The ghost road of Colac

I'm Andrew Rules, Life and Crimes. A story that's always fascinated me, although I have not written about it myself until this month, is the story of the killing of Huey Wilson just outside Kolak, back in nineteen seventy six. Now that effectively is a lifetime ago. It happened at the very beginning of when I started work, which is a long time ago. Huey Wilson was a World War II veteran of fifty seven years old in that year, which is interesting in itself because there are no World

War Two veterans left. Essentially, they're all north of one hundred and I don't know that there's any of them alive. But he back in the seventies was one of thousands of World War Two veterans who were still around, and Huey was a local boy from Kolak. He was one of a big family. I think he was one of ten kids, something like that, big family, and he joined up to go to World War Two. I think he might have been engaged to a local girl. But anyway, when he got back from war service, life had sort

of gone past him. I think his fionce or his girlfriend had married someone else, and he basically just settled down into a very quiet life and he was sort of sidelined in a way. In a way that happened to some veterans, guys that have been the army, They were affected by and they never really resumed civilian life with any great enthusiasm or success. And here he was not particularly eccentric. He wasn't a hermit. Really, he wasn't a strange derelict. He was just a local guy that

people knew and quite liked. Quite a pleasant man, quite a kind man. Nobody said a word against him. He wasn't dishonest. He didn't light fires or steel washing off the line or any of that stuff. But what he did do just to the south of Kolak, in the foothills of the otways is and was a lot of bush, thick bush, and what he did was set up camp in that bush, and basically he became a stationary swagman. He was a swagman who did not walk the highways

and byways traveling from Downtotown. What he would do was camp at one spot where he had a bit of a tent set up with Heshan and all the rest of them, a camp stretcher and a little fire to cook stuff and make a cup of tea. And he would walk into Kolak a few kilometers decent walk might have been five K, six K, seven k's whatever, And he would carry a sugar bag of sugar bags, a light Hessian bag and he'd take that with him and he'd buys some supplies, maybe couple of times a week.

This is the road. Incidentally, he would walk down the road to Kolak, the same road where Cliffy Young back in the day used to run. He would run to Kolak from Beach Forest, which is a hell of a long way, and he would run into Kolak and then run back out to Beach Forest. And I presume that sometimes a young cliff Young would trot past a middle aged Huey Wilson, which is just one of those funny little quirks of history. So Huey minded his own business.

He lived along there for decades, basically three decades, I guess. If you go from nineteen forty six to nineteen seventy six, that's thirty years, and nearly all of that time he was camped up in the bush, well known around the town. People didn't mind him, they knew who he was, He talked to people. There are photographs of him at Christmas time having a drink with his family, his sister or his brother in law, of that sort of stuff. Had

quite a few relatives around the place. As I say, he wasn't regarded as particularly strange and certainly never a problem, not menacing or anything like that, so no one had a reason to hurt him. It's the point we're making now.

On this night, a Saturday evening, September the eleventh, nineteen seventy six, it would seem that Hugh he's been down to town and he's walking back up to the bush, I think the district on that edge of like he's called Brungarook, and it's up past the golf club, and the racecourse and up into the hills where these days there's a few lifestyle blocks and farm lots and that sort of stuff. But back in the seventies pretty well farming country by and large, and the holdings were probably

bigger then and fewer people. Are much less traffic and all that. So about seven o'clock on this evening, and that's about an hour after sunset, so if there's any sort of residual evening light, it's getting pretty dark by the time this happened. It probably happened around seven pm

or a bit later that evening. He's walking up through Burungaruk and he's at a stretch of road just before it hits the bush, before the Bitchumin road runs into the bush, and his paddocks on one side, on the west side and on the east side on his left as he walks uphill is the old brickworks, the old Coolak brickworks, and I think at that stage it was

still operating. I think, not that it matters. And he's trudging up the road with his sugar bag, with his dusty, old, dirty, old coat that used to wear and all the rest of it. And suddenly and we're we'reconstructing what happened here, but we know pretty well what happened. A car speeds up behind him. Now I don't know if it's headlights were on or not, but you can guarantee it was going pretty fast because they had it been going slower, the driver would have had time to react and dodge him.

