Life & Death in the Sunshine State

This weeks blog is given over to a letter I recently received from Tom King, a former prison superintendent. He was writing after two tragic events - the devastating prison fire in Honduras, and the death of his former colleague Geoff Grant. Tom recalled the events that took place during a riot at Boggo Road in late 1986, and his letter is reproduced here with his permission.

Firefighters douse the flames in C Wing, Boggo Road, 1986
(BRGHS, Queensland Prisons collection)

"As the world’s media attention continues to focus on the tragic loss of 350 prisoners, who were abandoned by those responsible for their lawful confinement and safety, the most recent focus is concentrated upon the official who fled the prison, leaving the confined prisoners to suffocate or burn.

It is therefore now appropriate to reflect on the performance of several Queensland prison officers who responded with courage and commitment when confronted with a similar situation at Boggo Road Prison in 1986 when a widespread riot occurred at that prison.

It is timely to reflect that on the 22^nd of February former officer Geoff Grant passed away without any recognition ever being afforded for his devotion to duty and courage to act, without question, during the 1986 riot.

At the time of the riot prisoners set fires in the kitchen, prisoners mess and adjacent areas and the acting superintendent at the time concluded that control of the prison had been lost to the prisoners and he called on the acting Commissioner of Police to deploy his officers to secure the perimeter and withdrew the prison officers from within the prison.

The officers manning the towers remained on their posts whilst four other officers remained within the prison to be in charge of the chief officer’s office and to prevent prisoner access to the key safes.

By this time the fire brigade personnel had arrived and starting to control the fires from the exterior of the prison walls. It was apparent the prisoners, some of whom had been locked in their cells immediately above the fires, were starting to panic because the heat and smoke was now close to them.

Two officers, namely Geoff Grant and John Collins, a medical/security officer, were asked by me if they were prepared to enter the danger zone and release those prisoners, who were in peril, from their cells.

It was then noted that prison officer Mick Kindness, officer in charge of H Wing, had remained at his post and so officers Grant and Collins were instructed to escort the endangered prisoners from C Wing to H Wing, where they were then locked in safe and secure cell accommodation.

On the walkway, with the new women's prison and Buranda in the background.
(BRGHS, Queensland Prisons Collection)

I have made numerous attempts to have the bravery of the three officers mentioned recognised, but on each of those occasions my attempts have been frustrated, apparently because those then being in charge of the Queensland Prison Service lacked any appreciation of the incident. It was only on the return of Comptroller-General of Prison, Alex Lobban, to duty that a semblance of honesty prevailed.

Mr Lobban sent a letter of appreciation to those officers whom I had nominated for state awards, as well as those officers who had remained in the prison to safeguard the keys. Mr Lobban was apologetic that he was unable to redress what was in fact an incompetent, negative and self-serving report prepared by a then assistant to the Director-General of the department. Throughout and following upon the incident I found the then Acting Commissioner of Police to be a most honest and supportive individual and I believe that if justice is to prevail even in death, may Geoff Grant and survivors John Collins and Mick Kindness yet receive the recognition per medium of an uncompromised and honest investigation."

Tom King

Brisbane
24 February 2012

Riot damage, C Wing, 1986 (BRGHS, Queensland Prisons Collection)

"Brisbane has been voted the 2^ndmost haunted city in the world by National Geographic magazine."

Or so the story goes.This claim has been made loud and proud by Cameron ‘Jack’ Sim, owner of a Brisbane-based small business called Ghost Tours. It first emerged on the Ghost Tours website a few years back, and is still there today. The National Geographic logo was even used (without permission). The ‘most-haunted’ claim was also repeated in October 2010 on Channel 10’s 7pm Project, so it's been getting quite an airing.

Which is not too smart, because its a total fabrication.

I've dealt with this furphybefore, but this month the evolution of the fabrication has been fully exposed by some conclusive evidence presented by Liam Baker, who cemented his reputation as Queensland's best historian of the paranormal with two articles on this subject on his 'Haunts of Brisbane' blog (seepart one hereandpart two here). So here, once and for all, is my final wrap on a shameful episode.

Suspicions about any story of Brisbane being particularly haunted are quite natural because in the wider scheme of things our haunted status should be marginal at best. Ignoring tourismwebsites that mindlessly regurgitate the marketing blurb, a broader search of paranormal-themed websites reveals dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘most-haunted place’ polls. Of course, none of these polls have any real credibility as the supernatural is a notoriously difficult thing to prove, let alone quantify, but one fact that clearly emerges is the almost complete absence of Brisbane in any results. Even in pages assessing supposedly haunted places in Australia alone, Brisbane is seriously under-represented.

This is unsurprising. Why would this city be more haunted than London, Paris or Rome, with their millennia of bloody history? What about places that witnessed scenes of incredible wartime carnage, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Stalingrad (Volgograd), Gettysburg, the Somme, Baghdad, Nanking, and others? There are hundreds of cities that you would expect to be higher up the rankings than sleepy ol' Brisbane.

Their business wouldn't have lasted two weeks here.

So how did we get here? The timeline that emerged from Liam Baker's investigation followed this path:

Sim made inflated and unproven claims about just how haunted Brisbane was right from the get-go, when he started in his ghosty business back in 1998, saying it was the 'most haunted in Australia'. Then in 2000 a rather unreliable little publication called The International Directory of Haunted Places (put together by an author who had previously written on sea monsters and UFO's) listed 14 'potentially' haunted places in the city, a list provided by Sim himself. A couple of years later the website related to the book carried the claim that Brisbane was the most haunted city in Australia. No prizes for guessing where they got that info from.

Anyway, shortly after this it was reported in a Sunday Mail article that 'Brisbane had been voted the most haunted place in the southern hemisphere by international ghost hunters'...

...which was simply not true.

Once again the source for this info was Sim, and now there was a definite pattern emerging as he upscaled his claims without providing any supporting evidence. He tells somebody something, they repeat it, and then he reports what they said like it had nothing to do with him.

Around this time an amateur backyard operation calling themselves ‘Ghost Research Foundation International’ (GRFI) started producing 'most haunted' lists, based on the say-so of a person who has since been accused of being an actor posing as a 'parapsychologist'. In 2002 they wrote that York, England, was the ‘most haunted city in the world’ with Brisbane in third place behind Los Angeles. The numbers jumped around illogically in similar reports over the next few years, and in early 2009 the Courier-Mail recycled this nonsense for another non-news space-filler reporting that Brisbane was considered ‘one of the most haunted cities in the world’... according to the International Directory of Haunted Places.

It was later that year that the story took a quantum leap when the claim that National Geographichad 'voted' Brisbane as the 'second most haunted city in the world' first appeared on the Brisbane ‘Ghost Tours’ website. And that's when the questions started. Where was this National Geographicpoll? It couldn't be found anywhere, and even National Geographic themselves denied that any such poll existed. Last year some curious commenters on the ‘Ghost Tours’ Facebook page started asking to see a copy of the increasingly mysterious poll. This was when the whole lie started to unravel, and Sim backpedalled away from his original claim (while, quite incredibly, still making it).

Important details of the story suddenly changed, so instead of National Geographic voting Brisbane to be the second most haunted city in the world, Sim now claimed that they had merely been told it was by an unnamed ‘paranormal society’. It was now embarrassingly clear that there was no poll. A few months later it emerged that the ‘paranormal society’ in question was actually Ghost Tours themselves, who confessed that they had ‘happily supplied information to NG’. However, Sim was not so happy or willing to supply a scan of the article, or even something as simple the name of the magazine in which it appeared.

It was left to the National Geographic themselves to officially inform Liam Baker that they have never rated haunted cities, although the October 2008 issue of a magazine called Traveller (part of the National Geographic stable) did feature an article about the paranormal industry in York, England. At the end of that article the writer briefly listed some other supposedly haunted places, including New Orleans, Prague and St Petersburg. The last sentence reads:

"Then there is Brisbane, Australia, ranked after York by the Ghost Research Foundation International, with more than 240 sightings, including phantasms who wander the stairs and ride the elevators of City Hall."

And that's it. The only mention that any National Geographic publication has ever made of ghosts and Brisbane. The writer had merely referred to the the dodgy 'second most haunted' claim made years ago by Ghost Research Foundation International, after Ghost Tours had fed them unreliable numbers.

This was the point where the simple manipulation of baseless statistics, although dishonest in itself, turned into outright fabrication. A passing reference to a fallacy by some freelance writer in a spin-off magazine suddenly became this:

"As voted by National Geographic".

‘Lie’ is a strong word to use, but there is no other explanation for what happened. The big question here is why did it happen? What was the intent of the 'most haunted' lie? And why, after it was becoming obvious to all and sundry that the claim was a blatant lie, did Sim so arrogantly continue to use it anyway? I wrote an article about this 15 months ago, and the lie is still being told. This is the kind of thing that Choice magazine hands out 'Shonky Awards' for.

The 'most haunted' claim was an own goal of massive proportions, reflecting very poorly on the integrity of those responsible, and people like Liam Baker and myself will not remain silent in the face of such unethical behaviour. Part of our brief as researchers and historians is to engage in public debate. This is what we have done in our discussions on this matter so far, and we will continue to do so if required. Meanwhile, we would love to hear the other side of the story.

So what happens next? Will Sim apologise to the public, as he should? Will he even remove the lie from his website? Probably not. He has yet to publicly defend himself in the way that a real historian would - using facts and logic to construct a counter argument. There has instead been ongoing and deafening silence, as if none of this really happening. Maybe he is too caught up in his never-ending quest to get his face in newspapers or on TV, but that is no substitute for real credibility and it doesn't turn lies into truth. The following quote is often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, Cameron 'Jack' Sim seems to have taken the George W. Bush variation to heart:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."

Don't be one of those people.

VOTE IN THE BOGGO BLOG POLL AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE!

