by Sue Williams
They agreed they’d had enough of the Barossa, and decided to turn left. If they’d turned right, they might have driven through increasingly bleak and inhospitable countryside, out to Sedan. There they might even have passed Bradley Murdoch en route to or from his southern hideaway on a drug deal and waved innocently to him as their vehicles passed. But their wave may not have been returned — Murdoch had as little time for tourists as he had for blackfellas. And the long road trips and the uppers and downers that fuelled them were starting to play tricks with his mind.
CHAPTER TEN
THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN
SHE WAS PRETTY, SHE WAS twenty-two and she was driving the 2700 kilometres from Perth to Adelaide alone when she encountered Bradley Murdoch. It was a dark night on Tuesday 19 June 2001, and as the young woman’s Suzuki Vitara was overtaken by a white traytop Toyota Landcruiser, she waved, then tucked in behind to follow the light its large spotlights were throwing on the dark road ahead. By that time, the softly-spoken brunette had drunk a couple of six-packs of beer, and was feeling sociable. When she stopped for petrol at the start of the Nullarbor desert, near Caiguna, 350 kilometres before the WA–SA border, and found the other driver had also pulled up, she suggested they do the rest of the journey together. He readily agreed, and they introduced themselves.
Murdoch was now sporting a grey Mexican-style moustache that came down over the sides of his mouth, and he suggested they meet up at the next truck stop for a beer. They were both on one of longest, straightest stretches of road in the world, and while following someone else’s tail lights at night might be boring, it was still better than driving alone in a place where the greatest hazards come from kangaroos, wallabies and feral camels, or worse, other drivers falling asleep at the wheel. The woman, Julie McPhail was tall and slim with long hair curling down past her shoulders, framing an attractive heart-shaped face. She seemed sweet and innocent, but in fact was worldly beyond her years. She had been working as a barmaid in a bikies club in Broome run by the infamous Coffin Cheaters gang and she and Murdoch knew many of the same people. They also both liked to drink and take drugs as they drove.
BUSINESS HAD BEEN GOING WELL and Bradley Murdoch was feeling happy and relaxed. He didn’t mind the long journeys of his business with James Hepi, and loved to feel the power of his well-equipped vehicle beneath him. His friend and part-time employer Brett Duthie knew it too. ‘Basically, Brad’s car or vehicle was his home, he had everything in it,’ he says. ‘If he was required to go camping for work, he had everything on him.’ He even had a pair of clippers, so he could cut his own hair and moustache when necessary. Occasionally, though, company on the road was welcome. Once, he’d taken his friend Darryl ‘Dags’ Cragan along for the ride, an old childhood friend from Northampton who’d been badly burnt as a kid when he fell in a fire, and who sometimes had trouble finding work. Cragan regularly helped out with odd jobs, but Murdoch sacked him in Broome in September 2000 when they argued about Cragan’s habit of injecting himself with speed. Murdoch gave him $3000 and told him to get out. A more regular travelling companion was Brian ‘The Sheriff’ Johnston who says he was recruited to help through an ad in the newspaper. Johnston did three trips with him, and helped him out with various tasks, including buying a red fire extinguisher and fixing it onto the back post of his Landcruiser by the passenger seat with cable ties. Johnston knew Murdoch carried a.38 revolver in his ute, inside a panel in the driver’s door, but it didn’t seem to bother him; he’d stayed at the Broome flat for a couple of months and said he’d seen James Hepi playing with Murdoch’s Magnum 357 in the lounge. Johnston also knew Murdoch bought a prepaid sim card in Adelaide for his mobile phone so he wouldn’t have a phone bill in his name, but he was still surprised to see Murdoch take it out of the phone on long trips. ‘He reckoned you could track a mobile if it had a sim card in it,’ says Johnston. The long-term use of amphetamines, of course, is known to make people paranoid.
Another time, Hepi’s girlfriend, Rachel Maxwell, accompanied Murdoch on one of his trips. She liked him. ‘He talked slow, not dumb slow, but like he was thinking,’ she says. His ute was comfortable too. He and Hepi had fixed up a hose for a shower with cable ties and black tape. One day at their place, she walked in to see Murdoch and Hepi at the table with a gun with a wooden handle and a silver barrel. ‘Like an old gun,’ she says ‘that John Wayne would have used.’
