SA’s X-Files, Part 2: Nullarbor Nymph, Marree Man, Kapunda’s ghosts and the Stuart Pearce family murders
The ghosts of Kapunda, the Nullarbor Nymph, and the horrific murder of the Pearce family – this is SA’s X-Files, part 2.
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In part 2 of SA’s X-Files, we look at more of South Australia’s bizarre mysteries, including the Marree Man, the scantily-clad blonde woman filmed living in the bush in 1971, the shocking murder of the Pearce family, and SA’s most haunted town.
And if you missed part one, read it here.
The Marree Man
Discovered in July 1998 by a charter pilot, the Marree Man is literally SA biggest mystery, and one of the most enduring.
Who was it that created the 4km-long image of an Aboriginal man in red desert sand 60km west of Marree, which was only properly visible from the air?
Made with a plough or ripper, scarifying the earth to a depth of about 20-30cm, the figure is a “pastiche” of several different Aboriginal cultures and times, according to experts from the South Australia Museum — which means it probably wasn’t made by an indigenous person.
The second-largest geoglyph in the world, the Marree Man was once visible from space but has eroded over time.
At first, the town was sceptical it was even there. But a fax to local businesses changed that.
After the news broke, the ensuing publicity was enormous. It created worldwide headlines, with international journalists tying up the town’s phone lines.
At the time, the Crown Land was at the centre of a legal battle between the Dieri Mitha and Arabunna people, eventually won by the latter.
The Marree Man’s construction was complex: his lines were up to 35m wide, and a GPS would have been required to keep the figure — which is very obviously a man — in perspective.
And this was in 1998, when GPS wasn’t in virtually every car and phone.
Ray Goss, a local who was one of the first to visit the site before it was closed off, estimated the tracks were made with a 4m-wide plough attached to a tractor.
The anonymous faxes — three of which were also sent to Adelaide media — only added to the mystery, especially “Update No. 2”, which suggested further scraping away the dirt down to highlight the white chalk underneath against the bold red dirt.
Local First Nations people were angered and demanded a ban on flights over the Marree Man.
Dieri Mitha tribal spokeswoman Raelene Warren said the etching was exploitative, “making a joke of our Dreaming” and was causing her people “great harm”.
Then-environment minister Dorothy Kotz called it “environmental vandalism” but the government chose to leave the drawing.
Local police reported 4WD tracks and used toilet paper at the scene.
BUT IT GOT WEIRDER
At the bottom of a pit, dug near the figure and down to the level of the white chalk, was a pot holding an American flag. It contained a note with the words “Stuart’s Giant”, and a reference to the US cult Branch Davidians — involved in the 1993 siege and inferno that claimed 76 lives in Waco, Texas.
By August, police had ended the hunt, saying there was no evidence an offence had even been committed.
But who made the drawing? An early theory was a group of army engineers and surveyors, after army trucks were reported in the area about the same time.
That a surveyor was involved was a theory right from the start, with Adelaide surveyor Michael Burdett noting the Marree Man was framed perfectly within the boundaries of a nearby creek.
All along, it was reported that GPS would have been required — an early Advertiser report theorised a backpack-operated differential GPS was used to stake out the 4km-long figure.
With no hard evidence pointing to a culprit, the mystery slowly died away — as the etching itself almost did by 2015 with the geoglyph no longer able to be seen on Google Maps.
However, the owners of the Marree and William Creek hotels in 2016 restored the etching, with the permission of the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation – but not the state government who in 2017 announced it was investigating the return of the image.
In 2018, the environment department decided not to charge the two pub owners behind it, and the Marree Man remains visible for all.
WAS THIS MAN BEHIND IT ALL?
But this is one mystery that may have been solved.
SA artist and eccentric Bardius Goldberg, who lived most of his life in Alice Springs, was the most likely creator of the figure, The Advertiser reported in 2006 – and again in 2018.
Adelaide journalist Mark Douglas told The Advertiser that Goldberg didn’t dispute before he died that he’d created the etching.
