A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today — about how the most notorious kidnapping in Australian history ended without a single death or a single gunshot; how a novel and its screen adaptation turned the story a hundred times darker; and how, in the end, there was a place for the villain’s heart on a school shelf of specimens.
Faraday is not the sort of place where you expect headline-grade drama. In 1972, it was a farming district a little over 100 kilometres northwest of Melbourne (and thirty-eight kilometres south of Bendigo): sheep, gentle hills dotted with granite boulders, and enough scrub to hide just about anything. School No. 797 had one teacher and ten pupils. Fifty kilometres south stood that same Hanging Rock, where five years before these events Joan Lindsay had “lost” her schoolgirls on paper, and where, three years later, Peter Weir would turn the rock into a national myth. Australian mythology loves disappearing children in precisely this geography.
October 6, 1972. Friday. A cold spring day — October is spring in Victoria — around three in the afternoon. Twenty-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs is sitting at the piano: musical chairs, the very end of the school day. Six girls — the Howarth sisters (Robin, Gillian, and five-year-old Denise), the Conn sisters (Linda and Helen), and ten-year-old Christina Ellery. Four more pupils are home sick, and that accident determined who was in the classroom.
The door opens. Two men: one in a balaclava with a sawn-off shotgun, the other in a hat and dark glasses. The line that starts it all is almost quiet: “School’s over for today, kids.” At first Mary takes it for a prank — then she sees the children’s faces and understands it isn’t. The oldest pupil, Robin Howarth, will still find the nerve to ask one of the kidnappers outright: “You’re not going to kill us, are you?” She remembered the answer for the rest of her life: “It wouldn’t pay us to kill you. But we have nothing to lose by doing so.”
The kidnappers were two unemployed plasterers, Robert Clyde Boland and Edwin John Eastwood. Their plan was startup-on-a-shoestring stuff: children are obedient, the government will find the money faster than the police find us. They shoved the teacher and six girls into a red van and drove them sixty kilometres southeast — to a ditch pre-dug in the scrub near Lancefield, covered with sheets of corrugated iron. Cottage-country engineering, but their own. In the van, the children got a bag of chips; Boland stood guard with a pocketknife. Christina Ellery later recalled that the children clung to the make-believe with all their strength: they pretended they were going on an excursion and made little boats out of leaves.
A note was left on the teacher’s desk. Read it as a technical specification: one million dollars; five hundred thousand in twenties — into three suitcases; five hundred thousand in tens — into six suitcases; all currency to have been “in circulation for at least twelve months.” That last part was not posturing but an element of communications hygiene: fresh bundles can be traced by serial number, worn notes almost cannot. Next: at 19:25, a call to Victorian Education Minister Lindsay Thompson at the police headquarters on Russell Street. And, on a line of its own: “Any attempt to trace us will result in the annihilation of all hostages.”
The word “annihilation” in a note left at a school of ten pupils. One of the most melodramatic words I have encountered in crime reporting — and it appeared in a case where not a single shot was fired, that day or ever.
The first person to announce the crime was the kidnapper himself: at 16:40, he called the offices of The Sun and gave journalist Wayne Grant a ready-made bulletin: “I’ve just kidnapped a schoolteacher and children from Faraday School” — then hung up. Grant initially took the call for a prank, until he found tiny Faraday on a map and raised the alarm. By evening, State Premier Rupert Hamer had officially announced: the government would pay.
That night, in the van, Mary Gibbs turned captivity into a game: she sang songs to the children and let them believe it was all part of an adventure. According to the note, the kidnappers had promised to call at 19:25, but the real call came at dawn: an anonymous voice dictated instructions — Thompson, Woodend post office, five in the morning, “no funny business.” And this was where the Australian state staged its finest scene: Education Minister Lindsay Thompson personally took the ransom, dressed as a chauffeur, with a tiny derringer under his jacket; on the back seat beneath a blanket lay Assistant Commissioner Mick Miller with a rifle. The minister’s instructions: if shooting started, duck and give Miller a clear line of fire. At five to five, another anonymous voice called back and declared the first instruction a hoax. Nobody came. They stood there until dawn.
And in the scrub near Lancefield, meanwhile, the central event of the whole story was taking place. The kidnappers had gone off “for the money,” promising to return by daybreak — and Gibbs understood that it was now or never. The door was blocked from outside; she braced shoulder to shoulder with Christina and began kicking the rear-door panel — in her platform boots. “God knows how many times,” she would later say, “but the panel slowly started to give.” By eight in the morning, the whole group had reached the road, walked along the tree line, and knocked on the door of some rabbit hunters. Seventeen hours from the beginning — zero victims. Just a smashed plywood panel.
The ending did not take long: Boland was arrested at home in Bendigo, Eastwood in Edithvale outside Melbourne. The ransom was never collected. Eastwood received fifteen years; Boland, after three trials, seventeen. He would be released in November 1983, having served eleven. Mary Gibbs was awarded the George Medal for bravery on January 22, 1973; Thompson received the Royal Humane Society’s bronze medal, became State Premier in 1981, and Miller became chief commissioner of Victoria Police in 1977. The press called it the “crime of the century”: ransom kidnappings had barely featured in Australian crime reporting before it, and Assistant Commissioner Miller called the situation “the gravest in the history of the state police.” But something else is telling: after Faraday, the Victorian government closed one-teacher schools — the very kind of school without which the plot would have been impossible. Children in the scrub with no adult nearby — never again. That was the state’s chief architectural lesson from an incident in which no bullet ever left any barrel: no shot was fired, yet the school system was rebuilt as though one had been.
