Interview Transcript

Yes, well when I was told about the story I went down with photographer, Max Holton. Um, as a crime reporter I was, I considered fairly cynical and hard headed and I um thought the whole job was a hoax until I got down there. The first person I met was the chap on whose farm it had all been happening. A chap called Allan Davidson, who not only was um a very practical man but he was a successful farmer and he'd been a, an infantry lieutenant in world war one, so ah, he wasn't the sort of chap to be fooled by anything. ..The general theory when we arrived was that these stones in some way were being flicked or thrown by ah local aborigines who were camped on the farm property at Pumphreys Bridge out of Popanyinning. That was um pretty quickly dispelled in my mind because the aborigines were obviously in considerable fear. And th the, thought was completely dispelled when Max Holton had the whole of the aborigine family lined up in his camera sights, I was standing beside him with an unobstructed view of about a half a mile and I was looking in the distance and he was
concentrating on the photograph when four stones actually fell around us.

Now, I was an artillery officer for four years during the war and I was well versed in the science of ballistics and the trajectory of projectiles but the way these stones were, want of a better word appearing ah entirely confounded all those technical and scientific ideas. They appeared to be dropping vertically, they were not dropping heavily. When they dropped on the roof it was just a dull thud, when they dropped on the ground it more like a plop and apparently these stones had been doing this for over a period of about 5 days when I arrived. Not only was I quite convinced that they were in some peculiar way dropping out of the sky, but a tent in which the aborigines had been living, they had said that stones had actually dropped inside the tent. So one night two of Davidson's adult boys and another white man sat in the tent with the aborigines and while they were in there stones actually dropped inside the tent and plopped onto the blankets. They carefully examined the whole of the canvas of the tent, the roof and the sides and there was absolutely no signs at all of any holes. Further to that, a police inspector called Slom Sunter who'd had very wide country experience, knew the bush, knew the aborigines and was a straight down the middle, hard nosed cop, he was sent down there to investigate and he'd put in a report saying that he could find no explanation for it but that in fact, he was convinced it did actually occur.

I don't know how they fell.. ah.. I didn't visually see them dropping through the air and, as I recall, no-one I spoke to down there did ever actually see them falling. Um, the first indication that something had happened was when they either hit a roof or hit the ground. But for actually visually noticing them dropping through the air, I didn't see that and I didn't find anyone that did.

No, when I first went there, there was only the farmer and the aborigines and the farmer's family. Ah, before I left, a couple of days later, there had been some sort of a function in the town and the word had got around and quite a lot of the local towns people came out to the farm to have a look. Um.. At first the farmer was a bit annoyed, but subsequently he accepted that this had to be and um quite a lot of people poked around the place trying to find bits of these pebbles or stones or whatever they were. As I remember them they were about, they were seemed to me to be gravel and ah they seemed to be anything from a half an inch up to an inch in diameter. Ah after the initial influx of people from the town, um they all seemed to lose interest and drifted off. And I went back to my job of reporting murders and shipwrecks and air crashes and what have you.

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