The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  I did learn several things of interest: that Dalkeith’s leafy streets were named after graceful racing yachts, Circe, Genesta, Viking, Adelma, Nardina, Curlew, Minora, Iris and Beatrice, which had sailed the river early in the century; that the main street had been named after another elegant yacht, Westana. And that, in 1924, a taxi driver, John O’Neil, had been murdered in his Buick cab in Westana Road, ‘his head smashed with a heavy instrument until the brain was exposed’, and his body dumped in the river at Crawley Bay.

  This was news to me. For the apparently motiveless murder, a twenty-four-year-old socialite, George Auburn, had been tried and convicted. Auburn escaped hanging ‘because of his youth’. As the Mirror pointed out, such an age had never deterred the authorities from execution before. In fact, it was the average age for murderers at time of execution. The Mirror hinted that Auburn’s ‘important connections’ had pulled strings.

  For twenty days the trial excited the newspapers (Most Momentous Murder Case in Our History!). The notoriety greatly concerned Dalkeith’s residents and real estate agents. Alarmed at the prospect of falling land values, they moved swiftly to change the street’s name. Westana Road became Waratah Avenue. Westana Road and its murder – Dalkeith’s bad name – were erased so completely from the public memory that they might never have been.

  Learning about the old murder was vaguely exciting. But discovering the main street of my childhood was a re-creation made me feel odd.

  Waratah Avenue was the home of Mr Palmer’s cinema, the comic-book racks of the newsagent, the Dutch lady baker, the 202 bus route and Eller’s Store, which had allowed me to help weigh and pack potatoes into one-stone bags and to deliver groceries, my wage being a piece of cheese, an apple or those Animals of the World swap cards which had worked loose from Weeties and Vita Brits cereal wrappers. Waratah Avenue had been the central thoroughfare in my life. Now it was revealed as a bit of commercial sleight of hand. The street suddenly seemed as false as a movie set.

  And it wasn’t the only spot on Dalkeith’s reputation. In the files I discovered another violent murder. This one rang a bell. It was the one Nick Howell had heard about from his mother.

  It went back to the suburb’s beginnings in 1833 as a land grant to a Scottish settler, Adam Armstrong. He’d already been given land on the Murray River, a hundred miles south of Perth, but the farm’s isolation and ‘the aggression of the natives’ had forced him back to town. So on a bend in the Swan River five miles from Perth, where the Aborigines were detribalised and more docile, he took up another grant – of three hundred and fifty acres – instead.

  By 1838, with the Murray River Aborigines decimated in the Battle of Pinjarra, Armstrong decided to return there. By then Dalkeith Farm – named after his old home near Edinburgh – was well established, its market garden on the riverbank raising grapes, goats and vegetables. As his For Sale advertisements pointed out: ‘Its celebrity for Melons is notorious. As a goat run, it is not surpassed by any in the Colony.’

  The property passed into the hands of James Gallop and his son James Jr. For the rest of the century the family developed the fruit and vegetable gardens until they stretched for a mile along the riverbank and were the showpiece of the colony. The farm was still isolated from any roads, and access by land was difficult, but in summer the beauty of the gardens attracted boatloads of weekend sightseers and picnickers. The Gallops supplied Perth, Fremantle and the goldfields with plantains, grapes, quinces, apples, figs, mulberries, peaches, pomegranates, currants, watermelons, rockmelons and sugar cane. Fifty tons of grapes were cut each year.

  Above the thriving farm and its rare, rich patch of darker soil, situated on a dune of yellow sand at the edge of the bush track which would later become Westana Road (and still later be changed by a taxi driver’s murder into Waratah Avenue), there was for more than fifty years a native camp.

  The Gallops employed Aborigines from the camp to bang kerosene tins to keep the birds off their ripening fruit. They also armed two of them with guns to shoot the little birds called silvereyes which had developed a fondness for grapes. The men were skilled shots. Despite the small size of the silver-eyes, thousands of them were shot each year. One year, the Gallops noted with satisfaction, the Aborigines had killed eight thousand five hundred silvereyes.

