The Mystery Bay Murders:
Gold Fever, Missing Bodies, and a 150-Year-Old Cold CaseBy Mic BrookeRecorded Track
Length1h 53m
About this audiobook
Five men vanished. A boat came back without them. In October 1880, government geologist Lamont Young arrived on the New South Wales Sapphire Coast to inspect the fevered Bermagui goldfield. Within days, he, his assistant Max Schneider and three experienced boatmen were gone, leaving behind a wrecked vessel, scattered belongings and a mystery that would haunt Australia for generations. Was it accident, murder, robbery or something darker born from gold fever? Drawing on archival records, witness statements and modern AI-assisted analysis, The Mystery Bay Murders reopens one of Australia’s most haunting cold cases and asks whether gold fever, failed investigations and buried motives concealed the truth all along.
Audiobook details
GenreTrue Crime
Length1 hr 53 mins
Narrated byRecorded Track
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateJul 9, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Mystery Bay Murders:
158Lamont Henry Graeme Young was one of only three geological surveyors in the New South Wales Mines Department, and his arrival at Bermagui carried official weight. A 29-year-old Englishman, trained at the Royal School of Mines and elected a Fellow of the Geological Society, he brought to the new goldfield the habits of a careful professional: observant, precise and aware that his report could either confirm or deflate the colony’s latest gold fever.
2Gold Fever, Missing Bodies, and a 150-Year-Old Cold Case
159Tall, fair and very light-haired, with a beard, whiskers and moustache, Young had a smart, almost military bearing. The impression may have owed something to his father, Major-General C. B. Young of the Royal Engineers, late Bengal, retired. Two of Young’s brothers were also serving in India, and the family background gave him the air of a man accustomed to discipline, duty and public expectation.
3By Michael Brooke
160Away from the goldfields, Young was a husband and father. He lived at Belmore Cottage in Mittagong, 77 kilometres south-west of Sydney, with his wife Dora, their two young children and two servants. Dora was expecting their third child, making his journey to Bermagui not only another government assignment but a departure from a household waiting for his return.
4This is the story of the mystery that Refuses to Die
161From Mittagong, Young travelled widely across the colony—to Araluen, Yass, Gundagai, Braidwood, Harden and Albury—inspecting mineral fields, reporting on discoveries and exploring caves. His work demanded endurance as much as expertise. In Sydney, he often slept on a makeshift bed at the Mines Department, a sign of the long hours and unsettled routines of colonial fieldwork.
5For almost 150 years, the Mystery Bay murders riddle has lingered on the New South Wales coast like a story the sea refuses to surrender.
162A personal friend of fellow geological surveyor C. T. Wilkinson, Young was regarded by colleagues as accomplished, conscientious, methodical and reserved—the kind of man who inspired confidence not by display, but by diligence.
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6In October 1880, five men vanished on the rugged Sapphire Coast. Among them were government geologist Lamont Henry Graeme Young and his assistant, Max Schneider, who had travelled to Bermagui to inspect what many believed might be one of the richest new goldfields in the colony.
163In January 1880, Young told Wilkinson he had bought two horses and a saddle to save the Department the cost of train and coach fares. Around the same time, while away from home, he suffered a severe illness marked by coughing blood, vomiting and acute pain in his side and back. A country doctor diagnosed liver trouble; a chemist suggested sunstroke.
7They are believed to have been accompanied by three experienced boatmen from Batemans Bay. The party set out into a landscape of surf, scrub and sudden fortune. None of the five men was ever seen again.
164Young wrote that he was “very weak”, but by October he appeared to have recovered. Before leaving for Bermagui, he had just returned from inspecting the Mount Werong goldfields near the Victorian border.
8Their disappearance shocked colonial Australia and drew attention across the British Empire. Newspapers speculated. Police searched. Rumors multiplied. A colonial Select Committee was appointed in 1883 and later concluded that the men had almost certainly been murdered and their bodies disposed of at sea.
165Young’s field assistant, Max Schneider, was formally named Maximilian Karl Waldemar Schneider and cut a very different figure. German by birth, he had reached Sydney only ten months earlier, in December 1879, after working his passage on the barque Cesar Godfrey.
9Yet the inquiry left its darkest question unanswered: motive. That single question has kept the case alive through generations of speculation, suspicion and silence.
166Unlike Young, who moved within the ordered world of government service, professional societies and colonial respectability, Schneider arrived as a young immigrant with little standing, few local connections and a past known mainly through what he said about himself.
10For generations, historians have regarded the mystery as nearly impossible to solve. Some believed the truth died with the killers. Others argued that too much evidence had vanished to ever identify those responsible.
167His position as Young’s assistant placed him close to the official work of the Mines Department, yet socially he remained an outsider on the Bermagui field. He was young, foreign-born and dependent on employment that required endurance, obedience and trust. In a crowded gold rush camp, where men were judged quickly by accent, dress, reputation and usefulness, Schneider would have stood apart from the older miners, local officials and experienced boatmen around him.
11Yet modern technology offers a new way of looking at an old crime.
168About 23 years old and of medium build, Schneider had dark hair, small side-whiskers, a black moustache and spectacles. A large scar marked his left cheek, which he said he had received while serving in the Austrian army. The detail was striking: it gave him the appearance of a man who had already lived through hardship, but it also depended on his own account.
12Artificial intelligence cannot solve a murder on its own, nor can it replace historical research or police investigation. What it can do is analyse large bodies of evidence, identify relationships that human readers may overlook and test competing theories against the available facts. Used carefully, it becomes another investigative tool, not a substitute for traditional methods.
169To strangers at Bermagui, the scar, the spectacles and the foreign accent must have made him memorable in a camp where every newcomer was noticed and weighed.
13This book combines archival research with AI-assisted analysis to re-examine the evidence gathered in 1880 and the parliamentary inquiry appointed in 1883, which reported the following year.
170Schneider’s background would later acquire an importance far beyond anything he could have imagined when he arrived at Bermagui with Young and their surveying gear.
14Like many researchers before me, I began with journalist Cyril Pearl’s Five Men Vanished: The Bermagui Mystery, published in 1978. Pearl examined more than a thousand documents from the police investigation and parliamentary inquiry, producing what remains the most comprehensive published account of the case. His work has long shaped how the disappearance is understood.
171After the disappearance, police treated Schneider not simply as a missing man but, for a time, as a possible suspect. That suspicion rested less on firm evidence than on uncertainty: he was young, foreign, comparatively unknown and absent with the others.
15Following Pearl’s trail led me to the New South Wales State Archives in Sydney. With the assistance of archive staff, I obtained access to original police files, witness statements, official correspondence and Crown records. Over three intensive days, I examined handwritten letters from police officers, private investigators and witnesses, together with documents that had remained largely untouched for decades.
172In the surviving record, Schneider appears as both victim and enigma—a man present at the centre of the mystery, yet only faintly visible before it overtook him.
16Handling the fragile papers required gloves and patience. Unlike Pearl, however, I had one advantage unavailable to researchers in the 1970s: a smartphone that allowed me to photograph the documents for later analysis.
173Before Schneider could be understood as victim, suspect or scapegoat, the record itself had to be tested: the witness accounts, the damaged boat, the missing evidence and the official assumptions that shaped the first version of the story.
17The documents revealed a fascinating and often disturbing picture. They confirmed that newspapers had promoted Bermagui as the southern hemisphere’s “El Dorado” after rich gold was discovered on local beaches, sparking a brief but intense rush. They also showed that Young enjoyed an outstanding professional reputation and that his father, a retired British Army general, challenged aspects of the official police account. The records contained striking contradictions.
174Chapter 7 – The Police Narrative
18One local official told the inquiry that one man could not possibly have murdered five people unless poison had been used. Historical records, however, show that the same official had previously been involved in violent frontier and bushranging episodes. Such details do not prove guilt, but they complicate any simple reading of the evidence.
175Daily Telegraph journalist Cyril Pearl investigated the Bermagui Mystery decades before I began my own search. His account remains valuable because it drew on a large body of police and parliamentary material, but it also needs to be read carefully against the original records.
19Other inconsistencies emerged. Police treated Max Schneider as a principal suspect despite his own disappearance. Some witnesses received payments for appearing before the parliamentary inquiry, while one of the most credible witnesses—the man who located the abandoned boat—was never called to give evidence. Young’s widow received compensation from the Crown, while the widows of the three boatmen depended largely on public donations. The reward offered for identifying the killers was never claimed.
176Pearl wrote that Young and Schneider landed at Bermagui on Friday, 8 October, arriving by ship’s boat from the steamer Truganini with their surveying equipment. According to this version, they pitched their tent at Barter’s Hole, on Bermagui Heads south of the river. The next morning they crossed the river and walked to Montreal to visit Senior Constable John Berry at the police camp.
