by John Pinkney
The costly task of draining and replumbing the property would simply have to wait its turn. For the first time in the sisters’ lives, money had become a diminishing resource.
Beyond the mansion stretched Tullaree’s neglected paddocks. Here, even on hot dry days, cattle were regularly being rescued from the sucking mud. The farm’s teeming cats were luckier – for the moment at least – than the sinking livestock. Warmhearted Margaret had instructed the staff that no stray should ever be turned away. Every desperate feline that turned up at Tullaree was given food and sleeping quarters for life. Margaret was so in love with cats that she even sought out needy specimens during shopping visits to local towns. The ever-swelling swarm of moggies fattened themselves on prime steak, which the butler had been instructed to place on permanent order at the butcher’s shop.
As one observer commented, it was difficult to determine who lived better: the sisters with their global shopping cruises, high-fashion wardrobes, French cheeses, pates and exotic pastries – or their outrageously pampered felines. While the mansion and its surrounding land slid into decay Jean and Margaret, untrained in the exercise of thrift, continued to spend.
Rain was becoming an ever-more powerful enemy. Sheep died, in large numbers, of footrot. Cattle drowned in floods. The mansion’s roof needed repairs. During storms, ceilings dripped, staining the ageing carpets and fine furniture below. A heavy smell of damp pervaded the house. Financially, Tullaree had become an unstaunched wound. The quality of its sale and breeding stock had so declined that only a trickle of cash was coming in, while debts relentlessly mounted: staff wages, grocers, wood merchants, feed suppliers – and even bills for additional cattle, some of which seemed mysteriously never to have been delivered.
The family, who for years had been troubled by the sisters’ unworldliness, knew it was time again to intervene – perhaps more forcefully than in the past. They deputed sister Anna to visit Tullaree and offer advice. Accompanied by her three-year-old son she stayed at the property for a week and was not surprised to find that radical action was necessary. Jean and Margaret, she instructed, must stop the haemorrhage by dismissing the domestic servants immediately. They must dispense, too, with all but one of the farm employees. The survivor would be temporarily retained to fatten the remaining cattle for sale. Anna further insisted that her sisters:
Cancel all banquets and garden parties for the foreseeable future.
Abandon plans for further foreign holidays.
Repair, as soon as possible, the drainage system, the crumbling house, and the dilapidated fences, stilled windmills and choked wells.
Sell half of Tullaree’s paddocks, using the proceeds to pay for repairs and settle debts.
Chastened, Margaret and Jean promised to take Anna’s advice. But their land sale proved disastrous. Neighbouring farmers strolled through the squelching paddocks and decided that the cost of drying them out would not be worth the money. An estate agent managed to sell small parcels of Tullaree’s pastures, but at heavy discounts.
The debts remained: burgeoning daily and seemingly intractable. There was only solution, a solicitor advised: the sisters must raise a loan. Devastated, but understanding that they had no option, Margaret and Jean signed three mortgages, requiring the payment, with steep interest, of more than £15,000 ($30,000) – a large fortune in that era. They managed to meet their interest payments by renting the least muddy of their paddocks to neighbours.
Aside from the pasture rents, Tullaree’s income had virtually dried up. The property’s owners, once envied luminaries of Melbourne society, had become impoverished prisoners in a crumbling house: virtually the tenants of moneylenders and only a missed payment away from eviction.
ONE NIGHT A MASSIVE STORM lashed Tullaree. Margaret was forced to push her bed into a corner and place buckets in the centre of the room to catch the steady drizzlings from her ceiling. She managed to stay dry: a relief as she had an arduous day ahead of her tomorrow, trudging the long miles into Buffalo township to buy the household’s meagre weekly ration of food. In happier times the butler had performed this task. When Jean and Margaret decided to go shopping together they had travelled in a chauffeured car. But now, with that luxurious vehicle, all the servants and Jean’s health gone, only Margaret’s stoic willingness to walk long distances, carrying large loads, stood between this beleaguered country household and hunger. The women’s plight was well known in the district – and neighbours often called by with saucepans filled with stew or soup. Jean and Margaret politely refused the gifts. Accepting free food from outside the family would, to them, have been a final degradation.
