Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  Workers at the Sandy Cape lighthouse also saw the turtlefish. A London history museum offered a bounty of £100 for the entire animal – but no one is on record as having secured the monster or the money. (The Brown and Lovell cases were collected by Paul Clacher.)

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  The Monster and the Melbourne Vicar

  The saurians repeatedly seen in Australia’s lakes and oceans are often likened to those prehistoric monsters, untouched by time, which allegedly dwell in Loch Ness, Scotland.

  Since 1934 (according to the Loch Investigation Society) more than 7000 people have testified to watching a gigantic beast, with a serpentine neck, rearing from Ness’s icy waters.

  In 1985 I spoke to one of those witnesses: the Melbourne clergyman, Reverend Dr Gordon Powell.

  ‘I saw the creature on Sunday, June 21, 1936,’ he told me. ‘I was on a camping trip with two fellow theology students from Glasgow University. We’d pitched our tent beside Urquhart Castle. It was 5.30 pm – the longest day of the year – and conditions were unusually hot and bright.

  ‘I was sitting writing a letter when I happened to look up – and something like a huge eel suddenly appeared, worming its way toward the opposite bank. I got such a shock I nearly ran the pencil through the paper.

  ‘To my amazement I saw three and sometimes four humps moving rapidly through the water. They were like the coils of a huge sea serpent. The head was quite smooth, like that of a young calf.

  ‘I hastily grabbed my camera – but as the range was about 200 yards, the photo registered only the creature’s wide wake. What astonished me perhaps the most was that when I moved to get the camera, the creature seemed to turn and look at me. Then it sped at an enormous pace toward the ruins of the old castle, where it dived at a point that I later learned was about 700 feet deep.

  ‘Sceptics can smile as much as they like – but I know what I saw.

  ‘And many years later, in 1960, I finally developed a theory about what it might have been. While visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum in London I was suddenly confronted by the skeleton of an ancient plesiosaur, more than 30 feet long.

  ‘Without even looking at the nameplate I gasped and said, “That’s the skeleton of the Loch Ness monster.”

  Dr Maurice Burbon of the British Museum would have echoed Dr Powell’s sentiment. He liked to point out that Loch Ness would have been an ideal environment for prehistoric monsters to breed down the centuries. He said, ‘The loch is deep, filled with food, and cut off, today, from the sea and the creature’s natural enemies.’

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  Mysterious Murders in Sydney’s Dunes

  The Atrocity on Wanda Beach

  On a windswept morning in January 1965 a man, strolling with his nephews through the sandhills on Wanda Beach, Sydney, stumbled upon a scene of horror. Half-buried in a dune were the brutally stabbed and battered bodies of two teenage girls who had been reported missing the previous night. The sadistic double murder shocked Australia. Police shifted thousands of tonnes of sand in a fruitless search for the weapons. Over the ensuing years they interviewed more than 9000 people, spoke to scores of suspects and coped with a barrage of false confessions. But the maniac has never been found...

  WANDA BEACH, with its treacherous rips, sandbanks and explosive waves, forms part of Sydney’s wildest stretch of coastline. Before sandminers attacked its towering dunes the area inspired numerous filmmakers – serving as a backdrop to Puberty Blues, representing part of a post-apocalyptic world in Mad Max, and even accommodating World War I battles in Forty Thousand Horsemen.

  Closely neighboured by Cronulla Beach, the scene of 2005’s racial riots, Wanda has a long history of violence, stretching back to the gang wars of the early 20th century. Occasionally a particularly grim drama occurs when a startled beachgoer discovers skeletal human remains protruding from the sand. But police forensic tests have always found such bones to be older than Sydney itself. Wanda’s dunes were once home to tribal Aboriginals. And even the traces of their banquets are returning to haunt us. The discarded shells the tribespeople threw onto their middens are still working their way to the surface today and crunching under visitors’ feet.

