The case of the vanishing PM
Status: Solved
You don’t need me to tell you Australia boasts a coastline of beautiful beaches … more than 10,000 of them, in fact. While some stretches of sand such as Surfers Paradise and Bondi are iconic, many others remain hidden and relatively unknown to all but those who keep them a closely guarded secret.
Until a hot and humid morning in the summer of 1967, Cheviot Beach, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, was one of those. However, after Prime Minister Harold Holt decided to take a dip in its waters on Sunday 17 December, this surf beach entered our national psyche forever. And it was for all the wrong reasons.
Although the nearby patrolled beach at Portsea was closed because of especially rough sea conditions, the 59-year-old PM, clad in his trademark blue swimming trunks, didn’t hesitate diving into the surf off his favourite patch of sand. “I know this beach like the back of my hand,” Holt famously boasted.
He was an excellent snorkeller and let everyone know about it. In fact, he played up to his image as the outdoorsy PM and was photographed in the London press in his wetsuit and surrounded by three bikini-clad women (his daughters-in-law). Apparently, it was good for votes.
Although he was competent in the water, Holt found it difficult to swim freestyle due to a persistent shoulder injury he sustained playing football at university. To compensate for this, during long speeches delivered by his colleagues in the House of Representatives Chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Holt sometimes practised holding his breath for as long as he could. Mmm. Starving the brain of oxygen – I guess that’s one way to make parliamentary debate more exciting.
On the sand with gung-ho Holt that fateful morning were four others, including Marjorie Gillespie, Holt’s Portsea mistress. (Apparently, he also had lovers in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Hong Kong.) Like US president John F. Kennedy, who allegedly courted 13 mistresses, Holt’s infidelity was swept under the carpet and, as a result, Marjorie’s presence at the beach was initially not reported by the police.
In fact, there are some accounts she was rushed away from the beach in the boot of a car to protect her from the prying media.
Holt’s demise was quick because almost immediately after diving in, he vanished beneath the water. In one of her rare public statements before becoming a recluse, Marjorie recounted the tragedy.
“He was like a leaf being taken out. It was so quick and so final,” she said.
“Holt lost in sea,” screamed newspaper headlines and, despite one of the biggest air and sea searches in our country’s history, Australia’s 17th prime minister was never seen again.
The public struggled to comprehend that anyone, let alone the prime minister, could simply vanish without a trace.
This resulted in many rumours, accusations and conspiracy theories to explain his disappearance, including that he was assassinated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, supposedly for his imminent withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam. The next year, the US Navy named a frigate after him – USS Harold E. Holt (FF-1074), to put pay to some proponents of that plot.
Another provocative theory that gained widespread coverage but received limited traction was suggested by Ronald Titcombe, a former Australian Navy intelligence officer, and published in Anthony Grey’s book, The Prime Minister Was a Spy (1983). Titcombe proposed that Holt was a Chinese communist spy, and that two frogmen from a midget submarine lurking offshore spirited him away to freedom and his Chinese masters.
Several years later, Dame Zara Bate, Holt’s wife, drolly denied the outlandish theory: “Harry? Chinese submarine? He didn’t even like Chinese cooking.”
Holt once asked his press secretary, Tony Eggleton, “What are the odds of a PM being drowned or taken by a shark?” And although we aren’t privy to Tony’s answer, they were clearly much higher than Holt bargained for. A Coronial Inquest in 2005 found “death by accidental drowning in rough sea conditions”.
Just don’t try telling that to the conspiracy theorists.
Riddle in desert sands
Status: Unsolved
Australia isn’t known for geoglyphs – large designs in the landscape made by people moving soil or stones. That changed on 26 June 1998, when outback charter pilot Trec Smith spotted an extraordinary sight from the air – a 4.5km-long warrior carved into a barren desert plateau near Marree in outback South Australia.
Suddenly, Australia lay claim to one of the biggest – and certainly, the newest – geoglyphs in the world. However, despite a blaze of world-wide publicity, no one claimed responsibility for the colossal creation that was initially dubbed ‘Stuart’s Giant’, a reference to highly accomplished 19th-century European explorer John McDouall Stuart.
Satellite imagery indicated the site was undisturbed just two weeks prior to its discovery, and the Marree geoglyph’s rapid appearance led to a host of theories, ranging from the far-fetched “aliens have done it” to a marketing campaign for a soon-to-be released product (that never eventuated).
The precision with which the figure was carved into the stony surface of the desert – before the widespread use of GPS technology – also prompted suggestions the oversized warrior, soon re-named Marree Man, must have been the handiwork of a covert professional group with access to state-of-the-art survey equipment.
