by Graham Seal
I’ve left my soul to me banker—he’s got the mortgage on it anyway.
I’ve left my conversion calculator to the Metrification Board. Maybe they’ll be able to make sense of it.
I have a couple of last requests. The first one is to the weatherman: I want rain, hail and sleet for the funeral. No sense in finally giving me good weather just because I’m dead.
And last, but not least, don’t bother to bury me—the hole I’m in now is big enough. Just cremate me and send me ashes to the Taxation Office with this note: ‘Here you are, you bastards, now you’ve got the lot.’
A Farmer
7
Home of the weird
And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush—the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.
Henry Lawson, ‘The Bush Undertaker’
FOR ALL THE gritty realities of colonial life, Australia has its fair share of unexplained discoveries, odd events and mysteries of all kinds. The continent had existed in myth for so long before its actual discovery, charting and eventual European settlement, that peculiarities appeared very early on. By the time Lawson wrote his conclusion to his short story ‘The Bush Undertaker’, the bush—meaning anywhere outside a city, quite an area—was well known as a place of mystery as well as hardship.
Curious discoveries
In January 1838, an ambitious soldier named George Grey led an exploration party into the completely unknown northwest of Australia. Grey would go on to an astounding career in politics and government in two Australian colonies, in New Zealand and South Africa, and eventually would be knighted for his sometimes controversial actions and approaches. But now he was still in his mid-twenties and keen to make his name as an explorer. He was totally inexperienced in Australian conditions, as were most of the others in his party. Nevertheless, Grey’s military background and iron will kept the expedition going through unexplored terrain, battles with the local inhabitants and many other hardships recounted in his journals.
Grey and his men were the first Europeans known to have seen the Wandjina paintings and other ancient rock art of the Kimberley region. But they also made some even more enigmatic discoveries that continue to puzzle us today. In his journal, Grey describes his discovery of the cave containing the carved, or ‘intaglio’ head:
After proceeding some distance we found a cave larger than the one seen this morning; of its actual size however I have no idea, for being pressed for time I did not attempt to explore it, having merely ascertained that it contained no paintings…
I was moving on when we observed the profile of a human face and head cut out in a sandstone rock which fronted the cave; this rock was so hard that to have removed such a large portion of it with no better tool than a knife and hatchet made of stone, such as the Australian natives generally possess, would have been a work of very great labour. The head was two feet in length, and sixteen inches in breadth in the broadest part; the depth of the profile increased gradually from the edges where it was nothing, to the centre where it was an inch and a half; the ear was rather badly placed, but otherwise the whole of the work was good, and far superior to what a savage race could be supposed capable of executing. The only proof of antiquity that it bore about it was that all the edges of the cutting were rounded and perfectly smooth, much more so than they could have been from any other cause than long exposure to atmospheric influences.
One of the few people known to actually visit the area since Grey is Les Hiddins, the famous ‘Bush Tucker Man’. He found the cave but was unable to find the carving until he used Google Earth, which revealed a passage Hiddins had missed on his previous visits. He intended to return in 2012 for another look but so far has not reported further.
Grey’s outback adventure also turned up some other puzzling sights. He came across ‘a native hut which differed from any before seen, in having a sloping roof ’. Shortly after, on 7 April 1838, he found ‘curious native mounds or tombs of stone’.
This morning I started off before dawn and opened the most southern of the two mounds of stones which presented the following curious facts:
1. They were both placed due east and west and, as will be seen by the annexed plates, with great regularity.
2. They were both exactly of the same length but differed in breadth and height.
3. They were not formed altogether of small stones from the rock on which they stood, but many were portions of very distant rocks, which must have been brought by human labour, for their angles were as sharp as the day they were broken off; there were also the remains of many and different kinds of seashells in the heap we opened.
My own opinion concerning these heaps of stones had been that they were tombs; and this opinion remains unaltered, though we found no bones in the mound, only a great deal of fine mould having a damp dank smell. The antiquity of the central part of the one we opened appeared to be very great, I should say two or three hundred years; but the stones above were much more modern, the outer ones having been very recently placed; this was also the case with the other heap: can this be regarded by the natives as a holy spot?
We explored the heap by making an opening in the side, working on to the centre, and thence downwards to the middle, filling up the former opening as the men went on; yet five men provided with tools were occupied two hours in completing this opening and closing it again, for I left everything precisely as I had found it. The stones were of all sizes, from one as weighty as a strong man could lift, to the smallest pebble. The base of each heap was covered with a rank vegetation, but the top was clear, from the stones there having been recently deposited.
Grey also reported other perplexing discoveries he referred to as ‘an alien white race’. He found among the Aborigines he encountered ‘the presence amongst them of a race, to appearance, totally different, and almost white, who seem to exercise no small influence over the rest’. Grey thought that these people were the main leaders of attacks on his party and speculated that they were of Malay descent.
