Celine Cremer: Into the Tasmanian forest, never to be seen again
What became of Belgian traveller Celine Cremer who disappeared on a family-friendly walk in the Tasmanian bush? No one has a clue.
It was an unusually gentle winter’s day when Celine Cremer pulled her white Honda SUV into a roadhouse at the tiny former tin-mining town of Waratah, the gateway to Tasmania’s rugged western wilderness.
Like many tourists, she briefly stopped at the Waratah waterfall near the century-old Bischoff Hotel, a cherished social hub in a town that has slowly been drained of its services. The local primary school is shuttered, its abandoned playground beaten up by sleet and sun. The only church was deconsecrated a decade ago and the police station is unmanned.
A recent Ghosts of Waratah paranormal tour of the courthouse-turned-museum was described as truly memorable, yielding many unearthly encounters.
This is a step-back-in-time town where road signs warn drivers to watch out for platypus, where metal sculptures depicting extinct Tasmanian tigers haunt the landscape. Some insist the striped doglike creatures with pouches still survive, prowling ancient forests that have rarely, if ever, known man’s footsteps.
For nature lovers the main attraction is not in Waratah with its rich mining history and population of about 200 people, but Philosopher Falls, 10km along the road opposite the petrol station where Celine Cremer briefly stopped that afternoon of June 17.
The Belgian traveller, who’d celebrated her 31st birthday four days prior, had recently left her waitressing job in Coles Bay on the state’s east coast and was doing a solo farewell tour of the state she had grown to love, sleeping in the car she had customised for overnight stays.
With an eye for scenic locations, she’d sent her mum Ariane photographs from her travels and spoke of her dreams of returning to Tasmania and showing it off to her family. “She wanted us to discover this beautiful country with her,’’ Ariane told The Weekend Australian from Belgium.
Celine’s west coast trip took her through the mining moonscape town of Queenstown, north to Corinna, a wilderness village at the southern end of the vast Tarkine region, and then on to Waratah, 50 minutes’ drive southwest of Burnie.
“Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while,’’ she reassured her friends and family. Mobile phone reception is patchy around the west coast where it’s possible to drive for hours without a signal.
At the roadhouse at about 1.15pm she was in good spirits as she chatted in fluent English with staff, telling them about her plans to catch the Spirit of Tasmania ferry from Devonport to Melbourne, where she would work after having her visa renewed for another year.
Staff suggested she visit Philosopher Falls – locals often point visitors to the “Alice in Wonderland” short walk – and CCTV at the roadhouse captured her heading towards the falls, an easy 10-minute drive, at about 2pm.
Ten days later her car, containing all her belongings, was found abandoned at the Philosopher Falls carpark.
Celine Cremer, the friendly young woman who was so excited about the next phase of her Australian adventures, hasn’t been seen since.
Mystery takes hold
It’s not uncommon for bushwalkers to get lost and need rescuing in dense and unforgiving terrain around the island state, especially in winter’s freeze, and so police immediately set up an extensive ground, air and water search. It came to nothing.
The presence of her car and GPS data suggests her phone, and therefore Celine, had gone into the forest and got lost, Tasmanian Police Commander Stuart Wilkinson said.
But in the absence of any other information police can’t be certain what happened, or why.
“Our minds are still open to anything else because we haven’t found her. We have no physical evidence of her being on the track, no footprints, no clothing, no sign of a struggle, no sign of her injuring herself or any such thing,” he said. “It is one of those really frustrating unsolved missing people [cases].’’
The Texas friend
Celine’s friend Amanda Jones has anxiously followed the case from her home in Texas, researching the track and monitoring any scrap of information.
Her friend wasn’t a risk taker, she said, not someone to casually wander off in the bush. “If Celine is there, why isn’t there any trace of her at all?”
As time passed, locals wondered how anyone could lose their way so thoroughly on that short well-formed walk. They’d never heard of that happening. In the front bar of the Bischoff Hotel they question whether she was there at all, speculate about the possibility of foul play.
