the disappearance of harold holt

[missyfan45]

Today is the 50th anniversary of the mysterious disappearance  of former Australian prime minister Harold Holt of course since he went into the sea and never came back the sea devils could be a obvious choice after all some say he was picked up by the Chinese in a submarine. Maybe catsmate can elaborate more on this there are lots of adventure you could have he could be converted by the cybermen or be taken by the master or the meddling monk. maybe the zygons take him and duplicate him. i want you guys especially catsmate to further create ideas in honor of his disappearance.

[Catsmate]

Dec 18, 2017 0:05:04 GMT missyfan45 said:

Today is the 50th anniversary of the mysterious disappearance  of former Australian prime minister Harold Holt of course since he went into the sea and never came back the sea devils could be a obvious choice after all some say he was picked up by the Chinese in a submarine. Maybe catsmate can elaborate more on this there are lots of adventure you could have he could be converted by the cybermen or be taken by the master or the meddling monk. maybe the zygons take him and duplicate him. i want you guys especially catsmate to further create ideas in honor of his disappearance.

Ah yes, The Mystery of the Disappearing Prime Minister, a fine title for a Golden Age novel^[1]. Gandalf probably knows the truth. He was probably there.

It'd fit well into a Pulpish story, or a Call of Cthulhu one with enemy submarines^[2] or Deep Ones responsible, respectively. There's actually a book (The Prime Minister Was a Spy, it's awful) that uses the former premise and portrays Holt as a deep-cover Chinese agent. Or a more Cold War-ish one with Holt being assassinated (diver, trained shark, cybernetically enhanced dolphin...) by <Insert Group> for <Insert Nefarious Reason>. 

Of course the Whoniverse has even more options. He could have been kidnapped/killed by alien invaders, Sea Devils hoping to influence Australian policy, a Mad Scientist with a brainwashing machine/mind control implant s/he wants to test or time travellers who've been paid to acquire him for a future zoo exhibit. Or to be interrogated by an academic with a historical thesis to write...
Maybe the death was accidental and Holt was supposed to have been returned alive. 



Hmm, one of these days I must dig out all my Australian weird incidents and tie them into a Who timeline. From the British Rocket Group's experiments in Woomera, the dead body of the Somerton Man (obviously a time traveller^[3]), Parkes Observatory^[4], The Birdman of the Coorong, the mystery of whether Guillaume Le Testu reacher Australia, the disappearance of Lamont Young, strange falls of hail in Alice Springs  and what really happened to Lassiter's Reef?
There's also the sheer desolation and isolation of the Outback. An easy place for people to disappear (and a handy spot for serial killers like Milat) and Sinister Projects to be located. Plus Tegan of course. Oh and might Magnus Greel's experiments with time travel have effected Australia in the past?

And in earlier years there was the deaths of Snowy and Squizzy, the razor gangs, Miss Phyrne Fisher^[5], and the City Beneath the Sands. Even earlier and there was an outbreak of Scareships too^[6].


As Bryson said: This is a country that loses a prime minister and that is so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world’s first non-governmental atomic bomb on its mainland almost four years would pass before anyone noticed. Clearly, this is a place worth getting to know.








[1] Though Poirot found MacAdam alive...

[2] Reluctant as I am to burst any bubbles, the water off Cheviot beach is far too shallow for a conventional submarine to approach the shore.

[3] Read Kerry Greenwood's book on the subject. Then read her other books.

[4] Which interestingly, for space trivia and conspiracy fans, was the main receiver for television signals broadcast from the moon during Apollo 11. Perfect to tie in with the Silence. And then there's the question of why Apollo didn't use Parkes for the first nine minutes...

[5] The perfect NPC for a scenario set in 1920s Australia. Link.

[6] Probably British experiments with anti-gravity propelled craft built using scavenged alien parts.

[Catsmate]

A few more items now that I've had a chance to collate the Australia related stuff from my General Notes files.