At Roebuck Bay, an officer aboard the Beagle, the ship that carried Grey’s expedition to Australia and picked them up at the end of the expedition, also described fair-skinned Aborigines in the area:
At this time I had a good opportunity of examining them. They were about the middle age, about five feet six inches to five feet nine in height, broad shoulders, with large heads and overhanging brows; but it was not remarked that any of their teeth were wanting (as we afterwards observed in others); their legs were long and very slight, and their only covering a bit of grass suspended round the loins. There was an exception in the youngest, who appeared of an entirely different race: his skin was a copper colour, whilst the others were black; his head was not so large, and more rounded; the overhanging brow was lost; the shoulders more of a European turn, and the body and legs much better proportioned; in fact he might be considered a well-made man at our standard of figure. They were each armed with one, and some with two, spears, and pieces of stick about eight feet long and pointed at both ends. It was used after the manner of the Pacific Islanders, and the throwing-stick so much in use by the natives of the south did not appear known to them.
After talking loud, and using very extravagant gestures, without any of our party replying, the youngest threw a stone, which fell close to the boat.
These accounts have led many to since speculate about the origins of the hut, the carving, so unlike Aboriginal art and building, as well as the ‘individuals of an alien white race’. An early suggestion was that these discoveries were linked to a mythical French sojourn in the unknown southland as early as 1503. Others have tried to link the finds with survivors of Dutch shipwrecks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the carved head, the stone tombs, if that is what they were, and the fair-skinned Aborigines remain some of the many mysteries of Australia’s past.
The marble man
In mid-1889 a curious object was discovered i
n a marble quarry near Orange.
It is the body of a man about 5ft. 10in. in height, well formed, and evidently from the shape of the head and the contour of the features a European. To geologists and scientific men generally, an examination of this strange discovery should prove interesting. The marble in which the body was found is of various colours, but the body itself is petrified in white marble. With the exception of the arms, which are broken off at the shoulders, the limbs and features are intact, the left side of the body, however, being slightly flattened, due no doubt to the fact that it was found lying on this side.
The object was taken to Sydney where the discoverers placed it on display to the public. The body, if it was one, excited immense interest. Speculation ran wild. It was an Aboriginal. It was an escaped convict. It was a hoax. Doctors, geologists, government officials and just about everyone else examined it, to judge by the number of opinions and suggestions published in the press. Not all of these were very serious: one correspondent pointed out that the body took a size 12 hat.
Another correspondent claimed to have found a similar figure near Mt Gambier in 1854—‘a petrified blackfellow had been found in a cave on Hungry M’Konnor’s station at Mosquito Plains, between Jatteara and a place called Limestone, and now known as Penoli. The blackfellow was in a standing posture.’ The governor was said to have visited the object, which was protected beneath an iron grating.
A Bathurst district local, probably tongue in cheek, claimed to know the true origins of the man:
deer mr. Headhitter—This here putrified man are a stature, mr. jones, the Bathurst stonemasing, sais he were sculpted at a old public at cowflat. the wurk tooke ten weaks, and arterwards the stature were berried in the ground, then dug up, and hexibetted as a putrified man.
The police were called and investigated the matter, their report being discussed in the Legislative Assembly. The mystery only deepened though. The police believed that the mummy had never been in the quarry but had been fabricated by a certain Mr Sala for nefarious commercial purposes.
Then the plot took another twist. Two, in fact. Sala claimed that he had found not only the marble man in the quarry, but also a marble woman and a marble child. People were now expressing their incredulity about ‘the Sydney Fossil’, as an Adelaide newspaper called the object, but despite this, the ‘two shilling show’ exhibition was a commercial success.
This did not stop a court case from which Sala emerged unsentenced and with costs awarded, the magistrates considering that the matter should never have been brought before them. Rumour, speculation and commerce careened on and the newspapers of the land milked the story for all it was worth, which seems to have been quite a lot. Officials partially dissected the body, claiming the results proved that it was once human. The geologists analysed some chippings with inconclusive results. The wags did not miss an opportunity:
‘Don’t you think,’ said the lunatic, ‘it’ud be a good idea to run that petrified man from N.S.W. for a seat in the Legislature of Queensland?’
‘No,’ said the practical one, ‘I don’t; there are too many darned old fossils there already.’
The marble man even appeared in a spoof advertisement for Milk Arrowroot biscuits—‘Now with added bone ash!’ He was featured on stage by the Watson’s Bay Minstrels in ‘a very laughable farce’.
By this time the story had rolled on for months, boosted by the marble man’s travels as he was exhibited around the country. During that time, ownership of the marble man seems to have changed hands. Who actually owned the object and was therefore responsible for its debts became the subject of legal action, which, like everything else about the marble man, simply raised further questions without answers.
Then, in August 1889, Sala produced the marble woman he had earlier claimed to have found beside the man:
The body is apparently that of a young woman of spare build, 5ft. high, with the facial features flattened. The body appears to be solid marble. The legs are raised at the knees; the arms, hands, nails, and fingers appear very natural. The head and an arm have been broken and re-joined roughly with plaster.
