MUSTARD gas and a malnutrition scandal that killed 23 migrant babies are part of a new book entitled Startling Stories From Albury.
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Former Border Mail journalist Howard Jones has collected more than 40 true stories about events that shocked or surprised Border people. They include murders, a juicy divorce case from the 1920s and the sad case of a dentist who accidentally strangled himself in his garden shed.
“Some of these stories have been hidden for years,” Jones said. “I was astonished to discover only last year that 11,000 tonnes of poison gas weaponry was stored in great secrecy at the Wirlinga munitions dump for three years in World War II.
“As a reporter in 1990, I wrote of the army ceasing to store ordinary munitions at Wirlinga like bombs and bullets that year.
“But I had no idea that the depot had stored highly dangerous, toxic gas bombs, mines and shells in 1942-45. The idea was to hit a Japanese invasion force if ever it landed. Amazingly, when the war ended, the army started burning off the poison gas at Wirlinga until someone thought of the idea of putting it in drums on redundant ships that were then sunk off Sydney and Melbourne.
“How’s that for an environmental nightmare?”
Jones said he couldn’t understand how the deaths of 23 migrant babies at the Albury and Bonegilla hospitals in 1949 is not known as one of the Australia’s worst human disasters, like terrible train or air crashes.
“Even after the first few deaths, The Border Mail editorials were calling it “near murder and a blot on humanity”,” he said. “There was a whitewash inquiry and a lot of blame shifting, but incredibly no inquests, because the deaths were deemed natural causes.”
Other stories range from Bronwynne Richardson’s unsolved murder 45 years ago to an amusing story of a “naughty” Catholic nun who hid fruit under her habit to pass through the fruit fly block at the Union Bridge.
Jones also tells of a Lavington man who survived the Voyager disaster in 1964 and of Father Kevin Flanagan’s amazing survival from a heart attack after he struggled through conducting two funerals in 2003.
His book features multiple drownings in the Murray river at Albury, including a mishap in 1991 that cost four lives when a small boat sank at night near South Albury.
“It’s not all sad, as I have written about the startling success stories of world-famous sports stars Margaret Court and Lauren Jackson and former Australian of the Year, singer Lee Kernaghan,” Jones said.
- The $20 book is available from Dymocks Albury, Beckers’ and Mahonys newsgencies and the Albury Library-Museum.