Category Archives: Tamam Shud

Gerry Feltus very helpfully included the text of Ina Harvey’s 1st December 1982 Adelaide News interview with Tom Loftus in “The Unknown Man” (pp.197-200). Harvey recalled a “strong and fit”, “professional” man with “an air of refinement” who had checked into the Strathmore Hotel close to Adelaide’s railway station for a few days before 1st December 1948.

She noted that “[He] had no baggage, except for a small black case – such as a doctor or musician who played the flute might carry”. Because she had suspicions about the man, she asked an employee to go into the man’s room (#21 or #23, she couldn’t recall) and have a look in the mysterious case – to her surprise, “the only item in the case was a needle”. Furthermore, “[from the employee’s] description I got the impression it could have been a hypodermic syringe.”

Pete Bowes now proposes that this flute case could well have been important: he suggests that it formed some kind of signal, a “covert [sign] of identification“, a chess move played out as part of a wider spy game unfolding on the streets of Adelaide in 1948.

Well… OK. But has Pete’s instinctual metal detector found the needle in a haystack we’ve all been grasping blindly for? In this instance, I don’t honestly think so. So if not a spy narrative, then what on earth was going on with the “needle” and the small black case?

And My Suggested Explanation Is…

What if… the small black case was actually a rifle case, for a takedown (easily dismantled) .22 rimfire rifle?

And what if the “needle” were a barrel cleaning rod, for (duh) cleaning the rifle barrel?

With Fred Pruszinski’s short life and indeed the whole rifle socks scenario, we have already seen how miniature (typically .22 calibre) rifles were popular in Australia in the years after WW2, mainly because of the difficulty of getting full-calibre shot.

For this reason, many WW2-era weapons (such as the Martini Cadet training rifle) were recommissioned by companies such as Sportco as sports or competition rifles, and sold (for the most part) into rifle clubs. I’m not a rifle expert at all, but I do know that some rifles did definitely come apart into pieces: for example, the very rifle that Fred Pruszinski had in a suitcase that he took from Broken Hill to dump on Somerton Beach that very weekend was a takedown rifle – but only its stock was ever found (Pruszinski, who knew rifles well, insisted that he left both the barrel and the stock in the suitcase on the beach).

What, then, are the odds that the man staying at the Strathmore had come to town with a discreet little black carrying case for a takedown .22 calibre rifle? You know, the kind of case that a professional man would use to carry his rifle to Rifle Club meetings?

And – spookily enough – what are the odds that the rifle that Fred Pruszinski dumped on Somerton Beach was the same one that was meant to go in the Strathmore Hotel visitor’s little black case, and that was meant to be cleaned by the cleaning needle in it?

Might all these pieces, all moving around Adelaide on the same weekend, be parts of the same convoluted puzzle?

This is a story about three men, two of them alive and the other long dead: and, as Steve Martin famously said at the start of L.A. Story (1991), “I swear, it’s all true“…

The Somerton Man

Mysteriously, our first protagonist was found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide on 1st December 1948: his identity, despite the passing of several decades since, has still not been determined. Yet it recently turned out [*] that this ‘Somerton Man’ was known by at least one person – a nurse who once signed herself “Jestyn”, but whose real name was Jessica Thomson (neé Harkness), and whose Adelaide phone number was written on the back page of a book later connected to the man, though she never disclosed his identity to anyone (if indeed she ever knew it).

As far as evidence goes, the cold case associated with this man has heaps of (for want of a better word) “micro-clues”: and we really should be able, with all our modern databases, computers, and crowdsourced collaborationware, to identify him without much difficulty. Yet apart from the fact that he was a fit-looking guy not much older than forty with an enlarged spleen, we don’t know (a) who he was; (b) where he was coming from; (c) where he was going to; (d) what he was doing; or even (e) what killed him, let alone anything so fancy as (f) why.

All of which is defensive researcher-speak for we know diddly-squat of importance about him: the truth is we haven’t even got started.