  When the head gardener’s young wife disappeared and a police search for her was unsuccessful, black trackers from the camp were called in to look for her. They found her some distance from the house, chopped to death with an axe. The murderer was never discovered.

  In 1920 the old Gallop estate was sold. By then the gardens were overgrown, gone to seed or eaten by birds. The dunes gradually drifted over the vines. The government bought the river frontage for future public recreation and the rest was subdivided into two hundred and thirty-one suburban lots. New streets were named after graceful racing yachts. The blacks’ camp was knocked down and the people shooed off.

  At last I had something reasonably juicy on Dalkeith. But when I showed this material to Jack Morrison, he passed it back, saying, ‘Where’s the angle, where’s the peg?’ He was frowning when he said it. Then he took a deep breath and said it was very interesting ancient history. It would be terrific background if someone was murdered in the same place in the same way tomorrow.

  I went back to interviewing twelve-year-old eisteddfod prodigies and fencers and table-tennis players who’d made it as far as the semi-finals in Eastern States competitions. I listened to go-karting administrators griping that horseracing, football and cricket got all the prime real estate as well as press coverage. On Monday mornings I hid in the toilet to avoid Mrs Knopp and her croquet epics. I went back on the road.

  It was frustrating. I was desperate to cover real news, yet while I was stuck on eisteddfods-and-shitfights Perth suddenly abounded in big, glamorous stories. According to Premier Dave Brand, the eyes of the world were on us.

  Not only was Perth hosting the Commonwealth Games but, more importantly, we had just been dubbed the City of Light. This accolade from the New York Journal-American came after the astronaut John Glenn publicly thanked us as he spun overhead in his Mercury capsule. As the West Australian’s headline summed up the historic space flight:

  Glenn Orbits Earth,

  Says Thanks to Perth.

  Despite the scoffing of the sceptics, including our Lord Mayor Harry Howard, who said Colonel Glenn would never see them from one hundred and fifty miles up, we left all our lights on all night in honour of John Glenn and the United States space programme – and he saw them. He spotted the tiny glow on the south-west tip of the great black southern continent. ‘I can see lights on the ground,’ he said. ‘I can see the lights of Perth on the coast. Thanks everyone for turning on the lights.’

  With the City of Light shimmering in the news, some local boosters even pushed for Perth’s name to be officially changed to the City of Light. One canny businessman at the pet-rock end of capitalism made a killing by selling sealed, empty tins labelled Guaranteed Air from the City of Light. They gave people a giggle. My father bought a dozen cans of air and gave them away to bigshots visiting from Melbourne.

  In this newsy climate eisteddfods-and-shitfights languished even more than usual. But I found one compensation in my beat. Graylands Teachers’ College, where Ruth was now studying, was right in the middle of my supplement’s area, situated between the Claremont Mental Hospital and the Graylands Migrant Hostel.

  The nuns’ fears had been realised. With actual personal contact Ruth and I had grown closer. I thought she was warm, attractive and intelligent. She liked philosophical conversations about religion and films and current affairs. I began a routine of borrowing the Renault to do my reporting rounds, picking up Ruth after her lectures, and parking for an hour or two, before driving her home to South Perth, where she now lived, and then parking some more.

  I more or less convinced myself I was out on the road. What was parking if not a form of reconnoitring? Movie private eyes did it
all the time. The eisteddfod-prodigy mothers and croquet administrators couldn’t reach me, and if hard news broke, I told myself, I’d be handily positioned. If a lunatic escaped from the asylum or a shell-shocked refugee went on a hunger strike or set himself alight, I’d be on the spot.

  Maybe they did. Madmen and smouldering migrants could have been swarming around us on a daily basis. We were too busy fogging up the Renault’s windows to notice. At Cottesloe, Crawley Bay, King’s Park, the South Perth riverfront and the Lakeway drive-in we became such accomplished parkers, dexterously maximising cabin space and avoiding handbrake and gearstick, that we were distracted only once, when a peeping tom boldly peered into the car window one night in South Perth.