She was shipped straight off to Sydney for exhibition and caused a similar flurry of interest and disagreement. One newspaper wondered if further searching in the Orange area might reveal a whole family—‘seven children, a cat, a dog, a frying-pan, and a broom handle—all petrified or all marble’. The article concluded with a reference to the great American showman and shyster, P.T. Barnum: ‘… as Barnum used to say, “the public like to be gulled”.’
By the end of September, Sala was in the bankruptcy court where more accusations of fakery were levelled against him. Others felt it necessary to air their opinions in the press, and further farcical depictions appeared on stage. The same year, Harry Stockdale, one of the first marble man’s early owners, published a book titled The Legend of the Petrified or Marble Man, adding further fuel to the furore and, of course, to the publicity blaze.
The following May, Sala’s son was displaying yet another marble man in Orange, at a shilling a time. The reporter was so impressed he went out to the marble quarry and, under the supervision of Sala junior, managed to unearth a few items of his own, including a woman’s skull, a hand and a breast. The place was also littered with fossil remains of fish, horses and other animals. By June a marble horse taken from the quarry was on show. The next October the marble man had graduated to the Great Hall at Sydney University and was said to be soon off to even greater things in Chicago.
From then the marble man, woman, child and horse seem to fade from the newspaper columns. Was the marble man really a petrified human being, of whatever kind? Or just a showground hoax? And what about the other fossils, allegedly human and otherwise, discovered in the area near the quarry? Opinions remained divided at the time and no one seems to have come up with any answers since.
Was Breaker Morant the Gatton murderer?
In 1898, Gatton was a small Queensland town with fewer than 500 souls, located on a busy route to and from Brisbane, and travellers passed through on a regular basis. The Murphy family were local farmers around 13 kilometres outside the town. On the evening of Boxing Day 1898, Michael Murphy, aged 29, with his sisters Ellen, eighteen, and Norah, 27, left home in a borrowed sulky bound for a local dance. When they arrived, the dance had been cancelled and they headed back sometime around 9 p.m. They did not return home and the following morning their mother asked her son-in-law, William M’Neill, to look for them.
M’Neill had loaned his sulky to the three and soon found its tracks. He followed them through scrub for over a kilometre from the main road, coming to a field where he found their bound and beaten bodies carefully laid out with their feet pointing westwards. Norah’s body was lying on a rug; Michael and Ellen were found lying back to back, a few feet apart. The horse drawing the sulky had been shot dead. It was later established that Michael had been shot in the head as well as bludgeoned. His sisters had both had their skulls fractured. Norah was probably strangled with the harness strap found around her neck. Both women had been raped. The murders were thought to have taken place between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. the following morning.
Investigation of the dreadful crime was botched from the very beginning, with crowds of gawkers destroying much forensic evidence at the scene. The police were slow to arrive and conducted their inquiries in an oddly slapdash way. The post-mortem was careless too, and resulted in the bodies having to be exhumed for further examination. The Royal Commission eventually held to examine the whole affair confirmed all this, but despite this level of official investigation and activity, the murders remained a mystery. Who had committed such a savage act? And why? The victims were three locals with no links to criminal activity, simply driving home from a dance that never happened.
Suspects included a newcomer to the area named Thomas Day, various itinerants and even family members. There were suggestions of a failed abortion attempt on Norah and also of incest. There was no sign of th
e victims having been forced into the paddock, strongly suggesting their acquiescence and the presence of someone they knew. None of these possibilities were ever substantiated and the Gatton murders remained unsolved, but ever since, there have been frequent revelations of the killer’s identity, all impossible to prove.
One of the most intriguing, if apparently left-of-centre, possibilities is that the famed horseman, womaniser and poet Henry ‘the Breaker’ Morant was the murderer. This theory was put forward by the folklorist John Meredith, who conceived it while researching a book on the poet Will Ogilvie, a mate of the Breaker’s. The theory depends on aspects of Morant’s personality and personal history and on some suggestive chronology.
The man who was executed for murdering a prisoner of war during the Boer War was an enigmatic and sometimes disturbing character. The Breaker’s early life is as clouded in myth as his later years, a situation made worse by his romancing of his past. He was born Edwin Henry Murrant in Somerset, England, into very ordinary circumstances, though he often intimated that his ancestry was considerably more exalted. He arrived in Australia at age eighteen in 1883 like many other young Britishers of the time looking to make a fortune, a name or even just a living, under a false identity. Over the next fifteen or so years he made a rip-roaring reputation as a flamboyant bush character and outstanding horseman, earning his nickname ‘the Breaker’. His feats of horsemanship, particularly riding a buck jumper few others could master, are still legend among horse fanciers. His amorous adventures included marriage to Daisy May O’Dwyer, later to become famous as anthropologist and journalist Daisy Bates. According to the story, Daisy gave the Breaker his marching orders when he—characteristically—refused to pay for the wedding. He took off on a stolen horse, also characteristically, and that was the end of the relationship (though not the marriage, as they never divorced). The Breaker continued his roistering lifestyle. He worked at whatever was available and developed a literary reputation as a bush poet, becoming friendly with other poets like ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and Will Ogilvie.
