The Kamarooka panther, 1907

The Whipstick is mallee scrub north of Bendigo, Victoria. Today part of it lies inside Greater Bendigo National Park. In 1907 a road ran through it to Kamarooka, where the Danish immigrants Tobias and Maria Christensen farmed. Five of their seven children became teachers.

Two of them were Alheith Christensen, aged 29, and Trine Christensen, aged 23. Alheith taught at Patho State School. Education Department records called the sisters "most careful and painstaking", "rigorous", "thoughtful and intelligent". A local paper called Alheith "a teacher with few equals".

A Thursday in late January, 1907. The sisters were driving their buggy through the Whipstick toward the farm, some 18 miles north of Bendigo. As they climbed a crest, they saw what they took to be a fox on top of the hill. But it did not act like one. It showed no fear. It walked toward the buggy "in a sneaking attitude and gait peculiar to that species". They meant a cat.

They described a body about three to four foot long, standing about 20 inches at the shoulder, though one account gives 24. A thick neck and head. A cat-like profile, "more oblong" than usual. A long tail. A "glossy brown body with lighter undercarriage". Frightened, the sisters hurried home and told their family it was "no fox at all". They were convinced they had seen a panther.

The story reached Melbourne and other states. Over the following months others came forward. A woman driving a pair of horses to Bendigo was said to have been chased for a mile. Some witnesses said the animal was too big for a panther, "shaped and marked more like a tiger". Some papers even claimed the sisters had been chased. That was never what they reported.

Early February. A search party went through the scrub. No animal was found. By mid February most people who had to travel through the scrub to Bendigo said they would carry firearms.

Two theories led at the time. One was a "big dog of a strange variety". The other was an escapee from a circus that had "camped near Kamarooka for several days twelve months earlier". Its menagerie reportedly included a puma and a Cape lynx, a caracal, which fits the shape and colour the sisters described.

March 1907. The papers declared the mystery apparently solved. An orchardist in the Epsom and Huntly district had a "big and most peculiarly marked dog" that broke its chain and strayed some weeks earlier. No source says the dog was ever caught or compared with the sisters' account. A feral domestic cat has also been suggested. Nobody ever accused the Christensen sisters of making it up.

Eight years later, a new report came from the other side of Bendigo. In 1915 farmer John Comer at Mandurang reported an animal like a tiger or leopard. Bendigo police superintendent Arthur Dungey remarked that "it's a very old bird by now". Dungey is also quoted promising the "undying gratitude of every member of the force" to anyone who could lay low "that ferocious mythical beast of prey".

Public Record Office Victoria revived the case in its podcast Look History in the Eye, inspired by the research of David Waldron. Kamarooka now sits early in a long line of Australian phantom panther reports, beside the Tantanoola Tiger of South Australia.