There's been a fair amount of talk recently about the possibility of Boggo Road Gaol becoming a National Trust of Queensland (NTQ) site, but one thing that has struck me time and time again when speaking to people about this is that quite a lot of them didn’t really know what the NTQ is. Sure, everybody has heard of the National Trust, but some assumed that it was a government department, some thought it was a private business, while others thought it was some kind of a political party. None of which are correct.

So what is this National Trust thing, exactly? And why do I care?

Logo of the National Trusts of Australia,
a distinctly Antipodean version
of the British logo (see below).

The National Trust of Queensland is actually a not-for-profit membership-based community organisation, with the Mission Statement* of ‘To identify, preserve and promote our heritage’. It is the largest heritage organisation in the state, with over 7,000 members – which would be more members than the major political parties have here. These numbers include 300 active NTQ volunteers who help to look after the 11 properties managed by the NTQ, including Wolston House, Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, and the James Cook Museum. These properties are all open to the public.

The Hou Wang Temple, Atherton, another
NTQ property (see here).

The NTQ also preserve and promote our heritage through active campaigning, such as the fight against the controversial Northbank development circa 2005-08. This massive six-skyscraper project on the Brisbane riverbank directly impacted on an important heritage precinct in the city, and the NTQ and many in the community argued against the development, and the NTQ organised a petition, a public forum and media releases and letters. In 2008 the state government announced that the project.would not be going ahead.

Of course all this work costs a considerable amount of money, especially maintaining and operating valuable heritage assets. NTQ relies on the work of its many volunteers, and income generated from ‘membership fees, property admission fees, sponsorships, donations, and some government grants’.

On a wider scale, NTQ is part of a national and global network. There are over 20 other National Trust organisationsaround the world, the original one being started inBritainin 1895 and which currently has a staggering 3.7 million members. The famous oak-leaf logo (below) is a familiar sight around the British Isles.

The various state branches of the National Trust in Australiahave a combined membership upwards of 50,000 people. Between them these branches employ about 350 people, have 7,000 volunteers, and manage over 300 heritage places. These include several heritage gaols, such as Fannie Bay Gaol Museum and Old Stuart Town Gaol (Northern Territory), the Penitentiary Chapel(Hobart) and the Old Melbourne Gaol, which has won Victoria's top tourism award three years in a row and also the national award for Heritage and Cultural Tourism at the Qantas 2009 Australian Tourism Awards. Not too shabby, really...

Old Melbourne Gaol

Anyone who knows the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society will know that we have long believed (since about 2003) that the Boggo Road Gaol would make an ideal National Trust site, especially as NTQ do not own any properties inside Brisbane itself. This is also a very popular idea with the public, and is something we are still working towards as the planning process for the redevelopment of the old gaol proceeds.

The NTQ were actually involved at Boggo Road in the 1990s, when they formed the 'Friends of Boggo Road' group of volunteers, who did some great work in looking after and interpreting the gaol, including re-enactments and the production of booklets and a CD-ROM.

Whether or not Boggo Road becomes an NTQ site in the future remains to be seen, but I am pleased to say that, as of this week, I am a member of the Council of the National Trust of Queensland and looking forward to helping the NTQ itself grow. However the Boggo Road planning process turns out, I'm sure the NTQ will be a strong voicein advocating for the right thing to be done at the gaol. They have a strong history of campaigning for heritage and either working with or standing up to government when needs be.

I just hope that, with a new state government in place, it turns out be a casing of 'working with' rather than 'standing up to'.

BOGGO BLOG POLL

Do you support Boggo Road Gaol becoming a National Trust site?

* Yes, I hate Mission Statements too.

Well, after a nice little couple of months hiatus, during which I did some paid (and ongoing) historical work and got caught up in research into one or two other areas, the Boggo Blog is back up and running. This return is a bit off-topic in some ways maybe, but I'll look at the surprising array of historical heavyweights who were (like myself) afflicted with a stammer (or stutter, if you prefer). Given the obvious lack of audio recordings from centuries past, there is some real debate over the extent to which some of these people actually stammered, and in the interests of accuracy I will point out where that debate exists.

Here, quickly, are a few numbers: 1% of all people (and 5% of all children) have a stammer, and there are about 70 million stammerers in the world. The following list is very male-heavy, largely due to a patriarchal bias in history that we are only just beginning to overcome, but also partly because stammering is five times more common in adult men than women. This list includes people who either stammered as children and overcame it, or had the problem through adult life.

A good place to start would be none other than Moses, one of the towering figures of Jewish, Christian and Islamic history (he is mentioned more times in the Quran than any other individual). There are several Biblical references to Moses having speech issues, such as him being 'heavy of tongue', which have been interpreted to mean stammering. In Exodus 4:10 Moses speaks to God:

Then Moses said to Yahweh, “Excuse me, Adonai, I have never been a man of words, neither yesterday, nor before, nor since you have spoken to your servant. For I am heavy of speech and heavy of tongue.”

This being the Bible and all, scholars still dispute what was meant by this phrase, but I'm happy to claim Moses as a stammerer, especially as he attributed with performing feats like this:

A somewhat less impressive stammering leader of the Ancient world was the Roman Emperor Claudius, who was described by the historian Suetonius as also having weak knees that gave way under him, a shaky head, a tendency to slobber, and a nose that ran whenever he was excited. Still, despite all that, he was an emperor...

Here's a surprising did-you-know fact: Three of the all-time great U.S. presidents carved into Mount Rushmore - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt - were stammerers. Abraham Lincoln is the odd man out here. As a search of the www will show, there are those who believe Barack Obama stammers, but this tends to be people who dislike him and think they can point and laugh at him for it. Obama is not a stammerer, although his vice-president Joe Biden used to be.

Other political A-listers who stammered, and whose level of greatness probably depends where you sit in the political spectrum, include Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin and Winston Churchill.

(Fellow stammerer and post-WWII British Labor minister Anuerin Bevan may be a lesser-known historical figure than these three, but he led the establishment of the National Health Service and is one of my own political favourites).

As a republican I will ignore the several stammering British kings because their place in history was determined by merely being born in the right place at the right time. However, some people who struggled with stammers or worse and worked hard to earn their place in history as giants of science include Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Steven Hawking, although Newton is one of those whose presence on this list is very much open to debate.

In Philosophy there was Aristotle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, although Aristotle was wrong on many things, including the idea that stammering was caused by a malfunctioning tongue.

As for the world of Arts, we might not be able to claim such giants of Literature such as Shakespeare, Twain and Dickens, but John Updike, Arnold Bennett, the Roman poet Virgil, and Aesop were stammerers who found a way to express themselves via writing. Lewis Carroll was a life-long stutterer, as were his father and most of his ten siblings. The main character in W. Somerset Maugham's semi-autobiographical classic Of Human Bondage had a club foot, a device used to convey Maugham's own struggles with his stammer.

Singers who suffered with the condition at some point include Carly Simon, Noel Gallagher (Oasis) and Chris Martin (Coldplay). Three kings who also stammered were B.B. King, Nat King Cole, and Elvis Aaron Presley. A doctor encouraged the young Elvis to sing as a way to gain confidence and stop stuttering. Children at his primary school used to throw fruit at him and taunt him because of his problem, which continued into high school.

While some used singing to overcome the problem, others turned to drama. These include half the main actors in Pulp Fiction - Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis andHarvey Keitel. Willis said of his childhood,

"I could hardly talk. It took me three minutes to complete a sentence. It was crushing for anyone who wanted to express themselves, who wanted to be heard and couldn’t. It was frightening. Yet, when I became another character, in a play, I lost the stutter. It was phenomenal."

Other actors on this list include Jimmy Stewart, Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, the mighty Anthony Quinn, and James Earl Jones, best known as the voice of Darth Vader, and who overcame his own severe case by reading Shakespeare "aloud in the fields to myself". One icon who used a slow, breathy way of speaking to overcome her condition was the legendary Marilyn Monroe.

So while there might have been times in their lives when they would have struggled to say the word 'history', many of these people left their mark on it in a big way.

I once spent a night alone in a Boggo Road cellblock. In fact the entire prison was empty apart from me. The 'lights out, gates locked, 3:15a.m.' kind of empty. As far as I know, I'm the only person to have ever done this.

The answer to the first question that always comes after I mention my little sleepover is (spoiler alert) no, I didn't see a ghost. There again, while there won't be some Edgar Allen Poe-ian narrative here, it actually turned out to be an interesting test of the limits of my skepticality.

It was October 2003 and the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society had organised a special Centenary Day to commemorate the passing of 100 years since No.2 Division opened as a women's prison in October 1903. To mark the event I had designed my first big museum exhibition, '100 Not Out: A century of escapes from Boggo Road', which used escape tools from the museum collection to tell the story of escapes from the prison. This exhibition took up the whole ground floor of D-Wing, including the cells, and took months of planning and construction by the museum volunteers. Being the first project of its kind that we had attempted, it turned out to be a great learning experience as there were a number of hiccups along the way. In fact, come the day before the Centenary Day it was still not finished, and despite a long day's effort there was still work to be done so I volunteered to stay back until it was all in place. Darkness fell, and after turning out all the lights except for our office and D Wing the other volunteers left, locking the big prison gates behind them, and I was alone.

I anticipated the work would take a few hours to finish, but after a few hours of glueing industrial felt onto backboards, laminating text boards and applying the finishing touches to various display cabinets, it was clear I would have to stay much later. Maybe even right through the whole night. All by myself in a Boggo Road cellblock. Which wouldn't be a problem if I don't believe in ghosts, right? And I don't believe in ghosts. Their existence has never been proved to me, and I think that explaining strange shadows, sounds and movements as some kind of inter-dimensional entity is a massive leap of logic and a slap in the face to the Age of Reason. I've never seen or heard anything in my life that couldn't be explained in a rational manner (except the continued presence of Richard Wilkins on our TV screens).

A bit like this, but without the piano.

