An extract from Swamp: Who murdered Margaret Clement
Hit hard by the Great Depression and World War I, their finances declined and the ditches that kept the Tarwin River back collapsed through neglect. The lush paddocks sank under a vast swamp as the elderly belles clung to their beloved Tullaree. As the swamp rose, so too did the presence of opportunists, scammers, lawyers — and a killer.
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SWAMP: WHO KILLED MARGARET CLEMENT?
CHAPTER 9: SWAMP
Tullaree, built to withstand time, crumbled with neglect. The spinsters, raised in refined affluence, aged and fell into further ruin with it. Years of impoverishment had taken their toll. Their once-luxuriant auburn hair was streaked with grey and had been shorn with blunt scissors. Some of Margaret’s teeth had broken from the stumps and she had developed a stoop. Jeanie’s legs were very swollen and it seemed there was not a part of her body that did not bring her pain. The elder woman’s eyesight was fading, too, so that by 1938, when she was 60, she had to ask Margaret to read to her.
For the past two winters, the flood plains around the house had spread and to get to the main road Margaret had to wade through a mile (two kilometres) of waist-deep water, just as she had after the 1934 flood. The drains that Charlie Widdis had dug decades early were now silted up completely and permanently and it was inevitable that after heavy rain the paddocks would vanish beneath a sheet of water. Tullaree was bitterly cold and damp and even the heat of summer seemed ineffective. Windows broken during the 1934 storm hade not been replaced, simply because the women could not afford it. And no offer of repairs came from Ross Grey Smith because he did not want them living on what he considered was his property.
During the cold months, Margaret collected wood from the dry area immediately surrounding the house and at night the sisters sat in the dining room beside the fire and talked of the delays in getting their case to court. A regular visitor might have found the conversation intensely boring, but the women were obsessed with and possessed by Tullaree; and there were never any visitors anyway.
Anna and her son Clem were sending them a pound note or so every fortnight in addition to a box of groceries from their flat in Melbourne’s St Kilda, but they were themselves not particularly well off.
Margaret continued walking to Buffalo to pick up the supplies, although sometimes she was able to get a lift with a neighbour if she was seen walking along the narrow road. She used a sugar bag to carry her stories because her shopping bag had broken. Her clothes were now very shabby, but when she spoke her voice carried all the refinement of those earlier days. Margaret Clement was an enigma: a dignified lady in a down-and-out’s clothes. A woman once fashionable, who had ridden in style in a polished buggy on country outings, who now trudged through the mud in outsized men’s shoes handed over by a sympathetic neighbour. She and her sister were the talk of the neighbourhood. The gossip in the pubs and on the streets was about the sad state of affairs; the obstinate women who would rather live in squalor than ask for outside help. Everyone knew of the sisters’ earlier grand lifestyle and there were long debates on whether or not they were responsible for their decline. Whatever views people held, Margaret — or Miss Clement as she was generally known — continued to receive the greatest of respect and, had she asked for help, it would have come from many directions. The local people had stopped offering because they had always been politely turned down. ‘No, we can manage quite well, thank you,’ was Margaret’s usual answer.
But one hot day she was grateful to receive a young neighbour’s help. Walking back from Buffalo she suddenly felt dizzy. She fell forward onto her hands and knees on the road, the sugar bag dropping from her shoulder. Trying to stand, she stumbled sideways, head spinning, her breath coming in short gasps. Time meant nothing.
She heard a voice.
‘You all right, Miss Clement?’
She opened her eyes. She recognised the man — young Ken Fisher, from one of the nearby properties.
‘’Ere, let me help you up.’
Margaret Clement struggled to her feet, with the young man’s assistance.
‘Shall I go and get some help, Miss Clement?’
‘No, I am quite all right, thank you.’
She picked up her bag and continued walking home. She felt very weak, but the swamp was down and the soggy pastures were a lot easier to manage. On arrival at the house, she did not tell Jeanie what had happened.
Bushfires swept across country Victoria in January 1939 but at Tullaree, the sisters, hearing of the drama that had sent men from the city rushing to help, could not help seeing the irony in their position. They sat on the verandah and watched the orange glow in the distant night sky. With all that water around them, they were safe from any fires.
A few months later, Anna Carnaghan and Clem, nicknamed ‘Knobby’ because as a young boy in Sale he had once had a horse of that name, travelled to Tullaree. The four of them gathered in the musty sitting room and Clem, now in his mid-20s, tall, dark-haired and slim, acting as spokesman for his mother, despite her presence, addressed Margaret. With his polite words, Margaret became aware that age had caught up with all the Clement girls, but she had never wanted to accept it.
‘Mum hasn’t been too well of late, Aunt Margaret, and I’m not earning a fortune fixing up wirelesses,’ he said. ‘We’ve been thinking that perhaps you should both go onto the old age pension. Aunt Jeanie already qualifies because she’s 61 and you’ll qualify next year. We thought that if you received that money—’
‘Never! We will never accept charity in this way.’