As a result of all this, what can only be termed wretchedly hopeful theories – was he romantically connected with the nurse? was he an American spy? a Soviet spy? a uranium prospector? a car thief? a black marketeer? a Third Officer on a merchant ship? etc etc – hover over his long-dead corpse like flies above dung.

But the thing he now most resembles is a blank Sudoku grid – a puzzle which has at least as many answers as people scatching their heads over it. Why not insert your own pet theory (or indeed theories) into his still-basically-blank grid? Some days it seems as though every other bugger has: welcome to the world of the Somerton Man. 🙂

Derek Abbott

Professor Derek Abbott is our second main protagonist. A few days ago, a long-form piece in the California Sunday Magazine laid out his personal journey from obsessive London schoolboy to Professor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide.

But most importantly, the piece finishes up with something that has been an open secret within the Somerton research community (as if anything so ramshackle and disparate can have so grand a title): that a few years ago Abbott married Rachel Egan, by whom he has three young children. Oh, and if you didn’t already know, Egan’s grandfather was Robin Thomson, the nurse’s son: which certainly directly links Abbott to the mystery of the Somerton Man, and quite possibly to the dead man himself.

Unfortunately, Abbott has devised a whole host of strategies to work around his well-trained stance of scientific impartiality, because he has become utterly convinced that the Somerton Man was Robin Thomson’s real father, despite having (as far as I can see) no proof of this whatsoever beyond really wanting it to be true. And so, over the last few years, Abbott has conjured up all manner of petition-backed legal motions to exhume the Somerton Man (essentially, a techy ‘fishing trip’ to extract DNA from the dead man’s teeth or bones), every one of which has been rejected.

Abbott’s latest variant on this theme – to convince American crowdfunders to back his group’s ongoing research via a £100,000 Indiegogo campaign – currently seems fairly dead in the water (having raised roughly £227 after 18 days, i.e. less than 0.25%), despite his efforts to promote it to gullible open-minded American backers, even floating the possibility of some long-winded family connection between the Somerton Man (or, to be precise, between Robin Thomson who he believes to have been the Somerton Man’s son) and Thomas Jefferson’s family.

For me, the two biggest problems with Abbott’s Indiegogo campaign are (a) that it doesn’t actually specify where the money would go, just that it would be spent on a range of things Abbott believes would best achieve the goal of identifying the Somerton Man, even though he only really has a single theory in play that he wishes to try to prove; and (b) that, given that he plans to put a fair tranche of this Phase 1 cash on building videos and lobbying to promote a putative “Phase 2” (raising even more cash and doing even more complicated tests), he hasn’t exactly been open about this.

Actually, it turns out that crowdfunders are far less gullible and, frankly, far cleverer than Abbott seems to believe them to be. They like proper details on a project page (ones they can actually check for themselves); they like plans that are specific, believable and actionable; and they like to back people who are taking on difficult things that benefit everybody, not just themselves. Abbott clearly believes that he has ticked all of these boxes: I don’t think he has.

Of course, it’s down to individual crowdfunders where they put their money, and Abbott might yet get stumble into a nest of random accidental energy billionnaires who end up throwing a wodge of Monopoly oligarch money in his direction. All I can say is that as far as codes and ciphers go (this is, after all, Cipher Mysteries), all Abbott and his students have managed to do in eight years is essentially what Aussies super-codebreaker Eric Nave did in one day in 1949 (and without computers to help him). Hence I wouldn’t expect them to make any progress with the specifically cipher mystery side of this story any time soon.

Feltus

The California Sunday magazine piece also lays out Abbott’s bitter ongoing rivalry with former South Australian detective Gerry Feltus. Feltus, who retired back in 2004, considers Abbott a pest, and – I’m sure it’s there between the lines somewhere, but please correct me if I’m wrong – an annoying prick with it. Furthermore, though Gerry has never said such a thing to me, I’d be unsurprised if the phrase completion “…and Costello” looms large in his mind whenever he hears the Professor’s surname. Let’s face it, the Aussies really are masters of sledging, so Abbott’s surely bound to come out wet in any pissing contest.

