If you’ve followed parts one and two, you’ll know that I’m pretty sure that
(a) that The Unknown Man had worked on a ship (probably as a Third Officer), but was unemployed & nearly destitute;
(b) that Jestyn had probably first met him in the hospital where she worked, and – as with Alfred Boxall – had given him a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as well as her new phone number; and
(c) that he had recently been acutely ill, possibly even hospitalized following a bad virus.
Some other facts that strike me as relevant:
(d) the Somerton Man, Alfred Boxall, and Jestyn’s husband were all much the same age
(e) the Rubaiyat is a collection of love poetry
The first issue is why the Unknown Man travelled far across Australia to see a nurse who had once treated him, carrying a book of love poetry she had apparently given him, despite being unemployed and outrageously poor. Personally, I suspect the answer to this lies in the question: love. A number of people have speculated that the unknown Man had fathered the nurse’s son (some based on the observation that their earlobes apparently shared the same rare structure): travelling long-distance to see your own young son would be a perfectly consistent scenario.
But Jestyn now had a new partner, whom she consistently referred to as her “husband” (though it was to be several years before his divorce came through and they were able to marry). Given that she had already refused Alf Boxall’s request after the war to meet up with her, it seems odd that she allowed the Unknown Man to visit: why one and not the other? I believe this points to a different dynamic between her and the Unknown Man: indeed, if the Unknown Man were her young son’s father, I believe Jestyn wouldn’t comfortably have been able to turn him away, even if she did now have a partner she intended to marry.
All in all, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that this is what connected them together, and that rather than conspiracy or subterfuge, it was love that had bound him to her (even if it was not necessarily reciprocated): but what then are we to make of his mysterious enciphered note? After all, this is a cipher mystery, right?
MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABO AIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB
For all the speculative and hallucinatory code-breaking efforts that have gone into cracking these few short lines, there’s no doubt in my mind what it actually is: nothing more than a performance aide-memoire, the first letters of a poem dedicated to Jestyn that the Unknown Man had himself written, perhaps composed on the train on his way over to Glenelg. In his mind, I suspect he was aspiring to something close to:-
“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Of course, few poets reach such sublimity and subtlety of expression, and I have little doubt that the Unknown Man’s own poetry fell well short of that league. But if it is a love poem, it seems a reasonably safe bet to me that each line has only four feet (there seem to be too few initials there for it to reach FitzGerald’s five feet per line), and so the lines probably also divide into four sets of two halves:-
MRGOA
— BABD
MTBIM
— PANETP
MLIABO
— AIAQC
ITTMTS
— AMSTGAB
Given that there’s a high chance that the letter [L] (which only appears once) probably stands for ‘[L]OVE’, I’d expect that [MLIABO] will turn out to be something not far off from “My Love Is Almost Boiling Over”. Intensely felt no doubt, but probably far from sublime.
Perhaps a retired crossword enthusiast with plenty of time on their hands might care to try to reconstruct this poem? There are plenty of reasonable clues to be had: [ITT] could well be not too far from “I Think That”; the last word of [BABD] probably rhymes with the last word of [PANETP], and similarly for [AIAQC] and [AMSTGAB]; the lines beginning [A-] could well be “AND…”, while [M-] could be “MY…”; the [Q] strongly constrains the [AIAQC] line; etc.
To sum up, I’m completely comfortable with the idea that the Unknown Man travelled to Glenelg not long after coming out of hospital to see Jestyn and their son, and that it was there he died, possibly poisoned by digitalis, but more likely from an allergic reaction to something in the pasty he’d had for lunch. But none of that really touches on the question of where he came from: really, what happened before the curtain rose on his relationship with Jestyn?
People don’t tend to speculate on this much, which is a shame because in many ways I think we do now have enough information to to give it a go. Perhaps the chewing gum he was carrying was the clue: for, as Diane O’Donovan thoughtfully pointed out in her comments to Part Two,
Well, I’d say that one thing is quite sure; he wasn’t Australian.
Gum-chewing was considered an exclusively American habit in the forties, and even into the sixties, positively loathed by most adults and by middle class teenagers too.
