The Crow Eaters Read online

  Inside the ring a man with cauliflower ears and a flattened nose dances around the canvas, feinting, circling and attacking an invisible opponent. He stops and says hello, taking the time to shake my hand despite the fact that I’m a stranger to his gym and I’m interrupting his session. Antonio Caruso is from Elizabeth and he now helps run the gym. He has dabbled in MMA, jiujitsu and boxing, and was on the undercard of the Anthony Mundine v Danny Green fight at Adelaide Oval in 2017. I ask what they do here now and Antonio tells me, ‘We help kids off the street, lots of people. We help get a lot of people to channel their aggression.’

  He takes me over to meet the head trainer, Don McKay, a big, bald brawler who has been part of the boxing club here since 1971. Don looks like the sort of man who has seen the end of a few fists in his day. He has big fingernail-moon scars across his nose and eyebrow, and tattoos running down his arms. Don’s family moved to Australia, and Elizabeth, from Scotland in the 1950s, as with many ‘ten-pound Poms’ – those who only had to pay a nominal fee to migrate to Australia in those days. Don’s family has lived in Elizabeth ever since. He shows me the line in the bricks on the wall, roughly halfway along, where the gym was extended a while back. The gym used to only be slightly larger than the ring, though the assistance of the community, including the council, has helped them maintain their presence in Elizabeth. Don is happy that they help out lots of young people here and that they’ve maintained their values of toughness and discipline without needing to resort to alcohol or gambling to subsidise what they do. Despite this, Don says he still does pine for ‘the good old days’.

  ‘I was a security guard from 1980 until 2004, when pubs were pubs here,’ he says with a gruff laugh. ‘I was shot at three times,’ he adds. ‘We do MMA and jiujitsu here as well now. But this is Elizabeth. People still want the boxing. MMA is more like street fighting, though the only thing you can’t do is head butt,’ he says wistfully. ‘That was my favourite move back in the day,’ Don says of his biker-bouncer days.

  It would be understandable for a writer not to be welcomed in, out of the blue, to a place like this, though Don is pleased for me to see the gym and he talks and walks with me as his protégés skip and then drop at intervals to do sit-ups and push-ups at his command. ‘Come on, on your toes,’ he says to one young woman, a local schoolteacher, who starts shadow boxing. There are young Aboriginal men holding pads, while Afghani and Congolese men practise next to a young red-haired man and a woman with white plaits ducking and weaving with their sparring partners. ‘We’ve got people who come here from all over Adelaide,’ Don says, confirming the esteem in which they’re held here. Many notable boxers have learned their trade on the bags here: ‘Mark Dalby, David Ross, and Denis Hill was the 2000 Olympic boxing coach,’ he says.

  Don doesn’t shy away from the complications that come from being in Elizabeth either: ‘We’ve had lots of champions, though some of them are now in gaol and some are on Christmas Island,’ he says, picking up two foam bats to help a woman who is struggling to combine her jab and hook together. Mostyn Niemann, the former Australian amateur heavyweight champion, trained here until he was gaoled for involvement in the 2013 attack on a Finks Club biker at the Salisbury headquarters.

  I take a spot on the side of the ring as Antonio and his older brother Diego put on their gloves, headgear and groin protectors. Diego used to be a lawyer and has been coming to the gym here for eight years, and he persists, even though he now lives in Richmond. ‘I love it here. I love seeing the young kids come up,’ he says of their community.

  Diego and Antonio wait for the bell to chime and they start stalking and circling each other in mock battle. Diego lands a jab on his brother before Antonio unloads with a combination to the body and then the head. Even though they’re in their 20s and 30s, it’s a lasting image for me: two brothers competing, smiling at each other in the ring – like I did when I chased my brother around the shed with a ping-pong paddle on a nearly daily basis 25 years ago, and like my own sons do now as they battle over Lego pieces and PAW Patrol toys.

  I leave the brothers to their fight and say goodbye to Don as he strolls through the gym watching his boxers. There is a sign on the wall I notice as I leave: ‘This is your club, be proud of it, don’t abuse it.’ In a place with so many visible problems like Elizabeth, the respect and discipline learned in the gym is significant.

