Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Greens party, still takes that question seriously. On 15 August 2004 he told the ABC: ‘I’m inclined to believe that Brenda and Max had their plane interfered with – and that the environmentalists who were terrified after that event were justified in their terror...And one of the great women in Australian environmental history died, maybe as a result of misadventure, maybe as a result of murder.’

  Seven years earlier Senator Brown had told parliament: ‘The whole Pedder campaign was seized by fear of foul play...After Max and Brenda disappeared, the campaigners were scared to get into their cars in the morning and press the accelerator. This was a prima facie case of criminal foul play. It warranted nothing less than a public enquiry.’

  Max Price’s son Maurie shares the senator’s opinions on the deaths: ‘It would have to be something – some setup. I personally believe that someone sabotaged the plane.’ According to aviation experts a saboteur – possibly the intruder who broke into the hangar – could easily have concealed a small bomb, attached to a timing device, inside or under the aircraft.

  When Max Price and Brenda Hean died, their colleagues and friends naturally expected the Coroner’s Court to investigate the case. But to their considerable dismay no coronial inquest was ever held. Nor would the State or Federal Governments agree to a judicial inquiry into the unsolved affair.

  Tragic though their deaths were, the two activists did not die in vain. The campaign to preserve an ancient glacial lake led to an international burgeoning of consciousness about the worth – and fragility – of our planetary environment.

  * * *

  What Caused Alfred Gibson’s Desert Death?

  EXPLORER Ernest Giles had a low opinion of his 23-year-old assistant Alfred Gibson.

  But when the young man vanished during a harrowing expedition, Giles honoured his memory by naming a vast tract of Western Australia after him: the Gibson Desert.

  That’s the simple story, to be found in history books. But it does not satisfy doubters -who, for more than a century have asked: Did Alfred Gibson really disappear? Or was he murdered?

  Ambitious to amass a fast fortune on the goldfields, 16-year-old William Ernest Powell Giles arrived in Australia in 1851. After failing at the diggings he drifted to Melbourne, where he found employment as a clerk. He detested the work, and life in the city – and after years of strenuous lobbying managed to persuade a group of pastoralists to finance him in a search for new grazing land.

  His first major expedition was in 1873, when he led three companions, accompanied by dogs and 23 packhorses, into central Australia. The party’s aim was to find the source of the Murchison River, and the inland sea often described by tribal Aboriginals.

  The foray was a disaster almost from the start. Horses collapsed and died in the pitiless heat, obliging the explorers to leave them behind with the supplies still strapped to their backs. The hungry men cut sides of meat from the dead animals, but the food turned rancid within the hour. In the expedition’s dying days the party tried to survive on pigeons and bush wallabies – caught, cooked and promptly eaten.

  Throughout the doomed journey Giles made meticulous diary entries, describing the stony moon-bleak terrain that brimmed to the horizons around them. He also wrote of his strained relationship with Alfred Gibson, impatiently describing him as someone who sulked, ‘sometimes for days’ – and lacked the most basic knowledge of what earlier explorers had learned. However, the pair continued to work together.

  Hoping to find rock-water, Giles and Gibson pressed on into the desert, leaving their two colleagues behind at a base camp. Historians have relied on Ernest Giles’s account (summarised below) for the rest of the story...

  Gibson’s horse, unsuited to the extreme conditions, was the first to die. With less than a pint of water left between them, Giles ordered Gibson to ride the surviving horse to a water store (two five-gallon kegs in the branches of a tree) that they had stocked that morning. After watering the horse, Gibson was to return to the base camp for help. He rode away – and was never seen again.

  Giles somehow managed to survive. Weak and dehydrated he walked first to the faraway water store, where he found evidence that Gibson had preceded him. Then, bearing a keg on his back, he found his way back to the base camp where he immediately collapsed.

  Was William Ernest Powell Giles telling the truth? Or had a more sinister story unfolded beneath the brutal desert sun? When only a few sips of water were left – and it was obvious that only one person could survive – might either Giles or Gibson have tried to kill his companion?

