I love an interesting story as much as the next guy but when some guy sits down to write a book on the “quirks, misfortunes and tragic turns of fate they wouldn’t dare tell you about in school” of Australia, you know there’s going to be some pretty big poetic license.

I mean I love Australia as much as the next guy but lets face it, we’re not that interesting.

In his new book Australian Tragic, Jack Marx writes about a collection of stuff that when presented in a short news article definitely sound intriguing. Fleshing out some of the paragraph summaries though left me wondering if it was really worth reading the full story.

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.


Alright so granted the photo is massively creepy in context of the story, let’s stop and think for a moment here. This is Sydney we’re talking about, guys generally don’t run around in loin cloth satan costumes without a reason.

I mean it’s not like someone took a photo of Damian and then after they all died it was developed and then-HOLYCRAP SATAN MAN APPEARED!

After the photo was taken and then what? Satan man followed the family (bastion of inconspicuousness that a loin cloth satan costume is) and lit the fire in the ghost train building?

…and then the “creature” vanished? Surely there’s a rational explanation as to why some guy was running around with that costume on that day other then RUN HE’S A DEMON!

Mardi gra started in 1978 – maybe the guy belonged to some gay satan cult theme float?

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…


…and then he raped and killed her? Strictly speaking from a literary perspective there’s not all that much scope for your imagination to run wild in this story. I mean either she died a horrible death or satan man jumped out of the car and set them on fire.

I never thought I’d say this but I’m gunna go with raped and killed.

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.


I’m no archaeologist but how exactly do you ascertain the position of skeletal remains in dirt? Isn’t it one bone at a time kind of thing?  What the hell experimental operations with a whole bunch of kids was Jones up to anyway?

I know what you’re thinking and yeah, I’m thinking it too!

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.


Religious nuts in the outback try to exorcise death itself? Again with the narrative continuity, where are we supposed to go from here? ‘The priest politely declines their invitation that he join them for lunch… and then left the house. The end.’

WoooooOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!

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…


I knew there was a rational explanation to the guy running around in a satan costume from the Godson story. Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: Crazy blood drinking satanist!

Sidenote: I’ve never worked in a pub but surely there’s more then two pints of blood in a dog?

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.


Really the dead baby reached out to the woman?

I don’t know for sure but I’m assuming this lot were asylum seekers? This ladies and gentlemen is why you don’t come to Australia on a rickety boat.

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 passed, 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.


So you flee a house that explodes and run off into the forest. Bushfire rages all around you and before you die you somehow manage to arrange yourselves into ‘walking to school’ formation.

Were they upright burnt corpses or what? Were they alive?!? HOW THE HELL WERE THEY IN WALKING FORMATION IF THEY JUST GOT ROASTED?!

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…


…uh, her cat? No seriously inner city Melbourne, IT WAS A FREAKING TYRANASAURUS REX YO!

Rats don’t just move in after a few days, I’m assuming Mousley mousta been dead a while.

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…


…and then their heads exploded? I know it’s bad luck (or offensive I can’t remember now) to see the dead in Aboriginal culture but these guys had been kidnapped and hauled halfway across the world.

They saw a dead guy in a building and what all of a sudden cultural superstition comes flood back to them?

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.


…did anyone actually die in this story? The imagery cast suggests a ghost ship made it’s way back to Australia but I mean what, some guy got a sniffle? QUICK CALL THE SUPERNATURAL POLICE!


Granted that the article is supposed to make you want to read more, I can’t help but feel that there isn’t really all that much more to some of these stories.

Having said that I reckon some of them would make corker movies (with a bit of meat added to the plots). Maybe they could sign the guy who did Wolf Creek to work them, I reckon there’s easily enough material to work with there.

Currently Australian Tragic is out of stock at both the Book Depository and Amazon. I refuse to pay the outrageous prices we pay for books in Australia so I guess when they do have stock I’ll have to weigh up if it’s worth a followup.

(meanwhile I’d really appreciate it if someone could explain the satan man photo!)

1. Can somebody explain Rudd’s immigration policy?