It remains the greatest mystery in Australian political history: did the then prime minister Harold Holt drown while swimming at his favourite beach or was he spirited away in a Chinese submarine?
Almost four decades after Holt vanished at Cheviot Beach, south-east of Melbourne, an inquest is trying to solve one of the country’s oldest political whodunits.
The decision by Victoria’s coroner’s office to reopen the 38-year-old case was not motivated by fresh doubts about the conservative prime minister’s presumed death at 59, but by a law change requiring investigations into more than 100 drownings in which the bodies were not found.
The police file on Holt’s disappearance has remained technically open, but because no body was found, no inquest could be conducted. That law changed in 1985.
Holt, who loved the image of a flamboyant outdoors man — posing for press photos James Bond-style in flippers and snorkel with bikini-clad women — was officially declared to have drowned while swimming in the ocean on December 17 1967.
A police investigation a year later found that Holt may have drowned in rough seas, or been taken by sharks.
The sea claims dozens of lives every year in Australia, but many people were reluctant to accept that something as mundane as drowning had claimed their leader.
A copy of the police report, now housed at the National Archives of Australia, made no mention of how Holt may have died or the whereabouts of his body.
In the fevered cold war climate this simply fuelled the conspiracy theories and provided Australians with their own home-grown version of the John F Kennedy assassination intrigue.
Holt had been prime minister for 22 months when he disappeared, prompting claims that he may have committed suicide because of political pressures, or run off with a mistress.
In 1983, a former Australian naval officer, Ronald Titcombe, persuaded the British novelist Anthony Grey that Holt had been a Chinese spy since the early 1930s.
He claimed that Holt, fearing detection by Australian intelligence officers, had sought political asylum in a Chinese midget submarine waiting off Portsea, near Melbourne.
Holt’s widow, the fashion designer Zara Holt, dismissed this conspiracy theory several years later when she said: ”Harry? Chinese submarine? He didn’t even like Chinese cooking.”
Others believed the CIA killed Holt because they thought he was about to take Australia out of Vietnam, given the strong opposition to the war by many Australians.
The CIA theory was equally fanciful, given that Holt had pledged during a visit to the White House in 1966 to go ”all the way with LBJ”, referring to the then American president, Lyndon Johnson.
Yet another theory was that he had faked his drowning — as the British MP John Stonehouse did seven years later — to join a lover in the south of France. Holt supposedly died of a heart attack 10 years later.
Most Australians now accept the conventional version of events: that Holt was swept out to sea and drowned. But with a full public inquest now under way, many cannot resist dusting off the old wild yarns.
Lawrence Newell, the retired police inspector who investigated the case at the time, on Tuesday dismissed the conspiracy theories surrounding the fate of Australia’s 18th prime minister.
He said the only culprits were Holt’s over-confidence in his swimming ability and the treacherous seas.
”I thought about them [conspiracy theories] carefully and none of them seemed to me to be at all credible,” the 85-year-old told the Melbourne coroner’s court. ”I think he went for a swim under conditions where he was most unwise and that’s it, and he got swept out to Bass Strait.”
The Victoria coroner is expected to close the book on one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries on September 2, when he hands down his findings on Holt’s death. – Guardian Unlimited Â