AUSTRALIAN HALLOWEEN (2025 Edit)

Is the spirit of Halloween murdering people in outback Queensland?

Like the majority of outback Queensland towns, Brownsville Station (strangely named since there wasn't a railway station within a hundred kilometres of the town), was made up mainly of sun-ravaged, white, grey, or yellow weatherboard, one- or two-storey buildings. Most with rickety deal wood porches. In 2025 Brownsville Station had a population of just twenty. At 6:00 PM on October 15 that year, one fifth of the town’s populace was sitting together on the hardwood bench on the porch out front of the general store, sipping warm beer straight from the can, smoking, and talking about nothing in particular. Bob Toohey, Johnny Baker, Dick Bailey, and Leo Ernst were all old-timers, who had long since given up worrying about the pace of life. Not that there was much pace or life in the dusty, outback town. Fifty years earlier Brownsville Station had been a thriving town, during the height of the Queensland mining boom. When the boom had bust Brownsville Station’s population had dropped from over a thousand to the current level in less than a decade.

Spitting out the butt of his cigar, Bob Toohey bit the end off another stogey. He lit up, took a puff and tried to blow a smoke ring. A feat which he had seen done in many a movie down the years -- yet which Bob himself had never managed to do in sixty years of smoking.

Smelling the pungent tobacco aroma, Leo Ernst turned round and saw what his friend was doing. Leo chuckled, then said, “Give it up, Bob. Anyhow, I thought the doctor said to cut back on those things when he passed through town last month.”

“The doctor can go to buggery. Life’s too damn short to be giving up what few pleasures are left at my age,” Bob said indignantly. “Anyhow what does he know? I’ve bin smokin’ these things for more’n sixty years now an’ it ain’t killed me yet!”

“’Sides,” said Dick Bailey, “we could all die at any time. You never know when your time’ll come, so what’s the point worryin’ about it?”

“I doubt if anything could kill you off, you old bugger,” joked Johnny Baker. “You’ll probably outlive us all by twenty years.”

“Easily,” agreed Bob, and they all chuckled.

Leo downed the last of his can of 4-X, then reached under the bench for another yellow beer can. Seeing him freeze with one hand under the bench, Bob asked, “What’s wrong, grab a centipede by mistake?” He guffawed at his own joke for a second.

“Runner coming!” said Leo. Lifting out a can of beer he held it up and pointed with it.

The three men raised a hand to shield their eyes against the sun and peered, trying to see what Leo saw. After a moment they could just make out a puff of dust from away across the brown dust bowl that was outback Queensland.

Although far, far off, the cloud of dust rapidly approached until there could be no doubt that it was a running man.

“You’ve got eyes like a hawk, you old Kraut!” Bob said with a laugh.

Leo smiled and shook his head ruefully at Bob’s taunt. Although born in Germany, he had come to Australia when only eleven, more than sixty-five years ago and considered himself now as Australian as meat pies or kangaroos. But to Bob, Leo would always be “the old Kraut”.

“Whoever it is, he’s comin’ at a run all right,” said Johnny Baker. He reached up with his left hand to pat his head, as though patting down the lush growth that forty years ago had adorned his now barren pate.

“You’re not wrong,” agreed Leo.

At first sighting, the puff of dust had seemed kilometres from the small town. Yet already the puff was close enough for the four men to begin to discern some of the runner’s features.

“Looks like an Abo,” said Johnny, seeing the dark colouring of the running man.

“Wearin’ some kinda weird tribal mask or somethin’,” pointed out Bob.

“A pumpkin,” said Leo.

Bob Toohey started to call him a dumb-arse Kraut. But as the running man entered the township and headed toward the general store, it became obvious that Leo was right: the runner looked like a native Australian wearing a hollowed out pumpkin on his head.

Unlike the reservation blacks they had seen, who wore western clothing and were usually pale-skinned half-breeds or less, the running man was night-black and naked apart from a small loin cloth. In his right hand he carried a large wooden spear, with what looked like an oversized boomerang fixed to the end of the spear -- so that it roughly resembled a scythe.

Sweltering beneath the outback sun, Bob Toohey wiped an arm across his brow and said, “Christ it must be hot under that pumpkin. Don’t know how he kin stand it.”

Seeing a flash of sunlight off the edge of the “boomerang” head of the spear, the four men realised that it was sheathed in metal.

“Holy shit, he must be one of the Lost Tribe!” cried Bob. “They’re supposed ta use steel-coated tools ain’t they?”

“That’s what the papers have been saying,” agreed Leo.

All four men rose to their feet as the native walked slowly toward them.

‘Phew!’ thought Leo almost gagging on the native’s body odour. ‘Smells like he hasn’t bathed in months.’ But in truth the aroma smelt more like a mixture of rancid fruit and decaying meat. ‘No, more like rotting pumpkins!’ he realised.

‘He’s a tall one, ain’t he?’ thought Bob. The native towered over them all, although they were standing on the wooden porch, the native on level ground. Feeling a little intimidated by the lofty black figure, Bob asked, “What can we do fer you?”

By way of answer the native raised the “scythe” back over his right shoulder and swung it toward Bob. The scythe neatly severed Bob’s head, which dropped to the porch, leaving his headless body standing, blood fountaining from the severed neck. Hitting the rickety porch, Bob’s head thump-thump-thumped like a basketball.

In the last second of his life, Johnny Baker didn’t know which was worse: the fact that Bob Toohey’s head had been cut off, or that Bob’s headless body continued standing, spraying blood across Johnny and across the rust-brown porch, as though the old man didn’t know that he was dead.

Then the scythe swung a second time. Bob Toohey’s body finally fell as Johnny Baker’s head jumped off to thump-thump-thump on the porch also.

“Holy shit!” said Dick Bailey. Then the scythe swung a third time cutting off his words.

Then only Leo Ernst was left standing.

Until the scythe swung one more time. And Leo’s head joined his friends’ on the deal wood porch.

Leaving the four decapitated corpses, the native started walking toward the general store. But he stopped as a shrill scream rang out from behind him.

Looking around the man saw a grey-haired old woman, flanked by a young girl and boy, both about seven or eight.

“Oh my God!” cried Shelley Toohey, staring in shock at her husband’s headless corpse.

The native stepped down into the street and strode toward them.

“Run kids!” Shelley shouted. And her two grandchildren sprinted down the main street toward the opposite end of town.

Standing her ground the old lady glared her hatred for the native and hissed, “You’ll have to kill me too,” not wanting to live without the man she had been married to for more than fifty-five years.

The native swung the scythe toward her. Then, ignoring the two fleeing children he returned to the porch and entered the general store.

“What can I do you for?” called Tom Farrow from the back room, hearing the tinkle-tinkle of the bell over the door. Before he could finish, the murderer stepped through the curtain into the back room of the store.


Harry Dwyer sat in the barber shop chair. His shorn hair lay on the floor, his stubbly face was heavily lathered.

“Be sure to give me a close shave, Dave,” said Harry.

“Sure thing,” said Dave Edgar, looking round as the door swung open. “Be with you ...” He stopped, shocked by the sight of the pumpkin-headed native. “Holy Jesus!” he said, backing away in terror.

“My God, what’s that pong? Smells like dead meat and rottin’ fruit!” said Harry Dwyer looking toward the door.

The native swung the scythe and Harry Dwyer got his close shave.

“Oh my God!” gasped Dave. He watched the blood spurting from the neck of the headless corpse in the chair, as Harry’s head rolled across the lino-covered floor, creating splodges of red left and right, like bloody footprints, as it rolled.

The scythe swung again and Dave’s head rolled across the lino too.

The native returned to the porch and continued his walk through the town. By the time that he had finished there were eighteen headless corpses. The only survivors were little Sandy and Tommy Toohey, who had run straight out of town and didn’t stop running until reaching Hoopertown, ten kilometres west of Brownsville Station.


Stepping out of the Land-Rover after a 120 kilometre ride, Vincent O’Connor was hot, sticky, reeking of perspiration, well and truly fed up, and not the least prepared for the sight before him.

A trained anthropologist, specialising in Aboriginal studies, O’Connor was affectionately known by his friends and colleagues as Jaffa -- due to his great shock of bright orange hair, which insisted on fanning out Dagwood Bumstead-style despite his best efforts to comb it into place.

Twelve hours earlier Jaffa had been enjoying the perfect weather of the Gold Coast, relaxing over the weekend before preparing for the rigours of the end of year exams at the University of Brisbane where he lectured. Half a day later he was sweltering under the 50 Degree Celsius heat of outback Queensland at a small Aboriginal reservation, Huntington-Station. But that wasn’t what made his blood boil when he stepped out of the Rover. Despite his red hair, Jaffa was anything but the stereotypical hot-headed redhead. Usually he was calm to the point of seeming indifference. However, he was anything but indifferent to the sight that greeted him now.

“What the hell is going on here?” Jaffa demanded. He looked in anger at the great cage that had been built at one side of the station. Actually it was a barb-wire fence four metres high, enclosing an area of perhaps two square kilometres. Inside the “cage” were fifty Aborigines, corralled like animals. But not ordinary Aborigines, this was the “lost tribe” that had covered the front page of every newspaper in Australia for the last three days, since the natives had wandered onto the reservation.

Supposedly the lost tribe had never encountered whites before, having wandered the Australian outback without ever entering the built-up areas. Watching them Jaffa was prepared to believe it. Unlike the reservation blacks, who were all relatively pale-skinned half-breeds or less, the lost tribe were night-black and obviously full-bloods -- although previously there had been few known full-blood Aborigines anywhere in Australia. Also while the reservation blacks wore western clothing and spoke passable English (sometimes of the pidgin variety), the lost tribe were stark naked apart from the smallest of animal-skin loin cloths.

“Why the Hell are they caged like animals?” Jaffa demanded.

“We had to keep them somewhere,” explained a Brisbane politician. He had been suffering the 50 Degree heat for the last three days in the cause of getting his picture into the papers with the lost tribe, and now reeked of body odour.

Ignoring the clicking cameras as reporters snapped his picture, Jaffa insisted, “They’re not animals! You’ve got no right to keep them caged up!”

“Could you keep your voice down?” asked the politician, aware that the journalists were hanging on their every word. “We had to keep them somewhere,” he repeated. “And we couldn’t risk them running off again before we had a chance to study them properly.”

‘Jesus save us from politicians!’ thought Jaffa. Turning away in disgust, his eye caught a glint of sunlight reflected off a boomerang held by one of the natives.

