00:00Welcome to Sawyer's Hut, one of the many mountain huts dotted around the Australian high country.
00:07Now these huts are refuges in case of an emergency out there in the bush
00:13and there are many tales of tragedy to do with some of these huts. There's a tale of tragedy to
00:19do with this hut, Sawyer's Hut, but it's not to do with exposure or a skiing accident or anything
00:26like that. It's something quite different. Come with me and I'll tell you about it.
00:34Come inside. It's been rebuilt a couple of times in the last 20 years or so because it was burnt
00:41to
00:42the ground in bushfires. Someone here is having a picnic today because it's right next to the
00:46Snowy Mountains Highway. But if you come over here near the fireplace with my brown paper bag,
00:51I wonder what's in that. I'll tell you the story of the tragedy. October 1952, three men stole a
00:59vehicle, a truck from Cooma, drove out of Cooma, got to about here at night time, used this as a
01:05base
01:05to hide out or to stay in. In the back of the truck they found a brown paper bag. Inside
01:11it, two bottles
01:12of what appeared to be beer. Two of the men drank the contents of the beer bottles and they were
01:19found
01:19dead the next morning. Turns out in those beer bottles, it wasn't beer, but the person before
01:26that owned the truck, before it was stolen, had stored some sort of poison, some sort of weed aside
01:32in the beer bottles and the two men had drunk themselves to death. Right here, they were found
01:40underneath the blanket the next day. Terrible tragedy. I wonder what's in my brown paper bag.
01:47Hopefully not a beer bottle, or hopefully there is and I can have a drink. Ah, it's a coffee cup.
01:54I may not try my coffee after hearing that story. I'm gonna put it back in.
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