In 1977, disappearing could be remarkably easy.
A seventeen-year-old girl leaves home with some clothes, a rucksack and enough money to get by for a while. She catches a bus, gets a lift, perhaps sticks out her thumb beside a highway and waits for somebody to stop.
Her family knows she’s gone. What they don’t know is where.
Today, she would leave an extraordinary trail: mobile phone records, bank transactions, CCTV, emails, text messages and perhaps social media. Her photograph could be distributed across the country within hours.
But what if the year was 1977?
That’s one of the questions I’ve been exploring while writing the next Annette Mollison novel. The story begins eight years before the events of The Long Grass, in 1977, before moving forward to 1987 and another investigation for Annette.
A young person could leave Townsville and travel north to Cairns without a mobile phone recording the journey. Pay cash for a room and there was no credit-card transaction. Hitchhike and there might be no record of the journey at all.
And if she didn’t telephone home, days could become weeks remarkably quickly.
Police work was physical
The same limitations applied to the people trying to find her.
Information didn’t simply appear on a detective’s screen. Someone had to make a telephone call. A photograph might have to be physically sent somewhere. A police officer in one town might need to contact police hundreds or thousands of kilometres away and ask whether anybody matching a description had come to their attention.
Records were paper. Files sat in filing cabinets. Information collected in one place wasn’t necessarily immediately available somewhere else.
For a crime writer, those limitations create problems. They also create opportunities.
When distance really meant distance
I first encountered this while writing The Long Grass. Setting the novel in Weipa in 1985 meant Detective Sergeant Annette Mollison and Detective Senior Sergeant Dave O’Reilly couldn’t rely on the tools available to modern investigators.
The new novel pushes that idea even further. In 1977, a young woman could leave one Queensland town, travel to another and potentially disappear into an enormous country without creating much of a trail.
A backpacker could change hostels. A hitchhiker could get into a stranger’s car. Someone could give a false name or simply decide to head north instead of south.
Unless somebody remembered them, there might be very little left behind to tell police where they had gone.
Another Annette Mollison investigation
I don’t want to say too much about how any of this fits into the new novel. What I can say is that researching how people travelled, communicated and disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s has become an important part of writing it.
It’s also reminded me of one of the things I most enjoy about writing crime fiction set in this period.
Take away the mobile phones. Take away Google. Take away instant databases and electronic records.
Then give your detectives a photograph, a name and a ten-year-old trail.
And tell them to find someone.
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