‘My God it’s true!’ Jaffa thought. ‘They really do sheathe their weapons in metal.’ Unlike many native races, the Australian Aborigines had never learnt to work with metal prior to the arrival of the white settlers. So Jaffa had rejected newspaper reports that the lost tribe had spears and other weapons sheathed in metal. Now he could see it was true. ‘They must have had some kind of previous contact with whites!’ he thought.


Walking around the blood-drenched town of Brownsville Station, Detective Inspector Bill Noonan sighed and shook his head. Although he had been a cop for thirty years (in Victoria, then New South Wales, and for the last four years in Queensland), he had never encountered anything like this before. ‘Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before,’ thought the fifty-five-year-old, grey-haired detective. ‘Not in this country anyway. Only the worst serial killings in the USA or Europe would be this bad!’ But then he looked over to where the headless bodies of Bob Toohey, Leo Ernst, Dick Bailey, and Johnny Baker lay on the wooden porch outside the general store. Shaking his head, Noonan thought, ‘Maybe not even there!’

“Well, what’re you think?” asked Sergeant George Neville, of Hoopertown.

Bill shrugged. “What can I think when the only witnesses are seven- and eight-year-old kids?”

“How do you explain their story of a pumpkin-headed Aborigine being the killer?”

“Hallucination caused by the trauma of seeing their grandparents butchered,” said Bill, only repeating what he had been told by the doctor tending the children.

“According to the kids it was already getting dark when he walked into town,” persisted Neville. “If he was wearing some kind of war mask, they might’ve mistaken it for a pumpkin.” Although there was no mistaking the faint aroma like rotting fruit and rancid meat which still hung in the air, the odour that the children claimed the native gave off.

“Maybe. But I can’t see a wild Aborigine having the expertise to behead eighteen people, each with a single swing of whatever he used.”

“Then you don’t think it could have been done with a spear, or an axe for that matter?”

“Damn near impossible to completely behead someone with an axe,” said Bill, quoting the doctor again. “If it could be done, you’d mangle the neck in the process. Each of these was killed with a single, clean cut.”

Bill sighed then said, “I suppose I’d better go and speak to the kids again. Maybe they’ve calmed down enough now to be able to tell me what really happened.”

“Let’s hope so,” agreed George. All his life he had yearned for something exciting to happen, to put Hoopertown on the map. But watching the swarms of Brisbane cops photographing the headless bodies, he had the awful realisation that Brownsville Station and Hoopertown were both about to appear on the world map, but not for the sort of reason he had always hoped for.


Huntington-Station derived its name from the fact that a few hundred head of cattle and sheep were farmed there. But the station was mainly an Aboriginal reservation, where half-breeds lived, were schooled, and even worked. The livestock was corralled in paddocks in the outer reaches of the farm. The inner hectares were devoted to housing, schooling, and workrooms. On the left as you entered the farm was the large, barb-wire cage where the lost tribe was held -- a few hundred metres past the cage was the first of the livestock corrals. On the right as you entered, stood a rectangular redbrick building, facing front on to the gate. Further back, at 90 Degrees to the redbrick building, were four large, iron-roofed, cream coloured, weatherboard buildings. The first two of these were for the showers, dining rooms, and recreation rooms. The third was sleeping quarters. The fourth was the garage for the station’s three vehicles, and was also used as a mechanical workshop. Behind the four buildings were two other weatherboard buildings, used as sleeping quarters.

As his driver Jackie, a reservation black, began removing his equipment from the Land-Rover, Jaffa went across to the cage to make first contact with the lost tribe. Most of the natives in the cage backed away at his approach -- making him fear that it would be a long process to get through to them. But one of the Elders -- a tall, willowy, grey-bearded man, stood his ground, refusing to be intimidated.

Seeing a chain of brightly coloured stones worn around the man’s neck, Jaffa pointed and said, “Agantra? Agantra?” using the North Queensland Aboriginal word for ornament.

When this failed to elicit a response, he looked round the station. Seeing an emu a few hundred metres away he pointed. When the Aborigine turned to look, Jaffa said, “Armangadda.” When this failed to get a response he tried the word for bird, “Chulaggie,” still without success.

Sighing his frustration, he looked back to where Jackie, the reporters, and the politician were all watching with interest. Jaffa raised a hand to shield his eyes against the relentless sun, then said “Gallan” a Northern Queensland word for sun. When that failed he tried the Southern Queensland word “Ghigan”.

Then “Ingluna”, another Northern word. Then finally, out of desperation, the South Australian word “Kurru”. Then he tried the Northern Queensland word for heat “Gnardya”, brushing his head across his sweat-dripping brow for emphasis.

“Kortuchal wallaloomagoo loowamar mar loagilgilmoo ....” said the Aboriginal in response. He continued with a long string of words, all sounding vaguely like the sort of syllables that Jaffa had heard before in Aboriginal words, but strung together in a way that was meaningless to him.

Out of politeness, Jaffa waited till the man had finished. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he said, “You’ve got me, I’m afraid.”

Frustrated, Jaffa turned and headed toward the Land-Rover to help Jackie carry his suitcases and equipment into the redbrick building where he would be staying while he studied the lost tribe.

“What do you think?” asked Jackie as they started inside, leaving the Brisbane politician to make another speech for the news media.

Jaffa shrugged and said, “I’ve been studying Aboriginal languages from around Australia for twenty-five years now. It could easily take that long again before I can communicate with them.”

Inside the small room he unpacked his personal belongings, including a powerful personal computer. Once he had the PC working, he attached a modem to the phone so that he could utilise the powerful mainframe system at Brisbane Uni. if necessary. Then as a first step to breaking down the language of the lost tribe, he inserted into the PC a CD titled, “Aboriginal Languages and Dialects from Around Australia”, compiled by Professor Vincent C. O’Connor B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

When the CD was loaded, Jaffa typed in the expression “Kortuchal wallaloomagoo loowarmar mar loagilgilmoo...” and as much more of the Elder’s words as he could remember.

“Do you think you’ll find it?” asked Jackie, looking over his shoulder.

“No, the best that I can do is compare the individual syllables to syllables of known Aboriginal words, to try to locate a similar word structure.”

He continue to play around with the syllables of the expression for the next few hours, till stopping for tea. Then, after teatime -- hoping that the reporters would have left for the night, Jaffa and Jackie returned to the cage to try again. This time they each carried a small tape recorder with a large supply of tapes to make certain that they got the Elder’s words correct.

Approaching the compound, Jaffa was surprised to see the natives crouching around a large wood fire. “They are allowed out of the cage sometimes then?” he asked, hoping that was the case.

“No, we gathered some wood for them,” explained Jackie. “It can get murderous out here at night.”

‘Don’t I know it!’ thought Jaffa. He knew that even on 50 Degree Celsius days, the temperature can easily drop below freezing point at night in the Queensland outback.

Over the next three months Jaffa -- now on extended leave from Brisbane University -- continued to study the lost tribe. He fought hard to get permission to have the natives released from the barb-wire cage, arguing that allowing them to work among the reservation blacks might make his job easier. But the Brisbane authorities refused, afraid that the lost tribe might wander off again as suddenly as they had appeared.

Fortunately, after the Brownsville Station Massacre -- as the world news media called it -- the swarms of reporters clogging the reservation gradually drifted away.

After twelve weeks Jaffa had begun to make small inroads into understanding the lost tribe’s language. But his communications with the tribe still involved a lot of sign language, guesswork and frustration for both Jaffa and the natives. After so long in the cage, the Aborigines had started to become irritable, and Jaffa finally managed to secure permission for half a dozen natives at a time to leave the compound during the daylight hours only, so that they could work on the reservation. This helped alleviate their feelings of being kept prisoners, and also gave Jaffa a chance to try to make headway with their language by watching them at work to observe their names for the tools and things around them.


After talking to Tommy and Sandy Toohey again, Bill Noonan returned to have another word with the coroner. Then with the coroner’s A-OK the eighteen headless bodies were taken away to arrange for burial.

Thousands of photographs were taken of Brownsville Station -- both before and after the corpses were removed. More than five hundred cops were used to scour the countryside, looking for the lone native whom the two kids still insisted was the sole culprit.

Three months later the task force had been reduced to less than a dozen, but with eighteen fatalities the case would never be completely closed until it was eventually solved.

‘How can he have just vanished off the face of the Earth?’ Bill Noonan wondered. But he knew that the murderer might have simply run into the outback and not stopped. Although a white man would not get far into the desert of central Queensland without food and water, a full-blood Aborigine has the knowledge to cross from one side of the continent to the other with only a spear to kill food and a knife to dig for water. ‘He’s probably lying low in Western Australia right now!’ thought Bill cursing his own luck.


By 6:00 PM twilight had started to fall at Broadhurst, an outback Queensland town of thirty-two people and half as many age-worn weatherboard buildings: a general store-cum-post office; a garage-cum-livery stable; a one-room school; a tiny church, and an even dozen houses.

While most of the townsfolk were eating dinner, Tony Costa wandered down Main Street (ironically named, since it was the only street in town). An open bottle of cheap wine protruded from each outer pocket of his dirty burlap coat. He held a third bottle up to his mouth to drain the last of its contents. He shook the bottle to make certain that he hadn’t missed a drop, then threw the empty bottle into the street behind him. Then he reached into his coat for another bottle.

Strictly speaking it was illegal to drink alcohol in the street. But Broadhurst was too small to warrant its own law enforcement officer and the other residents had given up trying to get Tony to obey the law years ago.

To his dismay Tony found that the second bottle was almost empty already. “Stupid bastard!” he cursed the bottle as he wandered over to sit on the porch outside the general store. He bent under the hitching rail, still used by locals to tie up horses, and sat on the rotting, yellowing porch.

After finishing the second bottle in a couple of swigs, Tony decided to take a little nap to help make his third and final bottle last. He had intended to lie on the porch -- having learnt to ignore the nagging townsfolk. But as lightning flashed, fearing that it was going to pour rain, he lay in the gutter beside the porch, then eased between the supports until he had wriggled under the wooden porch.

Despite the lightning, he fell asleep almost immediately. But he was awakened less than an hour later by the sound of a woman’s shriek.

Looking up, he saw boards above himself and almost panicked. ‘My God I’m in a coffin!’ he thought: ‘I’ve been buried alive!’ But then as his fear sobered him, he realised that he was beneath the porch outside Joey Booker’s general store.

