Memory of a time that died. 100-year-old portable typewriter.

Where have all the old skills gone, long time passing…

Sitting in my favourite cafe in Sydney the other day I was amazed to see that every table – yes every table – was occupied by someone working on a laptop. Some were typing with two fingers, a few others were touch-typing. How things had changed, I thought. Before the proliferation of the laptop and, in fact, computers, I could sit in a public place with my portable Remington typewriter and people would stare at ‘that man who was typing with all his fingers’.

My sojourn in the cafe, in the wake of the riots in England, emphasised to me that the skills, the decency, the manners of the past have gone. But before you tell me that I have to ‘get with it’ and keep up with progress, I’m doing that – but it doesn’t stop me bemoaning the death of incredible times such as the fabulous 1960s, when rock music was fantastic, when photography needed calculations and added darkroom skills, when manners abounded (well, perhaps they were beginning to fade by then, fair enough) and when people back in the old country – England – gave an interview on the radio you could actually understand what they were saying.A mixture of dialect and street talk in one interview left me wondering what on earth was being said.

As for photography – everyone, it seems, has a camera or a phone-cam. You don’t need to use a light meter or twist the lens to focus. You just aim, press a button and it’s all taken care of. I look back sorrowfully at the time when you needed to learn how to develop a film and make a great print. You want a really eye-catching photo these days? Easy, press the button for an app and it will all be done for you. And writing…if you didn’t know how to spell a word in the past you reached for your dictionary and actually looked it up, confirming its meaning if you weren’t sure. Now you don’t have to do anything. Just type away and word check will do all the work for you. And what do you really learn from this? Nothing, I’d suggest.

Coincidentally, while I was sitting in that cafe with my own MacBook Air tethered to my Samsung Galaxy S2 (you see, I am keeping up), I was flicking through one of the Sunday papers (which I’d actually purchased because I still like the look of ink on paper) I saw a piece reviewing a book by the woman known as Australia’s etiquette queen, June Dally-Watkins. Her thoughts were in line with my own. ‘I am concerned the human race is slipping back to the heathen era and it disappoints me,’ she writes in her book, Manner for Moderns: Be the Best You Can Be – in Every Little Way.

Our dependence on technology, she says, has spoilt face-to-face communication and made us increasingly unaware of others. People send emails instead of writing letters, she says, and while I have to admit that emails are a hell of a lot more convenient than pen and paper, the ‘art’ of handwriting is going out of the window.

The mobile phone has introduced an era of selfishness – people walk down the street sending texts, heads down, crashing into you. The phone goes off in the cinema, the library, the bus, train. And where has personal style, gone?

I walk around Sydney and see people in smart suits, agreed, because they’re business folk out for lunch, but there’s no ‘overall’ sense of smartness about the western world I walk through. There are places where style still exists, admittedly – I was in Japan a few months ago and walking through the Ginza, the main shopping centre of Tokyo, I was stunned at the smart way people dressed. And manners were in abundance – all bows and smiles.

Somebody might, just might, stand for an elderly person on a bus in our western world, but would a male give up his seat for a more capable woman? No way.  We’re a selfish mob and it’s getting worse. In Britain the rioters looted and burned after rallying one another by mobile phone because they were dissatisfied with ‘their lot’ in life.

Perhaps we should dump them in the horn of Africa and let them find out what it’s really like to go hungry.

But I digress. If the internet crashed around the world one day – and I mean for all time – I wouldn’t shed a tear. It would mean that those who believed the best times have gone would start rejoicing. Old skills would be revived. Instead of watching moving pictures downloaded onto our computers, we might create imagery in our minds from a book or go to live theatre. There are untold areas of progress that leave me wondering if they really are progress. There are many gadgets we could do without. And with them gone, perhaps, our world would be all the better for it.

I stand at the spot near Barrow Creek where Peter Falconio disappeared 10 Years ago.

Ten years after British backpacker Peter Falconio vanished on a dark night in the Australian outback, the man convicted of his murder has challenged the police  to ‘show me his body’.

