Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  No one at this point could do anything more than theorise. Pat and Fred had begun to wonder whether the dazzling triple display might be connected in some way with Fred’s escape from death on the freeway. ‘I’ll never forget what happened in those few moments of the crash,’ Fred told me. ‘I got the distinct feeling someone had grabbed the wheel and steered me out of the worst of the collision. Now we both think the crosses could be connected with that – whether it’s been sent to tell us something.’

  The couple said they had cancelled a planned trip to England to visit Pat’s aged parents. ‘We feel that while the crosses are in the house they might be a message to us to stay right here with them,’ she said. ‘We’re not regular churchgoers, but this whole affair is making us feel quite religious.’

  I began to build a chronology of the crosses. The first witness I spoke with was Mike Sims, husband of Pat’s daughter Mandy: ‘I’ve been to dozens of barbecues on the patio facing those windows and I can honestly say that neither I, nor any other visitor, saw those things glowing there before last February. I’m a practical bloke, but I find it totally baffling.’ Neighbours and friends made similar comments.

  I recommended to the Whiteheads that they have the windowpanes scientifically analysed. While we were arranging this, the level of high strangeness increased by several notches.

  UNCANNY CROSSES In February 1988, dazzlingly bright crosses began inexplicably to shine in three windows of Fred and Pat Whitehead’s house in Frankston, Victoria. A Pilkington-ACI engineer and glass expert removed the panes for testing, but could find no flaws. ‘The crosses are floating outside the glass,’ the engineer said. Pat Whitehead is pictured with daughter Michelle.

  FOLLOWED HOME Pat’s friend, travel agent Christine Grace drove 40 km to see the phenomenon. On returning home she was astonished to see that crosses had entered her windows, too. Christine Grace and children, Erin and Lauren, stand outside one of her windows.

  The Crosses Multiply

  One of Pat’s friends, 27-year-old Christine Grace, visited the house with her sisters Jacqueline and Beverley.

  ‘We went there specifically to look at the crosses,’ Christine, a former travel agent, told me. The day was bright and sunny and the crosses were shining so brightly they gave me a sharp pain in the temples. My head was still aching after we’d driven the 40 kilometres home to Rye that night. I went straight to the bathroom – and the moment I stepped in my heart started pounding.

  ‘There in the bathroom windows were three more crosses – the same as Pat and Fred’s.’

  I visited the Graces’ seaside house in company with a second photographer, Gianni Marzella. We stood in the back garden trying to make sense of the sharply defined golden images shining in the afternoon sunlight. Gianni spent a long time closely scrutinising the panes. He concluded: ‘The crosses are definitely not caused by a distortion in the glass. A warp would create hundreds of tiny crosses. But here, in each pane, there’s only one. They remind me of crosses in the Vatican. I’ve never seen anything so strange in my life.’

  Christine’s husband, telephone linesman Tony Grace, was equally dumbfounded. ‘When Christine called to me from the bathroom on that first night I thought she must be joking. When I saw the crosses hanging there, I couldn’t believe it. We’ve been in this house 19 months with the same bathroom windows – and they’ve always been blank. Some people think we’re playing a practical joke, but we wouldn’t know how to do that. We’re not religious and we’re not hoaxers. We only want to find out what’s causing this.’

  Pilkington-ACI engineer and glass expert Gerald Otten did his best. After removing panes to check whether a recurring flaw might be creating the images, he produced this verdict: ‘There is no warping whatever. The crosses are outside the glass. I can’t explain them. I’ve had extensive experience with glass, but frankly this business staggers me.

  ‘None of my tests on Mrs Whitehead’s panes revealed any visual defects or distortions. When I removed the panes and held one up in front of another, the cross seemed to hang between them, indicating that the crosses are outside the glass. And when I held a pane up to the light, the brightness of the cross hurt my eyes.’

  PARTICULARLY INTRIGUING was the fact that the Whiteheads had three bathroom windows, in each of which a cross perpetually shone.

