Tag: Tasmania

Cannibalism in Wyong, Australia?

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Police sources have confirmed that cannibalism will form part of an investigation into the death of a four-year-old boy in NSW Australia.

Police forensic experts are taking samples from a mother’s fingernails and mouth for evidence of cannibalism after she allegedly claimed to have consumed part of her son, who was found dead in their home on the NSW Central Coast in eastern Australia.

A 32-year-old woman entered the Wyong Police Station about 4:40pm on Saturday July 4 and, as a result of the conversation, police ordered a welfare check. Officers searched a unit on Byron Street at Wyong where they found the body of a four-year-old child.

The woman allegedly told police she had eaten part of her son.

Police found the body of her son with significant arm injuries. The woman was charged with domestic violence murder and refused bail. Police are investigating whether the boy had been dead since the Wednesday before the alarm was raised.

Police were granted approval to carry out a forensic procedure on the woman over the weekend that will allow them to carry out a buccal swab, a sample of her blood, nail clippings and matter under her fingernails,

“to examine the internal mouth contents and forensic material of the suspect”

Curiously, the order notes it was not to obtain the woman’s DNA, which is the usual purpose of such procedures.

The NSW Department of Communities and Justice said it had previously been in contact with the family. A department spokesperson said,

“Given the matter remains the subject of an active NSW Police investigation, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage”

The Minister responsible for child welfare has admitted that the department is chronically understaffed.

Sources with knowledge of the investigation say it’s suspected that the mother had a combination of mental health and drug addiction problems. The mother and child had moved into the rental house earlier this year, a neighbour said, allegedly following domestic violence between the woman and an ex-partner.

At a press conference on Sunday, Superintendent Chad Gillies from the Tuggerah Lakes District said police were calling for information about the woman and child.

“It was an extremely confronting scene. It’s been confirmed the child had injuries. I am not going to speculate further on what those injuries are”

The woman has not been identified, but police confirmed she was known to them.

Superintendent Gillies said,

“There is a domestic relationship to the child … the 32-year-old female and the four-year-old child lived at the unit together, and as I understand it, nobody else lived at that unit”

The matter will return to court at Wyong on September 1.

Wyong is a small town (population around 4,500) on the holiday coast of NSW, about 90km north of Sydney.

Australia has a history of cannibalism, not to the level of the USA or Russia, but still a part of its mythology. Australian Indigenous people, who comprise the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet, were labelled cannibals as a prelude to the expropriation of their land and the attempted annihilation of their culture and genocide of their people. Such reports are heavily contested by historians and anthropologists and, where they did perhaps occur, are usually put down to mortuary rites, survival in drought or sometimes revenge killings. Reports were largely based on hearsay.

Earliest reports from the British colonies were mostly of convicts escaping and resorting to cannibalism or bushranging, or sometimes both. The most famous was Alexander Pearce, who escaped twice in Tasmania in 1822 and 1823 and each time sampled some flesh from his accomplices while trekking to imagined freedom. His story was adapted in the famous 1874 novel “For the Term of His Natural Life” which was made into a film in 1927 and was incorporated into Australian mythology, which sometimes assumes he bred a family of cannibals in the wilderness of western Tasmania.

Others included Thomas Jeffrey in 1826 and Edward Broughton in 1830, and probably a lot more whose cases were hushed up by colonial administrators. What’s the point of accusing First Nations people of savagery if your own fellow countrymen are chowing down on each other?

In more recent times, there was the case of Tracey Wigginton (called the “Lesbian Vampire Killer“) who, with some friends, picked up a drunk man in Brisbane in 1989 and drove him to a park, where Wigginton stabbed him 27 times and drank his blood. The friends said that she was a vampire and had previously drunk the blood of other animals.

The Snowtown bodies in the barrels case was revealed to have an element of cannibalism in the final murder, but this was very much an afterthought to the killings and not even mentioned in the film of the events. Several people thought to be somehow socially undesirable (or witnesses to earlier murders) were killed and stuffed into barrels, which were later stored in a building in the small town of Snowtown in South Australia. In the final case, according to reports which surfaced years later, the killers sliced off a sliver of flesh from the right thigh of a man who wouldn’t quite fit in the barrel, then heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and handed it around.

Katherine Knight was a slaughterhouse worker who in 2000 had passionate sex with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked some of his flesh. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate placenames for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but decided against it. However, police arrived before the kids, so no one got eaten.

David Kevin Loader, 43, murdered 64-year-old George Martin at Mandorah, near Darwin, on July 5, 2001 after a heavy drinking session. He later told a cellmate that he had cooked and eaten the man’s leg and penis. He said it tasted like chicken.

In 2019, Jessica Camilleri killed her mother and decapitated her. The judge sentencing her said she had “engaged in “acts of decapitation and cannibalism”.

