What really happened to Harold Holt? It's a question that has occupied Australian minds intermittently for 49 years now, and if filmmaker Scott Mannion has his way, it will occupy us for a few more yet.
Mannion has written and directed a short film called The Defector, and is already developing a feature version of the tale. Shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Boyd, the short stars South African-born actor Sean Taylor (Jacki Weaver's husband) as Holt, the Australian Prime Minister who disappeared while swimming in rough seas near Portsea in December 1967.
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In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt is embroiled in a power struggle involving his chief spymaster and Red sympathisers in Canberra.
Holt was a strong swimmer but was suffering from a shoulder injury at the time. He was on medication for pain relief. Some have speculated he simply overestimated his powers and drowned. Others have posited that he committed suicide. The wildest theory of all, though, was that he was a communist spy, and was picked up by a Chinese submarine off the coast.
Mannion is coy about the details of his film, which he and his producers hope to get into major festivals internationally ahead of a digital release next year. But the synopsis dangles tantalising words and phrases such as "Red hysteria", "paranoid" and "espionage battleground", while promising that "Holt must get his hands dirty to retain power. Holt's fate, and the course of Australian political history, is in the balance."
A straight historical biopic this clearly is not.
"A film is an idea, a dream," Mannion says. "The audience is interacting with that idea, and they come to it with sets of expectations, contexts, knowledge, and judgments. But then you add the other variable: their prior interaction with the Holt enigma. It's endlessly complex."
Mannion says he was "interested in subverting" what we think we know about the Holt story. "Conventions and expectations are tools to be manipulated," he says, "but always for the audience – and always in service of their enjoyment".
Holt's grandson, Robert Holt, has given the project his blessing, agreeing to be interviewed for a promotional video for the film's Kickstarter campaign, which raised $65,000. That campaign also included a story aboutt Mannion having been sent a roll of film from Russia, dated 1968, in which a man who looked a lot like Holt could be seen amidst a phalanx of Soviet officers; that's a claim that has since been given the Trotsky treatment, being quietly airbrushed from history.
Mannion, who studied philosophy before moving into filmmaking, says the Cold War era has long fascinated him. "It was the last great battle of world ideologies; two superpowers, on the brink of war for decades – with all the absurdity that comes with it. That pressure cooker makes for brilliant drama."
There have been attempts to get to the bottom of the Holt mystery on film before. Ray Martin made the documentary Who Killed Harold Holt? in 2007, and a dramatised doco called The Prime Minister is Missing, starring Normie Rowe as Holt, was screened on the ABC in 2008.
But Mannion's take is pure genre filmmaking. "No one has made a thriller about this before," he notes. "Crazy, right?"
He knows he might be chasing a rabbit down a hole with his reds-under-the-PM's bed approach, but it's all in the name of a cracking yarn rather than a truth that must by its very nature always remain elusive.
"If everyone hates it, you're screwed," he says. "But if half the people hate it, and the other half love it ... that's where you want to be: on the knife-edge."
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
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