As the mystery remains about what happened to Mr Falconio after his girlfriend Joanne Lees claimed she heard a gunshot at the rear of their Volkswagen campervan, Bradley Murdoch continues to insist he did not kill the 28-year-old Briton at that lonely spot at Barrow Creek.

Miss Lees, then 27, and Mr Falconio were travelling through the outback, heading north from Alice Springs towards Darwin on the night of July 14, 2001, when she claims a stranger in a white four-wheel drive tricked them into stopping, with the pretence that something was wrong with the exhaust of their Volkswagen campervan.

After Mr Falconio got out to inspect the rear, she heard the two men talking, then heard what she believed was a shot. The stranger then tossed her into his vehicle after a fierce struggle but she said she managed to escape through the rear and hide in nearby bushes.

Murdoch, prisoner number 257128, shudders in an icy winter wind sweeping in from the surrounding desert as we sit in an outdoor visiting area in the Alice Springs Correctional Centre and claims that it is these very same conditions that made it impossible for him to have murdered and buried Mr Falconio.

‘The police say that after I shot him I must have buried his body – but the ground is so hard out there at this time of the year that you’d need a mechanical digger to bury someone so well that they can’t be found. And there was a time frame against me, making such a thing impossible.

‘The police have had all the time in the world to find Falconio – 10 long years to search while I, according to their case had just hours to hide him.. They haven’t found him. Yet they’ve convicted me of murdering him.’

In an extraordinary chat with me, the tall 52-year-old former drug courier who is serving life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 28 years, revealed he still held out hope of freedom, despite losing all his appeals. Speaking at length for the first time since his conviction, he disclosed that legal and forensic experts from around the world were working on the evidence and discrepancies in the prosecution case and ‘there remains a good chance for me yet. I can only repeat to you that I didn’t kill Peter Falconio because I wasn’t there at Barrow Creek.’

Two other people with an intriguing role in the affair have also added to the mystery of Falconio’s whereabouts – if his remains are not lying in the desert somewhere. Melissa Kendall, 32, insists that she and her partner, 33-year-old Robbie Brown, served a man fitting Peter Falconio’s description at a petrol station in the outback town of Bourke a week after what has become known as the Incident at Barrow Creek.

‘Robbie and I have had since 2001 to think about all this,’ she said, ‘and not a day goes by without us remaining convinced that the man we served was Peter Falconio. His picture was in the Sunday paper that very same day and we were both left shaken to see him walk into the store and buy some chocolate.’

The mystifying ongoing Peter Falconio case has intrigued lawyers, scientists, police officers and armchair detectives around the world. For based on forensic evidence presented at Murdoch’s trial in Darwin in 2005 – his DNA was said to have been found on Miss Lees’ T-shirt and in the campervan – he was the man responsible for the murder of Mr Falconio, from Huddersfield.

But according to discrepancies in the events as described by Miss Lees, the Australian could not have been there – her description of her attacker did not match Murdoch, his dalmation dog or his vehicle. And several police officers had serious doubts about her account of the attack on that bitterly cold night with the temperature hovering around zero.

Added to the intrigue was the revelation during Murdoch’s trial that Miss Lees had been having an affair with an Irishman called Nick Riley, whom she had met each Friday night for sex in Sydney before setting off for her outback travels with long-time boyfriend Mr Falconio. She was forced to reluctantly admit in court that she had even written to Riley just days after Mr Falconio’s disappearance suggesting they meet up in Berlin.

‘You put her entire story together and there’s only one conclusion – it doesn’t add up and you can’t have a case that doesn’t add up and then convict a man of murder without even a body,’ says Murdoch as he sits at the table, decorated with an Aboriginal motif, in the visitor’s area of the prison. His short-cropped once-sandy-coloured hair has turned grey and his face is deeply lined. Under the cuffs of his blue sweater are traces of the tattoos that run up his arms. His two front teeth are missing – a startling feature that Miss Lees did not mention when she described her attacker to police.

‘Joanne claims that after I shot Falconio I dragged her into my vehicle and that while I was looking at ways to get rid of the body she managed to clamber into the back of the vehicle and escape through the rear,’ he says. ‘Well everybody who knew me knows my cab was sealed – you can’t get into the back that way. In fact the police admitted they had found only a couple of vehicles in the whole of Australia that had access from front to back.

