Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Five

Examining the verifiable facts of the Tamam Shud case has, so far, only uncovered further layers of impenetrable – not to mention downright bizarre – mystery. At this point I am tempted to shrug dismissively and say, ‘That’s Adelaide’. However, for those who only know Adelaide from the outside, as a city of culture or a glorified country town, I need to explain what I mean by that. And for the insiders, I need to begin by establishing my own Adelaide credentials.

I used to come into Adelaide tired and dirty and, for the moment, cashed-up. I worked as a grape picker, which was good money, much better than a factory, and kept you out in the open air (along with the mosquitos, sandflies, snakes and other pests). I used to take the train from Melbourne and get picked up by the winery’s furniture van at Central Station, all clean and eager. They would cart the gang of us out to sleep in a shearing shed and cut grapes all day, every day.

It was monotonous work but not heavy and, after a while, soothing. Grape pickers don’t have to carry the grapes on their back but, rather, drop the cut cluster over their shoulders into a bag resting on the ground, which can be pulled along between the rows. I had tried other crops, apples and pears and soft fruits – you have to climb. Strawberries – you have to bend and crucify your back. Grapes – you don’t have to pull; you just clip the stem and the round, smooth, warm globes fall into your hand. I preferred the wine grapes, because it didn’t matter if they got slightly mangled, whereas every table grape had to be perfect. I could work faster on wine grapes.

I wore jeans, boots, gloves, a heavy flannelette shirt of my father’s and a straw hat – the last to general amusement. No one wore hats then. Thus protected from the weather, I motored along the row with my name on it, finding grapes where they hid themselves under the leaves, listening to the birds singing and the boss swearing and my fellow workers yelling tidbits of information across the rows. I had no partner. I was there for isolation and silence and, of course, money. I watched with great pleasure as they emptied my bag into the hopper, wrote down the weight and freed me to go back to the shed, take a cold shower, make myself some sort of dinner and sleep like a log.

I would do this for two weeks or as long as the vintage lasted. I spent nothing because there was nothing to spend anything on. I did develop a dislike for grapes and my clipping hand still aches a little at the memory. But it was all worth it when the van deposited me once more at Central Station and I went into the Railway Hotel for my one night of luxury. Near the station I purchased a pumice stone and soap. I always bought exotic scents; my favourite was called Rose de Gueldy. I also bought Pears shampoo for my hair, which was stiff with sweat and grime. I wouldn’t have let me into a respectable hotel but the Adelaide hotels were used to pickers. And in my pack I had night clothes, slippers, cosmetics and proper garments in which I would not mind being seen.

I would ascend to my room, lock the door, and run a huge bath, as hot as I could bear. Then I would peel off my frightful clothes and immerse myself, head and all, and start scrubbing. Sometimes I would have to drain and re-run the bath twice before I got back to my usual skin tone. Then I would wrap myself in hotel towels and lie down for a nap on my clean bed with sheets. Removing all that grime was exhausting. I felt as the sailors must have felt in The Weary Whaling Grounds as sung by Danny Spooner.

After that it was time to put on my clean clothes and sandals and wander out into Central Market to see what was available. I would have been eating bread and tinned soup, so now I was avid for real tastes, real fruits – except grapes – and above all, meat. Central Market was a good place for a carnivore in those days. There was a pub that served steaks so big that they overlapped the edges of the plate, the first chargrill I ever tasted.

I used to buy a steak and a glass of red wine and eat my way through that steak, nibbling and nibbling until I had absorbed it all. Every meaty morsel. Every proteinladen bite. Then I would stagger back to the hotel, have another bath out of sheer swank, and next morning eat the hotel breakfast and get on the train for Melbourne.

That used to be all I would see of Adelaide, although later, when I had friends in the town, I used to go there for fun, because I had made enough money folk singing and cleaning houses to tide me over the holidays. That first brief glimpse had told me Adelaide was a big, sleepy country town, not unpleasant or unfriendly. But my dad’s stories told me different. Adelaide, he said, had a dark underside. Children vanished there. Strange things happened. He always told me to be very careful in Adelaide.

