Gordonvale scarab – 3

For the earlier parts of the Gordonvale scarab story go to Part 1 and Part 2.

A practical joke?

This leads me to propose that that finding of the scarab was a practical joke.  Not singling out Isaac Brown or any unnamed perpetrator, we have a well that needs re-digging on a property either immediately before, during or maybe even just after the Great War.  The standard process would be [1] hoaxer brings scarab in his pocket, [2] chucks it in hole when no one is looking, [3] innocent pulls up a spadeful of dirt and sees scarab, [4] hilarity ensues, [5] culprit confesses, [6] revenge plotted.  That would work anywhere in Australia.  In Gordonvale, however, the joke has added meaning and irresistibility, because it and Egypt are the only two places on Earth where you get money for digging up scarabs.

I would argue that the standard joke was given a much sharper edge in the Gordonvale area, precisely because farmers would have been aware of the double meaning of the scarab beetle.  For the joke to work the scarab has to be so out of place and incongruous that it cannot have been mistaken for a rock.  Therefore a fairly large one was required.  When it was dug up, the joke worked on three distinct levels.

Gordonvale scarab – 2

For the first part of this discussion go to Part 1.

Clive Morton’s account

Almost all mentions of the Gordonvale scarab say that it was found when digging a well in 1910, 1911 or 1912.  In a paper held by the Mulgrave Settlers Museum local historian and author Clive Morton offered a slightly different account.  He says

The Egyptian scarab beetle above was dug up at Napiers property at Packers Camp between 1912 and 1915.  The Napiers tried to draw water from nearby Mackeys Creek with a windmill and a pipe buried under the dirt road and into what came to be called the Pump Hole which was a favourite swimming hole up until the 1950s when it silted up.  Napiers found that the pump would not draw and they asked for expert advice. This came from either Muir chief engineer of Mulgrave Mill and later a water driller or a man called Ebrington. The advice was to lower the suction pipe under the mill to assist with drawing the water which they did and the scarab beetle came up with one shovel full of dirt.  Claims that Isaac Brown a local man brought a fake scarab beetle home from the Middle East during WW1 are wrong because he did not get to the Middle East as his troop ship returned to Sydney from a day or two on the way when the war ended.  [Morton no date]

Morton’s additional detail is important – it provides an exact find location, the property owner and clarifies that it took place when an existing windmill pump drawing water from Mackey’s Creek was being repaired.  The scarab came from what seems to have been the first spadeful of dirt.  The date is later than that usually cited, and there is an interesting, unprompted mention of Isaac Brown, who could not have planted it as a hoax.

Gordonvale scarab – 1

The Gordonvale scarab is one of two found in remote Australian locations that are frequently brought forward in support of secret visitor claims.  The other, the Daly River scarab from the Northern Territory, is much better known, and has already been discussed in the Secret Visitors Project.

While the Gordonvale scarab appears to have been known about in that part of northern Queensland for decades, it only achieved publicity from about 1985 through Marilyn Pye’s investigations of alleged Egyptian sites near Walsh’s Pyramid, a naturally pyramidal mountain near Gordonvale.  Since then it has been cited either in conjunction with Pye’s other claims or been picked up by others as demonstrating Egyptian presence in far north Queensland.

In this post, and the two following, I want to take a close look at the Gordonvale scarab and put forward what I think are the key elements of its discovery, and why it should not be considered as proof of Egyptian contact.

Kariong – when were the glyphs found?

‘When were the Kariong engravings produced?’ has been the focus of nearly all the discussion about this site.  Another question that asks something slightly different is ‘When were the glyphs found?’.  Although it is most important to determine their actual date, we also need to know the date at which the glyphs were first brought to public attention.  In 1983-4 a National Parks and Wildlife Service ranger apprehended a man at the site with a chisel, and freshly carved engravings was observed by a rock art conservation specialist.  If we take that as the date of confirmed public discovery, when everyone in the pro- and con- camps agrees that they existed,  how much further back can we push knowledge of them?  This can lead to a better appreciation of when they were made and the way that dating evidence can be interpreted.

