Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  ‘When I looked up the trials in the library I was horrified to find they were published in a form almost useless to the researcher...After hours of search I went along the line of shelves to an assistant librarian and said, “I can’t find it, there’s no clue, it may be in any of these volumes.” I then put my hand on one volume and took it out and carelessly looked at it.

  ‘It was not only the right volume, but I had opened it at the right page.’

  The Fateful Bread-wrapper

  When Melbourne woman Kiersten Wunderle was a baby, the Vietnam war threw her life into chaos. Just before Saigon fell in April 1975 the Viet Cong arrested her parents, who were never seen again. Kiersten, whose nurse had earlier kidnapped, then abandoned her, lay unidentified in a Saigon orphanage. Her life changed again when an Australian couple, Othmar and Nola Wunderle, adopted her. They reared Kiersten as an Australian, alongside her sister Kartya, adopted from Taiwan.

  In 1998 Kartya managed to trace her Taiwanese birth parents. Two years later Kiersten decided she’d try to do the same. She travelled with her mother to Saigon, where they persuaded a newspaper to publish her baby picture from the orphanage alongside a brief appeal for relatives to contact her.

  The news story produced no result. Kiersten and her mother returned to Australia.

  Three months later, Kiersten’s grandfather Vu Van Tu walked to the market to buy a loaf of bread. On returning home he removed the sheet of newspaper in which the loaf was wrapped – and was about to throw it away when an obscure item attracted his eye, prompting him to put on his spectacles. The news story concerned a Vietnamese girl brought up as an Australian, who was hoping to find her birth-parents.

  Inset into the text was a tiny orphanage photograph of the baby the young woman had been. He recognised the child immediately.

  This was his first granddaughter peering up at him: the girl he and his family had mourned since she was an infant. He knew it was her, because he had an almost identical photograph here at home. Delighted, he showed the newspaper photo to his wife Vu Thi Thoa, who immediately fainted.

  Kiersten’s grandparents contacted her in Australia. She was doubtful initially, but her reservations dissolved when they sent a photograph of her father. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Kiersten said. ‘It was like looking at me, but it was a man.’

  Kiersten, now a pharmacy assistant, returned with her mother to Vietnam, where she was reunited with her frail grandparents, nine aunts and numerous cousins.

  The young Australian often reflected on the frailty of the thread from which this meeting had hung suspended. If her grandfather had arrived at the market stall 30 seconds later, that crucial sheet from an outdated newspaper might have wrapped someone else’s bread. And quite possibly the reunion with her birth-family might never have occurred.

  DESERT COINCIDENCE After Australian actor Noah Taylor had completed his role in Nick Cave’s The Proposition, he and English-born partner Emily Jenkins stayed briefly at a hotel in the Queensland desert town, Winton. Here, during a casual conversation with the film’s continuity woman, it gradually emerged that her life was linked to Emily’s- by an astounding fluke of chance.

  Astounding Encounter in an Outback Hotel

  In 2004, London-based Australian actor Noah Taylor combined a small role in Nick Cave’s award-winning film The Proposition with a short holiday. He and his English-born partner, set designer Emily Jenkins, stayed briefly at a hotel in the remote central Queensland town of Winton.

  Surrounded by searing desert, Winton serves the surrounding cattle country and opal mines. While visiting the district Banjo Paterson wrote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  Intrigued by Emily’s accent, a fellow-guest, the film’s continuity woman, asked what part of England she was from. Emily replied that she was from Suffolk.

  ‘I know Suffolk well,’ the woman said. ‘I lived there for a few years when I was young.’ She named an old, tiny village.

  Emily was bemused. She was aware that most people, even in England, had never heard of that village. ‘That’s where I grew up!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘If that’s the case,’ said their new acquaintance, ‘you might know the place I lived in. It was the most beautiful old farmhouse...called Cherry Tree Farm.’

  Emily and Noah were thunderstruck. Cherry Tree Farm was Emily’s childhood home. Her family still lives there – and she and Noah often stay with them at weekends.

