Writing duo gives new life to enduring mystery

Following the breakout success of their podcast Lost in Larrimah, writing duo Kylie Stevenson and Caroline Graham have co-written a book on one of NT’s most abiding mysteries.

Caroline Graham, left, and Kylie Stevenson have been investigating the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty. Picture: Rebecca Booth

Even before Paddy Moriarty’s disappearance, Kylie Stevenson and Caroline Graham knew Larrimah was a strange but oddly compelling place.

Tucked along the Stuart Highway, more than 500km south of Darwin, the remote outback town became the subject of intense media speculation and public intrigue after long-term resident and local personality Paddy Moriarty and his red kelpie mysteriously vanished in December 2017.

After almost four years of ­investigation and no plausible ­explanation, Northern Territory Police offered a $250,000 reward for information in February, still convinced Moriarty was the victim of foul play.

In May, they confirmed the generous sum had attracted no new leads, but said they continue to pursue persons of interest in the hope something will come up.

“We are still calling for any information, the smallest detail may be helpful to the case,” sergeant Justene Dwyer said. “A 70-year-old man and his dog don’t just disappear from a tiny outback town.”

Stevenson, a former journalist, first encountered Moriarty when she visited the town in 2016 on a two-week writer’s residency while trying to finish her first novel.

“I remember him as an old guy, quite small, but striking,” she said.

“He was ­always at the pub. He certainly liked to drink and he seemed like he’d lived in the town for a long, long time.

“I came down from Darwin and there was no phone reception and about 12 people were living there.

“But I knew I needed to abandon my novel and write about Larrimah. It had such an odd mix of characters, and I felt I needed to chronicle the town before it disappeared.”

When Moriarty vanished, a year after Stevenson first met him in the local pub, she returned to the town with friend and fellow writer Graham to undertake their own investigations, which eventually led to their 2018 Walkley-award winning podcast, Lost in Larrimah.

“We had this urgent need to understand the town and document what had happened to Paddy. A podcast seemed the best medium for including all the different voices and explaining the chronology of the story,” Graham said.

Paddy Moriarty from Larrimah in the Northern Territory.

But now the two writers have changed tack, turning their smash-hit podcast into book form, with the goal of fleshing out their initial work and delving into some of the more complex details that surrounded Moriarty’s disappearance.

“We amassed this vast amount of material from the podcast and most of it just couldn’t be included because we worked to tight deadlines and big aspects about the town and its history had to be dropped,” Stevenson said.

“We both wanted to write a book that took in some of the bigger issues that we could only hint at in the podcast.”

The task of co-writing a book during a pandemic proved surprisingly easy for the duo, as border closures and snap lockdowns made travel next to impossible.

“We wrote the podcast line-by-line together, but with the book we just worked remotely sharing an open word doc,” said Graham, who is based on the Gold Coast.

“We know each other so well, so we were able to just write different parts and discuss changes as we went.”

“The podcast-to-book trend seems to be growing because it is such a great way of taking a linear story (as told in the podcast) and adding different aspects to it ­because Larrimah and Paddy’s story can tell us so much about the outback.”