And if you tenaciously follow that idea through to the end…
So how about this? Mystery man is American, contracts malaria in the tropics and is sent to a hospital in Australia, as was usual. This first time, in Sydney. But then he gets orders to return to the front, prefers to go AWOL, gets caught and is put into an internment camp [perhaps already in Victoria; Melbourne Hospital was one of the internment camps. While there, he gets plenty of sun and exercise, but little really hard work. Fortunately, war ends. He’s finally tried for AWOL, but only sentenced to 12 months in prison (or gets sick again) so no sun for the final year.
Now released, he asks to be accepted as a new migrant, claiming to be a sign writer. He’s accepted, and buys the tools of the trade intending to start a new life and find Jestyn. Suitcase and clothes were given from a refugee/charity organisation, as part of a routine de-mob and welcome to Aus. etc.
BUT – While at Melbourne Hospital .. and so forth.
With my only proviso being that the Unknown Man was arguably more likely to be in the US Navy than the US Army, I think this is pretty much the best scenario currently going. Might the answer to the Somerton Man mystery therefore lie not in Australian hospital archives, but in US Navy files? As Diane muses, perhaps the most telling clue of all here might turn out to be the smallest: the pack of Juicy Fruit. Something to chew on! 😉
Nick…re the code: do you think that it is too much of a stretch to assume that as it seems clearly related to Khayyam in some way, and as Persian is written right to left that the snippet might be backwards?
If so then the first line might be the last line (reading from the bottom up) and might be not MRGOABABD but instead DBABAOGRM which by simple substitution (I have always instinctively felt the cipher is ‘simple’) could give us TAMAM SHUD as the last line and by extension. Rest of it doesn’t seem to pan though as the start would be A M H_ _ D
Probably nothing…
AIAQC ~ And I am quite consumed?
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au posted a spectacular article regarding the Somerton Man’s identity.
As usual Nick, another fascinating cypher mystery.
The Rubi’a’yat connection reminds me of the Ripper wall writing “The Jewes are not the
men…”
Well done, Sir!
One question for you cipher people, which may be idle, but for me is pivotal in this interpretation of the cipher: in short, do people DO that? I get the idea using real words made up of the first letters of a list of items in order to help remember all the items on the list (ROY G. BIV — which I always hated because indigo has no place in a list of the primary and secondary colors, but I digress). But for me, it would be infinitely harder to remember a list of 44 random letters (random as in not spelling anything) than to simply remember the actual words of the verse or paragraph, using grammar and the logic of language and all…
Anyway, I love all these new theories and although I’m on the fence about some parts, that is one thing I don’t buy outright — thought I do leave room to be convinced that other people’s minds work differently (i.e., I’m here for the great Taman Shud info and not the other cipher threads, as I do not have a mind for ciphers and such, unfortunately). So… let me have it if I’m wrong, if nothing else I’m always intrigued by how other people’s minds work!
(Of course if anyone is still reading this — I just found it, but I subscribed and hope there will be a lot more info to come.)
@Jestyn- my computer passwords are all like that. I will take a phrase that is easy for me to remember, for example, “one day I will find the right words and they will be simple” (a favorite quote of mine) and turn it into a mix of letters and numbers: “0d1wftrw4twb5”
I find it very odd that a relatively poor nurse goes around handing out rare copies of a book unless there was a very specific reason for it. Such as using it for code keys in a spy ring. It would be essentially as secure as a one-time pad. Was “Jestyn” only the source of the books, or the ring leader also? Just a thought…
WRGOABABD
WTBIMPANETP
We Already Got A Baby
Want To Be Impanet
(impotent)
somerton man was ENCODING a message.
Digitalis was known for causing impotentcy
refering to the jestyn-somerton love child?
was she offering to sire children for terminated spies?
You didn’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to appreciate the Rubiayat – my grandfather was a railway worker & he had a beautiful copy which is now a treasured possession of ours. As for the malaria theory, if the unknown man was in “the tropics” & sent to an Australian hospital, it would have been more likely Townsville (which is in the tropics) than Sydney. Because of the war in the Pacific, Townsville was a big military centre & was full of American troops.
Nick, your articles on SM are fantastic and thoughtful. I was hoping to push you a bit further and get your thoughts on the ‘possibly related cases’ in this whole affair (re-capped for clarity and other readers):
a. The abduction of Keith Magnoson, the death of his two year old sun and the subsequent harassment faced by Mrs Magnoson for her husband’s prying into the Sommerton man.
b. Joseph Marshall’s 1945 death not far from where Jestyn was living in Sydney at the time, a copy of the Rubaiyat found on his corpse.