Those first to see it up close on the ground reported it was likely created with a tractor pulling a scarifier, a type of scraper. Some were convinced it was the creation of the Department of Defence. Others claimed it was a statement on Indigenous recognition and rights. All were guessing.
Not surprisingly, the appearance of the astonishing artwork also sparked a booming local tourism industry, with curious sightseers from around the globe keen to be among the first to catch a glimpse of the man-made wonder from the air.
Some pundits suggested American spelling and vernacular in a series of mysterious faxes sent to authorities soon after the figure’s creation were a not-so-subtle clue as to its origins; perhaps it was connected to an American mining exploration company. Others rebutted this, saying it was a red herring to throw investigators off the track.
At the top of the list of suspects was First Nations artist and sculptor Bardius Goldberg, who prior to his death in 2002 denied any involvement. Another candidate was retired mechanic Robin Cooke, the mastermind behind the large-scale Mutonia Sculpture Park on the nearby Oodnadatta Track.
“I reckon it was Robin as he’s probably the only one clever enough around here who could do it,” says Lyall Oldfield, owner of the Marree Roadhouse, adding “he could have accessed that spot without anyone else knowing, but you’ll never get him to admit it.”
And he’s right. Robin steadfastly denies any involvement.
Adventurer Dick Smith, founder of this magazine, was so desperate to get to the bottom of the outback mystery that he dedicated two years “solidly undertaking research” trying to solve it. “I hired a private detective, half a dozen experts, spoke to people on the ground, and despite all that have absolutely no knowledge of who did it,” Dick confesses. “It’s a classic outback whodunnit, it’s Australia’s secret of the century … no one could have done it by themselves, it was definitely a group of people, including professional surveyors, but exactly who, we may never know.” Dick is so determined to solve the mystery he is offering a $5000 reward for information that leads to the unmasking of the perpetrators. “I really hope this will be solved before I die,” he says.
Although controversially ‘touched-up’ by a couple of local business owners using a grader in 2016, the Marree Man has slowly started to fade back into the desert. But that hasn’t stopped tour operators from offering scenic flights over the intriguing landmark.
The mystery of the century
Status: Officially unsolved, unofficially solved
A quiet backwater of the Lane Cove River is as idyllic a place as you’ll find in suburban Sydney. But this aquatic haven was far from paradise when, on the unseasonably cool morning of 1 January 1963, while much of Australia was still nursing hangovers, two boys looking for golf balls at the nearby golf course stumbled upon a man lying on the ground just above the high tidemark.
At first, the boys thought the man – who was naked from the waist down but, bizarrely, covered with clothing, a carpet square and flattened boxes – was just sleeping off New Year’s Eve celebrations. So, they wandered on. About an hour later they returned and were shocked to notice the man’s face had turned purple. He was dead.
Shortly after the boys raised the alarm, police discovered a second body – that of a woman, only 15m away. Like the man, she was in a state of half-undress. Her body was covered with opened-out beer boxes. Apart from some minor abrasions, which she seemed to have sustained while crawling away from the riverbed, there was no obvious sign of violence.
The two bodies were promptly identified as those of respected CSIRO scientist Dr Gilbert Bogle and his lover Margaret Chandler who the night before had left a small party of fellow intellectuals in nearby Chatswood and snuck down to the secluded riverbank, which at the time was a known lover’s rendezvous.
It was clear the lovers died of a rapidly acting poison, but autopsies offered little clue as to the killing agent. And who was the culprit? Perhaps the murderer had tried to cover up the crime with cardboard boxes?
Immediately, the finger was pointed at Geoffrey, Margaret’s husband. However, it was soon revealed the couple had enjoyed an open relationship. Not only had Geoffrey encouraged the romantic tryst between Bogle and his wife, but he also sported a watertight alibi – at the time he was with his own mistress. Really!
Such sordid details scandalised conservative Sydney society, and the tabloid press had a field day. After all, this was a time when a couple couldn’t even book into a motel unless they were married.
Just about everyone had a theory as to what killed the duo, ranging from LSD to overdosing on an exotic aphrodisiac. Conspiracy theories also began to spread. Bogle had apparently just accepted a job with a security firm in the United States and, given that the Cuban missile crisis had only unfolded three months before, the police explored the possibility that Bogle was a spy, or a target of espionage-related nerve gas.
Meanwhile Vivian Mahoney, the chief toxicologist, fastidiously pored over the evidence and consulted experts, including the FBI in the US and Scotland Yard in London. For more than a year, he carefully considered hundreds of obscure chemicals and poisons, including strychnine, arsenic, carbon monoxide, venomous spiders, even poison darts from the Amazon – you name it. But he came up blank. The unprecedented forensic investigation failed to identify cause of death, or the killer. Someone had committed the perfect double murder.