The key difference between these two men’s appraches is plain to see. While Abbott knows exactly what family history he wants to prove and is willing to spend £100K of other people’s money (in Phase 1, and probably double that in the Phase 2 lined up in his mind) to do it, Gerry Feltus is the opposite: patient, meticulous, careful, and seemingly immune to theories. He thrives on the fuzz of doubt: and what he says and writes is all the better for it.

You also don’t have to look very deeply to contrast Abbott’s attempts to embrace the wonders of crowdfunding and Internet self-promotion with Feltus’s dislike for the Internet’s noisy troll-yappery. In many ways, Feltus’ book The Unknown Man is the epitome of doubt, care and patience: the two men may be united by the Somerton Man, but in every other aspect they really are chalk and cheese.

Yet in a way, this kind of starkly opposite pair of trenches isn’t a helpful part of their discourse: in my opinion, pure credulity and pure doubt are both inadequate methodologies for tackling something as historically complex as the Somerton Man.

And so it is for me that even though Abbott often comes across as though he is a scientist doing bad history, Feltus is still thinking too much like a detective, and not enough like an historian – and there’s a big difference.

For sure, Feltus’s overall approach is hugely better than Abbott’s: but – in my opinion – what differentiates the best historians is a driven willingness to choose just the right kind of a limb to go out on to help them find the key evidence they need, and I’m not sure Gerry – who I like, if you hadn’t worked that out by now – has yet developed that ability. (Abbott thinks he has, but he plainly hasn’t.)

The Lessons Of History

Oddly, the cipher mystery world has seen something similar to all this before, insofar as Abbott is trying to raise funding for what constitutes a full-frontal attack on the Somerton Man mystery. Argably the closest parallel is Colonel Fabyan’s Riverbank Labs from a century ago, that famously brought William Friedman and Elizebeth Friedman together. Yet the central point of what Fabyan was doing was to try to prove something that he firmly believed was an a priori truth: that the real genius behind all William Shakespeare’s fine words was none other than Francis Bacon.

Despite the fact that the whole exercise yielded good incidental results (though I would expect that the Friedman’s would have met and perhaps even married through Govermental crypto channels), Fabyan’s attempt to prove Bacon’s authorship was still a foolish thing to be trying to do.

Perhaps Abbott’s efforts will incidentally / accidentally yield secondary long-term benefits: it’s always possible. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t think he’s ultimately doing just as foolish-minded a thing as Fabyan was doing, back a century ago.

[*According to her family in a recent TV documentary*]

Pete Bowes has recently finished writing his Tamam Shud-themed novel The Bookmaker From Rabaul, a story carefully braided from the skein of loosely connected threads we like to call ‘historical evidence’. When published (in December 2015), it will feature all the Usual Suspectskis of the Somerton Man world – spies, intelligence, betrayal, death, ciphers, and so on – and, on Pete’s past form, should have a rich cast of angular characters doing some kind of crunchy dialogue thing.

But he doesn’t need me to crank out his book PR bullshit for him, he’s more than capable of doing that himself. 😉

What’s nibbling at my trouser cuffs today is the distinction between literary truth and historical truth: doubtless Pete’s book will aspire to the former with a healthy nod to the latter, and that’s basically OK for novelists.

Yet the practical problem with literary truth is that aspiring to it is simply a terrible way of doing history: and this is something that Pete, for all his justified mania for details and (more recently) timelines, doesn’t really seem to get.

Perhaps the crux of the matter comes down to the difference between ‘more plausible’ and ‘more probable’ (this is known as the Conjunction Fallacy, Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” gives some nice examples). In the case of the Somerton Man, literary truth aspires to narrative plausibility while historical truth aspires to genuinely higher probability.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, as an example a little closer to home (if you live in South Australia, that is), which of the following two claims would you say is more probable:

(a) The Somerton Man was killed by someone he knew
(b) The Somerton Man was killed by a lover he had spurned

?