I really like your theory, it is a solid one. But how do you account for these above events? Looking forward to your commentary/
Fred: it’s quite possible that these mysteries are related in some way, but it’s far from obvious (to me, at least) how. We only really have hemi-demi-semi-clues in the Somerton Man case! 🙁
Nick.
You left a question on another forum about how to find WWII US Navy deserters in Australia. The National Archives is probably the best place to start:
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/SearchScreens/BasicSearch.aspx
Searching on just “deserter” brings up over a thousand hits. Narrowing it to the war years, about 105. Nationality is mentioned in the description for some, but not all. Unfortunately, only 2 of those 105 are scanned and available online. One, which is circa 1944, mentions two US navy deserters, Officer’s Steward 1st class Robert Joseph Alcorn, USS WHITNEY, and Seaman Bobby F. Keller, from a different US ship. If any of the other descriptions look promising, you could order copies. You could also try searching the NAA on other keywords that may turn up something. Good luck.
regards,
Martin
Melbourne
The Rubaiyat is not a collection of love poetry.
Apologies for the self-serving link here, but there is passing mention of a code .. good enough thinks I.
http://tomsbytwo.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-professors-thesis-blame-the-students-who-put-it-together/
Small point, but though someone said they saw the chap knocking on the door, his having eaten nothing but some bakery take-away, and having a couple of cigarettes (probably cadged since in a different pack) doesn’t sound much to me as if he’d found anyone home.
And, on seeing the corpse, ‘Jestyn’ reacted in a way that sounds like genuine symptoms of shock.
Did anyone enquire if she’d been at work that day?
The police aren’t known for giving anyone advance notice of a visit, though she appeared to have been treated very kindly by all the authorities. Gerry Feltus wrote of her with some empathy .. if that was not done out of conspiracy, well what else. Sympathy?
The unknown man had dystonia, his son(?) may have inherited the condition, ballet notwithstanding. Perhaps both men were of a superior physical disposition, as well as being similarly handicapped.
and there I am giving away the bloody plot again ..
Pete,
I should probably ask this on your blog, but since you’re here – why was the chap’s assertion that the book was ‘thrown’ into his car accepted without question. Too late now, but I’d have made a note of whether he smoked, and what brand, too.
Thrown.
That would mean that the back car window was open at the time whoever went past, whoever being the person who had the book in his hand and wanted to be rid of it. So he threw it in, or tossed it in, or slipped it through the open window. Didn’t want it any more.
Who are you referring to ‘ whether he smoked?’
I mean, who says that’s how the book ended up in the car? was he seen throwing it in? Or was it just the car-owner’s say-so after the torn-out leaf was mentioned in the press?
The Somerton man was suffering from an incurable illness as noted the enlarged spleen. He was a neat and tidy person, who would have put his things in order before going to the beach. The cigarettes were from a friend that shared a pack with him. He made his final exit looking out over Gulf St Vincent and the sea he loved. There is nothing to tie him to the Australia-Soviet Friendship League or to Russian spies.
Neither the car owner, or the man who found it claimed ownership. So you could assume that a passenger dropped it inside or a passer-by tossed it in.
If it is part of a conspiracy, one that includes the police and the press etc – then it must have been elaborate in its make up, with a lot of conspirators.
Then a soldier found another copy in the back of his car in Glenelg a day later. I’ve never found a book in the back of my car that I didn’t put there myself.
Why was the scrap of paper from the book found 6 mounts after he died?
Ever worn a pair of duds, made in the 40’s, with a fob pocket xplor?
They were made to hold a folded wad of notes if a man was worried about pickpockets. They were inside the waistband, not outside like the fob is today, and they were pretty tight. The scrap was rolled up and pushed down, like a cigarette paper.
A fob pocket was originally used to hold a fob watch.
The news report at the time said that the book was found in the car around the time of the RAAF pageant; this took place on Saturday 20 November 1948, 10 days before the unknown man died. The car had been parked in Jetty Road at Glenelg. Gerry Feltus says that it was the car owner’s brother-in-law who found it on the floor in the back of the car and later put it in the glove box because he thought it belonged to the car owner. Perhaps they were on their way to the pageant at the time and that is why it was mentioned.
