Police killer Dezi Freeman sought quiet, remote places, but he wasn’t the first fugitive or gunman to be drawn to the lovely and isolated Upper Murray.
Freeman was shot dead by police on Monday at a property on the Murray River at Thologolong, about half an hour down river from the villages of Walwa, in north-east Victoria, and Jingellic, a few kilometres over the river in NSW.
Despite the apparently peaceful nature of the back-country area, it has seen more than its fair share of drama.
In February 1924, an unhinged gunman who was a member of the Walwa Rifle Club earned the title of the “Jingellic killer” after he took his gun and ambushed a group of seven picnickers taking refuge from the summer heat by the bank of a creek.
The gunman, Claude Batson, said to be consumed by unfocused vengeance and depressed after his girlfriend dumped him, killed one man and wounded three others.
He was earlier seen walking across the Jingellic Bridge to the NSW side of the river after leaving Walwa, armed with a .303 rifle, a bandolier of ammunition and more bullets in his pockets.
He said he was out for “a bit of bushranging”.
Batson, after shooting his victims, fled a police hunt into the deep silence of forests in the area before emerging a week later, starving. He was captured and sentenced to a psychiatric institution.
In 1984, a man who had held two young people captive on a farm near Holbrook in NSW stole a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a small armoury of guns and headed through the back country for Victoria.
He crossed the Murray over the bridge between Jingellic and Walwa and took to the forests south of Corryong, half-an-hour further south-east along the Upper Murray.
There, the 25-year-old was captured in a dramatic police operation after the vehicle he was driving ran out of fuel on a rough bush track.
The handy, out-of-the-way Jingellic Bridge was again favoured by the nation’s most wanted outlaws when father-and-son Gino and Mark Stocco slipped into Victoria in October 2015.
Wanted for numerous offences over eight years, including shooting at police in Wagga Wagga, they drove across the state border late at night between Jingellic and Walwa before continuing to evade police throughout north-east Victoria.
They slipped the net of a massive police hunt in the Victorian High Country before heading back into NSW.
The Stoccos were captured after murdering a 68-year-old man near Dunedoo in central-western NSW.
How and when Dezi Freeman, for seven months Australia’s most wanted man, found himself a handy bolthole in the area remains unknown.
But despite his desire to lie low, if he was bunkered down on the lonely Upper Murray farm in early January this year, his isolation suddenly became tenuous. And hot.
Scores of firefighters and about 11 firetrucks raced along the boundary line of the property on January 5 and 6, battling to control a blaze that roared out of bushland and came within a few hundred metres of the place where Freeman was hiding when police found him and shot him dead on Monday.
The bushfire – one of many out of control across Victoria at the beginning of the year – became known as the Walwa fire, though it was in an area properly known as Thologolong, about 40 kilometres downriver.
A “watch and act” alert was issued at the time. Did Freeman, who once masqueraded as a firefighter to big-note himself in the Ovens Valley, pay close heed?
Like much else, it is not known whether Freeman was on the property next to the blaze in January, or whether hard-pressed firefighters saw him or even knew anyone was there.
Over the seven months since he shot and killed two police officers and wounded a third near Porepunkah on August 27, Freeman’s whereabouts became a matter of high frustration for the hundreds of police searching for him and engrossing fascination for much of the public.
All that was known for certain is that after shooting the police, he fled into the rugged Mount Buffalo bush.
He was variously thought to be dead, or hiding out in a cave or mineshaft on the slopes of the mountain, or taking refuge with supporters in the anti-authority “sovereign citizen” movement to which he adhered.
Instead, he somehow travelled 190 kilometres north-east to the remote farm at Thologolong bounded to the south by the rugged wilderness of the Mount Lawson State Park and to the north by the Murray River.
Police have “a strong suspicion” someone helped him make the trip, according to sources unwilling to be named.
How Freeman sustained himself in this remote place, and for how long, also remains a mystery. He is known to be a skilled hunter and bushman who regularly butchered and hung deer carcasses at his various homes around the Mount Buffalo area.
Freeman was clearly living rough, whatever he was eating and wherever he got his supplies.
The farm on which he was found on Monday morning has no house, but scattered around were two containers, a caravan and several disused trucks and cars.
The absentee owner of the farm, from a well-known Thologolong cattle-farming family, lives in Tasmania, where he is suffering a serious illness.
And soon, when the police investigators and the coroner have gone, the old area, we can be sure, will revert to its rural quietude, the river running by and the forests whispering, its history of attracting fugitives once again all but forgotten.
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