Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

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My mother has a strict regard for truth. She loves facts, history, biography. But my father taught me fiction because he told wonderful stories. Dad was a wharfie and a knockabout bloke, who ran away from his nice respectable middle-class home when he was fifteen to be a shearer; who had been everywhere and done everything; who invented a special tool to replace dolls’ arms; who felt that if a story needed embellishment to make it a good story, then he was the man to embellish it. I listened to his stories with huge enthusiasm, but I never really believed him. You wouldn’t bet your life on my dad’s veracity.

So no one was more surprised than me to find that the Tamam Shud mystery was all true.

In 1948 my father went to Adelaide. He had just got out of the army and had been stringing wires at Woomera Rocket Range as a signaller. He was slim and tanned with a mop of red curls and beautiful brown eyes. A friend of his, a boxer called Ray Dunn (also known as Killer), had had a disagreement with John Wren, the crime lord of the time, and felt that trying his luck in another city for a while might be wise, so he and my dad palled up. They stayed in Adelaide for almost a year.

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