For example, as a small child there were three different occasions, each one still very clear in my memory, when I 'saw' apparently unexplainable things. The first was when I was lying in bed one night, maybe aged about 6, when a strange woman and what can only be described as a 'Mother Goose' lookalike slowly raised their heads from beneath the bed and looked at me. They disappeared when I screamed my head off and my parents came running in. Ghosts? Some would say so. Another night I clearly saw a frog jump on the bed and under my sheets. Frogs freaked me out, so I screamed, and when my parents came in and tore the sheets off the bed to find the frog, there was nothing there. Ghost frog? Hmmmm. The third time, when I was aged about 8, I was crossing a busy road behind my mum when I looked up and saw, as clear as day, a massive Saturn V rocket (those big black and white ones) flying low between the clouds directly overhead. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it, a car slammed on its brakes, and my mum came back and sternly dragged me to the other side of the road. Ghost Saturn V rocket? I don't think so.

The most rational explanation? I hallucinated all three things. If I had only ever seen the woman and the strange bespectacled goose it would be very easy to look back and say, yes, I once saw a ghost. The frog would have been trickier, but a space rocket over Heywood, Lancashire? No way.

Destination: Heywood

So despite my attempts to be super rational, as the night wore on and I got into the wee small hours working away alone in that cellblock, it felt rather spooky, but only because I let myself start thinking about scenes from movies like the 'Sixth Sense', the original 'Woman in Black', and the original 'House on Haunted Hill'. I also remembered some paranormal investigation report I once found at the prison, reporting some 'dark energy' they had 'sensed' on the top floor of D Wing. If I turned around suddenly, would there be some horrible thing standing there staring at me? Would there be a dark shape on the top landing, watching over me? A little girl sat on the steps? A man hanging from unseen gallows? After walking over the grass circle to the toilet outside, would there be faces watching from the upstairs cellblock windows as I returned? Of course not, but it's easier to imagine such things in a setting like that than in a supermarket at lunchtime. It's an inherent quality of old deserted buildings, especially at night, we are culturally conditioned to fill the blanks in the familiar scene with stock standard characters.

If I had seen this, I would have been the first person to go over the
Boggo Road walls without the aid of a rope or ladder.

And so it was that at one point in that night in Boggo Road, around 3 a.m., I found it increasingly hard to focus on the work at hand because of the niggling feeling that I was being watched (in my defence, this was after about 18 straight hours of work). The cellblock felt colder and colder and quieter and quieter, except for the light classical music playing on my radio. I managed to half-convince myself that somebody was on the top floor walkway, looking down at me. Once or twice I looked up suddenly, to settle my suspicions one way or the other, but saw nothing in the darkness up there. In the end I walked quickly over to the powerboard and switched on every light in the cellblock, on all three floors, because that would scare off any ghost, right? Then I switched stations, from classical music to full-on bogan rock and then cranked up the volume. Maybe enough to scare off any ghosts, or at least mask any sounds they might make so I wouldn't hear. I soon managed to refocus on the work and it didn't take long for my rational mind to take over again, especially as dawn and the deadline loomed.

Imagination can have a powerful effect on emotions. Some people get more easily frightened and tense on our nocturnal cemetery tours because their minds are running through spooky scenarios. While some see a darkly quiet scattering of headstones and trees, peaceful under the moonlight, others imagine a bustling supernatural landscape of shadows among the graves, the woman in black staring back at them, and lost souls wandering the pathways. Manipulating the imaginations of particularly gullible people to make them tense is what some ghost tours attempt to do, even if it means telling lies to get there ("someone saw a ghost right here during last week's tour"). In my experience, people in this induced state of mind are too quick to slap the 'supernatural' label on anything slightly out of the ordinary.

When I finally put the finishing touches to the exhibition, the sun was rising in the sky, admittedly to my relief. The front gates opened again and the first volunteers started to arrive to set up the museum for the soon-to-be-arriving public. They were rather surprised to see me as I said goodbye and headed home for a few hours sleep.

And there it was. As far as I know, I'm the only person to ever spend the night completely alone in Boggo Road prison. I saw nothing (not that I looked too hard), heard nothing (over the strategically blaring AC/DC), and I didn't get paid $10,000 by Vincent Price for surviving the night alone in a haunted house. However, I did learn that even a skeptical mind can play tricks on itself when placed in a stereotypically 'spooky' situation, and some of us are not as always as rational as we like to think we are.

It's been a while since I posted an update about the future of Boggo Road, mostly because we are still in the 'waiting and seeing' phase. As far as we know, the developers from Leighton Properties haven't yet put their proposal for the management of the old gaol forward to the Dept of Public Works. Or maybe they have? Whatever the answer, the timing could not be worse given the dramatic change in the Queensland political scenery. Or maybe it couldn't be better? Let me explain...

The planning process for this proposalcommenced back in October 2011 and it was due to be handed in around about now, but of course during this time we have seen the election of a Liberal National Party government in Queensland. What does this mean for Boggo Road?

To begin with, we are currently in the midst of a now-predictable stage of the political cycle, in which the new government does its best to make the previous government seem as bad as possible. Despite Australia having a very strong economy (perhaps the best in the world), a sense of Greek-like financial crisis has been drummed up, a crisis that of course only the new government can save us from with some pretty radical spending cuts. This process is underway right now and the cuts have been harsh and many. I personally know of a terminally-ill father who has lost access to disability transport funding, and a teacher aide for special needs children who lost her job. There would be hundreds of other cases so far, and frankly it is hard to see Boggo Road being on any spending priority list in this climate.

To be fair, much of the blame for the lack of action at Boggo Road since 2005 can be sheeted home to the previous Labor government, whose economic rationalist tendencies led to a lack of investment in the museum, despite the tourism and social capital benefits of doing so. On the plus side, they never knocked it down. There again, this is the third belt-tightening crisis of recent years, so the Bligh government probably felt it had a reasonable excuse not to invest in the gaol. There was the Global Financial Crisis circa 2008 and then the floods of 2011 that left the state with a massive repair bill, and now this change-of-government cycle.

The irony of all this is that while we are constantly being told how wasteful the previous government was, we couldn't get that government to spend a cent at Boggo Road! A little bit of that much-vaunted waste would have been more than welcome.

Despite all this doom-and-gloom, there is actually great opportunity for new premier Campbell Newman to be seen to 'get the job done' with Boggo Road and kickstart the eventual shift to self-sufficiency with some government investment. I have heard that Mr Newman has a genuine respect for the value of heritage, so fingers crossed he will make that investment. The decision-makers know full well that the gaol will NOT create jobs, so the future of the museum component of this historical site clearly lies in a volunteer-based staffing model overseen by a professionally-run not-for-profit organisation, such as the National Trust of Queensland.

The saviour of Boggo Road?

So, in short, we in the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society have long been planning for a 2013 reopening for Boggo Road, but the funding goalposts could be moved at any time now and there is real potential for the whole saga to be dragged out even longer. On the other hand, its a chance for a new government to solve a lingering problem.

CROSS RIVER RAIL UPDATE
The other great unknown is of course the will-they won't-they Cross River Rail project, which was proposed by the Bligh government and canned by the then-Opposition. A scaled-back version has now got the go-ahead, pending serious investment from the Federal government, who of course have their own cost-costing agenda. This project could be years away from commencement, and as it involves the excavation of an underground station adjacent to the gaol and Ecoscience Precinct we can only guess what impact that would have on redevelopment plans and access to the gaol.

The proposed Boggo Road station (see here), which
according to this picture will be full of ghosts.

Every now and then the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society is approached by university film students wanting to make a Boggo Road-related film as part of their assessment. We help out when we can (which is not often) and it's always interesting to see the results.

The old gaol is a great subject for the visual arts, and over the years dozens of photographers and film-makers have taken their cameras inside the gates. Visitors ranged from high school students to Disney, who turned the gaol into a massive film set for a few days when they made part of 'Inspector Gadget 2' there (not their biggest success). There was also the bizarre Indian commercial I wrote about previously here. When the gaol does open up again this will a revenue stream for the place, although attracting TV and movie productions is dependent upon keeping as much of the historical integrity of the old buildings intact as possible.

The video shown here - 'Controlling Chaos: The screws of Boggo Road' - is one such worthwhile effort. These student films are always limited by their length (in this case about 3 minutes) but nevertheless quite a lot can be packed into them. It was made very recently by uni students and contains extracts of interviews with a couple of former 'screws', condensed from about 3 hours worth of material. It's worth a look:

Budding film-makers please note: You need to contact the Department of Public Works for permission to film at Boggo Road, not the BRGHS. While we do like to help where possible, we sometimes have a lot on our plates and have to say no.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the closure of the last male prison at Boggo Road. That last prison was the big white concrete-and-besser-block monstrosity known as No.1 Division. The neighbouring No.2 Division, which had also served as a male prison, had closed almost three years earlier. It is now the only prison building left standing at the site.

No.2 Division has stood empty since closing as a museum in 2005, and the prolonged closure has left the spaces behind the high walls feeling even more quiet and isolated. Among these spaces are the exercise yards, which were once the social hub of prisoner's lives. Long hours were spent here, talking, resting, playing games, mustering, exercising, and a hundred other things that the men did to pass the time of day. Today the yards are silent, the toilets are no longer working, the fences and shelters are slowly rusting away, and the presence of the thousands of men who ever entered the yards has long gone. Almost. I say almost because if you look closely enough, there are actually some physical traces of those men still there today.

Each yard has a shelter shed in the centre, supported by metal posts that were once painted blue. Prisoners used to scratch their names, hometowns and the date into the paint on those posts, and although time has left those scratchings rust-speckled today, they do survive as reminders of when the prison was alive a quarter of a century ago. The BRGHS have recorded these for posterity, and a small selection of our photos are shown below to mark the passing of 20 years since the last male prisoner left Boggo Road.

