If you pick up an old world map or globe, in a remote part of the Northern Territory you will find a probably unfamiliar name: Birdum.
It was once the busy end of the railway line from Darwin, where Russian peanut farmers, buffalo hunters, criminals, soldiers and First Australians all converged.
Now, it's an abandoned ghost town reclaimed by the bush.
So, where the hell is Birdum, what happened to it, and what secrets did it take with it when it disappeared?
The birth of Birdum
It was 1927 when Daniel David Main, a thickset man with an enormous bushranger moustache, decided to settle his family in a tiny pocket of scrub about 80 kilometres south of Mataranka.
His motivation is unclear, but descendants of Daniel, who was a blacksmith born in Ballarat, claim he got into a stoush with Ned Kelly when he refused to repair the outlaw's armour.
In his book The Main Lines of Birdum, Daniel's late grandson Dave Whitehouse wrote that, according to one family story, the argument became physical and Daniel whacked Ned Kelly with a pick handle, then fled interstate.
Another incentive for the move was likely money: the North Australian Rail – an ambitious project that aimed to ultimately connect Darwin to Adelaide – was under construction and Birdum was set to be a station on the line.
As construction barrelled southward, Daniel, his wife Sarah (who had been Ned Kelly's sister seamstress), two of their adult daughters Elsie and May (known as Dolly) and Dolly's husband Bill Jacobsen constructed three buildings: their home, a boarding house and a general store with petrol station.
But the depression put a stop to the railway.
Money ran out and workers were instructed to pull up stumps where ever they were.
Fortunately for the Mains, where they happened to be was Birdum, which meant the little outpost became the accidental head of the rail.
Suddenly the Main/Jacobsen family was busy accommodating and feeding an eclectic mix of travellers and passengers aboard the train known as Leaping Lena.
Their businesses were thriving.
The Jacobsens also provided entertainment: the train would pull in and, with Bill on the drums and Dolly on banjo, they would play for whoever was around.
But things did not end well for the Jacobsens.
Or for Birdum.
The Birdum Hotel
By the time the first train arrived on September 5, 1929, Birdum was basically three shacks in the bush and a few goats.
It wasn't until 1930 the town really had something going for it: a pub.
It was a rough building in a dusty clearing, but a welcome sight for anyone who had endured the bumpy road up from Alice Springs or the gruelling train journey from Darwin.
But the Birdum Hotel was born in the shadow of death.
The badness started on opening night.
It was July 11, 1930 and somewhere amid the drinking, stories and singing, the news filtered in that Neil Angus McDonald had shot himself, over by the No. 2 bore.
The region's Mounted Constable McNab, who had come to celebrate the pub's opening, excused himself from the party.
He had buried McDonald before the clock struck midnight.
The shovel had barely been brushed off before it happened again, nine days later. McNab was called back to bury the next victim: a man who had been staying at the pub.
He had gone to bed and never woke up. It wasn't the pub's fault, of course, it was a brutal time.
But the deaths kept coming.
And in 1936, the victim was Bill Jacobsen.
The Birdum murder
It was 5:45am on January 24, 1936 when Dolly Jacobsen woke to find her husband, Bill, gone.
His absence wasn't alarming – he was often up early for his job as a fettler on the rail – but when she went outside, Dolly discovered his body on the ground less than 100 metres from their front doorstep.
Dolly ran to the railway station for help, but nothing could be done.
When police were phoned, they assumed it was a suicide and had the guard put Bill's body on the train to Pine Creek, where a post-mortem was carried out by Dr Clyde Fenton.
Bill was buried the next day.
At the hearing, Dr Fenton testified that Bill's death was not suicide.
He raised questions about the position of the rifle and the damage to the skull, and said the gun found with the body was not the gun that had fired the bullet.
Bill Jacobsen had likely been murdered, but because the body had been moved and buried so quickly, there was no evidence to point to a killer.
The Jacobsen/Main family soon moved on, and Birdum entered another phase of growth: the war
The war years
In 1942, when Darwin was bombed, Birdum became even more important.
The north was evacuated and the Americans had to look for somewhere to headquarter their Asia-Pacific military response.
Darwin was too dangerous, so they shifted thousands of soldiers and a substantial hospital south to Birdum.
The only building available for the bigwigs was the pub so they paid the owners John and Olive O'Keefe 10 pounds a week to rent the place, and the publicans sat down and waited for the war to finish.
The bar stools that until then had been a place for drunkards to spin stories were suddenly used to plan the Indonesian retreat and aggression against the Japanese.
During the war, deaths were especially frequent. At one point, two American soldiers fought over a blanket—in the scuffle, one shot the other.
The survivor was fined one dollar for fighting and ten cents for the bullet used and the loser was buried near the goat yard.
In a separate incident, a transport lorry rolled over and caught fire.
To spare the trapped driver from being burned alive, one of the US Lieutenants took out his pistol and shot him.
The man's lonely grave is still out there, somewhere near No. 2 bore.
Death comes for all of us, and towns are mortal, too.
Black soil made the place difficult to navigate, so the railhead was moved to Larrimah and overnight, Birdum was obsolete.
It limped on for a little while as the turning place for trains where they would pump water into the steam engines, but ultimately everyone left, and Larrimah cannibalised its neighbour.
When it died, Birdum took many secrets with it, but that doesn't mean people have forgotten.
Who killed Bill Jacobsen?
Bill Jacobsen's 1936 suspected murder was never solved, but 70 years after his death, Jacobsen's daughters Ethel Webb and Rose McRae, who had been young girls in Birdum when their father died, returned to the scene of the crime.
Along with a group of their relatives, they turned up at the Larrimah Hotel wearing 'Who killed Bill Jacobsen?' t-shirts.
With the then publicans at Larrimah, Ann Kanters and Barry Sharpe, they drove out to what remains of Birdum, which isn't much.
All that's left is a replica pub, built by locals where they used to sometimes hold Back to Birdum events, celebrating the region's rich history.
It wasn't the first time Jacobsen's daughters had come to the Northern Territory seeking answers.
For a long time the family didn't even know where Jacobsen was buried.
As adults, Mrs McCrae and Mrs Webb put ads in newspapers and visited Darwin searching for his grave.
Since then, Mrs McRae has passed away, but Mrs Webb, aged 90 and living in NSW, still thinks of her father.
Bill's daughters have spent years going through old documents, writing letters to archives and bureaucrats, and visiting clairvoyants, trying to uncover the truth.
But his death remains a mystery.
Being able to place a plaque on their father's resting place in Pine Creek meant a lot to the sisters, but it did little to ease the pain of not knowing how he'd gotten there.
And as for Birdum, the replica pub remains, but it's been many years since locals held an event there.
The area is overgrown, but if you look closely there are remainders of the old town – bottles stranded neck-down in the dirt to create a path to what was once a house or a shop, the railway tracks hidden beneath termite mounds and tall grass.
Like Jacobsen, Birdum is gone, and both have left behind small reminders of how important they were.
