The Tasmanian Globster: the West Coast Monster of 1960

August 1960. Jack Boote and Ray Anthony, stockmen from Smithton, were droving cattle down the west coast of Tasmania to agistment areas near the Interview River. On a beach about two miles north of the river, they found something lying on the sand. Some accounts add a third man, Ben Fenton, a stockman from Temma.

"I'll never forget my first sight of it," Fenton said. "It was sort of eerie. The monster lay on top of the beach."

It was enormous: about 20 feet long and 18 feet wide, with a hump of about four feet at the front that tapered gradually to the back. Fenton described the exposed part as "hard and rubbery, covered with fine hair like sheep's wool, with a greasy feel." There were "five or six gill-like hairless slits on each side of the fore part and a smooth, gullet-like orifice." No eyes, no defined head and no bones that anyone could see; one stockman compared the wool to "the six-month clip from a border leicester sheep." It also gave off a very strong smell.

Fenton reported the find to the local authorities. They showed little interest. For about 18 months, the thing simply lay on the beach.

Early March 1962. The story finally went public, and the Hobart Mercury put it on the front page. A private expedition, paid for by a local businessman, sent four researchers to the beach. On 7 March, a first CSIRO analysis on site could not identify the material.

On 17 March, the government sent an official party drawn from CSIRO, University of Tasmania zoology and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and it spent two days taking samples while Senator John Gorton oversaw the matter at federal level. By then the carcass was mostly buried in sand, and one telegram from the effort survives: "Blubber sealed in cans dispatched today. No preservative added. Open outside building."

On 20 March 1962 the mystery was announced as resolved. A second CSIRO analysis had found protein and collagen, "not inconsistent with blubber." Gorton spelled it out: "In layman's language, and allowing for scientific caution, this means that your monster is a large lump of decomposing blubber, probably torn off a whale."

Eric Guiler of the University of Tasmania was blunter. "None of us wanted to go because such things as monsters don't exist," he said. L. E. Wall reached the same answer in the Tasmanian Naturalist in 1981. In 2004, Pierce and colleagues examined a museum sample with electron microscopy and molecular methods. Their verdict: "All blobs examined represent the decomposed remains of great whales of varying species."

Not everyone was convinced. The CSIRO file, now held by the National Archives of Australia, holds letters from around the world, from a Moscow headmistress to American schoolchildren. Some locals suspected a cover-up, and the museum asked CSIRO to reopen the case. J. H. Calaby wrote that some Tasmanians "consider that the deflation of the monster was a blow to their national pride." Graham Airey, a child at the time, said his father sat up until 2am with the man who found it; he has never accepted the answer: "This thing doesn't look like whale blubber."

In 1962 Ivan T. Sanderson coined a word for it: globster. The name now covers a whole family of shapeless carcasses found on beaches around the world. A journalist that same year called it "Sea Santa". In 1989 a creek near the site was officially named Monster Creek. And at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, a preserved piece still sits in a jar labelled "west coast monster".