Drownings, suicides and murders: Gardiner’s Creek holds many secrets.
On a balmy morning in November 1868, Alice Greenwood, her little sister and their dog set out for a walk along the dirt track that was Gardiner’s Creek Road (the precursor to Toorak Road). Back then, the road followed the trajectory of Kooyong Koot Creek, known colloquially after the first British settler in the area, John Gardiner.
Gardiner’s Creek meandered east of the Melbourne settlement from its intersection with Birrarung (the Yarra River) in South Yarra towards Blackburn. It comprised of shallow channels with a swampy floor, fringed by dense thickets of swamp paperbarks.[1] Dotted along its path were deep waterholes that generations of Wurundjeri people used for fishing and swimming. With them now gone, the new settlers had also discovered the delights of cooling off in Gardiner’s Creek.
Although Gardiner’s Creek was low-lying and prone to flooding, Alice and her sister enjoyed the aftermath of an extended period of dry weather that kept the track dry. As the threesome wandered past the various market gardens and farms that had sprung up after Gardiner sold his large tranche of land years earlier, they came to a paddock owned by a Mr Crook.
Mr Crook occupied a farm near the ramshackle bridge crossing the creek near Toorak. An inviting nearby waterhole soon lured Alice’s sister and the dog into further exploration. As Alice sunned herself with a watchful eye, the little girl happily poked around in the reeds with a stick. The dry weather had caused the waterhole to lower significantly. Suddenly, the little girl struck a small hessian bag half submerged in the water. Pulling it towards her, she called Alice over. The bag was heavy, as if weighed down by numerous stones.
Alice knelt and peered inside. She quickly recoiled in horror. Inside was the decomposed body of a newborn baby. It was the first recorded discovery of a body in Gardiner’s Creek.[2]
As the population of Melbourne steadily grew, more people built houses and lived along Gardiner’s Creek Road. Yet the creek itself remained unfenced and unmolested. From the 1850s, the Victorian colonial authorities established Gardiner’s Creek as public riparian land [3], in recognition of its value as a public resource for everyone. Although bridges over it eventually appeared, it attracted no investment in securing its banks from flooding, nor providing safety warnings for swimmers.
The Creek’s depth varied considerably depending on the time of year and season. In some places it was very shallow, others it could be up to 12 feet deep. Its deeper sections, near its junction with the Yarra and further upriver at Hawthorn and Kew, made it an alluring suicide spot.
In 1877, this was the addled thinking of John Carter, a 48-year-old unemployed labourer from Hawthorn. According to his wife Jane, John suffered from ‘religious mania’ that had already caused his hospitalisation twice. This is a mental illness where his intense devotion to religion interfered with his normal functioning capacity. On 9 November, John left his Hawthorn home to look for work as he always did. But this time, he never returned.
A passerby found John’s naked body (except his boots, he had decided to wear those to his death) lying on the banks of Gardiner’s Creek in South Yarra.[4] The coroner found John had drowned himself.
Sometimes the circumstances of a body in Gardiner’s Creek were less clearcut. Malvern resident Thomas Porter discovered the body of a 60-year-old(ish) man face down in a scant three inches of water. It was August 1894 so a swimming accident seemed unlikely. Yet the coroner dismissed the death as an accidental drowning brought on by the despair of his circumstances, indicated by the man’s shabby clothing.[6]
Gardiner’s Creek also saw its share of strange occurrences. In 1913, a passerby pulled the unconscious body of John Mawson, a butcher from East Malvern out of the creek. He had been stabbed in the throat. Nobody seemed overly alarmed by the incident as Mawson had been ‘morose’ lately. The consulting doctor decreed the incident an attempted suicide.[8]
The lost children
Fortunately, suicide by drowning in Gardiner’s Creek was a rare occurrence. Accidental drowning on the other hand, was tragically common. Yet despite the loss of multiple children over the years, these deaths did not act as a deterrent against swimming or as a motivator for the Colonial authorities to post warnings about the dangers of Gardiner’s Creek. Many strangers risked their lives trying to save children from ‘sinking’ or worked tirelessly to recover bodies. The coroner deemed these accidents and misadventures, with no culpability being afforded to the Creek’s colonial custodians.
In one example from 1887, a young man named William Cooney drowned while swimming in deep water near Glen Iris. When they saw he was in trouble, his friends tried valiantly to save him. To no avail. Mr Newey responded to the friends’ calls for help and spent over an hour diving for William’s body. Eventually, Mr Newey brought William to the surface. He was loaded onto a cart and returned to his parents’ house in Hotham Street.[5]
By the turn of the 20th century, Gardiner’s Creek was consuming about one young man a year, usually aged less than 18.
In response to the 1906 recovery of 15-year-old Thomas Walsh in a clay-hole in Surrey Park, Councillor Dillon moved that Camberwell Council erect a sign near the spot stating the potential danger to bathers.[7] This appears to be the first intervention of this nature.
By the mid-1930s, the significant post-WW1 population growth combined with heavy rain caused a spate of accidental drownings. In February 1934, Evelyn Hourhane, a domestic servant, slipped and fell off the Glenferrie Road bridge, drowning in the deep water below. A week later, another domestic servant, Nellie McPhee also fell to her death in the same location. The coroner decreed the absence of a handrail had contributed to their deaths.[9] This is the first indication of encouraging the installation of more physical barriers to protect users of the Creek from accidents.
Sadly, they still happened. The next summer, a nine-year-old boy called William Leonard drowned when his canoe overturned in the Creek near Toorak Road.[10] This was followed later in the year by the drowning of another nine-year-old, John Shaw near Burnley.
The Victorian Government considered these kinds of incidents tragic accidents. For parents, they raised awareness of the dangers inherent in children playing unsupervised around the deep bodies of water in Gardiner’s Creek. From then on, reports of accidental drownings grew few and far between.
