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Welcome back to the Missing Matter podcast. We have been busy since we started this. We've talked about rolling with the punches and all the hoops have had to go through to get the documentation doing the dog search of looking for my mum's body in two locations in northern New South Wales. We've headed to Japan and now we're
heading to London. We we're here for only a very short span of time, okay, So we are about twenty five minutes out of Gatwick, so we've been on the plane transiting now from Japan for close to twenty hours hits. I'm going to be one o'clock UK time when we touch down, which will be about nine o'clock Japan time and ten pm Australian time, so we're definitely on the other spectrum as of now for the rest of the
journey until we transit back. So we left Dubai and I've got air tags in every piece of my luggage and I'm quite concerned that my suitcase was actually showing that he was left behind, and I got a notification as we were on the tarmac saying it was left behind. So I'm really hoping like everything that my bag is actually on this flight and it's going to come off with me when we arrive, Otherwise I'm going to cry.
Fifteen after.
Three, thank you.
We've got two nights here. Of course it's raining again. And we arrived to our accommodation, which it was a little average, just a little.
There was these little bugs that were vine did well, you did so well with the coom.
So the problem with this accommodation was I had books somewhere right, and we kept bouncing. I'm like, are we going to be closer to the library? We closer to here? And I was really trying to go back and forth.
And what the problem that Joany and I came across with, well, what I came across with booking accommodation was we really wanted to have our own beds, which is understandable, and a lot of the places, if you were staying in a hotel, they actually didn't offer double beds in any of the hotels we were looking at all through Europe and the UK. So we opted to go to Airbnb's and this place had mold on the roof, like had really great reviews. One of those ones I had really
pretty pictures and things like that. The bedroom where this was the other bedroom. Johnny walked in and went, there is not I just cannot I'm staying in. It had a weird feeling about it.
It was weird.
It was like a closet, but it just had a weird vibe about it.
So I just chose to sleep on the cap. Joanie didn't sleep. She was up at all hours of the night, and I kept thinking to myself, You've got to sleep because we've just bounced from Tokyo and it's actually a long way, like we had to stop over in Dubai and by the time you get off, you get on a train. We were out at Gatwick, so because we were coming back through Gatwick, so we flew in there as well. Then we had to catch a train. We
had no idea what train we were getting on. We just jumped on a train randomly and hope it's the best. Got out at the Victoria station, we grabbed ourselves pass yes because Johnie had never been to London and I said, this is like a pasty place that's totally very UK, and she's like, yes, can we please get one? So we grabbed that, got now Uber and went to our accommodation, So that night was just really we walked around to try and get some food.
I thought it would be a nice little park walk, just to stretch our legs, and of course it was a cemetery.
And then the graves were like explode out of the ground. They were some big part. It was all a bit Gaulish, wasn't it. And the main two things we had to do in the UK was go to the British Library yep, and go to Sphinx.
Well, the British Library has a whole complete room which is just pretty much newspapers media. A lot of it is online, a lot of it is electronically resourced, so to be able to get in there and actually just putting keyword searchers rather than having to physically go through newspapers or physically flick through microfish, which you know, if you do that for too many hours, your eyes literally go square and blurry and you start having your eyelids
flutter and crazy stuff. So what we were going there for was to access all the British newspapers because that was a big hole within the whole scenario. Again, this was probably focusing more on Rick Bloom than your mum. So a lot of people had looked through newspapers in that ninety seven period, particularly around Tunbridge Wells Burwash, that Sussex kind of area, looking to see if there was
any clues. But when we heard the inquest that the family had lived in Burwash, that was of interest to me to see whether there was any media about things that had happened over the time when they were living there within Burwash itself, if there was anything sort of that we could query and take back to Australia, and also of course searching all the different aliases that Rick Bloom had had over the years to see whether there was anything.
Great. So we have eleven reading rooms here.
They're all divided by subject across three floors something particularly in the study.
Yeah, I think we've already worked out what floors and everything in me to okay.
Yeah, so first thing you have to do is pronounce and Loggia got through things, aren't yeh?
That you read the rules?
Yeah, we had loved that.
All right, good umbrellas leave the bag there? Yeah quit, Yeah, that pencil up.