Tony rolled over onto his side so that he could look out into the street. He saw Joey Booker running across the street to where a near-naked Aborigine stood before the open doors of the livery stable. The native wore what looked like a pumpkin on his head and was holding a strange scythe-like spear, raised menacing toward Mary O’Brien who was looking around feverishly, obviously wondering if there was any point running into the stable where a green Datsun sat with its bonnet up. ‘Don’t risk it!’ thought Tony: ‘Even if the keys are in the dash you’ll never start it up fast enough!’

Because his own body odour was so “ripe” there were few smells that Tony found offensive. But even from across the road he felt himself gagging at the native’s body odour. ‘Jesus they reckon I’m a bit off, this bloke smells like rottin’ meat and veggies!’

“Hey what’re you think you’re doing?” demanded Joey, who Tony knew had the hots for Mary.

By way of answer the native swung his spear and lopped off Mary’s head.

“Holy Jesus!” said Tony as the native turned and decapitated Joey also. “It’s finally happened.” For the last thirty years do-gooders had tried to get Tony to mend his ways, warning him that alcohol would rot his brain. Of course he’d heard stories of drunks suffering the DT’s and seeing pink elephants or golden unicorns, or what-have-you. But it had never happened to Tony. ‘Until now!’ he thought. ‘But it’s finally gone and happened!’

But as the slaughter continued and ten, fifteen, then twenty or more people were beheaded, Tony started to have his doubts that it was the DT’s. Although not one to read the newspapers and not owning a TV, Tony had heard rumours months ago about a full-blood Aborigine wandering into Brownsville Station eighty kilometres away and beheading everyone. Tony hadn’t taken the reports seriously until now.

“Holy Jesus, it’s true though,” he said to himself. He didn’t want to watch the ongoing slaughter, but was unable to take his eyes away.

Then, to his horror, the native turned and stared toward the general store where Tony was hiding. ‘He can’t possibly see me here under the porch!’ thought Tony: ‘Not in the dark!’ But he had heard rumours that some full-blood Aborigines could see in the dark like cats. And to his dismay the Aborigine continued staring in his direction, and finally began walking across the dirt road toward the porch ....

Only stopping when he was less than three metres from the porch.

Then as lightning struck again, for one terrible moment the features of the Aborigine were lit up clearly. ‘Holy Jesus!’ thought Tony seeing the vast black depths of the tennis-ball-sized eye sockets, the large tusk-like fangs that hung down over the bottom lip, and the bluish forked tongue of the native. ‘It’s not a mask!’ he thought, realising that the grotesque yellow-orange, pumpkin-like tumescence was actually the native’s head!

As another lightning flash struck, seemingly on the very edge of town, the native raised the scythe back over his left shoulder. Even in the moonlight the blade of the contraption looked unusual, but as the lightning flashed, the metal edging gleamed and Tony thought, ‘The bastard’s after my head now!’ Then as it seemed that he was finished, Tony heard running footsteps on the planks above his head.

“Hold it right there, you fucker!” a male voice shouted.

The Aborigine snarled an almost panther-like snarl at the man and started forward again.

There came the roar of a shotgun above the porch and the native staggered backwards.

Small buckshot holes dotted the pumpkin head of the creature and as it reeled backwards Tony thought, ‘So the bastard’s mortal after all!’ But then the monster started toward the porch again and Tony realised that the shotgun blast had only wounded the creature. ‘Looks like I was right, it’s gonna kill us all!’ he thought, not even noticing as he wet his trousers in terror.

Then the shotgun fired a second time. The creature staggered again and roared its panther-like cry at the rifleman. But as a second shotgun fired a few metres away, the creature turned and ran toward the outskirts of town.

“Come on, let’s finish it off!” shouted one of the gunmen and the two men started down the street after the monster. But it had no trouble leaving them both behind.

‘My God, look at it go!’ thought Tony. His fear gave way to a touch of admiration. ‘If we had him on our Olympic running team, Australia might actually win a few gold medals for a change.’

Though now uncomfortable in the cramped space beneath the porch, and acutely aware of the dirt and scuttling spiders that fell down onto him from time to time, Tony forced himself to wait where he was for another hour. Partly to await the return of the two gunmen, partly out of fear of the killer returning.

An hour later no one had returned. So -- not knowing if the two men chasing the monster were lost in the bush, or had been lured away and ambushed by it -- Tony decided that it was time to go for help. He squeezed out from under the porch, then started down the street in the opposite direction to that taken by the gunmen and the killer.

Tony left Broadhurst before 8:00 PM, but it was almost 1:00 AM by the time that he reached the next town, Stanforde.


Sergeant Des Sherwin was not happy at being awakened at one o’clock in the morning. He was even less happy about allowing the derelict -- who reeked of sweat, alcohol, and urine -- into his home. But he decided that it was better than getting dressed and going down to the police station.

“All right, what can I do for you?” asked Des, trying his best not to yawn but failing. But by the time that Tony had finished his tale, the policeman was wide awake. “Twenty-five or thirty people murdered?” he demanded.

“That’s right!” Tony insisted. “As far as I know everyone in town except me and the two blokes who took off after it. And they never came back, so it probably got them too.”

Des shook his head, not sure if he could believe the dirty, seedy old man. Although he had sobered up during his long walk, it was obvious that Tony was Broadhurst’s town drunk. But the cop took the trouble to try ringing through to Joey Booker’s general store at Broadhurst. Then, receiving no reply, he rang half a dozen other numbers out of the local directory before saying, “Wait here while I go upstairs and change.”

Ten minutes later he was heading for the front door, with Tony Costa in tow.

Even driving on high beams, on the unpaved road between the two towns, it took till nearly 3:00 AM to reach Broadhurst.

“I hope you haven’t led me out here on a wild goose ...” began Des as they drove into town. He stopped in mid sentence as the car’s headlights lit up the porch of the general store where three headless bodies lay. “Holy Jesus!”

“There’s Joey Booker and Mary O’Brien,” said Tony, pointing toward the livery stable across the street. Des swung the Fairlane around to catch the two headless corpses in the headlights -- along with other bodies further up the street.

“Wait here,” ordered Des opening the police car door.

“Can’t I come with you?” asked Tony. He decided that the sight of the corpses all around town wasn’t as bad as waiting alone in the car -- afraid that the killer might return while Des was inside one of the buildings.

“All right, come along,” said Des reluctantly, not wanting to waste time arguing the point.

In the street they found seventeen headless bodies. Inside the weatherboard houses and stores they found eleven more. Plus one very frightened, almost catatonic old lady -- Moira Walsh, the local school teacher -- crouching in terror in the broom closet in her house.

“Pumpkin ... pumpkin head!” shrieked the old lady as Des helped her to her feet. He led her gently, yet insistently, outside to the car.

“Well, I guess you were telling the truth,” Des said to Tony as they placed Moira Walsh in the back of the police car.

They had already started out of town again, when the headlights picked up two figures running toward them.

“Oh my God, he’s back!” shrieked Tony Costa. But as the figures approached, they could be seen to be two white men carrying shotguns.

“It’s Larry Stroud and Maurie Cribbins,” explained Tony as the car screeched to a halt. “It must’ve been them chased the bugger out of town.”

The two men were clearly exhausted, having spent the night on the move.

“My God I thought ol’ pumpkin-head musta got you boys,” said Tony as Larry collapsed, panting furiously, against the bonnet of the Fairlane.

“Not a chance,” said Maurie, the least exhausted of the two. “I don’t know if the buckshot even hurt the bastard, but the gun blast sure scared him off.”

“Then where’ve you been all night?”

“Our own stupid fault,” explained Larry. “We must’ve chased the bugger fifteen Kays or more into the outback. By the time we gave up on him, we were well and truly lost. We’re lucky to even get back alive.”

Des and Tony helped the two fatigued men into the back of the car. Then Des drove them to Hoopertown, where Detective Inspector Bill Noonan still had a small task force investigating the Brownsville Station Massacre.


Bill Noonan listened in horror as he was told of the twenty-eight murders in Broadhurst. He peered at the four men sitting in front of the small, worm-riddled desk where he sat at the back of the small office, surrounded by four-drawer filing cabinets filled with the paperwork from the Brownsville Station Massacre -- mainly thousands of photos of the headless victims. ‘My God,’ he thought, ‘we’ll have the federal boys nosing about if we don’t catch this bastard soon.’

Bill listened to the accounts of Tony, Larry, and Maurie again and again, desperately searching without success for anything new, any clue that might allow them to start making headway with the case. Their accounts had been typed up and signed, and Larry and Maurie had already left, when Tony Costa suddenly remembered the metal sheathing that he had seen on the blade of the murder weapon.

“Jesus Christ!” cried Bill. Although news of the lost tribe had been pushed off the front page by the Brownsville Station Massacre, he had read enough to recall that the lost tribe were said to be the only wild Aborigines known to sheathe their weapons in metal.


Huntington-Station was halfway between traditional Aboriginal and western lifestyles. Some of the reservation blacks had higher education and were completely westernised. Others were partly westernised but still did traditional Aboriginal crafts such as weaving, boomerang making, and hunting wild animals for food. Also boomerangs, stone carvings, and Aboriginal paintings were produced by many of the inhabitants and sold through a co-operative which shared the profits among all the station’s residents.

Having lectured at Brisbane University Jaffa was used to rising early, yet he couldn’t help yawning at the five o’clock start at Huntington-Station. But he had decided that if he wanted to make headway with the lost tribe, he must adapt to their ways, and knew that even the reservation blacks were usually hard at work by six o’clock.

Stepping onto the concrete steps outside the main building, Jaffa saw Debbie Mandilalal -- a reservation black -- and two women from the lost tribe sitting together on the dirt weaving a wicker basket. For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes away from the opulent breasts of one of the near naked full bloods.

Reluctantly he forced his eyes away, then blushed deeply as he saw Debbie grinning at him.

Despite his embarrassment, he stopped for a few minutes to ask Debbie how the two full-blood women were fitting in. He was careful not to talk directly to the two women, knowing that by Aboriginal tribal law a single man should not speak to a single woman unless she is his sister, or he is engaged to her. Although the law was no longer enforced by the reservation blacks, he knew it would be among the full blooded lost tribe, and he didn’t want to reverse the progress that he had made with the tribe by violating their code of ethics.

After a couple of minutes Jaffa went across to another corrugated-iron-roofed weatherboard building to look for Jackie. His former driver had now become his aide-de-camp in dealing with the lost tribe.