In 2021, Cecil Mabb abducted a five-year-old girl from a campground in Tasmania, not because he was planning any sexual molestation but, as he told prison staff, because he wanted to eat her, and that he had wanted to eat people since he was a child.

In the Australian state of NSW, cannibalism is not mentioned in any legislation, but section 81C of the Crimes Act 1900 proscribes “Misconduct With Regard to Corpses” which involves “indecently” or “improperly” interfering with a human body or offering any “indignity” to it, and provides for maximum imprisonment of two years.

In fact, in most countries around the world, cannibalism is not listed as an offence. Killing people is certainly against the law, and there are a range of motivations that may elevate it from manslaughter to murder, but what happens if the killer uses the flesh thereafter is a bit of an afterthought. Our assumptions about human inviolability are based on Biblical claims about being made in “the image of God” (whatever that may mean), but the subsequent insistence on that sacred being having an immortal soul creates a contradiction – if the soul has left the body, are the remains “just meat”? If so, why have rumours of cannibalism elevated this story from a tragic murder to sensationalist clickbait? And why are we not equally repelled by the idea of eating a baby of other species?

Convict Cannibals: FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE (Norman Dawn, 1927)

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For the Term of His Natural Life is a 1927 Australian film directed, produced and co-written by Norman Dawn. It is based on the 1874 novel by Marcus Clarke, and was the most expensive Australian silent film ever made. It remains one of the most famous Australian films of the silent era. John Laws, in the trailer above, calls it “the grandest of them all, the climax of Australia’s silent cinema.” Amazingly, it was the third attempt to film the story, starting in 1908 with the film version of a stage play of the book,  and then in 1911 another filmed stage adaptation, The Life of Rufus Dawes.

It’s the story of a gentleman (in the traditional sense of that obsolete term) who is wrongly convicted and transported to Australia for “the term of his natural life.” This was a fairly common trope in Victorian novels (no one wanted to read about real criminals), and was recreated by Tim Burton when he made Sweeney Todd into a returned convict in his version of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As a convict, he changes his name to Rufus Dawes, and the rest of the story tells of the brutality of life as a convict at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania and his eventual escape to claim his innocence. And, in the American version of the film, a happy ending (the book and the British version saw the hero and his true love come to a watery end).

The bit that interests devotees of Cannibal Studies in this story is the escape of a group of men led by a particularly evil-looking convict named Matt Gabbett (played by Arthur McLaglen in the 1927 film).

Being a silent movie, even the narrator gets an intertitle card:

After nine days with no food, Gabbett points out that there are only two choices— starvation, or eating one of the followers, who has fortuitously become lame. We see him taking an axe to a fellow escapee, while the others cringe, as we suppose semi-civilised folk would.

Gabbett tells them:

The cannibalism subplot was one of the most controversial aspects of the film. Gabbett is based on the true story of Alexander Pearce, who escaped from Macquarie Harbour in 1822 with seven other prisoners. Once recaptured, Pearce confessed that he had eaten his companions, but the magistrate in Hobart refused to believe him. A year later, Pearce escaped again and this time he was recaptured with the flesh of another man still in his pockets. He was taken to Hobart and hanged.

The story languished somewhat until revived in a six hour mini-series in 1983. In 2008-09, a number of Australian films were made that referenced Pearce – The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008), directed by Michael James Rowland; Dying Breed (2008 – about his supposed offspring who are still eating people in the 21st century), directed by Jody Dwyer; and Van Dieman’s Land (2009), directed by Jonathan auf der Heide, which cut the crap and concentrated on the cannibalism story. We’ll get to revue this one, dear reader, one of these days.

The controversy over Norman Dawn’s 1927 version was driven partly by Tasmanian sensitivities about the unwholesome revelation of the island’s history. Marcus Clarke’s book was one thing; a big international motion picture, intended for a mass audience overseas, was quite another. Certainly, the film does sensationalise the cannibalism, shifting the focus away from the book’s message, which was to advocate prison reform. Prisoners like Gabbett (played by the brother of well-known British actor Victor McLaglen) seemed more likely to offer justification of capital punishment.

Australia is sorely lacking in cannibal stories, so even though Alexander Pearce was Irish (as were a large percentage of convicts), we claim him as our own. He did, after all, eat people and get hanged here, and if he hadn’t, no one would even remember he ever existed.

The film is currently available on YouTube.

Need to feed, need to breed: THE DYING BREED (Jody Dwyer, 2008)

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Two hundred years ago (July 19 1824), Alexander Pearce was hanged in Hobart, Tasmania, and his body dissected for research. He was a cannibal.

