Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  Elkin concluded that Aboriginals were ‘far more open to experience and more purely perceptive’ than were the invading white settlers. The quiet solitude of the tribespeople’s environment – and their indifference to clock-measured time – enabled them to achieve altered states of consciousness and to perform mental and physical feats that stunned outsiders. Elkin enjoyed picturing ignorant Europeans marvelling at the Australian indigenes’ ‘uncanny’ abilities. If he had lived several decades later he might have appreciated Arthur C. Clarke’s description of such a situation: A primitive people, when confronted by a more advanced society, will regard its accomplishments as magic.’

  Is there anything ‘magical’ about the Aboriginals’ paranormal abilities? In this author’s view, probably not. Those psychic feats are, I think, simply the product of untrammelled minds.

  Aboriginal’s Dream Saved a Fighter Pilot

  In his book Fair Dinkum (Rigby, 1960) the distinguished Australian journalist Douglas Lockwood describes how one Aboriginal’s dream – in harness with another’s ESP – saved the life of a downed American pilot.

  In 1942 Japan was confident that her forces could subjugate Australia. Over Darwin, Australian and American airmen were regularly engaging in dogfights with Japanese fighter-bombers. At that dark time Lockwood’s friend Jack Murray was supervisor of Delissaville Aboriginal settlement, across the bay from the city. Murray – who doubled as a volunteer rescuer – received an Air Command radio message that an American pilot had been shot down 20 miles (32 kilometres) to the southwest.

  He immediately set out by launch to conduct a sea search. But someone had erred. Just after he crossed the horizon and lost radio contact, Air Command told Delissaville that, thanks to a hurried map-reading, the original alert had been wrong. The pilot’s position was northeast, not southwest. Delissaville sent out a second launch, found the pilot afloat in a rubber dinghy and rescued him.

  Murray, unaware that the job had been done for him, continued on what could fairly have been called a wild goose-chase. But it would soon transpire that there was nothing futile about his journey.

  Aboard with Jack Murray were his Aboriginal assistants, Mosic and Will. As the launch passed Indian Island, the mouth of a small creek came into view – one of hundreds of such tidal estuaries. Mosic stared across the water, then said, ‘Funny thing, Jack, but I dreamed about that creek last night...that same one.’ Jack Murray asked, ‘What did you dream?’ and Mosic replied, ‘Nothing much. I dreamed we saw that creek – then we went up it in the boat.’

  Murray still believed he was in search of a missing airman. He reasoned that as he was somewhere in the vicinity of ‘20 miles southwest’ he should start looking for a downed plane and its pilot. As a man who had learned to trust his hunches, he decided that Mosic’s dream creek was as good a place as any to begin.

  The launch ploughed upstream into hell-clouds of mosquitoes. Walls of lush vegetation bordered the narrow waterway, creating an enclosed space that deafeningly amplified the pop-popping of the two-stroke motor. The sheer wall of noise made conversation impossible.

  Suddenly, for a reason he would never succeed in explaining, Will pushed the tiller hard to starboard. He had been Jack Murray’s helmsman for years and was expert at his job – but here, when he should have been steering a straight course, he deliberately risked the launch’s survival, sending it veering for mangrove roots and rocks. Just in time, an angry Murray retrieved the situation by cutting the motor.

  The ear-splitting noise of the engine died – and silence fell. Silence broken only by the distant sound of someone shouting ‘Help!’

  Unable to believe his luck, Murray announced, ‘That has to be our pilot.’ He remained unaware that the man he had been sent to find had been retrieved hours earlier. The three rescuers stepped ashore and began to wade knee-deep through thick mangrove slime, pitted with crocodile tracks. The cries grew louder and soon the trio located their quarry: a raggedly bearded American pilot, crouched in the fork of a mangrove, about eight feet from the ground.

  The man was gaunt, barefoot and capless, his legs and face angrily pustuled by leech and mosquito bites. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Paul Johnston, USAF. It now became clear that he was not the pilot Jack Murray imagined he had been seeking – but a flier who had vanished five days earlier, and had been given up for dead when searches failed.

