Kerry Greenwood - Tamam Shud

There was a stir at the back of the crowd. Pacing down through the groups of people came (I swear) Don Dunstan in a safari suit, riding on a camel – a good choice because it sneered all opposition out of its way, as camels do. You always know that they are calculating exactly where a half-kilo of semi-digested grass will do the most harm. The Premier had come to join his people at this moment of danger. If Adelaide was going to be hit by a great wave, it would have to get past Dunstan first.

It was the only time I ever saw him. He was slight but had such a commanding presence. He got down off his camel and stood with his arms outstretched, facing the sea. Surely he must have been just a little apprehensive? I was. The crowd was silent. We watched him. He watched the ocean. Even the camel stopped bitching, caught by the moment. I remembered Cuchulainn the Irish hero, cursed and fighting the sea.

Then the moment passed and Dunstan shook hands all round, got back on his camel and rode away. I grabbed the bottle from Vic and drained it in a toast.

What a wonderful man.

Speaking of the day when Dunstan defied the ocean and God’s vengeance on unrighteous wretches (that is, us), Adelaide has the highest number of atheists in Australia. It had no convicts and fewer Irish (and therefore fewer Catholics) than the rest of Australia’s state capitals, which meant that its servant class was free and probably quite stroppy. It was a capitalist venture that went broke and had to be bailed out by Her Majesty’s Government in the 1840s. It has only one tram route. It is a green and watered park in the middle of some very desolate deserts. There is no good reason for it to be where it is.

And it has the oddest crimes. No one from Adelaide can understand our fascination with Adelaide crime. They point out, rather stiffly, that their crime rate is lower than other cities, which is true. I am not saying that there is more crime in Adelaide. Just that it is odder.

It has been suggested that Adelaide works on a massive form of the Old Boys’ network. If you are alone in Adelaide, it feels uncaring and you will be isolated and lost. But if you know one person, they will introduce you into a network of other people and life will suddenly become vibrant and exciting and full of friends. It’s a series of cliques but they are big cliques, containing between two thousand and ten thousand people. You can know everyone in your chosen clique. This is the source of the ‘Adelaide Effect’ which means that any two Adelaide people encountering each other in, as it might be, Ulan Bator will find at least one acquaintance in common. Apparently it’s a hard and fast rule.

And so it is in regard to crime. Everyone has serial killers but only Adelaide had Snowtown, where the killers (plural, which is very unusual) stored the bodies in barrels in a disused bank. Everyone has homophobic attacks on passing homosexuals but only in Adelaide are the attackers the police and the assaulted (and, in fact, drowned) a university lecturer, Dr George Duncan. Everyone has cults but only Adelaide had The Family.

The Family murders were, as the Americans would put it, particularly heinous. A series of young men and boys – Alan Barnes, Neil Munro, Mark Langley, Peter Stogneff, Richard Kelvin – were raped and mutilated and murdered and thrown away like rubbish. They had all been dosed with knock-out drops, including mandrax, a restricted substance, which led the police to one Bevan Spencer Von Einem, who lived with his mother in a nice middle-class house in a nice middle-class suburb. Called Paradise.

Von Einem’s method was simple. The boys were enticed to begin with, plied with alcohol and promises of parties and girls. They were doped with a mixture of alcohol and rohypnol (now called ‘the date rape drug’), mandrax, valium and chloral hydrate marketed as Noctec, the original ‘Micky Finn’, and then ravished away to be held captive for the monsters’ amusement. I say ‘monsters’ in the plural because more than one person was definitely involved in their torture. Not all of the boys picked up by Von Einem were murdered. He never explained why some were released and some were killed. He showed no remorse. He admitted no guilt. And he never revealed who else was involved, so the stories about a high-level homosexual rape club were given free rein.

It might have been true. This was Adelaide, after all, home of the seriously weird crime. Think of Derrence Stevenson, who was murdered by his young male lover and stuffed into a freezer. The murderer superglued the lid and took off for Coober Pedy, presumably for the opal mining. You have to admit that that was unusual.

Everyone has road murderers, riders on the storm, but only Adelaide had Christopher Worrell, who took his homosexual mate Miller along with him when he killed hitchhiking girls on the road to Truro. He then had the bad taste to die before he could be tried. Miller wrote a nauseating little self-justification, Don’t Call Me Killer , explaining that he loved Chris dearly, was only along for the ride and never murdered anyone. Meanwhile, the most heart-wrenching book about any murder, It’s a Long Way to Truro , was written by Anne-Marie Mykyta, whose daughter Julie was one of Worrell’s victims.

Children vanish in Adelaide, too, most famously the three Beaumont children, who disappeared from Glenelg Beach. The wanted man – a thin harmless-looking creature, whose identikit picture was nicknamed Fred Nurk by the irreverent – was never found. Neither were the Beaumont children. Seven years later, Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon went missing, presumed murdered, from the Adelaide Oval. The task of taking a smaller sibling to the toilet was one I often undertook. Now, suddenly, it was dangerous.

The worst abduction – though they are all the worst, really – was of Louise Bell in 1982. A stranger came in through her window, picked her up and carried her away through the front door, never to be seen again. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time. No one in Adelaide felt safe anymore.

Yet it is a safe city. I am acquainted with perilous cities. South London. Les banlieues in Paris. My own bit of Melbourne in its time. Such places require care, preparation and luck to get through unmolested. Don’t carry a bag in your hand. Don’t wear good clothes or look too rich. Don’t carry a camera. Look straight ahead. Walk briskly, but not too fast or too slow. Never stop to consult a map. Do not ask for directions. And if you encounter the natives, melt spiritually into the streetscape and never, never meet their eyes. Aim to pass through with a ‘don’t notice me – nothing to see here’ field all around you. Act, in fact, like a scout in enemy territory.

Adelaide is not like that. One can walk around Adelaide in the middle of the night, as I and, indeed, my dad frequently did, and find no trouble if you aren’t looking for it. (He was. I wasn’t.) The only danger I ever felt was when threatened with the prospect of a pie floater from the pie cart. A pie floater is a dish of green pea soup with a meat pie floating in it, topped with tomato sauce. It looks decorative, like an Italian flag or a Margarita pizza, and it probably tastes wonderful if you are drunk and hungry enough. Fortunately, you can also get the pie without the pea soup.

The pie floater is an Adelaide invention, as are frog cakes, which my father loved, though he usually didn’t eat cake. Frog cakes are a form of petit four , made of cake, cream and green icing, in the shape of a frog with chocolate buttons for eyes. These days they are apparently made in strawberry and chocolate as well but in my time they were green icing or nothing. They have recently been awarded ‘icon’ status.

So that’s Adelaide. Justice, votes for women, the most sensitive skin in Australia and terrible drinking water. (Every time I arrive there I always forget that and brush my teeth with what tastes like industrial effluent.) Frog cakes, pie floaters and the Torrens system. The Family, Bevan Spencer Von Einem, slaughtered boys and a suburb called Paradise.