He said Goldberg had made a giant dot painting in Alice Springs and wanted to create a sculpture that could be seen from space. He also created a giant green cross on the Todd River at Alice Springs.
Goldberg was known to be familiar with global satellite technology and also had access to earthmoving equipment — he’d have needed both to create the Marree Man.
Douglas said he’d asked Goldberg after the Marree Man was revealed if he’d done it but Goldberg said only that it was a secret.
He told other friends he’d made “a huge sculpture in the desert up near Marree and got $10,000 by an Adelaide businessman to do it”.
Friends say he’d shown them early draft drawings of the Marree Man — the same as it appeared in the sand.
To close the mystery, a drilling contractor told The Advertiser he’d loaned Goldberg a Panasonic GPS — plus 600 litres of diesel and a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer.
Goldberg died in Hahndorf in 2002, taking his secret to the grave.
In 2018, Kangaroo Island Mayor Peter Clements said Goldberg confessed on his death bed he was behind the mystery,
The Tantaloona Tiger
IN another mystery that was eventually solved — this one, also shot and stuffed — a supposed Bengal tiger once terrorised the sheep and farmers of 1880s-era South-East SA.
The legend goes that the tiger at Tantanoola was believed to have escaped a travelling circus in the early 1800s.
That something was taking sheep and eating them was certain — by 1893, there were too many reported sightings of a creature doing just that to ignore.
Here’s an Advertiser report from 1895:
“The tiger is reported to have been seen again at Tantanoola.
“An employee of Mr Wehl who was out hunting last week reported that he had seen a strange animal, but was some distance off and did not care to make a closer acquaintance. He, however, sent his dogs forward and says they returned in great fright.
“He then proceeded homeward, believing that discretion is better than valour when an unknown danger is ahead.”
As the rumours spread, reported sightings of the mysterious sheep-killing tiger ranged from Robe to Bendigo, Gippsland in Victoria and Trangie in central NSW.
Two cows had even been eaten, newspapers claimed — and professional Indian tiger tamers tried their hand for a 100-pound bounty but left without the money.
But in 1895, farmer Tom Donovan spotted a creature running away with a sheep in its jaws, and took a shot, hitting it in its side.
The reign of the Tantanoola Tiger was over. Bizarrely, the creature was an Assyrian wolf, as far away from home as a Bengal tiger would have been, and believed to have survived a shipwreck on the notorious coastline years earlier.
The wolf — complete with its bullet hole — was stuffed. You can still see it on display in the Tantanoola Tiger Hotel, along with the rifle.
The tiger mystery was over, but not the loss of sheep — which continued for 15 more years until local man Charlie Edmondson was charged with stealing 78 sheep.
He later confessed to the theft of 4000.
But that wasn’t the end of big-cat sightings in the South-East. And the next ones may have been a much more Australian — albeit, extinct — creature.
In the mid-to-late 60s, reports began to emerge of a “strange striped animal”, usually seen briefly, often at night, while people were driving.
One of the earliest was in January 1966, when a Mr C.R. Barker of Mt Gambier reported seeing an animal like a “great overgrown cat” in his headlights as he drove between Keith and Naracoorte.
It “bound across the road like a tiger”, he said.
“It had black and white or grey and white vertical stripes and it was about the same size as a sheepdog.”
There had been earlier, but rare, similar reports from the South-East region. Now they gained momentum. All of a large, catlike, striped animal that “loped” or “bound” along:
• Mr F.W. Gardiner’s “slinking” creature in November 1965 on the Victorian border.
• Nine-year-old Richard Weckert, frightened by a catlike animal with tusks on a hunting trip at Kingston in January 1966.
• Travelling “representative” Mr D. Korner’s two-foot-high animal with a “loping run” in December 1967 at Naracoorte.
• A “mangy fox” with a huge head and faint strips at Beachport in February 1968.
• An animal resembling a Tasmanian wolf at the Coorong in April 1968.
• The Robe weeds officer, Mr L.R. Russell, on an inspection tour in July 1968.