At the coronial inquest, the NSW police commissioner labelled it “the mystery of the century”. No one disagreed and the ‘crime’ was destined to remain unsolved, resurfacing every New Year’s Day in newspapers across the nation.
However, the case was turned on its head in 2006 when filmmaker Peter Butt released compelling evidence of a silent assassin in his tell-all documentary Who Killed Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler? Peter presented a convincing case that, just prior to the duo’s fatal trip to lover’s lane, hydrogen sulphide gas – caused by high levels of industrial waste and sewage – had bubbled up from the bed of the then heavily polluted river. The two lovers weren’t murdered, after all. The river had killed them – with hydrogen sulphide.
“It’s an ephemeral gas and in high concentrations can’t be detected by humans. The moment they knew something was amiss they obviously started crawling away from it, but death would have been swift,” Peter says. “The cooler weather over the morning in question would have kept this invisible killer at ground level where they…[were] making love.”
When Peter divulged evidence to back up these claims to Vivian, the toxicologist “burst in tears” before declaring to Peter, “You’ve got it!”
“He really was shocked it slipped through the system,” Peter says. “Despite reports of the presence of hydrogen sulphide in the river for several decades in the lead-up to the deaths, there had been absolutely no consideration from the police that it had been the river.
“It was simply a case of two people in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Peter concludes. “I’m now very confident we have the full picture of what happened.”
But with such a long gap between the deaths and this explanation, it seems unlikely there will ever be conclusive proof that this was the cause of their deaths.
Oh, and as to those cardboard boxes and clothes? Peter uncovered anecdotal evidence that a greyhound owner, known for his strict morals, was illegally training his dogs when he found the bodies and covered them up. Again, something for the coroner to consider should there be another inquest.
Our most puzzling UFO incident
Status: Unsolved
Most UFO reports feature fuzzy lights fleetingly spotted in the night sky in faraway places, and usually by only one or two eyewitnesses. That was not the case with the Westall Incident when, on 6 April 1966, not one but three UFOs were clearly seen in broad daylight hovering over two schools in the Melbourne suburb of Westall for at least 20 minutes.
What’s more, there was no shortage of witnesses, including more than 200 students and several teachers. Talk about a ufologist’s nirvana!
UFO investigator and researcher Shane L.J. Ryan has toiled away for 20 years trying to solve this mystery. He says he’s corresponded with more than 100 of those witnesses, most of whom “are both adamant and mystified about what they saw in the sky”.
The main UFO “was shaped like a bowl, inverted on a plate, with a slight hump on top, but with no visible joins – as if it had been poured from a mould”, Shane says. “It flew fast, then slow; it ascended and descended; it turned at very acute angles; and it seemed to vanish and then re-appear in a different place in the sky.
“Multiple witnesses attest to seeing at least one of the UFOs either on, or hovering just above, the ground in a paddock near the school, or descending behind pine trees in the paddock as if landing.”
While some people were overly quick to explain the incident as a standard weather balloon blown off-course (a theory that was later dismissed), reports of a significant and swift response from emergency services, along with the unexpected attendance of army and air force personnel in military uniform, spawned theories it was part of some secret military experiment.
Another ufologist Keith Basterfield believes it may have been a high-altitude test balloon launched from Mildura in north-west Victoria and blown off course. According to Keith, these balloons were used to monitor radiation levels after British nuclear tests at Maralinga.
“An equipment hire company was even brought in to assist the military response in the ‘landing’ paddock, and witnesses saw soldiers using Geiger counters and metal detectors there, and a cordon being set up,” Shane adds.
Like any high-profile UFO report, there are, of course, claims of a government cover-up. According to Shane, “a very high-ranking public servant was tasked at the time by the Department of Supply to visit the site and compile a secret report for the government. He was then sworn to secrecy and told his career and reputation would be threatened if he spoke about what he saw.”
After 56 years that report hasn’t seen the light of day … yet.
Whatever your take on UFOs, the Westall Incident is well-documented and remains firmly on the radar of investigators the world over.
Spook lights of the outback
Status: Partially solved
When the National Museum of Australia opened its daring new building in Canberra in 2001, one of the highlighted stories involved the feared Min Min lights.
Taking pride of place in the museum’s Eternity gallery was the absorbing account of “Granny Locke”, who was mesmerised by a strange light “bouncing” near her home in outback Queensland.
“It was around 100 yards (91m) off the road and about 4ft (1.2m) off the ground. It looked like a car light with only one beam out the front and seemed to be floating; it made no noise, moving about all the time. Then it entered an area where there are no roads, just scrub, yet it was still there,” Granny’s voice crackled from the museum’s audio-visual display.
