AN AUSTRALIAN MURDER

Australia is a wonderful country, especially for murders. I believe a good murder unites the people of this vast, sparsely populated country more than any sport. They had a good one last year. A young English woman claimed that when she was travelling in the outback (in the outback you’re lucky to meet another human being within a 500 mile radius) with her boy friend they were stopped by a lone man. He tied her up; she wriggled free, ran and hid in the bush. Her boy friend vanished, along with the man. Cops, with aborigine trackers and tracker dogs, scoured the area. They found no trace of the boy friend, the man or even her footprints in the bush. The mystery remains and most people cynically don’t believe her tale. Another famous ‘murder’ that became a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep was the Dingo/baby case. I’m sure you’ve heard of that one.

I arrived in Melbourne on a fine autumnal day, prepared for a good murder. In Australia, autumn is May, winter July, and this can sometimes confuse visitors down under. Even the sun keeps its distance, moving at a slanted angle across the sky so that it’s never directly overhead. You always throw an angled shadow.

Melbourne lies against an inlet bay facing the Bass Strait, and beyond the Strait lurks the icy Antarctic Ocean. The city curves around the shores of the bay with some lovely stretches of white sand. However inviting the sea and sand, I do not intend to dip a toe in the water. These waters have jellyfish the size of your small fingernail and one touch from them means an instant and agonising death. A British tourist had died the day before I’d arrived, admittedly up in Queensland but one never knows. He was the second fatality from these almost invisible specks of protoplasm drifting with the current. The day after I arrived a shark bit off the leg of a swimmer and a few days later another shark was caught. When they cut it open, they found human remains, a skull and a femur. This ‘murder’ was solved a few days later. A Vietnamese man had disappeared fishing off the pier and DNA proved it was him in the shark’s belly. Admittedly, I have scuba dived off Cairns, and luckily jellyfish and sharks avoided me. I’ll think twice about another scuba dive.

Melbourne’s weather can be mercurial. On some days at uncertain hours, you could be walking along St Kilda’s Road in warmth and within one step an icy wind from the Antarctic can rip through your T-shirt, nearly freezing your blood. It helps you understand that why sometimes a little craziness enters the Melbournite’s life.

Or maybe this murder, which is to happen in a few days of my arrival, is due to the changing patterns of the city. On my first visit, many years ago, Melbourne was a city of decorum. It was a low-key town with few pretensions, reminding me of an English sea side town like Brighton or Scarborough. The tallest building on the skyline was about four floors and quaint trams rattled along tree shaded roads, sharing the space with a few motor cars. The people were very British in their manner, tea was had frequently and the evening meal was called tea, not dinner. Multiculturalism was a term waiting invention.

Today from a distance, you can see the Melbourne skyline of high towers, its become a muscular, glittering testosteronic city, not yet a Manhattan but with longings towards that island. Like a Manhattan its a city in constant re-invention now, high towers springing up around the centre and along the docks. It now has a population of 3.5 millions and is the most popular destination for business, immigrants and other Australians. Its not only gone up but now sprawls like a Los Angeles. From a southern suburb to a northern suburb, it now takes an hour and a half along sweeping freeways, and I’m not talking any traffic jams. Melbournites have become an impatient people which is why they have built these fat ribbons of concrete that run, curl, soar, around the city. If they have to wait for a traffic light to change twice, they consider it a major traffic jam. With such a bounty and the vast landscape, its no wonder that Australia has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world. Wandering around southern Victoria, I always saw the mangled remains of car like a freshly killed carcass by the roadside. There are speed limits (100 km/hr max) and heavy fines and video cameras but Australians persistently kill themselves on their beautiful roads. Road rage: in a very quiet suburb one evening two cars approach a roundabout with absolutely no traffic anywhere else in sight. One car doesn’t give way and the next thing I know both drivers are out of their cars fighting on the roundabout.

