by Sue Williams
So when Nicholls set off in his car with his girlfriend, her kids and a loaded gun in July 2001, trouble was never going to be far away. ‘Along the way, Geoff shot a cow at the side of the road,’ Rose told police later. ‘It didn’t die immediately so he and Lance chased it for an hour, so Geoff could continue to shoot it. It finally died when Geoff struck it over the head with the butt of his rifle, with such force that it broke the rifle butt off.’
Later, the rifle accidentally discharged into the floor near the accelerator pedal while the whole family were in the car. Later still, he threatened Rose with the rifle, then jumped out of the car and put the barrel against his chin, saying he was going to shoot. He had spent most of the journey drinking heavily and taking large amounts of medication, and Rose feared the worst.
Others too waited with dread for news of the trip. Meanwhile, Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees were driving straight towards him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEEN
A TOWN LIKE ALICE
ALICE SPRINGS IS ALMOST AT the dead geographic centre of Australia; remote, rugged and with the kind of frontier town raucousness that comes from being 1500 kilometres away from the nearest city. Its physical setting is spectacular. The town of around 22,000 people is set in what feels like an amphitheatre, with the mighty red sandstone walls of the MacDonnell Ranges to the south and its spurs to the north and east. The Todd River flows through the centre with its bridesmaids of tall red river gums and is either a swirling brown torrent of water in the wet season, or a modest trickle of red in the dry, often disappearing completely into the parched river bed of sand. As the traditional home of the Arrernte Aboriginal people, Alice has a large black community. With its formal foundation in the 1870s as a staging post for the overland telegraph line which connected to the submarine line from Darwin to Java, it also has a large white community. The rest are drawn from a wide mix of people who stumble into the town every year: tourists, transients and a swathe of CIA operatives from nearby Pine Gap, the US–Australian joint space research project.
Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees liked the town from the moment they arrived. With plenty of accommodation, shops, cafés, internet offices, bars and art galleries, it was a true oasis in the desert. Being in the middle of so much nothingness, with Darwin 1540 kilometres to the north and Adelaide 1660 kilometres to the south, the place has the air of a community battling to survive together against the elements, so people are generally extremely friendly. Like many remote outposts, the Alice is also home to plenty of larger-than-life characters, including crocodile hunter and stockman turned singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker and raconteur Ted Egan. He’s one of those big, bluff, heart-of-gold blokes who seems to personify the outback town so well, it’s a shock to learn he’s actually from the city of Melbourne. He left there, however, at the age of sixteen and has been in the bush ever since. The archetypal Aussie larrikin, he was the bloke who introduced Rolf Harris to the song Two Little Boys, and recently received the Northern Territory’s highest honour, being sworn in as its Administrator — the Queen’s representative — in November 2003.
He loves Alice, and says it’s a wonderful place. ‘Yes, it’s got its faults and its shortcomings and problems, but it’s a magic place to live, and people from all over the world come here to see it,’ he says. ‘It’s frontier territory, it’s the end of the line and it’s filled with end-of-the-road people. It still has a very transient population, with people who come here for twelve months for whatever reason, and then they’re gone.’
As a perfect illustration of the enormous mix of people who have made Alice Springs their home, Egan’s Aboriginal namesake, a former employee who took his name as a gesture of respect to him and is now known as Teddy Egan Tjangala, also lives there part of the time. One of the most sought-after black trackers in Australia, he was born around 1925 into the traditional Aboriginal way of life, hunting for food and living off the land. He was initiated early after the great Walpiri tribe of the Central desert lands annointed him a rainmaker from his birth. He would grow up great, strong and powerful, they said; a born leader. At seventeen, he was still wearing only a loincloth when he met, face-to-face, his first white man.
Now, when he’s outback, he still walks incredible distances to hunt and commune with the land, hold talks with his people, paint, play music and perform traditional dances. When he’s in Alice, he sleeps in a little humpy he’s constructed of sheets of plastic in the back garden of his granddaughter’s house in one of the main streets. ‘It’s a very good place,’ he says, stroking his snow-white beard. ‘The country is my home, but this is also home.’