IN LATE JUNE 2001, MURDOCH had been driving on his own, however, so he welcomed the chance to pull in to have a drink and a chat with the woman who’d been driving behind him. On one stop, he even gave McPhail a line of speed and may have given her a joint — she can’t quite remember — before the pair set off again. At each of their stops, they’d drink more beer, do another line of speed, sometimes some cannabis, and chat for a while longer. When they took to the road, she was careful to ride behind him and not beside him on the double-lane highway. That would have been dangerous, she would later blithely tell a court in Darwin, apparently not realising that drinking vast quantities of alcohol, consuming speed and smoking cannabis might also be viewed by some as more than a little hazardous when driving long distances. At one point, McPhail mentioned she needed a rest. Murdoch recommended they stop for a few hours at the Head of Bight, 200 kilometres past the border along the 65-metre high Bunda Cliffs, a popular whale-watching spot. When they arrived, they parked their cars together to provide room between to sleep. She unrolled her swag and laid it out on a flat rock; Murdoch went to sleep on the mattress in the back of his ute, his dog Jack by his side.
Just before dawn, McPhail was woken by Murdoch offering her coffee, and the pair soon set off again. They stopped at a roadhouse for a shower but, far more often, they stopped to drink and take more drugs. When the woman stopped to withdraw $180 and check her bank balance at Ceduna, on the shores of Murat Bay and the first sign of civilisation since the long drive across the Nullarbor, Murdoch waited for her further up the road. Earlier, she’d remarked that she was on the lookout for a small ladies’ revolver, a nice one, preferably with a mother-of-pearl handle. Now, Murdoch took a small revolver out of his car and asked if she’d be interested in buying it. He also offered to let her fire it. His behaviour was impeccable: he’d given her beer, cannabis, speed and now a gun. ‘He was a complete gentleman,’ McPhail says today without a trace of irony.
Nevertheless, she declined to try out the gun and, instead, Murdoch fired a round of bullets into the bush.
MURDOCH WAS, OF COURSE, A dab hand with guns, having been fascinated with them since those childhood rabbiting expeditions. Now, he had at least two besides the one he’d brought out to show the woman. James Hepi says Murdoch owned a big revolver, a Magnum 357, as well as a lighter, smaller revolver, a .22. Hepi had fired the 357 on a fishing trip up at the Fitzroy River, and the .22 on his block at Sedan, shooting at cans arranged on a fence. Murdoch usually wore a gun in his dark-coloured, leather body holster, or kept one in his car.
His demonstration of one of his guns on the lonely highway, however, spooked McPhail and she began feeling uneasy. ‘I didn’t feel very comfortable there at all,’ she says. ‘I kind of wanted to get back in my car. We parted ways at Port Augusta … He told me he was heading off to the Riverland. I said, “If you come into Adelaide, give me a call.” I gave him my number.’
She did, however, leave him with another parting shot. ‘If you go back through the centre, you must stop at Barrow Creek. I spent some time there and know the publican there, Les Pilton.’ She told him it was a great place.
He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I might do that,’ he replied.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LONG ROAD NORTH
WHEN PETER FALCONIO AND JOANNE LEES finally hit the long road north, they breathed sighs of relief. They were on the last leg of their long journey around Australia, with perhaps its greatest wonders just over the horizon. The 3000 kilometre Stuart Highway was, up until 1980, mainly a dirt surface which could be washed away by the heavy rains
that struck at certain times of the year. Today, it’s a sealed two-lane highway stretching from Adelaide to Darwin. Named after the Scot John McDouall Stuart, who was the first person to cross the continent from north to south in the early 1860s in preparation for the Overland Telegraph Line, the road passes through Alice Springs and the sacred Aboriginal site of Uluru, or Ayers Rock. At its start, it heads north between Gulf St Vincent and Spencer Gulf and, just 142 kilometres out of Adelaide, swerves past the pretty little town of Snowtown nestling in the flat farmland, with its wide roads, neat stores, chocolate-box houses and population of just 520. It had always been considered a peaceful rural backwater but, at the time that Peter and Joanne passed through, it had become the centre of intense worldwide interest.