Two Yard, Boggo Road. The shelter shed, with table, benches and TV box,
is in the centre. (BRGHS)

'The Machine was here'. Cherbourg names from 1987.(BRGHS)

'Remember December'. A reminder of the time in December
1986 when a major riot gripped No.2 Division and prisoners
lit fires and mounted the roof of F Wing to draw attention
to allegations of brutality and arbitrary discipline. (BRGHS)

A hello from Toowoomba in 1985. (BRGHS)

'The Boat', 1988. (BRGHS)

Political symbols of white frustration. (BRGHS)

Above: A dog lover.

The other day I was down by the riverbank near the SouthBrisbaneCemetery and saw an old friend of mine throwing a stick into the river for their dog to retrieve. I had recently been updating my book Shovelnose: Tales of the BrisbaneRiver sharks and just couldn’t help warning them of the danger they were placing their dog in. Sure, it’s winter now and probably quite safe, but when summer comes you don’t want your dog to be going in that river because there’s a reasonable chance it could end up as shark food. So, as promised to John and his dog Griff, here is a reminder of some very unlucky dogs.

Earlier this year I wrote an article on the cruel practice of men forcing tigers to fight bulls in arenas. In this article I will show how the outcome of another 19th-century cross-species battle had rather more predictable and tragic results. This time the venue was the BrisbaneRiver, and the animals were bull sharks and the unfortunate canine pets of Brisbanites.

Bridges across the BrisbaneRiver were in short supply during much of the 19th century, roads were uncovered and shoddy, and so ferries were a popular way of getting across the river. Dogs usually weren’t allowed on the boats, and anybody wanting to take their faithful pets across the waters sometimes had to let them swim behind the ferry. Unfortunately for these dogs the waters are home to the the bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), the apex predator in the river system and one of the most dangerous species of shark in the world.

The Bull Shark (Image: Brian Watson)

Bull sharks are common in the BrisbaneRiver, the adults ranging in size from 1.5–4 metres and having an omnivorous diet which includes fishes, dolphins, turtles, birds, crustaceans, molluscs and, when the opportunity presents itself, land mammals. When dogs swam behind ferry boats, the opportunity presented itself very frequently. In murky waters the splashing of a swimming land animal could be mistaken for a struggling fish. The danger is increased by the fact that bull sharks are fast (up to 18kph in short bursts) and very aggressive. Unlike most sharks they will attack animals larger than themselves. They hunt using what is known as the‘bump and bite’, head-butting their prey before biting it. The bull shark has very poor eyesight, and uses the bump to help identify the prey. They also use their keen sense of smell to help make up for their poor vision.

The first recorded report of a shark attacking a dog in Brisbane came back in 1848, when a dog belonging to David Peattie was bitten on the side and chest while swimming across from Kangaroo Point to North Brisbane. The wounds were so severe that it died shortly after reaching shore.

Kangaroo Point, 1850s (John Oxley Library, #143606). Sharks were
noticeably active in this stretch of water during the 19th century.

Just how frequent such attacks were over the following years is not known, but by the 1860s newspapers carried regular warnings of the dangers of people and dogs swimming in the river, often with a stark demonstration of what could happen. In December 1867 two dogs were killed in the same week. The first was near the Russell Street ferry, when the dog was so badly bitten on it's hind legs that the owner "was obliged to drown him". A few days later a valuable Newfoundland dog (a breed that can grow up to 70kg) was reportedly "destroyed by a shark" near the Kangaroo Point ferry stop. Both incidents were used as a warning to the many young boys who bathed in the river every day (there was no running water at home in those days).

South Brisbane riverfront, circa 1868 (JOL #139498)

Another dog was "fearfully wounded" in the same area the following summer, and then in 1869 Captain Knight of the City of Brisbane lost his favoured retriever near the Alice Street ferry when, as it was swimming after the boat, it disappeared under the waters and never rose again.

A rather more gory encounter occurred in December 1877 when a large black dog swimming across the river from South Brisbane was attacked by a shark.The dog apparently fought back bravely, but inevitably lost and was soon "torn up". Just as it was about to disappear below the water an osprey swooped down and flew away with some of the dog's entrails. Later that same month another dog near a South Brisbane ferry stop was trying to swim across but never made it:

"The current was running strong at the time, and he appeared to become exhausted when about half way across, and lay quite still on the water; but not for long. Giving a yell, he disappeared below, and when the carcass came to the surface again, some fifty or more yards higher up, the water around it was lashed into foam by sharks that were snatching at it. The fins of four or more sharks could be seen at a time, as they darted at their prey. Several times it was dragged under water, and each time came to the surface smaller than before. Finally, and with what was evidently a tough struggle between the monsters, the last of the poor dog disappeared, but left the impression on eye witnesses that the river is rather unsafe at this time."
(Brisbane Courier, 20 December 1877)

The next reported fatality came in 1878, this time at the Moggill Ferry when a dog following a boat had one hind leg bitten off and its forelegs severely mutilated. It somehow managed to reach the other bank, but had to be killed on the spot to end its suffering.

In 1881 a rather racist but lighthearted article in the Brisbane Courier listed dogs as the favoured food of the river sharks, "and next in order comes kanaka as most juicy, but he is not averse even to a highly-flavoured billy goat". As a demonstration of this taste, a black retriever dog had barely entered the water at the Kangaroo Point ferry stop in 1883 when it was grabbed by a shark and dragged under, the only trace left of it being the blood that stained the water for metres around. Another dog swimming near Customs House in 1892 had its hindquarters ripped off by a shark and had to be euthanised on the shore. A large dog that jumped from the ship Maidaat the RailwayWharf in 1893 met a quicker end, being bitten clean in half by a 3-metre shark just after it hit the water.

This catalogue of carnage continued right through the 20th century and up to the present day. For example, a retriever was"taken away bodily by one of these monsters" (as the Brisbane Courier put it) near a North Quay pontoon in 1901. Over the years several dogs were lost in the stretch of river at Indooroopilly, although improved transport, more bridges, and increasing water pollution meant that less dogs were crossing the river. Reports of the attacks certainly declined, although it was still happening, as seen when a dog was bitten in half by a huge shark a few metres away from the Balmoral riverside baths in 1927.

In 2008 a Pomerian chasing ducks in the Bremer near Tivoli was taken by a shark, and in 2010 a Brisbane ferry drivertold of seeing a Chihuahua snapped up in shallow water at the edge of the river. Bull shark expert Professor Craig Franklin said small dogs were in the range of prey items attractive to sharks, and warned against letting dogs swim in the river, especially around dawn and dusk when the sharks are most likely to be feeding. I would have to add that history shows much larger dogs are also at risk. In fact, a 2-metre shark latched onto a 500 kg racehorse in the river near Kholo in 2005, dragging it under before the horse scrambled to safety.

So there it is, a rather gruesome listing to be sure, but if you let your dog take a dip in the river during the hot summer months you could both be facing your worst nightmare.

Which, in the dog's case, would look like this.

Anyway, for more about the history of sharks in the Brisbane River, including the results of numerous attacks on humans, the second edition of Shovelnose: Tales of the Brisbane River sharkswill be available later this month (RRP $8). Also, the next issue of the Queensland History Journal will feature my article on sharks in the river, so watch out for that one too.

Solitary cells and gaol room, MoretonBay Penal Settlement, 1828

Here it is - the first in a new and recurrent 20-part Boggo Blog series called Know Your Colonial Gaol History. Each article will provide a little look at one of the old gaols used in 19th-century Queensland, ranging from the early convict years right up to the opening of the women's prison at Boggo Road at the start of the 20th century.

So what was the first gaol in Brisbane or Queensland? Well, officially it was Brisbane's Queen Street gaol that opened in early 1850 (and more on that at a later date), but various buildings had been used to confine unruly convicts since the days of the MoretonBay penal settlement in the 1820s. None of these earlier facilities were ever officially proclaimed as a gaol, but they were known as ‘gaol rooms’ and ‘solitary cells’ and as such can be considered as the first purpose-built incarceration facilities in the region.

Moreton Bay Penal Settlement as seen from the south Brisbane
riverbank. Sketch attributed to Henry W. Boucher Bowerman
c.1835 (State Library of Queensland) .

The first of these structures was located in what was to become Queen Street, near the top of the present-day mall. The need for a gaol to hold unruly convicts had been recognised in the earliest days of the convict settlement, where discipline was considered especially important as they were places of secondary punishment for transported convicts who had reoffended since arrival in Australia. One of the reasons that the infamous Captain Patrick Loganrelied so much on flogging as a form of punishment at Moreton Bay was the lack of alternatives, such as adequate incarceration facilities or a hard labour treadmill (although one was built in later years). Of course, when a convict refuses to work, hard labour is not an option anyway.


Convict flogging at Moreton Bay, 1936, artist unknown (State Library New South Wales)

The records concerning the construction of these buildings are incomplete, but the cells and gaol room were probably constructed during 1827 under the supervision of Logan, and apparently without authorisation from the colonial government in Sydney. There were 16 solitary cells, built from rough stone and measuring 7 feet and 9 nine inches long by just 2 feet and 2 inches wide. There was a small ventilation opening over each door, and while the cells would have been uncomfortable at the best of times, they would have been especially unbearable in summer. They were used to hold particularly troublesome convicts, as well as those due to be returned to Sydney to face trial on serious charges. One Aboriginal prisoner, Bingi Mhulti, was held in one of these tiny cells for several months while an unsuccessful search was made for an interpreter for his murder trial.

Gaol rooms and solitary cells, Moreton Bay plans, 1939
(Queensland State Archives)

March 1826:MoretonBay commandant Captain Bishop sends plans for a new gaol to Sydney.
April 1826: Captain Patrick Logan, the new commandant, was first instructed to start building a wooden gaol, but then told to concentrate on a new hospital instead.
October 1826: An unidentified ten-foot by twelve-foot building was appropriated for use as a gaol.
December 1826: A plan for a gaol to hold 50 was submitted by Public Works, but later shelved.
April 1827: Logan complained that he still lacked solitary confinement facilities.
May 1827:Beginning of unauthorised construction of solitary cells and gaol room.
1828: Gaol room reported to be in use.