  On 12 January 1965, Wanda became the most infamous – and feared – beach in Australia. On that grim day the savagely mutilated bodies of two 15-year-old schoolgirls were found in a vegetated hollow amid the dunes. The luckless discoverers were a local man and his three nephews, who imagined at first that a department store dummy had been buried, its head and feet protruding. But when the man noticed blood on the sand he hurried with his young charges to the Wanda surf club, where he called police.

  Detectives arrived, wearing the dark suits and business hats of the era. Helped by constables with spades they quickly established that there was not one body, but two. The feet belonged to one of the girls; the head to the other. Many of the policemen were openly distressed. The double murder was marked by a barbarity and chilling heartlessness few had encountered in their work before. The girls, their clothes torn away, had been repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned. A forensics check established that both victims had been raped. Senior investigators called for floodlights so that work could continue at the crime scene through the night.

  Prominent among many pictures a police photographer took were images of a bloody trail up a sandhill: mute evidence that at least one of the teenagers had fled the monster for 40 metres before he struck her down. Police culled the sand for several days, unearthing the bloodstained tip of a blade, but finding neither the cruelly sharp knife itself nor the blunt instrument which also had been used.

  It was the beginning of a murder hunt that would haunt Australia for decades.

  THE TRAGEDY’S SEEDS were sown on the pleasant summer morning of 11 January when friends and next-door neighbours Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt, both 15, decided to spend a pleasant day swimming and sunbaking. The girls, with four of Marianne’s six younger siblings in tow, headed for Cronulla Beach. It was by no means the closest stretch of sand to their homes in West Ryde – and there would, for a generation afterward, be speculation about why they had chosen to go there. One theory centred on the fact that Marianne’s father, now dead, had often taken the children to Cronulla. Obviously the beach held special meaning for Marianne.

  A second, stronger conjecture was that the teenagers had met boys (or someone more sinister) during their visit the previous week – and innocently hoped to renew the acquaintance.

  By the time the party arrived at Cronulla, the summer weather had soured. A strong wind was blowing, prompting the young people to shelter among rocks at the beach’s southern end. The only visitor with any desire to swim was Marianne’s seven-year-old brother Wolfgang. She walked with him to a shallow stretch of surf, but he soon emerged, shivering. Marianne, a conscientious and motherly girl, helped her little sibling to dry himself quickly and dress. Then, sheltered from the wind by Cronulla’s cliff front, the youngsters sat amid the rocks and shared a lunch of tomato and cucumber sandwiches.

  Wolfgang, regarded by police as an exceptionally observant witness, would later describe what happened next...

  After lunch Marianne suggested that everyone walk through the sandhills past Wanda Beach. Before setting out the youngsters hid their bags amid the rocks. It proved an unpleasant excursion. The sky was now heavily overcast; the wind blustery and strong. The smaller children fretted, saying that whipping sand was hurting their legs and getting into their mouths and eyes. Marianne and Christine shepherded the complainants into the shelter of a sandhill near the surf club, enjoining them to stay there while they strolled back along the deserted beach to collect the bags. Marianne entrusted Wolfgang with her transistor radio, suggesting he entertain his siblings with it. When they came back, she promised, they would all go home.

  Marianne and Christine waved and walked off. Wolfgang could hardly believe how foolishly they were behaving. They were going the wrong way. The rocks where the bags were concealed lay
back in the direction from which they had all come. But Christine and his sister were taking exactly the opposite path!

  ‘I yelled out and told them,’ Wolfgang, his eyes seldom free of tears, told a detective. ‘But they didn’t take any notice. They just laughed and kept on walking.’

  ‘Going north instead of south,’ the detective said. And later, in his report, discussed the possibility that the naive teenagers had made arrangements to meet someone. Someone they knew. Or thought they knew.

  The small children waited shivering behind the sandhill until five o’clock. Then they returned to the rocks to collect their bags and went home. Christine’s and Marianne’s families assumed at first that the friends were out (albeit uncharacteristically) on some heedless teenage errand and would be back to face chastisement before long. But at 8.30 they rang police.