As it turns out, it's going fast, it hit Huie Huie. And I know this because I've been close to someone who was hit by a car once, and it is amazing how people hit by a car are thrown in the air like a crashed desk dummy. They go up in the air and they somersault and they come down in a very ugly, untidy heap, and they do not fall softly, and they did not fall in a straight line. They are smashed up like a rag doll, and their arms and legs are everywhere, which is a relevant point

to this story. It would appear that the unknown driver of this white Valiant police car, let's say it, jumped out of the car and took a look at his victim. And it seems, and this is where we're getting into speculation, it seems made a terrible decision. It would appear that the driver of this police car probably wasn't supposed to be driving it that night. It would appear that the driver of this police car might not have wanted anybody to know that he was driving in that area at

that time. He may not have been supposed to be there. And the other concern here is he be facing a culpable driving charge, probably particularly if it had any drinks earlier in that day and in the nineteen seventies on Saturdays and Saturday nights. I'm here to say that most rural males, particularly police, probably had had a drink or three or five on a Saturday afternoon in some setting or another, if not at the football, then at a barbecue, or at the pub, or watching the races at the pub,

whatever it might be. So these every chance that this driver also had that incentive not to be caught because they probably had a drink which would play against them if they went to court. So, whatever the reasons were, this driver did not call in on the police radio to say of struck a pedestrian, did not call for an ambulance, did not go for help, did not pick up the stricken man and drag him into the car, and drive down to the hospital to try and save

his life. At the very best he left him. But the rumors and whispers suggests that this actually got out and decided to do something that he and many others have done with injured kangaroos or injured wombats over the years. In bush country. When you injure a kangaroo, beyond all help you dispatch them, you kill them, essentially and usually by hitting them in the head with a heavy object

which people used to carry in their cars. And the suspicion is that poor Huey Wilson was struck in the head with a heavy tool of some sort, and one with a bit of an edge on it, because it left a very sharp wound in the head, which people, including a coroner, thought was not consistent with being struck by a car. The car had hit him at a certain level below the torso and thrown him in the air and so on, but it looked as if his head had been deliberately struck to finish him off. That

is that the heart of this most terrible story. The suspicion is that a driver had got out and killed this middle aged man rather than help save him. Because the driver in this case, wanted to save their own neck. They had other problems and they wanted to avoid it, and they made this terrible decision in a matter of seconds. Now, how do we know about this, Well, Hughey Wilson is found early next morning, I think at dawn, about six o'clock,

six thirty. I think a lady's driving down from Baron Garrook and she sees the body lying beside the road. She goes down or calls whatever, She gets to a phone or she drives to the police and Colac police turn up. Now the policeman on duty, he is a fellow called Peter Gonon and Peter Gournon at this stage was a twenty three year old constable. From eleven pm

until seven am. He was the watchhouse keeper who was basically the only go on duty apart from another placeman called Gary Thayer who was out driving the divvy van patrolling in the divvy van. Gunham was on duty. Goonan is sent or called or whatever, goes up, jumps in the car, drives up to Baron Grook, takes five minutes and he inspects the body of Huey Wilson and what he found was interesting in view of what was later thought about this. He found it a little disconcerting. He thought,

what's wrong with this scene? What's wrong with what's happened here? If this bloke's when hit by a car, why is he laying out so straight and neat and true, sort of beside the road in a straight line, I think, with his arms beside his body and his feet together. And he was laid out as if he'd been laid out ready to put in a coffin. And even though he was only a young copper, he realized that if you've been struck by a car and left the way

you fell, you don't look like that. You don't fall dead, straight and neat and rick and mortis had already started to set in. And this Huey Wilson, his body had stiffened sufficiently straight that he could fit into a coffin. And this, I think stuck in Peter Gounon's mind. He thought, this isn't right. There's something wrong. He's been arranged. That body's been arranged. Now was it arranged here where he fell? Or has he been taken away and then brought back?

Because if he was taken away, maybe somebody thought they were going to bury him or get rid of him, and then they've thought about it perhaps and brought him back and dump him beside the road. Again, these are all valid speculations in the case of Peter Godon. Now Peter Gournon, as a said, he was only twenty three. He is quite concerned about this, the irregularities about this matter, and he made his concerns felt. But he's only young. He's very junior at the station, and he soon realizes

that there's a bit of pushback about this. Pettigoon is not happy about that, and some other people are not happy either, because the rumor goes around Kalak that strange things happened on that Saturday night. Later that night, a man working at the local cream factory and I think it's a cream factory and a nice creamery actually now

owned by Buller Dairy Foods. I think he was a security guard or similar, and he saw a tow truck come down the main street which is the Princess Highway with what he thought was a white police car on the back and disappear into the big roller door entry into a local panel shop. The panel shop is called lane Way Panels. Was called and it had the unique advantage for Colak Police of having a very close relationship

with them. In fact, the locals, being local and funny guys, they called lane Way Panels Coolak West Police Station because so many of the coppers at Kolak would go down to Laneway Panels where they would nighttime might have a drink.

They would perhaps or night shift meet there for coffee or beer and have something to eat, and many of them were very close to the proprietor or proprietors of lane Way Panels because of course Kolak is a highway town on the Princess Highway and in those days in the seventies, it was peak road crash time in Australia.