“Looking for me?” asked Jackie tapping Jaffa on the shoulder from behind. He grinned when Jaffa jumped, having not seen the half-breed sneaking up behind him.

“Er ... yeah,” said Jaffa smiling himself. He knew that Jackie and some of the reservation blacks took great pride in showing off their stealth to him.

“Where to first?” asked Jackie.

Jaffa ran a hand through his unruly red hair while looking round the half dozen or so large building that made up the reservation. After a moment he said, “The cage.”

As they started across the compound, Jaffa sighed his frustration that he had not been able to get permission to have the barb-wire “prison” torn down.

Since his original encounter with the tribe, Jaffa had become friendly with many of the natives. But particularly with a tall, athletic-looking, grey-haired Elder named Julabawali.

Over the last few days they had shown Julabawali how the reservation blacks used a forge to melt and mould iron and other metals. In turn the full blood had demonstrated how his tribe painstakingly extracted metal from ore and melted it to coat the edge of their spears and boomerangs. Which brought them to today’s “lesson”. Using a combination of a pidgin form of the lost tribe’s tongue, and sign language, Jaffa indicated that they would like a demonstration of how the lost tribe hunted with the metal-sheathed weapons.

Julabawali broke into a long string of words -- only a fifth of which Jaffa had any familiarity with -- then eagerly nodded his head to indicate his willingness.

“Here we go then,” said Jaffa as the three of them set out on foot toward the outer limits of the reservation. ‘Let’s just hope that he doesn’t make a break for it!’ thought Jaffa, knowing that he was taking a risk by allowing Julabawali to stray so far from the cage. Since the return of the Brisbane politician to the Gold Coast many weeks ago, and the eventual disappearance of the journalists, Jaffa had had free rein to interpret his instructions regarding the handling of the lost tribe however he liked. But he knew that he would be answerable if any of the tribe escaped into the outback.

As they raced across the dirt plains, occasionally climbing boundary fences, Jaffa started to fear that Julabawali had indeed abused his confidence to make a break for freedom. Before long the redheaded man was more than a hundred metres behind Jackie, who in turn was falling further and further behind the running full blood.

‘Why didn’t we take the Land-Rover?’ thought Jaffa as his legs began to cramp up, not used to cross-country running. ‘Then at least we could have kept him in sight!’ He had almost given up on ever seeing the native again, when reaching a grove of blue gums he saw Jackie waiting for him. The black had a finger to his lips to shush the white man. ‘Easier said than done!’ thought Jaffa, able to silence his running feet more readily than his gasping breath.

He waited where he was till his breathing returned to normal, then followed Jackie through the sweet-smelling eucalyptus grove. On the other side he saw Julabawali’s willowy figure ever so slowly creeping up on a mob of half a dozen grey kangaroos grazing on the desert grass twenty metres away. The old man would creep forward a few centimetres, or even millimetres, then stand rigid as a statue at the slightest hint of movement by the roos. Jaffa knew that kangaroos have very poor eyesight and rely on hearing and smell to warn of imminent danger. Fortunately what wind there was, was blowing from the mob toward the lone hunter. So that the only danger was of being heard by the boomer, the dominant male roo, who acted as sentinel for the mob while his harem and their joeys fed.

Despite Julabawali’s caution, the old man was still fifteen metres from the mob when the boomer’s dog-like ears lifted and his head span round to the hunter’s direction. The old man roo roared his warning and quickly the two joeys dived into their mothers’ pouches, then the mob took to flight.

Throwing stealth to the winds, Julabawali leapt forward and launched his large hunting boomerang. Unlike the toy boomerangs sold to tourists, a hunting boomerang is not designed to return to the thrower. Instead it is aimed at the head of a fleeing animal, with the usual intention of killing or stunning the animal long enough for the hunter to reach it. But Julabawali’s aim was lower than Jaffa expected.

“He’s missed his shot,” said Jackie, echoing Jaffa’s thoughts as the boomerang sailed toward the neck of a fleeing doe.

But upon hitting the roo, the metal-sheathed boomerang neatly decapitated the creature, sending its head flying off to one side as the headless animal continued hopping forward.

“Jesus!” said Jaffa. He watched in shock as blood spurted from the severed neck of the kangaroo, which still had not stopped -- like a grotesque, oversized headless chicken racing round and round the farmyard.

After half a dozen hops the headless carcase finally realised that it was dead and fell into a heap on the red desert sand.

“Holy Jesus!” said Jaffa. He and Jackie raced across to the headless carcase as Julabawali held up the severed head and started to chatter away a kilometre a minute in triumph at his success.

Too shocked to even listen at first, Jaffa missed most of the full blood’s monologue, but caught enough to realise that the hunter was proud of his achievement and expected them to be impressed.

“My God, have you ever seen anything like that before?” asked Jaffa, knowing even as he spoke that it was a stupid question.

“No way, never,” replied Jackie.

Obviously disappointed by the reaction of the two men, Julabawali went across to retrieve his boomerang. Then he speared the headless roo from tail to neck so that they could carry it back to the reservation.

“Good eatin’ tonight, boss,” said Jackie with a laugh. He took the back end of the spear to help carry the carcase.

Jaffa followed the procession, grateful that the weight of the roo slowed down the two Aborigines enough to allow him to keep up with them.

When they returned to the reservation, Jaffa was dismayed to see the buildings swarming with police and reporters. I’m in for it now! he thought, assuming that they had been called in after Julabawali had taken off into the outback with he and Jackie in pursuit.

“Professor O’Connor?” called Bill Noonan as they approached. He looked a little startled by the sight of the speared kangaroo. The grey-haired inspector introduced himself to Jaffa as they headed toward the main complex building. “I’m in charge of investigating the murders at Brownsville Station three months ago,” he explained.

“What brings you here?” asked Jaffa, puzzled, as he led Noonan into the redbrick building. Although there were a couple of bedrooms in the building (including Jaffa’s), most of the doors on either side of the grey-lino covered corridor led to recreation rooms where various arts and crafts could be practised when it was too dark outside, or too hot in summer. At the end of the building was a large room which doubled as a library and a school room when it was too hot for the station kids outside. But although Jaffa and Noonan were both sweating from the outback heat, today was regarded by the teachers as cool enough for the kids to sit under the shade of the giant gum trees that ringed the reservation. So the library was free for Jaffa and Noonan to use to talk in private.

Bill followed Jaffa over to a long, cushion-covered wooden bench at one end of the library and sat beside him before answering. “There was a second massacre, at Broadhurst, last night,” he finally said. “Twenty-eight people were killed. All of them beheaded like at Brownsville Station.”

“Jesus!” said Jaffa, not knowing what else he could say.

“The only difference is that this time there were four survivors, so we have a description, of sorts, of the killer.” He went on to describe what Tony Costa, Larry Stroud, and Maurie Cribbins had told him -- so far Moira Walsh was still in too deep a state of shock to be able to tell them anything.

“A pumpkin-headed Aborigine?” asked Jaffa, thinking, ‘He’s gotta be joking!’

“I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what Tony, Larry, and Maurie all claim to have seen commit the murders...” He paused for a moment, feeling a little guilty for not having believed them earlier, “And also two kids, Tommy and Sandy Toohey, who were the only survivors from the first massacre.”

“But what has this got to do with me?” asked Jaffa. Seeing Jackie standing in the library doorway, he waved a hand to call him over.

“I believe ...” began Bill hesitantly, “that is I suspect that one of your blacks ... that is one of the lost tribe could be the killer.”

“What?” asked Jaffa. Looking toward Jackie, he saw that his second in command was just as astonished. “But why?”

“Because...” Bill hesitated again, this time unsure of his witness, afraid that Tony Costa might have been having an alcohol-induced hallucination. “One of our witnesses claimed that the spear used to behead the victims was sheathed in metal.”

“Yes, but ...” began Jaffa. He stopped as a dreadful thought struck him. ‘A spear used to behead the victims!’ he thought.

Although he had read newspaper reports of the Brownsville Station victims being beheaded, it had not meant anything special to him. But now he thought of Julabawali’s demonstration of how the sheathed boomerang could effortlessly behead a kangaroo. Looking across at Jackie, he suspected that the half-breed was thinking the same thing. Jaffa wondered if Noonan had noted the headless state of the kangaroo Jackie and Julabawali had carried past him earlier?

“But none of our Aborigines wear a pumpkin, or pumpkin-like mask,” pointed out Jaffa. “It’d be difficult for them to hide something that size from us.”

“On the reservation yes,” agreed Bill Noonan. “But if he’s escaping at night he could hide it in the bush somewhere.”

“But neither Brownsville Station nor Broadhurst are within a hundred kilometres of Huntington-Station,” pointed out Jackie. “It’d take days to walk that far and back.”

“Yes,” agreed Jaffa, “and we’d notice his absence for sure if he vanished for a week at a time then suddenly appeared again.”

“Fair enough, but it might not be someone you have on the reservation. It’s possible that the lost tribe might have left some of their members out in the bush when they walked into the reservation three months ago ... Or if they knew this bloke was a dangerous psychopath, they may have exiled him from the tribe.”

“All right I’ll speak to them about it,” agreed Jaffa. “But I’d prefer it if I could do it without you looking over my shoulder. They’re used to me and Jackie, but they’re still very wary of strangers.”


Reaching the cage, Jaffa signalled to old Julabawali who ran grinning across toward them from where he had been cooking the headless kangaroo twenty metres away. The old man began chattering a-kilometre-a-minute, obviously thinking that they had come to congratulate him again on his skill in killing the roo. Jaffa waited politely till he had finished, then, hoping his knowledge of the lost tribe’s dialect would not let him down, he asked if they had ever heard of an Aborigine carrying a metal-sheathed spear who wore a pumpkin -- here words failed him and he settled for a “yellow-orange gourd or melon” -- on his head. The full-blood Aborigine stared in wide-eyed horror at the redheaded man.

“What’s the matter?” asked Jaffa.

Instead of answering the old man ran toward the other end of the compound shouting, “Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh!” as he ran.

“What the hell?” said Jackie, obviously as puzzled as Jaffa.

Reaching the other end of the cage the old man began to chatter to the other full-bloods without stopping. By the time he reached the back of the cage the other full-bloods had began wailing “Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh!” also, in obvious terror. But the old man did not stop, he merely took a running jump and landed nearly two metres up the side of the cage then began furiously trying to scale the barb wire fence.

