Children vanish in Adelaide, too, most famously the three Beaumont children, who disappeared from Glenelg Beach. The wanted man – a thin harmless-looking creature, whose identikit picture was nicknamed Fred Nurk by the irreverent – was never found. Neither were the Beaumont children. Seven years later, Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon went missing, presumed murdered, from the Adelaide Oval. The task of taking a smaller sibling to the toilet was one I often undertook. Now, suddenly, it was dangerous.
The worst abduction – though they are all the worst, really – was of Louise Bell in 1982. A stranger came in through her window, picked her up and carried her away through the front door, never to be seen again. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time. No one in Adelaide felt safe anymore.
Yet it is a safe city. I am acquainted with perilous cities. South London. Les banlieues in Paris. My own bit of Melbourne in its time. Such places require care, preparation and luck to get through unmolested. Don’t carry a bag in your hand. Don’t wear good clothes or look too rich. Don’t carry a camera. Look straight ahead. Walk briskly, but not too fast or too slow. Never stop to consult a map. Do not ask for directions. And if you encounter the natives, melt spiritually into the streetscape and never, never meet their eyes. Aim to pass through with a ‘don’t notice me – nothing to see here’ field all around you. Act, in fact, like a scout in enemy territory.
Adelaide is not like that. One can walk around Adelaide in the middle of the night, as I and, indeed, my dad frequently did, and find no trouble if you aren’t looking for it. (He was. I wasn’t.) The only danger I ever felt was when threatened with the prospect of a pie floater from the pie cart. A pie floater is a dish of green pea soup with a meat pie floating in it, topped with tomato sauce. It looks decorative, like an Italian flag or a Margarita pizza, and it probably tastes wonderful if you are drunk and hungry enough. Fortunately, you can also get the pie without the pea soup.
The pie floater is an Adelaide invention, as are frog cakes, which my father loved, though he usually didn’t eat cake. Frog cakes are a form of petit four, made of cake, cream and green icing, in the shape of a frog with chocolate buttons for eyes. These days they are apparently made in strawberry and chocolate as well but in my time they were green icing or nothing. They have recently been awarded ‘icon’ status.
So that’s Adelaide. Justice, votes for women, the most sensitive skin in Australia and terrible drinking water. (Every time I arrive there I always forget that and brush my teeth with what tastes like industrial effluent.) Frog cakes, pie floaters and the Torrens system. The Family, Bevan Spencer Von Einem, slaughtered boys and a suburb called Paradise.
Strange.
There is an excellent book about The Family murders, written by Bob O’Brien, one of the detectives in the case, who puzzles over what it is about Adelaide that makes it produce such bizarre crimes. He is unable to shed any light on the matter but if we return to the idea of cliques, we may have an answer or, at least, the beginning of an answer. If you operate in groups all the time, then if your particular group becomes corrupted, you are all corrupted. That is what happened with The Family and in Snowtown. Even Worrell and Miller were a clique of two. One psychopath is bad but when there are two psychopaths or more, the effect is not so much additional as exponential. That’s why, when Adelaide is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid.
That’s the closest I can come to a theory. Adelaide is such a straight up and down city that there is no room for any deviation, so when deviation comes, it breaks all the rules. My home city, Melbourne, is also as straight as it comes. A grid system made by Mr Hoddle, with big streets in which one can turn a coach and four and little streets, to keep the service vehicles off the boulevards. Tree lined. Decorative. And, like the old Roman roads, it could have been ruled with a spear shaft. Parliament at the top, Spencer Street Station at the bottom. Square. But somehow Melbourne, in its angularity, allows eccentricity in the lanes and squares and strange little shops and markets. The most attractive Melbourne streetscape is an arcade. And the town hall is in the middle of the city, not at the top like Adelaide.
The Torrens River breaks Adelaide into two unequal parts and that is not good for a city. It means that sometimes the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing. Which would, come to think of it, make Adelaide an admirable place for a nest of spies. (If that is the collective noun. A conspiracy, perhaps?) In true Adelaidian fashion, no outsider would ever know. But everyone inside the clique would…
Chapter Six
From the days of the International Workers of the World onwards, Communists in Australia were relatively well organised, trade union based, most of them, and thus, well, yes, a clique. They were also very careful. When I was working on the Waterside Workers Federation archives in Canberra, I had to crack two substitution codes to read some of the documents – mostly lists of names and contributors to strike funds. The codes weren’t difficult. I suspect they were just meant to discourage the idle passer by, although I wouldn’t have had the nerve to read those documents over Big Jim Healey’s shoulder. When I was interviewing the old wharfies for my legal history thesis on the 1928 waterfront strike – the research that gave me Phryne Fisher – they used to call me comrade. I was honoured. It was the first non-gender specific title I had ever had, apart from ‘mate’, and only my father called me ‘mate’.
Nineteen forty-eight wasn’t only the year of the Tamam Shud murder. It was also the year that a frightful scandal struck the diplomatic service in Australia, causing both the English and the Americans to cut us off from all their secrets. Canberra was leaking like a sieve. (Although I don’t know why that is considered bad; after all, sieves are supposed to leak.) Information sent in conditions of utter secrecy had been disclosed to the Russians, otherwise known as The Enemy.
It is hard to recreate the fear in which Communists were held in that era. They were known as the Red Menace. Stalin had been exposed as a mass murderer of his own people, a totalitarian who gave a new and frightful meaning to the term. The Russians desperately wanted to duplicate the American success with the atom bomb but America had been faster at grabbing nuclear scientists when Germany fell and was ahead on points.
I remember the feeling of almost enjoyable dread in the seventies, knowing that some clown, either in the White House or the Kremlin, had his thumb on The Button and could wipe us all out. (Of the two, I was more afraid of the White House.) Tom Lehrer sang a merry ditty called We Will All Go Together When We Go and the arms race ticked on to three minutes to midnight.
Nineteen forty-eight was close to the beginning of that story, the story of the Cold War. The only difference between a Cold War and a Hot War, as far as I can see, is the number of people getting killed at the same time and in the same place. The Cold War produced plenty of hot spots where a lot of people were becoming dead quite quickly – for instance, Korea and Vietnam. It also produced the spy dramas like The Rat Catchers and Callan, which I loved to watch with my dad. We read John Le Carre and Frederick Forsyth as well but it was all set in Britain or America or Prague, not here in sun-drenched Australia. While our Russian neighbours might very properly flinch at the thought of a visit from the KGB, no one seemed worried about ASIO kicking the doors in at 3 am. I am still not sure why. Possibly because there is something fundamentally anti-Australian about spying. Possibly because, until 1951, peacetime espionage was not illegal.