20The fate of the physical evidence became especially important.
177Pearl then placed Young and Schneider at lunch with Berry at a restaurant run by Mrs Quin. After lunch, Schneider supposedly returned to the Bermagui camp and was not seen again, while Young went with Sergeant Stapleton to meet Warden Henry Keightley, carrying letters of introduction.
21I searched for records relating to Young’s personal belongings and geological equipment, which had reportedly been sent to the Mines Department in Sydney after the disappearance. Eventually I learned that bags containing clothing and equipment had been destroyed in a government fire in 1882.
178Pearl added that Young spent about an hour and a half with Keightley and arranged, at Keightley’s suggestion, to have his tent moved from Bermagui to the prospectors’ camp the following Monday so he could inspect the Corunna field.
22Much of the physical evidence had therefore vanished almost as completely as the men themselves. Most disturbing, no known photographic record of the recovered boat has survived.
179Young then returned to the police camp, leaving in Keightley’s care several items connected with his work, including a valuable surveying instrument, his belt, hammer and tape measure.
23After weeks of reviewing witness statements and official reports, I faced a choice. I could rely solely on traditional historical interpretation, or I could see what modern analytical tools might contribute. I chose the latter.
180Back at the police camp, Young reportedly found Berry preparing fishing tackle for the next day. Young said that if he did not dine at Hobbes’s house, he would go fishing with Berry. Pearl noted that Hobbes was the Montreal mining registrar and held a free selection called Tilba Tilba, about five and a half kilometres from Bermagui.
24Using an AI-assisted criminology platform known as Crime GPT, I tested the available evidence against behavioural and probabilistic models commonly used in modern criminal analysis. The program highlighted patterns that suggested certain local officials and goldfield interests deserved closer scrutiny than they had previously received.
181Young borrowed a needle and thread from Mrs Berry and walked through the diggings. Around 4 p.m., Berry met him in the street and asked whether he was returning to camp. Young said he was. Berry suggested he stay overnight at the police camp, but Young declined, saying his mate was alone and that he would go back.
25These findings do not establish guilt. Rather, they identify investigative hypotheses based on patterns within the surviving evidence that warrant closer examination.
182Berry reminded him not to forget the next day’s fishing arrangement. Young replied that he would remember.
26The analysis also raised another possibility: if Young and Schneider were killed first, the later deaths of the three boatmen may have represented a second crime committed to eliminate witnesses. Under that interpretation, the famous discovery at Mystery Bay may have formed part of an attempt to disguise what had actually occurred.
183About an hour before dark, Peter Egstrom, who kept a sly-grog shanty at Montreal, met Young near the long lagoon about two kilometres from Young’s camp. Around 6 p.m., a man named Henderson saw Young crossing a paddock toward his tent at Barter’s Hole. In Pearl’s account, this became the last confirmed sighting of him.
27To test these ideas further, I used ChatGPT as a research assistant, asking it to evaluate alternative scenarios and consider whether modern technologies—including seabed mapping, forensic archaeology and behavioural analysis—might help identify burial sites or reconstruct the movements of those involved.
184Pearl wrote that two days before Young and Schneider arrived, three men from Batemans Bay had moored their green fishing boat near Barter’s Hole. The boat belonged to Thomas Towers, an experienced fisherman. His companions were William Lloyd, an old sailor, and Daniel Casey. They had come south with bags of potatoes on a trading trip and were preparing to return home.
28The results did not solve the Bermagui Mystery. They did, however, raise important new questions. Those questions centre on whether greed during the brief Bermagui gold rush could have provided a motive; whether local officials occupied positions where conflicts of interest existed; whether weaknesses in the original investigation allowed crucial evidence to disappear; and whether today’s technology might reveal clues beyond the reach of Victorian investigators.
185Early on Sunday, 10 October, several people in Bermagui saw the boat leave the river and head north. Pearl wrote that one of the last sightings was by Jim Egstrom, Peter Egstrom’s 14-year-old son, who was tending cows about 7.30 a.m. He was unsure how many men were aboard, but thought there were at least four and possibly more.
29This book explores those questions.
186At about 10.45 a.m., Keightley was taking people to church in his buggy when his son drew attention to a green boat sailing north under light canvas about a mile from the house. Casey’s son later said the boatmen had been returning to Batemans Bay after inspecting the diggings and had agreed to take Young and Schneider as far as Corunna Point.
30It is not an attempt to rewrite history, but to re-examine it using every tool now available. By combining archival research with modern analytical methods, it seeks to shed new light on a mystery that has remained unsolved for nearly a century and a half.
187At about 4.30 p.m., William Johnston, an employee of John Forster, J.P., was riding along the beach at Mutton Fish Point, also known as Corunna Point, about eight or nine kilometres north of Bermagui. There he saw a boat on the rocks.
31Chapter 1 – The Gold Rush Begins
188No one was nearby. Johnston later said he did not want to examine the boat alone, so he fetched Albert Read, who lived about two kilometres away. They returned together and inspected it, touching little except a book that Read removed. The book bore the name “Lamont Young”. Johnston asked Read to report the discovery to police. Both men were known to police as being of excellent character.
32The first rumours reached Bermagui like sparks blown across dry grass. Along the lonely sweep of the Sapphire Coast, where fishing boats worked the white-edged surf and scrub pressed close to the sand, word spread that gold had been found. On 20 September 1880, Canadian prospector Henry Williams and three companions reported payable wash gold near the small settlement on the far south coast of New South Wales.
189About 6 o’clock the next morning, Read went to the police tent at Bermagui and called for Constable Berry. When Berry asked what was wrong, Read told him a boat had been found at Mutton Fish Point.
33Within weeks, the quiet coast was transformed by gold fever. Canvas tents snapped and sagged between the lake and the sea, campfires smoked in the damp evening air, and more than 2,000 men crowded into the district, drawn by the promise of sudden fortune. Williams named the field Montreal after his Canadian hometown.
190Berry first assumed it was a ship’s boat.
34The new arrivals pitched camp on the narrow strip between Wallaga Lake and the South Pacific Ocean. Seabirds cried above the ring of picks, the scrape of shovels, the creak of pack saddles and the urgent talk of men chasing gold. Smoke hung over the tents, mingling with the smell of wet canvas, horses, boiled tea and churned earth.
191Read corrected him, explaining that he had found a geology book in the stern sheets with Lamont Young’s name in it. Berry then saddled his horse and rode to Montreal to inform Keightley of the discovery.
35Each day brought another wave of arrivals: weathered miners, hopeful labourers, shopkeepers who had abandoned their counters, and men hardened by earlier rushes in Queensland, New Guinea and the inland fields. Shops in Cobargo and Bega closed as owners and employees joined the movement. From Mount Dromedary, Temora, Nelson, Goulburn and Wollongong, they poured into the new field, turning a remote coastline into a restless camp of ambition, exhaustion and disorder.
192That version became influential, but it deserves scrutiny. One difficulty lies with Pearl’s statement that Young and Schneider travelled to Bermagui on the steamer Truganini.
36On the last day of September, a special correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald packed his travelling bags and made his way to the wharf, alert to every rumour and detail. Around him were the smells of coal smoke, damp rope and harbour water as the steamship Australia prepared to sail for the new goldfield. His first dispatch captured the excitement of a colony ready to believe that fortune might lie just beyond the next headland. “Very few of Madame Rumour’s darts are required to cause an excited rush of goldseekers in Australia,” he observed.
193Pearl’s account has often been repeated, yet shipping records suggest that the Truganini was operating in Tasmanian waters during the relevant period. If that is correct, the accepted arrival story requires revision. This matters because Young’s mode of travel affects the reconstruction of his movements. If he did not arrive by the Truganini, then other possibilities must be considered, including whether he travelled overland, as he often did while conducting fieldwork in New South Wales.
37Well before the 8 p.m. departure, “a hundred fine, stalwart fellows” had boarded. Many were seasoned miners, carrying the habits and scars of earlier work in New Guinea and Queensland. The voyage from Sydney Heads to Bermagui covered about 185 kilometres. Fares were £1 10s first class and £1 second class. The Australia anchored about a quarter of a mile offshore at 4.30 p.m. on 1 October, and the passengers—eager, tired and salt-sprayed—were rowed ashore in small boats.
194The Truganini was a 203-gross-ton iron passenger steamer, built by Black & Noble of Montrose for the Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company of Hobart. Records place her in Tasmanian ownership from December 1879. Later she was associated with James Burns, transferred to the Queensland Steam Shipping Company, and eventually worked under Australasian ownership before being wrecked in 1891 at Aneityum in the New Hebrides. Those records raise a serious question about whether Pearl’s travel narrative can be accepted without qualification.
