The plump, bespectacled girl glimpses the ethereal trio of young women stepping between the darkened voids of the rocky outcrops rising from the forlorn landscape.
“Miranda, come back,” she shrills. "Don't go up there!"
The golden-haired, white-gowned leader looks back fleetingly before all three are swallowed within the deepening shadows. It’s Valentine’s Day, 1900.
One will be found a week later, near death, remembering nothing. Two are never seen again. A teacher searching for them becomes another unaccounted for victim. The only eventual indication of a presence of any kind, a torn fragment of frilled calico.
That, of course, is a wrap-up of Joan Lindsay’s iconic Picnic at Hanging Rock, the haunting events unfolding in the remote surrounds of Mt Macedon, Victoria.
In the Canberra region, there was a mystifyingly similar scenario four years earlier than the setting of Lindsay’s beguiling tale. And rather than the tantalising nature of the dream-inspired work she feverishly produced over two short weeks 54 years ago - fact or fiction, you must decide - the tragic case of Kate Donnelly is indeed true.
Along with multiple (and varied) reports of the incident, it’s attested to by Kate’s great-niece, Helen Jeffery, who continues to live in the area.
“Kate - or Catherine - was the older sister of my grandmother,” she comments.
In another echo of Picnic, Helen says that once when trying to get to the bottom of what happened, her nanna dismissed it by suggesting it was “so long ago it no longer mattered”.
It all began on a frosty though dry mid-autumn day, 1896. In the wake of a particularly gruelling Australian summer that killed 435 - 70 buried in the one day alone at Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney; the beginning of the destructive seven year blight of the Federation Drought, considered “one of the world’s worst recorded ‘megadroughts’ ".
[NB: Another local, William Farrer, would be instrumental in saving the national economy from ruin with his cultivation of a rust-free strain of wheat in response to the devastation of crops.]
Attentions diverted by an unexplained disappearance in a country town soon to earn prominence for its neighbour-status with what would become the nation’s new capital, Canberra.
Along a depleted river running at the outskirts of the old NSW borough of Queanbeyan, a small set of footprints are revealed. Ending near a “large, deep hole” in the riverbed, none are to be found coming out again. The discovery of a “lady’s veil” above a steep approach down to the watercourse, believed a vital clue.
Five days earlier, 21-year-old Kate had vanished. Neither rhyme nor reason.
Wednesday, April 15; last day of the first modern Olympic Games, held in Greece. Locals soon distracted from their excitement that the only Aussie competitor (of 14 nations), Edwin Flack, is bringing home two gold medals for track events and a tennis-doubles bronze.
Early that evening, Kate had farewelled a friend, making her way to Queanbeyan’s impressive, decade-old railway station, perched south of the few rudimentary streets marking the 60-year-old township’s centre. Off to Sydney for an operation on her throat. The next morning, failing to appear at Redfern for a pre-determined meeting with her employer, Miss Cunningham of Lanyon.
Abandoned on the platform at Queanbeyan, a box belonging to her and two unlabelled parcels.
The perplexing situation is reported to police, but it would be Monday before an official search commences.
The 5ft 6in Kate was fashionably attired in “a dark navy blue dress, with full sleeves, and a feather boa round her neck, a sailor hat with black band”; a handbag to match her reddish hair. She's witnessed going through the gates of station. Thereafter, she'd apparently been seen “getting through a wire fence … and making straight for the river” - the willow-infested Molonglo on the Canberra side of the train tracks, meandering its way through the industrial area of Oaks Estate.
Kate’s blacksmith father, Chris - an original board member of the first Canberra School, who’d lose his life in 1911 when kicked in the head by a bucking bronco at the Queanbeyan Showground - somehow sure the prints along the bank are his daughter’s.
Some 50 of 1500-odd residents hunt in vain. The local waterways combed; scrubby bushland for miles around, scoured. They’d even employed dynamite - purchased by townsfolk handing round the hat - to blow up all the deep areas where a body may have lodged.
Not a further trace “alive or dead”.
“Drowned” is the obvious whisper. Theories to blemish a reputation also making the rounds: afraid of the procedure she was to endure, she's in hiding; she’s “cleared out”, or, “committed the sin of self-harm”.