‘And then, when she was challenged on this in court she said she might have been mistaken and that I had pushed her in through the canvas sides. She was wrong about that, too, because underneath the canvas I had a steel mesh. She talked about hiding in bushes while I came looking for her with my dog, but believe me if it was me there my dog would have found her.

‘And how come the police and the Aboriginal trackers found traces of her footprints in the bush but no traces of anyone else’s? Yet I was supposed to have been looking for her for hours.’

Murdoch remains calm as he goes over what he says are the numerous discrepancies – he has had nearly six years since his sentencing to go over the claims against him and his anger has subsided. ‘But I still wonder how they could have possibly thought that after claiming I had shot Falconio – and there was no gunshot residue on the back of their van – I drove off with the body, leaving a witness, Joanne, hiding in the bushes.

‘Why on earth would I have decided to drive all the way back to Alice Springs – what, 300kms – to buy fuel, as the police claimed, with a body in the vehicle? How was I to have known that Joanne hadn’t raised the alarm before I even got there and that police had already set up road blocks?

‘It’s another aspect of the case against me that doesn’t make sense and neither does the fact that not only did they not find any trace of a body being picked up or dragged into another vehicle at the scene – they haven’t even found the body.’

Northern Territory Police say that there are no active searches for Mr Falconio’s body, but if they received credible information it would be investigated. Murdoch holds out hopes that the DNA evidence used against him will eventually lead to his freedom.

Referring to the speck of DNA said to be his on Miss Lees’ T-shirt, the convicted murderer says that if it was he who had dragged her from the VW and thrown her to the ground to restrain her, his DNA would be all over her – and it wasn’t. He also says that traces of his DNA said to have been found by British forensic scientist Dr Jonathan Whitaker using a controversial technique called low copy numbers should not have even been allowed in his trial.

‘The FBI refuses to use this very same technique because it’s unreliable and when it was used against Sean Hoey who was charged with the Omagh bombing in Ireland in 1998 the case collapsed after the judge criticised Dr Whitaker’s evidence.

‘Yet this technique was used against me when Dr Whitaker said he found traces of my DNA in the VW because I had presumably driven the vehicle into the bush to hide if from passing traffic.

‘The holes in the case against me are huge but one day I hope it will all turn around. None of us knows where this business is going to turn next.’

Nearly 800 miles away Melissa Kendall says the day the man she insists was Peter Falconio walked into the petrol station in the remote outback town of Bourke where she was working with Robbie Brown will remain imprinted on her mind.

‘The police made a mockery of us, one detective saying he hadn’t seen Elvis yet, either, after we reported seeing Peter Falconio – because that’s how I’ll always refer to the man.’

The Falconio affair is replete with red herrings and alternative scenarios but Miss Kendall’s ‘sighting’ of Falconio fits in with rumours that Mr Falconio faked his own death because he had money troubles at home – and never expected his disappearance to make international headlines. But they are rumours, whispers, guesses, and Mr Falconio’s family and Miss Lees have often pleaded for them to stop.

Murdoch’s lawyer, Grant Algie, raised the possibility of the ‘fake death’ scenario when he said at Murdoch’s trial that the British couple had stopped by the side of the road near Barrow Creek to meet a third man who, it had been arranged, would take Peter away alive.

‘When the man I say was Peter Falconio walked into the petrol station, he was with two other people who behaved really strangely,’ recalls Miss Kendall. ‘He didn’t say much, but I think he had an accent, which might or might not have been English. I was just stunned at seeing this man whose face I had been looking at in the paper just a short time before.

‘The people he was with – a man and a woman – were in an open-back truck which they parked out of sight of the office part of the petrol station and they had to stretch the fuel hose right out to make it reach. It was as if they didn’t want us to see the vehicle.

‘But Robbie and I both went out, very carefully, to look at them all. The other man who was with “Peter Falconio” matched the photo-fit pictures the police had put out in the hunt for the man who carried out the attack at Barrow Creek.