38The Herald correspondent quickly noted shortages of food, tools and accommodation. Hunger and scarcity could be felt in the prices as much as in the camp itself: a long-handled shovel had attracted an offer of £3, meat and sugar sold for fourpence a pound, and flour cost fifteen shillings a hundredweight.
195Chapter 8 – Gold Fever Murder Theories
39A hotel and three boarding houses were under construction, but lodgings remained “very rough”.
196By the time the official inquiry closed, the Bermagui Mystery had become less a single explanation than a field of competing theories. Accident, drowning, robbery, goldfield rivalry, personal conflict and deliberate staging all remained possible in some form, yet none could be proven.
40Authorities moved quickly to impose order on the swelling camp. A warden’s clerk and mining registrar were appointed, and New South Wales Inspector-General of Police Edmund Fosberry arranged for a sergeant and two constables to protect the miners—a small official presence set against a restless crowd of men hoping the field would make them rich.
197The simplest explanation was accident. The coast was rough, the boat was small, and the men were travelling through waters where wind, tide and rocks could quickly turn dangerous. But the accident theory struggled to explain why no bodies, clothing or personal remains washed ashore, why stones were found in the boat, and why the vessel appeared to have been left in a position that many witnesses found unnatural.
41Warden Henry McCrummin Keightley reported to the Secretary of Mines, W. H. Suttor, that the miners were “a very orderly and respectable class”. Mining registrar A. J. Ivimey, of the Montreal Division, also expressed guarded confidence in the field.
198Drowning was closely related to the accident theory, but it raised the same difficulties. Several witnesses believed that capable swimmers could have reached shore from the area near Corunna Point. Others argued that weed, tide and surf might have made escape impossible. The disagreement shows how much depended on interpretation rather than proof.
42Ivimey acknowledged that the field had first been exaggerated and later unfairly criticised. Even so, he believed the ground already discovered could support its population for at least a year. Further promise appeared at Corunna Lake, seven kilometres away, where payable gold had been found. A smaller rush had also begun between Montreal and the lake, with yields of up to three pennyweights to the dish.
199Kidnapping was also proposed, but it was never a strong explanation. Inspector-General Fosberry rejected it as unlikely, arguing that sailors were plentiful and that five landsmen would have been of little use to anyone seeking crew. The theory survived mainly because the men had disappeared so completely.
43Gold rushes brought sudden waves of miners seeking fortune, and in nineteenth-century Australia they helped shape settlements, economies and public imagination. Bermagui briefly felt that fever intensely. Such rushes were often marked by a buoyant belief that anyone might become wealthy almost overnight. At Bermagui, reports of gold-bearing sand on the beach helped turn local excitement into speculation, then speculation into frenzy.
200Criminal robbery offered a more plausible motive. Hannan believed desperate men on a collapsing goldfield might commit violence for money or valuables. One of the boatmen was said to have carried about £16, and in a camp filled with disappointed diggers even a modest sum could have attracted danger. Yet robbery alone does not fully explain the disappearance of five men, the apparent attempt to damage or sink the boat, or the absence of bodies.
44The Bermagui rush continued to expand. Within a week, the settlement had its own newspaper, the Bermagui Times, which the Herald correspondent described as “a very creditable production” that was both humorous and truthful. Other services soon followed, including a chemist, two stores selling everything from sardines, sugar and ink to miners’ rights, business licences, flour and shovels—and, unexpectedly, a circus.
201The more troubling possibility was gold fever itself. The Montreal field had been advertised with extravagant promise, and the value of claims, reputations and local authority depended on whether the goldfield was genuine, exaggerated or already failing. Lamont Young’s unwritten report therefore mattered. As a government geologist, he could confirm the field’s value—or expose its weakness.
45Yet even as the camp acquired newspapers, shops and amusements, doubts were beginning to gather beneath the excitement. The Herald reporter warned that the field was badly overcrowded and that many had been drawn there by wildly false rumours. Anyone intending to inspect it, the paper advised, should wait until government geological surveyor Lamont Young had submitted his report.
202If Young’s assessment threatened expectations built around the rush, then his presence created pressure. That does not prove murder, but it gives the case a possible motive beyond random violence. A poor report could have damaged claims, investments, official standing and the public story being told about Bermagui as a new El Dorado.
46Chapter 2 – Dead Men Tell No Tales
203Goldfield rivalry also fits the atmosphere of the time. Sudden rushes produced winners and losers almost overnight. Men who had invested time, money or reputation in the field could become desperate when hopes collapsed. Rumour moved faster than evidence, and suspicion could attach itself to anyone who appeared to stand between others and profit.
47That report was never written. Within 24 hours of arriving at Bermagui, Young and his assistant, Max Schneider, had disappeared with three local fishermen: Thomas Towers, the boat’s owner, William Lloyd and Daniel Casey, all reportedly respectable, sober family men.
204Another theory is that the visible scene at Mystery Bay was not the original scene of death. The stones in the boat, the disputed bullet, the missing gear and the evidence that the boat may have been deliberately damaged all raise the possibility that the wreck was arranged to mislead investigators. This remains a theory, but it helps explain why so many details seemed out of place.
48Only a day earlier, the new field had been crowded with talk of gold and easy riches. Now the same coast that had promised discovery offered something colder: a wrecked boat, abandoned belongings, the smell of seaweed and wet timber, and five missing men.
205The most cautious conclusion is that no single theory explains everything. Accident explains the sea but not the staging signs. Robbery explains motive but not the disappearance of every body. Gold fever explains pressure but not the mechanics of the crime. Staging explains the boat but not who arranged it. The truth may lie in some combination of these forces: opportunity, fear, greed, official failure and the chaos of a gold rush that briefly promised too much.
49The first official alarm came from an unsettling source. The same man who had reported the Montreal gold discovery would now report the disappearance of Young and Schneider.
206Chapter 9 – Keightley the Killer?
50On 11 October, Montreal gold warden Henry Keightley telegraphed the Secretary of Mines, W. H. Suttor, with grave news. Young and Schneider were presumed lost at sea after their belongings had been found in a wrecked boat.
207Montreal gold warden Henry McCrummin Keightley was no stranger to violence. Long before he became part of the Bermagui story, he had lived through—and participated in—episodes of armed conflict on the colonial frontier and during the bushranging years.
51The boat had been discovered the previous afternoon, Sunday 10 October 1880. Stockman William Johnston was riding near Mutton Fish Point—later known as Mystery Bay—when he came upon the scene: surf muttering over the rocks, wind moving through the coastal scrub and the wrecked boat lying where it should not have been. It was not simply the sight of the boat that troubled him. He would later tell special investigators that the arrangement appeared staged.
208On 24 October 1864, Ben Hall’s gang rode to Keightley’s farm at Dunn’s Plains looking for revenge. Keightley, then a gold commissioner, had boasted of helping police pursue the bushrangers and of his willingness to shoot them. Near sunset, the gang appeared at the property. Keightley and his friend Dr Pechey saw them coming and rushed inside as the bushrangers dismounted and opened fire.
52The implication was disturbing. If Johnston was right, the wreck was not the random aftermath of an accident at sea, but a message left on the shore for others to find. The discovery set police and independent investigators in motion, but from the beginning the case resisted explanation. Three separate investigators would later struggle with the same central problem: if five men had been murdered, why had anyone wanted them dead?
209Gunshots cracked around the house. In the exchange, Mickey Burke was struck in the abdomen, while Keightley and Pechey retreated to a rough barricade on the roof, their weapons and ammunition running low. Badly wounded and refusing capture, Burke tried to shoot himself. The first shot only injured him further; the second killed him.
53News of the Bermagui mystery spread quickly through Australia and the British Empire, helped by Young’s family connections. His father, General Young, was politically influential, and his wife was said to have access to Queen Victoria.
210Grief and rage then made the attack more dangerous. John Vane, mistaking Pechey for Keightley, struck him with a pistol and prepared to execute the men in revenge. Mrs Keightley intervened at the crucial moment and persuaded the gang to accept a ransom instead. Pechey rode into town and obtained £500 from Mrs Keightley’s father, equal to the reward offered for Burke. After ordering Keightley’s servants to carry Burke’s body to Carcoar, the bushrangers rode away, leaving the farm scarred by gunfire and fear.
54In the Sydney press, however, the Bermagui mystery competed for attention with two major Melbourne events: Ned Kelly’s trial, which began on 29 October, and the Melbourne International Exhibition, opened by the Marquis of Normanby on 1 October.
211Keightley had arrived in New South Wales on 8 May 1853 aboard the Panthea, newly arrived from England with Bateman under the patronage of Charles Grant Tindal. That connection placed him within one of the Clarence River’s powerful pastoral circles. The Tindal brothers controlled substantial leases, including Koreelah and Ramornie, and on those stations Keightley found both work and influence.