Then, two weeks later, on July 24, 1968, Mr T. Taylor spent 10 minutes watching an animal with saddle-shaped markings on its body that “jumped on to a fence post like a cat”.
It took on near-hysteria proportions after sightings from a school bus between Naracoorte and Lucindale.
And Parks and Wildlife officer Jack Victory watched the animal at 400 metres through a telescope in the Coorong: “He was a large animal, a bit like a fox and a kangaroo, but neither … he had a dog’s head and ran with a long, loping gait. His torso was striped in grey, the rest of his body was brown.”
But then sightings stopped — the last one found in the Advertiser’s archives was reported on August 13, 1971, when two women saw two animals with stripes emerging from thick scrub near the Kalangadoo-Glencoe road, near Mount Gambier.
“They had short front legs, long hind legs, and were nearly as big as a fox, with long tails like a monkey” “They moved with a loping action” said Mrs G. Breda.
The animal was likened in many reports to the extinct Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine. The last known thylacine died in the Tasmanian Zoo in 1933 — the last wild thylacine was shot by farmer Wilf Batty in 1930. On mainland Australia, it had been extinct for at least 2000 years.
There have been continued reported sightings of large catlike animals, often claimed to be a thylacine, well into the 2000s.
None have been verified and the animal is presumed extinct by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service.
The Nullarbor Nymph
NO, it’s not a mystery. Hasn’t been for decades, and, looking back, maybe the mystery is how the hoax of the Nullarbor Nymph ever became so widely reported — and believed.
It’s easy in hindsight to believe we wouldn’t have been caught in the hoax. Or would we?
The Nullarbor Nymph was first reported at Christmas time, 1971. For the news, it was the silly season, when media outlets are looking to fill pages and airtime.
So that helped, but surely so did the lure of a half-naked, white-skinned blonde woman who lived with kangaroos in the desert
It was near Eucla, nearly as much in the middle of nowhere as you can get — 13km from the SA/WA border, off the Eyre Highway … “a few tin sheds, a dirt road”, said roo shooter Laurie Scott.
The story was cooked up by Scott and bushman Ron Sells in the motel pub, as most tall tales are.
But it would have stayed there if not for a PR chap named Geoff Pearce travelling through Eucla. Drinking in the pub that night, he was listening and decided to “put Eucla on the map”.
The lowdown on Pearce isn’t clear. Some stories have him as broke and offering to pay his motel bill by giving Eucla a tourism boost — others as the town’s recently appointed PR officer. Either way no one knew him — he was a “blow-in”.
He used the telex to send out the story to a newspaper — and then it broke across the world.
Sells and Scott kept giving him stories of sightings. He’d left the town but kept feeding the story of the hot blonde running with the roos to the press.
It exploded. The reaction was enormous. TV crews and journos came from across the country, as well the world. The BBC sent a documentary crew. It was described as “planeloads of journos” heading off to the tiny desert town — which, in those days, had a permanent population of just eight.
Adelaide paper The News sent up famed SA journo Murray Nicoll, who described it like this:
“The visiting journos caught the strange madness that afflicts city people who have never seen so much flat, wide, insanely hot open space in their entire lives.
“They actually believed the story. Out there, in Madness Country, it seemed quite possible, even logical.”
But Scott knew they’d have to provide proof — the world wasn’t just watching, it was in his town and asking questions.
He and another local, Herman Jonas, dressed up Scott’s girlfriend, Geneice Brooker, in a flesh-coloured bikini and tied a roo-fur shirt around her waist.
They chased some roos until they were tired, and everyone went out to a clearing, where the now-famous film and photo was shot.
Here’s how Brooker — the real Nullarbor Nymph, who later married Scott — put it:
“I was hanging on to one by the tail while they took pictures. There were a few blokes in bushes nearby holding on to the other roos and they all let them go at the same time and there was roos going everywhere.
“I had no idea what would happen with the photos — no idea at all it would go so wide. It all got right out of proportion.’’