‘It was really weird and rather frightening. “Peter Falconio” had a bit of an injury to the left side of his mouth, like a scab, just below the corner of his mouth. When they drove off, they didn’t drive out into the main road. They went up a back lane which led off in the direction of Brisbane.

‘Nothing will convince me that the man I saw wasn’t Peter Falconio. It was him all right and Robbie and I will continue to swear it for the rest of our lives.’

Today Miss Lees lives in a house she has bought in the north of England. She has declined to comment in any detail about the incident, adding that she and the Falconio family would prefer to remain out of the spotlight now that 10 years have passed.

At Barrow Creek today there is no longer any sign of the patch of blood on the road which forensic scientists said matched Peter Falconio’s – despite one analyst claiming it was mixed with animal blood.  It has long since been erased by thousands of tourist vehicles and the single complete footprint that police said matched Miss Lees’ in the sandy surface near the road has eroded with the weather.

But hawks circle overhead, looking for animal prey – dead or alive. And Aborigine trackers – first called to the scene in the hours after Miss Lees’ raised the alarm by waving down a passing truck in the dead of night – said if there had been a body or a wounded man lying in the bush at the time, the birds of prey would have hovered over it.

But they saw no hawks. Cadaver dogs found no body.

Peter Falconio had disappeared, leaving behind a mystery that has endured for 10 years.

Daniel Moore in a relaxed moment.

The parents of a British man found with critical injuries at the side of a Sydney street have told how they are living through ‘the worst of nightmares’ as their son fights for life.

Daniel Moore, 21, from Marske, near Redcar, in Teeside, remained in a life-threatening condition with a fractured skull, brain injuries and internal bleeding as his tearful parents made an emotional appeal for a taxi driver to come forward.

His mother, Mrs Valerie Rutters, who has remarried, said she would happily change places with her son.

Daniel’s father Robin Moore and his mother sat at their son’s bedside for a short time after arriving in Australia from their homes in the north of England, then faced the tv cameras to appeal for the taxi driver who might be able to assist with police inquiries to come forward.

‘As Daniel’s parents, we need answers as to how and why this happened – and we also need to know who is responsible,’ said Mr Moore. Police have said a taxi driver, believed to be the last person to see Daniel, needs to come forward to answer police questions.

Directing his words to whoever might be able to explain his son’s injuries, Mr Moore said: ‘We ask that you look into your conscience and come forward and give the police any information that you may have, no matter how small and trivial it may seem.’ Sitting at his side, Mrs Rutters was in tears as she spoke of her son’s critical condition as he lies in Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital’s intensive care unit.

‘He’s still very, very sick. It’s a parents worst nightmare…I would happily change places with him.’

The distraught couple left it to Detective Inspector Luke Arthurs to provide details of what they knew of Daniel’s movements last weekend, leading up to the mystery incident that had left him seriously injured at the roadside.

The inspector said Daniel had taken a taxi with a friend from Sydney’s central station to the seaside suburb of Manly, which is popular with British backpackers, in the early hours of last Sunday morning. The friend had got out of the taxi in Manly, but Inspector Arthurs said they were unsure if Daniel got out at the same time. He was later found with his injuries in another part of the suburb.

‘We just need to speak to the taxi driver and see what, if anything, he knows about this.’

Inspector Arthurs said it was not known whether Daniel’s injuries were the result of an assault or an accident. Police have also not ruled out the possibility the Briton was injured in a hit-and-run accident.

Daniel had been living and working in the Manly area for the past two years. A family friend in Redcar, Julie Jones, has told how he and her own son grew up together. ‘Our son went out to Australia and Daniel followed him, but Daniel decided to stay on longer,’ she told the BBC. ‘It is really upsetting to think this is going on. I just hope they found out what has happened.’

FOOTNOTE: A taxi driver has since come forward and given a statement to police. His vehicle is being forensically tested. Developments in the case are now awaited…

By the left...young women army cadets go through their paces in Pyongyang

I’ve recently returned from an extraordinary journey into North Korea, possibly the world’s most secretive country, although the physical danger is nothing like that of Iraq or Afghanistan.