  Was there a fight to the death – and did Giles leave his vanquished opponent to desiccate in the ferocious heat?

  No one, including the historians, knows. The mystery surrounding the death of Alfred Gibson remains unsolved.

  * * *

  Phantoms on a Moonlit Road

  Australians and the Uncanny

  Dr Ted Walker was driving at night along a country road in Western Australia when he saw what seemed to be an accident ahead. At the bitumen’s edge, a body lay sprawled and motionless. A tall man, seemingly intent on offering aid, was hastening toward the figure. Dr Walker immediately pulled over – and for a moment he and his shocked family assessed the grim scene in the glare of their headlights. Then he shouted an offer of help. No one was prepared for the subtle horror of what happened next...

  TED WALKER, a PhD in electrical engineering, worked for 30 years with the old Telecom organisation in Western Australia. One of the job’s perks enabled employees and their families to spend a few relaxing weeks at the Postal Institute’s holiday units in Albany.

  That was where Ted and his family were heading on a dazzlingly moonlit summer night in 1982. Seated in the front of the family’s Rambler Matador were Ted (at the wheel) and his wife Heather. In the back sat their three children: Amanda, then 11, Mathew, 10, and Pasha, 8.

  It was a journey that no member of the family would ever forget.

  Ted retired long ago from his Telecom post as Senior Engineer, Network Operations. But he is busier than ever in his role as chairman and station engineer at Radio Fremantle – a call-sign which has offered a start in showbusiness to many young people working today in radio and TV

  At my request, he looked back more than two decades to the moon-drenched road on which he experienced the eeriest events of his life:

  As a rationalist I’ve had a lot of trouble making sense of that night’s occurrences. I’ve never particularly wanted to believe that we saw ghosts. But that leaves the question – what did we see?

  ‘It happened around Walpole. I vividly remember the brilliance of the moonlight that night. It penetrated the thick forest of towering Karri trees and mixed Jarrah that loomed on either side of us. We were moving at a reasonably leisurely pace – chatting and silent by turns, as tends to happen on a long trip – and the kids were well-behaved in the back.

  ‘The moment I saw the body, or whatever it was, lying on the edge of the road, I snapped into emergency mode – stepping on the brakes and turning the lights to high beam so I could better see what had happened. Of course we all assumed there’d been some kind of accident. The only problem was that there were no cars anywhere. Just a tall man, walking along the two metres-width of roadside gravel in the direction of the prone figure.

  ‘I wound down the electric window and shouted to him, “Can we help you?” He took absolutely no notice...didn’t even turn...just kept on walking. It was then, pretty much at the same moment, that Heather and I noticed that the man – the entity – was making NO NOISE. By this time I’d turned the car engine off and there was bush silence all around us. But here was this fellow walking in the gravel – and there was no sound of gravel crunching, no sound at all. These were not the only observations we made. The man didn’t seem to be wearing ordinary clothing. His jacket and breeches resembled something of 19th century style you might find at a costume party. None of it added up.

  ‘It
was at this point that Heather and the children became seriously frightened. Heather whispered to me, “It could be a trick. Robbers. Let’s go.” I’d been poised to electronically close the window if it did turn out to be some kind of ambush – but I was also reluctant to leave the scene, because despite all evidence I still feared we’d be deserting someone who was injured or dying. However, when the children started begging me to get away from “the ghosts”, I felt it was definitely time to start the engine, drive carefully around the body, and leave. As I manoeuvred the car I glanced in the rear mirror and saw there was nothing on the road any more. No body. No helper.

  ‘Over the next few days, I continued to regret that I’d left the scene. I checked the local papers and listened to radio news – but there was never anything about an accident around Walpole. In the years that followed, I began to wonder if we had indeed seen ghosts. I wondered too whether they dated from an era before the internal combustion engine – and were still lingering in a spot where violent death might have occurred many years before.’