  The Graces had four bathroom windows – but crosses appeared in only three.

  Several months after Christine’s visit, Fred and Pat Whitehead sold their house and flew to England where Pat’s father lay seriously ill. They changed the panes in their bathroom windows and took the ‘haunted’ panes with them. But when they unpacked those panes in Britain, the crosses were no longer visible. After several months Christine and Tony Grace’s crosses also vanished, as mysteriously as they had arrived.

  The Crosses-in-Windows enigma was not confined to Australia. Through 1988 (the same year in which Fred Whitehead escaped death on the freeway) reports and photographs began appearing in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, New Zealand and Argentina. The phenomenon persists today – even having invaded windows of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) in Vancouver.

  Numerous glass experts and scientists of varying disciplines have studied the crosses – but no one has yet produced a satisfactory explanation of how (or why) the images are manifesting themselves. Some observers say that for sheer mysteriousness the crosses rank with crop circles. Among international physicists who have examined the panes, the general consensus appears to be that:

  To produce such a sharp, focused image, a windowpane would have to be extremely curved or concave. In known tests so far, no such concavity or curvature has been found.

  So much force would be needed to bend the installed glass that it would break before the ‘cross effect’ became possible.

  Windowpanes are not normally flat. The solidifying process during manufacture renders them slightly wavy. The straight lines photographed in the crosses would be unlikely to appear on a wavy surface. (This seems to lend weight to the Australian expert’s statement, above, that ‘the cross is outside the glass’.)

  The ‘lines of coherence’ in sunlight (about one micrometre) would prevent a glass sheet from reflecting such a large image without fuzziness. Window-crosses, wherever they appear, are characterised by straight clean lines.

  The analysts, in short, are unable to explain how the crosses manifest themselves. They can only produce reasons why the images should not be there at all.

  To my knowledge no ‘cross-cases’ were reported before February 1988. My research suggests that Australians Pat and Fred Whitehead were among the first people in the world – if not the first – to find these awe-inspiring artefacts in their windows. Before quitting the house, Fred told me, ‘We both have the strong feeling the crosses are trying to tell us something. I only wish we knew what that something is.’

  Thousands of witnesses around the world might echo his sentiment.

  * * *

  The Cross that Glowed – From 1918 to 1986

  The dazzling crosses that invaded the windows of two Melbourne bayside houses had lifespans of less than eight months.

  That was a mere cosmic tick of the clock compared to the mystery that persisted in the Pioneer Cemetery, Lismore, NSW, for 68 years.

  The saga began on 30 September 1907 when a 29-year-old railwayman, William Steenson, was fatally injured while courageously trying to stop a runaway carriage with his bare hands. William’s family buried him beneath a large stone cross – and for a long time his burial place appeared no different from the graves surrounding it. Not until 1918, when the Great War was drawing to a close, did the ‘strangeness’ set in.

  Without warning or apparent reason, William Steenson’s cross began suddenly to glow – and on some nights it shone, with a brilliance so intense it lit up a wide area of the cemetery. Like the crosses that would invade windows in Frankston and Rye 70 years ahead, the Lismore cross shed radiance around the
clock.

  All efforts to make sense of the phenomenon failed. Some locals believed reflected moonlight might be causing the glow. But this theory was quickly discarded. The cross emitted light both in the daytime and on cloudy nights when no moon was visible. As the motorcar became increasingly common on Lismore’s rough bush roads, theorists suggested that their headlamps might be creating the mystery. But they could not explain why only one cross was shining, in a cemetery teeming with them.

  In February 1978 a Sydney newspaper was (extremely belatedly) tipped off about the story. Within 48 hours Lismore was a swarm with reporters, TV cameramen and sceptics determined to demonstrate that the entire affair was nonsense. Physicists, geologists, gemmologists, refraction analysts and many more experts looked at the cross and offered a jumble of attempted explanations. One expert pronounced that the glow was caused by the ‘polished state’ of the Balmoral granite that formed the cross. The argument collapsed when a local resident pointed out that many surrounding crosses were fashioned from the same material. Why weren’t they glowing too? Despite their considerable collective brainpower, the experts who had descended on Lismore could offer no convincing answers. Then, in 1986, the evidence vanished. Following a long string of vandal attacks, someone managed to remove the cross from its pedestal. Police and volunteers could find neither the perpetrators nor their loot.