My ‘entry ticket’ was as a competitor in the first-ever amateur golf tournament to be staged in the country. Oh yes, I do play golf (badly) and North Korea does have a course, even though it’s reserved for the elite and diplomats.

You can read the full account in my story in the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392821/North-Korea-Paranoia-cars-silence-cities.html) but in summary I left with mixed feelings. I hadn’t been shown everything I wanted to see, that was for sure, and the people were generally shy of Westerners like myself. They obviously weren’t used to seeing many, or any.

But I’d like to return again one day and see more of the way of life (but minders will be present, just as they were this time) as five days, interrupted by a golf tournament (at which I embarrassed myself) was not nearly long enough, even though I was given an extraordinary insight into many aspects of life there.

This crazy sketch is on a pavement notice board in Newtown, Sydney

I am now convinced that British-Australian Interpol fugitive Lisa Marie Smith is shadowing me, trying to contact me – or someone who knows her is trying to get in touch. Either that or it is an astonishing coincidence that when I follow a particular route in my suburb, almost daily, I come across messages and posters containing her name.

The paths I tread are obscure – a back lane here, a walkway through a park there – but no matter where I go, the weird messages referring to her pop out of nowhere. The picture above has appeared in the past few days in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, near the railway station. It is sketched on an A-frame notice board, which is filled with crazed drawings and words that suggest the writer is hallucinating. Or is the apparent madness a cover for leaving a message for me…or for someone Lisa Marie knows…or someone Lisa Marie is trying to get in touch with?

It’s all very bizarre – but  how do you explain that these cryptic signs are posted in the very same places that I frequently walk in Sydney’s inner western suburbs and are not found anywhere else? Her name is written on pieces of paper stuffed into wire fencing or tacked to a tree – all of them freshly written on routes that I habitually take.

One message, contained on the same A-frame board that carries the strange drawing I’ve posted above, is aimed at – well, who? It asks: ‘Do you want to meet me?’ Now, is that Lisa asking someone – me? – if I want to meet her? Or is it someone Lisa knows asking if she wants to meet that person? The other messages I’ve seen posted around the Newtown and Stanmore suburbs are cryptic but all mention her name and most point out that she’s a fugitive  from Thailand after disappearing in 1996 while on bail after being charged with serious drug offences.

When she fled from Thailand in August 1996, the-then 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong-based insurance company executive is believed to have used a British replacement passport – she claimed to have lost the first in the weeks before her arrest – to flee to Greece.

There, she obtained yet another British passport and vanished – ending up among the top 10 on Interpol’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. An international police search, involving crack investigators in Britain and Australia, failed to find any clues as to Lisa Marie’s whereabouts and her father, who had posted bail for her in Thailand, insisted he had no idea where she was.

So, is she now in Australia, treading the paths that I tread? Are the messages aimed at me – because I’ve written about her extensively in the past? Or have they been put up by someone trying to get in touch with her? The mystery endures. But if Lisa Marie reads this, I’d be happy to hear from her. No tricks, no traps. I’m easily found.

Curious sign on a tree in Sydney suggests British-Australian drug fugitive Lisa Marie Smith is living in the city.

Fifteen years after Briton Lisa Marie Smith vanished from Bangkok while on bail accused of serious drug trafficking charges, mysterious clues have begun to emerge suggesting she is living in Sydney. And if curious cryptic messages posted on trees and walls are to be believed, Miss Smith, a former star pupil at Eastleigh College, near Southampton, is now living in my neighbourhood – and perhaps in my street. When she fled from Thailand in February 1996, the-then 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong-based insurance company executive, is believed to have used a second passsport – she held both British and Australian documents – to flee to Greece. There, she obtained a new British passport and vanished – ending up among the top 10 on Interpol’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. An international police search, involving crack investigators in Britain and Australia, failed to find any clues as to Miss Smith’s whereabouts and her father, who had posted bail for her in Thailand, insisted he had no idea where she was. But small, fascinating signs written on pieces of plaster and wood, have been popping up around the inner-west suburbs of Sydney suggesting that Miss Smith is living in the area – and may have even scrawled one of them herself.