Her eyewitness account is only one of a long list from residents, farmers and travellers who claim to have seen a baffling ball of light in the outback, especially in the flat country of western Queensland. Some say it’s red, others describe it as green or, rarely blue, but mainly it’s white.
Intriguingly, the spook lights are almost always sighted close to the surface and rarely, if ever, high up in the sky. And unlike standard UFO reports, there’s rarely a suggestion these sightings are spacecraft with little green men peering out from portholes.
Instead, there are several scientific theories explaining this nocturnal phenomenon. They range from escaping swamp gas and luminescent fungi, to radioactive mineral deposits.
Given the distribution and sheer number of sightings, the most plausible explanation is the fata morgana – a mirage created by light bending around the curvature of the globe due to a temperature inversion, where a cold, dense layer of air next to the ground carries light far over the horizon to a distant observer without the usual dissipation and radiation.
A prominent proponent of this theory was the late Professor Jack Pettigrew, a neuroscientist at The University of Queensland. “The Min Min light occurs when light, from a natural or man-made source, is refracted to an observer who is tens, or even hundreds, of kilometres away, by an inverted mirage, or fata morgana,” he told me in 2003, after he undertook a series of field experiments in Channel Country in outback Queensland.
These experiments were able to clearly demonstrate that a layer of cold air just above the ground between the distant light and the observer could indeed trap light. “This layer of cold air bends the light and keeps it close to the ground, so it can be seen over great distances,” Jack told me. “The Min Min light was actually truck headlights sometimes up to 300km away.”
Just don’t try telling this to the good folk at Boulia, where the lure of the fabled light is one of the main reasons outback travellers visit their far-flung town.
Missing in the clouds
Status: Solved
Travis “Shorty” Shortridge had no idea when he taxied down the tarmac at Sydney Airport bound for Melbourne on 21 March 1931 that he was about to fly into a storm. He was piloting an Avro X aircraft called Southern Cloud, operated by Australian National Airways – a company set-up by aviation pioneers Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith.
Sure, he knew he was going to fly in windy and rainy weather – but he was unaware that, just after he took off, the Bureau of Meteorology revised its forecast to near-cyclonic conditions for his flight path over the Australian Alps. The unexpected tempest blew his tiny plane off course, causing it to crash, killing all eight people on board. The whereabouts of the wreck would become one of Australia’s longest running aviation mysteries, one that wouldn’t be solved for more than 27 years – three long decades of anguish for the grieving families searching for closure.
When news that the flight failed to arrive in Melbourne was made public, aviation authorities were swamped with reports from eyewitnesses who claimed to have heard or seen an aircraft in difficulty across a 500km route from just south of Sydney all the way to Melbourne. But despite an extensive search, the wreck wasn’t found.
A plane couldn’t just disappear, could it?
The years passed and eventually the plight of those onboard the ill-fated flight was all but forgotten until, by chance, Tom Sonter, a carpenter working on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, discovered the crash site on 26 October 1958, almost three decades after the crash.
Tom was attempting a trek to Black Jack Mountain in the rugged upper valley of the Tooma River on the western side of Kosciuszko National Park, before beginning work at midday. But the going got tough so he turned around and, while navigating back to his worker’s camp through an area of thick scrub aptly called “World’s End”, Tom literally stumbled upon the wreck, although he initially didn’t realise its significance.
“I wasn’t sure if it was a known wreck or not, so I removed the ID plate off the fuselage and took it to the police,” Tom later told me. He admitted he’d hitherto never heard of the Southern Cloud.
The crash site was a grisly one. A small number of passengers’ belongings were scattered a short distance away, resulting in speculation that some on board may have somehow survived the crash, only to perish a very short time later. Of course, the items could have just been moved by animals over time.
As is so often the case with disasters, several passengers cheated death by last-minute changes to their travel itineraries. Sydney businessman Stan Baker had booked on the fateful flight but, at the last minute, decided to travel by train instead.
In a bizarre epilogue to Stan’s story, following the Southern Cloud’s disappearance, he reportedly developed a fear of flying, which tragically proved justified when in he died in a plane crash near Perth in 1950.
Then there’s cricket great Sir Donald Bradman, who hitched a ride in the Southern Cloud from Adelaide to Goulburn “not long before the tragedy”. In his 1950 book Farewell to Cricket, Bradman described the trip as a “bumpy journey”.
While that flight may have been a bit turbulent for ‘the Don’, you can only imagine how terrifying the last few minutes must have been for those onboard the Southern Cloud as it plummeted into the rugged realms of the Snowy Mountains.