‘But Aunt Margaret, it’s not charity. Everyone has a pension when they come of age. It will help both of you and be a relief to us, to be honest.’
‘I’m sorry, but we will not go beyond the family.’
Clem and his mother were determined to keep working at persuading the women to take a pension. Their reasons were entirely selfish — with money coming in they would be less inclined to continue asking for help from mother and son. It took Clem and Anna several more months and numerous trips to Tullaree, as well as visits from the Carnaghans’ Sale solicitor, Eugene Allman, before the women saw reason and agreed to apply for the pension. Even then, they insisted on receiving the money indirectly because they felt it was too much bother for themselves to keep a check on the payments. So Anna and Clem received the pension cheques, cashed them, and sent the money in the mail.
In Tarwin Lower, the wealthy young sons and daughters who had once dined so well with the sisters were now grandparents. The Clements’ neighbour John Buckley, who once rode a horse through the mansion, married and moved into his father’s house with his bride, Kathleen. And Ross Grey Smith was chalking up a string of achievements, including being on the committee of the Royal Victorian Aero Club between 1931 and 1932, and on the committee of the Oaklands Hunt Club between 1935 and 1938. He, too, had married. Yet still the case of Misses Clement versus Ross Grey Smith, the National Bank and the Registrar of Titles remained untouched in the files.
The World War II broke out and Australians once again sailed from the ports to support the Allies in Africa and Europe. Ross Grey Smith went into the Royal Australian Air Force and still the women attempted to get the case to court. Margaret Clement waded through the widening swamps to borrow the Bulletin magazine from the Buckley family to keep up with the war news. Yet one of her prime concerns was the increasing crime in Melbourne. In a letter to her sister on 19 August 1942 she wrote:
‘You better be careful never to go out at night unless with Knobby. There seem to be so many bad characters about and there are cases in the papers of houses being broken into and people knocked about. This sort of thing always happens at war time.’
One day, reading a newspaper she had bought at Buffalo, she saw a picture of Mussolini. It did not look like other photographs she had seen of him, which prompted her to tell her younger sister that she thought ‘it must have been someone else impersonating him.’ Her sister wondered whether the comment was evidence that Margaret still had a perceptive mind, or whether, in fact, she was losing it.
In any case, Margaret continued to write to Anna with her observations about the war. The Allies, she considered, were getting on better in Italy: ‘The Italians seem to be doing far better for the Allies than they did for the Germans,’ she reflected.
Italian prisoners were working on some of the Gippsland farms where the local cream wagon called and, noted Margaret, ‘I think they are pretty comfortable. They look comfortable and seem to have cigarettes to smoke and everything they need. The ones I have seen wear pinkish-coloured uniforms.’
Throughout the 1940s Margaret and Jeanie Clement refused to budge from their crumbling refuge. Then in February 1944, in the midst of reading good reports from New Guinea where Australian troops were winning battles against the Japanese, they received terrible news.
Their brother Peter was dead.
He had been found at his Wurruk Wurruk farm with a bullet in his head. The enemy had failed to bring him down in the First World War and it was his own hand that had now ended it. The Gippsland Times of 3 February 1944, wrote:
‘A member of an old Gippsland pioneering family in Mr Peter Scott Clement passed away at the Gippsland Hospital on Monday last. On January 24 he was found at his home at Wurruk with a bullet wound in his head. He was brought into the hospital in a low condition and passed away on 31st January.
‘He was the son of the late Mr and Mrs Peter Clement, the owner of Prospect Station, near Seaspray. He was educated at Gippsland College and Scotch College and enlisted for service in World War I. For some considerable time he has lived in complete retirement at Wurruk. He had not for a very long period of years enjoyed good health.
‘Born under favourable circumstances, he followed grazing as an occupation for a number of years. He raced a few horses and his principal success was in winning the Adelaide National Steeplechase with Snob. He was a likeable fellow and many years ago his friends regretted the decline in his health.’
Their father had died suddenly and now Peter. Their mother had passed on, too. The sisters wondered who would be next.
In the summer of 1946 Margaret, now 65, saw a cattleman on a neighbouring property kick and curse a dog. The animal cowered in the grass, whimpering.
‘Stop!’ shouted Margaret. ‘Stop hurting that dog!’
‘He’s no good, Miss Clement. Can’t train him to do a thing. Reckon I’ll put a bullet in him.’
‘You will do no such thing. You will give him to me.’
The cattleman was surprised. ‘He’s a nasty bit of stuff, Miss. Bitten me a couple of times.’
Margaret called the dog and finally it slunk over to her. It looked, she thought, just like a dingo.
‘And that’s what I shall call you,’ she said, patting it. ‘Come on, Dingo.’
The dog followed her to Buffalo and then walked home with her to Tullaree, swimming through the swamp to keep up.