Then there are the travellers, tourists, casual workers and lost souls who have settled in town. White Egan says they fit right in. ‘It’s a no-names, no-packdrill kind of place,’ he says. ‘A lot of people come here to get as far away as possible from everything else. Lots of bizarre things happen here as a result.’ When a man was refused a drink at an Uluru bar in 1983, for instance, he drove his massive road train into the bar, killing five people. And, strangely enough, Alice Springs was the site of Australia’s first attempted air hijack. As an Ansett Airlines flight from Adelaide was approaching the town in 1972, a man emerged from the toilet with a gun and demanded, not a flight to Paris or Tripoli, but a parachute and a jumpsuit and to be flown 1000 kilometres into the desert. On the ground, he kept an air hostess and six passengers hostage until a police officer, disguised as the navigator of the Cessna that was supposedly going to take him into the outback, jumped him. The hijacker, after injuring the officer, eventually shot himself.
The Northern Territory also has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate per capita of violent crime in Australia, together, in 1999, with the highest murder rate of 3.63 victims for every 100,000 people. More usually, however, the threats come from nature, accidents or mistakes: travelling without water, a first-aid kit, or supplies; treading on snakes; becoming lost in the desert; running out of fuel and leaving the vehicle to walk for help; fishing from mudflats close to saltwater crocodiles; or sharing their waterholes for a swim.
But the area’s dangers were furthest from the mind of Peter Falconio as he collected the Kombi from the mechanic, noting how much more smoothly it was now running, and went into town. He called into the tax office, hoping to pick up a refund on the tax he’d paid while working in Sydney. He was disappointed. ‘They said he owed them money, when he was expecting a tax return,’ explains Joanne. Accountant Maureen Laracy had examined his group certificate and realised he’d been taxed as a resident instead of as someone on a working visa. She asked him if he’d like to fill in a tax return to pay the difference. ‘He declined,’ she reported, later. Their other chores were carried out more successfully. They both emailed friends and family at the internet office next door to the Melanka Lodge to tell them they were having a great time, but were looking forward to getting back to the east coast of Australia, and then to New Zealand afterwards. They dropped into a travel agency nearby to ask how much it would cost to make a side-trip from Brisbane to Papua New Guinea as Peter had been talking to a friend back in Sydney about taking a week’s walking holiday there. Joanne didn’t like the look of it at all, and said if he wanted to do that, she’d return to Sydney to spend a few extra days there with the friend’s girlfriend while they were off doing ‘guy stuff’, and then they’d meet back in Brisbane. They took away the brochures and a quote for prices, saying they’d think about it. Joanne wrote her mum a postcard to say she was missing home, but enjoying her trip. Peter phoned home and spoke to both his mum and his dad to tell everyone he was having the time of his life.
ALICE SPRINGS GAVE THE YOUNG couple a chance to relax. They wandered through the mall with its blind busker escorted by a different, sighted friend every day, and wondered at the town having a pedestrian mall when there were so few cars. They took a walk around the grassy parks where Aboriginal families come to sit and enjoy the sunshine with their kids playing nearby. They sipped coffee in some of the trendy ca
fés which felt as though they’d been transplanted from Sydney’s eastern suburbs or Melbourne’s St Kilda. And they scuffed through the dry riverbed, where groups of people congregate each evening to talk, to sing and to drink. The town was full of live music, most of it country Australian and much of it for the benefit of tourists. But its cheerful amateurism could be charming. Peter and Joanne ate one day in the cheesy Bojangles Saloon and Restaurant, guarded by a full-size replica of Ned Kelly, while another night they dined at the Overlander Steakhouse, with its choices of kangaroo, snake, crocodile and emu. With sing-songs, corrugated tin roofing and a complete wall of cricket memorabilia, it’s not a place for the pretentious. ‘What’s the house wine?’ one diner was heard to ask the waitress. She didn’t hesitate for a second before replying, ‘Cask.’
The Stuart Caravan Park was a pleasant enough place to stay, too. They parked the Kombi under a shady gum, had long, hot showers, and cleaned the Kombi inside and out. Peter bought some material to try to make new seat covers to replace the torn ones, hoping they’d then get a better price for the Kombi when they came to sell it. ‘That was ambitious,’ smiles Joanne later. They abandoned the attempt soon after.
