Australian ugliness

Early on 1 December 1948, a man was found dead at Adelaide’s Somerton Beach. His pockets contained cigarettes, matches and chewing gum, but he had no wallet, and his clothing tags had been removed. The man has never been identified, and, though a 1949 coroner’s inquest entertained the possibility that he may have been poisoned, the cause of his death has never been determined. The unsolved death is known as the Taman (or Tamam) Shud Case, named for a fragment of text found inside the man’s trouser fob pocket; investigators eventually discovered that it had been torn from a rare edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. In Persian, the words “tamam shud” mean something like “it is ended”.

‘Taman Shud’ is the lead single from Feelin Kinda Free, the seventh studio album by Victorian-based band The Drones. “Late 1948 / is sending a transmission...