Deep in the scrub a short drive from where two cops, a neighbour and three doomsday killers were shot dead, a fringe dweller was confiding his conspiracy theory about what really was behind the violent tragedy.
The man was standing barefoot in a yard strewn with rusted car bodies and junk, goats running around, dogs barking, a kind of house with no windows, its walls sagging and lumpy with tarred-up holes.
This is ‘Blockie’ territory which lies between the town of Tara, where this week’s two slain police officers worked, and the Wieambilla property where cop killers Stacey, Nathaniel and Gareth Train lived.
Hundreds of fringe-dwellers live in this stretch of the Condamine State Forest on what were sold as unsewered blocks with no running water, no electricity, just virgin land carved and divided in the bush.
The man repeated what is becoming the favourite Blockie conspiracy in these parts since Monday’s tragic events. ‘Them three, the government just wanted to get rid of them and take back their land,’ he said.
‘They had to sacrifice a couple of their own to make (the Trains) look as if they were the bad ones, but it’s the police, the authorities … trying to make us look bad.’
Heather and David bought 15 hectares of dirt cheap land 20 years ago and lived in a shed on the bottom of their dam but now have power, water and a septic tank and say as fringe dwellers ‘life is good’
Proud blockies Judy and Peter’s ‘spaghetti block’ out in the scrub north of Tara is strewn with what might look like rubbish and about 20 cars, but the couple is happy living on the fringes
Ex rubber factor worked Peter Treloar, 70, and wife Judy, 58, paid off their mortgage on their $34,000 block of land about 15 years ago and prefer to think of isolation in the scrub as ‘peace and quiet’
A few kilometres up the road down what was essentially no more than a track worn into the bush on a block even less accessible to outsiders, a bearded man emerged from a shack with a couple of pale kids and shouted: ‘You’re trespassing. Get off my land now’.
A friendlier Blockie, John, on the other side from the Wieambilla shootout site, offered some advice from inside his gate: ‘There’s a lot of people with guns out here, and I’d say most of them aren’t licensed.
‘I’ve had feral kids in here trying to steal my stuff, one even tried to taser me after I discovered his dope crop.
‘There’s a lot of preppers out here and talk about a training camp, para-military, and there’s people still living in tin huts with no water.
‘Be careful, there’s some places I wouldn’t stop at or get out of my car. I’ve got electricity, tank water, sanitation, a satellite dish, but when people see you’ve got stuff from the road they just want to break in.
‘Feral kids who’ve grown up here not knowing normal life in town or city.
This mysterious row of corrugated buildings also sits deep in the bush surrounding the Trains home
Dotted around the backblocks Tara through cleared scrub in the Condamine forest are thousands of fringe dwellers, some of whom have guns and are preppers, according to their neighbours
‘There’s a lot of preppers out here and talk about a training camp, para-military, and there’s people still living in tin huts with no water,’ locals told Daily Mail Australia
‘There’s one kid’s got multiple charges for arson and home invasion, but the cops can’t do anything because the judge just lets them off.’
John himself had a personal encounter with one of the Wieambilla shooters, Gareth Train, in the middle of Tara two months before the shooting tragedy.
‘Looking scruffy, I think they were all on ice. It was at Foodworks in the middle of town, he blocked my car in and when I asked him to move, politely, he just said f*** you, wouldn’t even look at me.’
He had previously met Stacey Train, an ‘odd unit, very alternative’ and remembered her comment about some young people who had been playing up.
She said, “‘they all need to be put in a hole and shot’ and I thought ‘that’s a bit extreme’ but said, ‘they just need a kick up the a***’.’ “
The Blockie culture of the settlers north of Tara is under scrutiny in the wake of the fatal encounter between the Trains and police which left six dead.
A shipping container, sheds, a caravan and tents equals home sweet home behind a security fence in the back blocks between Tara and the shootout site of the Wieambilla property where six died on Monday
Thousands of fringe-dwellers live in this stretch of the Condamine State Forest on what were sold as unsewered blocks with no running water, no electricity, just virgin land carved and divided in the bush
The ‘blockie’ culture of the settlers north of Tara is under scrutiny in the wake of the fatal encounter between the Trains and police which left six dead (pictured, inside one of the homes)
The Blockies have long been a thorn in the side of ‘old Tara’ residents, since the once prosperous and still proud district was overtaken by mostly socio-economically disadvantaged people who were lured by the promise of cheap land ownership.
From the late 1970s onward developers all over Queensland lined their pockets with sales of dirt cheap ‘dry’ blocks, creating a land boom for poor people and factory workers from the cities.
They came in their droves, buying blocks between 10 and 40ha, though in Tara blockie country the ‘spaghetti blocks’ are typically 1.5km long by 300m wide.
Refugees from areas like Logan City debunked to the blocks after the 1982 Commonwealth Games. Others came in the early 2000s, paying around $35,000 for 15 hectares.