I had written extensively about Miss Smith when she fled Thailand in August 1996 after being the first foreigner to be given bail on serious drug charges after her millionaire father, Terry Smith, had paid around £30,000 to secure her temporary freedom to await future court appearances. It had been claimed by police that she was carrying opium when she was first arrested as she tried to fly out of Bangkok – a charge that can result in the death penalty – but that was reduced to hashish and amphetamines after her parents arrived in the country with a top lawyer.

Miss Smith spent six months in Lard Yao Prison – nicknamed the Bangkok Hilton – before being granted bail and fleeing the country. She obtained a new British passport in Greece and vanished, defying all police efforts to find her. But at the end of my street, less than 30 yards from the entrance to the local railway station, an intriguing sign has been attached to a tree.

Written on a small block of white-painted wood, the message reads:  ‘Lisa Marie Smith. I did it for you, Damien. Look at me. Omen.’

Just two days earlier, totally by chance, I had noticed another small sign, written on a piece of plaster that had been painted red, and stuck on the side of a house. It read: ‘Lisa Marie Smith. Bangkok Hilton Fugitive 1996′.

British police, who admit the runaway has ‘dropped off our radar’, have said she may have changed her name to McGuigan.  Could the reference to ‘Damien’ on the block of wood in my street refer to an Irishman she knows…an Irishman called McGuigan? Further checks on the internet reveal that there are other references to Lisa Marie Smith, some suggesting that she should go to jail and that Australian drug smuggler Schapelle Corby, serving 20 years in Bali, should go free.

One sign echos the British police belief that she now has an Irish surname. Stuck to a wall in the Sydney suburb of Newtown – one rail stop from my home – it blares out the name of Lisa Marie Smith, points out that she is a fugitive from the ‘Bangkok Hilton’, and adds: ‘New Identity – McGuigan? Travels Eire 2 Australia as Though Invisible.’

The story Miss Smith told investigators immediately after her arrest resulted in her being accused of lying. She said she had befriended a Pakistani man who on hearing she was short of money, agreed to pay her to take a rucksack to Tokyo ‘for a friend’. When she reached Bangkok airport with the rucksack – and she insisted she did not know it contained drugs – police who had been tipped off were waiting for her.

It is believed she was set up as a distraction, to divert the attention of police away from a bigger smuggling operation that was being worked at the same time. Perhaps if Miss Smith and I should meet in my street, she’ll tell me more. And the coffee invitation stands.

Severe injuries were suffered when this bus was hit by falling masonry during the earthquake

Millions of words have been written since the terrible earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, this week and while I have been there on the spot to cover the story, there is little point in trying to sum up the extent of it – the consequences, with the death toll rising steadily past the 100 mark, have been too wide-reaching, affecting too many families for me to be able to begin to express the true horror of this natural disaster.

There have been victims and heroes, there have been those who have had narrow escapes and there are those who wait anxiously for news of missing loved ones. What story do I pick to sum it up – the teenagers who sat on a pavement hoping their mother was alive in one of the buildings, only to learn that no-one in there could have survived…the same teenagers who learned that while they were away from home, someone broke in and stole many of their belongings?

There is the British man I spoke to who would have been crushed to death by the tumbling steeple of Christchurch Cathedral if his girlfriend had not called him in to a Tourist Information Bureau seconds before the masonry crashed down. And then there is the stomach-churning story of the doctor….

Heading north from Townsville after Cyclone Yasi struck

A friend was remarking at the weekend that it was nice to have a good wind blowing through Sydney after a week of breezeless, high temperatures.

Judge Linda Dessau - Gives Permission for Boy to Become a Woman

A schoolboy has been given approval to start changing into a woman – provided he has his sperm frozen in case he decides to ‘father’ children some time in the future.

A lone mosque remains after the 2004 tsunami. Picture: AP

For most of us, the terrible 2004 Boxing Day tsunami was a disaster that we reflect on as the years drift by – but for a number of mothers in Indonesia every day is a day to remember.