Mike Richards - Wakool Crossing. A Modern-Day Investigation into the Mysterious Death of a Young Woman in 1916

Scribe Publications
WAKOOL CROSSING

Mike Richards is the author of the best-selling biography The Hanged Man: the life and death of Ronald Ryan (Scribe, 2002), which was a joint winner of the 2002 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime and highly commended in the National Biography Award in 2003.

In memory of

Alice May Richards

18901984

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056
Email: info@scribepub.com.au

First published by Scribe 2012

Copyright Mike Richards 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Map drawn by Bruce Godden

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Richards, Mike.

Wakool Crossing.

9781921942884 (e-book.)

1. Hood, Hazel, d.1916. 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)New South WalesWakool Crossing. 3. Murder victimsNew South WalesWakool Crossing. 4. Missing personsNew South WalesWakool Crossing. 5. Wakool Crossing (N.S.W.)History.

364.15230994

www.scribepublications.com.au

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

Lord Byron

CONVERSIONS

I have retained imperial weights and measures, and pre-decimal currency values, in this book as enshrined in official documents and proceedings, as well as in newspaper reports of the day. The table below indicates approximate conversion values for length, distance, volume, currency, and temperature:

1 inch = 2.5 centimetres

1 foot = 30 centimetres

1 yard = 0.9 metres

1 mile = 1.6 kilometres

1 gallon = 3.8 litres

2 bob (shillings) = 20 cents

10 shillings = $1

1 (pound) = $2

100 degrees Fahrenheit = 38 degrees Celsius

CONTENTS

Wakool , n., river in southwest New South Wales, tributary of the Murray river; Aboriginal word meaning deep and slow, pron. war-cool

PROLOGUE

Summer holidays were always hot and dry when I was a child, taken to stay in the Mallee river-town of my grandparents. The overnight journey by steam train from Melbourne was an adventure, sleeping in the overhead bunks and woken by the porter in the morning as the train whistled its way through the sparse Mallee bush. The end of the line was Mildura, a town on the southern-most fingertip of the central Australian desert. Irrigation from the Murray river had long since made it an oasis of fruit growing, but its sandy desert character was not too far from the water channels that had transformed the place. It took a day or two to adjust to the harsh Mallee light, a blazing blue sky that creased a squint on my face I can see still in photos of the time.

There were lots to occupy a ten-year-old boy in 1950s Mildura red-dirt laneways to explore with my cousin Johnnie, Pops enormous almond tree to climb, and Nans chickens to feed. Apart from the fruit trees nectarines, limes, grapefruits, and oranges Nans chook-run took up most of the large backyard in Tenth Street. There must have been two or three hundred chooks, as the feed of pollard and bran had to be stored in several 44-gallon drums. On one memorable day I was tending the chooks with my grandfather, and had to lean right into the pollard drum to scoop out more feed. I had a two-bob piece in my shorts pocket, and as I stretched to reach in steadied by my grandfather the coin spilled into the fine pollard mix and disappeared. I was horrified, but Pop was unmoved: Another one for me, he laughed.

The chooks were an important part of a local barter system. Roosters and hens, with names like Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns, were the core of the trading arrangements that operated in the country in those days, or at least in Nans little corner of it. I never did learn the values of produce Nan traded. All I know is there was a regular stream of strangers who somehow knew that my grandmother kept chooks and that their own large Murray cod or a brace of ducks or a dip-tin of asparagus could be bartered effortlessly for chickens or generous bags of fresh brown and white eggs. With names like Arthur and Clarrie and Bert, they would turn up with their catch or crop formal introductions were unnecessary pleasantries were quickly observed, and the trade would be swiftly completed.

Gday missus, theyd say, Got a pair of ducks, as if this was as natural as a litre of milk, please at the corner shop. No haggling, no cash, they knew the value of things, and this was just matter-of-fact, country commerce.

Shopping with my grandmother was something different. Walking along Tenth Street we would head for Shillidays store, but along the way wed stop off at Thom Packs, the Chinese greengrocer on the corner of Ninth Street and Langtree Avenue. This was a windowless, weatherboard shop with rough, sloped racks of vegetables and fruit. Coming inside from the bright light outside, the uniform dimness of the room tended to blend the fruit and vegetables together, as I strained to see what we were there to buy.

One of the greengrocers was Yen Yock, who had his black hair in a long pigtail, and wore a traditional tunic and high-necked shirt under a dun-coloured jacket. Yen was a particular favourite of my grandmother, and she always dallied to talk to Yens Chinese wife and coo at what she called their Chinee baby. We didnt have to carry the produce away; it would be delivered later in the day by Yen in his horse-drawn cart. As Yen approached the house, Nans cockatoo, Peter, used to tilt its head on the side and call out to him in the tone my grandmother used: Yen-ee, Y-E-N E-E.

Nans neighbours were part of that country town landscape, too. Old Spog and his son, Desmond, lived in the small weatherboard house next door. There was a little girl, as well, Ailsa, who was always being called by her mother. Ailsa, AILSA, A-I-L-S-A! Come in here! Ailsa never did come in, and I couldnt say I blamed her. Dezzy, a bit older than me, was a nuggety boy with bandy legs and a lisp, who used to earn two bob from Nan for killing a chicken for the Sunday roast. This was a job she deemed well beyond this city boy, albeit one of Mallee parents.

I avoided learning to wield a Sunday axe, but Mildura was where I learned to swim and catch fish in the Murray. It was also where I heard what was to become the dominant story of my childhood, which endures with me still as I write these words.

Nan used to move around the house humming away at some tune or other, always keeping an eye on the fire in her kitchens Stanley slow-combustion stove that served as hot-water service, oven, and cooktop. One of my holiday jobs was to feed bits of kindling into the stoves little furnace. When her housework was done, Nan used to sit at the small kitchen table, her knobbly arthritic fingers gesturing for emphasis, as she told me the family legends.

Born Alice May Hood in July 1890, Nan was an elfin figure only then in her mid-sixties, but she seemed much older to me then and she was a natural storyteller. I was enthralled by every detail as she related vivid stories about my father and my aunts growing up in the grape- and citrus-growing district of Mildura in the 1920s and 1930s. They were dark, threatening stories of itinerant fruit-pickers in the pickers camps, raucous family tales of eccentric relatives, and sometimes instructive myths and stories, like the one about the local doctor who had a passion for the medicinal properties of asparagus, and drove to his house calls along the irrigation channels throwing asparagus seeds in the water to advance its propagation a kind of antipodean Johnny Appleseed.