  In an obscure hotel, in a tiny Australian town, two women learned that, at different times, they had enjoyed similar experiences on the same farm, half a world distant.

  NOAH TAYLOR’S FRIENDS know that wherever he travels, synchronicities are seldom far away. One coincidence – surprising to everyone concerned – occurred on his 21st birthday when his parents and brother Jack were giving him a celebration dinner at a Melbourne restaurant’s window table.

  The talk turned to Noah’s days at University High School. Someone asked whether he had seen one of his schoolfriends, Joanne, lately – and Noah replied, ‘No – not since I left Uni High.’

  Several seconds later there was a tapping at the window. It was Joanne, who had been walking past when she noticed Noah and his family inside.

  A Curious Calendar Coincidence

  On 22 July 2001 the Sunday Herald Sun revealed that the 23rd of the month had long been a significant time for Melbourne’s Gray family.

  The couple’s second child Simon was born on 23 June 1990.

  Mother Lynne was born on 23 January 1960.

  Father Craig entered the world on 23 April 1955.

  His brother Daniel was born on 23 September 1982.

  The couple celebrated their anniversary on the 23rd.

  * * *

  Uncanny Odyssey of the Uncanny Odyssey of the Lottery-Scooping Truckdriver

  Bill Morgan, a 37-year-old truckdriver with electrical retailer Harvey Norman, suffered a heart attack in early April 1998. He managed to drive himself to Melbourne’s Dandenong Hospital where, despite all the staff’s efforts, his heart stopped for 14 minutes.

  Surgeons eventually managed to revive him from clinical death – but he quickly fell into a coma, from which he seemed unlikely to emerge. The medical team considered switching off his life support, but ultimately decided to have him flown by helicopter to the Alfred Hospital.

  Bill’s prognosis was poor. The average patient whose heart has stopped for so long would be expected either to die – or at least to suffer serious brain damage. But after 12 days Bill emerged from the coma smiling and announcing that he was hungry.

  He subsequently revealed that, while ‘unconscious’ he had entered a realm of breathtaking beauty, where he had talked with his deceased mother.

  Bill Morgan’s morale, and recovery, were boosted by his employer’s promise to keep his job open. Within a few months he was driving his truck again. By Anzac Day 1999 he was feeling sufficiently healthy — and sufficiently confident of his future – to ask his girlfriend Lisa Wells to marry him. She said yes, giving him one more reason to consider himself an exceptionally lucky man.

  But there was more good fortune ahead.

  On impulse several weeks later, he bought a Tattersalls scratchie ticket from his local Cranbourne newsagency. It was the last one in the shop that day. As he scratched the plastic film away he saw he had won a $27,000 Toyota Corolla.

  The fact that a man revived from clinical death had gone on to fluke a car for $5 was of great interest to TV’s six o’clock news services. Channels 9 and 7 asked Bill Morgan to re-enact his purchase at the agency that had sold him the ticket. Obligingly he handed the assistant $5, began to scratch the ticket with the edge of a coin, then recoiled in shock.

  He had won $250,000.

  When the journalists and cameramen spoke cynically of cheesy publicity stunts, Bill burst into tears. ‘It’s true!’ he said. ‘I really have won the money.’

  Briefly the luck-touched truckdriver became globally famous. TV crews from Britain, Europe and
Japan flew to Australia to film his story. A man who had died 13 months earlier had returned, healthy, to be offered his old job back, to become engaged to the woman he loved, and to beat estimated odds of 6.1 billion to win two major lottery prizes from the same outlet.

  Bill Morgan was quietly convinced that far more than coincidence was involved. He believed that someone, somewhere had done him a favour. ‘If things like this happen to you, there’s no way you can say it was pure chance,’ he told the media. ‘There has to be something bigger and more powerful at work.’

  ANOTHER STRANGE scratchie synchronism occurred in November 2002 when a Tasmanian man named D. Oliver bought a $5 scratch-ticket in the $50,000 Melbourne Cup Sweep.

