Australian Outback's unsolved mysteries

From Azaria Chamberlain to Peter Falconio, death and mystery haunt Australia's Outback. GREG ANSLEY
explores a land where legend and reality blend in stories everyone loves to believe.

Barrow Creek is not much of a town: little more than an old telegraph station adjoining a tiny, haunting cemetery, and a roadhouse and pub where for years an artwork of cow dung cemented by hair spray hung as a conversation piece.

It sits astride the Stuart Highway, driving arrow-straight through the spinifex and scrub of the raw centre of Australia between bends as far apart as 50km, gently steering the road around the low outriders of the Davenport and MacDonnell ranges.

The Barrow Creek Hotel, operated by publican and jazz musician Les Pilton, is typically Outback, its concrete block and timber walls and corrugated iron roofing baked by temperatures that soar above 35C for 80 days of the year, sear to more than 40C on 12 of those, and peak at almost 45C.

It was at Pilton's pub where Barrow Creek last year leaped into world headlines.

Joanne Lees, a 27-year-old tourist from Britain, was bundled through its doors early on Sunday, July 15, her wrists scoured by the battery leads that had been used to bind her and her body cut and scratched by the thorns and branches of the scrub that hid her from a man intent on murder.

Her partner, 28-year-old Peter Falconio, is still missing, presumed killed, perhaps - and perhaps not - by Bradley Murdoch, a 44-year-old mechanic from the exotic pearling and tourism town of Broome, on the far north coast of Western Australia.

Murdoch, in custody in Adelaide on unrelated charges of the abduction and rape of two women, is at present asking the South Australian Supreme Court to refuse Northern Territory police permission to check his DNA against blood found on the clothing of Lees after the Barrow Creek attack.

Murdoch is now the prime suspect in Falconio's presumed murder. His name joins a growing list of criminal cases which in the world's eyes are turning the Outback into a desert road map of abduction, killing and tragedy.

To the north of Barrow Creek, the Stuart Highway zips through Tennant Creek, where reclusive former All Black Keith Murdoch (no relation of Bradley Murdoch) was the focus of investigations into the mysterious death of a local petty thief.

Recently cleared by police, Murdoch had been implicated because of an altercation with Kumanjayi Limerick before Limerick's body was found at the bottom of the abandoned Nobles Nob mine, named for one-eyed Jack Noble and blind William Weaber, who found what was the world's richest open-cast gold mine.

Limerick's death remains a mystery.

Hundreds of kilometres north again, the Stuart Highway passes through Adelaide River, where the dead from the Japanese attack on Darwin are buried, and sprouts a branch that leads to Litchfield National Park and the old uranium mine at Rum Jungle.

Three weeks ago at Litchfield Park a pot-bellied gunman forced 50-year-old Nuremburg psychologist Eva Obermeyer and her 16-year-old daughter Sarah into the bush, robbed them of a petty amount of money and left them bound to a tree.

Again, with Falconio's disappearance as a spur, foreign journalists tracked the hunt for the man named as a key suspect: Matt Page, a reportedly depressed and potentially suicidal hospitality teacher from north Queensland.

Page, with a four-wheel-drive load of tourists held at gunpoint, was captured at a roadblock in Arnhem Land, the vast sandstone expanse of Aboriginal land, sprawling beyond Kakadu National Park to the Arafura Sea in the north to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the east.

He appeared briefly in court yesterday on 14 charges, including aggravated assault, deprivation of liberty, armed robbery and assault.

At the mid-point of the Stuart Highway lies Alice Springs and, nearby, the evocative granite mass of Uluru, sacred to the Aborigines and, as Ayers Rock, a global trademark for Australia.

Here, on August 17, 1980, the greatest modern Outback mystery began when baby Azaria Chamberlain vanished from her tent, leading to the conviction and later pardon of her New Zealand-born parents, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, on murder and accessory charges.

To the far west, Heytesbury Holdings, owner of a huge pastoral holding on the verges of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia's Kimberley region, has agreed to settle in legal action from yet another Outback drama.

In 1986, two inexperienced city teenagers, James Annetts, 16, and Simon Amos, 17, were hired as jackaroos on Flora Valley Station and sent, unsupervised, to tend the desert fringes from an isolated outstation.