55At Mystery Bay, the first investigation appears to have deepened the uncertainty rather than resolved it. Keightley and five police officers were among the first officials to reach the scene. The details they recorded were odd and uneasy, set against the sound of surf and the smell of damp timber.
212He had been born far from the Australian bush, in Corfu in 1830. His father, Lieutenant-Colonel Keightley, had served as a British administrator in the Ionian Islands and as governor of Zante before retiring to Pickhill Hall, Wrexham. When the elder Keightley died in January 1853, Henry’s old world closed behind him. Within weeks, he was sailing for a harsher and less forgiving one.
56One of the first things Keightley noted on reaching the wrecked boat was that someone appeared to have been sick in the forward section.
213Frederick Tindal’s letters give the first sharp glimpses of Keightley in the colony. Tindal expected him to prosper, but the bush quickly stripped away any illusion of gentility. In August 1853, after cattle had been speared, Tindal and Keightley joined a pursuit of Aboriginal people and came upon two camps where remains of beef were found. Tindal later called the episode Keightley’s “first service”. It was an ominous introduction to frontier life.
57Fishing lines lay about as though the men had been fishing, slack and salt-stiffened. A book bearing Young’s name suggested he had been reading. The mast, a makeshift sail formed from a tent fly, and two paddles were lashed to the thwarts, creating the impression of ordinary activity interrupted—or arranged to look that way.
214By late 1853, Keightley was learning the work of the stations, but he was also making himself impossible to ignore. Tindal wrote that Keightley and Bateman caused “immense commotion”, and described Keightley bullying shearers in several accents until he was “voted fit to travel anywhere”. From Koreelah he moved to Ramornie, where he entered the rough sociability of station life and horse racing, later appearing among the principal winners at a private meeting at Eatonsville.
58Inside the boat were six three-bushel bags. One held potatoes. Four contained a jumble of clothing, scientific books and Young’s private papers, with sailors’ boots and trousers packed indiscriminately among them. From one bag came the last letter removed from Young’s belongings: a letter from his mother.
215As the months passed, Tindal’s amusement gave way to sharper judgement. Keightley and Bateman acquired the nicknames “Jill” and “Jack”, while Keightley was portrayed as a man drawn to horse dealing, punch, storytelling and risky wagers. He could be clever and entertaining, but he also left irritation in his wake.
59Keightley instructed Berry to make a careful inventory of everything found. Berry noted that the boat contained no oars, only paddles. Yet no serious effort seems to have been made to identify who owned the flute, the two pairs of spectacles or the pair of eyeglasses—small objects that might have helped place each man within the boat’s final story. Keightley later said he had found nothing on board to suggest anything unusual had occurred. There were no bloodstains and no obvious signs of a struggle. On the surface, the boat revealed very little.
216When the Crimean War stirred imperial loyalties, Keightley talked of returning to Britain to serve. Tindal doubted the performance. To him, Keightley seemed less consumed by patriotic duty than by horses, bargaining and restless ambition. By September 1854, he had left the Clarence district for a minor government appointment.
60Then there was the bullet. Keightley was shown a bullet said to have been removed from the boat, along with the place where it had allegedly been found. He later insisted that any experienced man would conclude it had not been fired from a gun. Its position in a crack in the paint, he argued, showed it had been deliberately placed there and used as a fishing-line sinker.
217Sydney offered Keightley a new stage. He became an extra clerk in the NSW Emigration Office and received a commission in the 1st Sydney Rifle Corps, yet within months he was back at Ramornie on what he called sick leave. Tindal suspected “some scrape in Sydney”. During that return, Keightley announced an engagement to a Miss Palmer, though even his friends were unsure whether the claim should be believed.
61That conclusion remains uncertain. Other bullets found in the boat, Keightley said, appeared to have served the same purpose, and he treated them as insignificant. A possible clue was therefore explained as routine before its significance was fully tested.
218The Ramornie letters leave behind a vivid, uneasy portrait. In one remembered incident, the station cook threw a coal shovel at Keightley, an act that reportedly won admiration on the property. Taken together, the letters show a man of energy, confidence and social daring, but also one who was restless, combative and often abrasive—a figure already marked by friction before he entered the darker story of Bermagui.
62Keightley offered a £10 reward for the recovery of Young’s body. No similar reward appears to have been offered for the other four men.
219None of this proves that Keightley had any role in the disappearance of Lamont Young and his party. It does, however, explain why his evidence deserves careful scrutiny. He was an official with authority on the goldfield, a man accustomed to conflict, and a witness whose explanations often reduced troubling evidence to accident, mischance or harmless coincidence.
63Keightley could identify no motive strong enough to lead one or two men “to perpetrate such a cool transaction”. He believed Schneider had not accompanied Young, but had remained at Bermagui in charge of the tent and instruments.
220The question is not whether Keightley can be declared guilty. The surviving evidence does not allow that. The question is whether his position, history, assumptions and interpretations helped shape an official narrative that left too many possibilities unexplored. Keightley died in Sale, Victoria of diabetes related illness, on 8 Janaury 1887, aged 57. He took many unanswered questions to the grave.
64To Keightley, this was supported by the fact that none of Young’s camp gear—tent, instruments, rugs and other equipment—was found in the wreck. If Schneider had stayed behind and then learned that Young and the others had disappeared, Keightley thought he might have taken the chance to vanish for three reasons.
221Chapter 10 – Hobbes, Witnesses and the Missing Scene
65First, Schneider may have been unable to present himself at the Department of Mines because of some discreditable matter in his past. Second, he held an able seaman’s certificate that could have helped him obtain passage elsewhere. Third, because he was presumed dead, he could have disappeared into the crowd of diggers, using Young’s tent, swag and equipment as his own.
222Hobbes’s evidence left the inquiry with a problem it never fully resolved. If the boat at Mystery Bay did not tell the whole story, then the real scene of death—or the first scene of the crime—may have lain somewhere else.
66Keightley also tried to explain the traces of lunch found near the wreck. He suggested that passing travellers had searched the boat, found nothing of value, stuffed the contents—including papers and sailors’ clothing—into a three-bushel bag, and then eaten the lunch as “the only available property”. Why they would have taken the trouble to repack the items was never explained.
223This possibility does not prove that Hobbes was correct, nor does it prove that any specific person arranged the wreck. What it does show is that several witnesses were struggling with the same contradiction: the boat looked both real and artificial, both abandoned and arranged.
67Chapter 3 – The Reward
224Johnston’s first reaction remains important. He found the boat but did not treat it as a simple wreck. His later statement that the arrangement appeared staged gives the chapter its central question: was Mystery Bay the place where the men died, or the place where someone wanted investigators to look?
68For six months after the disappearance, little changed. Then, on 28 February 1881, the case crossed oceans. A reward notice issued in London offered £300 for information connected with the missing men: Lamont Young, government geologist; Max Schneider; and the three boatmen, Casey, Towers and Lloyd.
225Forster’s evidence pushed in the same direction. The tide, the stones, the food, the missing gear and the boat’s final position all suggested to him that the vessel had been handled after the men left it. He did not merely doubt drowning; he suspected deliberate deception.
69The notice stated that the party had left Bermagui, about 180 kilometres south of Sydney, in a boat later found jammed on rocks near Corunna Point. Although bullet marks were said to have been found in the boat, the notice also acknowledged that there was no clear evidence of a struggle or of foul play.
226Hobbes went further, proposing that the party may have landed elsewhere and that the visible scene at Mystery Bay may have been arranged afterward. His theory included poisoning, possible accomplices, the vessel Magic and an escape route by sea. Much of this was speculative, but it arose from genuine weaknesses in the official explanation.
70The reward combined two offers. Major-General Young, Lamont’s father, offered £100 for the first information leading to the discovery of his son. The Government of New South Wales offered a further £200 for information leading to the conviction of anyone responsible for violence against the party. Information was to be sent to the Commissioner of Police at Great Scotland Yard, London, or to the Metropolitan Police Office at 4 Whitehall Place. The notice was signed by E. Y. Henderson, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.
227The most difficult task is to separate what was observed from what was imagined. Observations included the boat’s position, the stones, the absence of bodies, the scattered food, the disputed bullet and the uncertainty over how many people were seen aboard. Interpretation began when witnesses tried to explain why those details existed.
71General Young asked that copies be distributed in New South Wales, hoping the reward might draw out information that the colonial investigation had missed. Inspector-General Edmund Fosberry advised against broad circulation. He objected in particular to the notice’s suggestion that the party may have been kidnapped and carried away by another vessel. In his view, kidnapping was out of the question: sailors were plentiful, five landsmen would be of no use and “crimping” was a different matter altogether.