The shaky 8mm film and photos went worldwide … and then more “proof” — Brooker dressed up and running across the road in front of tourism buses — just sent the world’s media into a lather. A second film was produced.
Charlton Heston looked at coming over for a documentary. Time magazine wrote a piece. A Chicago radio station announcer accused the Nymph of causing increased tension in the Middle East, claiming she would have to be an Arab, which led to US President Richard Nixon being asked his thoughts.
Sells and Scott were pressed for more details – they mocked up a cave where the Nymph was living and created footprints in desert sand for journos.
There was doubt early on – an Advertiser article in early January 1972 suggested the Nymph was living “comfortably in a caravan”.
But midway through 1972, it all came out – in the press at least.
Nicoll had got Laurie Scott first drunk, and then to admit it was rubbish – a hoax.
It seems – but it’s not clear – that he’d got the admission early on but The News decided to hold on to the hoax angle for a couple of months: “The story was softened,” he wrote for The Advertiser in 2007. “’Hoax’ became ‘Miss or Myth?’ The subeditors wanted to hedge on it. This story had legs. The journo was in trouble for killing it off too early.”
By then, Eucla was well and truly, albeit briefly, on the world’s map and the Nullarbor Nymph entered into Australian mythology – even as the subject of an Arts masters for Adelaide artist Dora Dallwitz, who made a sculpture of the Nymph that sits at Flinders Medical Centre.
Then a low-budget “mockumentary” was made in Ceduna in 2012. Seems that even though we know the truth, we’re not quite ready to forget the Nullarbor Nymph.
The ghosts of Kapunda
In 1909, a young girl at a Catholic-run reformatory in Kapunda fell pregnant to the mad, torturous priest who ran it. He forced her to have an abortion, which killed her — so he buried her in the nearby cemetery in an unmarked grave.
In a cover-up, the Catholic Church shut the reformatory, leaving the priest to live in the old church until he died of starvation. And now her ghost roams the nearby cemetery, while his ghost haunts the ruined reformatory.
Of course, none of that is true. That’s what the internet says happened at St John’s Reformatory at the turn of the century. The truth is nowhere near as salacious.
The outrageous story grew from rumours of a ghost in an ancient cemetery in a paddock 5km from a Barossa town. But how?
A TV show.
Ghosts stories abound in Kapunda, considered by paranormal investigators to be one of the most haunted towns in Australia.
Talk to Allen Tiller, and it sounds like there’s not much room for the people.
Mr Tiller, a paranormal investigator and co-host of Foxtel’s Haunting: Australia lives in Kapunda and says the town has hundreds of ghosts.
“Every pub has one, every second building down the main road,” he says.
At least four spirits live in the North Kapunda Hotel, in which people have heard disembodied voices.
He’s been told of a spirit that haunts Montefiore St and another that prefers a dirt road out of town — a one-legged ghost that rides a bike.
“I don’t know where he originates from — but it seems curious that he has one leg but can ride a bike,” Mr Tiller says.
It was school kids in the old cemetery who claim they saw the ghost of a young woman named Vera that eventually sparked a TV documentary, which made the claims of impregnated reformatory girls and abusive priests.
Their sighting was recorded in a 1980s book called Barossa Ghost Stories, by Valerie Laughnton.
The tale sparked the 2002 TV documentary Kapunda, Most Haunted Town in Australia — hosted by Warwick Moss, of 1990s paranormal-and-spooky-stuff show The Extraordinary.
These days, the show seems faintly comic — full of old-school computer special effects, mysterious music and liberal use of night-vision in old cellars and jails.
But back then, it led to an onslaught of people walking through the cemetery and ruins, looking for ghosts.
The mystery of St John’s Reformatory
The TV show retold stories of ghosts of the St John’s Reformatory, which from 1897 until 1909 was a boarding home for 87 troubled girls.
Originally opened in 1854, it was first a Catholic Church and then a school as well, and had something of a troubled past itself — its first three priests died just a few years after each one began.