The gaol room closed in late 1828 when a similar facility was built into the ground floor of the south wing of the new convict barracks. The original gaol room was later used to house married soldiers.

Coming up in Know Your Colonial Gaol History #2: Queen Street Gaol, Brisbane, 1850-60

I have made the point here before that being in a local history group is not all nice cups of tea and cardigans. What should be an interesting and enjoyable hobby can occasionally be spoiled by people who think they are engaged in some kind of dog-eat-dog business world where only the most ruthless succeed. Strange but true. Fortunately, this behaviour has a weakness in that the perpetrators want to keep it out of the public gaze, which makes it a bit like a vampire. When it gets exposed to daylight, it vanishes. So here I am once again throwing the curtains open and letting the sun shine in on more recent silliness.

Last week I was emailed by a person I had never heard of before who owns 'Moonlight Haunted Tours' down in Adelaide. I help run the Moonlight Tours of South Brisbane Cemetery, and this person (without introducing themselves) demanded to know if our 'Moonlight Tours' was a registered business name. Past experience set the alarm bells ringing and I knew straight away where this was all heading. I played dumb and asked why he wanted to know, and sure enough it was suggested to me that our tour name was a "breach of registration of business law". He asserted that our name was "too close" to his registered business name and "may cause some confusion for clients".

I refrained from launching into a sarcastic diatribe on the bizarre proposition that anybody could possibly be confused when looking up tours in Adelaide or Brisbane, which are over 2,000 km and four states apart. What I did instead was about 30 seconds of research on the federal government website and found out that:

"Registering a business name does not in itself give you any exclusive rights over the use of that name - only a trade mark can give you that kind of protection."

As I knew this person was up to no good I continued to give non-answers to his questions. Obviously frustrated, he then claimed to have spoken to an officer at the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC), who allegedly told him that our tour name was illegal as it was too close to his business name. This claim is very strange, as such advice would directly contradict the information available on the ASIC website, where a bold subtitle as clear as day reads "a business name does not give you exclusive trading rights over the name". The alleged advice seems even stranger when you consider that ASIC also list 'Moonlight Tours' as an openly available business name.

By this point I felt the situation was getting increasingly ridiculous so I told him we would be happy to take the required action if he could get ASIC to forward me the information, or perhaps he could point out the relevant section in the legislation himself. If you want to accuse someone of breaking the law, start by pointing out exactly which law it is they have broken. It turned out to be a 'put up or shut up' that has so far resulted in a shut up. I forwarded his email to ASIC anyway, and they can make of it what they will.

All the above is pretty much by the bye, as I had the technical points covered almost from the start and found it more amusing than stressful, but what I still can't understand is the WHY of it all. What motivates someone to try and make life difficult for a group of volunteers, total strangers, running occasional not-for-profit tours on the other side of the country? Especially when his desired outcome would bring no obvious benefit to his business anyway. The mentality behind this behaviour is beyond my comprehension.

This is in fact the third time that something like this has been tried on with us, and each time it was by a different 'paranormal group'. I know some very good people who identify as 'paranormal researchers', but this kind of behaviour by others reflects very poorly on a sector that requires no minimum qualifications, no previous experience, no professional standards, no clean record, no scientific credibility, no industry oversight, and is consequently home to all kinds of charlatanry and schoolyard skullduggery.

We do the Moonlight Tours once or twice a month, we charge a very reasonable $15 per head, and we don't make a cent out of them. Almost all of the money raised is spent on heritage projects, and the rest barely covers basic costs. The tour guides work on Friday nights for free, even though we all have kids at home. The harassment may be water off a duck's back to us, but we really don't appreciate it. So grow up and back off.

(If you want to support South Brisbane Cemetery Moonlight Tours, details on bookings can be found here.)

Well, it's here at long last. The new Inside History book In Heavenly Garb: The headstones of theIpswich General Cemetery is back from the printers and ready for purchase. Publication has come a few months behind schedule due to, well, this and that, but here it is anyway.

In Heavenly Garb was put together by Tracey Olivieri and myself and the printing was funded by the Ipswich City Council's 'Viva Cribb Bursary', which enabled us to produce it in glorious glossy Technicolor. The primary subject matter is the symbology that can be found on the cemetery headstones in Ipswich. We've been here before with Rock of Ages: South Brisbane Cemetery symbolism, but this work is more in-depth, using the headstones to tell a history of the cemetery and Ipswich itself.

The daisy represents innocence,
gentleness and purity of thought.

The idea came from Tracey's work on the Ipswich City Council's Historical Cemeteries Project, when she was recording headstones in a number of old cemeteries across the city. Having already worked on Rock of Ages, she was struck by the variety of headstone symbols she was seeing in those cemeteries, symbols that we hadn't seen in South Brisbane. After scouting around the cemetery some more we reckoned there was enough to justify a whole other book on the subject.

In the process of writing these books I think we've become nerdy headstone-spotters, a bit like birdwatchers, always with an eye open for something new whenever either of us are in a cemetery. If we do see something new somewhere there's always a flurry of photos and emails afterwards. A bit sad maybe, but now we have recorded dozens of different symbols from various Queensland cemeteries. Despite us having done two books on the subject, there are still quite a lot of other symbols we have found in other local cemeteries that we haven't used yet.

The Four R symbol of the Apostolic
Church. What do the four R's stand for?
Buy the book to find out!

The headstones are, in most cases, nice examples of public sculpture, although the decoration can often be overlooked because people tend to focus on the words and dates on the inscription instead. They are far from being just nice peripheral ornamentation however, because the objects depicted all have some specific cultural meaning. There doesn't seem to be a single type of flower or plant that wasn't ascribed with some quality or other during the 19th century. In some cases the meanings of funerary symbols can be traced back for thousands of years to Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Biblical and Pagan sources. The result is a book that blends ancient, modern, religious and local history, with some biography thrown in too.

A few other symbols that can be found in the Ipswich General Cemetery and are featured in the new book are shown below:

Triskelion: Symbol of the Isle of Man

R.I.P.: Requiescat in Pace, Rest in Peace

Winged face: 'The soul in flight'

Heptagram: Used in Jewish mysticism and the Gnostic
tradition, the seven points also represent the seven
days of Creation.

In Heavenly Garb will be officially launched and available in shops in a few weeks time, but in the meantime it can be purchased for $15 (plus p & p) by emailing info@boggoroadgaol.com.au for details.

Regular readers of this blog, or those who have read my Haunting Question book, will be well aware of my opinion of the appalling standard of historical research behind most ghost stories. All too often the claims of how a place came to be haunted and who died there turn out be either completely or significantly wrong, yet remain unchallenged and find a wide audience. However, recent events in Queensland have raised hopes that the days of this unquestioning acceptance of such urban myths could soon be over.

There are many examples of ghost stories involving people who died as victims of murders, accidents or fires that, in reality, just didn't happen. Such stories have become increasingly embedded in folklore thanks to the thoughtless cut-and-paste nature of social media. Sometimes they are propagated and publicised by people in the tourist or hospitality industries who have a commercial interest doing so, and then repeated ad verbatim on paranormal-themed websites or in local newspapers by C-grade reporters. Even governmental authorities can get in on the act. On the Scenic Rim Regional Council's tourism website, the former owner of Harrisville's Royal Hotel tells us that the pub "is home to seven ghosts, which legend has it were killed in one of the pub’s fires". This fatal fire, as we shall see, never happened.

Say no more.

I can understand that commercial operators might want to peddle nonsense in the name of light entertainment, but what about those who claim to be serious paranormal researchers? Most 'ghost hunters' see their primary task as electronically recording the kind of phenomena that is popularly passed off as supernatural, and my skeptical opinions on that work are not relevant here. What I am more concerned about is the historical research of supposedly haunted places.

That research usually assumes that ghosts exist and can be linked to certain dead people, and the aim is to try and find out ‘who’ the ghost may actually be, and what happened to them. On paper, the task of finding out who died at a particular location shouldn't be too hard, especially if they died in notable circumstances. Once upon a time, however, this relied primarily on word-of-mouth accounts, as paranormal researchers often lacked the ability or inclination to spend hours or days delving into archives and microform records. If so-and-so said the ghost is linked to a murder that took place in the 1920s, that was good enough for most researchers, leaving us with all these stories beginning with "legend has it", "old timers say", or "according to local folklore". For serious research, this approach simply isn't good enough

So what has changed in Brisbane ghost research over the last year or so? Well, Liam Baker started the Haunts of Brisbaneblog. Liam is not only a rare example of a paranormal researcher with a university education (Cultural Heritage and archaeology), but he has some scruples when it comes to presenting history. Having formerly worked in the ghost tour industry as a historical researcher, he was appalled to find his material being ignored or distorted during tours and replaced with more sensationalist but untrue stories. He has used his blog to apply his research skills to the ghost stories turning up elsewhere online, often with surprising results. It was Liam who recently exposed the story of the Royal Hotel fire as a furphy. A few examples of his groundbreaking exposés include:

Others are now taking their lead from Liam and either doing their own research or using his work. For example, just after Liam published his account of the history of the Royal Hotel (left), a newspaper article about a paranormal investigation at the pub talked of "false accounts of seven deaths when the pub burned to the ground in 1916". This might not seem like much, but it represents an important step in the reporting of such stories. The new breed of researchers, more concerned about credibility, are dumping tired old rumours and gossip and placing greater emphasis on factual history. This new approach is something of a watershed, a demarcation between schlock-horror tour guides and more serious researchers.The seven-death fire story is now dead, and anybody repeating it from now on instantly loses credibility. Hopefully this phase will see all similar stories thrown in the rubbish bin once and for all.

This movement is enabled by new and easy-to-use technology, such as the brilliant 'Trove' newspaper search facility of the National Library of Australia, which allows quick but exhaustive database searches of historical newspapers to check details of supposed murders, deadly fires, etc. While this should be seen as no more than a great starting point for further investigation, it is safe to say that if a Brisbane murder is not mentioned in any Brisbane newspaper, then it never happened. Liam Baker provided a great 'how to' guide for this kind of research on his blog.

