The Marree Man: an outback enigma

Updated

Who created the Marree Man and how they did it is unknown. But like with all great mysteries, everyone has a theory.

"It's probably Australia's greatest peacetime whodunnit."

Phil Turner stands in a cosy back room of the pub in the tiny outback town of Marree.

His voice echoes around the high ceilings with the confidence of someone who's told this story before.

As he continues, a hush comes over the crowd — tourists from around Australia, here to soak up the emptiness of the outback.

"The Marree Man is 4.2 kilometres long and 28 kilometres around the circumference," the publican goes on.

To give you an idea of the scale, draw a straight line on a map from the Sydney Opera House to Redfern Station in Sydney, or from the MCG to St Kilda in Melbourne.

It's big.

"And I might add his penis is 400 metres long," Mr Turner says to raucous laughter from his audience.

"It is the world's largest work of art. Yet to this day we have no idea who did it."

But like any great mystery, there are many theories — and every theory has a counter theory.

Over the years, Mr Turner has heard them all.

He knows better than most that for every question answered, another two or three need to be asked.

The faxes

Marree, about 700 kilometres north of Adelaide, is dry, dusty and remote.

Road signs on the edge of town warn drivers about the dangers of driving on the Birdsville and Oodnadatta tracks which intersect there.

The small community of about 150 people is central to the mystery that has confounded people from around the world for two decades: who created the Marree Man?

That's exactly what locals wondered in 1998 when outback pilot Trec Smith first spotted the figure from the air.

"It was so big I assumed everyone would know about it. But when I landed back in town nobody had any idea," he says.

"They thought I was a little bit mad at the time. I tried to explain to them this thing is huge. I could see it from 6,000 feet."

A couple of weeks later, a series of anonymous faxes were sent to businesses in Marree, and later, the media.

They were from someone who claimed to be behind the Marree Man.

"On a plateau 36 miles north-west of Marree there is a giant drawing of an Aborigine more than two miles long," the first fax said.

So began a bizarre series of messages that make the search for a culprit even more opaque.

After the first fax or two, authorities discovered an American flag on the remote plateau where the Marree Man was carved, along with a note that referenced the infamous US cult the Branch Davidians.

That note has never been made public.

A later fax proclaimed to the now frenzied media and puzzled locals: "During the creation of the figure, a 36-inch by 25-inch dedicatory plaque was buried on the plateau four inches below the surface, 23 feet south of the point of the nose."

Sure enough, police dug a hole and there it was: a chipboard plaque with an American flag and a faded version of what looked like the Olympic rings.

The next message said: "There will now be provided weekly, for several weeks, a series of answers to such questions as: Who, Why? How?"

What followed was a treasure hunt, not in the red and dusty outback of South Australia but in the green and muddy countryside of England.

Locals were sent faxes that led to clues buried near other giant figures — the Cerne Giant in Dorset and the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex.

As promised, the 'why' behind the Marree Man was revealed.

"As a permanent benefit to the state of South Australia through increased tourism, and also to honour the inherently athletic pursuits of the Indigenous people for the Sydney Olympiad," read one of the notes found buried in a glass jar.

People the world over waited with bated breath for the next clue.

Where would it be? Who is behind all this?

But just at the world seemed on the cusp of finding out, the trail went cold.

No more messages. No more clues.

Just a riddle in the desert with more questions than answers.

The Americans

In the two decades since, guesses, theories and hearsay have filled that void.

"The Americans, that's the one that come across the bar the most," Mr Turner says.

It's easy to see why.

The American flags combined with the language used, like 'Aboriginal reservation' and 'color' would point the finger stateside.

"There were combined US and Australian forces at Woomera and some say they came up and did an exercise in groups," Mr Turner says.

"I suspect that these faxes were not authored by an American, but by someone who was trying to throw a curveball and blame the Americans for it."

Like a lot of the theories, this one leaves you with more questions than answers (not to mention that both the Australian and US militaries denied any involvement).

The artist

There is another theory which is far closer to home.

And it comes across the bar at the Marree Hotel almost as much as cold beer.

"Bardius Goldberg," Mr Turner says.

"I think there's sufficient evidence to say he had an involvement."

The eccentric artist from Alice Springs is often linked with the Marree Man.

As the story goes, Goldberg received $10,000 shortly before the Marree Man appeared and told his mates about a project.

Peter Clements, the Mayor of Kangaroo Island, says Goldberg gave him a confession of sorts while gravely ill in hospital in Adelaide in 2000.

