about Walgett that he preferred to email rather than call because he lived in a place with poor connectivity, suggesting he may have spent much of his time at his brother’s house, where mobile reception was irregular
Psychologists say that people who feel they have lost control of their lives and feel that their trust in institutions has been betrayed are vulnerable to conspiracy theories as a way to regain control. Nathaniel was dealing with the trauma of a heart attack and a grievance from his time at Walgett. “I had a brother who was already involved,” said University of Sydney psychology academic Micah Goldwater. “You have someone right there to say, ‘Look what the institutions you trusted did, here’s a system you can trust.'”
While Nathaniel worked in Walgett, it is unclear whether he knew his estranged sister, Naomi, worked an hour away in Brewarrina, also as an educator who identified as Indigenous. The two brothers were separated from their parents and two other siblings 23 years ago, their father Ronald told A Current Affair this week, and never explained why. “Gwen [his late wife] and I did a trip in 2004, to Charters Towers [near Townsville], to locate them, to try to talk to them,” he said. “But they refused to let us into the house.”
The split also meant that Ron and Gwen were estranged from Nathaniel and Stacey’s two children, now adults. Her son, who describes himself as a proud Wailwan man from central-west NSW, was Queensland’s highest-achieving Indigenous student in the mid-2010s, achieving an OP 1, which equates to an ATAR d ‘at least 99. offers at a sandstone university in Sydney to study engineering at the University of Southern Queensland. He planned to devote his talent to improving the population of the regions. His “parents are proud of him and happy for him to go anywhere with his degrees,” read a university publication, “but he feels the pull of his Wailwan heritage.”
Ronald Train doesn’t believe it was his intense religious beliefs that drove his children away. “I have two other children who didn’t have this trauma,” said the pastor, who converted to Christianity in 1985. His views fall on the conservative end of the spectrum; in a 2015 constitution governing the church he founded, the Christian Independent Fellowship of Toowoomba, encourages regular sharing with “non-believers,” emphasizes that leadership roles belong to men, and decrees that “the scriptures have to accept literally in the first instance”. His books include Protestant Shame and Without Absolutes, God Is Not God.
Gareth and Nathaniel may have rejected their family, but they don’t seem to have rejected religion. “I am a child of Yahweh, the creator God,” Gareth was quoted as saying in a private forum. “Yeshua [Jesus] he is my king and brother”. He also talks about missing out on formal education “because of my critical evaluations of teaching practices and the resulting conflicts”, but returning to university as a mature student to study social work. “In doing so I discovered the religions of education and psychology … I soon learned that their high priests were the same indoctrinating serpents as the high priests of the church.” In this final video, released after the officers were shot, the police referred to each other as devils and demons.
A family photo of Gareth (left) and Nathaniel (back) with their sister Naomi and older brother Andrew. Credit: A Current Affair
While Stacey lived with Gareth at the Western Downs property, which they bought together in 2015, she worked as head of curriculum at nearby Tara Shire State College. He did not voice his views, but his colleagues, some of whom he liked, suspected that they were “alternative”. He left school at the end of 2021 because he refused to comply with the Queensland Government’s mandate for teacher vaccination against COVID-19. Without work, his contact with the outside world was reduced.
When the missing persons report was issued last week, the three were huddled together on the property: isolated, resentful and paranoid.
When Nathaniel’s worried partner contacted Walgett police in early December, they suggested a few places where they could find him. Gareth’s home was one of them, so NSW officers asked their Queensland colleagues in the Darling Downs to pay them a visit. The missing persons report was shared widely on social media, reaching family members, including Ronald. It is not known if she told officers about the vicious and threatening messages she received from Gareth when someone sent her. Police in Walgett are devastated by the Queensland shooting and are receiving support.
A murky social media account, which appears to have been run by the pair and in which they posted their final video, reveals how they raged at police and foreshadowed violence in the days leading up to the attack. “After dealing with agents and covert tactics for a while now, Daniel [Gareth’s middle name] believes that if they choose to cross the Rubicon with public actors of the state, our Father is giving us a clear signal. Monsters and their bosses soon part,” reads one comment, which appears to be made by the couple.
The account also claims Nathaniel was a whistleblower of “high-level corruption” to the Department of Education and the NSW Police, and mentions previous welfare checks. “The ‘welfare checks’ aka state-sponsored murder have started again. These fools are walking into a world of evil they know nothing about,” read one comment, posted on Friday week past, and which Crikey first reported.
The property in Wieambilla, Queensland, where police and a neighbor were killed on Monday before a siege ended with the train trio dead. Credit: New
It is unclear how much Queensland Police knew about Gareth and Stacey before attending the property, which, like many…