1. Death on the Reef.

On 24 February 1875 the SS Gothenburg sank after encountering a powerful storm off Australia's east coast (near the Great Barrier Reef) with the loss of approximately 102 lives, many of them government officials (judges, civil servants, RN officers and others). Also on board was around 125kg of gold, plus more carried by travelling miners (many of whom drowned because they insisted on trying to swim while carrying it).

A natural disaster? Or deliberate act?



2. Kelly Country.

On 28 June 1880 the saga of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly came to an end in the town of Glenrowan in Victoria, Australia. Kelly, dressed in homemade plate metal armour was wounded in the legs by gunfire and captured. He was tried for murder and hanged on 11 November 1880 at Old Melbourne Gaol.

But what if he and his gang had survived the battle?
The train tracks had been sabotaged to derail the special train carrying police (a plan that'd probably have succeeded), but a teacher named Thomas Curnow slipped out from the hotel, where he and others were being held, and stopped the train, warning the police of the ambush.

If this hadn’t happened, and the ambush had succeeded, could the actions of the Kelly gang have triggered a general rebellion in Australia, perhaps with support from American and European sympathisers? Could Australia have waged a war of independence, perhaps featuring steam-powered Gatlings, armoured trains, steam war-cars, dynamite cannon and dirigible airships^[1]? And who’d want to make this happen^[2]?



3. Pine Gap.

What’s really under the domes of RAINFALL? Is it related to the occasional outbreaks of odd weather at nearby Alice Springs?

• The facility, near the town of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, intercepts telemetry information for Soviet ballistic missiles, defensive radar and acts as a control centre for satellite communications as part of the ECHELON network.
  In the Whoniverse it could be so much more...
  

4. The Missing Shipwrecks.

How do three 74-year-old shipwrecks just disappear from the ocean floor? That's seemingly what happened in Indonesia in 2016, when the wrecks of three Dutch warships sunk in World War II (HNLMS De Ruyter, HNLMS Java and HNLMS Kortenaer) were found to be missing from their previously known locations.

• The wrecks were first found in 2002 by amateur divers, with all sites being declared war graves. The ships collectively had taken down 915 Dutch and 259 Indonesian soldiers when they fell victim to the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Java Sea on 27FEB1942.
  
  

In November 2016, the Dutch government confirmed that all three had disappeared from the seabed. Ship salvage experts weighed in on the mystery, saying that any attempt to move entire warships (totalling around 15,000 tonnes) that had been sunk for three quarters of a century would be a significant operation , one not easily concealed from the authorities.

Even theories that the ships had been torn apart and stripped for salvage didn't quite hold water; and a number of other possible fates for the shipwrecks were suggested. Storms, swell, tsunamis or even a shift in tectonic plates could have been to blame, though a shipwreck of this sort would have been incredibly difficult to budge by most means. 

• Silurians suddenly in need of a substantial amount of metal perhaps? The self-repair system of a crashed Cybership?
  

5. Black Mountain

A few kilometres inland from the beaches of the far north of Queensland is a mountain, a huge piled-up mound of slick black boulders, sticking out from the green of the surrounding landscape. The site is a National Park but visitors aren’t invited to climb or even approach the mountain, there’s  lookout spot just off the road, as close as tourists are invited to go.
Within the mountain itself, occasional gaps between the rocks lead to twisting tunnels and caves which lead deep into the Earth, well it's assumed that they do; few people who've explored the caves came out alive.
...

Known to most as Black Mountain, the place had a long and storied history even before Europeans arrived in Australia. The traditional owners of the land are the Eastern Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal people, who know the mountain as Kalkajaka, literally translated as ‘place of the spear’.The Kuku Yalanji people definitely know better than to go too close to the mysterious mountain.


Since the arrival of white settlers in the area, a number of stories have been told about disappearances on the mountain. The first of these dates back to 1877, when a man went out towards Black Mountain on horseback, looking for a stray calf. Widespread searches were conducted when neither the calf, the horse or the man returned, and no trace of them was ever found.
A few years later, a criminal named Sugarfoot Jack and a few of his companions took refuge near the mountain after a shootout and also disappeared.
An extensive police search could find no trace of them.

