'x' Marks Spot In The Remote Gumble Scrub
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 12, 2001
One morning in February, the man from the Gumble scrub turned up on Marj Bollinger's doorstep.
Living on a property abutting the 1400-hectare patch of inhospitable bush west of Orange, in New South Wales, this middle-aged woman had tried hard to be a good neighbor to the swagman-like recluse.
His visit was a surprise, but not an unpleasant one, and she was not alarmed.
Momentarily, she failed to recognise him. He seemed older than previously, his formerly wild dark hair and unkempt beard grown distinctly more grey.
Where others had noticed and ignored him, a year earlier Mrs Bollinger had given him a lift and tried to entice him to come to live in a shed on her 400-hectare property, Glenelga, a sweeping spread with a view of 1397-metre Mount Canobolus.
Steel posts had been stolen from Glenelga's fence line in the scrub (although she did not for a moment suspect him), and she was looking for a caretaker.
In a brief conversation in the car he politely declined her offer. He was comfortable where he was, he said, with his huts and his garden in the middle of the scrub.
On this February morning, though, he asked for a piece of car tyre tube. And they had a short conversation about the weather.
``His comment was `It must have been pretty dry' because all the leaves had gone off his grapevine," Mrs Bollinger recalled this past week.
``I said `Yeah', and he said `I've been away' and I'm pretty sure he said he'd been to Melbourne."
Mrs Bollinger's recollection is the first public connection between Melbourne and the man from the Gumble scrub, otherwise known as the Killanbutta State Forest.
Although not yet officially identified by Victoria's homicide squad, he is suspected to be the Mr X charged with the murder of security guard Steven Rogers at an abortion clinic on July 16.
The alleged murderer was arrested at the scene, the Fertility Control Clinic in Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, after two men in the waiting room jumped him and another removed a rifle.
But he has refused attempts to get him to identify himself, including at his first court appearance, at which he was remanded to November 20.
Since then, police have released photographs of the man, who was wearing a goatee. ``I have seen the photos and there's a very strong resemblance," says Mrs Bollinger.
They have also shown several pieces of iron tubing allegedly found on the man at the time.
Acting on Victorian advice, the NSW police have extensively examined the Gumble scrub site, taking forensic evidence to compare with samples obtained from the man in custody in Melbourne. Yet no announcement has been made of conclusive identity.
Neither the homicide squad in Melbourne, nor Orange police in NSW, have revealed why they suspect the man from the Gumble scrub - it's not just on appearance, but what Molong's Senior Constable Kevin Beatty called ``just good policing".
The Sunday Age has no way of knowing whether they are right. But through independent research, it has become clear that the Gumble scrub man is Peter James Knight, 48, son of a former Molong farmer, Jim Knight, and his late wife, Beryl. The family is Roman Catholic, although not religious or church-going.
According to Peter Knight's cousin Austen Knight, a schoolteacher and farmer still at the Knight family's original home in Black Springs, south of Bathurst, his father Ron and Jim Knight parted ways in the late 1940s and Jim Knight bought the farm at Molong.
Peter Knight spent some of his childhood, with brother John, sister Helen and several other sisters, on his family's farm about three kilometres east of Molong, where their old timber home, now empty and in disrepair, still stands in a paddock.
According to local accounts, the family suffered because Jim Knight became a heavy drinker. People remember that John had to milk 40 cows before and after work.
Few, however, have any recollection of Peter Knight.
By the mid-1960s the farm was in other hands, and the Knights appear to have moved into Orange.
Another source has told The Sunday Age that a Peter Knight worked in the car industry in Victoria in the 1980s.
A few years back, this withdrawn figure appeared to reach out to others, urging a local supermarket proprietor not to sell cigarettes to children, and letter-boxing copies of a finely handwritten document grumbling about this and other matters. No one can remember precisely what they were.
Austen Knight has never met him but about six years ago he got a phone call from Peter Knight, complaining that the Forestry Commission might plant pines on land Jim Knight had inherited and then sold to the commission at Black Springs. That was precisely what happened.
Greenie or not, by all accounts Peter Knight has been out in the Gumble scrub for 10 years now, surviving on homegrown vegetables and fruit, plus flour in damaged bags scavenged from the Manildra tip.
A walk in the Gumble scrub is no walk in the park. Even on a nice day, there is something oppressive about its monotonous scribbly gums and infestations of black pine.
Although only 20 kilometres from Molong, it feels very remote and requires four-wheel-drive vehicles to traverse the tracks.
Peter Knight carved out his universe somewhere near the centre of its 1500 hectares, a 400-metre walk from vehicle access.
First you come across a surprisingly well-fenced 40-metre-square paddock, containing 10 fruit trees and a wired row of grape vines. There is impressive contouring and channelling of water run-off into a 10-metre-square dam.
The man shows a remarkable capacity for ingenuity. Galvanised iron has rarely served so many ends.
There are two structures, each rough-hewn from timber, and serving as a kitchen-sleeping area and a sort of lounge-room.
The site is strewn with boxes of recycled stuff, and among it is a fair quantity of steel tubing offcuts. He has fashioned a basic work bench in a dead tree.
It was from this base that Peter Knight would make incredible journeys, mostly on an old bicycle draped with bags, sometimes pushing an extraordinary bicycle-wheeled trolley capable of carrying the heavy loads of material he retrieved from tips.
He would ride straight past people on the road without so much as looking at them, and few have seen his face more than fleetingly.
In recent years, he was seen making at least a fortnightly day trip, there and back, across the hills and dales to Orange, where he would have lunch and a chat with the only people he really cared about - his old dad and his sister, Helen.
Today, Jim Knight, 88, is cared for in his Prince Street, Orange, brick home by Helen, and a professional carer. He appears to be quite unaware of the controversy swirling around his youngest child, although other members of the family in Orange refused to discuss their brother.
Still lucid in speech but uncertain of memory, Jim Knight says that it feels to him like ``three years" since he saw Peter ride in on his bicycle.
He is concerned he may have hurt himself. After all, he says, he had warned him often enough that it would only take an ankle sprain and he would be unable to pedal the 50 kilometres there and back.
Jim Knight says he doesn't know why his son took to the scrub, but is concerned to defend him. ``He isn't no bludger," he says, pointing out that Peter supported himself.
Molong, a sleepy town of 1700 or so, is intrigued but not overly impressed about becoming known as the base for a mysterious swaggie.
It sees itself as an old-fashioned law-abiding country town. Local newspaper editor Norm Bloomfield never locks his car in the main street. In fact, he says, until now there's only been one petty criminal, and when he arrives back in town, everyone locks up and keeps a look-out until he goes away again.
Even out on the farms near the Gumble scrub, some people leave the keys in the front door. But Marj Bollinger is not one of them.
© 2001 The Sunday Age