They also took some time to unwind. ‘They seemed a nice couple,’ says owner Leonie Marshall. ‘We were very busy at the time, but I still remember them. She was very quiet, but he was more talkative.’
It was peak season when they’d arrived and the Camel Cup — a series of bizarre camel races with an assortment of riders, prizes and events — was due to take place on the Saturday. It was one of the highlights of the year in a community that loves nothing more than to have fun, and the louder and odder, the better. On the Friday evening, 13 July 2001, Peter and Joanne got chatting to a couple who were camping nearby. ‘Are you going to the Camel Races tomorrow?’ the woman asked them. ‘You should go. It’s a hoot!’ That night, lying on the back seat of the Kombi, they discussed going. If so many people made the trip all the way to Alice Springs especially for the event, it must be worth seeing. They could set off that afternoon, after they’d seen some of it, on the long road north to Darwin.
It’d be a fun way to say farewell, they agreed as they fell asleep that night, Friday the 13th. After all, it would be many, many years before they’d be back in Alice again, they mused sleepily — if ever.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DANGEROUS DELUSIONS
ANDREW HEFFERNAN’S PROBLEMS first began in 1994 when, as a twenty-year-old, he punched a man who’d been abusing his friends. He ended up coming off worse, far worse, from the fight. He was stabbed in the back and spent a long period in hospital undergoing delicate lung and abdominal surgery. But the real damage couldn’t be seen. Heffernan, from the dairy centre of Moruya just south of Batemans Bay on NSW’s south coast, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder which, in turn, led to a long bout of psychiatric illness.
No-one realised quite how bad it was until four years later when he attacked, without provocation, the ex-boyfriend of a female friend. He leapt from a car, knocked the man down with a flying kick, struck him in the head and, when he was crawling on his hands and knees trying to get away, punched him in the head and back. The man sustained a fractured jaw and spent eight days in intensive care. A psychiatric report written the next year, in 1999, said that immediately prior to the assault, Heffernan had been talking to himself, wandering aimlessly, sharpening knives and fashioning daggers. There’d also been incidents where he’d slashed his own abdomen and foot. He was assessed as being mentally ill with severe paranoid schizophrenia, and was admitted to a high dependency mental health unit where he responded well to medication.
When Heffernan was released, he continued to drift. He’d left school during Year Eleven to start a carpentry course but had subsequently been turned down for apprenticeships. For a while he worked on his stepfather’s farm — he and his mother had separated — then a supermarket, before again leaving town to travel Australia and work in a series of short-term, dead-end jobs. By July 2001, he was in the South Australian Riverland, looking for work. When he couldn’t find any, he decided to drive north to Alice Springs to seek employment there. He set out in his old car, leaving his medication behind. As the distance between him and Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees narrowed, his paranoid schizophrenia again began to take hold. He was a ticking time bomb.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE CAMEL CUP
IT LOOKED CRAZY: DOZENS OF people running around Alice Springs in strange costumes and face paint. There was a carnival atmosphere sweeping the whole of the town. ‘Come and watch the camels!’ called a man on a tannoy. ‘You can even eat them afterwards!’ The annual Alice Springs Camel Cup attracts a huge crowd of locals and tourists every year, as one of those strangely surreal events for which Alice has become renowned. Ever since local Noel Fullerton suggested settling a feud with his mate Keith Mooney Smith with the challenge of a race on camels along the dry Todd River bed in 1970, it’s become one of the most celebrated dates on the Northern Territory calendar. For Australia is today the only country in the world where wild camels roam free. First imported from India in 1840 to help explorers cross the vast desert interior, they proved to be the perfect creatures in desert conditions, capable of travelling around 40 kilometres a day carrying loads of up to 600 kilograms. In 1866, a few escaped from a team of 260 transporting goods from Adelaide to Perth, and turned wild. On the advent of the railroad from Adelaide to Alice, and then of trucks on the road to Darwin, others were turned loose. Now Australia has so many wild camels, it even exports breeding stock into the Arab world.