Murders
The first confirmed murder associated with Gardiner’s Creek occurred in 1940. A passerby found the body of William Herbert, a 41-year-old electrical contractor lying in the creek near Toroonga. A sawn-off shotgun lay clutched in his hand.
At first deemed a suicide, it soon transpired that the day before, Herbert had shot and killed his son Allan and critically wounded his wife Elizabeth. The family lived with Elizabeth’s parents in Valley Parade, Glen Iris. According to them, the only explanation for the murder-suicide was Herbert’s war-related ill-health. He had recently sunk into a deep despondency only relieved by golf.[11]
Elizabeth died in hospital eleven days later.[12]
The Glen Iris section of Gardiner’s Creek was also the site of one of the most confounding cold cases in Melbourne’s history.
On the afternoon of 15 April 1975, two young boys searching for their football on Eric Raven Reserve stumbled across the naked dead body of 26-year-old Margaret Elliott in the shallows of the creek behind the pavilion. Someone had beaten her to death around the head and upper body with a blunt instrument.
At the time of her tragic murder, Margaret lived a normal happy life in Berwick with her husband and two young children. Her husband told police she had not returned home from a visit to a close friend and her newborn baby in Box Hill Hospital the day before.
Today, Box Hill and Berwick are well over 30 minutes’ drive away from each other. Back then, it would have taken Margaret even longer to get to Box Hill: up the Mulgrave Freeway to its abrupt end in Dandenong, then through the streets of Rowville, Wantirna and Nunawading to the Eastern Freeway. The journey back would have been a similar duration and Margaret told her husband Brian she did not expect to be back until at least 8.30 pm.
When she still had not returned long after 8.30 pm, Brian spent the night driving the route looking for her, convinced she had gone through the Dandenong Ranges and perhaps her car had driven off one of the steep turns on the way home. But there was no sign of her until her body inexplicably turned up where the Southeastern Freeway ended in Glen Iris.
Police found Margaret’s car near the hospital. It had been driven between 140 and 170 kilometres, a far greater distance than the trip from Berwick to Box Hill.
Police had no clue how her body came to be in Glen Iris or why her killer chose the site. The most likely scenario was that the murderer followed her to her car after she left the Hospital, beat her over the head, bundled her inside the car, then drove her around for some time before ending up at the end of the Freeway in Glen Iris. Access to the dump site on Eric Raven Reserve required a right turn off High Street down Albion Road and then a sharp right on Estella Street before parking at the Reserve. The person or persons had then returned the car to Box Hill, probably to pick up their own car.
The dump site perhaps suggested some familiarity with the area but the truth was: if anyone saw anything in Box Hill or Glen Iris, they have never come forward. The only clue was an anonymous letter sent to police in 1975 describing a sighting of Margaret with a man the night she died. Its author never surfaced. Speculation emerged years later that Margaret may have been the first victim of the notorious Tynong North killer. Another of his victims, Beth Miller had been taken from High Street on her way to the Glen Iris tram stop. But nothing ever come of it.
Margaret’s murder devastated her family and friends. A heartbroken Brian drank himself to death and her children grew up troubled.[13] One eventually committed suicide, the other lives with the awful knowledge that nearly 50 years later, his mother’s murder remains unsolved.
The Ghost of Progress
Today, Gardiner’s Creek is unrecognisable from its original state. In the 1950s, the creek began to be heavily urbanised and its environment dramatically changed. Over the years, the State Government placed many of the smaller tributaries underground or filled in the land. These became sport fields, including those privately owned by Kooyong Tennis Club, Scotch College and St Kevin’s College.[14]
As a watercourse, most parts became far too shallow to swim in. Pollution made this a highly unappealing prospect anyway. Accidents still very occasionally happened though, especially during heavy rain events. In 2008, two construction workers found the body of Yadav Munohur, a nine-year old orphan from India near the Hawthorn section. The effect of heavy rain had subsided in the creek, bringing Yadav to the surface two weeks after he disappeared. Most of the time, increased vigilance by parents about the dangers of playing in Gardiner’s Creek – especially when it was in flood – ensured accidental drownings and suicides moved into memory.
Yet Gardiner’s Creek still holds the last moments of life for the beloved people lost in it. As Margaret Elliott’s husband foretold in The Age in 1975, ‘when this happens one person doesn't die – other people and other precious things die with them.’
References
[1] Koster, Wayne, 'An Assessment of the Aquatic Fauna in Gardiners, Scotchmans, Back and Damper Creeks,' Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, May.
[2] "Inquest," Argus, 3 November 1868.
[3] Riparian means relating to or living on the banks of a natural watercourse, such as a creek or river.
[4] "Inquests: Suicides," Argus, 15 November 1877.
[5] "Inquests: Accidentally Drowned," Argus, 4 November 1887.
[6] "Drowned in Shallow Water," Argus, 9 August 1894.
[7] "Another Dangerous Place," Argus, 16 January 1906.
[8] "Casualties and Fatalities," Argus, 29 July 1913.
[9] "Fatal Fall from Bridge," The Age, 8 March 1934.
[10] "Small Boy Drowned," Argus, 24 January 1935.
[11] "Shot Dead in Sleep: Family Tragedy," Argus, 13 May 1940.
[12] "Third Death in Glen Iris Tragedy," Herald, 22 May 1940.
[13] Bucci, Nino, "Hunt for Killer Still on after 40 Years," The Age, 15 April 2015.
[14] Lancaster, Marcus, "An Urban Environmental History of Melbourne's Watercourses" (University of Melbourne, 2018).
Sadly not confined to the distant past Drowned boy 'attracted to water' (smh.com.au)