The doco said that in 1909, Ruby Bland, a pregnant girl from the reformatory, died in hospital at the hands of Father James Martin, the “mad” Catholic priest that ran the boarding home for troubled girls. It implied he impregnated her and forced her to have an abortion, which killed her.
That she was quickly buried the next day in an unmarked grave in a cover-up. That the same day St John’s was closed.
And now her ghost wandered the cemetery, looking for her baby. Even though other stories say the ghost is Vera’s.
From here, the rumours grew — as did Kapunda’s reputation. Ghost hunters, and the merely curious, descend on the country town. The cemetery and ruined church were vandalised. Locals were forced to demolish the ruins.
So what was the truth?
“The TV show was not only poorly researched but also exaggerated for effect,” Mr Tiller said.
“Many of the local rumours spring from this particular documentary, which make claims of a Catholic Church cover-up due to a young lady dying on the day the reformatory closed.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REFORMATORY
Here’s what Mr Tiller states as the truth:
• The reformatory had been earmarked to close six months earlier with a date already chosen.
• There are no girls from the reformatory buried in the cemetery.
• Ruby Bland never lived in the reformatory.
• Ruby was actually training to be a nurse at the local hospital, and died after an operation to remove kidney stones went wrong.
• She was buried the day after her death (as was customary), which happened to be the day the reformatory closed.
“This is documented in a recently surfaced diary of Ruby’s sister that has been forwarded to Peter Swann, the cemetery caretaker,” Mr Tiller said.
“There were no suicides, no deaths at the reformatory. Such things would be documented — the location was inspected daily by local police, priests and the public who bought vegetables from the girls and also had the girls do odd jobs like sewing and cleaning.
“And this rumour that there were babies out there — the reformatory was set up by the government, not just the church. They were nuns out there, they weren’t out there aborting babies.”
Father Martin — the allegedly torturous priest — was at the reformatory for less than six months, and lived at the site for 10 years until he died.
“He wasn’t some rapist priest — people have formed this opinion but there is no evidence of that,” Mr Tiller said.
There is, however, evidence to suggest he was harsh on the girls, and mentally unfit to care for children. Despite that, the community helped him after the reformatory closed.
“Many girls and locals returned to visit him and feed him and he eventually died of starvation from senility, he could no longer get food or water for himself.”
As for Vera, she was a well-known local woman who is buried in the cemetery, but was never in the reformatory. In fact, she was born after it was closed down.
In 2002, Mr Swann, a descendant of Vera, found a grave monument to Ruby Bland buried under a pile of dirt and restored her grave.
So is there a ghost in the cemetery?
“I don’t believe there is something in the cemetery, but there might be something in the ruins,” Mr Tiller says. “But they’re completely demolished — there’s no good reason for any kind of ghost to be out there.”
He’s seen first-hand, however, the results of the doco — even if was 12 years ago.
“I’ve seen 80 people in a night out there, they walk in the cemetery, they’re already scared, hyping it up in their own mind.
“The cemetery is literally all by itself in a paddock. There are no houses, no signs of life, with the added element of ‘no one can hear your scream’ — plus there are no street lights so it’s pitch black.”
So, mystery of St John’s, solved. But what of the rest of Kapunda?
The hotel, the now-closed lolly shop, the mines, the old courthouse, the old jail — does Kapunda still deserve its reputation?
Mr Tiller has had an electronic voice phenomena experience in the old Kapunda Kandy Mine, but the results are private and owned by the client.
“It’s in the main street but it’s been shut down. We use EVP — electronic voice phenomena — where you ask a question and when you play it back we’ve got answers.
“In the hotel we get a lot of activity — we’ve caught a lot of it on film. During filming, one of our crew members hit the floor hard. I can’t say he was possessed but he went down hard.
“We’ve heard disembodied voices. You’ll hear it audibly. It’s a common thing in back part of the hotel.
“And we were showing someone the back hallway when they heard a voice — it wasn’t clear, but it was something like ‘you’re not welcome in here’.”
The hotel is rumoured to have several ghosts, something Mr Tiller puts down to it being the main meeting point in the town for so many decades.