In the baking heat of December the two boys, for reasons unknown, drove into the wilderness in a ute, became bogged, and tried to walk for help.

A despairing Amos was later to shoot himself; Annetts walked on before collapsing, writing a farewell note to his parents, and expiring.

You could barely look for worse publicity in Australia's first-ever Year of the Outback - a struggling bid to pull visitors inland and away from the over-loved national icons - and when tourism is struggling in a post-September 11 hole.

Instead of a glowing air of welcome, all the evil legends and myths of the red interior are being pulled back to the surface and repeated around the world by a media fascinated by crimes which, if committed anywhere else, would barely rate a mention.

Bradley Murdoch's possible involvement in Falconio's disappearance, for example, has hauled him from obscurity to national and international attention; his alleged abduction and rape of a mother and daughter over three days elsewhere is mentioned in passing. When the Falconio-Lees story broke, immediate, still unsubstantiated lines were drawn between that case and three other disappearances in the Northern Territory, none of which has been confirmed as a crime but which still rate "serial killer feared" headlines.

Page's alleged abduction of the two German tourists, disturbing as it was, would have been downpage news in major dailies - if at all - had it been committed in Sydney or Melbourne, where much more serious crimes merit far less attention.

The truth is that the Outback, for most of us, is a fairly safe place to be, crocodiles, heat exhaustion and other normally attendant hazards of desert and tropics excepted.

A Northern Territory murder rate roughly three times the national average - and the nation's highest rates of assault, sexual assault and burglary - paint a misleading picture.

The prevalence of these crimes is a product of the national tragedy of Aboriginal disadvantage: 80 per cent of the victims are Aboriginal - overwhelmingly men - and roughly 80 per cent of both killers and victims knew each other, and were drunk. Similar statistics surround the rates of assault and burglary.

And while baby Azaria, Falconio and now the Obermeyers portray the Outback as a vast land of fatal mystery, the Territory has the nation's second-lowest rates of abduction and missing persons.

The remote north and interior of Australia has fallen victim to its own mystique.

Until the final two decades of the 20th century, the Outback was home to a two-fisted, pioneering mythology of Australian virility that is still assumed by an overwhelmingly urban population that has scant knowledge - and even less understanding - of the vast heart of the continent.

It is a strange and alien land, where legend and reality blend in stories everyone loves to believe.

The fiercest and most enduring battles between Aborigines and Europeans were fought through the west and across the north: as late as 1928 blood continued to be spilt, with the killing of 32 Aborigines in retaliation for the deaths of two pastoral workers.

Last week, Governor-General Peter Hollingworth returned land at Barrow Creek to its traditional owners, and apologised for an earlier tragedy - the massacre of a large, but unknown, number of Aborigines as revenge for the killing of two Europeans at the Telegraph Station.

This is the land that gave Australia some of its most epic adventures: John McDougall Stuart's three attempts to cross the continent from south to north, and the fatally doomed trek north from Melbourne in 1860 of Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills.

In 1929, the great Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith vanished with his crew on a flight from Richmond, near Sydney, to Wyndham in the far north of Western Australia. In the search that followed, Kingsford Smith's party was rescued after nearly starving to death; two of his arch rivals involved in the search crash-landed and died in the desert north of Alice Springs.

And Australians are still searching for their own fabulous El Dorado - the immensely rich, 11km-long reef of gold reputedly discovered by Harold Bell Lasseter in 1897 somewhere along the Western Australia-Northern Territory border.

Lasseter barely survived his initial discovery, and later died in a cave waiting to be rescued from his unsuccessful bid to rediscover his reef.

Of such legends, myths and real history is the Outback made.

It remains an almost magical place for Australians, where almost anything can happen, and frequently does.

Their fascination is shared by a media easily caught by the romance of a vastness of desert and rainforest, crocodiles and camels, brawling Outback pubs and hard-riding jackaroos, Aborigines and a culture of immeasurable antiquity.

But the price of this is the reverse image: a big, harsh land where crime gains a mystique and magnitude to match myth and expectation.