The first thing a native of Adelaide tells you proudly is that Adelaide was built without convicts. All volunteers, free settlers, not like your grimy crime-ridden hovels. It’s named after a queen. (No sniggering there at the back, please). It’s clean, planned and bright, with Colonel Light on his pedestal in the middle, supervising the activities of the devout citizenry. It’s the City of Churches.

And yet. Colonel Light’s statue is not in the middle of the city – he’s at the top of it, in North Adelaide. The city has no heart. The reason why it is a city of churches is not that the citizenry is necessarily devout but that, historically, Adelaide was settled by large numbers of protestant sects, who would arrive, build a church, have a schism and then build another church down the road, within convenient sneering distance of the unenlightened original. It’s like the joke about the Welsh Robinson Crusoe, who is finally found and exhibits the town he has built out of bamboo to his rescuers. There is the town hall, the bakery, the fish shop and two chapels. ‘Why two chapels?’ asks the rescuer (obviously English or he wouldn’t need to ask). ‘That’s the one I don’t go to,’ says Taffy the Shipwrecked.

And so it was in Adelaide. There are the beautiful main churches and, in the back streets, there are the rusty tin sheds of the others. This, oddly enough, made it a progressive city. Protestant progressives of the time wanted to free the slaves and bring about peace on earth and good will to all men, even if they were female. Women in South Australia got the vote in 1894, including indigenous women, at a time when Aborigines were not counted in the census and did not have the vote anywhere else. South Australians also invented a very sensible system of land holdings called the Torrens System, which was adopted all over Australia and made life as an articled clerk bearable. (Old law title searches were murder and got parchment fragments all over your clothes. Until you’ve tried to get powdered vellum out of a white shirt you haven’t laundered.) Anything that has been tried out in Adelaide and accepted, from legislative changes to new salad dressings of a major fast-food chain, will be acceptable to the rest of the country. If it fails in Adelaide, it will fail in the rest of Australia.

Adelaide elected Don Dunstan, for God’s sake.

What a man! Others have spoken lovingly of his iconic pink shorts. His tendency to wear a Greek tunic while playing the piano. His easy familiarity with people who were not white and protestant, partly because of his birth in Fiji. His comfort with his own sexuality. His defeat and his death were tragic and heroic. Not to mention a few minor law reforms, like the appointment of Australians as governor, first Mark Oliphant and then Doug Nicholls, who was also the first indigenous governor; the first woman appointed to the supreme court, Roma Mitchell; the declaration of native title; the extension of shopping hours; and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Not to mention the creation of Rundle Mall, his encouragement of good food, arts, music and festivals and Don Dunstan’s Cookbook, which contains an excellent chicken curry. My partner David is related to Adelaidian Dunstans, and desperately hopes that he might be close kin to the fabled and fabulous Don.

Picture the scene. I am sitting on a purple towel on Glenelg Beach with my transvestite friend Vic, who is being a lady today, hence the purple towel and the fetching lilac dress with frills. I am wearing jeans and a T-shirt as usual. We have a bottle of red wine, of which Vic is drinking the most because, as she said, ‘If the prophet who declared that Adelaide is about to be wiped out by a tsunami this afternoon spoke the truth, I want to get in a few last drinks before someone calls “Time”.’ The prophet had told us that God would wipe out Adelaide because it was a wicked city, similar to Sodom or possibly Gomorrah, and it would all be our fault for our sinful ways.

Although I never met anyone who actually said they believed him, people were nervous. Some of the Hindley Street shops had clearance sales in the middle of summer and some people were said to have sold their goods and fled to the hills to watch the sea take the city from a safe vantage point. In Adelaide it is always difficult to sort out the irony from the anxiety. But still.

So, on 20 January 1976, Vic and I were getting progressively oiled and not a little sunburnt as we waited for the end. There were lots of people there with us. They too were having picnics (though because Vic was on one of her all-alcohol diets, we had forgotten about food) and time ticked on. I was explaining to Vic that apocalypse was a Greek word that just meant revelation, not disaster, when the time for the tidal wave arrived.

There was a stir at the back of the crowd. Pacing down through the groups of people came (I swear) Don Dunstan in a safari suit, riding on a camel – a good choice because it sneered all opposition out of its way, as camels do. You always know that they are calculating exactly where a half-kilo of semi-digested grass will do the most harm. The Premier had come to join his people at this moment of danger. If Adelaide was going to be hit by a great wave, it would have to get past Dunstan first.

