Larrimah, page 21
But a short time later, the place burnt down. It happened on the only night of the year Karl and Bobbie—the fire-and-rescue crew—were out of town. A lot of people believe the fire was deliberately lit, so we track down the police record, which says the fire began at 2 am but wasn’t reported until morning. By then, the extent of the damage meant investigators couldn’t prove anything. No one received a pay-out and Di went bankrupt. ‘Everything I had put into Larrimah, I lost. For five years I was on the bones of my arse and I had to start again. All that hard work …’ The sentence trails off as Di thinks of what could have been.
Our file of peripheral information on Paddy grows, too. Once, the Irishman had been eating dinner at a pub with a bunch of mates and a bat landed in his meal: ‘He just picked it up and threw it out and kept eating!’ his friend Ray Aylett tells us. Megan Ashley, who lived two doors up from Paddy in Daly Waters, says he taught all her kids to crack whips. But some stories are dark. One man tells us he’s heard Paddy was twisted up in a $20 million drug bust at Hidden Valley Station, about 100 kilometres south of Larrimah, back in the 1990s.
We look it up and it’s a sensational case involving an ex-footy star, the Calabrian mafia and, allegedly, the mail-bomb killing of a police officer investigating the case. ‘Call this bloke, he knows something about it,’ our contact says. We dial the number and the phone call lasts one hour and forty-nine minutes and is hugely entertaining, but the guy denies knowing anything about Paddy being involved in the drug bust. Later, a woman tells us that she thinks some drug dealers Paddy dobbed in during his Heartbreak days had been biding their time and finally came for him. More than one person suggests Paddy was tangled up in the IRA.
These are, in some ways, far-fetched theories—but a certain kind of lawlessness attaches itself to the remote communities Paddy spent his life in. Outside the reach of phone reception and a consistent police presence, a person could easily get wrapped up in someone else’s wrongdoing.
Another woman tells us she heard a guy was paid to ‘knock Paddy off ’. She was sceptical at first, she says, but around the time she heard the rumour, the man suddenly came into a heap of money. ‘He was telling everyone he won forty thousand dollars on Keno up in Darwin,’ she says. We add it to our list of things to run by police.
Of course, these are theories—rabbit holes that begin with the words ‘what if ’ and end with murky frustration. We find ourselves obsessing, going over and over the possibilities, asking questions we cannot answer. Questions no one can answer.
20
A family full of Patricks, a horny border collie and a man without a past
For police, Kellie has always been the key to the case. It’s partly because if Paddy had met with misfortune, they were sure she’d have barked or come back to the house or the pub. ‘If we find Kellie, we’ll find Paddy and vice versa,’ Detective Sergeant Matt Allen had told us, early on. ‘They must be together somewhere.’
It’s a comforting idea—that whatever happened, the two of them were together. But as the case progressed, the police started to consider the possibility that Paddy and Kellie had been separated. They’d even had a few tip-offs about Kellie being alive. So they put call-outs in the media for anyone who might have picked up a young kelpie on the highway, thinking she was a stray. Kellie was distinctive: reddish brown, tan socks, two tan spots in place of eyebrows, light patches on her chest, a pale tip on her tail. Police hoped she might turn up at a shelter or at someone’s house—even someone adopting her from the side of the road would give police a point of reference. The place where the dog was picked up might be a place they could search for Paddy.
‘To cause harm to an animal, let alone a human, is obviously very untoward,’ Detective Sergeant Matt Allen had told us. ‘There’s a possibility that somebody who was involved may have dropped Kellie at an animal shelter, not just in the Territory, I’m talking anywhere in Australia.’
It’s something we’d considered, too, right back at the beginning of all this. Four months after the disappearance, we’d taken out a map and marked all the towns on the Stuart Highway. Then we’d looked at other likely routes across to Queensland and Western Australia. We pinpointed the animal shelters in those towns and enlisted some young journalists to make inquiries. Between them they called, emailed and messaged more than fifty shelters. They found a dog that looked a lot like Kellie in a shelter in Tennant Creek, 500 kilometres south of Larrimah, who’d been dropped in around the time Paddy went missing. But she wasn’t Kellie.