For the Camel Cup, domesticated animals are brought in from all over the country, and jockeys flock to take part. It’s a hard ride, and only the toughest cope. ‘Once a camel starts galloping,’ explains one jockey, ‘it kind of feels like being strapped to a poorly functioning washing machine.’ At a gallop, they can race for short distances at speeds of up to 60 kilometres per hour, but the problem lies usually in trying to keep them on course, or stopping them. ‘I was in front, I was screaming, I was happy,’ recalls another jockey. ‘And then the camel stopped like a shopping cart and turned left … but at 35 miles an hour, I just kept going …’
Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees had spent the morning at the accountant’s, visiting the library and dropping into a café for breakfast, but arrived at Blatherskite Park just outside town in time for the 12.30 p.m. opening ceremony for the 32nd charity fundraising Camel Cup. They paid their entrance fee and were each given a smiley sticker to prove it: ‘Try Hugs Not Drugs — The Australian Lions Drug Awareness Foundation’. It felt like the whole of the Northern Territory was there. Indeed, Bradley Murdoch was thought to be in the midst of it too.
Peter and Joanne milled about, enjoying the atmosphere and laughing at the contestants who’d dressed in fancy costume for the novelty races. ‘I really liked it,’ says Joanne. ‘It reminded me of the local galas and family fetes we used to have in our village.’ Passers-by smiled to see the two young tourists, so far from home, obviously having a wonderful time.
THE RACE HAD JUST STARTED when Peter and Joanne took their positions two back from the wire fence that runs around the park. The camels were thundering down the track, their leathery pads sending clouds of dust into the air. The jockeys strained to control their mounts — and to hang on for dear life. The commentator was getting more excited as the camels came closer to the finish line, with a $100 first prize at stake for the winner, and the glory of the title. Some camels were jostling others but the race caller gave a running commentary on how the rules of the race can change all the time, depending on the mood of the judges. The only steadfast rule was for spectators not to approach the camels directly; their teeth are notoriously sharp, and they can spit over a distance of more than 3 metres.
The race finished in a wave of cheering from those who’d placed winning bets, and boos from those who’d lost their money. Spectators were reminded that the Rickshaw Race would be coming up soon, so
why not volunteer you and your mates? The only other event for the public to take part in was the Miss Camel Cup. ‘Come on, ladies,’ he chided. ‘Don’t be shy!’ Peter looked at Joanne and she smiled.
‘No way!’ she laughed, shaking her head. She felt thirsty and her lips were dry, so she slicked them with a stick of strawberry-flavoured lip balm she had in her shorts pocket and then wandered off, alone, to find a stall selling cold drinks. A group of men standing near the beer tent made a lewd comment as the dark haired woman in a pale blue, tight-fitting French Connection T-shirt, green board shorts and sports sandals ordered her drink in a distinctive English accent. Joanne ignored them. She could see they were the worse for alcohol and she’d become used to men leering at her in outback Australia. She didn’t notice, however, a tall, rangy man standing alone, off to one side, eyeing her hungrily.
AS JOANNE RETURNED TO PETER with the drinks, she had the uncanny feeling she was being watched. She looked around and noticed a man with a video camera panning across the crowd; an innocent enough activity. She paid him little heed. After the last heat of the Rickshaw Race, the pair agreed they’d had enough, and decided to head off. They had originally planned to leave earlier, but had gotten carried away with the fun of the big day out. With a start they realised it was nearly 4 p.m.
They both climbed into the Kombi and raced back to the caravan park to have a final shower before they left. Then they drove to the chicken fast food chain Red Rooster on the Whittaker Street ring road for a last meal. Peter bought pizza and Joanne picked at his leftovers.
NEITHER OF THEM NOTICED the auto parts store Repco on the other side of the road, opposite. There, a man standing alone noticed Joanne climb back into the driving sea of the Kombi. He darted off to pick up his own white four-wheel-drive ute. He started the engine and checked his gun was still in the vehicle. He then watched the Kombi as it turned out into the road. He hung back to see which direction the van would take after going through town. He saw it turn north, and then pulled over on to the side of the road.
