German backpackers Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied had vanished without trace nearly two years earlier when their remains were finally found in shallow graves in Belanglo State Forest, in bushland south-west of Sydney, on 4 November 1993. Gabor had been shot in the head.
Anja had been decapitated, her head severed with a machete or sword in an act of brutality that shocked investigators even amid the horror of the Belanglo forest killings. Despite exhaustive searches of the forest, her skull was never recovered, and remains missing to this day.
Four masked men broke into a farmhouse outside Sydney on the night of 30 September 1816, and when John Miller rose from his fireside chair a musket went off, killing him in front of his wife and four children.
One of the raiders, Colin Hunter, turned on his companion moments later outside the house, snarling that "that murdering villain" Thomas Dooley had shot the man. But when the guns were examined, it was Hunter's own gun that had been discharged. It made no difference under the law: Hunter, Dooley and Michael Ryan had all gone there armed and masked to rob the house, which made each of them equally guilty of murder, alongside a fourth man, George Fuller, who turned Crown evidence against them.
Convicted within days, Hunter, Dooley and Ryan were hanged in Sydney on this day in 1816, their bodies afterwards handed over for dissection.
On the way to the gallows, Ryan led his companions in prayer, and all three were said to have met their deaths with sincere contrition.
Interior of Settler's Hut in Australia, John Skinner Prout, 1849. National Library of Australia
John Wayne Glover had killed only a day earlier, but on 3 November 1989 he struck again, this time inside the Wesley Gardens Retirement Village in Belrose, in Sydney. His victim was 81 year old Olive Cleveland, an elderly resident he overpowered and killed with brutal speed, slamming her head into the concrete before strangling her with her own pantyhose.
It was a signature he had already used on earlier victims and would use again, earning him the name the Granny Killer in the press. Before leaving, he rifled through her handbag for $60 in cash, a pitiful sum set against a life taken in moments. The short gap between this killing and the one before it exposed just how quickly his violence was escalating, and how close he was to finally being caught.
Ten convicts, under armed marine escort, set out from Sydney Cove on this day in 1788, bound for a patch of ground at Rose Hill that would later grow into Parramatta. The fledgling colony was starving, its soil poor and its supply ships overdue, and this small, closely guarded party of prisoners carried the desperate hope that convict labour could turn the land self-sufficient before famine finished what the sea voyage had not.
There was no trial, no sentence, no scaffold in this story, only a gamble: that men transported for crimes in Britain could be made into the farmers who would keep an entire penal settlement alive. The ground they broke at Rose Hill became the first successful crops grown on the continent under British rule, and the settlement they built outgrew the colony that sent them there.