"He told me that he had been working on a big project in northern SA and he mentioned the Marree Man," Mr Clements says.

"From memory he said 'I don't want people to know that I was involved while I'm still here, but I've left some clues in the ground that will tell the story'."

Goldberg had already created large artworks on the ground in Alice Springs, so he's got the artistic form, but the scale of the Marree Man means it's unlikely he created it alone.

"He may well have created the image and then handed that over to someone else," Mr Turner says.

"The sheer enormity of the whole thing suggests there's no way one person, or even two or three could have done it."

The miners, or anyone else with a GPS

So if you want to carve a CBD-sized figure of an Aboriginal man in the desert, who do you ask?

If you want to draw a big picture in an even bigger landscape you can't just hop on a tractor and go — you need to plot a course first.

For that you need a global positioning system, which in the late 1990s, was technology open to a select few.

"The only people that had it would have been the mining industry, the military, maybe even academia," Mr Turner says.

Mining companies come in for a mention quite a bit.

Back in the 1990s Western Mining was working on water bores and pipelines to supply the Olympic Dam mine 200 kilometres away at Roxby Downs.

These bores tap into the Great Artesian Basin below the Marree Man and surrounds.

"They would have contracted a guy to dig a trench," local man Aaron Stuart says.

"Maybe he got bored when he finished, had some left over fuel and thought 'I'll plug in the coordinates and do the [Marree Man] up there'."

Some locals at the time reported seeing heavy machinery coming in and out of Marree.

Others reported seeing lights over on the plateau when driving the adjacent Oodnadatta Track at night (in this flat country you can see the horizon in every direction).

And because the miners were in the area at the time, people began to join the dots.

But if the miner theory holds, could they have been subcontracted by someone else?

The locals

There has always been suspicion of native title having something to do with the Marree Man.

"The timing is important because the land was in the middle of very fiercely contested native title determinations at that time," Mr Turner says.

"Maybe in land that had no visible means of ownership the best way to make a statement is to brand it."

But there's a catch.

Mr Stuart became chairman of the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation when native title was finally granted to his people.

He's quick to point out the cultural inaccuracies of our giant friend.

"I'm glad he's called the Marree Man because he's sure as hell not Arabana," he says.

Mr Turner agrees.

"The headband, the hairstyle and scarring are more synonymous with someone from Central Australia around the Musgrave Ranges," he says.

"He's an Aboriginal hunter, but not from this area."

The restoration

By the time native title was granted to the Arabana the harsh desert conditions had all but worn away the Marree Man.

Keen to boost the tourism fortunes of the area, Mr Stuart came up with the idea to restore it back to its former glory and recruited Mr Turner to do it.

"So in 2016 we got hold of a surveyor, crunched all the data we could, rented a grader and went up to the plateau for 11 days and restored the Marree Man."

But this outback mystery had one more twist in the tail.

When Mr Turner and his surveyor were working out how and where to redraw the figure, their data could only get them so far.

Turns out accurately drawing a massive man in the desert is pretty hard, even with two decades of technological advances in GPS.

If they weren't accurate, the Marree Man would be a garbled mess when viewed from the air and no good whatsoever for tourism.

But, in a modern day version of those faxes from the late 1990s, an anonymous email turned up with a set of coordinates.

"It was correct! It gave us an accuracy of about 150 millimetres all the way around the 28-kilometre circumference," Mr Turner says.

"WTF!"

This mystery file was accurate enough for the restoration to go ahead, so accurate in fact that Mr Turner has one final theory.

"The file we used is actually [from] the original data used on the Marree Man," he says.

"You can't tell me someone can draw a file that accurately sitting in an office somewhere, when we've only been able to get within 15 metres.

"It has to be the original."

Who sent that email remains as much of a mystery as just about everything else about the Marree Man.

Today the figure is achieving the tourism benefits for the area that the creators seemed to set out in those original faxes.

Standing on the plateau today, despite being in a very remote part of Australia, small planes flying scenic tours can be heard in the air above.

At the pub tourists share their theories about the Marree Man along with their other adventures from the desert.

Perhaps the world is looking at this in the wrong way?

Is the story of this depiction of an Aboriginal man actually the work of art, rather than the figure itself?

In one of the faxes sent through in the 1990s, they signed off with this thought: "Half the art is mystery. And so enduring let it be."

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Topics: offbeat, indigenous-culture, indigenous-other-peoples, regional, deserts, visual-art, arts-and-entertainment, human-interest, marree-5733, sa, australia

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