Kahneman points out that because (b) implicitly contains (a) [i.e. “a lover he had spurned” is a subset of “someone he knew”], (a) is automatically more mathematically probable than (b). And yet many people would judge that (b) is more probable, largely (I think) because it has a certain ‘ring of truth’ to it. By its cautious language, (a) is a bit ‘colder’, a little less human: people have some kind of innate need for stories to embody human values, and so (a) doesn’t quite cut it.

In my opinion, it is specifically that ‘ring of truth’-ness that literary truth aspires to: and the quality of words and thoughts that sets (b) ahead of (a) boils down to its greater plausibility. But that doesn’t make (b) more true, it just makes it a rounder-sounding story.

Agencies, spies, microwriting, uranium at Mount Painter, poison, misdirection, tradecraft, plausible deniability, even Venona: all of these are real historical things. When taken together, they can indeed be arranged to tell a beguiling, plausible story. However, none of them yet connects with the Somerton Man in a way that an historian can genuinely work with: and because none of these individual details yet offers us anything approaching a genuine, probable history, putting them all together at the same time automatically tells a mathematically less probable story – for the more elements you conjoin into a single narratove, the lower the resulting probability goes. Sorry, but that’s just the way the numbers work: I’m just the messenger, me.

For what it’s worth, I remain quite certain that we will, in due course, find out exactly who the Somerton Man was and what precisely brought him to Somerton Beach on the last day of his life. But I also have no doubt that this will come not from assembling plausible narrative macro-hypotheses, but rather from doing historical research the hard way: forming micro-hypotheses about specific aspects of what happened and then painstakingly testing them against the archives.

Pete Bowes laughs when (for example) I wonder if the Somerton Man (with elevated zinc levels in his hair) might have been somehow connected with the zinc trade between Risdon and Port Adelaide; or when I wonder if the Somerton Man might have been connected with the person who sent Fred Pruszinski from Broken Hill to Somerton Beach carrying a rifle in a suitcase just a few days earlier. But that’s probably because even though Pete and I are walking along the same beach, I suspect we’re travelling in quite opposite directions.

A few months back, I asked the nice people at the National Archives of Australia if they could try to find some particular logbooks for 1948/1949 for the Howard Smith steamer S.S. Era (which I covered here at the beginning of the year).

The ever-Delphic Log of Logs said they should be there, but when I went a-looking, there was no matching record for the period we are interested in. To be precise, for the years 1930-1939, SP2/1 holds the logbooks, while SP290/2 covers 1940-1946: my guess (which proved to be correct) was that SP989/1 probably did hold the logs for 1948/1949 (but that they hadn’t yet been added to the database), so I asked the NAA to have a look for me.

Well, they found most of them in Sydney (which is really great), and have just this week added records to the NAA database (the easiest way to get to them is to click on RecordSearch, then “Advanced search for items”, and then search for the specific barcode).

* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 14/10/1947 to 27/4/1948, barcode 13642543
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 27/4/1948 to 9/11/1948, barcode 13642540
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 10/11/1948 to 30/3/1949, barcode 13642541
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 10/11/1949 to 29/3/1950, barcode 13642542

All of which may not tell us anything at all, of course: but incidental details studded through the logs may possibly help add an extra interesting dimension to our understanding of what was happening in Risdon at the time. 🙂

In the beautiful sunlight at Studland Bay’s Knoll Beach this morning, I suggested to my son that we build a sand sculpture together. But of what?

Naturally, I proposed that we make a man-sized Lego minifigure (because that would be cool), while he proposed that we carve ourselves a virtual Somerton Man. (That’s my boy!)

It should be no surprise that we ended up doing both at the same time – i.e. a life-size Somerton Man Lego minifigure sand sculpture – which was of course a lot of fun.

If you look closely, you can see his tie and a half-smoked cigarette dangling loosely from his yellow brick lips:

Is it art? No, but we had fun making it. I somehow doubt anyone on the beach realised what it was depicting, but who cares?

Anyway… later in the day, this whole thing sparked a much bigger idea in my sun-addled head. Why not hold a Virtual Somerton Man beach sculpture contest, so that everyone else has the possibility of showcasing their sand-based interpretations of this enduring South Australian mystery too?

