The Tasmanian Globster: the West Coast Monster of Interview River (1960)

In 1960 the beaches north of the Pieman River were remote country, crossed by stockmen moving cattle along Tasmania's west coast. The accounts differ on the month. June, say some. August, after a storm, say others. Both are winter there.

Jack Boote and Ray Anthony, drovers from Smithton, came to Four Mile Beach, about 2 miles north of the Interview River. Some tellings add a third stockman, Ben Fenton of Temma. Anthony's horse would not go near the thing on the sand. Boote walked up to it alone.

It was enormous. About 20 feet long, 18 feet wide and about 4 1/2 feet thick, with an estimated weight of five to 10 tons. Ivory-coloured. Stiff white bristles. "The part exposed was hard and rubbery, covered with fine hair like sheep's wool," Fenton said. One stockman compared the wool to "the six-month clip from a border Leicester sheep." No head. No eyes. A strong, foul smell. "I'll never forget my first sight of it," Fenton said.

That night Boote sat up until 2 a.m. with Robert Airey, who sketched the creature from the stockmen's description. Airey's son Graham, then eight or nine, later recalled five gills on each side and transparent spikes "about the size of Biros." It was, he said, "just like a giant slug."

Fenton reported the find. The local authorities showed little interest. For about 18 months the carcass lay on the beach. Then, in February 1962, word reached Hobart. A private party of four researchers searched from the air, then on horseback, and found the mass north of its original position. Cutting into the hide, they found tendons joined by fatty tissue. No bones. In early March they told the press they could not identify it, and recommended a scientific expedition.

9 March 1962. The Mercury ran the story on its front page. Sydney Morning Herald reporter Jack Pervical flew over the site. "The monster lies half exposed at the foot of a scrub-dotted sand dune."

Forced by the media frenzy, CSIRO sent an official party with University of Tasmania zoologists and the director of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. They arrived on 17 March and spent two days photographing and sampling the remains, which had shrunk and begun to decompose. Bruce Mollison, the CSIRO scientist who led the party, had said: "I think it might be a creature from an ocean depth never fathomed by man." On 20 March came the answer. Most likely decaying whale blubber. Samples went to laboratories in Australia and overseas, some sealed in cans, with a telegram that ended: "Open outside building."

Not everyone was convinced. Locals suspected a cover-up, and CSIRO stood by its report even when the museum asked it to reopen the case. Speculation ran from a prehistoric creature thrown up by an underwater volcano to an extraterrestrial. Graham Airey argued that the gills, the spikes and its long survival on the beach did not fit a whale. The science kept giving the same answer. L. E. Wall identified it as a whale in the Tasmanian Naturalist in 1981. In 2004 a DNA and microscopy study that included a museum sample reached the same conclusion.

The case gave the field a word. In 1962 Ivan T. Sanderson called it a "globster," a name now used for any unidentified mass that washes ashore, from the St. Augustine Monster to the Chilean blob. A piece of the West Coast Monster survives in a jar at the museum. Ben Fenton reportedly found a second mass nearby in 1970.