  I drive back the way I came, down Main North Road. Ahead in the distance I see the blue and red flash of a police car’s lights, reminding me that while I have seen lots of hope and a side to this satellite city I didn’t expect, there is still a lot of it I will never understand.

  Just like the juxtaposition of the food co-op and the abandoned house showed me earlier though, I suppose the Elizabeth you see, if you visit, really depends on how closely you look.

  CHAPTER 14

  ADELAIDE

  Although Thistle Anderson may have publicly lamented living in Adelaide in the early 20th century when she called it a place of bad wine, inbreeding and dim citizens, there have been other writers who have captured a more hopeful tone in the city over the past 50 years. While these writers often focus on the story since 1836 and the arrival of the white settlers in South Australia, there are more recent, personal accounts that take us on subjective and nuanced voyages through the city, like Mark Peel’s Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and the Future in Elizabeth (1995), Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Adelaide (2011) and even Carol Lefevre’s Quiet City (2016).

  My aim within Adelaide is to explore some of its most interesting and important places, though also to examine those stories and layers which may not have received as much attention when people have thought or written about Adelaide in the past. I am an outsider here. Unlike the authors above, I didn’t grow up in South Australia, so my impressions are different, as is my history. Though, just like the distance a good travel writer can provide to a reader – such as William Dalrymple in India, Pico Iyer in Nepal or Ted Conover in Mexico – I hope that the freshness with which I see the city also allows me a different view.

  Despite my goal of looking at things a little differently, I think there are many stories that are part of the fabric of the city and that can’t be ignored completely. The first is the claim that Adelaide is somehow purer than its eastern neighbours because of its convict-free establishment. In fact, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Robert Gouger, the two main founders of South Australia, both spent time in prison – Wakefield for the abduction of a teenage heiress and Gouger for his debt to a printer while promoting his South Australian cause – thus muddying this early assertion of Adelaide’s supposed purity right from the beginning.

  The other narrative that often envelops Adelaide like a storm front rushing up from the Great Australian Bight is the dark history of the city. Since the 1960s, it has had a reputation from the outside as the ‘murder capital of Australia’, mainly because of a series of bizarre and grisly deaths, disappearances and murders in the city. On the ABC in 2017, Salman Rushdie called Adelaide ‘the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film … Adelaide is Amityville or Salem, and things here go bump in the night’, though this seems like the assertion of someone looking for a reaction, not one from within. Adelaide gets bad-mouthed even though the murder rate is lower than most capitals, much lower than the Northern Territory, in fact. All of Australia’s major cities have experienced gruesome crimes over the years. Brisbane had the so-called ‘vampire killers’, Melbourne the gangland executions, and Tasmania the Port Arthur shootings. Sydney has had everything from the ‘granny killer’ to the backpacker murders, Perth the Moorhouse murders and the missing women of Claremont, and even Canberra has witnessed some shocking crimes, yet somehow the salacious media reporting on Adelaide as the ‘murder capital’ has stuck. An ABC story from 2017 cited South Australia’s murder rate as 0.9 per 100 000 people – well below the average. Caracas in Venezuela is currently at 111 per 100 000 and St Louis in the United States is at 65, as comparisons.
r />   I drive up from the southern beaches, tracing my way north on a quiet weekday morning. I want to look, just briefly, into the history of death and murder that has proved hard to get rid of here because of the strange manner in which many of the crimes took place. Over the previous few months I’d spoken to many locals – neighbours, former police officers and journalists – about the crimes which have defined the stereotype of Adelaide being the ‘murder capital’ of Australia. While the label is not deserved when compared to Australia as a whole, there are those occurrences that still linger beneath the city.

  These include the 1973 disappearance of four-year-old Kirste Gordon and 11-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe at Adelaide Oval during an Australian Rules game between city rivals Norwood and North Adelaide. Joanne took Kirste off to the toilet during the third quarter. There were many reports of a man being seen with the girls, and many conspiracy theories about what happened, though they were never seen again, and no-one has ever been charged.