So here it is: the 2015 Virtual Somerton Man Beach Sculpture Contest, which will run until 31st December 2015. Email me your pictures, or InstaTweetBookGram them (or whatever), but leave a comment here with a link to your masterpiece and I’ll collect them all together for a vote at the end of the year. I’ll try to track any #somertonman Tweets too, just in case a contestant is so technologically advanced that other forms of communication are too far below them. 🙂

For a bit of spice, I’m donating a non-virtual real-world prize: the winner (assuming anyone enters) will get not only their very own copy of Gerry Feltus’s excellent book The Unknown Man (on the Somerton Man mystery, if you couldn’t guess), but also a glorious victory to boast about forever!

So what are you waiting for? Get sculpting! 😉

For a lighter side to the Tamam Shud / Somerton Man case, you could (probably) do worse than Mose[le]y over to the Consbeeracy Theories Conspiracy Comedy Podcast site, where their latest episode is 009: Follow The 100° Proof Fence (Somerton Man).

The guys making the podcast clearly find each other hugely funny: though there are indeed a few good yoks in there (Tamam Shuda Cuda Wuda, etc), the closest they get to comedic historical insight is wondering why the dead man wasn’t wearing an “Australian Tie” (i.e. why he didn’t have vomit down his front having been poisoned). All in all, I get the feeling that their research train set out from Wikipedia, but never arrived at Feltusville.

All the same, it is (putting all their lazy stereotypes aside) a not-entirely-unpleasant contrast to the usual po-faced ‘battling theorists’ mushfest that gets posted: but just don’t expect to get to the end any wiser. 🙂 Enjoy!

Over the last couple of years, Australian researcher Gordon Cramer has been promoting (and indeed gaining a little media attention for) his various theories about the Somerton Man that he has patiently built up over the last four years: for example, that the dead man was a Cold War spy and that the Rubaiyat note contains microwriting.

Specifically, Gordon asserts that he can discern microwriting inside a number of the letters that were found on the back of the Rubaiyat, most notably the letter “Q”.

As I understand it, his claim is that even though the contrasty writing in the image (looks like it) was written in a laundry pen on a shiny surface (say, a print of a photograph), that overwriting process still managed to preserve the fine detail of the original microwriting additively within it: and that by using a carefully chosen sequence of image enhancement steps, he thinks he has been able to reconstruct that original microwriting.

I was sceptical of this claim for many reasons. For instance, it seems hugely likely to me that we can see a small part of the original writing that (one would hope) lies beneath the laundry pen marks…

…yet as far as I can see, there is no sign there of any microwriting. And if microwriting isn’t there, why should microwriting be anywhere else? But I digress. 🙂

More recently Gordon has, in response to questions from me, elucidated the experimental process he followed by which he believes he was able to make that microwriting visible. As a result, I have gone through the process of trying to understand and reproduce his results, and I’m posting here to explain what I found.

Here’s the original Q, cropped and rotated counterclockwise by 90 degrees but otherwise completely unchanged from the original scans:

We can, without much difficulty, directly pick out the set of grey levels in the image that make up the curve of the Q (that Gordon claims contains the microwriting): and if we adjust the image’s levels so that this range (12.5% to 50%) fills the entire 8-bit dynamic range, this is what we get:

Let’s now blur this (which is essentially what happens when you resize an image to be slightly smaller than 100%):

And then let’s sharpen it up again to try to bring out the detail that Gordon thinks is there:

Amazingly, we can now apparently see the word “SEGA” starting to coalesce out of the digital mists. Of course, the video games company SEGA (which started out as “Service Games”) only became known as “SEGA” in 1965 or so (it’s the first two letters of each word), so the actual chances of the Somerton Man having been a secret Sonic The Hedgehog fan are basically zero. Possibly even less.

Yet a number of other image processing experiments I carried out on the Q produced different results. All in all, while I can see how Gordon extracted some kind of microwriting from inside the Q, I also believe that he could have extracted any number of different messages from the same source image (with only slightly different image enhancement sequences), and that he could very likely have extracted plausible-looking microwriting from any sufficiently noisy source image.