  A parapsychologist might deem it more than probable that the Walker family witnessed a ‘residual haunting’ – a recording of a past event that had somehow impressed itself on the area in which it occurred. These visual imprints are among the commonest phenomena chronicled by such organisations as the British and American Societies for Psychical Research. The entities in a residual haunting never interact with humans, but – like images on a reel of film – simply walk repeatedly through the scenes of a drama that occurred long ago.

  An Eeerie Presence in a Paddock

  A similar encounter with apparitions wearing 19th century apparel was described to me in 2006 by Alan Ketley of Redcliffe, Queensland.

  ‘When I was a child in the 1970s my family and I were driving from Barraba to Bingara in NSW,’ he wrote. ‘During our journey we passed a paddock- and something prompted my mother to turn her head and look. She saw a man sitting on a dead fallen tree with a small boy standing next to him.

  ‘What struck her as unusual was the way they were dressed. They were wearing clothes of the previous century – the type that had been favoured by farmers in the area. She turned to my father and said, “Hey – look at this!” But when they both looked back to see, nobody was there.

  ‘My mother was mystified by this, because it would have been impossible for the man and child to have left without being seen in that otherwise deserted paddock. They had simply vanished.’

  The Deaths on Picton’s Haunted Highway

  Occasionally an abandoned Australian motorway will become spectral in its own right – luring motorists into a deadly detour. In her book Ghosts of Picton Past, the NSW paranormal researcher Liz Vincent describes one such road – which is not only aggressively haunted, but deemed by authorities to be extremely dangerous. Liz writes, in part:

  The Razorback Range Road has been changed many times over the years to avoid landslip. It is considered a blackspot because of the large number of accidents and the many lives it has claimed. Large signs at each end announce to the traveller he is entering a ‘crash zone’.

  Perhaps it is also a ‘phantom road’. Natalie Osborne-Thomason (a paranormal investigator) says, ‘These occur when a length of roadway has been slightly changed and relocated. Drivers, usually during the hours of darkness, witness the old part of the road up ahead and drive onto it. This has caused deaths and accidents, with witnesses swearing that they have attempted to drive on a road that no longer exists.’

  IN JUNE 2003 Liz Vincent spoke with a motorist who had experienced several distressing minutes while driving at night on the Razorback Road. A teenage boy had stepped in front of the man’s car.

  He had no chance to stop and tensed, waiting for the hit. There wasn’t one. The car had driven straight through the boy. The driver went back to where he thought he’d seen the lad. There was nothing there and certainly no boy lying on the road. He was later told of a boy being killed there at the same spot in similar circumstances.

  ...The bottom section of the old road begins at the southern base of the Razorback Range. A toddler who lived there was killed crossing the road to her grandparents’ house. She was buried in the Upper Picton Cemetery. Her ghost has been seen on a number of occasions, crossing at the spot she was killed.

  In recent years there have been many unexplained accidents on the new Razorback Road. A large number of cars have simply driven over the side, their occupants killed. On examination of the wreckage nothing amiss has been found...One man told me of being enveloped in a white mist. He managed to keep his car on the road and drive safely home. [But] an hour later a girl drove off the side of the roadside and was killed.

  ... Other drivers have told me of seeing a white misty figure floating along the road late at night. One said a woman flagged him down. He stopped the car...and started walking back to where she had been – and was startled to find the road empty.

  Additional evidence that Picton is a particularly haunted place was sent to me in 1985 by Tom Robinson, an amateur photographer of Brighton, Victoria. While on holiday Tom took four snapshots of the town’s historic cemetery, using a new roll of 1000 ASA high-speed film. The photographs (published in my book Unexplained) show bright lights – in the unmistakable form of human heads and shoulders – floating above two gravestones.

  ‘I didn’t see anything when I clicked the camera,’ said Tom. ‘But I do remember experiencing a very weird sensation. It was as if I was being watched.’

