Grave Tales Australia: the series Helen Goltz and Chris Adams

Dying young, Sylvia McArthur would make her mark, documenting in letters to a newspaper’s children’s page what life in rural Tasmania around the turn of the 20th century was like.

Some bushrangers became folk heroes, others were opportunistic thieves, but the Clarke Brothers were murderous thugs who hanged on duel gallows.

Madam Weigel’s patterns dressed the women of Australia for nine decades but in the large cemetery plot bought for three, there are no bodies.

Mark Jeffrey lived with the 1100 or so deceased residents on the Isle of the Dead, tending his own plot. But how did he avoid being buried there?

Little did Professor Theodore Flynn and his wife, Lily, of Sandy Bay, Tasmania, know that their son, Errol Flynn, would become Hollywood’s favourite son from the early to mid-20th century and die too soon at the age of 50. This is the story of the Flynns of Sandy Bay.

A story that has passed into folk law – how bushman Bernard O’Reilly put his mind to finding a missing aircraft with seven people on board when no-one else could.