clontaago
First Grader
MOST of us would like to think we live in "The Lucky Country". But crawl into the recesses and our history tells a different story. Journalist and author JACK MARX has spent years researching Australia’s underbelly, shining a light on the quirks, misfortunes and tragic turns of fate they wouldn’t dare tell you about in school.
So read on for our nation’s history, Marx-style, as he brings us the top ten darkest moments from his new book Australian Tragic.
Moloch See Picture Below.
While waiting at Circular Quay for a ferry to take them to Sydney's Luna Park on June 9, 1979, the Godson family are approached by a Satanic-looking figure dressed in a loincloth and wearing a mask with horns. The creature voicelessly places his hand on young Damian Godson's shoulder. Somebody snaps a photograph. It is the last photograph of the boy ever taken - hours later, Damian, his brother, Craig, and his father, John, will burn in the fire that sweeps through The Ghost Train. Nobody will ever see the horned man again.
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A Fork in the Road
One night in November, 1952, a young nurse from Queanbeyan lies dazed and injured on the side of a Canberra intersection, the wheels of a fallen motorcycle spinning, her boyfriend unconscious nearby. She begins to cry, fearing they will both die on this dark and lonely corner. A car approaches, she cries out, and breathes a sigh of relief as the vehicle slows. She cannot know that the man driving the vehicle has been drinking, and has just been released from prison for the attempted rape of his own sister...
Of Monkeys and Men
Many decades after the enigmatic Dr Henry Leighton Jones ended his experimental operations in the bushland around Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, builders excavating the site of the doctor's clinic are horrified when they unearth what appear to be the skeletal remains of so many children, huddled together in a common grave, as if cowering from some shared horror.
Joan of Antwerp
A priest has been called to a farm near the town of Antwerp in Victoria, where he has been told an exorcism has entered a difficult phase. Inside the house, he finds the body of Joan Vollmer decomposing in the bedroom, her fluids leaking into the bedclothes and onto the floor, while the three “exorcists†– including the dead woman's husband – are in the kitchen, in an extreme state of denial, fixing themselves some sandwiches. The priest politely declines their invitation that he join them for lunch.
A Day at the Races
James Larkins and his dog have been wandering in the Queensland outback for hours. James has been drinking for days, and his hangover is now baking under the intense midday sun. There is no water, no shade. Mad with thirst, he digs in the soil for water, but the earth is thirsty, too. He would do anything, he thinks, for any moisture at all. He looks at his dog. There is blood inside of her – a pint, maybe two. He takes out his pocket knife...
A Boat with No Name
Only weeks before, Amal had helped to deliver Alia's baby boy. Now, both women are in the sea, the baby floating between them, dead, the boat that was to ferry them to Australia having capsized and sank beneath the waves. Alia disappears into the deep, and the dead baby turns toward Amal, as if reaching out for the one who delivered him. Amal wishes him away, but the baby keeps drifting closer, needing her touch. Alia can stand no more and pushes the baby under, then turns and holds tightly to a dead woman who floats with her until the rescuers come.
Friday the Thirteenth
John Robinson has lain for hours in a clearing outside of his house as a bushfire has roared through the trees above him, the flames licking at his back. The inferno having past, he rises and goes in search of his four children, who ran for their lives when the house exploded. At last he finds them, on a dirt road that winds through the smoking landscape, their eyes closed and mouths open, as if they are merely asleep. In the terror, they have assumed the same positions in which they have always walked to school: two by two, descending by order of age – the same little arrangement that has ferried them safely to school for all their days.
What’s Eating Mrs Mousley?
On February 9, 1919, police are called to a mansion on Dandenong Road in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor. The occupant, old Mrs Mousley, has not been seen for days, and her neighbours are worried that she might have drunk herself into some kind of harm. As police force the door and cautiously move down the darkened hallway, their footsteps give rise to a ferocious trembling in the floorboards and walls as thousands of rats scuttle for subterranean safety. From the darkness of the living room comes a malevolent growl...
Voyage of the Savages
In 1883, a group Queensland Aborigines, mostly from Palm Island, are shanghaied to the other side of the world to take part P. T. Barnum's 'Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes'. While touring Europe, the troupe are invited to visit the Royal Museum of Berlin, and their mood becomes buoyant as they identify various boomerangs, message sticks and other Aboriginal artifacts on display. They turn a corner to be greeted by the sight of a stuffed and mummified Aborigine, ferried to the museum all the way from Queensland...
The Last Troops
On the morning of November 16, the HMAT Boonah, the last Australian troop ship to leave for the great war, arrives in the South African port of Durban to momentous news: an armistice has been signed. The war is over, and the lives of the young Australian troops aboard are to be spared. Before returning home to the West Australian port of Fremantle, the Boonah takes on supplies, and soldiers notice that some local stevedores appear to be sick. What nobody knows is that the stevedores are infected with the dreaded Spanish Flu, a pandemic that had already claimed millions of lives in Europe and America. The last troops to die for Australia in the Great War will never fire a shot.