  He didn’t seriously expect to win anything – and was thrilled when his name was drawn from hundreds of thousands to hold one of the 24 saddlecloth numbers.

  Punter D. Oliver was randomly allocated number 14, Media Puzzle – whose jockey happened, stunningly, to be his namesake, Damien Oliver.

  Media Puzzle won the Melbourne Cup.

  Journalists, intrigued by this extraordinary coincidence, were initially unable to contact D. Oliver. He was briefly away from home, attending his uncle’s funeral in Perth, Tasmania.

  Meanwhile Damien Oliver was flying to Perth, Western Australia, to attend his brother’s funeral.

  * * *

  A Synchronicity in Blood

  Barry Oakley is one of Australia’s most respected novelists and short story writers. Shortly after meeting the woman he would marry, he found himself entangled in a strange web of coincidence. Barry’s wife Carmel told me the story.

  ‘I was brought up in Maryborough, Victoria. When I was 16 my mother, Ann Hart, became very ill and was admitted to hospital. The doctor ordered regular blood transfusions – and as Mum had an unusual blood group the hospital took a little while to get it in.

  ‘Finally the blood arrived, with the female donor’s name taped on the bottles. Mum often looked at that name while receiving transfusions – and felt grateful to the otherwise anonymous person whose gift was helping her back to health.

  ‘Two years later I met Barry, the man who would become my husband. When I took him home and introduced him to Mum she was immediately intrigued by his surname. She asked if he had a relative named Mary Oakley. He laughed and said yes – that was his mother.

  ‘Then Mum amazed us both by saying, “Well, I’m already acquainted with your mother in a way. She donated the blood that was sent to me in Maryborough Hospital two years ago.”

  ‘It was a strangely symbolic coincidence. Here we were, about to combine our bloodlines by marrying and having children – discovering that the blood of our parents had been linked already.’

  Synchronous Smashes

  In 1985 a bizarre confluence of events bemused staff at Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission.

  The pattern of events began when a young man crashed his truck and was admitted to Sandringham Hospital. From his bed he tried to ring his girlfriend, but there was no reply. Eventually he discovered why.

  Within the same hour that he had experienced his accident, she had suffered one of her own, just down the road in Brighton. And she too was in Sandringham Hospital, in a nearby ward.

  The farrago of flukes did not end there. His truck and her car had been collected by the same towing company. They were standing side-by-side in the storage yard.

  NENE KING, former editor-in-chief of Woman’s Day, was similarly assailed by mysteriously matched mishaps. In September 2000, after delivering a speech in northern Queensland, she returned home to Noosa, to discover that her black-and-white mongrel Reggie had disappeared.

  While searching for him she slid down an embankment, breaking her leg. In hospital later that day she learned that a car had struck Reggie, breaking his leg. Neither dog nor owner had previously suffered a broken limb.

  Joy and Joy: The Coincidental Companions

  Joy Berg of Matraville, NSW had never met Joy Burg, who lived several streets away. But for years she was not only bothered by phone calls for the other Joy – but was stopped in the street by strangers wanting to discuss people and events she had never heard of. Nearby, Joy Burg was having much the same trouble.

  The pair finally met when one of the Joys happened to join the other Joy’s bowling club. Oddly the two women immediately became best friends. In an Age Good Weekend interview with Janet Hawley (8 July 2000) Joy Berg said, ‘Joy grew up in the bush. I’m a city girl – but the coincidences in our lives were uncanny.

  ‘The first time I went to Joy’s house she had the same picture of gum trees on her wall as I had...and the same green and gold wallpaper. We’d go out for the weekend, I’d step out of my front door in a blue dress and Joy would be sitting in her car in a blue dress – that still happens.’

  From the time they met the pair was inseparable, visiting each other’s houses, shopping together and sharing holidays. Strangers, noticing their almost identical hair colour, sometimes asked whether they were sisters. But their look-alike affinity had nothing to do with shared genes. Coincidentally they had both used the same hair dye for years: the product Frivolous Fawn.