  The other murders which have garnered Adelaide its reputation include the horrible and sadistic ‘Family’ murders of five young men in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bevan Spencer von Einem was eventually charged with one of the murders and, while he was suspected of committing them all, he was never sentenced for them due to the lack of evidence available. Many people, including local author Stephen Orr, wonder at the possibility of von Einem being responsible for many of Adelaide’s heinous crimes over the years: the Family murders, the Adelaide Oval disappearance, and the disappearance of the Beaumont children, even if ‘the evidence suggests otherwise’, as Orr writes.

  On my coastal drive, I pull in out the front of the salt-scoured beach houses at Somerton Beach. The ring of houses around the ocean-side boulevard seems neat and strangely quiet. My reason for coming to Somerton Beach now is because of the renewed attention on a 70-year-old unsolved death.

  A colleague of mine, Carolyn Bilsborow, recently wrote and directed a documentary titled Missing Pieces: The Curious Case of the Somerton Man, about the city’s most infamous cold case. In 1948, a well-dressed man was found dead on the seawall of Somerton Beach, with no obvious cause of death, no wallet or labels on his clothes and only a train ticket, a bus ticket, two combs, some chewing gum and a packet of cigarettes in his possession. He was believed to have taken a quickly dissipating poison, though it was never identified. Police later discovered luggage believed to be his at the Adelaide Railway Station and a mysterious piece of paper was found stuffed in his fob pocket – with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ printed on it. This phrase was torn from the last words of the 11th century book The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam written in Persian, and it means ‘The End’. The book it was taken from was subsequently found tossed in the back of a car a few streets from the beach and it was traced back to a local nurse, Jo Thompson. A scribbled collection of letters was also found written on the back cover of the book – a code that even navy code-breakers haven’t been able to decipher to this day.

  Theories and investigations have continued on for most of the past seven decades – with the latest, and most probable theory to discover the Somerton Man’s identity stemming from the idea that the local nurse, Jo Thompson, had a relationship with the man found on the beach and they had a child together. In order to discover if this theory is true, DNA is needed from the Somerton Man and an exhumation order is still ongoing at the West Terrace Cemetery. In one curious twist, one of the key researchers, Dr Derek Abbott, met and married Rachel Egan, the woman believed to be the Somerton Man’s granddaughter.

  Seventy years after the body was discovered, I spoke to Dr Abbott in Adelaide about what keeps him intrigued about the case. ‘The famous mathematician Paul Erdos once said that you can tell when a mathematics problem is a good one because it fights back at you. The Somerton Man mystery is so rich with twists, turns, potholes, and disappointments that it never ceases to fight back and elude a solution. But at the same time identifying this man is definitely something we can solve. I believe it is within reach due to advances in technology.’ In what is surely one of the most bizarre enduring mysteries in Australia, Dr Abbott believes that they’ll be given the exhumation order soon and it may help give a name, and some closure, to whoever his family may be.

  What strikes me after I speak to Dr Abbott is that Somerton Park is not an outwardly sinister-looking beachside suburb at all, though it is possibly the only place in Adelaide which lives up to its dark history reputation – even if it’s nearly impossible to feel this on a quiet and sunny weekday.

  Only 18 years after the man on the beach was found in 1948, the Beaumont family was living a normal suburban life a few blocks back from Somerton Beach on Harding Street. In an era that was about ‘street cricket, tree-climbing, the races on someone’s tranny, dads coming home pissed at ten past six, domestics on the lawn at 2 am, neighbours combining limited handy-man skills to build sheds, and mums sharing Liptons’, as Stephen Orr writes, it came as an enormous jolt to the entire city when, on 26 January 1966, four-year-old Grant, seven-year-old Arnna and nine-year-old Jane Beaumont caught the bus to Glenelg Beach on a hot summer morning. When they hadn’t returned to the bus stop at midday as their mother, Nancy, expected, she waited until the 2 pm bus, though they weren’t on it either. Nancy and her husband, Jim, scoured the beach and the surrounding roads, but their children were nowhere to be seen. Police were called, and various reports came in that the kids had been seen at the beach playing with a tall, dark-haired man in his thirties. The Beaumont children were later identified as having been in the local cake shop buying pasties and a pie, and the man was reportedly seen walking away with them at 12.15 that day from the beach. Grant, Arnna and Jane have never been seen again. Police boats, divers, local and city patrols searched the surrounding suburbs without finding a leading clue. People volunteered to search for the children and pleas went out across the media for any information. The Patawalonga Lake was drained to search for them and there were numerous sightings, pranks and false leads over the years, most recently in February 2018 when a vacant lot in North Plympton was excavated in the search for answers, all to no avail.