The next was seemingly a heartless hoax, the motive equally unanswered. A letter from a “fellow servant” informing her Scottish-born mother, Mary, that Kate “intended to marry a gentleman, Mr T—, residing between Murrumbateman and Ginninderra, and that she was going to the house of his sister at Harden”.
No so-named sister lived in the small town a few hours south-west of Canberra; the man referenced, in Sydney at the time.
Weeks creeping by. At the end of April, the unexplained saga pushed aside with news such as the death of former NSW Premier and ardent supporter of the country combining as a Commonwealth, Sir Henry Parkes, at 81.
Then, Friday, May 8: 23 days after Kate was last seen and 10 miles south, a cry goes up from John McIntosh of Majura Valley.
Some distance from his house, he'd come upon a trail of feathers he didn’t recognise, leading into thick scrub.
“Lying under a log exhausted, starved almost to death, helpless, and unable to speak” - still wearing her gloves and clutching the handle of her otherwise absent handbag - is Kate Donnelly.
In a “demented” state, only able to make gestures with her hands, she’s unable to articulate what had befallen her, or explain the miracle of how she was alive. The greater concern is that she won't survive her ordeal and the mystery will never be solved. If she does, there are “anxieties about her brain”.
Come Monday, on the mend, Kate's able to offer some details - as puzzling as they are. She’d been “knocked on the head by a man who robbed her”. For days “insensible”, unable to walk, managing only to crawl about, sustained with water and “what she could pick up in the bush”. Some reporters write that she hadn’t “tasted food during that time”. Dr Richardson of the belief she must have “partaken of food during the period she was lost”.
Kate's story later alters somewhat. The trip to to Sydney was debt-related – she needed additional work to pay for a frock she could ill-afford. However, she'd had a change of heart. Her memory ended at the decision to make her way back to her parents' Canberra home.
As with the conundrum of what befell Lindsay's three protagonists, 124 years on, questions around Kate's situation linger. Had the thieving cad simply chanced upon her walking along the river? Why would she leave her belongings behind?
It seems there was never a charge laid, nor even a suspect.
While described as “a girl of good conduct”, was there an intended assignation after all?
And what of the potentially adventurous young Kate? Sadly, an end grim enough to rival that to befall Miranda and her classmates in the mists shrouding that ominous Rock.
Four months after Kate's disappearance, while warming herself by the fire on the morning of another Wednesday, August 12, her nightdress caught alight. So badly burned was she - everywhere save below her knees and the hair upon her head - once again there “were grave doubts as to whether she would live through”.
This time, she didn’t, dying after four agonising days.
Less a dream within a dream than a living nightmare.
For more on the unsolved, unexplained and unknown in the orbit of the Australian Capital, also see my capitalcrimefiles.com.au website which has features my new podcast.
SOURCES:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/98557428?searchTerm=%27kate%20donnelly%20queanbeyan%27&searchLimits=
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/154126975/catherine-christina-donnelly
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/239999335?searchTerm=kate%20donnelly%20canberra&searchLimits=
Schumack, Samuel. Tales & Legends of Canberra Pioneers, 1967.
Hi Nichole, there has been a lot of work done on the McIntosh family who arrived in the district in 1839 - they were brought out from Scotland as shepherds by the Campbell family of Duntroon. There is a family history called "The Highland Shepherd" published in 2017. His property was at Malcolm Vale just north of the current airport boundary. One of the McIntosh family homesteads "Gladefield" nearby was built in the 1860s and survived as a ruin until very recently. I was fortunate enough to take some photos before the ruins were demolished. John Malcolm retired to Queanbeyan where he died in 1922, and his house there "Langdene" still survives.
Thanks Peter - that's another great connection to learn of! Do you have any further details on your G-G-grandfather? I had come across and used details from that article that mentioned him in the Goulburn paper.
Thanks for this article. John Malcolm McIntosh who found Kate was my great-great-grandfather. There is another report (which must have been based on an interview with him) in the Goulburn Evening Penny Post of 14 May 1896.