  Photographs in a Murder House

  Tom Robinson’s experience was not unusual. Many Australians take snapshots of phantoms without realising it – only seeing the images they have captured after the film is developed. The professional photographer Nicole Klug experienced a variation on this syndrome. When asked to capture images of an entity that had suddenly manifested itself in a hallway, Nicole obediently pointed her camera and clicked. She could see nothing at the time – but when the pictures were developed, the intruder was clearly visible [see photograph on page 170].

  Queensland photographer Nicole Klug with the camera that captured a phantom on film.

  The saga began in 1991 when ‘Nita’, a young mother of two in Logan, Queensland, approached the local council to beg for help. Her house, she complained, had become so noisily haunted that she was seldom able to sleep. The bureaucrats’ expertise lay more in the realm of unregistered dogs and rubbish collection. But they took pity on the obviously sincere complainant, asked around, and finally secured the services of a local paranormal investigator, Joan Starr.

  ‘Nita was distraught when I spoke to her,’ Joan recalled. ‘For weeks she’d been hearing unexplained thumpings and running footsteps in the night – but obviously what disturbed her most was being repeatedly woken by a child screaming, “Mummy, help me!” She’d rush into her seven-year-old daughter’s room, but the little girl was always fast asleep. That was when she became convinced the place was haunted.’

  The contingent that eventually presented itself at the house comprised council officers Vanessa Gregory and Jenny Gordon-Jones, photographer Nicole, Joan Starr and the medium she had recruited, Glennys Mackay.

  After several minutes’ meditation, the medium announced that the premises were haunted by five entities. The first was Nita’s brother who had died in a motorcycle accident several years earlier. He had returned to watch over her. Nita confirmed that her brother had indeed perished in the manner the medium described. Glennys Mackay next asserted that the other four personalities were from a nearby house, where a man had bludgeoned his wife and two small children to death, before shooting himself.

  She launched into a rescue seance, designed to free the five spirits from their imprisonment in the house – and to send them forward to a happier existence.

  A purported paranormal entity hovers near medium Glennys Mackay, its swirling form partly obscuring her face.

  Abruptly the medium interrupted the proceedings by turning to the photographer and sayi
ng, ‘Quick – take a picture down the hall!’ The passage was in darkness, but Nicole Klug obeyed. Not until the infrared monochrome film was developed next day did the floating entity appear, occupying two frames. In one of the pictures its body partly obscures Glennys Mackay’s face.

  The rescue seance was an apparent success. The tumult ceased.

  Frightened Nuns Fled a Troubled Convent

  During the 1960s the Catholic Church was forced to sell an intensely haunted convent: St Joseph’s in Murrurundi, NSW For decades the Josephite nuns had been complaining that:

  A heavy invisible entity would sit crushingly on their feet while they lay in bed.

  ‘Something’ in the laundry stingingly slapped their faces.

  Hot taps and showers would turn on of their own accord, filling the premises with steam.

  The convent’s corridors echoed with shufflings and sobs.

  The parish priest visited frequently, hoping to find some way of dispelling the phenomena. But the phantoms refused to perform for him. Whenever he arrived their paranormal pranks would stop.

  After the spectres had defied all attempts at exorcism, the distressed nuns were moved to new premises. The new owners renamed the abandoned building Murrurundi House, converting it into a convention centre and school camp. They were relieved over the ensuing months to discover that the ghosts had quit, possibly at the same time as the unfortunate women they had tormented.

  Terror at the Times

  The Gippsland Times newspaper in Sale, Victoria, was at one stage the scene of the most overt and aggressive haunting in Australia’s history. Staff described such phenomena as pineboard exploding dangerously from a wall, soft drink cans hurtling through the air without visible volition, and apparitions manifesting themselves as reflections in glass doors.

  The spectre-plagued publication’s old bluestone building had begun life as a bank in the 1840s, serving sheep and dairy farmers on neighbouring properties. In 1845, robbers invaded the premises, murdering the manager and his daughter. From that time, Shockwaves from the shooting reverberated through the building.