Even now, more than two years on, we search for Kellie—at every dog park, on every shelter website, at every beach we visit. We can’t help it. She’s everywhere and nowhere. Just like Paddy.
More than a few people have told us Paddy warded off questions about Ireland with the throwaway quip ‘Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes’, or a phrase like ‘I was poor and it was cold’. So when it comes to Paddy’s youth, there’s very little to go on.
Police must have had the same challenge. Anything before Paddy’s arrival in Australia is a black hole.
We have a few clues, though. The first is a copy of Every Man and His Dog, which features Paddy and his previous dog, Rover, on the cover. There’s something strange about seeing the image, immortalised in hardcover: the pair of them sitting on the steps of the Pink Panther Hotel. Paddy’s clutching a XXXX Gold and wearing a straw hat, staring straight at the camera with the faintest of smiles. Rover, a handsome black-and-white border collie, is grinning beside him. And together, with the chaos of the highest bar in the Territory behind them, it’s like they’ve captured the essence of the Australian outback. It’s not surprising that, of all the pairings, it’s Paddy and Rover who made the book’s cover.
But the real goldmine is what’s inside. A one-page story about Paddy’s life, written in first person. Mostly, Paddy uses the opportunity to talk about Larrimah, the Pink Panther, his womanising, Rover, and Rover’s womanising. ‘Oh yeah, I’ve had plenty of women in my life, no dramas,’ Paddy told the writer, David Darcy. ‘But, I’ve never settled down. I just done the rounds a few times. I’ve had a lot of different kinds of women … don’t worry about that. Yeah, there was a lot going on in the sixties. Some pretty wild stuff. No, I’ve never had a missus, just me dog, no dramas.’
Paddy also details the lengths Rover would go to for love (or lust), including a story about the randy dog who, over the course of a week, walked more than 100 kilometres back and forth to a nearby cattle station to mate with two dogs, resulting in twenty puppies. ‘So he sowed his seeds, all right, no dramas,’ Paddy reckoned.
The glossy photograph of the grinning bachelor and his bachelor dog is at odds with Paddy’s unsavory words. But we set our feelings aside in favour of the discovery of something we can rely on. Dates. Times. The name of a ship. Paddy’s account in the book pins down his arrival in Australia to a 1966 voyage to Darwin on the Fairstar as a ten-pound Pom. He would have been nineteen years old.
At this point, the idea of a clear-cut, verifiable fact makes us euphoric—shipping records are something that can be checked. But we search the archives for Moriartys and Paddys and Patricks and Patrick Josephs (his middle name), and even people with birthdates that match Paddy’s, on the Fairstar, which did the voyage to Australia in 1964 and 1965, but not 1966. And then we download the Fairstar manifests and go through them, line by line. He is not there.
We check other ships that arrived in 1966, and then just other ships that arrived in the 1960s. We consider any boat docked in Darwin, then Perth or Adelaide, too. We search Moriarty passengers for two decades, on any ship, docking in any Australian port.
Finally, we find a 1972 arrival card matching Paddy’s birthdate (30 March 1947)—the handwriting even looks like the samples of Paddy’s writing we have from the progress association documents. It’s a re-entry card, meaning he was ‘returning to live in Australia’ not ‘settling in Australia’. He listed his occupation as ‘forklift driver’, his country of birth as ‘Limerick Eire’ (Ireland) and the most recent address as Harlesden, London.
It’s hard to know what to make of the absence of an initial entry card, though. It’s possible that Paddy really did arrive in 1966 and there’s just no record of it—a mistake on the manifest, perhaps, or maybe he jumped ship. Possibly he travelled at some earlier date. It’s even possible he didn’t move until 1972 and was mistaken about the arrival date. But it’s a weird mistake to make. Back then, migrants spent a minimum of five weeks (sometimes months) on cruise liners to Australia; many describe it as the most exciting, albeit nauseating, time of their life. The name of the boat that gave you safe passage to your new country and the year you came are the sort of thing you remember.