And the cherry worth saying out loud: in the real version of this drama, there was not a single death. None at all. Remember that point — it will soon become the most important one.
Reality, however, was not inclined to stop at a happy ending. In December 1976, Eastwood escaped from Geelong prison, and on February 15, 1977, he did what no screenwriter could have dreamed up: he stormed Wooreen School in Gippsland and repeated Faraday — this time taking a teacher and nine pupils. Over the next twenty-four hours, he raised the number of hostages to sixteen, stopping trucks and hijacking a campervan with two women inside, and issued demands that marked a new stage in the degradation of the idea: seven million US dollars, weapons, one hundred kilograms of heroin and cocaine, the release of seventeen prisoners from Pentridge, and a new car with a full tank.
The same mechanism worked as the first time: one hostage, Robin Smith, managed to escape and raise the alarm; the campervan holding the others was disabled by gunfire near Woodside, and Eastwood was captured with a bullet in his leg. Twenty-one years in prison, from which he was later paroled in 1990 — after strangling a rapist in Pentridge’s exercise yard and being acquitted on grounds of self-defence, despite taking ten stab wounds himself. After release came another offence involving the theft of chemicals which, when mixed, produced cyanide gas; work as a truck driver; and another arrest in 2001. The man who had once staged the “crime of the century” turned out to be the sole pupil of his own plot: even a completed sentence could not let him out of the story — it took him back every time he tried to leave.
And the Faraday case itself left a loose end big enough for a separate long read: Eastwood later claimed that Boland had been innocent, and that the real accomplice was related to the man Thompson met outside the Woodend post office that morning — the very man who had been waiting there for a friend, was detained beside the story of the suitcases, and released.
By the end of the seventies, Gabrielle Lord — a teacher retrained as a public servant — had secured a New Writer’s Fellowship: a year to live by writing. The first novel she wrote that year was rejected at the reader’s-report stage. Three weeks of funding remained — and in those three weeks she wrote Fortress: about the kidnapping of a teacher and her pupils in the Australian bush. The novel, inspired by the eight-year-old Faraday case — not always honestly reproducing its circumstances, but taking its skeleton — became an immediate success, was translated into six languages, and the money from selling the screen rights allowed Lord to quit her job in 1983 and remain a writer forever. The Australian press would later call her “the first lady of local crime fiction.”
What is worth noticing here is this: Fortress was assembled from wreckage — someone else’s rejected novel — and in turn became the foundation of someone’s career. The best engineering often works exactly that way: out of whatever was already lying in the trash.
The screen rights were bought by Crawford Productions — the flagship of Australian television production — which planned a double delivery: a feature film for domestic release and a TV movie for American HBO. Before that, Associated R&R Films — the Robert Stigwood and Rupert Murdoch partnership looking for a project after Gallipoli — had considered the rights, but the deal fell apart. HBO put up half of the 4.4 million Australian dollar budget and made its standard demand: the lead role had to go to an actress familiar to American audiences.
Then began the seesaw. Bruce Beresford was announced as director — then left the project. American Bess Armstrong was cast in the lead — Actors Equity objected, demanding an Australian actress. A compromise was found in Sigrid Thornton — and two months before filming, she became pregnant. HBO and Crawford pushed Armstrong again, Equity refused again — and the project was shut down, after 700 thousand dollars had already been spent. It was resurrected only when they found someone who satisfied two contradictory conditions at once: Rachel Ward. A Briton who had recently moved to Australia and had just become a star through The Thorn Birds — a television phenomenon that had beamed her into the entire English-speaking world. For HBO, a recognizable face; for Equity, an official resident of the country. One actress checked both boxes. Somebody in casting earned their pay twice over that evening.
The director’s chair went to Arch Nicholson; the screenplay was written by Everett De Roche, genre veteran of Patrick, Road Games, and Razorback. Filming took twelve five-day weeks in 1985: the Grampians and the real Rosehill Primary School near Bairnsdale in East Gippsland. The kidnappers wear four masks: Father Christmas (Peter Hehir), Dabby Duck (Vernon Wells from Mad Max 2), Pussy Cat, and Mac the Mouse — cheap Halloween-style masks that turn ordinary extortionists into something between a circus and a nightmare. Among the schoolchildren in the cast were young Asher Keddie, future star of Offspring, and Beth Buchanan, soon to be in Neighbours.
In the United States, the film debuted on November 24, 1985, directly on HBO’s cable network, bypassing theatres — with a level of violence unusually harsh for television at the time. The New York Times reviewed the premiere just three days later, a sign that HBO understood the production as an event. The film reached Australian cinemas on June 26, 1986. And took in 139 thousand dollars. On a 4.4 million budget. That is not “a modest result.” That is a meteor crater, neatly calculated by accounting.