Australia has a bit of a dearth of cannibal stories (compared to places like the USA and Russia). Ask Aussies about cannibalism and they will often make a joke about state or federal politicians. Then they may search their memories and come up with Katherine Knight, a slaughterhouse worker who in 2000 had passionate sex with her partner John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked some of his flesh. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate placenames for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but decided against it. So, no points on that one I’m afraid – no one got eaten, so no cannibals. More recently, the Snowtown bodies in the barrels case was revealed to have an element of cannibalism in the final murder, but this was very much an afterthought to the killings, and not even mentioned in the film of the events.

Most of the real cannibals in Australian history were in fact convicts sent to the worst penal settlements the British could devise (and they were very good at that) then escaping, only to eat their comrades when other food sources were exhausted. Edward Broughton did just that in 1830, as did Thomas Jeffrey, who became a murderous bushranger, in 1836. But before them, a cannibalistic pioneer one might say, there was Alexander Pearce.

Pearce escaped the brutal penal colony only to eat his companions, not once but twice (he confessed when recaptured the first time, but the authorities didn’t believe him). He is shown very briefly in this movie as a historical flashback before the opening title, an escapee who is cornered by a very angry soldier whose gun misfires. Pearce tears the man’s throat out, swallows some and throws a bit to a thylacine (Tamanian Tiger) who is stalking him, to allow him time to escape.

The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial who was endemic only to Tasmania, until wiped out by European colonists, the last one dying in Hobart zoo in 1936. There is no evidence of them eating humans. Thylacines were not the only targets of white settlers: Tasmanian Indigenous peoples were also rounded up and subjected to genocide in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Anyhow, the plot of this movie revolves around a biologist named Nina and her friends, who are trying to find proof that the thylacine is not extinct – her sister found a paw print, but was killed mysteriously near the Pieman River on the west coast. The film and other sources often claim that Alexander Pearce was known as the pieman due to his love of the meat of a wide variety of animals, although in fact it seems it was named after a pastry cook named Thomas Kent.

They get a punt across the river, driven by a cranky old man with a small girl who is playing with bones and reciting bloodthirsty rhymes. She bites the boyfriend.

They get to the town, where the locals are killing puppies and who knows who else.

Long story short, as they say, these are a cannibal family descended from Alexander Pearce, who they call the Pieman. The city slickers, mocking the locals as they depart, head down the river where, at the midpoint of the film (where the really good or really bad stuff happens) Nina finally but briefly sights a thylacine!

Of course, she doesn’t have her camera, so she grabs it and they go look for the animal, splitting up to search, proving without a doubt that none of them has ever watched a horror film before. You don’t split up! The other girl meets the creepy child from the punt, then is grabbed from behind and killed, and we get to watch her tongue torn out and eaten. The others find her strung up on a meat hook and butchered like any prey animal.

There’s plenty of gore and somewhat predictable jump scares (or maybe I’ve just seen too many of these types of movies) but the plot is interesting, the acting great, the direction and photography first-rate, and the scenery is spectacular, although the depiction of the Deliverance-like locals may reduce the usefulness of this film for promoting Tasmanian tourism.

“What did you hope to find? We’ve been here a long time. Almost as long as the nation. We have a life to protect, a tradition. You tourists have no tradition.”

The cannibals in this film capture tourists and either eat them or breed them, not that different to what humans do to other animals. When modern twenty-first century humans eat others they are often referred to as degenerate cannibals – they are accused of devolving into the cannibalistic savages that early humans are portrayed as, even though there is little evidence that earlier cultures were into cannibalism or that modern ones have outgrown it.

Humans often turn to cannibalism when food runs out. The Biblical story of the siege of Samaria in Israel some 3,000 years ago (2 Kings 6) relates that, unable to afford asses’ heads and doves’ dung, two women agreed to boil their babies for sustenance. But after they’d eaten the first one, his mother found that the second woman had hidden her child, a shocking breach of contract.  Such starvation cannibalism became common in the day of sailing ships, but even on land, Sawney Bean in fifteenth or sixteenth century Scotland is supposed to have stopped tourists as they passed through his wild lands and taken them home for dinner. Some of these stories seem to stray from cannibalism into something like an aversion to getting a job, which is how the modern versions like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes are sometimes framed. We eat flesh because we need to or want to, and because we can. That still applies in the meat section of every supermarket. We don’t degenerate to cannibalism, we simply objectify the prey, be it human or any other animal. This objectification is at the heart of all politics.

