‘At that moment, an old mate, Sid Clarke, arrived in his car up on a rise in the road. He was walking, with his rifle over his forearm, always ready to shoot snakes, our Sid. Anyway, he spotted the would-be killer taking aim at me and firing. Sid wasn’t the type to yell or ask questions. He just took aim at the bloke and fired. I saw Sid hurry into the bush. A few moments later, he sauntered out of the scrub and came over to me. I had grabbed my rifle. Sid told me not to worry about anything. He said: “Take your ute and piss off for an hour.” Sid was an old bushie and well respected. He had a no-nonsense reputation. At age sixteen he had knocked out Jack Dempsey, the world champion boxer, in a bout in Queenstown, Tassie. It happened a few seconds into the first round. Sid was still hard as nails later in life. He had a gnarled face, but was a kind old bugger.’ Haut paused again, and seemed to be hiding his emotion and affection for a man who had saved his life. ‘That day, he was just coming to see if I was okay. That was Sid. Good bloke. Passed on now.’

‘What happened to the body of the attacker?’

‘I never asked. Didn’t want to know. Old Sid wasn’t going to tell me. We just had a few beers that night.’

‘But someone would find the body, wouldn’t they?’

‘Sid would have looked after that.’

Cavalier waited again.

‘I’ll give you an educated guess,’ Haut said. ‘There’s a tailings dam nearby. He probably put the body in it. You know what’s in a tailings dam?’

‘Waste, chemicals, acids …’

Haut nodded. ‘If he put it there, everything, including bones, would have been consumed long ago.’

‘Nice story,’ Cavalier said, ‘pity I can’t use it.’

7 THE APPARITION

7

THE APPARITION

Cavalier asked questions of Haut for another two hours, beginning with the much talked about, and often ridiculed, ‘vision from God’ that he had as a teenager.

‘Can you tell me about the original vision? How old were you and where did it happen?’

‘It was at a secluded beach at Variety Bay, Bruny Island,’ Haut said. ‘I was eighteen years old and surfing.’

‘In January 1977.’

‘Yes.’

‘Bruny Island? That’s where Truganini lived, isn’t it?’

‘Her people were my people—the Nuenonne clan—on the Island. The traditional name was Lunawanna Alonnah, before the land was misappropriated by early Australian settlers.’

‘So you were surfing there …’ Cavalier prompted.