And yet this is where the central paradox of its legacy lies hidden. More than forty years later, the film regularly resurfaces in conversation as an underrated genre gem: Australian film criticism site The Curb remembers it as a minor Australian Gothic classic — uneven, but an admirable ozploitation thriller. The Curb singles out the underwater sequence — the class crawling through a flooded cave system — and the farm scene where the criminals force an elderly couple to serve them dinner: a scene wound tight to the point of trembling. There are no police in the film until its final minutes; civilization here consists of a school and a farm, and both are violated before the viewer’s eyes.
Honesty about its quality requires acknowledging the unevenness: the child acting occasionally wobbles, production was breathing down everyone’s neck, Ward was cast at the last minute and filming had to begin immediately. But the ending makes up for everything — and it is in that ending that all three layers of this story become audible at once.
Now place the three versions side by side. Reality: a kidnapping, a note promising “annihilation,” seventeen hours in a hole — and zero deaths. Lord’s novel: a far more exhausting and bloody affair, with considerably more bodies. The film: four masked men seize a school, demand ransom, and promise to kill one child a day; they shoot the family at the old farm through which the children try to escape; and in the end, the teacher and class build a fortress in a cave — pits lined with sharpened stakes inspired by lessons on traditional Aboriginal hunting methods, spears made from school supplies — and kill the kidnappers one by one. From a story in which the adults never once lost control, Lord made a text in which everyone does — starting with the children.
In the ending, the children move from “we’re scared” to hunting with the disarming ease that makes the film frightening without a single cheap jump scare. The Curb puts it precisely: the shift “from classroom to tribe” is astonishingly smooth. The children chant in chorus, “We’ll get the dirty rascals!” — and it sounds like a poem learned by heart for class. The Golding line — Lord of the Flies is a directly named influence — is not a metaphor here but a structure: school exercises (songs are sung, spears prepared, pits dug) turn into warfare with exactly the same enthusiasm. The final shot: police surrounded by a silent class, and Father Christmas’s heart preserved in a jar beside the school’s collection of specimens. The adults understand nothing. The class has won by absorbing crime as study material.
Why did Lord need such an inversion? My version is this: fiction had to answer the question reality left open. In life, the kidnappers never once carried out their threat — but the very note with its “annihilation,” read by parents that evening, demanded a resolution for forty years. The novel took the promise and fulfilled it — with a reversal: the threat came not for the children, but from them. Psychological truth proved simpler than factual truth: everyone knew the children had seen it all, and everyone needed the story to somehow play itself out.
And now — the thing that makes this story genuinely sickening, and instructive at the same time.
While the novel (1978–1980) and film (1985–1986) existed, the real participants remained silent. The parents shielded the children from the press; the families decided to try to forget. In 2004, when The Age, for its 150th anniversary, persuaded Mary Gibbs, Lindsay Thompson, and Christina Ellery to meet for the first time in more than thirty years, Christina’s mother responded to her daughter’s agreement with one word: “Why?” Robin Howarth — the very girl who had bluntly asked about being killed — needed decades of nightmares, more than twenty years before seeking psychological help for the first time, and half a century before giving her first public interview. She published Faraday: A Community Rediscovered in autumn 2024, fifty-two years later, and stated her reason exactly: she wanted Faraday to be remembered not for that day, but as the town where she grew up.
The proportion is brutally honest. It took culture eight years to adapt the trauma — the novel — and thirteen for the screen adaptation. It took fifty-two years simply to be able to talk about it. Fiction is infrastructure with a low barrier to entry: three weeks of writing, twelve weeks of filming, a cheque for 4.4 million. Memorial infrastructure, meanwhile — the kind where the victim herself decides what to tell and when — unfolds on the scale of a human life, and it has no budget except the years already lived. The twenty-year-old teacher gave the press an interview the morning after her escape — “I’ve got a strong right leg” — and vanished from public view: her story did not require a sequel. The children did need one, but only an entire lifetime later.
I watched Fortress, I admit, with difficulty — and not because it is a bad film. Because making art well from someone else’s real day is always a little shameful. Yet that shame is what the whole kidnapping-thriller genre rests on.
Look at the pattern that emerges. Reality: a pair of plasterers with a technical-specification note, currency hygiene, and zero victims. Novel: the same thing, but with blood. Film: the same thing, but the children kill the adults and keep a heart in the schoolroom. Every step down that staircase adds not truth, but the desired payoff — and takes us farther from what actually happened. And in the real world, all that time, six specific girls are living their lives, with the longest part of the story still ahead of them: without murders, without end credits, and without villains in masks.
A paradox? No — just the usual mechanics of genre: a thriller must give its audience a resolution, while reality owes one to nobody. Sometimes resolution arrives fifty-two years later — in the form of a small book written by a grown woman about the town of her childhood. And that, when you think about it, is also a victory. Just in slow motion — a speed we are not used to.
Special thanks to Stephen Orr and his The Fierce Country — a rare case of true crime written with more care than a police report. And to Robin Howarth’s Faraday: A Community Rediscovered — fifty-two years later, measured and homely.