The moral of these stories (they all have one, even the most basic slasher), is that there are other worlds out there, away from what we are used to in our own little niche. There are people outside our ways of understanding life and morality, whose daily existence may be inconceivable to those looking in. Coetzee said that the “upper intelligentsia” (Nina is a scientist) live lives irrelevant to most people, who may be “devoted to brawling and guzzling and fucking”. That’s whom we meet in the unexplored wilderness of Deliverance or Sawney’s Scotland or the Texas of the forgotten, and in this film; they fight, they kill, they eat and they reproduce. They survive and breed: the basis of all evolution. It’s what animals do, and a good cannibal film like this reminds us that we are, beneath our veneer of civilisation, just another brawling, guzzling, fucking animal.  

“Man’s flesh is delicious” THE LAST CONFESSION OF ALEXANDER PEARCE (Rowland, 2008)

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Alexander Pearce was, as far as we know, Australia’s first cannibal. Although the Indigenous people of Australia were regularly accused of cannibalism, the evidence is suspiciously absent, and clearly such accusations were extremely useful in the British colonial campaigns of subjugation and genocide.

But Alexander Pearce was the real thing.

The film is mostly set in Hobart Jail, where Pearce (Irish actor Ciarán McMenamin) is waiting to be hanged, and has requested a priest to hear his confession. Somewhat unwillingly, an Irish priest named Father Philip Connolly (Adrian Dunbar) listens to Pearce’s story.

In 1824, the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land was a living hell, where vicious floggings were regular punishments.

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Pearce had been transported to Australia for stealing a pair of shoes, and continuing law-breaking saw him eventually transferred to Sarah Island, which was surrounded by sea on one side and wilderness on the other.

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Eight convicts made their escape, and headed off into the bush with enough food for four days. After eight days, weak with hunger, they start discussing cases where sailors lost at sea have engaged in cannibalism to survive, and realise they will have to do the same. They nominate Dalton the one member of their gang they all hate, a man who volunteered to be the “flogger” and who has whipped all of them. He probably should have kept his day job at Sarah Island.

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Three of the others turned back, but “took their share of Dalton”. Every time they run out of food, another man is killed. They see new potential meat – kangaroos and emus – and vow brotherly love – never to kill another of their own, but then discover how fast kangaroos and emus can run. Soon there are four, then just three, and Pearce realises that he is next, because the other two are friends. Luckily for Pearce, one of them gets bitten by a snake, develops gangrene and well… once more they have brotherly love. The priest is dismissive of such protestations of virtue, and Pearce answers:

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“A Full Belly is prerequisite to all manner of good! Without that, no man will ever know what hunger will make you do.”

Soon there are only two, and neither dares sleep. Pearce wins the game, and the last meal, but is interrupted by a local.

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After three months, Pearce made it, alone, to Jericho, in the centre of Tasmania, over 150km away from Sarah Island. The magistrate sent him back to Sarah Island, because he did not believe the story of cannibalism. He thought it was a cover for his friends, to disguise the fact that they were still at large, bushranging.

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“He’s a thief. He’s a forger. A recalcitrant Irish… but I didn’t credit him with being a savage”.

It was also impossible to hang him for murder, since there were no bodies – a legal benefit of cannibalism.

At Sarah Island, Pearce was viciously flogged and chained to a rock.

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He escaped again, perhaps at the urging of another young convict, whom he killed eight days later, while they still had provisions. He was apparently enraged when he discovered the boy couldn’t swim, a real disadvantage when escaping from an island. Pearce signalled the first passing ship, confessed his actions and showed the authorities the body. So this time, they could hang him.

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“The man’s a monster. He cut that young man in half, and devoured him for meat, and this while he himself still had bread and cheese lining his pockets”.

At the governor’s table, all merrily chewing on some other unfortunate animal, they discuss Pearce’s fate: to be hanged, and his body dissected.

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“Quite an irony, I imagine, a cannibal being dissected… see what breeds such savagery”.

Asked by the governor’s wife why he is giving comfort to Pearce, the priest replies “I do it for fear… Fear of what we all might become, here at the end of the world.”

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Pearce was hanged at the Hobart Jail at 9am on the 19th July 1824.

“whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall that man’s blood be shed, for in his own image, God made human kind.”

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“The world is always easier understood held at a distance with tales of monsters and the like. This is how Alexander is remembered. Not as a man. Yet few truer words have ever been spoken: A full belly is prerequisite to all manner of good. Without that, no man will ever know what hunger will make him do.”

The film was nominated for the 2010 Rose d’Or, Best Drama at the 6th Annual Irish Film and Television Awards, Best Drama at the 2009 Australian Film Institute Awards, won Best Documentary at the 2009 Inside Film Awards and the director Michael James Rowland was nominated in the Best Director (Telemovie) category in the 2009 Australian Directors Guild Awards.

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Pearce is supposed to have said just before his execution:

“Man’s Flesh is Delicious. It Tastes Far Better Than Fish or Pork.”

This line does not appear in the film, and is probably apocryphal.