WHEN MARGARET WOKE, the rain had stopped. Pale sunlight filled the room. She rose, washed and donned her least-favourite dress. It would be dirty, its hem filled with muddy grit, after today’s long walk. Jean was still asleep when Margaret, clutching the sugar bag in which she habitually carried the week’s provisions, tiptoed to the door, opened it and almost stepped outside.
As she described it later, the shock of what she saw came close to killing her. At her feet, brown water swirled. The grand gardens had disappeared beneath a flooded vastness. All that remained visible were the ornate roof of the gazebo and the stone heads of the taller statues. Horizon-brimming water from the bloated river had completely overwhelmed Charlie Widdis’s drainage system.
Margaret Clement hurried back into the house and woke her sister. ‘We’re trapped!’ she said.
BUT SHE WAS WRONG. Although the house now stood like an island in an ocean, the water was not so deep that it could not be traversed. To reach the road via the shortest route involved a waist-deep walk of about four kilometres. Margaret Clement soon became expert at such crossings – and in the years that followed, continued to make her regular pilgrimage to the shop – only postponing the journey on those occasions when the river burst its banks again. Usually, however, the trapped water was stagnant and still. In the spring and summer months, wearing farmer’s boots and her oldest dress, Margaret would wade quite comfortably through Tullaree’s new moat, using clumps of reeds as her guideposts and slapping at clouds of mosquitoes en route.
Winter was the worst time. The swamp water was breathcatchingly cold – and even the gravel road offered little relief, with steely winds biting into her sodden clothes. Every year she was afflicted by chronic coughs and red-raw throats – and wondered, often, whether she could survive these privations much longer. But in the end, it was her sister who died – and on a bitter winter’s night Margaret wept as six undertaker’s aides waded away through the torch-lit swamp, carrying Jean’s body on a stretcher above their heads.
Next morning a kindly neighbour called – and offered to row Margaret across the swamp the following day, and then by car to Wonthaggi where the burial service would be held. She thanked him for the offer – and uncharacteristically accepted.
JEAN AND MARGARET CLEMENT, locally nicknamed ‘the swamp ladies’, had long been a part of Gippsland folklore. But it was not until Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial published an article about Jean’s bizarre final journey that their plight became nationally known. The article, with photographs of the swamp-bound house, generated intense interest. Dozens of readers wrote to Margaret, care of the newspaper, offering to buy her property. But they were too late – and too far away. Already a local man, Stan Livingstone, had formed an unshakable intention to become Tullaree’s owner. Livingstone, a former Footscray footballer, had made his burgeoning property fortune by acquiring swamp-bound farms cheaply, draining them, then selling at a large profit.
To Livingstone, Margaret Clement’s flood-blighted farm was an ideal purchase. In a move one rival described as ‘strategic’ he bought a parcel of land bordering Margaret’s property. Before long he and his wife Esme, a former nurse, were on the friendliest of terms with her. Livingstone then made the bereaved and lonely 70-year-old an offer she found too attractive to refuse. He would at a pen-stroke remove her terrible fear of eviction by paying off Tullar
ee’s mortgages. Next, he would build a cottage on the property in which she could live rent-free for life. And to sweeten the bargain he would pay her £6000 ($12,000).
As a lady-about-town, Margaret had known virtually nothing about finances. Now, as the lady-of-the-swamp she understood – if that were possible – even less. She had in any case reached an age where money was far less important than being debt-free, with a secure home of her own, and friends to talk with every day. Ignoring her family’s objections, she agreed to Stan Livingstone’s terms.
According to local lore the couple (particularly the warm-natured Esme Livingstone) lived up handsomely to their part of the deal. While Margaret was still living alone in the mansion they dined with her regularly, and paid a woman to clean her living quarters. They bought the old lady numerous gifts to make her more comfortable – the most appreciated being a large battery radio. Margaret, who previously had dismissed the wireless as ‘too intrusive’, now listened to music and chatter all day.
But before long she was dead.
