Conspiracy theories a croc, says Harold Holt’s son

Harold Holt’s family pleads with the community to focus on his political legacy and to forget the conspiracy theories.

Harold Holt’s son Sam Holt yesterday. Picture: Aaron Francis

In Harold Holt’s family, the patriarch and former prime minister was always seen as a risk-taker.

Perhaps no more so than when he dived into water loaded with crocodiles in north Queensland just two weeks after a calf was yanked, deep in distress, from the banks of the Hull River.

Holt’s son Sam has recounted the story from one of the former prime minister’s trips to Queensland with his mother, Zara, as evidence of a rare politician who was relentlessly unafraid of water.

The point of the story, told recently to Victorian Liberal Party members, was to encourage the faithful to reject the conspiracy theories about what happened 50 years ago at Cheviot Beach and focus on the most likely outcome: accidental death by drowning.

“Harold is not a person who feared for his personal safety. He never was; he would swim in ­places and times when others wouldn’t,’’ Sam Holt, 78, said.

“And I can remember my mother telling me that up at Hull River in far north Queensland waiting to take the boat to their friend’s island ... he decided he’d do a little bit of spearfishing in the river while he was waiting.

“And they said: ‘Oh, Mr Holt, you shouldn’t do that. Only two weeks ago a crocodile took a calf at the edge of the river’.’’

The warning never stopped him, with Sam Holt adding: “There was nothing unique about him taking a risk.’’

Holt at Portsea with his daughters-in-law in 1966.

Sam Holt said there was a family fascination with spearfishing “but he would go into areas and parts that we wouldn’t’’.

As if to underscore the centuries-long danger in the Hull River, Queensland’s Department of Environment, citing report 2017644, warned last week of a crocodile at the mouth of the river. Sam Holt added that the family’s much-loved Cheviot Beach near Point Nepean on the Mornington Peninsula was a crap shoot for swimmers, a “paradise’’ when conditions are right but a deathtrap when the wind and waves are slamming the coastline.

Fifty years ago on Sunday, Harold Holt, 59, disappeared from the beach, 117km south of Melbourne.

He was never found, sparking a wave of international mourning and a rising tide of conspiracy ­theories that ranged from a kidnapping by a Chinese submarine to aliens in the Portsea skies.

Holt with US president Lyndon Johnson.

This weekend, Health Minister Greg Hunt and other senior Liberals will lead a low-key memorial service at the site.

Mr Hunt said: “There is a deeply overlooked social legacy as well as an economic one. The social legacy is he was very much a believer in the principles of freedom and equality and equality of opportunity.’’

Sam Holt naturally rejects the weird and wild stories and has urged Australians to focus on his father’s legacy rather than what he sees as an inevitable case of a then prime minister pushing the envelope too far.

The conspiracy theories, he said, were “absurd’’.

He told The Australian this week that in a political career spanning 32 years, his father had helped tear down the White Australia policy, engaged with Asia in a manner that was decades ahead of the curve and given benefits to women for the first time.

“I am keen for the legacy of what he achieved is remembered.’’