When interviewed by Stuart Littlemore in 1977, Detective Len Brown said that the book and paper were taken to Julius Combes(?), a paper expert in Adelaide, who examined them and said that the paper texture matched. Was that the full extent of the forensic examination?
The existing photos of the piece of paper and the the book with the torn page do not match. The piece would have to have been torn out and then torn again around the edge. Enquiries by Gerry Feltus found that the photos may not be genuine and that in 1949 the tears on the book and paper DID match exactly. If this was the case, why was it not mentioned in press reports? Two pieces that fitted together perfectly would surely have been newsworthy.
I have not heard of a soldier also finding a copy of the Rubaiyat, perhaps Minstrel Janet can elaborate?
AIAQC
As I am quite certain
Re: the cipher is there anything to say that the Somerton Man wrote the letters?
Obvs the link to the phone number, but does anyone know if they were in the same handwriting, etc.
The book would have been around 80 years old in the forties and so is it possible that the letters were written by a previous owner?
Also, with regards to the unused train ticket to Henley Beach – this is miles away from where (we assume) he wanted to go. Was the ticket bought in error or was he given a new address (and phone number)?
If he was where was this written down?
I think I have read that the guy who found the book wanted to be anonymous – but are there any clues as to where this was found and Jestyns address?
Someone has made a Google Plus profile entitled ‘Shalom to the Nurse’/’Jestyn Thomson’ which alludes to this case. More information will doubtless follow.
I am very interested to hear from people who may have known the parties personally and can vouch for the truth of their involvement, as some are now questioning whether the names are correct.
This mystery will never be solved. Thats if he even wrote the code in the book. Maybe she wrote it and gave it to him. Ive taken 6 days off work trying to solve this but my Air wolf box set arrived so I watched that. TAMAM SHUD [expletive] OFF
Mike Stobbs: watching the Airwolf box set sounds like a much better option to me.
stick it back on Mike, it’s better than saving stamps – especially when you find the whole set.
AIAQC –
all in all quit complaining;
american in autralia quite content;
all i ask quickly conceded.
MLIABO –
my love is a burning orb;
my life is a big 0 {digit zero}
military life is all but over.
these ciphers could be anything. nice write-up though.
if body exhumed could perform dental analysis and find out where he was raised.
I have always had my doubts about the claim by Diane (et al.), that “Gum-chewing was considered an exclusively American habit in the forties…”
A quick search in our old friend Trove suggests otherwise.
As early as the 1870s, chewing gum was the subject of a lot of tut-tutting, a hit song, sneering and “only in America”-style articles in the Australian press .
By the 1900s, the fogeys seems to have been lost the battle. In 1915, Philip K. Wrigley — from whom PK gets its name — made the long trek from Chicago to open his first Australian factory.
I’m not saying that SM wasn’t (or was) an American, merely that Juicy Fruit is no indicator of nationality. Although I wonder if anyone checked to see where his gum had been made.
And, for that matter, could Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit have been a practical method of delivering a poison such as digitalis/strophantin etc?
It’s an interesting question because, by the 1940s, chewing gum even plays such a part in crime fiction. To cite an example from my own shelves: Biggles in the Orient (first published in 1945). In it, the hero investigates a spate of mysterious crashes amongst RAF Spitfire pilots in India/Burma. Now there’s a demographic that could hardly be any more British (i.e. not American), especially Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth 😀
MLIABO AIAQC
My life is all but over, and I am quite content.
Perhaps I had the sort of upbringing which was considered a bit conservative, but the stuff was never permitted in the house, and if anyone at school were found with it, a letter went home to the parents. The odd cig. was considered a touch ‘wild’ and rather foolish, but chewing gum was infra.dig.
