The fourth of July, 1913. Four men stand shin-deep in the Tyne River in the north-east of Tasmania, in snowmelt coming off the range, turning a prospector's dish.
The method is sixty years old in that valley. Gold came out of Black Horse Gully in the 1850s and every man standing in the water learnt the dish as a boy.
But today, they are not panning for gold. There is a bag of ash on the bank beside them, carried down from a hollow on a hillside two kilometres back, and another bag coming. A farmer named William Mullins walked out to check his possum traps a fortnight earlier and did not come home, and this is what is left to look for him with.
Six weeks later a jury of his neighbours sat in the Mathinna hall and named the man who killed him. Six weeks after that a Chief Justice in Hobart took the case off a second jury before they were allowed to consider it.
Trial report, The Examiner (Launceston), 24 September 1913.
Druce, Alex. "Mathinna murder mystery endures." The Examiner (Launceston), June 2013.
"Tragedy in Launceston. Murder and Attempted Suicide." The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (NSW), 9 May 1882, reprinting the Launceston Examiner. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/851532
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