On Saturday, 24 May 1952 Stan Livingstone went to Meeniyan police station to report that Margaret Clement had disappeared. He said he had dropped by to visit her and found the front door standing open. Her walking stick lay in the hall. She had not slept in her bed.
The search began immediately – and grew. By midday Sunday, faces reddened by icy winds, more than 200 police and volunteers from farms and surrounding townships were breasting the chill waters of Tullaree Swamp. They dragged long sticks through the treacherous mud, hoping (and hoping not) to find Margaret’s body. Elsewhere, on higher ground, other searchers probed the scrub and threw grappling irons down congested wells.
Inside the mansion, women made hot soup for the searchers and built fires to dry their sodden clothes. In Melbourne’s Herald newspaper, reporter John Maher described his extreme difficulty in reaching the house:
The roads had vanished. Once, polished buggies used to rattle up to Tullaree when the gentry called, but now the swamp has conquered so much of its broad acres that when [photographer] Frank Tolra and I got to Tarwin Lower we were told we would never get through. Pouring rain had made the swamplands more treacherous than ever. We drove to within four miles of the homestead and...from that point it was ‘wade if you can’. For the first mile the water was only two feet deep and our first fear was of the swamp snakes we could see slithering in the water. Then the water got deeper and the scrub really rough, with ducks and quail in the swamp and rabbits on the few patches of dry land. At one stage our guide Paddy Brenock disappeared for an instant beneath the flood.
...We came to a drain, with a current that nearly swept one of the farmers away. And then at last...our first view of Tullaree...
Neither the bustle, nor the fires lit in the ghostlike rooms of the old homestead, could shut out the feeling of eeriness. Here was a mystery house that seemed even more mysterious now that its owner had vanished...
Margaret Clement’s body was never found. Police harboured strong suspicions that she had been murdered; the corpse buried on dry land or removed from the district. It seemed unlikely that she had simply drowned in the swamp, or her remains would have been retrieved by now. Even the tractors which dragged the mud in near-military formation had produced nothing. If she had not been the victim of foul play, why had her bed – and other beds in the house – remained unused on the eve of her disappearance? And why had she left her walking stick in the hall?
These questions were all too much for country police to handle. Detectives from the Melbourne-based Homicide Squad descended on Gippsland and began work on a list of people who might have sought benefit from Margaret’s death.
They questioned a family member who had been particularly vocal in opposing the sale of Tullaree. But his alibis, in the end, seemed impregnable. They contacted everyone who had written to Margaret offering to buy her property, but could find no indications of guilt. They even investigated a persistent local legend about 19th century criminals who had stolen 40,000 sovereigns and buried them on the land which later became Tullaree. Several days before she vanished, Wonthaggi residents claimed, a group of men, possibly from Melbourne, had been overheard planning to visit Margaret Clement at the homestead. Perhaps, detectives surmised, the men believed Margaret knew where the sovereigns were hidden. Police never managed to trace the sinister visitors. The Homicide Squad also questioned Tullaree’s new owner, Stan Livingstone, but without result.
Every line of inquiry led to a dead-end...until, in 1978, passers-by found a woman’s bones protruding from a bush grave at Venus Bay, four kilometres from Tullaree. Nearby lay a shovel, a hammer, a woman’s shawl and a purse containing four shillings (40 cents).
AT THE INQUEST, Coroner Kevin Mason found that the bones could not positively be identified as belonging to Margaret Clement. Stan Livingstone, now a multimillionaire, told the inquest, T did not do anything to Miss Clement – I’ll guarantee that.’
Stan Livingstone died at one of his Queensland properties in 1992. The following year his wife Esme died in a nursing home. Newspapers published articles alleging that she had kept a ‘secret diary’ which offered new clues to the Tullaree mystery.
But the rumours were as old as the trail was cold. The fate of piteous Margaret, who for 30 years waded through a stinking swamp to get food, remains as great a mystery today as it was more than half a century ago.