  The following morning, sunny but with a strong wind still blowing, the poignant, battered bodies were found. The crime, among the most repugnant in Australia’s history, placed NSW police under immense pressure to make a swift arrest. They asked for public help – and were approached almost immediately by a man who had been walking in the area that afternoon. He said he had seen two girls, fitting the description of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Shorrock, walking about 800 yards (730 metres) north of the surf club. One girl ‘kept looking back, as though she was expecting to be followed’ the man said. ‘But as far as I could make out, no one was following them.’ Possibly this witness was the last person – other than the murderer – to have seen the teenagers alive.

  The people of Sydney, gripped by grief for two young people they had never known, did everything in their power to help:

  A woman said that on the morning of the murder she had seen a man wearing a square Ned Kelly-style mask lying on Cronulla Beach.

  A motorist recalled that the owner of a Skoda parked near the seafront had behaved suspiciously.

  A man driving along Captain Cook Drive, Cronulla, on the afternoon of the murders saw a swarthy male running from the dunes, ‘covered in blood from ankles to nose’.

  Seven psychologically troubled men reported at various police stations to confess to the killings. However no one was of the right blood group, or could accurately answer questions about unpublicised details of the attacks. One of the men was so anxious to be charged that he produced bloodstained clothing. Under questioning he admitted it was animal blood. But forensics did check that that was the truth.

  Like the lay helpers who described suspects ranging from blonde to swarthy, police nurtured their own conflicting theories. Knowing that the dunes had always been a haven for perverts they worked steadily through lists of all who had ever been convicted for their deviant behaviour – or even questioned about it. Interviews with the men yielded nothing. Meanwhile Identikit pictures of six more suspects, names unknown, were circulated to all NSW police.

  Detectives interviewed sex offenders who had been released from prisons and mental hospitals over the preceding 20 years. Although they strongly suspected that some parolees were capable of the crime, they could not prove it.

  Detective-Sergeant Cecil Johnson strongly believed that the killer was a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been free at the time of the Wanda Beach atrocity. The following year he was found responsible for the rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman and was placed in a maximum security psychiatric prison.

  Detective Senior-Sergeant Jack Lucas had a different suspect, to whom he gave the unaffectionate nickname Tat Man’. On 11 January this unsavoury individual, about 25 to 28, approached six pairs of girls lying on the sand between South Cronulla and Wanda. He was shoeless, wearing a singlet and long black trousers and carrying a pornographic magazine. The young women to whom he tried to speak were so frightened by his incoherent mumblings that they ran away. Regrettably they did not report the incidents immediately, but waited until the following day when the bodies of Marianne and Christine were discovered. Witnesses saw the man walking toward Wanda Beach at 12.45 pm – 30 minutes before the girls were killed.

  Despite one of the biggest police operations in Australia’s history the Fat Man was never found. Jack Lucas so dedicated himself to solving the case that his heart suffered. After four traumatic years of work on the murders he developed a cardiac condition and was transferred to the Fraud Squad. He was not the first Australian policeman to have his health damaged by a murder investigation.

  In 1999 British police used DNA profiling to identify and convict a serial rape-murderer who had eluded them for 28 years.

  Sydney CIB have preserved all the clothing and blood samples from the nightmare scene at Wanda Beach. They remain hopeful – despite the hobbles of legislation – that they can perform a similar forensic coup.

  But it hasn’t happened yet.

  The Pilot, the Submarine and the Fluke of Fate

  Great Australian Coincidences

  During a crucial World War II battle, a young Australian pilot courageously sinks an enemy U-boat. He is later astonished to learn that his aircraft and the stricken submarine are uncannily linked. An Australian movie actor and his partner stay at an outback hotel, where they discover that a fellow-crew member’s life is deeply associated with theirs – against astronomical odds. An adopted Melbourne woman is reunited with her birth family in distant Saigon, after they notice her baby photo on an old newspaper wrapped around a loaf of bread. These are just a few of the eerie coincidences Australians have experienced over the past century.