After a few seconds other Aborigines joined him. Ignoring the barb-wire gashes in their arms and legs the Aborigines climbed toward the top of the four-metre tall fence shrilling “Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh! Eeeeeeeh!” as they went. The sound of the fifty-odd wailing natives was almost deafening.

While half the Aborigines tried scaling the barb wire, the others seemed intent on trying to push their way through it. Men, women, children ran screaming about the enclosure, some suffering horrible tears to their legs and arms in their bid to flee the barbed-wire fence that held them on the reservation.

“What’s going on?” shouted Jaffa. But Jackie was busy calling to other reservation blacks to run to their assistance in trying calming down the rioting full bloods.

“My God, what’s happening?” asked Debbie Mandilalal, the first person to arrive. She was closely followed by Bill Noonan who had been waiting by the redbrick building.

“They went berserk when I mentioned a pumpkin-headed Aborigine,” Jaffa shouted to Bill.

It took more than an hour to calm the fifty full bloods, then to attend to their self-inflicted injuries. Two men and two women had to be rushed by flying doctor to the nearest hospital, a hundred and twenty kilometres away, for treatment.

“What’s wrong?” Jaffa tried to ask Julabawali. The old man had been taken to the library at the back of the redbrick building to have his injuries dressed.

At first the full blood ignored the question. Lying back on the wooden bench where Jaffa and the grey-haired police inspector had sat earlier, Julabawali’s eyes roved around the metal shelving housing thousands of textbooks, Aboriginal history books, and novels for both adults and children. As the old man’s gaze stopped at a cardboard poster of Bart Simpson, advertising the children’s section, Jaffa thought, ‘Anyone would think he’d never seen books before!’ Then he realised that it was probably true.

Jaffa started to repeat the question, wondering if he had got the Aboriginal syllables wrong, when he was cut off by Julabawali. “Sanarn! Sanarn!” shouted the full blood.

Jaffa and Jackie braced themselves in case the old man was about to run off in panic again. But he made no move to leave the bench.

“Sanarn?” asked Jaffa. “What is that? Is that the name of a person?”

“Sanarn! Sanarn!” repeated Julabawali. With a little encouragement from Jaffa and Jackie, he accepted a pen and notepad from a police constable, and with difficulty (not used to handling the implements), began to scribble. He drew a stick figure man, with what was obviously meant to be a pumpkin on his head.

For the next eight hours Jaffa attempted to question the old man about “Sanarn”, trying his best to translate questions thrown at him by Bill Noonan. Jaffa only wished that he had a stronger grasp of the dialect of the lost tribe. After twenty-five years’s study, he was acknowledged around Australia as the greatest living white authority on Aboriginal languages. But now he felt like a high school student vainly trying to come to grips with some incomprehensible European language. After three months of hard work he still had only the most tentative understanding of the dialect and felt frustrated that for every word he understood there were half a dozen others that flew over his head.

By nightfall they had learnt little more, except that Sanarn seemed to be a Dream-Time monster, rather than a modern man. By the time that they gave up questioning the old man Jaffa, Jackie, and Bill Noonan were all mentally exhausted and very frustrated.

“But wouldn’t Jackie or the other reservation blacks have heard of this Sanarn, if it’s a Dream-Time legend?” asked Bill as he followed Jaffa down the yellow-walled corridor toward his bedroom-cum-workroom.

Although Jaffa’s room was one of the largest bedrooms on the reservation, there was very little furniture. On the right looking into the room, was a double-door wardrobe, then a few metres away a single bed and small dressing cabinet. On the left was a long, wooden bench holding Jaffa’s personal computer, a telephone, plus various computing software and hardware. There was also three or four ergonomic chairs around the table.

“Not necessarily,” answered Jaffa, as they both pulled up chairs before the PC, which he switched on. “There are basically three types of Dream-Time legends,” he said, sorting through CDs in a drawer of the computer table. “Large scale legends, such as the Great Rainbow Snake, that are believed by Aborigines right around the continent. Medium scale legends, which might exist in one or two states only. And small scale legends, that may exist only in a single tribe.”

“So it’s possible that no one outside the lost tribe has ever heard of Sanarn before?” asked Bill as Jaffa found the CD he was looking for.

“Quite possibly,” admitted Jaffa. He loaded the disk into the CD-ROM drive. “I put together most of this information myself over twenty-five years, so I have to tell you I’m pretty certain there’s no Sanarn on file. But with luck we might be able to find the basic legend under another name.”


By midnight they’d had no success and both men’s eyes ached from the strain of staring at the computer screen for so long. Jaffa had already started to pack up his equipment for the night, when they heard shouting outside.

“What in the world?” said Bill. They ran across to the window near the bed to look out into the compound.

Hearing running footsteps behind them, Jaffa turned round as Jackie raced in from the corridor to announce, “They’ve made a break for it!”

“What?” asked Jaffa, not understanding.

“The lost tribe, they’ve broken out of the compound and done a bunk toward the bush.”

“Jesus, they must know more than they’re telling, us!” said Bill. He almost knocked over Jackie in his haste to get outside.

When they reached the cage, they saw where a large hole had been cut through the wire at the side furthest from the reservation buildings. “Must have used their metal-coated spears like wire cutters,” guessed Jackie.

“You’ll never catch them now,” said Jaffa.

“Who says I won’t!” insisted Bill. He ran across to his police car parked a few metres away. In the distance they could make out lights bobbing about like angry fireflies and Jaffa and Jackie realised that the other police (and reporters) had taken off after the fleeing blacks, without waiting for the police inspector to arrive.

Bill spoke on the mike more than a minute. Then he called to Jackie and Jaffa, “They’ve got them well in sight. Want to come along?”

The two men leapt into the back seat even as the car took off. Although Jackie had to get out again a dozen metres later to open the first of half a dozen livestock gates between the reservation and the bush.

Finally, they reached the open dirt road, where the Fairlane raced along at a terrifying speed. Instinctively Jaffa crouched down covering his head each time that he saw a great gum or pine tree bob up in front of them. “Watch out!” he started to warn for the umpteenth time. But before the words were even out of his mouth, Bill Noonan had effortlessly veered the car round the tree, making Jaffa realise that the policeman had obviously been trained in high-speed night pursuits.

Seeing a group of running blacks in the headlights of the car ahead of them, Bill called over his shoulder, “Told you we’d get them.”

Jaffa realised the fact that they had tried to run away gave Inspector Noonan a legitimate excuse for now regarding the lost tribe as prime suspects in the Brownsville Station and Broadhurst massacres. ‘If only I could have learnt more of their language, more about the culture, taught them to trust me!’ thought Jaffa, feeling that it was his own fault the lost tribe had panicked and made a run for it.

So lost was he in his thoughts that Jaffa hadn’t noticed that they had stopped. Until he saw Noonan and half a dozen other cops highlighted in the cars’s high beams running hither and thither almost colliding with sweet smelling eucalyptus trees, and trampling Mulga bushes underfoot, as they concentrated on nothing but pursuing the panicked natives, catching and handcuffing them to low branches of gum trees, or anything else that was strong enough to hold them.

“Jesus!” cried a young constable as a frantic Aborigine kicked and writhed against the grey-barked tree that he had been cuffed to. After nearly a minute the thick bough broke with a great crunching and the native took off again, still cuffed. “Bastard!” shouted the constable taking off after him.

Frustrated still by his lack of fluency at their native tongue, Jaffa did his best to calm the Aborigines, and to convince them to co-operate with the police. He was afraid that the Queensland police -- never noted for their subtly in handling Aborigines -- might resort to violent tactics if they had too much trouble subduing the lost tribe.

After the Aborigines had been locked in the back of the police car, Bill Noonan used the car mike to find out how the other cars were doing. He cursed and said, “So far only a dozen of them have been caught. But they’re running down the rest of them gradually.


The chase took them many kilometres into the outback and lasted until dawn. After an hour or so, a great beam of light suddenly shone down on them startling Jaffa. Until he heard the whir-whir-whir of rotors overhead and realised that it was a spotlight from a police helicopter.

“Luckily we still had one chopper in Hoopertown, to help search for the Brownsville Station murderer,” explained Bill Noonan.

With the help of the helicopter it became almost impossible for the running Aborigines to escape. Yet when the chase was called off an hour after dawn, only forty-five of the fifty lost tribe had been tracked down. Looking disgruntled, Bill Noonan reluctantly conceded, “The others must have had too much of a head start.”


Back at the reservation they had to weld the cutaway section back into the cage wall. Then, at the insistence of Bill Noonan, they set up a series of lights facing the furthest sides of the cage, so that the natives could be observed all night.

“And I’m placing a twenty-four-hour watch on them,” Bill said. “At least until the two massacres are cleared up. After that they’re free to go as far as I’m concerned.”

Then it was up to Jaffa to explain to Julabawali why they had to bring them forcibly back to the compound, and why they must not try to escape again. Then, thinking, ‘I just hope they don’t blame me for taking part in their recapture,’ Jaffa tried to get the old man to explain why the natives had broken out en masse.

To his relief Julabawali accepted that Jaffa had only been doing his job. But he was reluctant to explain why the lost tribe had panicked.

Over the next two months Jaffa interviewed the full blood every day and slowly began to piece together the legend of Sanarn and why the Aborigines had taken to flight. The gist of what he had learnt was: “Sanarn is a demon which followed the Aborigines across the land bridge from Malaysia to Australia more than sixty-five thousand years ago.

“Sanarn was at heart a merciless and very proficient killer. But thousands of years ago the Aborigines devised chants and tribal dances that made Sanarn powerless to harm them. They subjugated the demon and forced him to help them with their hunting.

“Unable to hunt humans any longer, Sanarn adapted his skills to become a champion tracker and huntsman. Skills which he passed on to the Aborigines. Allowing them to become so adept that they could roam the length and breadth of the Australian continent tens of thousands of years ago, whilst white settlers even in the 2020s cannot stray far into the searing deserts of outback Australia without fear of death by dehydration or starvation. That’s why virtually all of Australia’s modern cities are built within a small strip around the coastline. 85% of the Australian continent is regarded as uninhabitable desert. Yet sixty thousand years ago the Aborigines knew how to survive and flourish right across that ‘desert land’. All thanks to the skills they learnt from Sanarn in hunting, digging for herbs, edible roots and tubers, and locating water in the desert.

