Shortcut: The Deadly Flinders Highway

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.
The Flinders Highway is an 800-kilometer stretch of road running through Queensland from Townsville to Mount Isa, and over the decades, it's been linked to a disturbing number of disappearances and murders. In this episode, we're talking about some of the most haunting cases along the highway, the possibility that there are connections between them, and what new forensic technology might reveal about crimes that have remained unsolved for decades. Our guest is investigative journalist Amelia Oberhardt. She's the presenter of a new Channel Nine series, Outback Murder Highway.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

**Amelia Oberhardt** (0:56)
It kind of is this junction that is way more populated than you think, but it is so isolated. To not have had CCTV, and it still doesn't have phone reception or CCTV in so many spots.
You take it back to the 70s and it is a serial killer's paradise. It offers everything you could possibly want if you're on the hunt.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:16)
I feel like we've had a national epiphany about our wilderness, if you will, over the last couple of decades with Ivan Latt, Bradley Murdoch and the Peter Falcone case, and then the movie Wolf Creek. All of those three things really opened my eyes to something I'd never thought about before. These lawless, huge area that feels lawless in the middle of Australia, because most of us cling to the coastline. Because there are a couple of stretches of highway around Australia that have similar, terrible statistics related to them. But I'm a Queenslander and I did not know about this patch between Townsville and Mount Isa.
I'm assuming it was probably a hard one to decide where to start. If you've started in 1970, I'm sure there were issues before that as well. But for whatever reason, why did you start with 1970?

**Amelia Oberhardt** (2:03)
1970 was a big time for discoveries on the Flinders Highway. Some of those murders have been solved, so you're starting there. But the first really big case that made what we call national headlines back then, which now would be nothing.
But there was no social media, there's a national news bulletin that's covering such huge topics, two girls going missing and the outback is not making top news. What was today's news is tomorrow's kitty litter. So big news for back then was that it made a few papers. What's bigger news is that the family never stopped campaigning to find out what happened. So we came across David Cunningham. He had for a long time been campaigning to have Anita and Robin, which is where we start. Their case re-looked at. He was on a real crusade to find out what happened to Anita, his sister, because Robin, who she was traveling with, her body was found and Anita is still to this day has never been located.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:02)
You make the point in talking about Anita and Robin that they were most likely hitchhiking and in those days that was not the taboo form of transport that we think of today. My mum used to tell me that too.
I was born in the 70s, but she used to say to us, don't hitchhike, she used to say, I can't believe how much I used to hitchhike as a kid. Now, looking back, I can't believe I did that, but everyone did in my day, but don't you ever do it. Even then, it seemed insane to me, who's hitchhiking? But they did.

**Amelia Oberhardt** (3:32)
The thing to note is that the Cunninghams had begged them to take a plane. They had offered to pay for those airline tickets, which back in the day would have been exorbitantly expensive. But they wanted that adventure and it was positioned in the 70s.
We're thinking, it's the beginning of free love. It's the introduction of abortion, the end of adoption, the start of it. It is this free love, wild sex, Woodford. That had happened a while before, but Australia is getting on board.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:04)
Specifically for women, it was touted as a period of freedom. You're all free now. You can live just like men live. Absolutely. All the things you've just talked about were positioned as great news for us, freedom for us.

**Amelia Oberhardt** (4:17)
I mean, for two young girls, they're like, it's freedom. We're allowed to be away from our parents. We're allowed to get secondary educations. We're going to university and we're off on this adventure of a lifetime on the holiday break to make it up to Bowen to see Robin's mom. But they never make it there. They do hitchhike. They do make stops along the way. They make contact quite a lot with the family on the way, and then they arrive to the Flinders Highway, and that's where everything goes very awry for them.