A constable named Ryan was one of the next victims of the mountain; he was searching for a fugitive with the help of local trackers, but the trail ended at the mouth of one of the mountain’s many caves. Ryan entered the cave to try and find the fugitive, and never came back out. None of the others in the group were game to look for him.

The list of disappearances goes on; a pair of police officers of whom one disappeared and the other made it out alive but was driven insane; two cavers and the trackers who were sent to find them afterwards; a backpacker named Harry Page, the only person whose body has been recovered from the mountain, though his cause of death was unknown.

While it’s incredibly hard to find solid evidence for many of these alleged disappearances happening, the locals tend to believe it. With a place like Black Mountain, it doesn’t seem unlikely. The mountain is crawling with snakes, spiders and bats, and the caves within the mountains most likely contain sudden drop offs or pockets of bad air.
 Many people even report a feeling of anxiety and fear when looking at the mountain and its strangely unnatural-seeming formation of boulders. The wind and the shifting of boulders is said to create an unearthly noise, sounding like moans or mournful cries. Pilots that pass over the mountain have also reported strange turbulence and magnetic disturbances, and most pilots now avoid the area if they can.

• Aliens. It's got to be aliens. Or a subterranean city, the remnants of a lost human civilisation. Or maybe degenerated Silurians. Or a spatial anomaly.
  

6. The Missing Patanela

The Patanela is Australia’s very own maritime mystery (well at least since the HMAS Sydney was found). This 19-metre steel schooner vanished without a trace while approaching Sydney Harbour in calm seas on 08NOV1988, leaving behind only a barnacle-encrusted lifebuoy and a message in a bottle.

The Patanela was known to be a sturdy little craft, having undertaken a number of Antarctic voyages and global circumnavigations under difficult conditions.

Michael Calvin was one of the crewmen aboard the yacht; the last communication from the vessel came was a letter posted by Calvin at Port Lincoln to his twin sister.
 The ship was headed up the coast on its way to Airlie beach, where Calvin and his friend John Blisset had been promised use of the Patanela for a charter business.
A few weeks later, however, the boat simply disappeared in waters off Sydney. No mayday call was received and no distress flares were sighted, no debris nor bodies turned up on Sydney’s shores; it simply vanished without a trace.


Almost 20 years after the ship’s disappearance, on New Years Eve 2007, a couple on a beach at Eucla, near the border between WA and SA, found a hand-written message in a bottle. Dated just a week or two before the disappearance, the note read:

    Hi there. Out here in the lonely Southern Ocean and thought we would give away a free holiday in the Whitsunday Islands in north Queensland,
     Australia. Our ship is travelling from Fremantle, Western Aust, to Queensland to work as a charter vessel.



The only other trace of the Patanela ever found was a barnacle-encrusted lifebuoy found floating off Terrigal almost seven months after the disappearance.
Over the years there have been numerous rumoured sightings, leading to theories of hijacking and foul play, but nothing has ever been confirmed about the fate of the Patanela and her crew. The Panatela was fitted with more than enough safety devices – radar, satellite navigation, watertight components, lifeboats and an electronic radio beacon that would signal the Panatela’s position for 48 hours in case of an emergency.







[1] Anyone who's familiar with the works of that excellent Australian science fiction writer Arthur Bertram Chandler (wiki) will get the reference.

[2] Australian nationalists? Republicans? Vietnam veterans of the 'Long Tan' rather than 'Into The Light Green' persuasion perhaps? Or the Meddling Monk (though he's a bit obvious; better keep him out of sight). Maybe CSIRO has a time travel research project? Lots of empty space in Australia, and the surrounding Pacific, for a crashed time/space ship...

[Catsmate]

The 'Somerton Man' is being exhumed.

What terrible secrets may be unearthed? And who's going to try and prevent the exhumation? Are he, and some of the other mysterious bodies, actually time travellers?