  IN THE FOURTH DARK YEAR of World War II, German U-boats ruled the Atlantic – sinking so many vessels that they exceeded the entire Allied shipbuilding program by almost three million tonnes.

  The burgeoning disaster prompted Britain and the United States to take powerful defensive measures. Knowing that the submarines had to come up every 24 hours to recharge their batteries, the Allies fitted fighter-bombers with ‘Leigh Lights’: powerful searchbeams that could brightly illumine U-boats floating on the surface.

  A 22-year-old Australian pilot who used these lights to devastating effect was Bendigo-born Flight-Lieutenant D. Marrows – a member of the RAAF’s 461 Squadron. On 31 July 1943, flying a Sunderland, he joined four other Allied planes in an attack on three surfaced submarines. The Germans zig-zagged, pouring a torrent of gunfire at their assailants, hitting two.

  With remarkable courage Marrows made his run, sweeping so low into the central U-boat’s storm of bullets he almost grazed its conning tower. But he managed to release seven depth-charges which sank the sub in an exploding tower of foam.

  The archives of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, reveal that the young pilot’s Sunderland bore the identification number U-461. The German submarine that he sank carried the same number – U-461.

  This bizarre coincidence is chronicled by the historian A.K. Macdougall in his monumental Victory: the Epic of World War II. The singular incident – a fight to the death in the Atlantic between foes who, against all odds, are identically numbered – would have fascinated the psychologist Carl Jung. He devoted much of his life to studying such coincidences – or, as he preferred to call them, synchronicities. Some, he believed, were far more than accidents, and seemed to be characterised by an apparent ‘hint of intention’. Was it possible, he speculated, that we might be pawns of a force far beyond our understanding? Might coincidences be the work of a ‘cosmic joker’, who, for opaque reasons, plays games with us: some comical, some sinister?

  A Shock in the Library

  Most coincidences are trivial. But some can be odd, to a disturbing degree. I had my sole experience of such a synchronicity when I was a young journalist with Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial. At that time, in collaboration with my friend, lawyer Peter Norris, I was preparing to co-found the Victorian UFO Research Society, of which Peter would become the first president. The media at that time were publishing numerous reports of oval craft which allegedly were buzzing planes, frightening farm animals and shining spotlights on the suburbs. I sometimes won
dered idly whether this was a uniquely modern phenomenon – or if such reports might have been made in the past. (Erik von Daniken was yet to appear on publishing’s horizon.)

  I decided to visit the Herald and Weekly Times archive in the faint hope of discovering whether there were indeed UFO reports dating back to our great-grandfathers’ era. I harboured little hope that I’d find anything – and vowed to devote a maximum of three hours to the exercise.

  The archive was a cold gloomy place. Thick leatherbound folios of the Herald, the Age, the Argus and other – defunct – 19th century broadsheets were crammed on shelves ascending to the ceiling. Task impossible. I’d be trawling through tens of millions of words, seeking a chimera-in-a-haystack.

  I began at random, took down a heavy folio of the Argus, carried it to a table and, equally randomly, opened it.

  Before me, on the very first page I saw, was a long article, accompanied by a large illustration depicting an Airship’ that witnesses had seen hovering above Port Phillip Bay.

  The craft, as the accompanying text described it, had been oval in shape with square windows.

  As an ad hoc researcher who had expected to fail, I should have been delighted. But all I could feel was profound unease: the sense that something had happened which should not have happened.

  For years afterward I imagined that that flesh-prickling occurrence in the archive had been an experience unique to me. But then Arthur Koestler published his book The Roots of Coincidence – and I learned about the phenomenon he dubbed ‘the Library Angel’. One person who had encountered it was the essayist Dame Rebecca West. In a letter to Koestler she recalled: ‘I wanted to gather some information about the Nuremberg war crimes trials: relating in particular to an episode described by one of the accused. I went to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, but quickly found myself at a dead-end.