It was the only time I ever saw him. He was slight but had such a commanding presence. He got down off his camel and stood with his arms outstretched, facing the sea. Surely he must have been just a little apprehensive? I was. The crowd was silent. We watched him. He watched the ocean. Even the camel stopped bitching, caught by the moment. I remembered Cuchulainn the Irish hero, cursed and fighting the sea.

Then the moment passed and Dunstan shook hands all round, got back on his camel and rode away. I grabbed the bottle from Vic and drained it in a toast.

What a wonderful man.

Speaking of the day when Dunstan defied the ocean and God’s vengeance on unrighteous wretches (that is, us), Adelaide has the highest number of atheists in Australia. It had no convicts and fewer Irish (and therefore fewer Catholics) than the rest of Australia’s state capitals, which meant that its servant class was free and probably quite stroppy. It was a capitalist venture that went broke and had to be bailed out by Her Majesty’s Government in the 1840s. It has only one tram route. It is a green and watered park in the middle of some very desolate deserts. There is no good reason for it to be where it is.

And it has the oddest crimes. No one from Adelaide can understand our fascination with Adelaide crime. They point out, rather stiffly, that their crime rate is lower than other cities, which is true. I am not saying that there is more crime in Adelaide. Just that it is odder.

It has been suggested that Adelaide works on a massive form of the Old Boys’ network. If you are alone in Adelaide, it feels uncaring and you will be isolated and lost. But if you know one person, they will introduce you into a network of other people and life will suddenly become vibrant and exciting and full of friends. It’s a series of cliques but they are big cliques, containing between two thousand and ten thousand people. You can know everyone in your chosen clique. This is the source of the ‘Adelaide Effect’ which means that any two Adelaide people encountering each other in, as it might be, Ulan Bator will find at least one acquaintance in common. Apparently it’s a hard and fast rule.

And so it is in regard to crime. Everyone has serial killers but only Adelaide had Snowtown, where the killers (plural, which is very unusual) stored the bodies in barrels in a disused bank. Everyone has homophobic attacks on passing homosexuals but only in Adelaide are the attackers the police and the assaulted (and, in fact, drowned) a university lecturer, Dr George Duncan. Everyone has cults but only Adelaide had The Family.

The Family murders were, as the Americans would put it, particularly heinous. A series of young men and boys – Alan Barnes, Neil Munro, Mark Langley, Peter Stogneff, Richard Kelvin – were raped and mutilated and murdered and thrown away like rubbish. They had all been dosed with knock-out drops, including mandrax, a restricted substance, which led the police to one Bevan Spencer Von Einem, who lived with his mother in a nice middle-class house in a nice middle-class suburb. Called Paradise.

Von Einem’s method was simple. The boys were enticed to begin with, plied with alcohol and promises of parties and girls. They were doped with a mixture of alcohol and rohypnol (now called ‘the date rape drug’), mandrax, valium and chloral hydrate marketed as Noctec, the original ‘Micky Finn’, and then ravished away to be held captive for the monsters’ amusement. I say ‘monsters’ in the plural because more than one person was definitely involved in their torture. Not all of the boys picked up by Von Einem were murdered. He never explained why some were released and some were killed. He showed no remorse. He admitted no guilt. And he never revealed who else was involved, so the stories about a high-level homosexual rape club were given free rein.

It might have been true. This was Adelaide, after all, home of the seriously weird crime. Think of Derrence Stevenson, who was murdered by his young male lover and stuffed into a freezer. The murderer superglued the lid and took off for Coober Pedy, presumably for the opal mining. You have to admit that that was unusual.

Everyone has road murderers, riders on the storm, but only Adelaide had Christopher Worrell, who took his homosexual mate Miller along with him when he killed hitchhiking girls on the road to Truro. He then had the bad taste to die before he could be tried. Miller wrote a nauseating little self-justification, Don’t Call Me Killer, explaining that he loved Chris dearly, was only along for the ride and never murdered anyone. Meanwhile, the most heart-wrenching book about any murder, It’s a Long Way to Truro, was written by Anne-Marie Mykyta, whose daughter Julie was one of Worrell’s victims.