It's when people were crashing cars all the time. And if you were a copper out on the highways, you know, several times in a week probably there'd be some sort of car crash and if you were friendly with the local panel Better guy or one of them, if they were competitive, you would tip off their tow truck and that tow truck would come out, get the job, take the car back into the panel shop, and of course that panel Better would get the big insurance job and

make money by repairing the car. And this symbiotic relationship between coppers and panel betters existed. I'm here to say in every major regional town, probably in Australia, anywhere big enough to have a dominant Panel Better would have a relationship with the local police. They'd either be very friendly with them or they'd be not friendly with them because

another Panel Better was friendly with them. So in Kolak there are actually two Panel Better shops and the other one were on the outer with the police because they weren't slinging the police cash or beer or whatever it was that the police were getting. Of course, this symbiotic relationship, you know, it's become social. You know. They were friendly,

literally friendly with each other. They might have been involved in footy or cricket teams with each other, the Panel Better guys and the police and some of the police being handy blugs always out to make an extra dollar, as many of them did. They were young blugs buying houses. Some of them would actually do work there as casual workers. They'd help rub down cars and they would work on

their own vehicles. If they had a scrape or a scratch, they'd work on their own cars and spray paint them whatever,

and everybody got along very well. But of course the dark side of this could be if a policeman runs over a citizen in a police car that he wasn't supposed to be driving that night, then it might be taken to the panel shop and they will work on it all night, and they will get it fixed up enough to go back to the police station, and he put in the police garage or the police car yard, and the keys from that valiant sedan would be then put back on the key rack or key cabinet inside

the police station as if nothing had ever happened, Please move on. That is the local rumor in a nutshell. But Peter Gunnon was a bit different. Peter Gunan was a local boy. He wasn't a copper from somewhere else. He was from a solid dairy farming family just outside the town. His wife was Heather, was also from another dairy farming place just outside town. They were really strong

local family. They were really strong local families, both of them, and they had the sort of values that come with that. They believed in justice and doing the right thing, and they would have grown up there knowing Wilson's, various Wilson family members, and young Peter Gurnon thought it's stank that this might have been what happened. And of course he heard rumors and he would hear whispers both in and outside the police station. He might have contributed to some

of them rumors and whispers. But the feeling was that early on that evening of September the eleventh, the Saturday night, that a particular policeman who was off duty at the time, it is alleged, had come in because he wanted to use a car to do something. Maybe he was supposed to be walking the dog, or maybe he was supposed

to be playing golf or whatever. But the reality is that he came into the police station and he took the keys to the white ves in sedan which wasn't being used then, and he jumped in it and went off to do whatever it was he wanted to do. Now it's open to speculation what that would be, but there are those who would suggest, well, he was visiting a woman other than his wife or something like that,

and that would account for a few things. A driving fast because he was in a hurry one way or the other to go there or to come back be it would account for him not wanting to be caught at the scene of an accident, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong car. It would give him motive to do what it is alleged happened to Huey Wilson, that is that he was not only

run over but then killed. So this dreadful rumor, it's like something out of the Deep South in America, has hungover that town of Kolak and that whole district for decades, and it's very well known down there, and people to

this day a very quiet about it. I know this because I actually went down there at least a month ago, it might be five weeks, and it was a very hot day, and I went up to the scene of the incident, and I was able to reconstruct exactly where the body was because I'd seen the old photos with Peter Goo and the policeman in them pointing at the ground, and I could line up the road signs. Still to this day, you can line up certain road signs and

fences and work it out where it happened. And I went down into the town and I went around to visit a woman who it is said had driven past that night and seen momentarily seen a white police car white police sedan at that spot. Her statement, I'm told by a former policeman who has come to me about this. He said that her statement was altered. They took out the paragraph that referred to her seeing that car at

the scene. Note for that lady at her most excellent and very neat tidy house in the local Housing Commission area. She would win an award for a tidy house. I think she looked highly organized the person I would think, but she wasn't answering her door that day. I think she was out somewhere and I went back several times and I left a note, but she didn't call me back, and obviously doesn't want anything to do with this because

it has been for her a dark shadow. I found other people who didn't want to talk much about it, and there were other people who didn't want to be found. And it's intriguing that at this distance, after all these years, that so many people are still so nervous of saying anything about it. This includes the former policeman who's talked to me about it, a policeman who went and worked

there at coolak around this time. He always thought it was very smelly, very wrong, and even now what is it forty eight years later when I met him to talk about it, he was very anxious that we'd not be anywhere visible to anybody who might be watching us, which I thought was interesting that he still worried about what he sees as the police brotherhood causing trouble for