The sisters lost their brother William the following year. He passed away in Melbourne at the age of 64. The Gippsland Times of 29 May 1947, said of him:
‘Born to the land, he carried on grazing pursuits and also took an active interest in horse racing … In racing as in other walks of life, his code of honour was high and he was greatly respected. He was of a very generous, if retiring, disposition and this was to his own detriment. His only brother, Peter, died a few years back while his sisters Margaret, Jeanie and Anna (Mrs Carnaghan) reside in Melbourne.’
This last statement was, of course, incorrect. Only the immediate district, it seemed, knew that the decaying, seemingly deserted, house in the middle of a swamp in Tarwin Lower was still occupied by Margaret and Jeanie.
Jeanie was beginning to complain of stomach cramps and she found it difficult to leave her bed. They also heard through their niece, Eileen, in Ballarat that Flora, their oldest sister, was in poor health. She had had a stroke and, wrote Eileen ‘she is now able to walk from her bedroom with a crutch and me supporting her on the other side … She can’t listen to the wireless as she has got very deaf.’
Margaret, aware that it would probably not be long before she lost Flora, sat beside Jeanie and read the latest correspondence and sometimes a novel, for Jeanie’s sight was now very bad. She had not left the house for six years and both women wondered how they could ever ask a doctor to clamber through the spreading bracken in summer or wade through the swamp in winter.
Mrs Kathleen Buckley, John’s bride at the nearest property, visited the sisters on several occasions and seeing that Jeanie was very ill one day managed to persuade the women to allow a trained nurse — one of the young Fisher girls — to call. Jeanie was tended but the visiting woman remained concerned about her general appearance.
Mrs Buckley decided to maintain her friendship with the now elderly Clement women, although Margaret and Jeanie seemed embarrassed by gifts of cakes and rarely talked much about themselves. Two visits, she was to recall much later, had caused her a great deal of concern — once she became lost in the swamp and on another occasion, while pregnant, she fell through the floor in the front room when the rotting boards collapsed under her.
But other feet were safe — the paws of the dozens of cats that still roamed the property. The sisters shared whatever food they had with the animals and of course there was now also Dingo the dog, which had finally been accepted by the cats. Often the two elderly women could be seen in the room where Jeanie’s bed had been set up surrounded by animals. Thanks to their pension money, it was in that same room that they ate their meals — potatoes, spaghetti, cans of corned beef and eggs. Jeanie was now totally bedridden and it was her sister’s added duty to attend to her toilet needs, lifting her onto a pot in the bed.
Her body a constant ache, Jeanie told Margaret: ‘I haven’t told that nice young nurse, but I’m not good. If I should die—’
‘Don’t say that, Jeanie. Neither of us has talked about our deaths before. It seems too … sudden.’
‘But you know I can’t even get up from my bed any more. Look at me. I’m 70. I’m not going to get any better at my age. But at least I know I’ll die in my lovely home.’
‘It’s not right that you should be saying these things. We’ll get help. I’ll make arrangements for a doctor to come.’
‘No, Mag. I don’t think a doctor would want to come here. He wouldn’t able to do anything either. You know, I never thought I’d find myself lying here like this and the business of the property still not settled. I was only thinking earlier that it’s been 20 years — a whole 20 years — that we have been trying to get it all sorted out.’
Jeanie shivered and Margaret, dressed in her old black coat, the one with the fur collar, pulled the blankets up around her sister. It was dusk and another winter was upon them. She could hear the rain hitting the roof and saw the smears of water running down the wall. In the corner of the icy room, Dingo lay curled on a faded rug, one of Tullaree’s many cats which had formed a special bond with the dog, lying beside him. Like the sisters, the dog had now accepted seclusion and he growled viciously when neighbours came to the house until he got to know them.
The skies over Gippsland turned grey and the wind whipped leaves from the trees and the rain came down heavy and widened the lake where the paddocks lay and during the third week of July 1950, as Margaret and the animals slept amid the creaks and sighs of rotting Tullaree, Jeanie Swanson Clement gave a short cry in the dark and slumped over the side of the bed, her life of luxury turned to poverty finally over.
Margaret had not heard the cry above the roar of the storm but when she saw the shape of her sister in the faint light of dawn she knew she had lost her. She walked over and felt Jeanie’s cold, stiffening hand.
‘Oh Jeanie,’ she said softly. ‘So you have gone. My dear sister and companion.’
Margaret, who had slept in her coat, put on her oversized shoes, and made her way to the front door. And there she stopped, looking out across the swamp, Dingo waiting expectantly at her side. It was not right, surely, to ask them to come and take Jeanie away so soon. Her sister had lived here for most of her life. Was she not entitled to a few hours of absolute peace; to lie, now undisturbed by the banging of doors, the dampness, the cold; free from the problems that had haunted them for more than two decades?
Margaret Clement nodded slightly, allowed herself a faint smile and walked back into the house, through to the kitchen. There she scraped out food for the cats and Dingo and made herself a cup of tea.
Extract reproduced with permission.
Swamp: Who murdered Margaret Clement?
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