228That distinction matters because the official investigation often treated uncertainty as absence. When no blood was found, violence became harder to imagine. When no bodies washed ashore, drowning became harder to accept. When no clear motive appeared, murder became more difficult for officials to believe. The case therefore narrowed around assumptions as much as evidence.
72Whether or not kidnapping was far-fetched, Fosberry’s reference to “five landsmen” is difficult to accept without qualification. Four of the five missing men appear to have had some connection with the sea or boats.
229By revisiting Hobbes and the other witnesses together, a different pattern appears. No witness solved the case, but several raised questions that still matter: where did the boat first land, who placed the stones inside it, why were key objects never traced to their owners, and why was the most important scene never secured as a possible crime scene?
73Two more years passed with no decisive development. The surf still broke over the rocks at Corunna Point, the first fever of the goldfield cooled and the disappearance settled into rumour. Yet William Forster, J.P., remained determined to force the matter back into public view. In September 1882, at his request, copies of correspondence, memorials and petitions relating to Young’s disappearance were tabled in the House.
230The missing scene may therefore be more than a location. It may be the gap between what witnesses saw and what investigators were willing to test. In that gap, the Bermagui Mystery continued to grow.
74More than a year later, on 12 October 1883, the mystery moved from the coast and the diggings into the formal rooms of Parliament. A Legislative Assembly Select Committee was appointed “to inquire into and report upon the mysterious disappearance of Mr Lamont Young and his party”, with power to summon witnesses and documents.
231Chapter 11 – Supersleuth Technology
75The Committee sat for eight days and examined 16 witnesses. In rooms far removed from the smell of seaweed, damp canvas and campfire smoke, men attempted to reconstruct a few uncertain hours on a lonely coast.
232With so much evidence to assess, I faced a choice. I could present the material to an experienced criminologist for independent analysis, or I could test the surviving record using an AI-assisted criminology program known as Crime GPT.
76A few new names emerged, but little significant new evidence. By then, witnesses were recalling events more than three years old—events they had likely discussed repeatedly until memory and repetition hardened into certainty. It was unlikely they would remember in 1883 and 1884 what they had not recalled in 1880, yet the questioning continued at length.
233Crime GPT applies probabilistic modelling, behavioural analysis and pattern recognition to bodies of evidence. It does not solve crimes, and it cannot replace judgement, context or archival research. Its value lies in testing patterns, asking whether assumptions are justified and identifying possibilities that might otherwise be overlooked.
77The Committee completed the taking of evidence on 14 February 1884. By then, the mystery had been flattened into minutes, questions and answers, while the shore itself remained beyond reach: the rocks, the tide, the boat and the missing bodies.
234The program drew attention to the people whose roles placed them closest to the goldfield, the inquiry and the early interpretation of events. It highlighted the gold warden, the police magistrate and local goldfield interests as areas requiring closer scrutiny. That did not identify a killer. It did, however, reinforce the importance of motive, opportunity and official influence.
78On 20 May 1884, the Committee reported to the House that it had examined all known witnesses likely to provide material evidence, but had uncovered nothing that explained the disappearance of Young and his party. The Committee found that the evidence did not support the popular belief that the men had drowned or been kidnapped. It identified the missing men as Lamont Young, his assistant Max Schneider and three fishermen who had come to the Bermagui diggings in the boat later found on the rocks at Corunna Point.
235The strongest pattern concerned gold. If Lamont Young’s report had confirmed that the beach gold lay on Crown land, or if it had deflated exaggerated claims about the field, the consequences could have affected reputation, profit and authority. In that setting, gold fever was not merely background colour. It was a possible pressure acting on everyone who had invested hope, money or position in the rush.
79The report stated that the boat had been moored near Young’s camp at the mouth of the Bermagui River on Saturday night, 9 October 1880. Young had been seen in Montreal that day with Senior Constable Berry and others, and had said he would return early the next morning for a fishing excursion. He was later seen walking alone toward his camp and was never seen again.
236The analysis also raised a second possibility familiar to modern criminal thinking: one crime may be followed by another to conceal the first. Applied cautiously to the Bermagui case, this suggests that Young and Schneider may have been the original targets, while the deaths of the three boatmen may have followed because they knew too much or had seen too much.
80The next morning, around 10 o’clock, a boat was seen leaving the Bermagui River near Young’s camp and heading toward Corunna Point. It was assumed the party was aboard. About six hours later, the same boat was found roughly 12 kilometres away on the rocks.
237Viewed from that perspective, Mystery Bay may not have been the beginning of the crime but its visible ending. The boat, the stones, the missing gear, the disputed bullet and the absence of bodies may have formed part of a confused aftermath—or, more deliberately, a scene arranged to mislead.
81The Committee concluded that the boat had not capsized, because rations and several of Young’s belongings, including spectacles lying loose on the thwarts, were still aboard. It also found that someone had landed from the boat and placed large stones inside, apparently to sink it and erase traces of the party. If that was the intention, it failed: the sea drove the boat high and dry onto the rocks.
238To test these ideas further, I used ChatGPT as a research assistant. Its responses were useful precisely because they were cautious. It repeatedly separated evidence from speculation, reminded me that no suspect had been proven, and challenged theories that depended on too many unsupported assumptions.
82From this summary, the Committee inclined to the belief that the men had been murdered and their bodies thrown overboard some distance from shore to avoid detection. Yet it found no evidence identifying the perpetrators or explaining what became of them.
239That caution was important. AI can help organise questions, identify contradictions and suggest modern investigative methods, but it cannot turn absence into proof. It cannot determine who lied, who remembered badly, who misunderstood what they saw or who deliberately shaped the official story.
83The belated inquiry ended in contradiction and confusion. Its papers preserved testimony, but they could not recover the lost morning, the missing men or the evidence already gone. Beyond the committee room, the coast remained unchanged: the sea still worked over the rocks at Corunna Point, and the boat’s final position answered one question only by raising another.
240Modern technology nevertheless points to possibilities that Victorian investigators could not pursue. Marine surveying, seabed mapping, underwater archaeology, forensic search methods and digital reconstruction might one day help test whether remains, equipment or other traces survive beyond the reach of nineteenth-century searches.
84Somewhere between the camp, the shore and the official record, the truth had slipped out of reach. Meanwhile, the police file continued to grow, filled with rumours and speculation—some improbable, others only marginally relevant—that spread in many directions. What the inquiry left behind was not an answer, but a landscape of pressures: ambition on the goldfield, official rivalry, damaged evidence, uncertain witnesses and figures later treated by some investigators as possible suspects. Each pressure pointed in a different direction.
241The AI analyses did not solve the Bermagui Mystery. They changed the direction of the investigation by forcing old questions into a sharper order: who had motive, who had opportunity, who shaped the first official explanation, and why did so much evidence disappear before it could be properly tested?
85Together, they suggested that the disappearance had not simply happened on the coast, but had been shaped by the officials and local actors who influenced events around it.
242My theory regarding the Mystery Bay murders is as follows.
86That possibility leads back to motive. If the answer lay anywhere, it was not only in the wrecked boat or the missing bodies, but in the question the Committee never resolved: whose interests might Young’s report have threatened among those invested in the southern hemisphere’s supposed El Dorado?
243I believe Lamont Young and Max Schneider travelled on horseback from the Young family cottage at Mittagong. Young carried a letter of introduction from the Mines Department addressed to the local magistrate, John Thomas Hobbes.
87If his report threatened more than the reputation of a goldfield, some positions and expectations may have been more exposed than others.
244Hobbes held a lease over a valuable beachfront estate for timber-getting, but the discovery of gold transformed its significance. The Crown sought to recover the land, and I believe that one of government geologist Lamont Young's missions was to investigate the goldfield and advance the Government's interests.
88In the public imagination, such a crime demanded swift justice. In practice, it produced delay, disagreement and a second round of inquiries.
245Young and Schneider are believed to have arrived at Hobbes' home near Wallaga Lake on 9 October. They were reportedly seen by prospectors exploring the goldfield that same day. I theorise that, following a clash of egos, competing authority, and the enormous financial implications of the gold discovery, both men were poisoned at Hobbes' residence on the night of 9 October.
89Chapter 4 – A Father’s Fury
246I further theorise that Keightley then orchestrated a second crime—the murders of the three fishermen—to conceal the true motive behind the deaths of Young and Schneider.
90For nearly two years, little changed. From Britain, Lamont Young’s father, Major-General Young of the Royal Engineers, pressed for answers with the persistence of a grieving parent and the authority of a military man accustomed to action.
247The boat carrying Towers, Lloyd and Casey departed Bermagui at approximately 7:00 a.m. Witnesses initially estimated that there were five passengers aboard. However, by the time the vessel reached the vicinity of Hobbes' home, witnesses reported seeing only one person on board. The boat was later found wrecked at Mystery Bay, still containing the belongings of all five men.