Tassie tigers still roaming in the wilderness
Status: Solved
If every report is to be believed, there’s hardly a swamp in south-eastern Australia that’s not teeming with bunyips, or a cave in the Great Dividing Range or south-west corner of Western Australia, that doesn’t have one of those seemingly ubiquitous ‘black panthers’. You know, the ones that witnesses claim are pumas, but the photos are almost always blurry.
The search for these so-called mystery animals falls squarely in the remit for cryptozoologists – pseudoscientists often clad in khaki and wielding bags of plaster of Paris and trail cameras, seeking evidence for these elusive and, in most cases, imaginary creatures.
The ultimate prize for every Australian cryptozoologist is evidence that the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) is still lurking in a remote patch of the island state. But, hey, at least we know they did once exist. Indeed, the thylacine once roamed over much of mainland Australia. However, several factors, including the introduction of the dingo, led to its extinction in all areas except Tasmania about 2000 years ago.
Contrary to popular belief, the Tassie tiger wasn’t prowling the Apple Isle in plague proportions before the arrival of Europeans. In fact, it’s estimated there were fewer than 5000 thylacines in Tasmania at the time of European settlement. Excessive hunting, combined with factors such as habitat destruction and introduced disease, led to the species’ rapid demise.
Although the last known Tassie tiger died in a Hobart Zoo in 1936, hundreds of tourists, farmers and ‘tiger hunters’, who have dedicated large chunks of their lives to find proof, claim to have captured tantalising glimpses of its stripes in the bush.
While the number of these reports has dropped significantly in recent decades, there is consensus among naturalists that the thylacine may have persisted in very small numbers after 1936, but is no longer. In fact, according to recent analysis of 1237 observations and claimed sightings of the animal since 1910 undertaken by University of Tasmania Professor Barry Brook and published in the June 2023 issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment, the thylacine may have hung on into the late 1980s and possibly even longer (see our 2024 feature story Is the truth still out there?).
One scientist who believes we shouldn’t completely rule out seeing a live Tassie tiger again is Professor Andrew Pask. He’s part of a University of Melbourne research team attempting to resurrect the extinct thylacine using DNA from preserved specimens (see A place of last resort). “I’ve always found it perplexing when the thylacine is pictured in montages alongside bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster,” he says. “Too often cryptozoology is associated with mythical creatures and not real ones.”
Australia’s El Dorado
Status: Likely solved
No exposé of Australian mysteries is complete without shining the spotlight on Lasseter’s Reef – that dazzling quartz reef laden with specks of gold, supposedly hidden somewhere west of the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia.
A long list of books, films and column inches, including in this journal, have attempted to unravel the truth about the fabled reef. In fact, it’s almost become a rite of passage for anyone travelling through the red centre and beyond to search for the mystical reef.
So, is the reef that Harold Lasseter claimed to be “seven miles [11.3km] long, four to seven feet [1.2m to 2m] high, and 12 feet [3.7m] wide”, really out there, just waiting to be (re) discovered?
In one corner are the true believers, who were loyally led by Harold’s son Robert “Bob” Lasseter until his death in March 2024. Bob was just five years old when his dad left on the ill-fated 1930 expedition to find the reef, which he claimed to have first spotted 33 years earlier during a prospecting expedition.
Unfortunately, Harold was never seen alive again, taking the location of his supposed reef to his bush grave. In a bid to authenticate his father’s bold claims, Bob dedicated much of his adult life to combing the deserts of Central Australia in more than 30 separate excursions, often through inhospitable country.
“My father wouldn’t have taken the risks he did if there was nothing in it … it was right for me to prove that my father was correct,” he said after his final unsuccessful expedition.
Meanwhile, in the other corner are the hardened sceptics – a long line of esteemed historians and researchers who seriously question Lasseter’s character, citing inconsistencies and blatant untruths in his stories.
Dr Steve Hill, chief scientist at Geoscience Australia, sits in this camp. But he doesn’t think we should give up all hope.
“Although there are no substantiated records of major gold-bearing vein systems or known highly prospective host rocks for this type of gold system in the broad region to the south-west of Alice Springs, it doesn’t mean that the search for mineral wealth in the region is hopeless,” Steve says. “The region still holds great intrigue and mystery, even to the most modern and sophisticated of mineral explorers. Over time, it will be fascinating to see what may be revealed.”
Whether or not that’s Lasseter’s mythical reef, only time will tell.
Tim The Yowie Man is a regular contributor to Australian Geographic. He is a naturalist, author, broadcaster and tour guide, who has dedicated decades to documenting Australia’s unusual natural phenomena.