  The Book that Boomeranged

  Newspaper columnist Michael Shmith first saw the film Anatomy of a Murder on TV when he was 12. So impressed was he by the Otto Preminger production that he bought a copy of Robert Traver’s novel on which it was based.

  More than 40 years later, writing under the pen-name Groucho in Melbourne’s Sunday Age, Shmith recalled what happened next. Having just seen the film again (this time on video) he found himself longing to re-read the book, ‘just to see if it was still as good’. At lunchtime one day, while passing a secondhand bookshop in Flinders Street, he decided to go inside ‘for a prowl among the thrillers, to see if, by chance, the Traver book was there’. Michael Shmith wrote:

  Now, Groucho’s first law of literature is simple: the book you want will not be there. The second rule – no one will have heard of it – had no chance to be proved because, amazingly, the first rule was overturned swiftly and mercilessly in the time it took me to look up at the T shelf.

  Anatomy of a Murder was right there at eye-level: an olive-green spine bisected by the silhouette graphic used for the film. Such luck!

  I looked at the price on the title page – $5, which I suppose matched the three and sixpence originally charged by Penguin – paid for it and left the shop. Normally Groucho begins reading books at Chapter One. A curious habit, I agree...but I don’t do the preliminaries, such as read the title page. This time, though...I flipped the book open at the first page.

  There, just under the pencilled price and the printed information that this was Penguin No 1479 was a scrawl in faded blue ink, in a youthful, flamboyant, familiar hand. It was my name. In my writing.

  This was my copy of Anatomy of a Murder, last read by me in 1961 and, for the intervening 42 years, read by who knows where or when. I can’t remember how long the novel had stayed in my shelves, or if or when it was borrowed, sold or (gasp!) stolen. All I did know was that there it was again in my hands, reunited with its first owner, whose condition sinisterly parallels that of the book: no cracks in the spine, a bit dog-eared and foxed, fading at the edges but otherwise in reasonable shape.

  Where has it been? How far has it travelled? What other hands and eyes have turned its pages? How did it end up on a shelf in a Flinders Street shop?

  ...I have read many better crime novels than Anatomy of a Murder. But I have never possessed (repossessed, I guess) a book that has given me greater cause for wonder at the eternal mystery of coincidence.

  The Expedition that Vanished

  The search for lost explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and his six companions has continued for almost 160 years. The rescue effort began confidently, with volunteers on horseback riding forth convinced they would quickly bring the missing men home. The quest continued stubbornly through the 20th century and into the 21st, aided by satellite navigation and
aerial photographic scans. But the result has always been the same. No trace of the party – not even a saddle-strap or a fragment of skull – has ever been found. Leichhardt and his colleagues, along with their 50 bullocks, 270 goats, 20 mules, 12 horses and tonnes of crated supplies, had simply dissolved into the shimmering tropical air. As one bemused historian wrote, ‘It was as though God Himself had reached down and drawn them into his realm, leaving no earthly residue...’

  THE DARK FATE of young Ludwig Leichhardt was sealed on his 12th birthday.

  Ludwig’s father, always pleased that his son’s scholarly bent mirrored his own, presented him with a large leatherbound folio filled with crude sketches of the peculiar animals, trees and flowers that had been discovered in the colony of New South Wales.

  The boy, reclusive and prone to depression, was already a naturalist – his room filled with plant and butterfly specimens from the forest bordering his home in Trebatsch, Prussia (now Brandenburg, Germany). But these drawings from the inconceivably distant and startlingly alien landscapes of Australia intoxicated him. Amateurish though the colonial artist’s depictions were, they opened horizons Ludwig had never dreamed existed.

  It became his life’s central aim to visit and explore that enigmatic southern continent. The continent into which, one day, he would vanish forever.

  Ludwig’s parents were not rich, but they had money enough to fund his studies of philosophy and natural sciences at the universities of Berlin and Gottingen – and later to pay him a small allowance while he conducted field studies in England, France and Italy. He worked hard – but never to earn himself a living. He regarded himself as a gentleman, too refined for commerce and suited only to the pursuit of knowledge.