Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast

Junjaree | Njimbin | Brown Jack | Little Hairy Man - Australian Cryptid Mystery

It isn't the Yowie. It's smaller than that. Faster. And by some accounts, considerably more unsettling.
The Junjudee has been part of this country's stories since long before records were kept. It appears in a newspaper from 1897. It appears in the testimony of soldiers on a military exercise in the Cape York rainforest. It appears to a horsewoman in the Northern Rivers, in open daylight, in open pasture and then vanishes into a stand of trees the size of a lounge room.
It's still appearing in Tasmania in 2024
In this episode of Strewth, we're on the path of this elusive creature. 


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Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay
Sources:
Karen Thurecht PhD - Personal essay, The Little Brown Hairy Man, 2019. https://karenthurecht.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/the-little-brown-hairy-man-junjudee/ 
Paul Cropper and Tony Healy - The Nimble Junjudee From Jiggi, The Fortean, 2018. https://www.thefortean.com/2018/07/21/the-nimble-junjudee-from-jiggi/ 
Paul Cropper - Christmas Hills Reserve, Tasmania 2024, Australian Yowie Research. 8 July 2024. https://www.yowiehunters.com.au/tasmania/2274-christmas-hills-reserve-tasmania-2024 
Jet Zak - (YouTube, 2007) - Black Shadows: Hairy Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_O6tb68R9k&t=18s 
Robin Morgan - Junjudee, 2021 - https://www.superbugtom.com/cryptid-catalogue/junjudee

Leanne Holland - Part 2 of 2 - Not a Scintilla - Unsolved True Crime

On Christmas Eve 2009, Graham Stafford's conviction for the murder of Leanne Holland was quashed. A Court of Appeal found his trial had been fundamentally unfair. One of its judges would have acquitted him outright.
The murder of Leanne Holland was officially unsolved.
Then Queensland Police conducted a two-year review, declared there was not a scintilla of evidence against anyone other than Stafford, and locked the report away for a decade.
In Part 2, we ask the question nobody in authority has seriously tried to answer: if not Graham Stafford, then who?

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Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay
Sources:
R v Stafford [1992] QCA 269

R v Stafford; ex parte A-G [1997] QCA 333

R v Stafford [2009] QCA 407

Stafford and Queensland Police Service [2021] QICmr 21

ABC Australian Story, "Body of Evidence" Parts 1 & 2, aired 20 & 27 August 2007.

Channel 9, Under Investigation with Liz Hayes, aired 14 February 2024.

Graeme Crowley and Paul Wilson, Who Killed Leanne Holland? One Girl's Murder and One Man's Injustice, New Holland Publishers, 2010

Graeme Crowley, Joe Crowley, Darrell Giles and Greg Cary, The Leanne Holland Murder, 2024

Podcast - Who Killed Leanne Holland?, Six10 Media, hosted by Graeme Crowley and Jamie Pultz, 2020

Thomas Chamberlin, "Leanne Holland murder case reopened by coroner after 35 years," The Courier Mail, 22 April 2026

Leanne Holland | Part 1: A Walk to the Shops | Unsolved True Crime

On the first morning of the September school holidays in 1991, twelve-year-old Leanne Holland left her home in Goodna, Queensland, wearing a purple jumper and no shoes. She was going to the shops. She never came home.
Three days later, police found her body in bushland off Redbank Plains Road. Within a week, a man was arrested. Within months, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.
He has always said he didn't do it.
This is Part 1 of a two-part investigation into one of Queensland's most contested criminal cases. Leanne Holland - A Walk to the Shops.
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Strewth social media links - https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast 
Contact us - [email protected] 
Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay
Sources:
R v Stafford [1992] QCA 269

R v Stafford; ex parte A-G [1997] QCA 333

R v Stafford [2009] QCA 407

Stafford and Queensland Police Service [2021] QICmr 21

ABC Australian Story, "Body of Evidence" Parts 1 & 2, aired 20 & 27 August 2007.