91Frustrated by delay and uncertainty, he eventually commissioned a private inquiry. He engaged Robert Hannan, who examined Mystery Bay in 1882 and considered three possible explanations for the fate of Young and his party: murder, drowning or kidnapping.
248This raises a critical question: who was the lone man whom stockman William Johnston saw steering the boat from Jimmy's Point towards Mystery Bay?
92Of those possibilities, Hannan considered murder the most likely. He believed the turmoil of the gold rush, together with the presence of desperate men seeking quick riches, offered the clearest motive.
249If the earlier witness accounts are accurate, then the other occupants must have disappeared before the boat reached Mystery Bay. I believe they were dumped overboard opposite Hobbes' home before the vessel continued south.
93Any theory of murder had to be tested against motive. Greed, jealousy, financial conflict, personal resentment and struggles for power all offered possible explanations, but each needed to be weighed against the surviving evidence.
250My theory is that the three fishermen were murdered by Keightley on 10 October after paying £9 for an abandoned prospecting lease near Little Lake. The man who subsequently sailed the boat to Mystery Bay was, in my view, the same individual who later vomited aboard the vessel following the killings. Constable Berry accompanied Keightley to the crime scene on 11 October before taking nine days of sick leave. This coincidence raises another question: was Berry's illness connected to the vomiting reported on the boat, and could he have been a key participant in the crimes?
94Witness accounts suggested a troubling timeline. The boat appeared to have left Bermagui Harbour in the morning with several people aboard. By late morning, it was reportedly seen some distance north with only one person visible. By late afternoon, it lay abandoned at Mystery Bay.
251While there is no conclusive evidence proving these events, I believe this sequence provides a coherent explanation for the disappearance of Lamont Young and Max Schneider, the murders of the three fishermen, and the staging of the Mystery Bay wreck as part of a broader cover-up.
95That uncertainty was where Hannan’s inquiry became important. The official investigation had struggled to accept that five men could have been killed without an obvious motive; Hannan’s work suggested the gold rush itself may have supplied one. Hannan’s starting point was simple but decisive: before any suspect could be weighed, the possible explanations had to be separated. He wrote that three theories had been advanced to explain the disappearance: murder, drowning and kidnapping.
252ChatGPT said: “
96He dismissed kidnapping as highly improbable. He also questioned drowning, noting that several members of the party were strong swimmers and that no clothing or human remains had washed ashore.
253This theory is internally coherent as a historical hypothesis, but it goes well beyond what the historical evidence can currently establish. The disappearance of Lamont Young and Max Schneider in October 1880 remains one of Australia's enduring mysteries precisely because there is no conclusive evidence identifying the perpetrators or even confirming exactly how they died.
97Hannan believed the people who landed at Corunna Point were responsible for the murders. Because several people had reportedly been seen in the boat when it left the river, he inferred that the perpetrators may have numbered four or five.
254Where my theory becomes speculative is in the causal links.
98For Hannan, the most likely motive was money. Young and Schneider were not thought to have carried much, but one of the boatmen reportedly had £16. At the time, nearly 3,000 people had rushed to Bermagui within days, including men whom Hannan described as belonging to the worst criminal class.
255For example:
99When the diggings proved poor and patchy, many of those men were as eager to leave as they had been to arrive. Hannan argued that, cornered by disappointment and hardship in an isolated place, desperate men might commit almost any crime to escape their position.
256There is no surviving evidence that Young and Schneider actually stayed overnight at Hobbes' residence or that they were poisoned.
100Hannan’s report offered little comfort to General Young. Its purpose was less to settle the case than to force the colonial government to act. By then, Lamont Young and the four other men had been missing for two years, and no one had been charged. The search for a killer begins with motive. Greed, jealousy, personal conflict and struggles for power all offer possible explanations, but each must return to the surviving evidence.
257No forensic evidence exists for poisoning. But there are no bodies to examine to prove poisoning!
101The goldfields of the 1880s sharpened those pressures. Men arrived hungry, indebted or desperate, drawn by the promise of sudden wealth and easily embittered when that promise failed. With that context in mind, the inquiry had to move from theory back to evidence: the movement of the boat, the condition of the wreck and the testimony of those who claimed to have seen something before the trail went cold.
258There is no direct evidence that Hobbes murdered them.
102The timeline of 10 October remained central. The boat appeared to have left Bermagui in the morning with four or more people aboard. Several hours later, about 12 kilometres north, only one person was reportedly visible. By late afternoon, the boat had been found wrecked at Mystery Bay.
259Likewise, there is no documented evidence that Keightley organised a second series of murders to conceal the first.
103What happened between departure and discovery remains open to debate. The evidence allows for more than one reading: a single crime, or possibly two separate killings—first Young and Schneider, then the three fishermen who owned the boat. The apparent absence of any photograph of the boat adds another uncertainty. It may point to concealment, or simply to another unresolved weakness in an already incomplete investigation.
260The idea that five people were originally aboard the fishing boat, with four bodies disposed of at sea before the vessel continued to Mystery Bay, is an interesting interpretation of witness testimony, but historians have not been able to prove that the witness estimates were accurate or that the witnesses were describing the same point in time.
104The mystery persisted because investigators found it difficult to imagine five men being killed without a clear motive. But the gold rush itself may have created the conditions in which motive, opportunity and violence converged. The next section therefore turns from motive to testimony—from broad possibilities to the fragile, often conflicting voices that remain from a vanished crime scene.
261Your question about the "one passenger" is perhaps the most intriguing part of your reconstruction.
105The witnesses did not offer a single narrative. Some gave direct observations; others offered interpretations based on the boat, the tides, rumours or later reflection. The distinction matters, because much of the case turned on whether physical details were treated as evidence or explained through assumption.
262If the eyewitness evidence is accepted exactly as you describe, then there are several possibilities:
106Keightley described meeting Young on the Saturday, inspecting the boat on the Monday morning, and finding three-bushel bags filled with mixed belongings: clothing, Young’s scientific books and private papers, and, to Keightley’s surprise, sailors’ boots and trousers.
263• The lone occupant was one of the original five men.
107From those observations, Keightley inferred that the contents had been handled after the party left the boat. He saw no signs of violence. His interpretation, after studying the tides, was that the frail boat had accidentally struck a projecting rock and broken its bow. Keightley’s accident theory depended on the physical setting.
264• The lone occupant was one of the killers returning the boat after disposing of the others.
108He said the occupants had tried to reach land, only about 35 yards away, but believed the tide and long seaweed made escape impossible. Although the water was only about four feet six inches deep, he thought two feet of weed would have entangled their feet and defeated even a strong swimmer. He said he had offered £10 to anyone willing to swim to the rocks under similar tidal conditions, with help standing by, but no one accepted.
265• The witnesses were mistaken about either the number aboard initially or later.
109Keightley offered a separate explanation for the meal debris. He thought “loafers or prowlers” had removed the boat’s contents after the accident, searched them for valuables and then shoved the useless items back into the bags. Although rumours circulated among the thousands on the diggings, he said he had no official or private knowledge of dangerous characters in the area.
266• Different boats were observed.
110One observed detail did strike Keightley as significant: a dry boot found on a thwart. He interpreted it as evidence that one man had removed one boot but had not had time to remove the other. Yet no one questioned him about the large stones found in the boat.
267Without stronger corroborating evidence, it is impossible to distinguish between these possibilities. Regarding the vomiting and illness:
111Keightley also drew an inference from absence: because none of Schneider’s belongings was found in the boat, he doubted Schneider had been aboard. Again, no evidence was taken about the ownership of the velvet-collared coat, the three pairs of spectacles, the flute or the German calendar.
268• You note that Constable Berry accompanied Keightley to the scene on 11 October and then took nine days of sick leave, suggesting the illness may have been caused by guilt or involvement in the crime.
112From that inference, Keightley developed a theory: Schneider, facing trouble in Sydney, had used the presumed drowning as an opportunity to disappear with the rest of Young’s belongings. When asked whether Young had mentioned going fishing, Keightley said Young had spoken of going to Corunna Point and had asked where he could obtain a boat. Keightley replied that he could take him there. Young, he said, wanted to investigate the geological formation of the coast south of Corunna Point.
269• That is certainly a hypothesis, but there are many alternative explanations:
113Asked whether Young had left him with that impression, Keightley answered yes. Asked why Young had gone so soon after leaving him, Keightley said he had thought about it and believed Young may have gone fishing to escape the crowded camp. Hundreds of tents surrounded him, he said, along with the disorder common to new diggings.