As a South Australian (albeit it one who was born well after all of this) the Somerton Man has always interested me. I’m not sure, however, if the idea of him dying at Jestyn’s house fits. It might help to fire up Google maps. There was some talk that he had a train ticket to Henley Beach (the line no longer exists, but as far as I can tell it would have followed the existing line to Grange and then continued South along Military Road (you can actually see some old platforms on Military Road – or you used to be able to). It is probably feasible that an out of towner might have thought this a resaonable route to Glenelg (especially if I’m right in thinking that Jestyn lived in Glenelg North (somewhere near or along Adelphi Tce, from memory, and I don’t know why, I always thought it was north of the bridge across the Patawalonga). One thing already strikes me a little odd. Adelaide’s only remaining tram line runs to Glenelg – and in fact almost everyone would refer to the Tram if asked how to get to Glenelg (Wiki has an article on the Glenelg Tram). The bus service to Glenelg, though offering many more options is far mroe cumbersome (although some of the services might have once been available on North Terrace in Adelaide (ie near the Railway Station) – these days I think all Glenelg services would use Grenfell St (although I guess that’s still closer than the Tram, which in those days would have terminated at Victoria Sq). Depending a little on the route, the bus would likely have joined the tram somewhere along Jetty Rd (Westbound), before turning into Moseley St (there may have historically been routes that came down Colley St – and in fact one that would cross the Patawalonga and actaully travel along Adelphi Tce – and perhaps it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that this is the way he came) – and another again along Tapleys Hill Rd (this might be a newer addition to the network, not sure). What is a little puzzling, is that someone who would have planned to use the Henley Beach trainline (assuming, of course, his visit with Jestyn was planned) was sufficiently aware of Adelaide to find a bus that would go to Glenelg, and then have sufficient local knowledge to find Jestyn’s house).
Secondly, it seems a little odd that he is then found at Somerton Beach – which is South of Glenelg (and again, possibly imagination rather than fact, I thought he was found somewhere near the Life-saving club – which is the Southmost point of Somerton Park, and possibly even in North Brighton. On the one hand, this is not a very long distance if you are trying to hide any possible association, on the other hand it is an incredibly long distance for convenience (I would guess (based mainly on how things are today) that far more people would visit Somerton Beach than the beach North of Glenelg (or even the banks of the Pat)…and I would have thought (spy conspiracies aside) that you would avoid busy places because there’s too much risk being caught unless you’re good at what you do).
I think there’s also something that rings a bit odd about a Nurse not realising the lividity issue – although I suppose we are talking many moons ago…
I take the point that there are many assumptions I make about Adelaide’s transport in the 40s which may not be spot on, nonetheless I doubt the geography has changed all that much, and am pretty sure Glenelg’s focus has always been Jetty Rd, so most public transport would aim to connect people there….
Oops – a news article of the day suggests he caught a bus to St Leonards. That suburb no longer exists, but there is a St Leonard’s school (which may indicate a previous suburb name) in……Glenelg North.
Hi,
About his relationship with Jestyn being that he fathered her child and came there to reunite with her i guess most people agree including Jestyn’s grandchildren and if DNA testing is allowed this can probably be proved.
About the rest that removes the possibility that he was involved in something dodgy as espionage or criminal activity I would agree with you if there were not for two things:
1. The piece of paper with the text “It is finished”. This piece of evidence does not link well to everything else
2. The fact that apparently someone placed and later removed evidence concerning the SM on a period of time after his discovery.
Also dubios is the reason why the right to exhume the body was continuosly refused.
cyp: the Somerton Man may have had some kind of (the oft-proposed) relationship with Jestyn, but I definitely don’t think it is a necessary part of the case – in my opinion, there are many more plausible scenarios where this didn’t happen than (romantic) ones where it did.
1. “Tamam Shud” – I suspect that this tells a very specific story, one about two people who hadn’t previously met but who needed to prove their identity to one another. But as you say, it is hard to link this story with the rest of the facts we currently have.
2. Personally, I don’t believe that there is any evidence that evidence concerning the SM was removed or even altered after his death. Whose theory are you referring to?
3. There is no right to exhume a body, you have to demonstrate that doing so would be in the public interest, something which (I, for one, don’t believe that) Derek Abbott has yet managed to demonstrate. Unlike police TV shows, you can’t just dig bodies up how you want. 🙁
What if Jestyn was sympathetic towards men who wanted male partners, and the book was a signal which one carried in certain places and times. In that case, the book’s turning up in a car could have been the critical clue towards a murderer. And what if it were plain murder – either by haters, or by someone terrified of being jailed, or by a jealous partner? As I recall it was still illegal not to be heterosexual then, wasn’t it? He’d obviously been in someone’s company, even if only for a short while. The cigarettes had been given him. (Were they still rationed so long after the war?)