Channel 9, Under Investigation with Liz Hayes, aired 14 February 2024.

Graeme Crowley and Paul Wilson, Who Killed Leanne Holland? One Girl's Murder and One Man's Injustice, New Holland Publishers, 2010

Graeme Crowley, Joe Crowley, Darrell Giles and Greg Cary, The Leanne Holland Murder, 2024

Podcast - Who Killed Leanne Holland?, Six10 Media, hosted by Graeme Crowley and Jamie Pultz, 2020

Thomas Chamberlin, "Leanne Holland murder case reopened by coroner after 35 years," The Courier Mail, 22 April 2026

The Unexplained Disappearance of the Patanela | Australian Mystery
In November of 1988, a steel-hulled schooner called the Patanela made three radio calls from ten miles off Botany Bay and disappeared.
No wreckage. No bodies. No distress signal. No explanation that holds together under examination.
Just an experienced skipper asking for directions to a town he'd already passed, a silence where a voice used to be, and one barnacled lifebuoy that turned up six months later and raised more questions than it answered.
Four people were aboard.
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Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay
Sources:
Janice Jarrett, "Operation 'Lilac' The mystery of the Patanela", Platypus: The Journal of the Australian Federal Police, Issue 36/38, July 1992. 
NSW Coronial Inquest, Deputy State Coroner Derrick Hand, Glebe Coroner's Court, 1992. 
Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 2008. "Message in a bottle redeems lost sons."
Paul Whittaker and Robert Reid, Patanela Is Missing: Australia's Greatest Sea Mystery, Bantam Books, Sydney, 1993.
Philip Temple, The Sea and the Snow, 1966 (reissued).
Derrick Hand, The Coroner, ABC Books, 2004.
John Pinkney, Great Australian Mysteries, Five Mile Press, 2004.
Under Investigation with Liz Hayes, "Ghost Ship: What happened to the Patanela?", Channel Nine, 1 March 2023.

The Humpty Doo Poltergeist - Unsolved Paranormal Mystery

In early 1998, a rented weatherboard house forty kilometres outside Darwin became the most talked-about address in Australia.
Over three months, the residents of 90 McMinns Drive reported knives hurling themselves across rooms, gravel falling through an intact ceiling, and messages spelled out in driveway stones, including the name of a friend who had died weeks earlier in a fire. Three priests of three different denominations came to help. None of them left with a simple explanation. Then the cameras arrived.
This is the Humpty Doo poltergeist, Australia's most-witnessed, least-investigated paranormal case of the twentieth century. Thirty people saw something in that house. Nobody in any official capacity ever tried to find out what it was.
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Contact us - [email protected]
Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay
Sources:
Anderson, Max. "Ghost Writer." The Australian Magazine, 9 May 1998. 
Voss, Nikki. Multiple articles. Northern Territory News, 3, 4, 6, 7, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23 April 1998; 3 May 1998. 
Ellis, Jack et al. Multiple articles. The Litchfield Times, 2, 9, 16 and 30 April 1998. 
Farrar, Tracey. Interview with Kirsty Agius. ABC Radio Darwin, April 1998.
Healy, Tony. "A Week with the Humpty Doo Poltergeist." strangenationaustralia.blogspot.com, November 1998
Cropper, Paul. "The Humpty Doo Poltergeist: 20 Years On." The Fortean, 13 March 2018. thefortean.com
Healy, Tony and Paul Cropper. "Tony and Paul Meet the Humpty Doo Poltergeist." The Fortean, 12 April 2020. thefortean.com
Healy, Tony and Paul Cropper. Australian Poltergeist: The Stone-Throwing Spook of Humpty Doo and Many Other Cases. Strange Nation / Xoum, 2014. ISBN 9781921134340.
Braude, Stephen. Review of Australian Poltergeist. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 29(1), 2015, pp. 158–160.