Nightmares on the Nullabor
On a hot, still afternoon in January 1988 a distraught middle-aged woman and her three adult sons stumbled into South Australia’s Ceduna police station, pleading for help. Their faces were white, their clothes smudged with a sticky black material. After they had told their story, the senior sergeant summoned a doctor who pronounced the four to be in a state of severe shock. In the weeks that followed, the family described their experience many times. They said that while driving across the Nullarbor Plain they were pursued by ‘a huge eggcup-shaped object’ which eventually landed on the roof of their car and lifted it from the road. Police checked the new-model sedan and noted that it was symmetrically dented in four places. It was also coated in thick black ash: a material which subsequently would perplex university analysts...
THE NULLARBOR PLAIN IS a vast arid slab of ancient limestone which borders the jaggedly cliffed coast of the Great Australian Bight and stretches deep inland. The plain’s name suggests Aboriginal origins, but it was in fact coined from Latin in 1860 by the surveyor Alfred Delisser. His learned sobriquet ‘Nulla-arbor’ (no tree) aptly describes this deadly wasteland, with its mean stunted scrub eucalypts and mockingly inaccessible underground streams.
Since the earliest days of exploration many people have perished on the searing Nullarbor.
At 5.30 am on the morning of Wednesday, 20 January 1988, Mrs Faye Knowles became convinced that she and her three boys would be the next to die.
Faye, 48, and sons Patrick, 24, Sean, 21, and Wayne, 18, had left their home in suburban Midland, Perth to travel to Melbourne, where they planned to holiday with relatives. With Faye at the wheel of her new Ford Telstar the three young men were intermittently chatting and dozing, when the family dog, ears flattened, began to snarl. Nobody took much notice, other than to speculate about what might be bothering the normally placid pet.
Roughly a minute later, near Mundrabilla, Western Australia, on a straight featureless stretch of the Eyre Highway, ‘the thing’ appeared. Faye Knowles would later describe it as ‘a huge, bright glowing object, big enough to block my view’. She added, ‘I swerved to miss the thing – and almost hit a car and caravan coming the other way.’
Faye stopped further up the road to catch her breath. Curious, her sons left the Ford and walked back for a closer look. It was the weirdest-looking thing,’ Sean recalled. ‘Shaped like an enormous eggcup and gleaming white with yellow in the centre. Before we could get a really close look we all got very scared and ran back to the car.’
Faye Knowles shared her sons’ unease. The moment
all three were in the Ford again, with the dog cringing in the front, she re-started the engine and fled the scene at high speed. Later, at Ceduna police station, Sean Knowles would describe to Senior Constable Gary O’Hagan what happened next: ‘Mum was flooring it...there was loud static on our radio, then it went silent....We looked through the back window and saw the glowing thing was in the air, chasing us. We were going close to 200-K, but it was faster than us. It hovered above the car, then we heard a tremendous thump...it had landed on the roof.
‘...We couldn’t see through the windscreen any more – it was covered with black stuff...the inside of the car was filled with it too: flying black ash, a terrible stink, so bad it made me and Wayne vomit...’
Faye Knowles said: ‘The car was filled with blinding light, then we felt it being lifted off the road. We were frightened and yelling, but our voices had gone strange and deeper and we seemed to be talking in slow motion ...After that a kind of black ash poured in and swirled around us. It smelt like dead bodies...I put my hand out and grabbed the car roof, but it felt different. My fingers sank into a kind of soft rubbery suction pad...it was a disgusting feeling, to touch that...The car was being shaken violently while we hung there...then we were suddenly dropped back onto the road. We fell with so much force that it jarred us painfully and one of our tyres exploded...’
[One week before the Knowles family endured their desert ordeal, the captain of a tuna boat, Empress Lady – 300 kilometres off South Australia’s coast – told police that an immense eggcup-shaped object had hovered above his vessel. The skipper radioed details of the incident to Port Lincoln, then turned for home. The report was not publicised. The skipper and his shaken crew said, via radio, that their voices had become slow and deep during the encounter. Port Lincoln police confirmed to the Melbourne Age that a second tuna vessel, the Monica, had reported moving lights over the Bight roughly three hours before the Knowles reported their incident.]