With such bounty has come that American avarice. The city feels American, that old English-ness is vanishing. It’s multi-cultural too with Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Bosnians, Serbs, Poles, changing the moods of the city and the tempo. In the Crown Casino, an air terminal look alike, Chinese gamblers crowd the tables, losing (and presumably making) fortunes on the turn of a card. Melbourne is filling with tycoons, moguls, magnates, billionaires and mere millionaires. In the last quarter, Australians spent one billion dollars more than the previous quarter. The newspapers, The Age and The Sun, keep a daily score card of rising property prices, on their front pages. The jumps are not in tens but hundred thousands, a million dollars will buy you a pad in a distant suburb today. It’s IT money, biotech money, construction money, mining money, sheep and cow money. (Even a pretty seaside village like Port Fairy on the Victoria East Coast, miles from Melbourne, has its own boom, with a small waterfront house going for $800,000.) Melbourne, with such vast amounts of money sloshing around, has the palpable feel of greed in the air. Its youth are now more driven, they talk about money, property prices, fast cars and expensive restaurants more often and with more intent too.

What I admire about the Australians is that despite such bloated prices, they do preserve their heritage. Even in Melbourne’s high priced districts like St Kilda or South Yarra the houses remain small, neat with that same look of wrought iron. It gives the city a continuity of style They don’t have a medieval or ancient past, a century is old, but the main streets in every town and village I passed through had preserved their buildings of wrought iron balconies, wood walls, covered sidewalks. Ballarat, an old mining town, has preserved its main street pretty as a picture postcard of the past. And yet you can buy your Gucci’s and your denims behind these preserved facades. Every town and village has a tourist information booth, happy to burden you with what-to-see-do brochures. While driving through a small village in dairy country, near the coast, I passed a Milkshake Museum and wanted to check it out. Unfortunately, it was closed for lunch but for the next hour on the drive, I tried to imagine what such a museum would exhibit. How many different shapes and sizes of milkshakes are there? This distraction didn’t last too long as we swept along the magnificent coastline. The sea, below high cliffs, is relentlessly eroding the shore. A popular site is the Twelve Apostles. The sea, over a millennium, has cut these massive rock pillars away from the mainland. They stand twenty to thirty feet off the shore as boundary markers of where Australia once ended.

My wait for a good murder also ended. I knew that Australia wouldn’t fail me. The ‘Society’ murders hit the front pages and TV News screens a week after I arrived. It began as a ‘Missing Person’ report. The children of an elderly couple, The Kings, reported them missing to the police. The Kings, in their 70s, weren’t exactly ‘Society’. They played Bridge (which could mean high society in Australia for all I knew), but they were wealthy, in a middle class way. She was the multi-millionaire daughter of a trucking magnate (that word again), and Mr King was her second husband. Two days back they’d had dinner at the Glen Iris house of their son Mark and his Spanish wife. They had left at around 9.30 p.m., and had never reached their home. The newspapers and television were just panting for such a story and went to town. There were photographs of the missing couple, their four children along with spouses, grandkids, the dog, the car. The police launched a search and nearly every Victorian reported to have seen them shopping, staying in a motel, walking arm-in-arm down a high street. Theories flew in all directions - they’d skipped the country, they’d been kidnapped, they’d committed suicide (Mr King was an invalid). Then their $150,000 Mercedes was found parked by a building site two days later. It had been there since the night of their disappearance.

Ten days went by and it looked as if this would become another Australian mystery. And then, chance, good luck or bad luck, depending on who you were, two forest rangers stumbled on what they thought was a Lyrebird’s nest in a park reserve outside Melbourne. Lyrebirds make their nest in the earth and the nest was in the bush, a few yards away from a walking track.