You're all sat okay, perfect? I was as bad.
Well, I've been doing this for a long time.
Thank you.
Very much saving fantasy.
Then we go and we put our bags in at the cloak room. They give you a plastic bag. You can only fill that bag with clear things, so you can't have a pencil case. You've only got to have loose pens. It was pretty serious stuff. I was quite shocked at how serious it all was. And we come up. We're trying to open the massive door to get into the access area and it's all temperature controlled because of the stuff that's held in there, which is fascinating, right, Like,
I've learned so much in this journey. So we go in and we go up to the desk and you introduced to the guy that we've actually got a booking and that you had done what do you call it again.
Order it up, ordered up, you'd ordered up.
Some files and some things. And we rock up to the desk and the guy tells us sorry, there's been a cyber attack. You can't access anything.
To listening.
We just like to operate one of the computers just to online newspaper resources.
Unfortunately we have nor computer access.
They're all really.
Wow, is a criminal microphone?
Okay, okay, we'll just come from Australia to access what if you play that.
Is anything taking And she's lousially uk on the holiday and came back.
We're just trying to sort some thoughts over here. An individual she was with travel some other records, some data records.
For yeah, So we were just wanting to come in and actually access what sort of beefers that you were talking about nineteen ninety seventh, June ninety ninety seven.
Like, it's not a big window that we're looking for, so that.
We usually a digital microone. We lost Dools as well his own issues. There was a malicious say what's tape from a people buy just washing? Where are by the washers?
So that kind of left us in alert. My god, well, we had planned to go there for five hours. You were telling me it's going to take us five hours to get through this. We had everything ready ready to rock and roll, and it was really a case that we literally had to just go with some newspapers on microfish. So you and I sat there going through that. I remember finding things and we were looking for nineteen ninety seven. We weren't too worried about what had happened before that
or post. We were really just focusing very tightly on that to see what we could find. And I remember you were probably looking for any criminal activity that had been reported in the newspapers. Yes, I was sort of me being me. I was going, oh, that's when Lady Diana died, and there's the article. Like, the newspapers were obviously flooded with all of that, which happened just shortly after my mum had left to go overseas. I didn't know she was missing at that point.
We have reports from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales has been killed in a car accident. They were apparently being pursued by paparazzi on two motorcycles.
It was interesting. We walked away there feeling a little bit flat. Yeah, what we'd planned to do had been floundered by who would have thought a Russian cyber attack who went in and stole all their information. And he was telling us about, you know, how the staff had I'm like, why would they want to do this? And he said, oh, well, you know, people have to register to come into the place with their passports, their driver's license.
And I'm like, oh, great, so we've just given them all our information and you're telling me now that you've just been caught out with a cyber attack on a very high level, and hence it could be years before that information is allowed to be back online for them to actually fix it all. So I remember you saying to me, well, let's just go to Sphinx, it's down the road, and we were like, okay, we're on a mission.
So the other thing that we experienced, like you asked to order up some more information and the lady said to us, we can get it, but it's going to take two days, and we just didn't have two days because we were literally about to go to Amsterdam. So I remember we posted something. We must have posted something, and a few people said, hey, I'm in London. Let me know. I can always go back. If you miss out on something, I can always go back. So we might have to call on some of you guys.
So in regards to the coin dealing, I just want to take everybody back a moment, right to the start of the coin dealing stuff, because you know, there was many years there where obviously you didn't know where your MAMO was, and then when Rick Bloom came along or Frederick de HEADEVERI it was quite early in the piece when we found out that he actually had a company called Balaner Coin invest. Sort of thought there could be a lot of stuff sitting behind the whole coin dealing thing.
What I did know was we had catalogs, we had invoicing, we had bank details, we had dates of auctions, we had dates that coins were bought and sold, how they were sold. So we basically had almost like a bit of a trail on a person that you wouldn't ordinarily get. And then if we could overlay even his coin timeline, we would be able to pinpoint exactly where he was.
Think is a twenty minute.
Walk away from him? Yeah, let's just go and think, well, let's go on head over there, always confined.