  Johnston, near collapse, gasped out his story. While parachuting from the burning plane he had lost his flying boots, into which vital survival maps were folded. Stranded in the mangrove swamp without food or drinkable water he had believed he would die, either from starvation or in the jaws of crocodiles. Desperate to escape the predators he had climbed high into a mangrove every night, struggling to stay awake lest he fall into the teeming swamp below But in daylight he inevitably dozed – and had been unconscious when the launch’s loud puttering woke him.

  Plainly the man, half-deranged by his sufferings, needed immediate medical attention. The three rescuers helped him down from the tree, carried him to the launch and took him straight to Darwin and its military hospital. En route, Johnston expressed profound relief that the searchers had heard his shouts, and had responded by stopping their launch immediately opposite his refuge. But Jack Murray demurred: ‘Before I cut the engine none of us could hear a thing. The motor was making such a racket we couldn’t even hear each other.’

  Up to this point Jack Murray had been preoccupied by the logistics of rescuing a pilot. But now, as the launch sped across the green ocean, he had time to think. And he realised that he, Mosic, Will and Lieutenant Johnston had just participated in an almost inconceivable series of events.

  Back at the Delissaville settlement, with the pilot safely in medical care, Murray sat down to talk with his two assistants. He began with Mosic: ‘From where we were, out on the ocean, we could see dozens of creeks. Why do you think you ‘d dreamed about that particular one...and how could it be it was that creek that led us to the pilot?’

  Mosic shrugged, embarrassed. He was unaccustomed to being asked questions of this kind. He’d had a dream – and the three of them had sensibly followed its path. What more was there to say?

  Jack Murray spoke next to Will. ‘Why did you suddenly push the tiller over like that? You might have ripped the launch open on the rocks.’

  Will was embarrassed too. He could offer no explanation, even to himself, for his reckless act.

  But Jack Murray knew it was Will’s odd behaviour that had saved a dying pilot’s life. Behaviour, moreover, which had occurred in a setting foredreamed – and to which they had been sent by error.

  He related the story at length to Douglas Lockwood. Long after the war Lockwood wrote: ‘Jack Murray, my old mate, is still in Darwin. He is even more dumbfounded than me about this incredible series of events. He thinks the Aboriginals have some psychic power more highly developed than anything understood by white men.

  ‘In the years he operated from Delissaville Jack was given only one incorrect wireless message, and that was it. In all the trips he did by sea with Mosic and Will, Mosic only spoke once about a dream – and Will’s subsequent behaviour at the tiller was exemplary.’

  * * *

  The 23,000-year-old Footprints

  More than 16,000 years before the first pyramids were built along the Nile, Australian Aboriginals were living in a complex society near the present Willandra Lakes of New South Wales.

  Hundreds of footprints, left by adults and children during the last Ice Age, have been found in what once was moist clay. Some of the Aboriginals seem to have been hunting – with one very tall man sprinting at about 20 kilometres per hour. The prints were laid down in mud containing calcium carbonate, which hardened like clay.

  Mary Pappin Jr of the Mutthi Mutthi people discovered the first print in 2003. Since then a team led by Professor Steve Webb of Bond University has found close to 500 more. He told Melbourne’s Age newspaper, ‘This find provides a unique glimpse into the
lives of those who dwelled in the inland. It brings these people to life in a way no other archaeological evidence can. You can see how the mud squelched between their toes.’

  The lakes are dry today – but in 20,000 BC they would have contained crayfish, mussels, fish and waterbirds enough to support a large population.

  The footprint site has been closed to the public, to protect it from damage. In the same area archaeologists discovered Australia’s oldest human remains – Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, who died 40,000 years ago.