If Paddy had lied about the date he arrived in Australia and the ship he came on, it’s hard to imagine why. Presumably, a person might fudge the year or means of arrival to cover shame or wrongdoing, or to make it an easier story to tell. It’s also possible to lie to create an alibi, of sorts.
Over the years, a few people have raised the possibility that Paddy was somehow connected with The Troubles, a period of unrest in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s into the 1990s. It’s a time synonymous with bombings and violence. Is it possible, people have asked us, that a young man with a past marred by poverty and injustice might somehow have been involved with the IRA, or the violence more broadly?
There’s no way to chase this up, though police have tried. There’s no evidence Paddy was linked to the IRA—he was from the south of Ireland, for a start. For a moment, we think we’re on to something when we discover that Harlesden, the London address on the re-entry card, had a strong Irish community and a bridge there was blown up by the IRA. But that happened in 1939, well before Paddy was born.
So we keep asking Paddy’s friends, over and over—surely Paddy said something about his time in Ireland? Nobody remembers. There are people who spent years chatting to Paddy on the verandah of that struggling pink pub and never asked any personal questions. The people who did ask are vague on details. One woman tells us she thinks Paddy talked about coming out to the Territory from Ireland on some teenage work program, only to be stationed in a place so grim and difficult that he escaped, without even shoes on his feet. It was, perhaps, a version of the ‘oranges and sunshine’ promises made to UK orphans and children taken by social workers, who were instead subjected to abuse in workhouses and outback postings in terrible conditions, right up until the 1970s. But on second thought, the woman tells us, she’s not sure that story was Paddy’s—she knows a lot of outback blokes with Irish pasts. Maybe Paddy’s story was about how he worked on a ship to get here, because he couldn’t afford the ticket. ‘It’s one of the two stories, I think,’ the woman tells us. ‘But I couldn’t say which.’
So we go back further. We have a birth certificate, partly in Gaelic, with some details: Patrick Joseph Moriarty, born in Limerick, Ireland on 30 March 1947 to Mary Moriarty, of Abbeyfeale. He was born at Croom Hospital, the nearest maternity hospital to Abbeyfeale. No listed father. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get us to some relatives. And what we find is that Paddy has disappeared before, within a small village and a large, close-knit family.
For Francis Foley, it was a curious shock to see a relative he’d never heard of in the pages of the national paper. The story was everywhere—on the radio, in the streets, there was talk of it in all Abbeyfeale’s shops and pubs. ‘It’s strange, really, for a man who left Ireland with no one knowing anything about him, he ends up kind of famous.’
We catch Francis on a Zoom call, early in the morning before his day as a local councillor gets too busy. He’s a kind, soft-spoken man in glasses and a blue polo shirt, with short grey hair—we can’t see any sign of Paddy in his face.
Francis is happy to talk but doesn’t know how much he’ll have to tell us. Although he’s sure he’s related to Paddy—Paddy’s grandfather Patrick Moriarty would have been his grandmother Josie Moriarty’s brother—until Paddy went missing from Larrimah, Francis didn’t know he existed.
Francis lives in Abbeyfeale, in County Limerick. It’s a quiet village right on the border near County Kerry and a lot of his family live nearby—Francis is the eldest of seven children. The size of the family, and the tendency to use family names (for example, at least three Patricks), makes the genealogy hard to navigate.
Abbeyfeale is almost certainly where Paddy’s mother, Mary, grew up and lived but, although he knew of her, Francis never met Mary. He did meet Paddy’s grandfather (also named Paddy), a quiet man who cycled everywhere and liked his food and the odd pint of Guinness. He was a simple farming person; back in the 1950s and 1960s, the region was poor and life in the village was simple. People lived off the land and got around by horse or donkey cart. Even though Francis’s grandfather helped build the electrification tower, he died in 1974 at the age of seventy-four, never having experienced the wonder of walking into his house and turning on the light switch.
‘That makes us sound very backward here but we weren’t,’ Francis says. ‘It was just taking time for things to come through in certain parts.’