Added to these improved research capabilities is the need for contextual analysis, asking why these false stories are being told. Where did they start and how are they spread? Once upon a time many of them were no more than schoolyard gossip, but the 'paranormal industry' has an underlying commercial need for customers to believe that ghosts exist in certain places and so any old tale will do.Facts aren't allowed to get in the way of a good story, and all too often the justification for repeating this schoolyard gossip has been that 'they are part of folklore'.

Unfortunately this attitude is directly at odds with the responsibility of historians to uncover the facts, and can lead to unwanted conflict. I have explained before how a ghost tour operator accused us, rather bizarrely, of using our non-profit Moonlight Tours of the South Brisbane Cemetery to undermine "old ghost stories of the cemetery with historical 'facts'". Here was a clear admission that the old school of ghost tours is built on the use of inaccurate history.

Making sure you get the 'who, what, where, when and why' of ghost stories correct is an increasingly important consideration in the overcrowded 'paranormal' marketplace. Credibility is suddenly vital, and those who want to stand out and distinguish themselves from the rank amateurs of yesterday need to take the time to check the facts and bust a few myths along the way. Play-acting with dodgy scientific equipment, night-vision goggles and groovy logos isn't enough anymore, and any 'ghost hunting' team without a decent historical researcher in their ranks aren't even in the game.

This change is well overdue. The paranormal industry that emerged in the 1990s was one that depended on being able to fool some of the people all of the time, and is now discredited. Those people have put too much misinformation on the record to hide from it and are being superseded by smart new operators who understand the public have ready access to new information and don't appreciate being taken for fools.Welcome to the 21st century.

Thanks to government cost cutting and lack of foresight, the prison that stood on Queen Street in downtown Brisbane during the 1850s was one of the very worst prisons in the history of Queensland. It was constantly criticised in local newspapers and was closed only ten years after it opened. However, the story of this prison reflects the rapid transition of Brisbane from a neglected frontier outpost into the capital seat of a newly-independent colony.

The white walls of the Brisbane Gaol, Queen Street, circa 1850. St Stephens church is in the background,
and the dirt track in front is now Queen Street. (John Oxley Library, # 153725)

The Queen Street prison building had previously been the ‘Female Factory’, which housed female convicts during the convict years. With the closure of the convict settlement in 1842 Brisbane became a ‘free’ town, but it had no prison. The town was still a remote northern outpost of New South Wales, but it grew steadily and it soon became apparent that a prison was needed. Unfortunately the NSW government decided to do the job on the cheap, choosing to renovate the old Female Factory instead of building a new structure. The cost was about £800, a paltry amount compared to the £40,000 that they had recently spent on building Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol. The work dragged on for a few years, with the place finally being officially proclaimed open at the start of 1850. This was the first official prison in what would later become Queensland, as the earlier gaol rooms in the convict settlement had never been proclaimed as a prison (see 'Know Your Colonial Gaol History #1).

Problems were immediately apparent. The Female Factory, like most buildings of the convict era, had been constructed with weak stone and was already crumbling away when the gaol opened. Inmates could easily scrape away material from the prison walls with little bits of wood, and one reporter called it a 'gingerbread structure'. It was so bad that the editor of the Moreton Bay Courier demanded that a new prison be built just a few months after it opened.

While the weak and insecure buildings raised concerns about escapes, they were also too small for the rapidly-expanding population of the township and overcrowding in the communal wards soon became a pressing issue. Disease was common, ‘harder’ criminals influenced first-timers, and - much to the professed horror of the authorities – homosexual acts were rife.

Layout of the Queen Street prison (C. Dawson)

By the mid-1850s the NSW government finally recognised the need for a new prison, but political events overtook construction plans. On one hand, the people of Ipswich had aspirations that their town would become the major centre of the region, and campaigned to have the new prison built there. Having a prison was clearly something of a status symbol in the colony! The looming creation of Queensland as a separate colony from New South Wales also delayed construction, as the NSW government were reluctant to spend thousands of pounds on a new prison when, if they waited for a few years, the new government of Queensland could pay for it themselves.

A third factor was the changing attitudes to prison management. The days of herding prisoners into common wards were coming to an end as new methods such as individual imprisonment in separate cells came into practice. A major review of prison operations in NSW was carried out in the mid-1850s, and construction of new prisons was put on hold for the duration.

A new prison was eventually built on Petrie Terrace, and the Queen Street building was closed in September 1860. It was used for a police court before being demolished. The current General Post Office opened on the same site in 1872.

A FEW FACTS ABOUT THE QUEEN STREET GAOL:

The gaol contained two male wards, one female ward, and six solitary cells. Figures were disputed, but it could hold between 35-58 inmates.

Eight men were hanged at the Queen Street gaol, including Dundalliin 1855. Until 1857, executions took place on the street outside. After the introduction of new private execution laws, the gallows were set up in a prison yard, but they towered over the low walls and had to be draped in black calico to prevent people in the streets from watching.

Dundalli, Sydney Illustrated News, 1854.

During 1851 Chinese prisoners accounted for 40% of all running costs. Most were in prison for breaching the Masters and Servants Act.

The most famous escapee was alleged murderer Sippey, an Aboriginal, who escaped in 1853. He turned up in the Upper Hunter in 1861 where, under the name ‘Black Harry’, he was convicted of another murder and hanged.

In 1857, 400 leading citizens of Brisbane petitioned for a new prison to be built immediately, claiming that conditions inside led to ‘crimes of the most revolting, disgusting and unnatural description’.

Stones from the prison were reportedly used to build the Botanic Gardens wall along Alice Street.

(More about the story of the Queen Street gaol can be found in my bookThat Gingerbread Structure: The trials and tribulations of the Queen Street Gaolpublished by Inside History, RRP $8.00)

Wooden outhouse, Rathdowney
( John Oxley Library)

The Boggo Road prison had many neighbours over the years, but none caused as much of a stink as the Eureka Sanitary Company. From 1889 onwards the Company had a contract with the South Brisbane council for the removal and disposal of 'night soil' collected from the outhouses of the local area. Their sanitary works, located between the prison, the railway line, and the animal pound near what is now the junction of Annerley and Gladstone roads, was the final destination for all the poop in South Brisbane. In modern times when flushing a toilet is about as much thought as most of us have to give to waste disposal, it is easy to forget that once upon a time it was somebody's job to actually come and cart that stuff away from your house.

The waste from outhouses was removed in airtight pans, stacked on carts, taken to the sanitary works, and then incinerated. This process was a vast improvement on the conditions experienced in 1840s Melbourne, as described by the historian Michael Cannon:

"Deep bogs and stinking cesspools festered everywhere. There was no piped water supply, no sewerage, no heating or lighting except that provided by firewood, candles and whale oil lamps. The perfume of nearby abattoirs drifted on the wind. Typhoid and worse diseases ran rampant, especially in narrow streets where jerry built slum tenements jostled for light and air."

The earth closet and sanitary pan system was introduced shortly after this time, with the waste falling into pans under the seat and often covered with soil or ashes. These pans were emptied, supposedly washed, replaced, and the waste taken away on horse-drawn carts by 'night soil men'. The more-expensive 'double pan system' saw the dirty pans swapped for disinfectantly-clean pans each time. During the 1890s the Eureka sanitation workers poured a strong solution of carbolic acid into the pans before they were emptied, and also rinsed the new pans with the same acid.

There were many variations on the outhouse. This typewas used in Manchester circa 1884.

Galvanised sanitary pans

Sanitary cart, circa 1884

Of course a problem with this system is 'what happens next?' In some places during the 1860s the waste was sold off as fertiliser, but the incineration method used by companies like Eureka was more common by the 1880s.

The entrance to the Eureka sanitary works was across the road from the South Brisbane Cemetery. The works consisted of stables and a large two-storey building of timber and iron with a 23-metre-high smokestack. The night soil was received on the upper floor and pumped down a pipe into the incineration cylinder, and burned using complex gas-powered machinery. Our more mechanically-minded readers might appreciate this description of how the cylinder worked:

"...it is revolved by a 6-horse power engine, is 27ft. in length and 5ft. in diameter, and built of boiler plates lined with specially made fire bricks. The revolution occurs once in each minute, the contents being continually turned over. The bricks have webs in them, which lift the material as the cylinder revolves, and throw it through the flames. As the cylinder has to revolve many times before the material reaches the exit end the fire has every opportunity to take noxious material from it. Any gas from the refuse which may pass from the cylinder is then led into a furnace, which consists of a coke fire 6ft. in length, and fed from underneath with fresh air. On the other side of the fire are two "Hit and Miss" firebrick walls, against which any gas which could possibly have passed the fire is to heat bricks it is contended that all noxious gases must be consumed. The system seems a thoroughly good one, and at the time of the visit of our representative the work was in progress, and the whole process was easily followed from the time the nightsoil was fed into the furnace until the residue came out into the manure store in the lower part of the building."
(Brisbane Courier, 19 November 1882)

An outhouse, or 'dunny', can be seen in the bottom right corner
of this 1889 Highgate Hill photo. (John Oxley Library)

The resulting smoke could hang over the immediate area and led to many complaints from locals and even prisoners. Some prominent residents of Brisbane lived nearby in the grand houses on the high ridge of Gladstone Road, and they were none too impressed with their neighbour. In 1892 a deputation of local people, including future (1896-98) South Brisbane mayor Abraham Luya, petitioned the colonial secretary about the problem, claiming that the 'horrible stench' and pollution from the works was ‘a nuisance and injurious to the health of all the inhabitants of the district’.

The complaints resulted in the council prosecuting Eureka for ‘causing a nuisance’ and the company was forced to upgrade their works.