“Sanarn also taught the Aborigines how to build spears, boomerangs, and woomeras. As well as how to build lean-toes, humpies, miamias, and other crude dwellings, so necessary to survive the midday sun in central Australia. Thirty thousand years ago, he also taught a small number of Aborigines the art of mining iron-ore, smelting it and coating the blades of knives, spears, and boomerangs, to give them a lethal edge.

“But before many Aborigines could learn the art of mining and smelting, disaster struck: a dispute over territory led to a war between two Aboriginal tribes. The war quickly escalated into a full-blown tribal war, reaching right across the continent. Over a hundred-year period two-thirds of Australia’s native population were killed in the tribal war, leaving only five hundred thousand Aborigines to populate the mainland. But apart from the millions dead, the real tragedy was that in this time all of the chant-masters were killed. So that the Aborigines forgot the sacred chants and ritual dances that allowed them to subdue Sanarn ....”

“So Sanarn began to slaughter the Aborigines?” asked Jaffa one day. He checked that his tape recorder was stiff recording Julabawali’s story.

“Yes,” agreed the old man. “But in particular the ones you call the “lost tribe”. The Aborigines whom he had taught to smelt and sheathe their weapons with metal.”

“But why?” asked Jackie. He placed a hand against the metal gate to the barb-wired cage, but quickly pulled his hand away from the metal which burnt from the heat of the noonday sun.

“Partly because he thought that we had used our control over him to take from him by force his most precious secrets. And partly because he resented the twenty thousand years of servitude to the Aborigines that he had suffered at the hands of the chant masters.

“So Sanarn ruthlessly hunted down the Aborigines, forcing them to continuously flee, thereby becoming the nomadic race that they are today. Originally the Aboriginal walkabout -- when tribes suddenly pick up all their belongings and flee into the outback without warning -- was no more than Aborigines running for their lives at the first hint of Sanarn’s presence in their vicinity.

“By the 1780s, only a couple of hundred thousand or so Aborigines survived on the mainland. By the year 1900 Sanarn began to concentrating all of his energies upon eradicating the lost tribe.

“In fact for more than a hundred years we have known of the white settlement of this continent, but have avoided your society for fear of bringing the demon Sanarn’s wrath down upon you.

“At the turn of last century there was more than a thousand of us remaining. But Sanarn’s raids have been so successful that the fifty or so of us who fled to this reservation in desperation are all that now remains of our tribe. Originally we had hoped to blend in with the Aborigines at the reservation and become anonymous. Hopefully eluding Sanarn. But we had not realised how Westernised the settlement blacks had become. Or that we would attract so much attention in your news media that instead of concealing ourselves, we were more exposed than ever to the demon pursuing us.”

“Is that why you tried to escape?” asked Jaffa. He turned over the cassette in the tape recorder.

“That and the fact that when we heard of the slaughters at your two towns, we knew that Sanarn must be responsible. We felt guilty that we had caused so many deaths, and hoped to lead the monster back into the outback far away from white society.”

‘Jesus!’ thought Jaffa. He felt even more guilty than ever about the way that the lost tribe had been treated: locked in a cage like animals, then hunted down and dragged back to the reservation by the police. ‘They weren’t running from guilt, but trying to sacrifice themselves to protect us! And this is how we rewarded them!’

“Why was there so long between Sanarn’s attacks on the two white towns?” asked Jackie. “Three months?”

“Because Sanarn is a little wary of white society. He has lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it is possible that he cannot be killed. But for most of that time he was only confronted with spears, knives, and boomerangs. He is still wary of modern weapons, afraid of the booming rifles and shotguns that he had never encountered in most of his existence.”

“Bill Noonan said that in the second slaughter Sanarn was scared away by the sound of shotguns fired at him,” pointed out Jackie.

“Yes, like all bullies, Sanarn is a coward at heart. But if the shotguns themselves cannot harm him, eventually it will become difficult, if not impossible to drive him away,” explained Julabawali. “That’s why you must convince your police inspector to allow us to return to the wild.”

‘If only I could!’ thought Jaffa. Having worked with Aboriginal tribes for a quarter century he had built up enough respect for their laws and lores to instinctively believe the old man’s tale of the avenging demon, Sanarn. But he knew that he could never convince the policeman that the story was anything but native superstition.


Bill Noonan was on his way to Huntington-Station to see what Jaffa had uncovered, when news of the latest slaughter reached him over the car radio.

The latest massacre had occurred at a “town” called MacWhirter. Actually the town was no more than a general store-cum-post office-cum-bottle shop-cum-news agent and six or seven, three- or four-room weatherboard houses. Out of a population of twelve, nine had been slaughtered.

As with the Broadhurst Massacre, the three survivors had frightened the murderer away with rifles and shotguns. The story the survivors told was identical to the one the Broadhurst survivors had told: “Just before nightfall a naked Abo ran into town. He smelt foul like rotting vegetation and carried a long metal-tipped spear. He was wearing on his head a carved pumpkin,” explained one of the survivors, Harry “Old Man” Seabrooke -- a tiny bald-headed man, barely five feet tall. “What the Yanks call a Jack-O-Lantern. Anyway, for no reason he went berserk, started beheading everyone with this crazy looking spear ... Until we managed to scare him off with our guns ....”

Then the old man said something that Bill Noonan didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to believe, repeating almost word for word what Tony Costa had said at Broadhurst: “From what I could tell, the bullets and buckshot didn’t hurt him at all ... Only the noise of the guns scared him off.”

‘But that’s crazy!’ thought the inspector. ‘How could he be bullet-proof?’ He knew from his regular meeting with Vincent “Jaffa” O’Connor over the last two months that the redheaded anthropologist was beginning to believe the crazy story of Sanarn. Which he had related to Bill Noonan in instalments each time that Jaffa learnt (or translated) something new about the “avenging demon”. ‘But that’s bull!’ thought the grey-haired policeman. ‘That’s impossible! How could some bullet-proof, sixty-five-thousand-year old monster possibly exist in the Australian outback in the 2020s?’

“We set off after him in Jim’s rattly old Jeep,” explained Harry Seabrooke, “but he easily outran us.”

“He outran a Jeep?” asked the inspector, incredulous.

“I know it sounds like bull; but it ain’t. We were flat-out in top gear and eventually he left us for dead. We must’ve followed him a good three or four kilometres into the scrub before losing sight of him completely and turning back for town.”

‘Jesus!’ thought Bill Noonan. ‘If this kind of crazy “evidence” keeps turning up, I might be forced to start believing in Jaffa’s demon spirit!’ Although he wasn’t ready to make that kind of admission aloud just yet.


Having acquired the last of the Sanarn legend from Julabawali, Jaffa returned to the redbrick complex. He added the last of the legend to what he had already learnt, saved it to the PC hard-drive and also to a portable drive, then printed out a copy of the complete legend for Bill Noonan’s benefit. Although he knew that the policeman did not believe anything that the Elder had told them about Sanarn. He feared that the inspector thought that Julabawali had made up the entire legend and suspected Noonan might be close to considering the elderly Aboriginal as a suspect in the killings.

Jaffa sighed and thought, ‘Unless I can make some kind of sense of this Sanarn legend, something tangible to help Bill catch the real killer, you might be for the chop, Julabawali, old mate.’

Having prepared the printout for Noonan, Jaffa stored a spare USB-drive copy of the Sanarn legend to be added to the data on Aboriginal legends on the CD-ROM as soon as he got a chance. Then booting up the CD, he spent another few frustrating hours scouring through the encyclopaedia of Aboriginal legends on the CD without success.

Jaffa was still wading through the encyclopaedia when he heard the approach of a car outside. Standing to peer over his writing bench, he looked out his bedroom window and saw a police car pull up. A few moments late out stepped Bill Noonan and two constables.

“Any luck?” asked Noonan a few minutes later as he entered Jaffa’s bedroom.

“Not so far,” replied Jaffa. He picked up the printout of the complete Sanarn legend and handed it to Noonan. “That’s the complete legend, as near as I can translate it. But I’m damned if I can find anything even remotely like it in the legends of any other Aboriginal tribe.”

“The whole story’s loony, if you ask me,” said Noonan. “Frankly I wouldn’t waste time on it, if I didn’t keep getting reports from survivors of a pumpkin-headed Aborigine wielding a scythe.”

“But surely you’ve only had the three witnesses from the Broadhurst slaughter, plus the two kids ...?” began Jaffa. Then seeing the look that passed between the two constables, Jaffa asked, “There hasn’t been another massacre, has there?”

Noonan nodded his head slowly. “Last night at a tiny town called MacWhirter. This time there were only nine deaths....” He thought, ‘Only nine deaths! Until recently that was more victims than the greatest mass-murderer in Queensland history had!’ He went on to relate to Jaffa what Old Man Seabrooke and the other survivors had told them. “Which doesn’t add one iota to what we already know about the murderer. Other than the fact that he can outrun a Jeep.” He sighed then added, “That’s going to look great in my report to Brisbane.”

He turned to leave, then stopped and said, “The only other thing was that one of the survivors referred to the pumpkin-head as a Jack-O-Lantern.”

“A Jack-O-Lantern?” said Jaffa. “But surely they don’t wear Jack-O-Lanterns like a mask?”

“No, the idea is to put a lighted candle inside and turn off the lights so it glows like a demon face in the dark.”

“That’s right,” Jaffa said, recalling the American Halloween legend. He began sorting through the CDs in his drawer, looking for one that might tell him more about the legend. Failing to find anything, he said, “Luckily I’ve got a modem so I can ring through to the University of Brisbane.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re onto something?” asked Bill Noonan.

“Let’s hope so,” Jaffa replied as he dialled through to Brisbane Uni. In the end it took nearly twenty minutes to successfully link up to the Brisbane Uni. computer.

On-line at last, Jaffa requested the use of a CD-ROM titled, Myths, Magicks, Legends of Europe, Africa, and the two Americas compiled by Professor William E.V. Morrissey-Blaxland B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

He called up the main menu listing: 1. The Americas, 2. Europe, 3. Africa, and punched in 1, which took him to a sub-menu: 1. North America, 2. Central America, 3. South America. He punched in 1 again and was this time given a choice of ways to look for information. He chose to search Alphabetically. Then, when prompted, typed in Halloween.

After a few seconds the PC screen informed him: “The Halloween legend dates back many thousands of years in the U.K. where the Celts celebrated the night of the 31st of October/1st of November as Samhain. In essence Halloween recognises and tries to rectify the sun’s retreat to winter. In many parts of the world bonfires are lit to stir the sun back to life. Halloween is the day most used by present-day witches and practitioners of occult lore. It was the night when witches rode to Sabbath on broomsticks, or tabby-cats that changed to coal-black steeds ....”