So read on for our nation’s history, Marx-style, as he brings us the top ten darkest moments from his new book Australian Tragic.
Moloch See Picture Below.
While waiting at Circular Quay for a ferry to take them to Sydney's Luna Park on June 9, 1979, the Godson family are approached by a Satanic-looking figure dressed in a loincloth and wearing a mask with horns. The creature voicelessly places his hand on young Damian Godson's shoulder. Somebody snaps a photograph. It is the last photograph of the boy ever taken - hours later, Damian, his brother, Craig, and his father, John, will burn in the fire that sweeps through The Ghost Train. Nobody will ever see the horned man again.
Â
A Fork in the Road
One night in November, 1952, a young nurse from Queanbeyan lies dazed and injured on the side of a Canberra intersection, the wheels of a fallen motorcycle spinning, her boyfriend unconscious nearby. She begins to cry, fearing they will both die on this dark and lonely corner. A car approaches, she cries out, and breathes a sigh of relief as the vehicle slows. She cannot know that the man driving the vehicle has been drinking, and has just been released from prison for the attempted rape of his own sister...
Of Monkeys and Men
Many decades after the enigmatic Dr Henry Leighton Jones ended his experimental operations in the bushland around Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, builders excavating the site of the doctor's clinic are horrified when they unearth what appear to be the skeletal remains of so many children, huddled together in a common grave, as if cowering from some shared horror.
Joan of Antwerp
A priest has been called to a farm near the town of Antwerp in Victoria, where he has been told an exorcism has entered a difficult phase. Inside the house, he finds the body of Joan Vollmer decomposing in the bedroom, her fluids leaking into the bedclothes and onto the floor, while the three “exorcists†– including the dead woman's husband – are in the kitchen, in an extreme state of denial, fixing themselves some sandwiches. The priest politely declines their invitation that he join them for lunch.
A Day at the Races
James Larkins and his dog have been wandering in the Queensland outback for hours. James has been drinking for days, and his hangover is now baking under the intense midday sun. There is no water, no shade. Mad with thirst, he digs in the soil for water, but the earth is thirsty, too. He would do anything, he thinks, for any moisture at all. He looks at his dog. There is blood inside of her – a pint, maybe two. He takes out his pocket knife...
A Boat with No Name
Only weeks before, Amal had helped to deliver Alia's baby boy. Now, both women are in the sea, the baby floating between them, dead, the boat that was to ferry them to Australia having capsized and sank beneath the waves. Alia disappears into the deep, and the dead baby turns toward Amal, as if reaching out for the one who delivered him. Amal wishes him away, but the baby keeps drifting closer, needing her touch. Alia can stand no more and pushes the baby under, then turns and holds tightly to a dead woman who floats with her until the rescuers come.
Friday the Thirteenth
John Robinson has lain for hours in a clearing outside of his house as a bushfire has roared through the trees above him, the flames licking at his back. The inferno having past, he rises and goes in search of his four children, who ran for their lives when the house exploded. At last he finds them, on a dirt road that winds through the smoking landscape, their eyes closed and mouths open, as if they are merely asleep. In the terror, they have assumed the same positions in which they have always walked to school: two by two, descending by order of age – the same little arrangement that has ferried them safely to school for all their days.
What’s Eating Mrs Mousley?
On February 9, 1919, police are called to a mansion on Dandenong Road in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor. The occupant, old Mrs Mousley, has not been seen for days, and her neighbours are worried that she might have drunk herself into some kind of harm. As police force the door and cautiously move down the darkened hallway, their footsteps give rise to a ferocious trembling in the floorboards and walls as thousands of rats scuttle for subterranean safety. From the darkness of the living room comes a malevolent growl...
Voyage of the Savages
In 1883, a group Queensland Aborigines, mostly from Palm Island, are shanghaied to the other side of the world to take part P. T. Barnum's 'Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes'. While touring Europe, the troupe are invited to visit the Royal Museum of Berlin, and their mood becomes buoyant as they identify various boomerangs, message sticks and other Aboriginal artifacts on display. They turn a corner to be greeted by the sight of a stuffed and mummified Aborigine, ferried to the museum all the way from Queensland...
The Last Troops
On the morning of November 16, the HMAT Boonah, the last Australian troop ship to leave for the great war, arrives in the South African port of Durban to momentous news: an armistice has been signed. The war is over, and the lives of the young Australian troops aboard are to be spared. Before returning home to the West Australian port of Fremantle, the Boonah takes on supplies, and soldiers notice that some local stevedores appear to be sick. What nobody knows is that the stevedores are infected with the dreaded Spanish Flu, a pandemic that had already claimed millions of lives in Europe and America. The last troops to die for Australia in the Great War will never fire a shot.
