Caroline Graham is telling me about the Northern Territory, about Australia’s vast and mysterious interior, about its secrets and its stories. “There is something about that landscape, the lawlessness of it, the harshness. It’s like it actively conspires to keep people’s secrets.” Caroline, or “Caro” as she is affectionately known by the University of Queensland students she teaches journalism to, spent months in the territory investigating and unravelling the threads connected to the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty (and his dog) from the central NT town of Larrimah, population 11. Caroline co-produced a podcast on the case in 2018, Lost in Larrimah, with journalist and friend Kylie Stevenson, and later wrote a book with Stevenson, Larrimah, on Paddy and the town. “The book, in many ways, is an existential unravelling about the nature of truth…We just went down so many rabbit holes…by the end of it, we just couldn’t tell what was true and what wasn’t, which is an uncomfortable position for a journalist to be in…The circumstances of Patty’s disappearance are really mysterious. I think they speak to something in our national psyche, I think we have this deep fear of the landscape and the interior.”
Caro won a Walkley award, Australian journalism’s highest honour, for her work on the podcast. The Australian newspaper took the project on in 2018 with the condition that it would be released before the upcoming The Teacher’s Pet podcast. “It was very last minute – I was supposed to be finishing my PhD. Kylie had a four-month-old baby, and we had this one 10-day period that we could do it. And so I think I booked flights the day before. And we just drove down and took a chance on it.” In 2018, true-crime podcasts were an emerging format in Australian journalism, inspired by the likes of Serial in America. Graham and Stevenson were pressured not just by time, but by inexperience. “Kylie will kill me for saying this – we were so green in audio we were listening to an audio book about how to make a podcast as we drove down there. And it was not helpful.” I wonder to myself if it would have helped Caroline to know that Hedley Thomas, my mentor and the journalist behind the enormously successful The Teacher’s Pet, had to have a source in his first podcast interview show him how to use the professional voice recorder he’d been provided. The looming release of that podcast meant Graham and Stevenson were on deadline. “I think from the day we got back from that trip, it was just over a month, until the whole thing was done,” Caroline says.
Lost in Larrimah explored the mystery behind the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty and his dog from the tiny town in central Australia.
Paddy’s disappearance is still unsolved, but there’s been progress since the podcast was released. At an inquest in 2022, extraordinary covert audio tapes were played; police had bugged Paddy’s neighbours without them knowing. In it, Paddy’s neighbour strums his guitar and sings to his dog, apparently confessing to having “killerated old Paddy”. The case is with the Director of Public Prosecutions in the Northern Territory. “We touch base with the DPP about once a month…I think it’s really difficult for police to prosecute a case without a body. But there’s quite a lot of circumstantial evidence.” I ask Caroline if she feels a sense of obligation to the lone, family-less bachelor Paddy. “I think a great injustice has happened. Nobody has been held to account for that. I feel some obligation as an advocate.”
There are rumours of a TV production, but Caroline can’t talk about that yet. Instead, we talk about her upbringing in the tiny town of Walkerstone just outside Mackay in Central Queensland. “I was the nerdiest kid,” Caroline says, speaking fondly of her upbringing among the sugar cane fields that define the region. “I think the first book I ever wrote, if you can call it that, would have been in like preschool or year one, and it was about this sort-of alien creature that lived in the cane and it would eat the cane dust.” She continues, “we always used to call it Queensland snow and when they burn it off the ash falls from the sky, and these sort-of black curls, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, it’s quite magical. It’s always around my birthday towards the start of summer, and that weekend would be the first burn off.” Walkerstone was a “beautiful place to grow up”, “conservative politically,” where “everyone knew everyone” and Caroline could jump through the hole in her fence to visit her elderly neighbours.
A love of reading and writing – “I would read with the torch and then I would steal the batteries out of the remote control” – led to Caroline studying journalism at university alongside arts, majoring in Japanese and International Relations. She “loved the culture and identity of journalism,” and feels like the media “just gets a lot of hits.” Most journalists are going in and “slugging everyday to try and do something good,” which I tell her is part of the reason I’m doing the podcast series in the first place. After uni Caroline returned to Mackay and worked at The Daily Mercury, a newspaper with a long history that is today barely alive. Within the first 10 days of being rostered on – and still a university student – Caroline arrived on a Sunday shift to discover she’d be writing the whole paper for Monday. “What do you do in a situation like that?” I ask her. “Well, you panic,” Caro responds with characteristic humour. “Then you start making phone calls.”
Caroline Graham (left) worked with longtime journalist friend Kylie Stevenson on the podcast, and the pair worked together again on a 2023 investigation into Northern Territory schools.
After Mackay, Caroline went freelance and learnt the old industry adage about how to work effectively: “On time, good, and not an asshole. You’ve got to be just two out of three,” she says. Ideas are the most important part to succeed at freelancing, she continues. “For me, it’s quite a manual process, sitting down and I will just write question after question after question until I have an impossible question that trips me off. And I think, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting.’ And it opens up this other world.” She switched to teaching to fund her way through a master’s, seeking “another way of telling longer stories or deeper stories.” Her master’s project examined her time in Mackay at the height of the mining boom, where massive wealth and FIFO workers flooded the town, changing the culture of it practically overnight. Dissatisfied with the limitations of news reporting, she turned to fiction and magical realism to tell the stories of people on the front line.
Fiction writing came about after a “digital panic”, Caro says, feeling that she cared deeply about what was happening around her but was “saturated by news”. “There’s all this talk about historical amnesia, but we are forgetting things that are happening right now,” she tells me. In fiction, “we’re almost taking (the audience) by the hand and saying, come inside this with me. We don’t necessarily need so many defensive mechanisms when we’re invited into a story like that.” Which brings us to her decision to pursue journalism and writing as a craft. “It’s pretty deeply embedded in who I am,” Caroline says, before delivering a profound line which I haven’t stopped thinking about since our chat. “I think it’s a great way to live a life. I like to go places and talk to people and think about things, and that sounds really simple, but that is a beautiful way to spend your time and it’s pretty bonkers that I get paid to do that.”
Lost in Larrimah is available on streaming platforms including Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2GzQNiHIxz6MPIKPmHSjV8?si=4367ea485ed04249