By this point, my stomach is growling one hundred miles an hour. And on the way to Sphinx, we stopped and had some Joe and the Juice. Yes, I introduced Journey to the Juice and Tunicado sandwich. That was one
of my favorite things to eat there. But we needed to keep fueling ourselves because otherwise we were going to get sick and we were going to run out of gas essentially, so we had a quick bite to eat, went to Sphinx and the reason that this had come to our attention, I guess is some of the longtime followers would remember Christina. She did some amazing investigation into my mum and helping me in the UK. She was
based down in the south of London. She was actually very helpful in helping us gain a lot of information. And as we were going along, she'd come up with this fantastic idea and spoken to a gentleman who worked in the postal system, and on the back of the postcards there were these little bluey purply lines that were like a kind of like a barcode that ran over the top of the stamp. And she'd spoken to him
and said, what are those? And they turned out to be an identification of where that piece of mail was posted and what time it was posted, and it sort of came down to morning or afternoon. It wasn't like a specific time as such, but we actually knew by looking at those that we could get an idea of where exactly Mum posted her letters. So I went down to the local camera shop close to me. I had to get them to do some really intense scans in hires to get those as clear as possible for this guy,
and I ended up emailing them back to Christina. She sent them to him and he came back with a full record of where all the letters and the postcards had been sent from and what stuck out to us. You were able to work out that Sphinx, which is a massive coin auction house, had an auction on the same weekend in the same neighborhood of where Mum posted her postcard back when she came back to London.
So we were like, wow.
And so what people who aren't familiar with in this world of coins is there's a catalog, so when you buy and sell these coins, it's actually all recorded. So we were like, okay, well, let's go and suss out that weekend in nineteen ninety seven and get the catalog and see if anyone we're familiar with purchased or sold coins. So we rock up, We come in the door, speak to the man. He's like, you have to go up the stairs here and go up to archive.
Hello, how are you look I'm looking for We've just got SENTI from upstairs. I'm looking for the nineteen n seven catalog. The option was against the new eleventh of July do you have a copy of that it was ancient and read Roman.
Yeahs yes, not no, not metals. I've actually got an image of it out.
We are very.
But we can pick with you. Okay, thank you, Yes, that's all right, thank you, thank you very much.
Bye, And she goes, let me just go and have a look. She comes back and goes, I'm very sorry. We actually don't have that one, like all of them that they didn't have. But how many times happened that one? We want a page out of a booklet? Oh, that page is missing? Actually, we're so sorry. Is that just that has happened many times? It's urgeous. It's like the gods are working against seriously.
Me was trying to get information or journey dis a questionable recording what do you call them? Exuckle with a spink catalog catalogs from the Spinks, And of course they only hold on dad, it has no seven us at a different location and.
It's not such be online.
Oh, dearie me, this just seems like an every time. Anyway, we came back downstairs and we spoke to a really nice guy and you had actually made up these little cards which were information cards.
That's correct.
Just to let people know what we were doing, and we sort of started handing them around.
Previously, when we'd done this stuff in Australia, we were having to get out our phones, so when we interacted with someone that may have known Rick Bloom, we were having to get out our phones and then scroll through to find images of him.
To show people.
So what we thought we would do is we would print a whole lot of postcards which had images of legal, publicly available images of Rick Bloom over his whole lifetime from the early seventies right up until the present day. We had the years set underneath each of those images. We also had all of his primarily used aliases or legal names that we used over that time, and then we had an email address that people could contact if they knew anything about the individual.
So that was basically what it was.
It was a quick grab for people to be able to say, this is the individual that we're looking for.
Do you know him, do you recognize him? Do you recognize any of his names?
So there's so many dealings with him, any dealings with.
Him, So it was just a really easy way to be able to do it without having to because it's a difficult thing to actually explain to people right without them thinking that we've literally lost our minds, and not just that like.
Every time for me having to repeat the story all the time, it's actually quite difficult and mentally draining as well to have it in a snapshot and hand it over and say yeah, this is the reason why we're here.
Of course obtually on the ip I a PM watch this yeah over in Europe. So as far as coinage goes, yeah, we've.
Spoken listed dealers and they know him. Yeah, all right, it's something.
Yes And unfortunately no, no, no, because I guess why we want that is because we actually sold a lot of his collection in twenty twelve food Gin and so if he sold something from purchased it's been in the July than we've kind.