[Jaffa skimmed the next couple of paragraphs.]

“Originally on the Witches’s Calendar as one of the major Sabbath days (the celestial times of power), Halloween was originally called November Eve; then later Samhain. Then the Christians took over the autumn holiday and changed it to All Saints’s Day. Later it was called All Saints’s Eve, All Hallows’s Eve, and finally Halloween or Hallowe’en ....”

[Jaffa skimmed forward again.]

“In the America version of the Halloween legend, the pumpkin plays a major part in the form of the Jack-O-Lantern. Carven into a horrible, monstrous face, the Jack-O-Lantern is meant to scare away any witches, elves, or trolls which may be out on the prowl. As is the loud explosions of fire crackers set off on ‘bonfire night’ ....

“The Jack-O-Lantern is also supposed to represent the demon face of Samhain, the spirit of Halloween. In the American legend Samhain is a monster with a Jack-O-Lantern for a head and a body either of an ordinary human, a mouldering cadaver, or simply a ghostly shroud ....

“In some parts of America, Samhain is said to also be the Grim Reaper. Thus the pumpkin-headed demon carries a scythe in one hand ....”

“Holy God!” cried Bill Noonan reading the screen over Jaffa’s shoulder. “That’s exactly what the eye-witnesses said, ‘A pumpkin-headed demon carrying a scythe’!” Looking back to the screen he read:

“In some versions of the legend Samhain arrives at Halloween parties looking like a guest in costume. Wielding the scythe he may then slaughter everyone in the room. Although he can be scared away (as noted above) by loud noises such as fire crackers or gunshots -- although the bullets themselves cannot harm him.

“Though an obvious adoption of the early name for Halloween, some American legends claim that Samhain is an ancient monster -- perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old -- who stowed away with the early settlers, coming over from England to Plymouth in the 1620s....”

“Well, it’s pretty conclusive isn’t it?” said Jaffa as he and Bill Noonan skimmed through the printout he had taken of the Halloween legend.

“Conclusive? What do you mean conclusive?” Bill Noonan demanded. Although his eyes told him that the Samhain legend seemed identical to that of the monster that the lost tribe called Sanarn, the Aboriginal demon which had beheaded more than fifty Queenslanders over the last five months, his brain refused to accept any possible connection.

“Well, obviously Sanarn is the Aboriginal corruption of the name Samhain. Obviously it’s Samhain that’s running riot in the Queensland countryside beheading people.”

“Oh, obviously!” said Bill Noonan sarcastically. From behind him he heard the snickers of his two constables. “But anyway, how could a tradition that goes back less than four-hundred years in America and possibly a thousand years in Europe possibly have any connection with the Australian Aborigines? To the best of our knowledge the Aborigines came to this continent at least sixty-five-thousand years and maybe eighty-thousand years ago. So how could the lost tribe know the legend of Halloween? Or Samhain?”

“They could if the roots of the Samhain legend go back sixty-five to eighty thousand years also. Although we only know for sure that the Halloween legend goes back a millennia or two, it could go back tens of thousands of years in one form or another. After all, the legend of Halloween exists right around the Northern hemisphere. In Europe, the British Isles and North America. It must have taken a long, long time to travel that far around the globe. So maybe the legend does date back to before the first Aborigines came to Australia?”

“Sixty-five to eighty thousand years ago?” asked Bill Noonan sceptically. “Was there even a written human language back that far?”

Jaffa sighed, forced to admit that Noonan had found a major weakness in his theory. “Well, no,” he conceded. “Fifty thousand years ago would be in late Neanderthal or early Cro-Magnon days. Although it seems Neanderthal Man did toy with a form of crude written language that long ago, he never recognised the power of written language and dropped it after a few centuries. The first lasting written language -- continuing right through to modern days -- was by the ancient Sumerians six thousand years ago.”

“Which lets out the Aborigines knowing a legend from fifty thousand years ago, surely?”

Jaffa considered for a moment, scratching his unruly red hair before answering, “Unless it’s not merely a legend. If Samhain is a real monster, or a member of a race of monsters, it’s possible that its kind may exist right around the globe. That would explain the universal nature of the legend. And it fits in with old Julabawali’s claim that Samhain -- or Sanarn -- followed the first Aborigines across to Australia from the Malaysian land-bridge that existed then.”

“But how could it be anything but a legend?” protested Bill Noonan. “You might as well say a freaked out vampire-murderer is really a vampire, or that werewolves really exist.”

“No, no, I’m not asking you to believe in the supernatural,” insisted Jaffa. “This creature only has to be a vicious humanoid similar to Homo Sapiens, yet not Homo Sapiens.”

“Which can live for fifty thousand years?” Again there were snickers from the two constables behind them.

“Well,” began Jaffa, stumped for a moment by this question. “Possibly. We know for a fact that there are creatures, such as giant turtles and giant clams, which can live for hundreds of years. It has been theorised that dinosaurs may have been able to live for thousands of years ....”

“Yes but all of those are reptiles or primitive crustaceans. It’s another matter entirely, an advanced humanoid creature living tens of thousands of years.”

Jaffa shrugged, conceding another good argument. “That’s assuming that the Aborigines are correct that the modern Sanarn is the same one that followed their ancestors to Australia from Malaysia all those years ago. Possibly a small group of the creatures followed them across the land bridge and have been breeding, and stalking the Aborigines ever since.”

“But what about Julabawali’s claim that the Aborigines had Sanarn imprisoned for twenty thousand years and learnt smelting and hunting from him?”

“Possibly a legend,” suggested Jaffa. “Or perhaps they had captured a small herd of the creatures, or ....”

“Or possibly this man-monster can really live for eighty thousand years,” Bill Noonan finished for him.

“Well,” said Jaffa. He realised that they were back where they had started.

Shaking his head Bill cried, “All this is crazy. How can you possibly believe this Samhain, Sanarn, or whatever you want to call him, can possibly exist?”

“Because it all ties together. And you have fifty headless corpses from three separate massacres at Brownsville Station, Broadhurst, and MacWhirter. Something must have killed them.”

“Yes, but ...” he paused, searching for arguments, unable to accept the premise that Jaffa was making. “But if these creatures have existed since prehistoric times, wouldn’t there be records of them in other native culture's legends. Statues, stone carvings, rock paintings ...?”

“There are,” pointed out Jaffa. He referred again to the text on the computer monitor. “But the problem is that in the early 1970s pseudo-scientists like Erich Von Daniken clouded the issue by claiming that they depicted ancient astronauts.” He paged through the data on screen for a few moments before finding a sketch of a “prehistoric spaceman”. Quoting from the text on screen, “They confused the round pumpkin head for a space helmet and quickly rushed their theories into print without bothering to do the necessary research to substantiate their claims.”

“Okay, but how do we substantiate any of this?” demanded the grey-haired policeman. “My superiors in Brisbane aren’t going to accept a few rock paintings as proof that the spirit of Halloween, Samhain, is responsible for killing more than fifty people in outback Queensland.”

Jaffa considered for a moment. Then taking the printout off the desk, he said, “I guess that the next thing to do is to take this to Julabawali to see if we’re on the right track.”


Suspecting what the wild Aborigines' reaction might be to the picture of Samhain, Jaffa made certain that there were plenty of people on hand to help calm them down if necessary. While they had been grouped around the computer, another five police cars and more than a dozen police officers had arrived at the reservation. All of the police, plus a dozen or so reservation blacks were waiting around inside the unlocked barbed-wire cage as Jaffa prepared to show the laser-Jet picture to the lost tribe.

“Well, here goes,” said Jaffa. He tried to sound more confident than he felt as he held the picture out toward Julabawali and three other Elders of the lost tribe.

Before he could ask if the picture of Samhain was the creature they called Sanarn, the four men began to shriek “Sanarn! Sanarn! Sanarn!” over and over, as they ran toward the other end of the barb-wire compound, obviously terrified even of the stylised drawing.

“Well, I guess that answers ...” began Jaffa. Before he could finish, all forty-five wild Aborigines in the cage started shrieking from terror, and throwing themselves against the barb-wire walls of the compound.

“Watch out!” shouted Bill Noonan. He pointed toward the Aborigines who had already seriously damaged themselves and were bleeding profusely from jagged wounds in their arms, legs, and flanks.

Half a dozen police, and as many half breeds from the reservation, raced across to try to stop the lost tribe inflicting any more damage onto themselves. But they were too late to stop two teenage males, who, ignoring the damage done to themselves, scaling the four-metre high barbed wire fence. They effortlessly descended halfway down the other side, then while still out of reach of any hands groping at them through the fence, sprang to the ground. Landing safely they took off at high speed toward the nearest corral fence a hundred metres or so away.

“Get them, for God’s sake, get them!” shouted Bill Noonan.

Two of the police officers raced out through the gate -- almost knocking over Jaffa in their haste -- and started after the two full bloods. There were already four station blacks racing after them, but Jaffa suspected that they would never catch the full bloods.

“Get a car, get a car, for Christ’s sake!” cursed the inspector.

One of the two constables raced toward the nearest police car and drove toward the first gate to pick up his companion. But by the time that the car got through the series of gates to the outside, there was no real chance that they would ever catch the two fleeing men without the help of the helicopter. But they continued to search for the two running natives for more than an hour.

By the time that the police car finally returned to the reservation, the “riot” had been quelled without any more breakouts. But the helicopter had been called to take the five most seriously injured to the nearest hospital, and a dozen others had to have wounds disinfected and bandaged.

“This lets out using the chopper to look for the two runaways,” said a young blond constable as the helicopter took off with the casualties aboard.

“No point anyway, with only two escapees,” said Bill Noonan, only hoping that he wasn’t allowing the mass-murderer to go free. “Let them go. But for God’s sake, we’d better not lose any more of them till this case is closed. ‘If it ever is!’ he thought.


“Well, I guess this clinches things,” said Jaffa. The rioting quelled, he and Noonan had returned to Jaffa’s room in the redbrick building.

“It clinches that the lost tribe recognise Samhain as their Dream-Time monster, I suppose,” said the policeman. However, he still did not believe for a second that the Spirit of Halloween was really loose in the Queensland outback, murdering people by the dozen.

“It also clinches the fact that we have no right to keep them caged up like animals!”

“What do you suggest?” demanded Noonan. “That we release them back into the desert?”