Kariong hieroglyphs – press release

I’ve limited my mentions of the Kariong hieroglyphs to date, mainly because its a big topic and because there are lots of other places on the Internet you can go to to see both sides at work.  So far I’ve mainly posted on Kariong clips on Youtube here and most recently here.  There are plans for a comprehensive treatment, but work has got in the way, so while there is a lot in draft, very little has actually appeared on this site.

A few days ago I got contacted about the Kariong glyphs by a Newcastle, NSW, journalist.  The main advocate for the authenticity of the engravings – Hans Dieter von Senff – had issued a press release to a host of news agencies about the site and some new discoveries he had made there.  Iwas asked to comment, and gave a fairly general answer about my overall studies rather than the claim, since I had not seen the press release as yet.

I thought it might be useful, while the news is still ‘hot’ to call your attention to it.

Kariong hieroglyphs – the movies – Part 2

The video clips showing Kariong just keep coming.  The first part of the this post gave 14 clips that collectively ran for more than an hour and a half.  In the year or so since then another bunch of clips have emerged.  Some of these follow the same format of shaky close-ups on the glyphs, which don’t really add much to what you have seen before, and can make you seasick after a while.  But there’s a lot more too!.  We get the site’s all too brief stardom when it featured in the Tony Robinson’s Australia series.  Among other highlights are footage of Val Barrow channelling her spirit guide Alcheringa on the site, and Paul White, who wrote the first articles about the site, presenting part of his dcumentary series from 1993.  All together its an interesting mix of scepticism through to wholehearted acceptance as genuine, and its even longer – totalling just under two hours.

As before I present these for your information and enjoyment.  If you come across any others, please drop me a line.  Until then, take the phone off the hook, uncork that shiraz and enjoy!

Daly River scarab

In 1963 it was reported in a letter to People magazine that an Egyptian scarab had been discovered by some children while playing beside the road near the Daly River, in the Northern Territory of Australia.  This discovery soon featured in articles about secret visitors written by Michael Terry in the mid-late 1960s, was picked up and promoted by Rex Gilroy in the 1980s and 90s, and then perpetuated and spread by the internet in the 2000s.  Is it actual proof of Egyptian contact?  Is it an actual scarab?  Is it actual anything?  Read on for the story.

More from Walsh’s Pyramid, Queensland

This post has been deleted.

The Jordanian Princess and the Eucalypt

In a 1967 article on the Egyptian presence in Australia Michael Terry wrote

[i]n February 1964 the tomb of a woman, probably dating back to 1,000 B.C., was found on the site of an ancient city in the Jordan Valley.  Examination of the body suggested that eucalyptus oil had been used to embalm it.  The only sources then of such oil were the gum-trees of Australia and New Guinea.  Now, of course, they are relatively common overseas but only since Baron von Mueller instituted a seed exchange between Australia and other parts of the world … [Terry 1967: p. 21].

As with many of the elusive snippets of information Terry used, no source was provided for this find.  The aim of this blog is to track down the source of Australian secret visitor claims such as this, and to work out what the actual evidence is, rather than the snippets that are sometimes misinterpreted and misapplied.

For example, in an earlier post I tried to track down claims that kangaroos had been found in Egypt.  As it turned out there had been a misreading of a well-publicised palaeontological finding.  Fossils of ancient marsupials, millions of years old, had been found in Egypt but journalists had misunderstood the meaning of this and had focussed entirely upon the marsupial aspect, assuming it inevitably meant kangaroos.  In fact, these were the ancestors of the South American opossums, and were only very distantly related to Australasian marsupials.  The mistake was readily understandable once I was able to get back to the original source and to do that I had to narrow down the time range by looking at the earliest mention of the mistaken reading, and working backwards from there.

Terry’s gave no source for the information.  Having only occurred three years before it was written I had hoped that it would have been based on a news item and readily findable.   Could I find it?  Would the eucalyptus resin be a mistake, a journalistic flourish, a reliable result?

Sumerians? No, wait – Egyptians!

A thread recently appeared on the Unexplained Mysteries Forum, titled ‘Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians in Australia -  Ancient Sumerian engravings found on Pyramid Mountain near Cairns’.

Update 25 May 2012 – The remainder of this post and subsequent comments have been removed at the request of one of the contributors to that forum.