  By then we were bolder, too. There was more to see this time. When the voyeur showed no sign of moving off, we sounded the horn at him and, laughing nervously, covered ourselves and accelerated away.

  2

  SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (II)

  He was peering down into the Swan River from the crown of the bridge and remembering his younger self down there swimming the Narrows with his oatmeal sports jacket gripped to his chest. He was remembering swimming the river before the bridge was built in ’59 and recalling things that had happened before and after. He relived every stroke across the river.

  He’d calmed down now. Standing there at the rail waiting for the cars to pass, facing east into the breeze, steadying his mind and getting his focus back, he could smell the inland bush and desert, that gravelly eucalypt dryness wafting over the ranges and over the river and out to sea. His people were from the country once upon a time. The York district. Three York generations before his old man, before Snowy, and all of them dust-and-stubble farmers, bad drunks and wife-beaters, Great-grandma Cooke dying suspiciously back then but not enough evidence to put Pa on a charge. So his mother said the time she left and got the legal separation through the courts and changed back to her maiden name. Miss Erica Edgar, a funny name for a mother. It’s in the blood, she said, the drink, the violence, the chaos.

  And then went back to him! Returned to Snowy, drunk all the time and hating him from the day he was born. If you think I’m going to keep that misfit all my life you’ve got another think coming! Banging his head on the wall. Talk properly, Uglymouth!

  Anyway, he had bad memories of the country. The country was boredom, booze, car prangs and women who changed their minds when it came to the crunch. He’d known country women, chased a few, and they were trouble. He was more a city boy, a suburban boy. A Saturday-night boy who knew his way around.

  Saturday nights had certainly changed since his river-swimming days, he thought, waiting for a lone north-bound car to come off the Kwinana expressway, pass over the bridge and disappear into the freeway roundabout. He couldn’t take any chances. He still had on his gloves (ladies’ best kid), as he stood at the rail facing the city, a bigger, brighter city now, with a couple of new skyscrapers thrusting self-consciously from the sand flats of the river basin.

  He felt its growing power in his own arms and shoulders, a pride in his control of his surroundings. Wasn’t he the cat among the pigeons! He could hardly wait to see the paper. He hadn’t felt so in command since the Boan’s fire, the robbery-arson. When was that – oh, years ago. When he was just a kid. Even if the feeling lasted only the five minutes he’d squatted on the railway-station bench opposite with an old hungover Aboriginal bloke, drinking a bottle of Passiona and watching the smoke pouring under the department store’s doors into Wellington Street, seeing the fire trucks arrive, the firemen buzzing around like blue-arsed flies.

  He’d heard they always rounded up the onlookers at an arson, checked who was getting the biggest kick out of it, so he’d run home then to his grandparents’ place before the cops arrived. Hid the money under the bed. But he’d left fingerprints on things inside. On glass counters, the cash registers. On things not even singed. They looked him up from his other thievings. At least the Boan’s business had taught him to wear gloves in future. Always.

  He was quite calm now, thinking things carefully through. Again he checked all the approaching bridge lanes for traffic. They were clear. So this particular hectic Saturday night in Cottesloe and Nedlands having come to its natural conclusion, he memorised the number stencilled on the bridge’s nearest light stanchion, No. 324. (Was there any point in doing so? Just the pride he took in his memory. He still remembered where he’d thrown the skin-diving knife in the river after the Berkman woman in ’59.)

  Then he took the rifle out of its newspaper wrapping and threw it overarm into the glowing river.

  3

  THE FULL MOON CLICHÉ

  One Monday morning the headlines in the West Australian jumped right out at me. The lead story. The photographs. John Sturkey was dead. He’d been murdered in his bed. He’d been shot in the head. So had two others.

  How could this be? The story was jagged, senseless. Sturkey? Funny, good-natured Sturkey. He was alive in my mind sauntering along St George’s Terrace. I was waiting for the bus the week before, on my way to see Ruth, leaning against the Government House fence as he strolled by. We talked for a while and he asked after her. He was leaving soon for the East to study veterinary science on a scholarship from the Department of Agriculture. He had a year of straight science under his belt but there was no veterinary school in Perth. He was on his way to pick up his train ticket. I wished him good luck and we shook hands.