  The Steensons honoured their ancestor by placing a new Balmoral granite cross, identical to the first, over his grave. This new cross never shone. The headstone’s base, which remains undisturbed, still bears an epitaph which 21st century observers have described as strangely prescient:

  Though sorrow and darkness encompass the tomb,

  Thy saviour has passed through its darkness before thee...

  And the lamp of his love

  Is thy guide through the gloom.

  * * *

  Mishap – or Murder?

  Mystery of the Missing Tiger Moth

  Perhaps it was a tragic accident. Or possibly – as a prominent senator has darkly suggested – it was Australia’s first political assassination. Whatever the truth, the disappearance of conservationist Brenda Hean and pilot Max Price has provoked argument for more than 30 years. In 1972, courageously defying a threat of death, the pair set out for Canberra in a tiny Tiger Moth aircraft. They hoped to prevent the ruination of a spectacular glacial lake in southwest Tasmania. But the two protesters never reached the capital – and neither they nor their plane were seen again...

  What will you do when all that is left in the world is money? Will you eat your money when no crops will grow and when all the herds of the plains and the fishes of the waters are dead? Will your money shelter you from the sun when all of the trees are gone? Will your money slake your thirst when the rivers are dry and still?

  – 19th century American Indian lore

  IT WAS AN IDEA THAT youthful Dr Bob Walker would forever regret. As a leader of the campaign to save Lake Pedder he knew that virtually no time remained before the devastation of one of Australia’s greatest national treasures began. The Tasmanian government was determined to go ahead with what, to some, was an abhorrent exercise, designed marginally to increase the state’s power capacity. The Federal Government seemed indifferent to what was happening – even though Pedder was part of a protected national park. And the majority of the Australian people, in that environmentally oblivious year of 1972, were silent.

  Something, Dr Walker knew, had to be done to focus national attention on the imminent vandalism: to get the Island State’s relatively obscure controversy onto TV and into newspapers. As part of the solution he suggested that a plane be flown over Parliament House, Canberra: an aircraft capable of writing SAVE LAKE PEDDER in the sky.

  The campaign’s committee applauded the idea. The 55-year-old socialite Mrs Brenda Hean, one of the earliest and most dedicated of the activists, volunteered to go on the journey herself. Nobody objected. Brenda was not only a gifted debater, but a strong personality with all the skills needed to lobby federal politicians. If anyone could mount a defence for the threatened lake, she could.

  The departure date was set for 8 September 1972. The plane would be a World War II Tiger Moth, equipped with a smoke-tank designed for skywriting; the pilot a trusted local, Max Price.

  The campaign committee announced the route the aircraft would take, hoping to garner publicity at its every fuel stop. Federal elections were imminent – and the protesters wanted to submit the major parties to as much pressure as they could muster.

  But Brenda Hean was determined that one story must never reach the media.

  Three days before her odyssey began, she received an unpleasant phone call. An anonymous male warned that if she valued her life, she had better cancel the Canberra trip – saying, ‘If you go, you’d better know how to swim.’ Frightened, but her resolve unshaken, she slammed the phone down in the caller’s ear. Neither she nor her committee colleagues were surprised by the threat. Since their campaign began, members of the Save Pedder group had endured numerous physical attacks and other bids to silence them.

  Police records reveal a particularly sinister development. On the eve of the Tiger Moth’s flight intruders forced the padlock on its hangar door. Investigating constables could find no evidence of theft or serious property damage, although they did note that papers on a worktable had been tampered with.

