93. The Tatura Tragedy 1905 (Death of a Hired Man)(Digital Death Trip)_TMBTP

Urban Broadcast Collective

An episode about a faceless man, and irrigation history. In April 1905, a man’s mutilated body was found in a bag in an irrigation channel in Girgarre East, northern Victoria. The channel was not far from where hundreds of men were constructing the Waranga Basin– a formative irrigation project storing water from the Goulburn River for distribution through channels that parceled up land for orchards, dairy farms and new towns. The body in the channel had been disemboweled, its head cut off, its legs missing, and its face sliced off in an apparent attempt to avoid identification. The find was dubbed The Tatura Tragedy, for the nearby irrigation town, and while investigators took weeks to identify the body, they quickly speculated on a connection to workers at the Waranga camp. This “rowdy township” housed “the usual navy class, neither better nor worse, prone to quarrel or to be hilarious and enjoy themselves on pay nights”, who “come and go without any notice being taken of them”. They typically travelled in pairs laboring, shearing or rabbiting. The Tatura Tragedy 1905 story was selected at random from the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive of digitized historical newspapers by Digital Death Trip, a custom bot coded by Sarah. The code uses Trove’s API to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it, then compile a case file. In the pilot run, DDT picked 2 stories from irrigation towns in Victoria, including The Tatura Tragedy. In this episode, Elizabeth has dug up more about the incident, its place and time. One theme is the nature of work, particularly itinerant work for men. When the victim, William Skinner (!) was finally identified, and killer James Edwards apprehended, speculation proved correct: the pair were workers and had been travelling together. A police description said Edwards was “fond of using the expression, ‘there’s no crawfish about me’, a shearer, a gambler, and two-up player; frequents country racecourses, drinks heavy when able, talks fighting, quiet when sober”. Edwards said he tramped the rivers of Victoria his whole life “like a book to me”, doing “any kind of work that comes my way”. Another theme is irrigation (which is interesting, at least in “Chinatown”). The Waranga wall is a 7km long, 12m high barrier built over a decade with horses, shovels and picks. It was Australia’s first major dam. Visiting Waranga Shores caravan park, maybe site of the workers’ camp, the basin looks like the sea but also like a flooded field. It’s popular for boating. Beneath the water lie remains of old grazing stations; and of the longer history of indigenous Taungurung people. Massive early 20th century irrigation and Closer Settlement projects were stages in the displacement embodied in settler colonialism: through which land, waterways, and rights to them, were carved out anew. Waranga still feeds Victoria’s irrigation system and its politics of water rights, environment, and the economic viability of farming and small towns. We also drove back roads of Girgarre East, searching for where Skinner’s body was dropped. Near where we narrowed it down to, someone had strung up bodies of dead hares, foxes and kangaroos along a barbed wire fence – including a fox’s decapitated decaying head. Very “In the Pines”. Edwards was found guilty of manslaughter: the defense argued the victim, Skinner, a comparatively privileged man, was bad-tempered and the killing was provoked. Edwards blamed drinking and working: “I’ve worked hard, lived hard, drunk hard and fought hard; but hard work has brought hard drink…”. Public fascination waned as Edwards seemed ‘ordinary’ back-blocks brawler. Today, there are rumors of unknown bodies from the camp buried in the Waranga wall. There are also tales of giant 2m waves coursing across the otherwise glassy surface of the basin, spooking workers and anglers. Like 70s song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, “the lake, it is said, never gives up her dead”.