Tasmanians with long memories recalled other missing foreign tourists whose names are still engulfed in mystery: German Nancy Grunwaldt, 26, last seen riding a bike on the east coast in 1993; American Rachel Funari, 35, who vanished during a walk on Bruny Island in 2011; British-Italian visitor Victoria Cafasso, 20, who was stabbed to death on an east coast beach in 1995, an unsolved murder.
In NSW, mystery endures over the disappearance of another Belgian tourist, 18-year-old Theo Hayez, who was last seen in Byron Bay in 2019.
A missing loved one is torture no matter where it happens. But for families who wave their children off on overseas adventures it is a particular type of agony to lose them in a strange land so far away.
The attraction
Some call it the Hobbit walk, a Tolkien-esque fantasy land of tangled emerald rainforest that blocks the sky and hems the path to Philosopher Falls, named for John “Philosopher” Smith, the man credited with changing the fortunes of Tasmania through his discovery of tin at Mt Bischoff in 1871.
The walk is partly along a historic hand-cut water race that once carried water from the Arthur River to the mining town of Magnet, now a ghost town deep in the valley.
It is a spectacular track in any season but in autumn and early winter the forest is studded with colourful fungi, including some that glow otherworldly green, blue and mauve.
It’s eerily still in here, calm and silent save for the flutter of a tiny pink robin or the groan of a moss-covered tree that’s grown tall enough to catch the wind. The roar of the waterfall further along comes as a shock.
The sign at the start of the trail grades it an easy 1.5 hour return although many people do it in under an hour, traversing the well formed but sometimes wet and muddy track and boardwalk that leads down 200-odd metal steps to a fenced viewing platform overlooking the multi-tiered falls that plunge so far below there is no discernible bottom.
It’s a straightforward path regularly negotiated by children and the elderly, travellers in T-shirts and footwear made for city streets. Commander Wilkinson has walked the path many times. “It seems so crazy that she could get lost on that track, it’s well-worn, it’s reasonably easy to see where the track is,’’ he said.
If she entered the track shortly after that 2pm CCTV sighting in Waratah she had time to get back to her car before daylight was extinguished under the thick canopy about 4.30pm.
But if she started off a bit later or took her time she might have lost her way in fading light, police speculate. She might have slipped into the water or injured herself or gone off the track to retrieve something or investigate one of those freakish fungi that everyone likes to photograph.
A possible wrong turn at the top of the steps is blocked by a large log a few metres in, surely a sign for the confused to turn back. Police combed this area.
On one point there is certainty: away from the track it’s easy to get lost and become disoriented in dense bush cursed by fallen trees that crumble underfoot, and a native scrub known as “horizontal” for the way it forms an impenetrable lattice across the ground.
An experienced search and rescue volunteer involved in Celine’s search, who asked not to be named, told The Weekend Australian of momentary panic when he lost his bearings in a spot off the track.
Local retiree John Powell went to the falls with his daughter on June 24, two days before Celine’s family notified police that they’d lost contact.
Mr Powell noticed Celine’s white Honda because it wasn’t parked in the carpark area further down a loop road where tourists always park. A few people thought it unusual but police do not.
It was an uneventful walk that day, Mr Powell said, no large hazards on the path, a bit muddy underfoot. No sign of a missing walker. Other hikers also reported seeing the white Honda but no one saw her on the track.
Waratah is known as one of the coldest and wettest places in Tasmania but on June 17 it was around 11 degrees, down to about four or five.
Over the days that followed temperatures plummeted, snow fell, and by the time search teams arrived on June 27, conditions were wet, windy and hazardous.
Medical advice was that no one could have survived the elements for the length of time Celine was believed to have been in the forest.
“The medical advice is that survivability was three to four nights,’’ Commander Wilkinson said. “If she went in on 17th … we think by the 20th or 21st she would have succumbed to the conditions.’’
Police kept searching, consulted lost person methodology to understand what someone might do in growing panic and confusion while lost in a forest maze. They checked other mobile phone activity in the area over those days, followed up with persons of interest.