In the Voynich Manuscript world, we have an extraordinarily close precedent for this whole thing: in the 1920s, Professor William Romaine Newbold used large prints of rotograph images, strong lighting and large magnification to extract what he believed to be microwriting – specifically Latin shorthand strokes. The intense effort of doing this seems to have sent Newbold to an early grave, followed by posthumous debunking to the point that he is now often cited as the worst possible way of doing cipher research: which is not a good end to any historical story.

Here, though, we have something that Newbold didn’t have: the possibility of better images. So rather than institute yet another dreary bout of back-and-forth comment tennis, why don’t we just see if we can get a higher-resolution (and higher bit-depth) scan of the photograph in the newspaper archive and see if we can work with that instead? If there is microwriting there, it should come out clearly. If there isn’t, it should vanish completely.

When dealing with the Somerton Man case, many people have a tendency to try to reduce it all to a story wrapped around an emotion (love, passion, jealousy, hurt, anger, loss, betrayal, etc) and/or a crime (plotting, deception, murder, suicide, etc).

But actually, these are mindsets that not only don’t help, but also get in the way: looking at the evidence with a clear head is a hard enough challenge on its own. In fact, I find getting to the point where I’m ready even to ask the right question to be a genuinely tough process, never mind reaching towards an answer.

So here’s today’s question…

Why was the “Tamam Shud” scrap of paper in the Somerton Man’s pocket at all?

After a lot of consideration, my starting points for answering this question are:
* I believe the Somerton Man placed it there himself (i.e. it was not planted there by someone after his death)
* I believe it was not random, accidental or coincidental (i.e. it seems to have been consciously and deliberately put in a hard to find place)
* I believe it was placed there for a rational reason (whatever that reason happens to be)
* I believe it had a specific extrinsic function – that is, it had value or meaning or use only in relation to someone or something else

So… why was it there, then?

Putting all this together, my current working hypothesis is that the “Tamam Shud” fragment was the Somerton Man’s physical proof that the Rubaiyat was linked to him, even though he had (apparently) not previously met the person who was in possession of that Rubaiyat.

So the two items when combined together form a paired identification proof mechanism: the Tamam Shud scrap was a token to prove his identity to someone he had not previously met, while the Rubaiyat was a token to prove the other party’s identification to him.

If this is right, we have a fairly small number of token-based mutual identification scenarios to consider, such as:

(1) Seller – Intermediary – Buyer
* The Seller tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat.
* The Seller gives the “Tamam Shud” to the Intermediary (the Somerton Man) and the Rubaiyat to the Buyer.
* The Intermediary meets the Buyer to collect money – possession of “Tamam Shud” token proves he was sent by the Seller.
* The Intermediary takes the money back to the Buyer.

(2) Seller – Messenger – Buyer
* The Seller (the Somerton Man in this scenario) tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat.
* The Seller gives the Rubaiyat to the Messenger to give to the Buyer (but keeps the “Tamam Shud”).
* The Seller meets the Buyer to collect money – possession of the two halves mutually prove each party’s identity.

(3) Buyer – Messenger – Seller
* The Buyer tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat
* The Buyer passes the “Tamam Shud” to the Seller via a Messenger
* The Buyer meets the Seller to collect money – possession of the two halves mutually prove each party’s identity.

Pete Bowes and Gordon Cramer seem to insist that this kind of behaviour is merely ‘tradecraft’, but I really don’t know if that’s a position that can yet be justified. All the same, there’s certainly a strong whiff of distrust and proof at play here: personally, I don’t yet know what to make of it all. But it is what it is.

Who was the 17-year-old boy from Broken Hill who dumped the suitcase with clothes and a rifle stock on Somerton Beach the weekend before the Somerton Man died there?