Of got in in the area. And see, yeah, it was quite effective.
Like we did it in English, we did it in Luxembourgish, and we had German, French and English, so they were used as a bit of a way to be able to get the story out quickly and easily without us having to explain all this stuff and fumble around with our phones.
So I guess coming back to Sphinx and the crux of it all is did he attend the auction and if so, that could link mum and him in the same location in London, because remembering the coroner has said in her findings that she believes they were together at some point, but there's no real clarity again as to whether they were or not. And you know what's in that.
What comes out of that not a lot, right, Like We'll be honest, but it's just interesting to put the pieces of the puzzle together, which at the end of the day, if we can put that together a bit better and where we're at at the end of the findings, that does help the situation for the story moving forward.
New South Wales police could go they could request the records for Spink. So I guess that is where my interest lies too, in that you've got Janet Oldenberg going into Barry Cooper's book store and selling stamps allegedly on behalf of Rick Bloom in Ballina, so he allegedly he
has sent women out to do his bidding. You've also got in Belgium at the Elson Coins, You've got both his cousin's widow going in there and they have confirmed that she did make queries and purchase coins from them, So therefore that did occur.
And you've also got.
Gilaine too going in purchasing coins on his behalf, and they have confirmed that that did occur. She did come in and ask for a catalog, so I guess that was also a major eye raising push for me. That imagine if Spink had Florabella Ramchal asking for a catalog or Marion.
Bardas two six two.
We have the nine hundred fifty on speed Live here, so when they said would be more than.
Two thousand packs, one thousands.
Would be my next thing.
Prosize for nine hundred and fifty.
Has Yes, we didn't get the catalog because it wasn't in archives, but you went onto eBay and you've actually found it on eBay and you've accessed it. So we're obviously very busy doing this right now. But there's a lot to go through in those catalogs, so I'm sure you're still going through that at the moment. We haven't really kind of got to that point yet, but we
will tell everyone. We'll do a post on Facebook and let everyone know if there's any juicy bits in there that we need to look further into.
That's right.
We post everything in two different locations on Facebook. Look a bit like the cyber attack. My Facebook page was shut down a majority of so I've actually not been able to post anything on there for over a year now, and no matter how hard I've tried to get better to let me access my mum's page again. I'm not sure who did what, but someone has said something and that has put a stop on me posting photos or
doing lives and things like that. But I tend to now post over on Instagram under missing person marrying Barter. Then I share it to missing person marrying Butter on Facebook. But we also have a group which people can come in and have a chat about, so we do talk a lot about this sort of thing inside that group. I'm going to encourage everybody to make sure we answer all the questions because so many people get turned away on the daily who are trying to join because they're
not answering the questions. So there are questions there just to protect the group and the integrity of the group, and we want to make sure that everyone's following the rules. It is an investigation, if I use those terms loosely, but we want to just protect the integrity of the case. So that's why those questions are really important. And you know, it's a really good community in there and people can come on over and learn all about the nitty gritty side of things over in that space.
And that is called the Missing Matter Marion Matters Podcast discussion group.
We just changed it, so come and join us. We'd love to meet you in that space.
What we're doing now, this is part of the journey.
So you've got to think like the past five years, Like I'm.
Excluding what happened three five years ago.
The past five years there has been so many hurdles, as so many black holes, stop signs, shut doors, refusals, europeadic rubbish. That basically what we're demonstrating now is that it continues. So whether it's in Australia, whether it's in Japan's, whether it's in the.
UK, it's continue.
So people are going to say, Okay, white isn't white, isn't in such and such, fine, they're missing family member, or we are illustrating exactly why that happens.
It's so frustrating, you know, to get that letter to arrive at home while I'm here for Chris is ended to me with Ato saying that they can't find anything about my mum on their system when they were looking for Flora Bella, when I clearly said the situation for them to come back and go We've looked under Florabella
Ramaca and there's nothing here. Sorry. So I'm wondering if we if I reach out to Vincy Arne and see if she'll meet us, to go to the Belgian police and chat with them about the current situation and maybe put a welfare check in for the coroner. Yeah, just for the record, we're sitting at farm Girls. We've got high t books this afternoon, which I wanted to do for month. She loves so she would really love to go and get some tea and spawn some things. So
we're going to do that at Convent Garden. The high Tea for me was a really special time for mum because my mum loved doing that and I thought she would love it. We were in Convent Garden, we had half an hour to ourselves, so I'd booked us to have high tea and we're up on the rooftop looking down. It stopped raining for half a second, so we got lucky.