  THE MAJESTIC BODY of water at the heart of one of Tasmania’s bitterest controversies was ‘discovered’ (in a European sense only) in 1835, by the explorer John Wedge. Roughly 18,000 years before Christ the area had been the home of Aboriginal tribes. In his diary Wedge wrote: ‘On the 11th March we reached two beautiful lakes, which we named Lake Pedder and Lake Maria, lying in the heart of the most romantic scenery and being surrounded by lofty mountains.’

  Wedge had named the first lake after the colony’s chief justice, Sir John Lewes Pedder. Over succeeding generations it would achieve recognition as the centrepiece of one of the world’s most exquisite areas of wilderness. Flanked by pink quartzite beaches and mirroring the mountains beyond, it was described by more than one poet as a spiritual place.

  In 1955 the Tasmanian government recognised the special nature of the forest-flanked nine-square kilometre lake by declaring it a protected area. Pedder’s special status remained unchallenged for 11 years. Then the government developed a plan. In 1967 the island’s premier, Eric Reece, announced a new hydro-electric scheme, saying that it would ‘result in some modification to the Lake Pedder National Park’.

  It was the understatement of the century. Journalists and worried members of the public eventually discovered that the ancient glacial lake was to be buried beneath a mountain of water equivalent, in one wit’s words, to ‘Sydney Harbour cubed and re-cubed’ – a deluge 27 times the volume of what the harbour held.

  A significant percentage of Tasmanians were so appalled by the proposal that they formed groups to oppose it. Eventually the protest movements coalesced into the Save Lake Pedder campaign. The group attracted recruits from across the social and political spectrum. One idealist who astonished friends by becoming a supporter was the conservative matriarch and socialite Brenda Hean.

  ON THE MORNING OF 8 September a crowd of well-wishers gathered at Cambridge airstrip to wave goodbye to their heroes. No one knew it at the time, but even as Max Price revved the Tiger Moth’s engine, the lake’s immemorial beaches had begun to vanish beneath a deluge unleashed by hydro engineers.

  At 10.16 am, 45 minutes behind schedule, the Tiger Moth taxied. Then, amid cheers, it took off into a cloudless sky. Most people in the crowd lingered, loath to leave, waiting until the plane had shrunk to a dot...and finally to nothing. Only when the heavens were empty did the silence lift. Immediately the gathering’s mood was optimistic. This would prove to be much more than a stunt: something far greater than a skywriter inscribing a message above bleak Canberra, only to see his words tugged at, elongated, then swiftly erased by the wind. The progre
ss to victory would really begin when Brenda Hean sat down in the national capital to talk to the politicians who had granted her appointments. Brenda, literate, witty, a master of argument, would prove, even at this perilously late moment, to be the campaign’s trump card. Brenda could do it!

  Conservationist Brenda Hean and pilot Max Price take off in a Tiger Moth on what proved to be a fateful flight.

  But Brenda Hean, soon, would be reported missing, presumed dead.

  According to an itinerary mailed to all of the state’s newspapers and radio and TV stations, the Tiger Moth was scheduled to make its first refuelling stop on Flinders Island. It never arrived. Over the following 10 days, 23 private and official aircraft searched for hundreds of hours over sea and land. They found nothing. Brenda Hean, Max Price, their plane, had vanished without trace.

  So intensely did some Tasmanians mistrust ‘greenies’ that for several days a rumour circulated that the Hean-Price disappearance was just another stunt – especially as their aircraft’s emergency beacon had not been activated. But as days passed without a breakthrough, it became apparent that the pair must be dead.

  Investigators from the Civil Aviation Department established that the Tiger Moth had probably last been seen near Eddystone Point lighthouse on Tasmania’s east coast. Witnesses recalled that it had been flying smoothly, with no sign of trouble. The inspectors further established that the plane had been reliable, with a history of scrupulous checks and services.

  As the lake they had hoped to rescue sank ever-deeper under man-made floods, the Save Pedder activists became suspicious – and frightened. Was it possible, they asked, that the intruder who broke into the hangar had somehow sabotaged the Tiger Moth?