A cadaver dog, brought in from NSW to search for 14-year-old alleged murder victim Shyanne-Lee Tatnell who went missing elsewhere in the state in late April, was repurposed to Philosopher Falls when the teen’s body was found in late July. Still no trace of Celine – no clothing, no mobile phone. Nothing.
Mobile phone data
Considerable effort went into analysing her mobile phone data but that too has been problematic. There are only two towers in the vicinity, one short of the three needed for accurate triangulation. Nevertheless the towers picked up a signal from her phone and this information was overlaid with her Google data that appeared to show her moving on foot in the forest on June 17.
In an area with good service, this data could identify movements down to a couple of metres, Commander Wilkinson said. However, here the signal is unreliable or non existent and other experienced bushwalkers confirm that GPS information off the track can be scarily misleading.
Commander Wilkinson said the data from Celine’s phone had thrown up a few weak false leads just outside Waratah but two highly probable points were identified off the falls track. “We were pretty excited about that at the time and we really ramped things up. We thought we were going to find her,’’ he said.
Is the GPS data reliable? “I think the data is reasonably unreliable. Because we can’t confirm anything with physical evidence to match the data evidence.’’
Celine’s mobile phone last connected to a tower on June 20, three days after police believe she entered the forest, and within the window of survivability leading to speculation she may have lost her phone.
Deep in the forest it might not have been much use anyway; there’s seldom a signal much beyond the carpark. “You think if she had coverage, why wouldn’t she have made a call? It’s tricky in there. One day we’d have coverage on a particular spot on the path and the next day nothing,’’ Commander Wilkinson said.
Mum awaiting news
Celine’s mother Ariane says her daughter was an experienced traveller and though not a hardened bushwalker she had been hiking in other parts of Australia, including through the Blue Mountains while living in Sydney.
She was careful and wouldn’t have been tempted to jump the safety barriers on the platform at the falls to get a photo, Ms Cremer said.
Her friend Amanda Jones confirms Celine wasn’t the sort of person to take risks. Police rappelled from the platform to check the vertiginous drop as best they could.
She was happy and loving her travels, excited for the future. “She was clearly a capable and independent young lady … there is nothing to suggest she was sick or in any way looking to hurt herself or get lost,’’ Commander Wilkinson said.
Ariane Cremer believes her daughter didn’t leave the track intentionally but became lost. She says a close family friend walked the track with police and reported back that some parts were confusing in the wet – a reminder that what looks straightforward to Tasmanians familiar with the conditions might bewilder foreign eyes.
Ms Cremer said she’s had frequent and good communication with the police – “I am very confident in them’’ – and she remains convinced her daughter tragically simply ran out of luck in bad weather and dense forest. “As we say in French ‘it’s the fault of no luck’ …
“Some private investigator thinks that she was kidnapped because nothing has been found even by [the] cadaver dog but if she has fallen into the river, the rainy conditions and the flow could have carried [her] away and the river is very steep for many kilometres without habitation.’’
It’s not unknown for people to vanish while bushwalking, with no trace ever found.
Worst fears
Celine’s friend Amanda thinks of darker scenarios, is worried that her friend might have been taken or left the track because she’d felt threatened or had been followed.
“I don’t think she’s there. I know the police have done everything they can, there’s only so much they can do, but I feel like they’re missing something.
“It would be nice to know something and that if she has passed away that she could go home and be with her mum and her sister.’’
Experienced bushwalkers, police and SES workers still search in their spare time, covering ground outside the official search area and sifting through the river below the falls. While the case remains open, police won’t conduct further searches unless something is found.
“We’ve had a lot of men and women on the ground covering the area quite extensively … we’ve done the waterway and had the cadaver dog in there. There would need to be a catalyst for us to recommence the search,” Commander Wilkinson said.
“We don’t have serious concerns she has met with foul play but until we find her we can’t rule that out.’’ He said that as time goes on it will be harder to find any evidence. “We assume the clothing will still remain and there is a phone. There is still some chance of finding Celine. We want that for the family.’’
Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000.