But I wanted to talk about another idea that I've got coming in and loop this in because it's kind of relevant, right most people might know that I was talking about doing the Missing Matter Walk for Mum and the Missing in October this year for Mum's eightieth birthday. I've had close to sixty people come into a group on my WhatsApp and we've been working tirelessly to try and work out how to do this and how we would get through it from a legality point of view.
And I hate to say it, but I think I just got pipped at the post for this because it was just bigger than Ben hur for me. We had people doing walks in Scotland, in London, down in the South of UK over in New Zealand, we had people up in Seattle. Laura Richard said she wanted to do one on the beach in Santa Monica, and we had all of the major cities and locations around Australia who
wanted to get involved in doing this walk. But unfortunately there is so much red tape and you know, hating to have indemnity insurance up to twenty million dollars on each particular walk to cover us if someone hurt themselves if they tripped over hurt their ankle, and it was just becoming so difficult, and some of the emails that we had, like I know Charlotte over in the UK in London, she was like saying, we want to get from here to here, but we're going to have to
walk through this area here to get here. And they're coming back going, oh, but if you want to have something in that spot, you're going to have to register and book in a time and she's like, we don't want to have it there, we just want to walk through it. It was just so much drama and it really got to the point for me where I was getting very stressed about it. I've been dealing with my dad as well over the beginning of the year, and that's when we were supposed to be working on this.
My dad ends up with vascular dementia and we have to get him sorted and bring him up to Queensland and find him care and that has really become my focus for the first quarter of this year essentially, so the walks had to be put back on a bit of a back burner. But then while I'm in the Blue Mountains, I organized a very quick catch up with some of mum's closest friends, some of the people she taught with, and some of her students who I'm friends with because we were in the same year at Springwood
Primary School. And we had a lunch and it was just funny because we were talking, especially mum's friends. I were talking about how much my mum loved having tea and how one of Mum's really good friends she had me over for a cup of tea and she served me hurt my tea and a mug and she said, oh, your mother would have a heart attack that I'm serving you a cup of tea in a mug. I said, well,
Mum's not here, so that's okay. And we were sort of laughing and joking around how much my mum loved high tea and having a beautiful cup and saucer to drink your tea from.
And so.
When that happened, and I was looking at her friends and I'm like, they're all turning eighty, and would they really be able to do a really big walk for her, Like, I wanted to make sure that I included her friends in this mix, her sisters as well, if they'd like to come and they're all getting older, so it sort of dawned on me that maybe I could do a high tea instead, And so then I had this idea of doing high te's all over the universe and the
spots that everybody had agreed to do the walks. The girls were like, yep, I'm on board with it, let's do a high tea instead. And then I start going
through the process of that. I've contacted the Hilton and said, maybe we could do the same hotel chain all over the place, and that might keep it a bit easier for me, But of course my ideas are always bigger than ben her and turned out that I would have to pay a room fee for each of the hotels prior to even putting the ticket sales out there, and so I added it up and it was going to be over ten thousand dollars that I would have to fork out of my pocket to book these high Tea's
all over the world, with no real idea as to who would actually want to come. So I was a bit nervous about that. So I've come to the conclusion that there's a beautiful house which is a Queenslander. We actually had Ella's twenty first there a couple of years ago,
and it's absolutely stunning and totally my mum's vibe. And Marissa there has said that she has one hundred and twenty tea cups that we can use and some little stands, so we're actually going to have high tea there and I'm actually going to be putting ticket sales out for that, probably at the end of July. Okay, so by the time you're listening to this, you'll be seeing lots about that coming up in the mix on socials. But you know what, I haven't had a chance to have a
memorial for my mum. So I've gone through all of these processes, I've you know, finalized her life in a nutshell, but I don't have a body, you know. I spoke to counsel here in Brisbane and they told me that there's a memorial site that they've set up for missing persons in a cemetery on the north side of Brisbane and it looks really beautiful. Like granted, it looks lovely, but I just said to him, I'm not going to go to a cemetery. My mom's not there. I don't
know where she is. I would like to sit on a seat and look out somewhere for my mum, because I know she's out there somewhere. So for me, that was the vision that I had and how the missing matter was growing in my mind. So if we wind all the way back to a year ago when I started the walks, this has all come about, really I remember.