270• exposure to bad weather,
114Keightley was then asked whether Schneider might have poisoned the others in the boat, thrown their bodies into the sea and let the boat drift ashore at Corunna Point. He rejected the idea, arguing that anyone committing such a crime would likely have removed the traces rather than leaving Young’s books and papers behind.
271• infection,
115Later revising his evidence, Keightley conceded that Young and the others might have died violently, but insisted there was “not a fraction of evidence” to prove it. No case in 25 years, he said, had so absorbed him while offering so little material on which to reach a firm conclusion.
272• food poisoning,
116If Keightley’s evidence tried to keep the mystery within the bounds of accident and uncertainty, the next witness shifted the inquiry toward a darker possibility.
273• physical exhaustion,
117Immediately after Keightley’s cautious evidence, Moses Owen offered not a direct observation but a firm conclusion: “there was no question a foul murder had been committed”.
274• or psychological shock after viewing what he believed to be a crime scene.
118Owen’s interpretation was that the men had been killed 12 kilometres from where the boat was found, and that the boat had later been taken to Corunna Point and smashed to mislead investigators. He rejected the idea that four or five men had simply jumped overboard and drowned; if they had, he argued, their bodies would probably have washed ashore.
275Unless contemporary documents explicitly connect his illness with suspicious behaviour or admissions, historians would regard this as circumstantial rather than evidential.
119From Owen’s suspicions, the inquiry turned back to the police evidence, where certainty again gave way to caution. Senior Constable Berry then reviewed the events of the Saturday before Young disappeared, including the puzzling claim that Young had eaten no lunch that day. He also described his Monday inspection of the boat: it contained no water, he said, and lay high and dry on a rock, with water washing beneath the keel.
276But what else is there to base my assumptions?
120When asked whether Young had drowned or been murdered, Berry separated proof from personal belief. Police had found nothing proving either, he said. Personally, however, he did not believe Young or any of the party had reached Corunna Point. Still, he added cautiously, that did not necessarily mean they had been murdered.
277Chapter 12 – Mystery Solved?
121When asked whether men who jumped from the boat near Corunna Point could have reached shore safely, Berry said yes: any capable swimmer could have done so, and if not, his body—or parts of it—would likely have washed ashore. He dismissed fears of sharks, saying they were not especially numerous there and that he had swum around the place himself.
278The question posed by this book is deliberately uncomfortable: can the Bermagui Mystery be solved after nearly a century and a half?
122Berry’s evidence left the Committee with another uneasy gap: the boat might have reached shore, but the men had not. The next witnesses tried to close that gap from opposite directions.
279The honest answer is no—not in the sense of a courtroom verdict. No body was recovered. No confession survives. Much of the physical evidence disappeared, and the surviving witness accounts are incomplete, contradictory and often filtered through years of retelling.
123Peter Egstrom, who said he knew Young from Nerringundah, gave direct evidence of a sighting. He was certain he had seen the boat leave the Bermagui River at about 6.30 on Sunday morning. More than two men were aboard, though he could not say how many. The sea was calm, and in his opinion the boatmen were skilled enough to land anywhere along the coast.
280But a historical cold case can still be tested. The question is not whether certainty is possible, but which explanation best fits the known evidence while leaving the fewest contradictions behind.
124John Forster, J.P., treated the physical scene as evidence of staging. He believed the men had likely met with foul play and that it could not have occurred where the boat was found. His reasoning depended on the tide: if the boat had left on Sunday morning, he argued, it could not have reached its final position in time, because the rocks were exposed at low tide and the boat could only have been stranded there at a very high tide.
281The accident theory remains the least complex explanation, but it struggles with the facts. If five men drowned near Corunna Point, why did no bodies, clothing or personal remains wash ashore? Why were stones placed in the boat? Why did several witnesses think the vessel had been handled or staged after the men left it?
125The facts Forster relied on were specific: Johnston found the boat at 4 p.m.; high water had been at 2 p.m.; there were no tracks; food was scattered on the beach and in the bushes; and no provisions remained in the boat. To Forster, those details suggested the occupants had gone ashore. Forster also considered the stones. A small bay about 150 yards from the wreck, where a shovel was found in shallow water, seemed to him the boat’s natural landing place. He found no matching stones near the wreck, but many similar stones in the bay where the shovel and axe were discovered.
282Robbery is more plausible, especially in the desperate atmosphere of a failing rush. One of the boatmen was said to have carried money, and Hannan believed disappointed diggers might have committed violence to escape hardship. Yet robbery alone does not explain why all five men vanished, why the boat was damaged, or why the scene appeared arranged.
126From those details, Forster concluded that the stones had been thrown into the boat to sink it. He believed two large holes might have been made with the axe. A person doing this, he reasoned, would expect the boat to drift into deep water and disappear, perhaps for months. Because it must have been waterlogged, he believed it could not have drifted from the landing place to the rocks in only an hour.
283The strongest theory is that Young’s official inspection gave the case its motive. The Montreal field had been promoted with extraordinary optimism. Claims, reputations, land values and local authority depended on the field being believed. Young’s report could have confirmed the excitement—or exposed exaggeration and weakness.
127Forster also described a bullet embedded in one of the boat’s knees. It looked, he said, like a spent bullet that had entered sideways and appeared grazed, as though it had passed through another substance first.
284If Young’s conclusions threatened those expectations, then gold fever becomes more than atmosphere. It becomes motive.
128Forster later found bullets on the grass that matched it and believed they would fit the same revolver. His conclusion was that the boat bullet had plainly been fired. Keightley, reading the same kind of evidence differently, was equally certain it had not.
285Under this interpretation, Young and Schneider may have been the original targets because they represented official scrutiny. The three boatmen may then have become witnesses, obstacles or unintended victims. Their deaths, if deaths they were, may have followed as an attempt to conceal the first crime.
129Forster rejected the suggestion that diggers had left the food behind. Diggers, he said, were unlikely to abandon food—especially a whole damper thrown into the bush. Where Forster read the scene as deliberate staging, the Water Police evidence gave the Committee a more technical account of the boat itself.
286This two-stage theory helps explain several otherwise awkward facts: why five men disappeared when the apparent motive may have centred on only one or two; why the boat may have been damaged or weighted with stones; why Schneider was later treated suspiciously despite being missing; and why the physical scene never quite matched a simple accident.
130Senior Constable Martin of the Water Police said he had been sent to Bermagui 15 days after Young disappeared, despite Fosberry’s statement that Martin had been sent immediately. Martin gave an expert description of the wrecked boat, calling it a good sea boat for its size.
287It does not prove who killed them. Nor does it prove that Keightley, Hobbes, Jaggers, Sullivan or any other named figure was guilty. The evidence permits suspicion and scrutiny, but not conviction.
131Chapter 5 – A Boat With Bullet Holes
288The surviving record instead points to a narrower conclusion: the official explanation was inadequate. Too many physical details were explained away. Too many assumptions shaped the investigation. Too many key questions were left unasked until memory had already begun to decay.
132The boat was 22 feet long, five feet four inches wide and 23 inches deep. It had pine flooring, cedar upper planking, hardwood fore-and-aft thwarts, a pine midship thwart, fine lines and the sharp shape of a fishing boat. It appeared to have been built for that purpose and had a roller aft for nets.
289The missing photograph of the boat remains one of the most frustrating absences. If the boat lingered for years, why has no known image survived? The absence may be innocent, but in a case built around physical evidence, it leaves a significant void.
133Martin recorded extensive damage: a hole in the starboard bow, torn planking near the keel and stem, large holes amidships and in the starboard quarter, stove-in planks and a crushed port-side bottom. The boat also had unpainted pine bottom boards and a centreboard.
290The destruction of Young’s belongings and geological equipment in the 1882 government fire deepens that void. Objects that might have clarified ownership, movement or motive disappeared before later investigators could test them properly.
134He also noted a revolver-bullet mark in the knee of the after thwart on the starboard side. The bullet had entered at an angle, about a quarter of an inch into the wood, and had grazed the thwart from forward. The dent suggested it had struck another substance before entering the timber.
291So was the mystery solved? Not finally. But the strongest reconstruction is this: the disappearance was probably not a simple boating accident. The boat appears too troubled, the evidence too displaced and the official response too uncertain. Gold fever supplied a plausible motive, and Young’s unwritten report may have placed him at the centre of danger.
135After examining the stones and searching several kilometres of coast, Martin concluded that they had come from a place about 150 yards from the wreck that had been pointed out to him. Martin found no witness who had actually seen the boat leave on Sunday morning. The master of the Maid of the Mill had seen it on Saturday night but not early Sunday.
292What remains is a disciplined suspicion rather than proof. The case points toward murder shaped by goldfield pressure, followed by confusion, concealment or official failure. That is as far as the evidence can honestly take us.