Children vanish in Adelaide, too, most famously the three Beaumont children, who disappeared from Glenelg Beach. The wanted man – a thin harmless-looking creature, whose identikit picture was nicknamed Fred Nurk by the irreverent – was never found. Neither were the Beaumont children. Seven years later, Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon went missing, presumed murdered, from the Adelaide Oval. The task of taking a smaller sibling to the toilet was one I often undertook. Now, suddenly, it was dangerous.

The worst abduction – though they are all the worst, really – was of Louise Bell in 1982. A stranger came in through her window, picked her up and carried her away through the front door, never to be seen again. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time. No one in Adelaide felt safe anymore.

Yet it is a safe city. I am acquainted with perilous cities. South London. Les banlieues in Paris. My own bit of Melbourne in its time. Such places require care, preparation and luck to get through unmolested. Don’t carry a bag in your hand. Don’t wear good clothes or look too rich. Don’t carry a camera. Look straight ahead. Walk briskly, but not too fast or too slow. Never stop to consult a map. Do not ask for directions. And if you encounter the natives, melt spiritually into the streetscape and never, never meet their eyes. Aim to pass through with a ‘don’t notice me – nothing to see here’ field all around you. Act, in fact, like a scout in enemy territory.

Adelaide is not like that. One can walk around Adelaide in the middle of the night, as I and, indeed, my dad frequently did, and find no trouble if you aren’t looking for it. (He was. I wasn’t.) The only danger I ever felt was when threatened with the prospect of a pie floater from the pie cart. A pie floater is a dish of green pea soup with a meat pie floating in it, topped with tomato sauce. It looks decorative, like an Italian flag or a Margarita pizza, and it probably tastes wonderful if you are drunk and hungry enough. Fortunately, you can also get the pie without the pea soup.

The pie floater is an Adelaide invention, as are frog cakes, which my father loved, though he usually didn’t eat cake. Frog cakes are a form of petit four, made of cake, cream and green icing, in the shape of a frog with chocolate buttons for eyes. These days they are apparently made in strawberry and chocolate as well but in my time they were green icing or nothing. They have recently been awarded ‘icon’ status.

So that’s Adelaide. Justice, votes for women, the most sensitive skin in Australia and terrible drinking water. (Every time I arrive there I always forget that and brush my teeth with what tastes like industrial effluent.) Frog cakes, pie floaters and the Torrens system. The Family, Bevan Spencer Von Einem, slaughtered boys and a suburb called Paradise.

Strange.

There is an excellent book about The Family murders, written by Bob O’Brien, one of the detectives in the case, who puzzles over what it is about Adelaide that makes it produce such bizarre crimes. He is unable to shed any light on the matter but if we return to the idea of cliques, we may have an answer or, at least, the beginning of an answer. If you operate in groups all the time, then if your particular group becomes corrupted, you are all corrupted. That is what happened with The Family and in Snowtown. Even Worrell and Miller were a clique of two. One psychopath is bad but when there are two psychopaths or more, the effect is not so much additional as exponential. That’s why, when Adelaide is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid.

That’s the closest I can come to a theory. Adelaide is such a straight up and down city that there is no room for any deviation, so when deviation comes, it breaks all the rules. My home city, Melbourne, is also as straight as it comes. A grid system made by Mr Hoddle, with big streets in which one can turn a coach and four and little streets, to keep the service vehicles off the boulevards. Tree lined. Decorative. And, like the old Roman roads, it could have been ruled with a spear shaft. Parliament at the top, Spencer Street Station at the bottom. Square. But somehow Melbourne, in its angularity, allows eccentricity in the lanes and squares and strange little shops and markets. The most attractive Melbourne streetscape is an arcade. And the town hall is in the middle of the city, not at the top like Adelaide.

The Torrens River breaks Adelaide into two unequal parts and that is not good for a city. It means that sometimes the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing. Which would, come to think of it, make Adelaide an admirable place for a nest of spies. (If that is the collective noun. A conspiracy, perhaps?) In true Adelaidian fashion, no outsider would ever know. But everyone inside the clique would…