A 19th-century stoneware storage bottle
found during the Dutton Park dig.
(UQ Archaeological Services Unit)

The Eureka company also disposed of other household rubbish by burying it in the big recreation reserve across the road, in trenches dug by inmates of the prison. This practice, which was described as creating ‘eyesores in what would otherwise be spots of sylvan beauty’, was stopped in 1892 following complaints that ‘soakage’ from the trenches was percolating into the South Brisbane Cemetery. Many glass and ceramic objects including, crockery, clay pipes, storage jars and various glass bottles, were found here during an archaeological dig in preparation for the construction of the Schonell Bridge in 2005. The archaeologists found material from two time periods, the lower layer containing items from the later decades of the 1800s, and an upper layer containing 1940s artefacts.

In 1902 Eureka was bought out by the General Contracting Company, based in Milton, and a sanitary contractor named Henry Carr used the Boggo Road premises until they were demolished around 1907. The city sewerage system was developed over the following decades, although sanitary companies continued to offer their services until the late 1960s. This rather poignant Christmas card from one company to their customers in 1938 acknowledged that;

"Now my days are nearly over,
Room for sewers I must make,
So your secrets to the shadows -
Where good sewers go - I'll take."

(John Oxley Library)

Outhouses can be seen behind these rows of houses in Norman Park, 1950.
Places like this were still unsewered at the time (John Oxley Library)

For the residents (and prisoners) in Dutton Park, the demise of the sanitary works was more than welcome. There again, the inmates of Boggo Road's No.2 Division had to endure the indignity and discomfort of using tin buckets as toilets in their cells until the place closed in 1989... but that's a subject for another 'Boggo Blog'.

Yes, a grown adult who sees this as a logical
sequence gets to be an actual senator.

Given that a Federal senator lost his job as a parliamentary secretary yesterday after suggesting that allowing equal marriage rights could lead to calls for the sanctioning of bestiality, it is perhaps timely to briefly reflect on some of the history regarding the law and bestiality here in Queensland, where it was classed together with homosexuality as an "unnatural offence" well into the 20th century.

As a kid growing up in Lancashire, there were two kinds of people that were taunted for being ‘sheep shaggers’ – Yorkshiremen and Australians. After arriving in Queensland I soon learned that New Zealanders get pretty much the same treatment here. And just like in Lancashire, you can soon work out the level of a person’s sense of humour by how funny they think it is and how endlessly they refer to it.

Australian law has generally taken a tough stance on bestiality (or, to use a new word I just learned, 'zoophilia'). Until the mid-19th-century it was considered illegal enough to warrant the death penalty, although I’m pretty sure nobody was ever hanged for the offence here. It remained a capital crime in Queensland until 1865, when the Offences against the Person Act changed the maximum sentence to penal servitude for life with a minimum of ten years. In the Unnatural Offences section of that Act, bestiality was dealt with in the same sentence as sodomy, both being referred to as “the abominable crime of buggery committed with mankind or with any animal", and also as "an infamous crime”. Maybe this is where Senator Bernardi gets his ideas from.

The vast majority of "unnatural offence' court cases in the historical records relate to homosexual acts, especially against children. Even men who engaged in anal sex with their wife could face the death penalty, as Lawrence Maher of Maryborough found out in 1864. The death sentence was recorded but not carried out in his case. Trials for bestiality were few and far between in early Queensland, and these all involved male defendants because "unnatural offence" laws about bestiality and homosexuality did not apply to women.

One of the earliest trials involved a Chinese immigrant named Tee Ang. In 1852 he was living in a camp in South Brisbane, where he was arrested for committing the crimeon a dog there. The newspaper articles did not go into many details in these matters, but in this case it was reported that the dog was so badly injured by the act that it had to be put down. At this time such "unnatural offences" were still a capital crime and Tee Ang was sentenced to death, although his sentence was later commuted to 12 months hard labour working on the Newcastle breakwater. Two more Brisbane cases during that decade involved attempted bestiality and attracted two-year sentences. The first was 60-year-old John Moore in 1857, and then Benjamin Jackson during the following year for his attack on a dog, the details of which were described in the Moreton Bay Courier as "horrible and disgusting".

William Sunnington, 1875
(Queensland State Archives)

Another case involved William Sunnington (or Sturmington or Simmington), an English immigrant working as a farrier (with horses hooves and shoes) in Maryborough. In 1875 a man and woman witnessed him committing bestiality, although the species of animal was not referred to in reports. Sunnington received ten years imprisonment. He was initially sent to the penal establishment at Saint Helena Island, where he worked as a farrier, before being sent to the old gaol on Petrie Terrace where he died of heart disease in 1878 at the age of 58. He was buried in Toowong Cemetery.

George Gayton, 1894
(Queensland State Archives)

It seems the minimum ten-year sentence was not always applied. In 1886 one old Brisbane man received 12 months for the crime, but in 1894 George Gayton of Bundaberg got ten years (although he was released after two on remittance). One Blackall man also received ten years for the crime in 1900, but in 1909 another Blackall man only got three years. In 1919 the unfortunate William Webster received a two-year sentence in Cairns for attempted bestiality. Apparently he was too drunk to succeed in his attempt.

So there you have a quick run-through of some Queensland cases. They were relatively rare, but we have to assume that the prosecuted cases were only the tip of the iceberg as far as the extent of the practice goes. It is one of the more unfortunate details of Australian legal history that homosexuality (which was widespread in the colonies) was treated under the same laws as bestiality, paedophilia and incest. Perhaps the parliamentary speech that cost Senator Bernardi his job shows that there is still some cultural hangover about this issue.

Under current Queensland laws bestiality carries a maximum seven-year sentence although, as is the case with most things, the situation differs in other Australian states and territories.

New South Wales - maximum 14 years
Northern Territory - maximum 3 years
South Australia - maximum 10 years
Tasmania - maximum 21 years
Victoria - maximum 5 years
Western Australia - maximum 7 years
Australian Capital Territory - maximum 10 years (although between 1988 and 2011 it was not a crime here)
(DID YOU KNOW? Bestiality is still legal in 15 states of the U.S.A., and is permitted in Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Russia.)

D Wing toilet tubs in the sanitary yard, Boggo Road, 1989 (BRGHS)

To cap off what has been (even by the usual standards) a very unsavoury month on the Boggo Blog, what with articles on poo disposal and bestiality and all, we finish up with a look at the 19^th-century toilet arrangements that prisoners endured in Boggo Road’s No.2 Division until 1989.

The No.2 Division cellblocks were built in 1903 and the cells had no toilets in them. This meant that prisoners (and to start off with for nearly 20 years that was female prisoners) had to use metal tubs with lids and carrying handles in the corner of their cells. These were affectionately known as the 'shit tubs'. As you might imagine this could be a bit disconcerting and humiliating for new inmates, some of whom determinedly held off going to the toilet until the morning and then used the facilities in the exercise yards. Some prisoners were in the habit of squatting to urinate in the tub, because missing the narrow rim left a permanent foul smell from the floor, even worse than the tub itself.

No.2 Division sanitary yard (3A), circa 1960s. The water
tower and awning can be seen on the right. (BRGHS)

The tubs were originally made decades ago in the old tin workshop at the prison. They were 26cm in diameter and 27cm high. The cell numbers were painted on top of the lids, and every morning they would be carried to 3A, the special ‘sanitary yard’ behind F Wing, for emptying and washing. An experienced worker could carry six tubs in each hand. As you can see from the photos below, taken in 2005, the sanitary yard in No. 2 Division is still largely intact. It contains a concrete trough for emptying the tubs out, a water boiler (below), and several shower heads.

The prisoner in charge of 3A yard was known as the prison sanitary managers, or more commonly the ‘turd-tosser’. This was a job that had its perks. While new inmates thought of it as foul work, the old timers knew that it gave a prisoner some freedom as some officers were reluctant to hand search a prisoner smelling of excrement and urine. Another perk was the sanitary yard showers, under the corrugated awning at the back of F Wing and next to a high water tower. There was a small boiler at ground level and sanitary workers were known to enjoy the luxury of rare hot showers there, using scrubbing brushes to remove the ingrained dirt that cold showers could not. As former officer Steve Gage recalled in his book Boggo Road Prison: Riots to Ruin;

'It should be noted in particular that the shit tub yards of 2 Division was a popular place to bathe, as prisoners in this area would block the sewer outlet in the bath sized disposal point and fill it with water for bathing; this was a sight to behold"

The sanitary procedure was spelled out clearly on this sign
painted on the yard wall. (BRGHS)

Of course there was always more than one use for a metal tub in a prison. The (clean) tubs could be used to hide and transport contraband, or provide endless target practice for bored inmates as they spat into it from their beds. During prisoner protests the lids could be banged in noisy solidarity on cell doors. There were also times when the tubs were used in fights between prisoners, and some of the less-trusted inmates were given rubber tubs for fear that they might use a steel-hardened can as a weapon. Some particularly unruly inmates were known to throw the contents of their tub over unsuspecting officers when their cells were being opened in the mornings.

(BRGHS)

The toilet tub system was in place until No.2 Division closed in 1989, although the newer No.1 Division cellblocks that were built during the 1970s had toilets in the cells. A true luxury for the inmates in No.1 Division! Still, as the 1980s photo on the right shows, this luxury was not always appreciated and the toilets were among the first things to go when prisoners smashed up their cells during riots.

After years of being used in their particular way, the tubs were then used as ash trays and waste bins by some unthinking visitors on the cellblock sleepovers when the gaol opened as a museum. This kind of disrespectful cell damage led to the sleepovers being stopped. The tubs then became part of the Boggo Road Gaol Museum collection, and are today stored away in a warehouse somewhere in Brisbane under the curatorship of the Queensland Museum.

Exercise yard muster, No.2 Division, Boggo Road, 1989 (BRGHS)

IMPORTANT UPDATE HERE
It is quite possible that the gates of Boggo Road will be open to the public again soon. While we in the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society still don’t know exactly what will be happening in the place yet, and nobody has been given permission by the government to offer this or that service in there, now would probably be a good time to talk about tours of the place.