136Martin separated what was possible from what he considered likely. Young could have walked the roughly nine kilometres from camp to the wreck site in three or four hours. After studying the tides, Martin concluded the boat could only have reached the rocks at about 1 a.m. or between 2 and 3 p.m. on Sunday. Even at a spring tide, he found that a person could still reach shore by swimming and walking.
293Chapter 13 – Eternal Riddles
137Martin’s interpretation was that the boat had been navigated to the site and damaged there. He said it had not been washed up by the swell, because it lay fore and aft on the rocks; a drifting boat would normally come in broadside. The stones inside would also have weighted it down and prevented it from moving far. Martin’s careful measurements strengthened the case that the wreck had been placed rather than merely wrecked.
294ChatGPT’s analysis landed with the cold weight of disappointment, but perhaps what troubled me most was not its caution. It was the realisation that, after all my searching, I still could not stand in final judgement over Hobbes, Keightley or anyone else. I had handled the same scattered records, followed the same contradictions and sat with the same silences, yet too many questions remained beyond reach.
138Thomas Crawford Binny, who arrived at Bermagui a week after the boat was found, maintained that the men had drowned. His explanation was hypothetical rather than observational: asked how drowning could have occurred if the boat had not capsized, he suggested they may have gone ashore for lunch, then rushed into the water when the boat began drifting away.
295I kept returning to the boat. It rested where chance alone seemed unlikely to have carried it. If this had been no more than an accident at sea, how had it passed through the encircling rocks to that improbable place?
139Young and Schneider, he said, were strong swimmers who may have tried to help the others. When asked why no remains had been found, he admitted that was strange, but added that there were many sharks in the area. The next witness brought the inquiry back to what had been seen from shore.
296What stayed with me was the strange domestic stillness inside it: supplies, belongings and spectacles lying neatly on a seat. Nothing seemed soaked through by disaster. The boat looked less like a vessel overwhelmed by the sea than a scene left behind for others to read, and I could not stop reading it.
140John Hobbes, a justice of the peace and magistrate, was more direct. He said that at about 11.30 on Sunday morning he and Keightley were in Hobbes’s sitting room when Hobbes’s wife, who was in the garden, drew their attention to a boat sailing north toward Corunna Point.
297There were holes in the hull, yet some evidence suggested they may have been made from within. That detail has always disturbed me, as though the boat itself had been forced into silence and then asked to help conceal the truth.
141They recognised the boat but not the people in it. Hobbes said they identified it by its colour and by the unusual shape of the sail. The wind was stiff enough that the boat was heeled toward the land, making it impossible to see how many people were aboard.
298A revolver bullet was found in the boat, and a cartridge case lay in the sand about 30 yards away. Yet neither the fishermen nor the geologists were known to carry firearms. These small objects troubled me most of all. They seemed to speak, but in a language no witness could translate and no researcher could fully silence.
142This account conflicted with Keightley’s statement that his son had drawn attention to a green boat as they left for church at about 10.45 that morning. Like several other inconsistencies, this point was not examined in depth.
299Where, then, were the anchor and sail?
143Hobbes also described inspecting the boat. It was identical, he said, to the one he had seen passing the previous day. The mast was unstepped and the sail had been brought ashore. He concluded the sail had been designed to serve both as a boat sail and as part of a tent, a view he said was confirmed by the owner’s son.
300Why had large rocks been placed inside the boat?
144Asked whether he thought the boat had capsized, Hobbes said the opposite. After the contents were examined, Berry and another constable, Day, suggested an accident. Hobbes told Keightley he was surprised they could think so, because he was convinced foul play had occurred.
301And if murder had come there, why had it left so little visible trace of struggle or violence?
145Having rejected accident, Hobbes moved beyond the condition of the boat to the question that had troubled the inquiry from the start: who could have done it, and how?
302For more than a decade, the Bermagui Mystery has held me in its undertow. It has followed me through archives, old newspapers, coastal roads and sleepless hours of doubt. Had all those years of reading, travelling, questioning and returning to the same fragments been wasted? I put the question to ChatGPT, which had already warned me against the certainty of my own theories.
146Hobbes remained convinced that the men had been murdered and that Jaggers knew something about it, but much of his account moved from evidence into speculation. His theory was that the party had landed, intending that Young would walk back to Hobbes’s house, about five kilometres away, and had sat down to tea.
303Its reply was blunt, almost merciful: “Short answer: no — you almost certainly haven’t wasted your time.” I wanted to believe that. I still do.
147From there, Hobbes speculated that Sullivan, perhaps with accomplices, may have offered them tea, drugged them, killed them and then smashed the boat in an attempt to sink it.
304The Bermagui Mystery is not a modern puzzle waiting patiently for a final solution. It belongs instead to that older class of Australian disappearances in which history, landscape and legend become inseparable. In 1880, five men, including government geologist Lamont Young, set out from Bermagui on a journey tied to the Montreal goldfield and vanished into silence. Their boat was later found wrecked near what is now Mystery Bay. No bodies were recovered. No certainty followed.
148Hobbes then tried to reconcile that theory with the physical evidence. He reasoned that the broken bow would allow the boat, pushed stern-first from the sand, to move without immediately taking on much water. It had gone farther than intended, he thought, before a heavy wave turned it onto the rocks, where it became fixed.
305This is the story’s hard centre: after more than 140 years, the case still resists proof. Accident, storm, quarrel, murder and misadventure at sea have each entered the witness box of speculation, but none has won a verdict. Whether my investigation was worthwhile depends, in the end, on what I was truly seeking—and perhaps that answer has changed with time.
149Hobbes could not say how the bodies had been disposed of. If they had been thrown into the sea, he thought sharks might have torn clothing loose and some fragments should have washed ashore. When asked whether the men might have been stripped, he conceded they might have been.
306If I wanted one final answer, then I reached the same wall that has stopped every investigator before me. The surviving evidence will not open that door, however long I stand before it. But if the purpose was to listen more closely to the record, to test what was assumed and to honour the lives of five men by refusing to let them become only a legend, then the work has not been wasted.
150He also suggested the bodies might have been buried in a deep sandy gully nearby, a place away from the road and rarely visited except on holidays by people collecting seaweed. Asked whether the government and civil service had done all they could to solve the mystery, Hobbes replied that they had done what they could only within the mistaken assumption that the case was an accident.
307For now, I can only stand imaginatively at Mystery Bay and watch the waves break over the same rocks, feeling the pull of a riddle that has taken more from me than I expected, yet given me a strange loyalty in return. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, a mystery need not yield every fact to possess the mind.
151He argued that if police had recognised foul play from the beginning, they would have secured the area and brought in trackers. Instead, he believed, several potentially important questions were left unanswered.
308It gathers atmosphere, silence and doubt until it becomes, in Poe’s phrase, “a dream within a dream” — a waking trance in which I keep asking how five men could pass so completely from the known world into the keeping of the sea, and why I still cannot bring myself to look away.
152Hobbes also pointed to a second vessel, the Magic, which he believed had been in the Bermagui River on the Saturday night and Sunday morning. According to him, police did not learn of it until three or four weeks later. When he asked a sub-inspector about it, the officer appeared unaware of the vessel. Hobbes thought every inquiry should have been made at the time.
309Prologue: the Author
153He also suggested a possible escape route rather than a proven one: the killer or killers could have escaped aboard the Magic, hailing it as it passed Mutton Fish Point around 2 p.m., then abandoning the boat to drift into the bay where it was later found.
310Michael Brooke was born in Sydney on 22 December 1962, and began his working life in journalism at the Sydney Daily Telegraph—the same newspaper that once employed Cyril Pearl, whose 1978 account helped keep the Bermagui Mystery alive in the Australian imagination.
154The Committee chairman, Mr Day, did not always press witnesses on points that now appear significant. His questioning was often repetitive and, at times, insufficiently searching.
311From the Murdoch press, Michael’s career carried him through South East Asia, where he spent more than a decade as a reporter and earned his reputation at The Bangkok Post before turning to freelance work.
155Invoking “British notions of fair play”, Day told Hobbes that murder required a motive: people did not kill one another for nothing. The Committee, he said, had failed to identify any inducement for the crime.
312Later, back in Australia, he entered the Australian Defence Force as a public affairs officer and deployed to Iraq in 2007 with the 515 peacekeepers of Overwatch Battle Group (West). The years that followed demanded their own kind of endurance.
156Hobbes replied calmly that one of the men had been seen with £15, and that the killers may have assumed the others—especially Young, the government officer—also carried money in a place with no banks.
313In 2019, Michael found renewed purpose in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, through the Australian Volunteers program, managing The Voice of Persons with Disability Radio Station.
157Chapter 6 – Who Was Lamont Young?
314His life and work have been shaped by independence, personal freedom and the stubborn necessity of asking difficult questions—even when the answers remain hidden.
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