the likes of him. When I set out to investigate this story back early in the new year, I thought I must track down Peter goon Peter Goonan, the honest copper, Peter Gounon, the copper who over the years at least twice has sought out help from the media. He was the subject of an Australian story on the ABC. He also made a series of allegations which were the basis I think of our fresh inquest to Huey Wilson's death back in the early two thousands. One way and another,

there's been at least two sets of inquiries into this. Interestingly, the police internal investigations units of more recent years. By that I mean in the early two thousands were quite concerned about this and had a real red hot go at it. Trying to get people to tell them the truth about what might have happened. And those internal investigators, I think they had a pretty genuine go at it,

and they've got a real good idea who thereafter. They believe that it was a particular officer who was driving the car that night. Lame May Panels, of course, are sort of innocent bystanders in this business in a sense. All they've done is help somebody fix a car up. But they didn't actually go looking for people to be run over, So they've been dragged into it through their association with the police. In this story, the bad guy

is a particular placement. It would appear that this car, the white car, was fixed that night and was taken back to the police station, as we know when an inquest was finally called or redone a second in quest. Perhaps several people gave sworn evidence, and most of them said they didn't know anything about it. They really didn't know. They can't remember a car being repaired, they can't remember anything.

It's all rumors and nonsense, etc. But one Panel Better, former panel Better, gave evidence that he was called in to work on that Saturday night and that he worked on a white Valiant police car. I think the coroner was able to deduce that Hughey Wilson was run over and killed by persons unknown, but that some of the injuries suffered by that deceased were not consistent with being

run over only. It seemed to me, after I'd been to Kolak back in the New year, early in the new year a few weeks ago, that I should track down Peter Goonon and I knew he was in Queensland. In fact, I knew he had been last known around Harvey Bay, and I looked up a business he had up there, a caravan storage business. I rang it and they said, oh, he hasn't been at this place for twelve years or something like that. He's retired somewhere, and he was very hard to track and I thought, oh, well,

I'll try and find him. I've got relatives at Harvey Bay. I'll try and track him down. I rang the relatives and they couldn't find him easily at least. And then just before I sat down to write this story, and before I sat down to make this podcast, I googled up his name just to see if there'd been any change, and there had been. While i'd been doing this story.

Peter Goonan had died. He died in Harvey Bay in the first week of February, and this week I had the pleasure, i guess, or the honor, to talk to his widow, Heather, and she spoke to me very warmly and openly about her husband. She said that he was a good and decent man. They had met when they're on the school bus of school kids, when they were teenagers. They got married young, they had two daughters. They lived

a happy life in many ways. And yet the shadow of this thing had hung over Peter because he'd taken on the bad guys. He tried to tell the truth, He tried to expose the truth. He tried to get the system to do the right thing and investigate the internal affairs people to investigate and find out what really happened. And what he got for his troubles, By and large, apart from some pretty sympathe that media coverage and good on him for that, he got the cold shoulder from

other police. He got sent to Coventry, He was the target of rumors and innuendos. He got shunned, he got ostracized. The classic stuff that happens when an outlier in the group stands apart from the group. This can happen a lot in groups like the police, and that is what happened to him. And his wife confirmed to me that Peter had left the police force in nineteen seventy nine, only three years after the death of Hughie Wilson. So he's still a young man. He was only twenty six.

And I said, what did you do? She said, well, we stayed around Kolak, that's where we came from. We had deep roots in the community and we started a business. We had quite a good business there. But after ten years, in nineteen eighty nine, we decided to quit Kolak, quit Victoria and go to Queensland. And that is when that couple and their little girls went to Queensland and they started other businesses up there. And Peter Gounon never really

let it go. He pursued it at least twice. He caused media to reinvestigate it, he caused the police at some level to reinvestigate it. But the result to date has been zilch Huey Wilson an Australian citizen, a brother, a son who went to war in the nineteen forties, came back, lived a strange and lonely life, but never hurt anyone, and he was run down like a dog or a kangaroo, and somebody got away with that, and it always angered Peter Gournon that that had happened. And

Peter Gunon died relatively young. He died fairly, suddenly, unexpectedly, at the age of seventy one, and his wife didn't quite say so, but she implied that the stress and strain of the whole Huey Wilson saga had been a dark shadow on her husband's life, and in fact, in the death notice that she put in her local paper in Harvey Bay, she finished her little death notice with an epigram which comes from a song, and the line is this because it's a bittersweet symphony, that's life, and

that is from a modern hymn. Some people call it. That is the life that Peter Goonon led, because he had the nerve and the guts to try and do the right thing.