  Before he walked off down the Terrace he said something that made me feel strangely pleased. I took it to mean he was having to leave his girlfriend behind and that he envied my romantic situation. ‘Lucky bugger,’ he said. As he strolled off he seemed debonair.

  Eventually the blur of typefaces cleared and I took in the words. I took in the police version of events, the Press artist’s map of the area with its addresses and times of shootings and the dotted lines linking the shooting sites in Cottesloe and Nedlands. I pictured the panic at the paper on the Sunday and I imagined Ralph Wheatley coming into work on his day off to write the story.

  The story said that around two a.m. that hot Saturday night, the night of Australia Day – actually early Sunday – a man had been spying on a couple in a parked car in Cottesloe. They became annoyed at him watching them and threw an empty beer bottle at him, whereupon he drew a rifle, aimed at the man in the driver’s seat and fired. The woman shouted at her partner to duck and pushed his head down and saved his life. He was struck in the neck, and she in the forearm, and they drove off, very fast and erratically, to Fremantle Hospital.

  Then the voyeur-gunman had climbed into a block of flats nearby and shot a young accountant, Brian Weir, in the head at close range while he slept. He’d then driven three miles to Nedlands, prowled through a couple of properties before he spotted John Sturkey asleep on his boarding-house veranda, and shot him in the head from two feet away. He’d walked calmly into the next street, ejecting the spent shell as he went, rung a random doorbell, taken a bead on the sleepy person turning on the light, and shot George Walmsley, a retired grocer, as he opened his front door.

  It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Sturkey and Walmsley were dead, Weir brain-damaged and not expected to live. The victims hadn’t known each other. The police had no suspect, no motives and no weapon, although the cartridge cases they had recovered showed the same .22 rifle had been used in all the shootings.

  Over the next few days the police followed false trails all over the State. The Police Commissioner, Jim O’Brien, said these killings had nothing to do with the murders of the sleeping women, Patricia Berkman in South Perth and Jillian Brewer in Cottesloe. He reminded reporters that those were, respectively, a knife and a hatchet murder. And the victims, of course, were young women. And they had a conviction for one of them.

  In their awe and fear of the mysterious killer, people could speak of little else. The mystified police appeared helpless and confused. Indignant letters-to-the-editor writers demanded they ask the FBI and Scotland Y
ard to step in. Locksmiths and gun shops did a thriving trade. Dogs’ homes sold out of watchdogs. Meanwhile, the papers aired increasingly bizarre theories about the ‘maniac slayer’. Soon nut cases were coming out of the woodwork and confessing to the murders. Everyone kept noting that the shootings had taken place during a full moon.

  The murder scenes were all in my supplement’s zone of operation – though not, of course, in my journalistic territory. A couple of days after the shootings I drove past Sturkey’s boarding house at 54 Vincent Street, then drove around the block and cruised past the Walmsley house at 51 Louise Street. For a week I found myself driving past the houses every day. I knew it was macabre but I couldn’t help it. I was more than curious; I was compelled.

  I expected the murder scenes to be bustling with police activity, but I didn’t spot any. When I saw those sedate, single-storey, middle-class houses, typical grandparents’ homes, my heart lurched. Over the years I’d passed them hundreds of times by day, and at night hurrying home from the Claremont dance, ordinary ‘Californian’ bungalows in the faded nineteen-twenties style of our old house in Leon Road. They looked elderly and vulnerable, as if small boys running around them would make cracks appear and sand run down their walls.

  The murders immediately changed the spirit of the place. They chilled the warm shadows of the peppermint and box trees and flowering gums lining the streets. The slightly crumbly lines of the brick and limestone houses, the cosy-looking fake-Tudor apartment blocks and shopfronts along Stirling Highway, had a sharper, harsher edge. Their facades looked stony and closed. People’s eyes flicked away as they hurried indoors or into their cars.