  * * *

  The Murders that Nobody Noticed

  Horror on Easey Street

  The century-old Melbourne terrace house was a scene of sickening carnage. Two young country women, frenziedly stabbed, lay dead: their blood splattered on walls and floors. For 56 hours the atrocity went undetected. Although at least four people visited the unlocked cottage in that time, they neither saw the bodies nor heard a starving baby’s piteous cries. Police created a list of prime suspects, confident that the murders – among the most brutal in the nation’s history – would quickly be solved. But today, almost 30 years later, the identity of the Easey Street Monster remains unknown...

  THE EASEY STREET MURDERS, on 10 January 1977, repelled Australia. The killings occurred during a period when Western society was undergoing radical change – an overturning of traditional values, partly driven by contraception, which conservative commentators blamed for a host of crimes and tragedies.

  In a May 2005 panel discussion on the ABC’s Radio National, novelist Helen Garner recalled her reaction to the homicides:

  ‘I remember [them] vividly. They happened smack in the middle of the great flourishing of communal households in Melbourne. That was the period when I lived in that sort of household – and when we read about those murders in the paper it made our blood run cold, because it could have happened to us, we thought.

  ‘They were very innocent times, in the sense that we didn’t lock our doors. The key was in the front door and people walked in and out of the houses in quite a casual way. And we were always going out to pubs and dancing the night away, and sometimes one would come home with the person one had only just met.

  ‘Those are things that we did in those days. I look back at it with incredulity...the unguardedness of our lives.’

  Helen Garner had accurately described the atmosphere of careless confidence and freedom that 27-year-old Suzanne Armstrong and her housemate Susan Bartlett, 28, enjoyed in the 1970s. The young women, friends since their days at Benalla High School, had mutually decided, on matriculating, that rural life was too restrictive. They moved to Melbourne to participate in what they regarded as the city’s cosmopolitan sophistication. Before long they had saved enough to travel around Australia – and after that to take several trips overseas.

  On one of these journeys, to Naxos in the Greek islands, Suzanne met a fisherman, Manolis Margaritis. They fell in love and she became pregnant. Manolis immediately asked Suzanne to marry him – and as she revealed in letters to friends and family, she was seriously tempted. But beautiful though Naxos – and her lover – were, they both reminded her too much of the unduly quiet country life from which she had freed herself. She stayed in Greece until her baby – whom she named Gregory Vagellis Armstrong Margaritis – was three months old. Then she announced that she must return with the child to Australia. No argument that the heartbroken Manolis advanced could change her mind. Suzanne had made her decision. A fateful one.

  THE TINY SINGLE-FRONTED HOUSES that crowd the streets of Collingwood, Melbourne, are markedly smaller than the workers’ cottages of St Kilda and Fitzroy. Nineteenth century landowners built the terraces in Easey Street and its surrounds to accommodate the tanners and fellmongers miserably employed in the filthy factories along the Yarra River. The men were paid poorly and endured minimal living standards, crammed with their families into poky rooms.

  But terrace life was pleasanter for the young childless couples and small groups of friends who came to Collingwood a century later. The houses they rented had ample room for two – or even a few. Many of the cottages were renovated and the city was so close by it was possible to walk healthily to work each morning.

  In October 1976 Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett became co-tenants in what they regarded as the ideal ‘share-house’: one of a pair built in 1878. In letters to friends Suzanne remarked that the cottage appeared quite pleasant from the street, if a little bare. Nothing, though, that a few hanging plants and a tree in a tub couldn’t improve. And both women were pleased with the cheerful, well-lit interior. For Susan, a teacher at Collingwood High School, the house could not have been more conveniently placed. Suzanne was making ample money as a babysitter and as an unofficial courier, delivering small parcels and letters for nearby businesses. Locals still remember seeing her cycling through Collingwood’s maze of streets, with Gregory in a babyseat behind.

  The two country-bred girls ran an open house. Doors, windows and gates were seldom locked. Friends were welcome to let themselves in at any time. Parties were seldom planned, but tended to begin spontaneously. It was a way of life better suited to a trusting rural town of the type in which Susan and Suzanne had grown up, than to a city where drugs, burglaries, bashings and murders were casting a lengthening shadow.