He speaks about the era with fondness but the story has all the gaps you’d expect for someone who was a child, more interested in games than his grandmother’s stories. He can pinpoint where Paddy should have been in the family, but it’s a picture that won’t shift into focus. Part of the problem, he thinks, was that Francis’s parents lived in Birmingham for a while, so they’d lost touch with some of the family in Abbeyfeale for a few years.
‘My grandmother, she was telling me stories. But you didn’t know the people so you wouldn’t retain it,’ he says, apologetic.
Over in Royston, England, Mae Screeney—a good-humoured young grandmother to four children under seven—was having a similar experience when the news of Paddy’s disappearance broke. She contacted police because she recognised Paddy’s mother’s name—Mary Theresa Moriarty—as her first cousin, the daughter of her oldest uncle, Patrick Moriarty (born 1897), who was one of fourteen children. Mary, one of three children, was born in 1921 and later in life went to live in the Channel Islands, where she remained until she died in 1995.
Mae’s family lived four miles away from Mary. Growing up, Mae’s uncle Patrick—Paddy’s grandfather—visited every Sunday evening. Mae’s late brother was also called Patrick. It’s a close community, where people notice things about each other; Mae is sure if there had been another Paddy Moriarty in the area she’d have known about it. So, although Paddy was certainly born to Mary, it’s unlikely he grew up with his mother.
In the years since Paddy’s disappearance, Mae has tried to unpick how one of her relatives might have been born without the family knowing. The conclusion she’s come to is that Paddy was probably born out of wedlock—the birth certificate supports this, with no father listed—and then fostered out or sent to a care home; adoption wasn’t legal in Ireland until the 1950s.
‘I feel sad that my cousin Mary might never have seen her son after his birth,’ Mae tells us, over email. And, as if to make up for it, between school plays and Santa visits with her grandchildren, Mae’s been hounding adoption agencies for records. The whole, huge family is invested—Paddy has ten aunts and uncles living in America, plus fifty-two first cousins and 152 second cousins and umpteen third cousins. Mae can’t bring Paddy home or make up for the way the past seems to have disappeared him, twice over. But she hopes to resurrect something from his lost past and she also hopes he’ll get justice.
Francis agrees it’s possible, if not likely, that Paddy was fostered out. Back then, plenty of things were talked about only in whispers, or not at all. Certainly, the idea of a child born out of wedlock would have been taboo in Ireland. Young women were sent away to have babies, and what became of those children in various institutions is a national scandal the extent of which is only just coming to light. ‘A lot of women suffered a lot of their lives wondering what happened to their babies, what happened to their children,’ Francis tells us. ‘It was unbelievable.’
But if that’s the case, it’s a lead that’s almost impossible to chase. According to a genealogist we contact, orphanage records from the 1940s and 1950s are not available and so much of the process was unofficial in those days, anyway. Paddy could have been boarded out to live with a farming family and might have had little or no contact with his mother.
‘I suppose it’s tragic, really, it’s sad that he just disappeared off the face of the earth,’ Francis says. ‘But then when you look at the other side, tragedy brings something else out of it as well. He’d have been lost completely. We’d have known nothing about him. Unfortunately, there are the circumstances of him going missing, but I know of him now and I never would have known about Paddy Moriarty. So I suppose the quirky thing about it, because of the tragedy of the whole situation, we know about him.’
However poetic Francis’s take is on family ‘finding’ Paddy, Paddy’s unknown early years eat at us. How can a whole person be a secret? Someone must have lived with Paddy, gone to school with him, worked with him. So we get in touch with Irish journalists and radio stations, hoping that someone will come out of the woodwork. A few Irish people get in touch to say they did meet him—not in Ireland but in Larrimah or out at Heartbreak Hotel. It’s always the same story: great bloke, good storyteller. Had an excellent night. He was a totally memorable character. But when it comes to details, there’s nothing.
It seems impossible, but it’s not. It’s just impossibly sad. What Mae suspects happened is this: Paddy lived in another area entirely, or under the shadow of another family’s name—at least until he needed a passport.
In the end, it’s not Paddy’s family who fills in some of the blanks in his Irish past. We hear it from Paddy himself.