Diane: it’s a scenario, sure. But… we have another couple of hundred similar scenarios, and no obvious way to choose between them.
It’s puzzling fact that in the normal way, a person with his property in their car would be a prime suspect.
Apart from hotel and railway staff, he is the only person who has any certain connection to the dead man. In the policeman’s place I would have asked witnesses if (a) he was the well-dressed man ‘helping’ someone along the beach and (b) the person seen door-knocking.
Too late now.
Diane: on the plus side, Gerry Feltus has talked a number of times with the gentleman in question, and I’d be genuinely surprised if Gerry hadn’t asked the man pretty much all the questions you’d want to have had asked.
Diane,
It would seem odd that a guilty person should hand in the only clue that can link them to a crime. Even as a smoke screen, it seems a rather peculiar course of action to put yourself into a picture where it would otherwise seem nobody is even aware of your existence.
Of course, the idea of anti-gay (or perhaps even just gay) crimes in Adelaide is interesting, given the much later crimes of George Duncan’s murder and later again with Von Einem and “The Family” killings.
Then again, for a relatively small place, Adelaide has a long criminal history – ironic given it was originally convict-free and founded Australia’s first police force (which is the third oldest in the world).
Jobe
We can imagine all sorts of reasons why the chap might come forward, but in the end we dont’ know. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a guilty person sought to seem actively helping police.
But perhaps at the time he gave the book away, or some other passenger noticed it before he did…
Yes, Adelaide gives me the creeps and always has done. Too many churches, police too noticeable. They were doing personal searches without cause even forty years ago. I think far too much is made of a few shiploads of convicts arriving two hundred and more years ago. As if the whole of America’s population was supposed to have inherited Quaker nature as descendants of the people on the Mayflower. I think the memory of those few hundred people, all that time ago, is kept alive mainly so that northerners have some reason to think less about the difference in weather!
Jobe, Adelaide has always had tickets on itself IMHO, and, like all self-written references, the reference is deceptive.
From Sean Fewester’s book “City of evil”. Sean is a chief court reporter in Adelaide, so the following should be well founded. Adelaide the widely know as the “city of churches”, but what is often forgotten is that churches have graveyards full of skeletons.
“According to the state’s top judge, he and his peers are not personally accountable to the public. In 2007 , Supreme Court Chief Justice John Doyle said those behind the bench are above such concerns. “A lack of personal accountability is the price you pay for a fair and impartial judicial system.” he said. “We must be independent of the community’s views. If you want a system where judges are personally accountable, you might say: “go to China”.”
“Cliches persist because they contain some truth: evil will flourish whenever good men do nothing. When no one asks questions, or when those in power do not listen, shadows form in the City of Churches. Within those shadows breeds more perversions, more monstrous thought. Adelaide is stripped of its progressive, welcoming veneer and revealed for what it is – a City of Evil. The vicious cycle that started with Edward Gibbon Wakefield spins around again.” City of Evil. Sean Fewester.
“The evidence is clear: Adelaide is far worse than a mere ”murder town” could ever be. …..What is it about Adelaide that creates such monsters? When considering the history of the place, it becomes apparent South Australia has always been a fertile breeding ground for disordered minds. One of the driving forces behind the creation of Adelaide was British politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield. His revolutionary idea was to settle the colony not with convicts, but with free men. His much-publicised belief was that Britain’s social problems had been caused by overcrowding, making emigration an essential “safety valve” for Mother England. By 1831, Wakefield had fine-tunes his colonisation plan and was the toast of London. To this day, his influence is remembered in Adelaide through the streets, statues and institutions that bear his name.
Wakefield was a visionary – a man who had clearly given a great deal of thought to devising the best method of colonisation. What history forgets is that he was afforded this time not in smoking rooms, university lectures or libraries, but in the depths of London’s prisons. Months before grabbing the headlines with his colonisation ideas, Wakefield finished a three-year sentence for kidnapping a 15-year old girl. In 1826, he had conspired with his brother to abduct Ellen Turner, a rich manufacturer’s daughter who caught his eye. Wakefield lured the girl into his trap by way of a false letter, warning Miss Turner her mother was gravely ill. Once the teenager was in his clutches, Wakefield took her to Scotland and demanded she marry him, saying it was the only way to spare her family financial ruin.