Australians love walking in their reserves. Victorian jungles are mostly dense scrubs, Lantana, lemon grass, with stands of gum trees (eucalyptus). I spent a couple of days at Wilson’s Promontory in east Victoria, the most southern tip of the Australian mainland, a 1000 hectares of reserve with walking tracks. Wilson’s Prom has 400,000 visitors annually but you won’t find even a stray coke bottle or a wrapper anywhere. Most of the wild life here is Kangaroo, Wombat, Emu and parrots. I walked a few of the winding tracks, including climbing Mount Oberlon (breathing hard) to catch a stunning view of the coastline and sea. There’s a beach here called Squeaky Beach, as the sand is so fine and clean that it squeaks as you walk across it. On every walking track there were stern notices not to leave them, as there was every chance you’d be lost, forever. The notices also stated that if you strayed and were lost and they had to bring in search and rescue helicopters, you’d have to pay for the whole operation, pay a fine and spend a few months in jail. I kept strictly to the broad paths snaking through the bush.

If was off one of these tracks that the rangers poked a stick into the Lyrebird’s nest and found two bodies. The Kings lay one on another, wrapped neatly in plastic. As the police remarked: ‘they could have lain there a thousand years without being found’. Before the police could put in a gag order, the press reported that Mrs King still wore a $100,000 bracelet and there were iron weights also lying in the grave. The newspapers theorised that the murderer(s) had planned to tie the weights to the bodies and dump them in a nearby lake. Unfortunately, the gate was locked so he/they had hastily buried the bodies in the shallow grave.

Melbournites had a wonderful time speculating on this whodunit. At every dinner or cocktails, they talked and dissected. I learned through gossip that Mrs King (Mr King was her second husband) ruled her family with a rod of iron and she controlled the purse strings to her fortune. A friend’s daughter had dated a King son and we learnt that the family was totally dysfunctional. Another son had major gambling debts. Strangely, little was written about Mr King. It was Mrs King who had the money, so she was given the closest attention. Even in death, the money mattered most. There was a grand funeral, well covered by the press, attended by the grieving children, relatives and friends. Two sisters were seen not to embrace one of the brother’s, Mark, but only shook hands with him formally as if he were a stranger. They ignored his foreign wife. The police were tightening their focus on the children, encircling them slowly in their noose. The family lawyer moved quickly to take over and run Mrs King’s multi-million dollar trust. The children called a conclave to discuss the crisis, the press was barred, much to their chagrin, and the children left with ‘no comments’.

Around the same times as the King murder, Melbourne’s favourite gangster was gunned down on a Port Melbourne street. Victor Pierce was shot four times as he sat in his car. He had been tried and acquitted for killing two cops a few years back. At first, it was thought the cops had killed him in revenge. His mother was the Godmother of Melbourne crime. She had been in and out of jail, and now vowed to take revenge for her son’s death. Thankfully, she exonerated the cops. Two of her other sons had also died violently. Mrs Pierce looked a real harridan but, despite her reputation (and another grand funeral), she failed to distract us or the press from the ‘Society’ murders.

I was asked for my opinion. I guessed it was Mark, the son, who had last seen his parents alive. The couple had been asphyxiated and there were no marks of a struggle on their bodies, according to the press. He had to have drugged them at the dinner and smothered them to death. I had my bets on him and as my departure date grew nearer, the police were still investigating. But now the investigation was concentrated around Mark’s home. They came with spades, picks and other paraphernalia, and even opened the manholes outside his house. A nearby garage belatedly reported that he’d hired a trailer the day after that fateful dinner with his parents. A neighbour reported that the morning after the dinner, he’d been hosing and washing his garage, something he’d never been seen doing before.

On the weekend before I left, Mark was arrested for the murders and his wife was arrested as an accessory after the fact. The greater tragedy was that Mrs King had outwitted her murderous son. In her will, she had stipulated that the children didn’t inherit any of her millions until they were forty. Mark was thirty-four. So, why did he murder them? Money, naturally. The trial begins in September and I’ll just have to follow it on the Internet.

Australia’s a beautiful country, and always lays on a good murder for entertainment.