“It was always the central point for meetings and general use,” he says. “It’s a high-energy place with high emotion and that tends to trap spirit energy. Allegedly has tunnels that go to the mines and old homes.
“It was a brothel, it used to be a morgue — often pubs used to house bodies — so maybe it’s tapping into that past.”
But why is Kapunda such a hive for alleged supernatural activity?
“I have a theory,” Mr Tiller says. He speaks carefully now, as though he still considering it.
“It comes back to fact that Kapunda was sitting on such a big copper ore and quartz deposit — now, copper in AA batteries stores energy.
“Most of the haunted houses in Adelaide have stone from Kapunda — such as Carclew House, the Masonic lodge.
“It seems to hold to hold this energy — the deposits under the ground hold this energy.”
The shocking Pearce family murder
Brutal murder took place inside a humble northern-suburbs Adelaide home in 1991.
Stuart Pearce
The true extent of that horror, which saw the violent death of three children and their mother, is still unknown.
The man police still hope can shed light on the suffocation of the children — found with bags over their heads — and the bashing murder of the woman is Stuart Pearce. He was their father and husband.
He’s now been missing for 23 years, since that day on January 6, 1991.
How does a man stay undetected for so long?
It was at 7am that neighbours of the mid-1960s brick-built Parafield Gardens home heard three thuds.
By 7.15am the home was engulfed in flames — fire units were on scene by 7.17am.
By 7.30am, the bodies of Meredith Pearce, 31, and Adam, 11, Travis, 9, and Kerry, 2, were dragged out of the still-smouldering house.
A fourth son, Matthew, survived because he was staying at a friend’s home overnight.
The hunt for Pearce began immediately.
There was no evidence Pearce had returned home that morning. Neighbours reported not hearing the sound of his car, which had a loud engine.
He was reportedly spotted still in his work uniform at 11am that Sunday, at a Port Augusta roadhouse.
At 8.30pm police found his Datsun 240K at Kilkenny shopping centre. He was known to have friends in the Kilkenny area.
By this time the public was alerted not to approach Pearce, who was thought to have a .303 rifle with him.
The hunt widened with alerts interstate and he was next seen at Ceduna.
About a week after the murders, his surviving son Matthew was placed into protective custody after he reported his father had chased him at Parafield Gardens.
From here, it’s thought Pearce tried to hide in his hometown of Mt Gambier, but was recognised by locals, leading to a police blitz that he managed to evade — believed to have been sheltered by friends. He was sighted in the South-East several times.
The most recent sighting was in June, 1997, at a Knox shopping centre in Melbourne.
Early on in the investigation, a picture emerged of a paranoid man at breaking point.
Six months before, Gary Austin, a good mate of Pearce who boarded on the property, killed himself, sending Pearce into a downward spiral of drugs and drink.
The family had endured previous tragedy. Meredith’s brother Wayne Maynard had shot and killed their parents at their home in Mt Gambier. He was found not guilty by reason of mental incompetence and had been released 12 months before. It was understood he had an alibi for the night of the murders
Stuart Pearce was frightened of Maynard, even if there appeared to be no reason. He had bought a gun, he was being squeezed by the bank over his mortgage. He’d recently lost his job selling cars and had found nightshift work at the BP servo, a job he shared with Meredith who worked there during the day.
Twenty-five marijuana plants were found in a bunker under the house. It had a watering system, lights and fan and lead to questions about drug trafficking links, but police said there was no evidence of anyone else having been involved in the murders.
It was thought the plants were to help raise cash for the family.
How has he escaped detection for so long? Was he hidden and sheltered by friends, regardless of the information he might have about the brutal murder of three of his children and wife? Or is he dead?
The state government is offering a $1 million reward over the murder of the family.
The murder had a tragic effect on Matthew Pearce, who spiralled into addiction, ended up in the Comanchero bikie gang and was in 2018 was jailed for dealing ice.
In 2014, SA Police released computer-generated images of what Stuart Pearce may look like now.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2015
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