So the idea with the seats is the High Tea will be a fundraiser to pay for seats to go into locations and I might even only raise enough money for one seat if everybody comes, and we're looking at that last weekend in September. The details will be all on our facebooks, groups and socials and we're not quite ready to launch that yet, but just so you know,
it's in the wings if you're interested in coming. So hopefully it will be a wonderful event as a memorial for my mum, something that my children can come to as well and go, wow, this is for my grandmother and it's somewhere special that we can always drive past and think, you know, that's where we had her memorial for her and a memory for her. And then the money from there, I'm hoping will be enough and we can do these seats which I'm planning them to be green,
so anyone will know that's mum's color. So a green bench seat and on the seat it will stay the missing matter, and we'll have a QR code there next to it that someone sits down to have a rest. So people who are walking their dogs and walking around, who are not going to go to a cemetery to go and think about the missing, if they sit on the chair and go what's that about and scan the QR code, the QR code will take them to the website.
And we're going to start asking families with missing persons to give us a story and a photograph and we can put it onto the website and people can just look at it and go, oh, there's missing people here and this is their story. And who knows who might see something or go, oh, I remember her, I remember something about that. So that's my mindset right. I haven't told Joni much of this where she's going, oh, because she's been busy helping me with other things, and I said,
I'm just gonna let you help me over here. I've got these amazing people over here who are going to work in this space. So it has been amazing. I want to shout out to those guys because that team in that little group awesome, awesome humans. And we did get like there was a couple like Sydney had massive numbers to do the walk, and we had massive amount of people who wanting to do it in Melbourne, but
I couldn't find anybody to run it down there. And just to clarify, on Sunday, the fifth of October, in the morning, I am going to do a walk. It's not planned, so there'll be no ticket sales or anything like that. It'll just simply be that I'm going for a walk. I'll be wearing green. If anyone else wants to go for a walk, We're going to ask everybody around the world to walk on that day, just in
their own space, in their own time. It's also a public holiday that weekend, so we were like, people probably will be away and now they can STI. They can just go for a walk on their own. It's not
a plan to walk. Were put on some green and take a photo of themselves or a video with their friends if they're going with their friends or their dog, and just do a hashtag the missing matter and we will collate it all together and we'll do something special on socials with that which we haven't had a lot of downtime. But we did meet Jade last night. So Jade came and met us and we went for a really beautiful dinner at a little Mediterranean place sim Paddington.
There and her friend Emma came. They've caught the coach, traveled for three hours, taken a couple of days off work to come and meet us. Jade had this beautiful little key ring maid that has Mum's picture of her. So she asked me a while ago what my favorite photo of Mum was, and I sentive the one I thought I liked the most, and to my surprise, she had actually organized to have that sort of lazy, isn't it onto like a little plat which is a key ring with some wings, and she said, you know, to
keep you safe on your travels. So so nice, like the people I've met, just amazing, very kind, very nice people. Big thanks Tama and Jade for making the effort to come and hang out with us and have some dinner after what was a very busy day yesterday, frustrating day, amongst other things, trying to get information that just doesn't seem to want to help us. The gods are not willing at this moment. So anyway, I off to have our coffee. It's on its way, and I was like a Koda.
In the next episode of The Missing Matter.
So we're only in Amsterdam for a short period of time, and the main reason is there's more coin dealers there that we wanted to go and have a chat with. We know that Rick Blum used Amsterdam as his main port in and out of Europe. It was important that we stopped there. We're only there for a short time, but absolutely on a mission. So for those of you
who don't know this part of the story. In my mum's postcards and letters, what she writes is next stop Amsterdam, and she wanted to go and see Vincent van Goo's sunflowers. So we headed there to see what we can find if there's any evidence of her making it there, because at this point we don't know she got there or not.