  The two schoolfriends spent 10 happy weeks in their new house. Then they died.

  For three days nobody realised that anything untoward had happened. The first hint of trouble – although it didn’t seem like trouble at the time – presented itself on Tuesday, 11 January 1977. Jenny, a 24-year-old restaurant manager who lived next door, found Suzanne’s Labrador puppy running on the street. She tucked the whimpering pet under her arm and knocked at her neighbours’ house.

  When there was no answer Jenny took the puppy home. Her young housemate Iris promptly walked to the milkbar to buy a can of dog food. That evening Jenny pinned a note to Suzanne and Susan’s door saying, ‘We’re looking after your dog. Just knock.’ She was not particularly concerned when there was no response, either that evening or the following day. It was still the summer holiday season. She surmised that their neighbours had gone off somewhere, with boyfriends perhaps, and that the dog, somehow, had escaped.

  On Thursday, 13 January Jenny and Iris, accompanied by the puppy on an improvised rope lead, walked to the shop to buy bread. As they passed their neighbours’ house they heard a baby crying. They would tell police later that they didn’t like to pry but felt they had better check that everything was all right. They entered through the back door – unlocked as always – and walked into the kitchen, whose light was burning palely in the harsh flood of sunshine from the window.

  On the table was a scribbled note someone had addressed to Suzanne. The women called out, ‘Hello!’ but there was no answer. Only the baby, crying.

  They had better find him. They walked through the house. And in the passageway they came upon the beginning of the meaning of everything. A woman’s body lay sprawled face-down, her green nightdress and the floor and the walls soaked in blood. It was Susan Bartlett.

  In the front bedroom there was more blood. Suzanne Armstrong lay on the floor, on her back, naked except for a blouse pushed up around her throat, appallingly wounded.

  The baby, Suzanne’s baby Gregory, aged 16 months, was in his cot in the middle bedroom – starving, dehydrated and distressed after three days alone, but still alive.

  Patrolling policemen rushed to the murder house, followed quickly by members of the Homicide Squad. The detectives formed the opinion that Suzanne had almost certainly known her attacker. She had been reading a book of Roald Dahl short stories when he arrived and had neatly (and presumably calmly) placed the volume face-down on the blanket at the moment he appeared in the doorway. The man had then dragged her by the legs into the centre of the room and stabbed her 29 times until she was dead.

  The trail of clues suggested that Susan Bartlett had shown extraordinary heroism by trying to help her friend.
Instead of fleeing the scene she had struggled with the intruder, sustaining 55 stab wounds to her forearms and the front of her body before collapsing, dying or dead, outside Suzanne’s doorway. Forensic experts collected physical evidence which proved that the monster had defiled the dead body of his first victim.

  The investigators believed they would make a relatively quick arrest. Suzanne and Susan had had numerous male friends. It seemed likely that one of them, whose advances Suzanne might have rejected, had returned to exact an insane revenge.

  Prominent among the suspects were several men who admitted that they had visited the house after the murders were committed. They insisted they had noticed nothing unusual. The first was a salesman, in his 30s, who had met Susan the previous week:

  ‘I wanted to ask her out again and rang a few times, but no one ever answered. I was out with a mate and I asked if he’d mind coming to the house with me. I just wanted to see if she was there. At about 10.30 on the Tuesday night I knocked at the front door and waited, but no one came.

  ‘So I finally climbed through a window at the side. I’d been wondering if I had the phone number wrong, so I copied the actual number off their telephone. We didn’t see anything in the house and we didn’t hear a baby.’

  The salesman’s friend verified his story.

  Another visitor was a farmworker, Stan, who had been seeing Suzanne and was similarly puzzled by the telephone that was never picked up. He and his younger brother visited the Easey Street house on Wednesday at about 8.30. When no one answered the front door he let himself in at the back and left a note in the kitchen, asking Suzanne to call him.