Obsessed with power and influence, an utterly shameless Wakefield wrote to his new father-in-law demanding his financial support. He was sure the man would acquiesce to his demands rather than risk a public scandal. Imagine his surprise when constables caught up to the newly-weds at Calais and clapped him in irons. His trial – the biggest sensation of 1827 – ended with Wakefield and his brother jailed and the marriage annulled by a special act of Parliament.
A driving force behind the creation of Adelaide, then was a duplicitous, power hungry, greedy kidnapper. With a guiding hand like that, it’s not hard to see where the darker side of Adelaide sprung. Wakefield’s choice of free settlers only worsened matters. He tirelessly hawked his new colony to two groups: religious dissenters and social progressives. The first, burned by their dealings with the Catholic and Protestant faiths, wanted a place to pursue their beliefs in privacy and without persecution. They brought with them a natural inclination towards secrecy, and the unwillingness to judge others. The progressives, meanwhile, believed that the basic concepts of human nature and morality were not fixed and should be reviewed on scientific advances. In other words, they carried a certain permissiveness and willingness to experiment with them to the new shores.
Once combined, these vastly disparate values did great good in South Australia. It became a land of tolerance, the first place in the world to grant women the right to vote, and a bastion o religious thought. But every light cast by the City of Churches created a shadow – within which darker, more pervasive thoughts festered. In a land where experimentation was encouraged, where secrets were to be kept, where judgement was slow to pass, deviant mindsets developed unhindered and spread without condemnation.
Over time, this underbelly became attractive to more people with monstrous thoughts, and a new group of emigres arrived. …….
Secrecy is a defining aspect of South Australia. Those who resist the flow are smacked down harshly ……”
It’s something in the water.
And that’s right about the legal system – the reason that England’s is so much better than America’s. If a High court position is bestowed on favourites by politicians, then the judgements tend to go whichever way the current lot of politicians want them to. No-one wants to lose his/her job.
Absolute guarantee of corrupt legal system. Ditto public elections. If a judge is elected in a small region where the general attitudes are racist, sexist, bible-belt, then you get judgements which just rubber-stamp mob rule.
Hearing that we here in SA are “up ourselves”, thought I’d weigh in.
The “Murder Capital” thing is more popular mythology perpetuated by sensationalist media than reality. Journalists like Sean Fewster like to wax lyrical about it. They like to string together a number of unconnected crimes in history and try to create some tenuous link around churches or some supposed uptight mentality.
Does anyone really buy that the Beaumont abduction somehow came about because of a proliferation of religious buildings or a long-dead Brit? Wakefield’s truly controversial idea was that in settling a town, it’d be best not to fill it full of crims, and to try to ensure there were women as well as men.
Let’s look at a few of these famous crimes. Interestingly, those with the best form for the Beaumonts – Percy, O’Neill, Brown – were from interstate, not Adelaide. I personally think Von Einem, who is from SA, was too young and I don’t buy the switch in target victims. As for Snowtown, Bunting was abused and displaying psychopathic tendencies in his home state of Qld well before he moved to South Australia, and Wagner hailed from New South Wales.
If you have a look around the rest of Australia and you can find plenty of depraved crimes through the years. Mr Cruel, Percy, Milat, John Glover, the Cobby murderers, Birnie, Denyer, Beck and Watts are just the tip of the iceberg. And Victoria should likely take a look at its own gang crime before it casts stones, just quietly.
The former Chief Justice was merely explaining how our judicial system works, which is based on exactly the same principles as those in every other State in the country. Do we want judges deciding to sentence based on how it’ll come off on Today Tonight? Or having elected judges trying to win a vote for another term?
MLIALBOAIAQC
Might like it a lot but old Adelaide is a queer city. (Yeah a bit dumb but no worse that the others). Strathmore hotel was a good place to stay many years ago. The boys would come in from Woodside camp on weekends and I guess it was old Ina who would allow as many in one room as could fit. Close to just about everything in the city and cheap as anything. Most people staying there were folk from the countryside or interstate. It felt most welcoming in an otherwise rather austere and unwelcoming large country town. Thanks Ina.