Shelley and her family on a block in Wains Road heard gunshots on Monday night and then police screamed into her driveway and told her to evacuate herself and all the kids overnight
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An aerial of the Wieambilla property where Stacey, Nathaniel and Gareth train shot dead two police and were then taken out in a 90-minute gunfight with specialist SERT squad officers
Nathaniel and Stacey Train on their wedding day, above left. Gareth Train is on right
Outside Tara, the number of people living on around 2000 rural subdivision ‘lifestyle’ blocks exceeds the town’s population of around around 1500.
Michael O’Brien a retired builder who lives in Tara objected to the Blockies being called a settlement.
‘It’s not. they’re economic refugees from western Sydney who sleep in trailers’.
The divided state of Tara could be seen in the days after the Wieambilla tragedy when one of the town’s respected matrons exasperatedly shooed a TV reporter away from interviewing barefooted and toothless Blockie residents, instead of town locals.
‘This is not Tara,’ said Carmel, who has been in the town for almost 40 years, though statistically it is.
Once a wool and grain industry centre, Tara was prosperous until the late 20th century when the wool industry declined.
In came the Blockies in waves, as developers cashed in on land nobody else wanted.
Heather and David on the property they bought for $30,000 started out on the block in a shed at the bottom of the dam and now have electricity, a septic tank and satellite dish
The Blockies were not farmers, and in any case their land was unfarmable, consisting of ‘a foot of dirt over white rock’, so impenetrable that jackhammers bounce off it and sanitation holes even for septic toilets are difficult to drill.
Throughout the bush can be seen their rusted old shipping containers, caravans, tents and dilapidated sheds clustered behind high wire fences and ‘Keep Out’ signs.
Many of the blocks are hidden among the scrubby gums of the Condamine, which is dotted with waste water holding ponds, compressor stations and gaswells.
One cop on duty near the Trains’ property joked that you could rate a Blockie’s wealth by the number of cars in their yard offering possible profit as scrap metal.
Along the Chinchilla-Tara Road leading away from the Trains’ Wieambilla property, between the Tara gasfields’ Kenya Block Valve and the town of Tara, Heather Scorridge and her partner David have lived on the block bought for $30,000 for 20 years.
For the couple, who started out in a shed on the bottom of their dam, the bush block is now their their 15ha slice of peace and harmony away from a crowded and troubled world.
David, from Mackay, was a warehouse worker at the Jack The Slasher franchise in Brisbane when he vowed to ditch city life for the bush.
Police down Wains Road outside the entrance to the crime scene and property belonging to Doomsday preppers Stacey Train, and brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train as forensic officers scoured the area
Heather, a New Zealander, had ‘always been a country girl’ when she started looking for an escape from working in the coastal Queensland town of Hervey Bay.
‘Thirty years ago the land was absolutely dirt cheap, thirty acres for a few thousand dollars, but there was no power for kilometres, no town water, absolutely nothing around,’ David said.
‘We had to build up what we have, it was very hard work, very hard.’
David has recently been treated for cancer, but when he’s not having to travel into Toowoomba for treatment he and Heather enjoy the remoteness of their land, which now has electricity, a septic tank, a washing machine, and a satellite connection.
The place is strewn with tents, caravans and half a dozen bird cages for their budgies and doves.
‘You never se your neighbours, that’s a pro. I don’t ever want to move again. It’s a good life.’
Queensland Shadow Police Minister Dale Last and Opposition Leader David Crisafulli walk down the main street of Tara where locals are horrified about the Doomsday prepper shootings which have blighted their town
Peter, 70, and Judy Treloar, 58, are proud Blockies living on a 15-acre property they bought for $34,500 in 2002 after the rubber factory worker and his wife decided to getr away and forge a life in the bush.
About 20 old vehicles are scattered across their front yard with piles of items and Peter confesses he finds it hard to throw anything out, although he recently sold a further 30 car bodies for scrap.
They live on a ‘spaghetti block’, typical of Blockie territory, 1.5km long by 300m wide.
Inside their home, the couple have ‘all mod cons’ including a coffee maker, fridge and freezer, giant TV, and after difficulties drilling through the local bedrock, still hope to get a septic system installed.
They have mobile phones with reception – a feat in this region where telecommunications black hole means Optus doesn’t work at all and Telstra does, some of the time ‘but not during storms’.
The ex-Brisbane residents partly moved to the bush for Peter’s health reasons, ‘to escape the humidity and dust, I get migraines, asthma’ and now ‘love the serenity’ away from Tara.
Tara local Tara residents place flowers at the memorial on the fence of the police station where slain officers Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold worked before their tragic deaths
They don’t have fences for the same reason it’s ‘too hard’ to dig a sanitation hole, but they feel secure and happy and have lured family members to the blockie lifestyle.
‘I moved all over as a kid, my father every 18 months would move us somewhere else, dairy farming… so it’s good to put down roots here,’ Peter said.
‘We go into Tara, but it’s always nice to come home. We shop up – bulk buy at Costco every year – and have a big freezer. The roof leaks a bit, but oh well,’ he laughed.
The Treloars don’t approve of Federal government policies – they’ve been going backwards for years, nothing gets done – but they are content where they are away from the rat race.
‘We’ll never leave, Peter said, ‘we own the place, paid off the mortgage about 15 years ago. We are happy at home.’
