MAY 26 2018 LISTENER 31
BULLETIN FROM ABROAD
- befriended Moriarty when she
spent two weeks in the hamlet
as writer-in-residence.
I
n her book, Notes from a Dying
Town, she recounted how
Fran Hodgetts, the owner of
the cafe, sued Moriarty, alleg-
ing he poisoned her garden.
She wrote of the feuds such as
the nightly one when the piercing,
stinking bats arrive: “The screech-
ing mob take off over the road to
Karl and Bobbie’s place. A little
while later, we hear Karl firing a
slug gun and they come swarming
back. Barry shakes a box of leaves at
the foot of the tree and they depart
again. Karl sounds a loud siren and
back they come. Barry blasts them
with water. The war is back on.”
Moriarty was no saint. In the one
interview he gave, to McLaughlin,
he said he liked living in Larri-
mah but that people didn’t get on.
“Fran’s got the worst pies. I used to
go over there and the dog wouldn’t
eat Fran’s pie,” he said.
He frequently called Hodg-
etts “the bush pig”. She later
accused him of hiding a dead
kangaroo under her house
and telling travellers not to
enter her cafe. After he van-
ished, she said: “I don’t know
where he is and I am not sad
that he’s gone.”
Police have searched houses
and the dump, and seized at
least one car, but there’s no
sign of Moriarty. They think
he’s dead, killed in a dying –
and deadly silent – town. lL
arrimah, more than 400km
south of Darwin, is a speck
on the map of the black-soil,
sinkhole country. Wild buffalo
roam, death adders slither and wedge-
tailed eagles scan for road kill left by
the trucks barrelling along the Stuart
Highway that runs all the way to
Adelaide, 2800km to the south.
Some suggest a killer stalks the
land, too. At least 13 people have
gone missing on or near the lonely
highway over the past 20 years. The
latest – and possibly the strangest –
was a little Irishman, Paddy Moriarty,
aged 71, who vanished, along with
his dog, from his home in a disused
gas station in Larrimah nine days
before Christmas.
Australians, most of whom
live on the edges of an end-
less inland, are not unfamiliar
with disappearances. But
Moriarty’s captivates – the
more so because of Larrimah’s
11 remaining inhabit-
ants, who are in their 70s.
Some came fleeing the past,
others the future. Many
loathe each other. Several
believe Paddy was mur-
dered. So do the police.
The saga has opened
a window upon the
truth of lives in a part of
the country where few
Australians venture.
Larrimah, says New
Zealand-born journalistThe disappearance
of an elderly man
is a classic Outback
whodunnit.
Town without pity
“Fran’s got the
worst pies. I
used to go over
there and the
dog wouldn’t
eat Fran’s pie.”
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is
the Australian correspondent for
the Times, London.ANTHONY ELLISON“I don’t think this is their best table.”
Murray McLaughlin, the ABC’s longtime newsman
in the Northern Territory, is “riven by intrigue
and rivalry, division and dissension – the outback
looking inwards”.
The town is so weirdly intriguing that a dying
Darwin author who, 13 years ago, forecast civil
war in the town bequeathed enough money for an
annual two-week writer’s residency.
Despite the impression created by his crum-
bling lodgings, Moriarty, a retired cattle drover,
was a man of order and daily ritual. A loner who
arrived from rural Ireland as an unaccompanied
teenager, he would make his bed each morn-
ing and cross off the day on his calendar. His
routine was to slowly drink eight cans of beer in
the one-room bar of the Pink Panther Hotel, and
wander home at dusk for his tea. But on that early
evening last December, his chicken dinner was
untouched on the table and the kangaroo-skin
hat he never left home without was indoors.
The hamlet has a history of vengeance. Unex-
plained fires have erupted, dead kangaroos have
been shoved in homes, loved pets have been fed to
the local crocodile, Sneaky Sam.
Darwin journalist Kylie Stevenson – who won
northern Australia’s leading non-fiction liter-
ary award last year for her study of LarrimahBERNARD
LAGAN
IN SYDNEY