  The third, and most recent morbid stain on the suburb came in 2015 when former Adelaide Crows AFL coach Phil Walsh was stabbed to death by his son Cy in their house in Somerton Park, only a 20-minute walk from the Beaumonts’ former home, and not far from the seawall where the Somerton Man was found all those years ago.

  I walk back from the seawall, where there’s no marker at all for the man who died here 70 years ago. As I get in my car, people walk their dogs, kids play on the swings and life goes on in Somerton Park, where three of the most heart-breaking acts have occurred in Adelaide’s history. It’s not enough to tarnish an entire city, though it’s the most prominent indication I can find for the reputation Adelaide has received.

  My next exploration within Adelaide continues not far from where I live in the Hills. I’m following a trail that leads from the tree-lined main street of the village of Hahndorf, which is incredibly beautiful and alarmingly kitschy at the same time, down to Adelaide, which often defines what many people from the outside think of South Australia as a whole.

  Two years after the colony of South Australia was established in 1836, the Zebra arrived at Holdfast Bay carrying a boatload of Lutheran refugees from Prussia looking to start a new life. It was one of three ships that travelled here with the first group of Lutherans. They promised to work in the newly formed state of South Australia in exchange for the religious freedom they could not obtain from King Friedrich Wilhelm III in Europe at the time.

  The new arrivals first camped in the sandhills of the aptly named Port Misery in Port Adelaide, an environment full of roaming pigs, sandflies and open sewers. First the settlement of Klemzig was established on the hot plains and in 1839, Captain Dirk Meinerts Hahn of the Zebra negotiated for some of the settlers to live on two 80 acre (32 hectare) plots in the cooler climate of the Adelaide Hills rent free for a year, along with six cows, pou
ltry and wheat, while they agreed to plant out the village in a German style as their payment.

  The Lutheran arrivals were hard workers, though they had little money in the early days and the distance to Adelaide (30 kilometres) was considerable without a bullock dray. While many of the men were away earn-ing money in work gangs, many of the tasks within the community fell to the women, and they soon developed a reputation – firstly as ‘the best shearers in the country’, then as expert washerwomen hired out across the area by British landowners. Some were even ‘hitched to the plough with a bullock to prepare the ground for planting their crops’, such was their strength and determination.

  This was, and still is, Peramangk country; the trails on the hills to Bukartilla, meaning ‘deep pool, swimming or wash place’, the original spot where Hahndorf now stands, was once ribboned with waterways full of perch, yabbies and mudfish. It was laced with trails and communication routes from the Aboriginal inhabitants, where many ceremonies, trades and meetings would take place. The Mount Barker hills were renowned for red ochre deposits and quartz used for crafting fine blades.

  Originally this area was also rich with native foods such as yam daisies, though as sheep and European farming methods encroached on the land around the Mount Lofty Ranges, the Peramangk were pushed further and further out.

  The Lutheran community flourished and endured because of their drive to succeed and the hard work they put in, though the issue of how they sold their produce to make an income was one that was solved by the pioneer women.

  While South Australia was promoted as a place free of the scourge of convicts, as the stories of the two founding fathers highlighted, the reality wasn’t quite so pure. Very early on in the development of South Australia it was realised that no-one had the required expertise to work with native woods, which used to be abundant in the Adelaide Hills. By 1837 at least 15 convicts with woodworking skills were brought to the region. These men lived in the old stringybark forests and were referred to as the ‘Tiersmen’ because of the tiers of quartz around where they lived and where the trees grew in abundance. These ex-cattle rustlers, runaway sailors and escaped convicts from other settlements were accused of rioting, robbery and murder in the hills, with the Bullock Track being the most feared section of the trail from the hills down into Adelaide.