Commenter ‘Clive’ had had no luck with the Adelaide Court archives (in fact, Janey found out a few weeks ago that “all [Adelaide] Youth Court files prior to 1984 have been destroyed”), so decided to trawl through the Police Gazette. Luckily, what Clive found there was that “the youth, aged 17, was named as Frederick William Pruszinksi. He was fined 4 pounds and 10 pence for unlawful use of a car”.

Actually, it seems very likely to me that the youth’s name was Richard Frederick (“Freddie”) Arthur Pruszinski, of 247 Williams Street, Broken Hill: and we can trace many aspects of his (unfortunately) short life through Trove.

10 December 1945: Fred Pruszinski was in Class 2CP, and got “1st English (aeq.), 1st Technical Drawing (aeq.)”

29th November 1947: a relative (presumably?) was working on the mines but fell ill: “C. Pruszinski was taken to the Hospital and admitted after he had become ill at the Zinc Corporation. His condition last night was stated to be quite comfortable.” (He seems to have flown back from Melbourne on 4th January 1949.)

Despite his young age, Fred Pruszinski was a keen member of the Silver City Miniature Rifle Club: his first newspaper mention is from 8th March 1948, and by 20th August 1949 he was Honorary Secretary.

29th November 1949: his sister Eileen Patricia Pruszinski announced her engagement to “Harold, only son of Mr. and Mrs H. Payne, 608 Beryl Street”. They were married on 11th March 1950 at 9am:

Fine needlerun lace and misty tulle was chosen for the bride’s picturesque period gown, which she had made herself. Underlined with rich satin, the frock was made with a high round neckline and circular tulle yoke piped with satin and outlined with a soft frill, and the slender satin-piped waist line was met by a hooped crinoline skirt. The centre panel of soft tulle frills was edged each side with satin piped scallops caught with sprigs of orange blossom, and the skirt swept out into a graceful flowing train flnished with a deep tulle trill all around. A trail of orange blossom was caught across the back waistline above a shirred bustle of satin-lined lace, and her long peaked sleeves were buttoned to the elbow. A coronet of orange blossom backed with a frilled lace halo surmounted her frothy veil of six tiers of scalloped tulle, and she wore a double strand pearl necklace. […]

By 14th May 1951, Fred Pruszinski was shooting for West Broken Hill Rifle Club.

12th July 1951: “Failure to observe a halt sign at the intersection of Argent and Kaolin Streets cost Richard Pruszinski a fine of £2 and 10/ costs.” (Might have been Freddie or his father Dick, I don’t know).

8th January 1952: in an apparent change of direction, Fred Pruszinski passed an Engineman Driver’s Examination (“AC and DC”). By 1st July 1952, he had passed his Diesel examination too.

Yet sadly, he died suddenly at Morton Boolka creek on 7th March 1953, having shot a bird and tried to swim to get it, before falling into difficulties and drowning. (The Coroner subsequently ruled that his death was an accident, e.g. Barrier Miner, 31 Mar 1953.)

There were plenty of funeral notices: a typical description of Pruszinski’s funeral appeared in the Barrier Miner, 11th March 1953 edition:

The funeral of Mr. Richard Frederick Arthur Pruszinski took place yesterday afternoon. The cortege left his residence, 247 Williams Street, for the general cemetery. Envoy J. Crocker conducted a service at the grave. The bearers were: Messrs. D. Hargraves, K. Cook, P. Fitzgerald, D. Carlin, J. Heslop, and J. Hamilton. The following representatives were present: Mr. J. P. Fitzgerald <W.I.U. of A> Mr. L. Farrugia (Zinc Corporation Sickness Fund); Messrs. F. Anderson and J. Brownett (West Rifle Club).

He was buried in grave #214 at Broken Hill Cemetery, the same one as Richard Walter Pruszinski (1928-1934, presumably an older brother).

According to this, Pruszinski was born and educated in Broken Hill, and “was employed at the N.B.H.C. as a miner. He was a member of the W.I.U. of A., Zinc Sickness Fund, and the West Rifle Club”. This funeral notice lists his close friends: “DON PURCELL, DON HARGREAVES, DON CARLIN, KEVIN COOK, JOHN WINKLER and PAT FITZPATRICK”. (They were also his pallbearers). At the West Broken Hill Rifle Club, “the flags were flown at half-mast and members stood in silence in respect for late member F. Pruszinski.”