In May 1999, police investigating a routine missing persons case had forced their way into the disused local branch of the State Bank of SA, an unassuming single-storey redbrick building on the main street, and found six barrels behind the thick steel doors of the vault containing hydrochloric acid and human body parts, including fifteen feet from eight different people. Further searches closer to Adelaide unearthed three more victims. Subsequently, four men were arrested and, during their ‘bodies-in-a-barrel’ trials, police alleged John Bunting and Robert Wagner had launched a cold-blooded campaign to kill suspected homosexuals and paedophiles, cutting their bodies into pieces and keeping them as rotting trophies. ‘The stench was unbearable,’ said Detective Steve McCoy, one of the chief witnesses in the trial. ‘It was putrid. It permeated your hair, clothing, everything. It was horrific.’ Bunting was found guilty of eleven murders and Wagner seven, making them the worst serial killers in Australia’s history.
From Snowtown, the road passes through Port Pirie and its lead smelter, and then past the oceans of dusty green spinifex up to the large sprawling port city of Port Augusta. To the east, the great granite folds of the Flinders Ranges tower up from the flat plains and to the west, dry salt lakes sprawl and the long, long road across the Nullarbor starts its journey to WA, while north lie the great scrubby plains of the desert. Many travellers use the town, particularly the giant Woolworths supermarket at its centre, to stock up before the long drives north or west. Bradley Murdoch knew it well.
Peter and Joanne, however, were eager to push on. The Kombi seemed slow and lumbering against the vast distances between the places of interest along the road. To kill time, they played music and chatted. Peter smoked as he drove, and both drank Coke to keep alert. It was all too easy, particularly when driving into the sun, feeling warm and drowsy with the rhythm of the never-ending road, to let your eyes close.
THE NEXT BIG AREA, WOOMERA, was a familiar name to anyone who’d spent any time in Australia. Britain had needed a large remote area to test new weapons systems after World War II, and had chosen the vast empty spaces out from Woomera, in conjunction with Australia, to use as a rocket range and missile testing program during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Further to the west lies Maralinga, the sacred lands of the Tjarutja Aboriginal people which were confiscated by the British Government, again with the support of Australia, to carry out nuclear testing between 1952 and 1963. A number of military personnel there were used in callous radiation experiments to test the effects of fall-out, and many of the Aboriginal people who remained in the testing range, unaware of the risks, were badly affected.
But at the time Peter and Joanne passed through, Woomera was better known as the home of the most notorious, and largest, detention camp for asylum-seekers in Australia. In stark contrast with the pleasant green town itself, the camp on its outskirts was desolate. Surrounded by double steel fences with two layers of razor wire, it had been the site of riots, hunger strikes, suicide attempts and escapes since its opening in 1999. Asylum-seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom were declared by Amnesty International to be genuine refugees, were housed in old military barracks with few facilities and minimal access to legal representation. Protests included inmates sewing their own lips together as a symbol of how they felt ignored, and unheard, by the outside world.
It wasn’t a nice place at all, and Peter and Joanne continued quickly north, stopping off at the odd town along the way to buy provisions and mostly sleeping in the Kombi at night. Occasionally they’d go to a proper campground where they could get a good shower and mains electricity and would then either cook at the van, or find somewhere to eat nearby. There were long periods of nothing between stops, and they’d take turns to lie in the back and read. Often they’d discover that they’d driven through places marked on the map, before realising that a few broken-down old cars parked on wasteground and a huddle of houses with corrugated metal roofs and fences were actually called towns.