A few months back I wrote about the strengths of our ‘Moonlight Tours’ of South Brisbane Cemetery which were, briefly:- we value historical accuracy; you can talk to the guides and ask questions anytime; the tours are very affordable; and the money raised is for a good cause. Pretty much the same could be said for the day and night tours we have planned for Boggo Road (touch wood), with one very important addition: the experiential knowledge of the guides.

This is a huge thing. Outside historians can research Boggo Road as much as they want, but they will never have the personal insights of somebody who actually worked or served time in there. These people are living conduits for that history. Same people, same place, different time. Standing in the prison listening to them is as close as you will get to being inside Boggo Road back when it was alive and kicking.

It’s like talking to a historian about the landings on Omaha Beach on D-Day 1944. Sure, they can provide all manner of background information and context and facts, but it is the soldiers who were actually there who can provide the most compelling account of what happened there, on that beach, on that day. To listen to and look at somebody like that in the place where it actually happened is like stepping into a time machine.

Several months back I was part of a group strolling around inside Boggo Road in the company of a former prison officer, who was giving us a bit of a guided tour. It was unscripted but totally engaging as he used his natural storytelling abilities and massive wealth of experience to give us unique insights into stories about this exercise yard or that cellblock. Then something quite unexpected happened. There was also a former prisoner in our group, and as the officer related a story from his own perspective, the prisoner offered a version of events from HIS side of the fence. Their memories didn’t exactly corroborate each other, but there was genuine good humour all around, and listening to these two bounce stories off each other as they walked together was probably the most fascinating experience I have had in the place.

Sadly, this ‘experiential knowledge’ is irreplaceable and finite. There is only a certain time frame that this knowledge can be shared first-hand, which makes it all the more important to take the opportunity to listen to it now. In time to come, and hopefully this is still a few decades away, all tours of Boggo Road will have to be taken by people who were never there when it was still a functioning prison. People who hadn’t even been born at that time. For now, however, we get to listen to the ‘elders’ share their stories, good and bad and everything in between.

So, to sum up, what the BRGHS tours would offer (if they happen!) are:

Experiential knowledge
Interactive conversations with guides who who knows their stuff
Commitment to accuracy
Not-for-profit and for a good cause too

This is not to say we don’t have other kinds of tour experiences planned. We have both dramatic interpretation and ‘HauntedCellblock Tours' in the pipeline, but I will save those for other articles.

For now, why not take a look at the BRGHS Tour News page and sign up to join our tours waiting list by emailing us?

(Warning! This article contains a gruesome image [two, if you count the photo of me] that some readers might find disturbing.)

Back in 2004 I was researching the stories behind the men who were hanged at the old Petrie Terrace prison during the mid-19^th century and then buried in Toowong Cemetery. This work was all going down the usual path of visits to the archives and libraries to trawl through microform records and old books, when one case jumped out and took me on an unexpected and rather gruesome tangent. It involved a Russian scientist, a Chinese murderer, a Sydney museum, a wild goose chase, and a head in a jar.

Nikolai Mikhoulo-Maclay, 1870s
(Wikimedia Commons)

Four executions took place in Brisbane during the winter of 1880, and a notable element of these events was the presence of the famed Russian anthropologist Nikolai Mikhoulo-Maclay, nicknamed ‘the Moon Man’. He was studying the comparative anatomy of the brains of various races in order to determine their comparative intellectual capacities. His conclusions were at odds with most contemporary opinions, as he found that the ‘cerebral-neural equipment’ of different races were identical and so there "was nothing to justify the concept of higher and lower races". Through his own work, Mikhoulo-Maclay became a strong advocate of the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Mikhoulo-Maclay had intended staying in Brisbane for just a few days en route to Sydney, but ended up staying for a few months after being given unexpected access to a laboratory, photographic equipment, and some ‘interesting specimens’ to examine – namely, the bodies of the four men hanged in Brisbane that winter. With colonial Queensland being as multi-racial as it was, these were a Caucasian, a Chinese man, a Filipino, and an Aboriginal man. And with colonial Queensland being as scientifically curious as it was, Mikhoulo-Maclay was allowed to remove and photograph their brains immediately after death.

This was all fascinating stuff, especially the case of the Aboriginal man, Kagariu, also known as Johnny Campbell, ‘the black Ned Kelly’. I will probably write more here at a later date about the bizarre journey that Kagariu’s body took after his death, but the story that involved a lot more digging than I expected was that of the Chinese man, thirty-something Jimmy Ah Sue.

Ah Sue had been sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow gardener at Nuggety Creek, near Copperfield. He had beaten the man to death after an argument over stolen rice, and so was hanged one May morning in 1880 in a Petrie Terrace prison yard alongside James Ellesdale, another murderer. After the event their bodies were handed over to Mikhoulo-Maclay, who neatly removed the tops of the skulls and took out the brains for examination.

What happened next was revealed when I read Frank Greensop’s 1944 biography of Mikhoulo-Maclay, Who Travels Alone. Greensop wrote of visiting the storage rooms at the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney and seeing two heads stored in jars on a cupboard shelf. He noted that the flesh, skin and hair were still “firmly attached”. The tops of the skulls had been neatly removed and, although they had been embalmed, the heads were not kept in preservative fluid. Greensop identified one of the heads as belonging to Jimmy Ah Sue, while the other seemed likely to be the Filipino man (Maximus Gomez). Mikhoulo-Maclay had donated the heads to the museum back in 1890.

The head of Jimmy Ah Sue (from Greensop, 1944)

I wondered if it was possible that these heads were still there, so I wrote to the museum and asked. It turned out that they were indeed still there, in a special store with restricted access. As I had traced the grave sites of the 23 executed prisoners in Toowong Cemetery, it occurred to me that perhaps the heads did not belong in a jar on a shelf but rather in the graves with the other remains. Given that the identification of Gomez was uncertain, I asked if it was possible for the head of Ah Sue to be repatriated, and was informed that I would need to contact Ah Sue’s descendants and then the museum staff would “consider their wishes in regards to the remains”.

Tracking down the descendants of an unhonoured ancestor born somewhere in China, sometime around the 1840s, was, as you might imagine, a daunting task. I tried to get help from the Chinese Embassy but none was forthcoming. The Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society made an enquiry here and there, and we got a story in the Courier-Mail, but quite frankly we could have thrown the entire resources of Who Do You Think You Are? at this and still got nowhere. Not having the rest of my life to dedicate to the task, I gave up and so the descendants remained unfound, the heads still sit on a shelf in Sydney, and whatever is left of the rest of their bodies are in Toowong Cemetery.

But who knows, maybe by some billion-to-one shot a descendant of Ah Sue will read this. Or maybe the museum will have a change of policy. Either way, I'm not holding my breath.

Brisbane man Charles Julius Jones, nicknamed ‘Chinchilla’ (or ‘Chiller’ for short), was born in 1885 with two healthy legs. As a young man in South Brisbane he put those legs to good use and became a promising amateur boxer and swimmer. Fate, however, seemed to have something else in store for those legs and over the next couple of decades Charles suffered a trifecta of injuries that beggar belief that one pair of legs could be so unlucky.

View of Brisbane River from Highgate Hill, 1902 (John Oxley Library)

As a boy he lived around South Brisbane, and in1902, at the age of 16, Charles and his legs had their first brush with disaster. He was taking a summer dip with some friends in the Brisbane River near Highgate Hill when a bull shark gripped his legs. He cried out for help and his brother swam to his assistance and guided him 15 metres to shore. The flesh and sinews of Charles' left leg were badly torn, and there were also bite marks on his right leg. He was rushed to hospital where he eventually recovered, although at one point it was feared that he might lose his left leg.

Australian troops in a trench near Gueudecourt, France, 1916

Charles grew up and married his wife Mary Ann in South Brisbane in 1915, just before he embarked for duty in World War 1. He was a member of the 15^th Battalion, First A.I F., and in early 1917 he was at the Somme in France. He was in a group of 70 men advancing on a German post near the village of Gueudecourt when he was shot by a spray of 14 machine-gun bullets across both his legs. He fell wounded into a trench and was taken prisoner. It was only skilled medical attention at the P.O.W. hospital that saved his legs. He remained a prisoner until the war was over, and arrived back in Brisbane in 1919.

Worse was to come for Charles when, in October 1920, he was boarding a West End tram on the corner of Creek and Queen streets in Brisbane. He slipped and fell under the car, which passed over his legs. He was taken to hospital where his left leg was quickly amputated. He managed to hold on to his right leg a while longer but it was too badly broken and could not be saved.

Charles survived this traumatic experience to become a fruiterer, driving around South Brisbane with his horse and sulky. On more than occasion he appeared before the courts charged with being drunk in his vehicle.

Courier-Mail, 9 December 1927

Charles ‘Chinchilla’ Jones died at West End in March 1946 at the age of 60, and was buried in South Brisbane Cemetery.After his death an article in the Courier-Mailcarried the tribute, “He had the heart of a lion. He never gave up, never failed to keep his chin up.”

His grave in South Brisbane Cemetery

In the Line of Duty: The Boggo Road Riots of 1986

World Leader Pretend: Exposing the 'most haunted' lie

The National Trust of Queensland and Boggo Road

The Stammerer in History

A Night Alone in a Boggo Road Cellblock

Boggo Road Reopening Saga: Deja vu all over again

Filming Boggo Road

The Ghosts of the Boggo Road Exercise Yards

Why sharks love it when dogs swim in the Brisbane River

Know Your Colonial Gaol History #1

What's in a business name? Not a lot, apparently

'In Heavenly Garb': Secrets of the cemetery

Dig the New Breed: Has Queensland ‘ghost history’ research turned a corner?

'Know Your Colonial Gaol History' #2: The prison on Queen Street

You Reeker, Eureka

Unnaturally Offensive: Queensland Zoophilia

Boggo Road Sh*t Tubs

The Best Tours of Boggo Road are...

The Moon Man, the Headless Murderer, and Me

Chinchilla Jones and his Unlucky Legs