The two tenets of Intellectual History are that (a) (almost) all evidence is deposited in good faith, and that as a result (b) historians should, as their default position, accept that evidence in good faith too.

Yet for cases such as that of the Somerton Man, the jumbled fragments we have to work with appear oddly paradoxical and often contradictory. Can we fit every one of these resolutely square pegs into the uniformly round holes of a single narrative?

What I’m going to present here is an oddly inferential Somerton Man account, based on various difficult pieces of evidence that rarely get mentioned in Tamam Shud presentations, but which Intellectual Historians would surely advise us not to overlook.

20th November 1948 – Parafield

Gery Feltus reports that he has talked several times with the (even now anonymous) man in whose car the Rubaiyat with the torn end-page was found. The man specifically claimed that it had been left there around the time of the RAAF Air Display at Parafield – 20th November 1948.

However, because this seems ten days too early, Somerton Man researchers tend to dismiss it by asserting that the guy ‘must have’ misremembered that date. But staying with the Intellectual Historian methodology, I say: if that’s what the man said, let’s assume he was telling the truth.

It therefore seems likely to me that the Somerton Man was also in Adelaide ten or so days before he died, because the “Tamam Shud” torn from that copy ended up in one of his pockets.

Around 30th November 1948 – Glenelg

“An amazing coincidence was revealed […] when another Adelaide businessman called at police headquarters with a copy of the “Rubaiyat” which he had found in his motor car at Glenelg about the time the body was found. This book was a different edition.”

If we also take this very specific newspaper article where the above claim appears in good faith, we now have two different Rubaiyats being left in the back of two different cars in Glenelg in the second half of November 1948.

What can we infer from this hugely improbable coincidence? The only explanation I can think of as to why two copies of the same book would have been left in the backs of two strangers’ cars at roughly the same time is as a pre-arranged anonymous signal. Though spies knew this as a “dead drop”, criminals with more than a touch of paranoia used this too.

It therefore seems highly likely to me that this second (but barely ever mentioned) Rubaiyat was also directly involved in the sequence of events that led to the Somerton Man’s death.

30th November 1948 – Adelaide Railway Station

The Somerton Man buys a train ticket for Henley Beach, but does not use it. He then leaves his suitcase at the Left Luggage department at Adelaide Station between 11am and noon; then catches a bus towards Glenelg at around 11.15am, but gets off at Somerton.

When you put these three pieces together, I think the resulting implication is that he originally intended to meet someone in Henley Beach and leave his suitcase with them before going on to Somerton Beach; but that when this proved not possible or not desirable, he left that suitcase at the station and instead went straight to Somerton Beach on a bus instead.

(I originally proposed that this also meant that the person he was intending to meet in Henley Beach must therefore have owned or had access to a car or other vehicle: but Helen Ensikat notes that there may well have been a bus going South along the coast from there to Somerton Beach. If there was, then I agree with her that that coast road bus would be a more likely alternative scenario.)

1st December 1948 – Somerton Beach

The Somerton Man is found dead on Somerton Beach at around 6am. He has no hat, no id, no ration card, no wallet, and no money. His stomach contains traces of blood: yet there is no sign of vomit on his clothes or shoes or anywhere nearby.

The presence of blood implies that he would very probably have experienced convulsions and vomiting not long before his death. However, the absence of vomit implies that where he was found was not where he died.

The man’s body has a strong lividity at the back of his head: yet his body is found propped up.

This mismatch implies either (a) that he died right there on the beach but that his blood was prevented from pooling lower by some kind of blockage caused by the specific way he was laying (the theory espoused by Derek Abbott); or (b) that after he died, his body was left laid on its back for some time with his head tilted slightly backwards (i.e. making it the lowest point of his body) which was then carried to the beach and posed there as if he had died there.

While I concede that Derek’s (a) is conceivable, I contend that the evidence points strongly to (b).