COOBER PEDY, 848 KILOMETRES NORTH of Adelaide, was yet another shock. A well-known centre for opal mining, the pair expected an established town with the usual range of facilities. Instead, it turned out to be in the middle of some of the most desolate and harsh countryside they’d ever seen and, with all the piles of grey dusty diggings from each of the thousands of little mines standing in peaks forlornly beside them, it looked like some kind of bizarre moonscape. There were warning signs everywhere telling visitors to be wary of uncovered mineshafts — many with tunnels as deep as 30 metres — where it’s rumoured that numerous bodies lie at the bottom of long-forgotten shafts as a result of the fierce competition between miners over their opal finds. And when people go missing there, the alarm is rarely raised. In fact, the whole place is populated by ‘missing persons’, people taking time out from regular lives to buy a share in a cheap, partly exhausted mine, and then spending their days and most of their nights digging, hoping for that elusive pocket of cloudy colour that could make their fortune.
The Aboriginal phrase ‘Coober Pedy’ means, literally, ‘whitefella’s hole in the ground’, an apt description since many of the locals live in underground homes which offer them some protection from the searing summer heat and the freezing winter nights. There is little vegetation in the area and most supplies, including water, have to be trucked into the town. There’s rusting machinery and old sheets of corrugated iron lying everywhere, dogs howl late into the night, and bored local hoons roar around town in the evenings in their utes, with heavy rock music at full volume, kicking up clouds of dust in their wake. The police station has been bombed twice since 1987, the courthouse once and the area’s most successful restaurant was taken out by a blast, while two police cars were also blown up. Dining out inevitably involves large amounts of reheated frozen food and bars sell vast oceans of beer. Like many visitors, Peter and Joanne weren’t at all surprised to learn the area was used to portray the post-Apocalypse world of the Mel Gibson movie Mad Max III.
Yet the 2700 locals, drawn from some forty different nationalities, are friendly to outsiders and most visitors find a visit to the town an unforgettable experience. ‘The nuisance is that you’re not allowed to dig for opal in the town, only outside,’ says one old-timer. ‘But you are allowed to make renovations to underground homes, so what’s the difference? If you happen to find opal while you’re doing it, who’s going to take it away from you?’
Peter and Joanne stayed at the Backpackers’ Inn at Radeker’s Downunder Motel, in an underground double room with shared facilities and did the usual round of museums, mines and opal shops. They were both stunned that humanity could thrive in such a grey, barren place that felt so much like the ends of the earth. Physically and psychologically, it couldn’t be further from the tame green hills and valleys of Huddersfield.
AFTER A COUPLE OF DAYS, they set off again. Joanne had sent a postcard in her childish capital lettering to her mum, stepdad Vincent, brother Sam and even dog Jess, saying how much the pair were now looking forward to some warmer weather after the cold, crisp temperatures of South Australia. They still had a long way to go, however, and this time there was even less to see: just the never ending desert country mottled with hummocks of spinifex grass and the occasional splash of colour of hardy
wildflowers.
There were plenty of roadtrains to watch out for though; the monster vehicles comprising a cab with a powerful engine pulling a series of trailers behind, which can weigh up to 115-tonnes and stretch back as long as 50 metres. The first was imported into Australia in 1934 as an experiment in carrying heavy loads through isolated areas. Since then, they’ve become a regular feature of the landscape. For drivers of smaller vehicles, like Peter and Joanne, they can represent a real hazard. When they overtake, it’s like being slammed by a gale-force wind. When overtaking them, the road ahead on a two-way highway like the Stuart Highway has to be seen to be clear for many kilometres as it’s often impossible to tell quite how long they are until you’re almost past. There’s nothing quite like the heart-stopping adrenalin rush of being halfway up a roadtrain’s length in the lane of oncoming traffic, and seeing another roadtrain bearing down on you.
Next stop was the small township of Marla which marks the turn-off to the Oodnadatta Track, the old dirt road leading into the heart of the Simpson Desert. From there, it was only 170 kilometres further to the SA–Northern Territory border. Just before the border is the old Sundown Station where the bodies of a murdered woman, her fourteen-year-old daughter and a family friend were found in their car after they’d set out to do the reverse of Peter and Joanne’s journey in 1957. When they’d failed to arrive in Adelaide, the search for them, at that time the most widespread in Australian history, had covered all tracks leading east and west of the road without trace of the missing vehicle or its occupants. Their killer was later hanged.