From the Edge by Mark Mckenna

Author:Mark Mckenna [McKenna, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522862607
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Yaburara Heritage Trail, in the hills above Karratha, 2015

Sholl wasted no time in requesting a ‘few of the inhabitants of the town’ to meet with him and ‘discuss matters’. Reconnaissance parties were sent out promptly. The wealthy squatter Withnell and two other men left Roebourne that afternoon, ‘intending to ascertain the fate of Jermyn and warn the other men’. Sholl started at sunrise the next day, travelling with his son Horace and a ‘“Swan River” native, Jimmy’. The two parties met near Jermyn’s tent four hours later. They unsaddled their horses about three hundred metres from the murder scene and walked in carrying the coffins. The first body they saw was Breem’s, ‘about 50 yards to the westward of the tent’. ‘He was lying on his face with his arms stretched in front of him … [his] hands being clenched’. The spear that killed him was ‘broken off under his left arm’ having ‘penetrated his heart’. His remains were so badly ‘decomposed’ that his clothing had ‘been burst by the swollen body’ and ‘too much distended’ to enable Sholl to ‘put them in the coffin’. He had no choice but to bury Breem’s remains on the spot. Griffis’s decomposed, ‘naked’ body was ‘lying at the western entrance of the tent’. He had been so badly ‘mutilated’ that there was ‘no vestige of a face below the eyes’. Sholl wrapped his body in a ‘boat sail’ and placed it in the coffin. He then dealt with Peter’s ‘much battered’ body, which lay nearby, his ‘face (crawling with worms) a mass of corruption’. Peter was covered with ‘bags’ and placed in a coffin. The ‘stench’ from the bodies was so ‘dreadful’ it made them ‘all sick’. All of this Sholl reported in clinical detail, reading the landscape strategically, like a military officer in the heat of battle:

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