“Yes! That’s where they belong. Not caged up on a reservation like cattle. So far Samhain has been attacking and killing whites because he can’t get at the lost tribe, and he’s obviously punishing us for protecting them. But sooner or later he’ll find a way to get at them, cage or no cage. Then, locked up like animals as they are, they’ll be sitting ducks waiting to have their heads hacked off. But if we let them go, at least they’ll have a chance to go walkabout; to keep on the move and keep Samhain at bay.

“Also it would take Samhain’s attention away from white Australia.” Although he hated himself for saying it, Jaffa added, “As long as he cannot get at the lost tribe, Samhain will continue attacking small outback towns. He’d probably never dare attack a major city like Brisbane, Sydney, or Melbourne, because the city noises would frighten him away. As the CD-ROM said, that’s the whole point of fire crackers at Halloween: loud noises will frighten away demons. But even attacking only outback, one-horse towns, he’s managed to kill fifty-five people in five months. If he continued unchecked for years, he could end up slaughtering hundreds or even thousands of people.” ‘Maybe he will anyway once he tracks down the last of the lost tribe,’ thought Jaffa. He wondered if Samhain would ever again settle for only killing blacks (who make up only 3.6% of the Australian population) now that he had tasted the lives of the larger white population.


Bill Noonan considered Jaffa’s words for a moment. Everything that they had learnt from the lost tribe or had been told by the computer seemed to gel together into a cohesive theory. ‘But none of it makes any sense!’ thought Bill. Despite what his eyes told him, his police training would not allow him to believe in either a supernatural killer, or a previously unknown humanoid species that had evolved parallel to Homo Sapiens. “No, no, I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head for emphasis. “What you want is impossible. Until we catch this Samhain character, or whoever did the killings, the lost tribe are still suspects. It’d be the end of my career if I let them go ... Even if I believed your wacky story.”

“But you’re never going to be able to capture Samhain,” insisted Jaffa. “According to legend he can be frightened away by loud noises, but bullets can’t harm him.” When Bill Noonan snorted in contempt, Jaffa added, “Your own witnesses claimed that they shot him from point-blank range, didn’t they? And the bullets didn’t even slow him down ....”

But Bill obviously would not be convinced. He stayed arguing with Jaffa for a few minutes more, before heading outside to check on the security of the caged natives.

As he headed out into the corridor, he explained, “I can’t have them all escaping. I’m making plans now to have them shipped to Brisbane tomorrow.”

Jaffa gasped in horror, and cried, “What?”

“That much of your story I can believe. If this Samhain character really is out to get the lost tribe, they’ll be much safer in the heart of Brisbane, than out here.”

“But they’ll go crazy in Brisbane,” protested Jaffa. “It’s inhuman enough keeping them caged up like animals out here, without putting them behind solid walls in the state capital. Aborigines can’t take captivity behind walls, they’re a naturally nomadic, outdoors people.”

“Bullshit!” said Bill Noonan. “Aboriginal suicides in custody is all a myth created by Aboriginal activists so that they can get out of obeying the law.” With that he departed before Jaffa had time to think up a suitable rebuttal.


While Bill Noonan spent the rest of that day organising the night watch on the barbed wire cage, Jaffa spent hours on the telephone to Brisbane, trying to go over the policeman’s head to prevent him from moving the lost tribe. Or better yet to get permission to release them. But he met with a wall of disbelief when he tried to explain why the Aborigines should be released.

In the end, to Jaffa’s dismay, the officials he spoke to ended up agreeing with Noonan’s logic: moving the lost tribe to Brisbane would make it easier both to watch them and to protect them against the serial killer, “If this Sanarn or Samhain character is really after them,” said one official, obviously thinking that Jaffa was mad with his story of a Halloween spirit hunting the natives.

Jaffa was still ringing around everyone he could think of in authority, late into the night, when he heard the sound of a commotion outside: raised voices (both in English and the lost tribe’s dialect) and seemingly hundreds of running footsteps. ‘My God he can’t be moving them at this hour!’ thought Jaffa looking at his watch and seeing that it was after 1:00 AM.

Then as he heard screaming among the shouting voices, Jaffa thought, ‘My God, it’s another breakout attempt.’ He had already started toward the corridor when he heard the first gunshots in the compound. ‘Oh, Jesus, he can’t be shooting them!’ thought Jaffa running out into the yellow-walled corridor.

Jaffa stood at the top of the concrete steps out front of the redbrick building for a moment, staring toward the melee at the other end of the compound. In the half light he could see naked Aborigines running helter-skelter about inside and outside the barbed wire cage. He could see kneeling figures clearly aiming guns that roared seemingly like cannons and he thought, ‘My God, they really are shooting them!’

Running across the compound Jaffa shouted, “Stop! For God’s sake stop it!” Reaching a young constable, he grabbed the youth’s left arm and tugged it away as he prepared to fire his rifle. “What the Hell do you ...?” he asked. He stopped, unprepared for the glazed look in the man’s yellow-green eyes.

“What ...?” he asked stupidly. Then as he smelt an overwhelming odour like rotting pumpkins and rancid meat, Jaffa released the youth who turned away and started firing again.

Jaffa looked around and saw the naked, scythe-wielding, pumpkin-headed figure of Samhain cutting a swathe through the Aborigines and police alike.

“Look out!” shouted Bill Noonan as Samhain started toward Jaffa. Crouching, Noonan fired six .38 shots into the monster’s pumpkin head from only two or three metres away. Each shot tore a large chunk out of the monster’s head, making Jaffa hope that it might be mortal after all. Out of each gaping hole leaked a sickly yellowy substance -- similar to the innards of a squashed grub -- which smelt like rotting flesh.

But as Jaffa watched, the yellow pussy holes began rapidly healing, until in only seconds Samhain’s pumpkin head was whole again. The creature roared its angry panther-like roar then spun round to face the police inspector, who was hurriedly reloading his revolver.

“Watch out!” Jaffa shouted in warning. But too late: as Bill raised his revolver again, Samhain swung the scythe and effortlessly beheaded the grey-haired policeman.

“Oh Jesus!” cried the young cop kneeling beside Jaffa. They both watched in horror as blood gushed from Bill Noonan’s severed neck.

“Shoot, dammit, shoot!” Jaffa shouted, reversing his earlier command.

For a moment the youth stared open-mouthed at the red-headed man, as though not understanding his words. But finally he aimed again and started firing his rifle at the manlike monster.

Roaring its anger, Samhain raised its scythe back over its shoulders and advanced toward the two men.

‘Oh, my God, we’re going to die!’ thought Jaffa as the monster bore down on them.

From beside them came the boom of shotguns as two more policemen opened fire upon the raging creature. For a moment Jaffa thought that it was going to ignore the shotgun fire. The pellets tore away chunks from the monster's head, releasing sickly tendrils of yellow slime, but like the handguns and rifles, they did no permanent damage to the monster.

The monster roared in rage at this latest affront, and for a moment seemed as though it would not be scared off. But as the shotguns boomed again and again, Samhain finally turned and fled toward the reservation gates. Whereas the handguns and rifles had only angered the monster, it was still clearly frightened of the booming shotguns.

“He’s making a run for it!” shouted the young cop in elation.

“For now,” conceded Jaffa. But he realised that it had been harder to scare away the monster this time. It had ignored the handguns and rifles as it rampaged through the Aborigines and police. ‘Maybe next time nothing will scare it off!’ Jaffa thought.

Although he didn’t really want to see any more of the carnage, Jaffa took part in the clean-up operation. Samhain had killed twelve of the police and eleven of the lost tribe -- including old Julabawali, whom Jaffa had grown to regard as a friend over the last few months.

‘Oh, God, not you old mate!’ thought Jaffa looking down through teary eyes at the headless corpse of the Elder. He looked about until locating the grey-haired head a few metres away and tentatively placed it beside the body of the old man.

Looking up Jaffa saw Jackie standing beside him holding a shotgun. He was pleased that the black tracker was one of the few police to survive the latest massacre.

“Are you all right?” asked Jackie. He knew the redhead had grown close to the old man over the last five months.

Jaffa nodded unconvincingly. After a moment he said, “I suppose you’d better go report this to your bosses in Brisbane.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Jackie. But he didn’t move.

“I suppose they’ll send out replacements overnight ... for the dead police that is?”

Jackie shook his head. “Army,” he said, “they’ll send in the Army now. Can’t risk the killer of so many cops getting away. They’ll have hundreds of Army and Army Reserves scouring the outback by noon tomorrow.”

They talked a moment longer, then Jackie turned to start back toward the redbrick building. After a moment’s hesitation the two other surviving police officers went with him. Both young men, they nervously looked about themselves as they walked, obviously afraid to stay outside alone in case Samhain got over his fear of shotguns and returned.

Jaffa watched the retreating cops until they were well out of sight. Then, tentatively, he went across to the decapitated body of Bill Noonan. His heart pounding from fear, expecting to be caught by Jackie or the other police, Jaffa felt round the dead police inspector’s clothing till locating the key to the cage, which Noonan had taken custody of after deciding the lost tribe were legitimate suspects.

Locating the key, Jaffa crept across to the door of the barbed-wire cage. But he saw that the lock had already been shattered -- presumably by Samhain’s scythe -- and lay on the ground. The remaining lost tribe members were cowering together near the opposite end of the cage. After their initial hysteria they had gone into a near catatonic state of terror.

“Come on,” Jaffa called. First in English, then doing his best to manage their Aboriginal dialect. Struggling to make them comprehend, he realised just how dependent he had become on Julabawali’s help in communicating with the lost tribe. And how helpless he now was without the old man’s assistance.

Finally, though, he managed to get through to the cringing natives and led them all outside the cage. Go! Go! Go! he willed the stumbling, zombie-like figures.

And, to Jaffa’s relief, as they left the cage the natives became more animated and began to run toward the station gates and the freedom beyond.

It seemed to take forever, but finally the last of the black figures had vanished over the first of the series of wooden cattle gates.

‘Now how do I explain their disappearance?’ he wondered. Turning back toward the main compound, Jaffa was startled to see Jackie standing behind him, watching the fleeing full bloods.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ wondered Jaffa. He expected the black tracker to sound the alarm.

Instead Jackie said, “I guess we can say that they broke out after that Samhain thing left.”

“Yes,” murmured Jaffa. He was grateful for Jackie’s understanding of what he had done.

The two men watched the fleeing natives for a few moments more, then turned and started back across the compound toward the redbrick building.

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia