00:00Welcome to Sawyer's Hut, one of the many mountain huts dotted around the Australian high country.
00:06Now 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. That'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 vehicle,
00:59a truck from Cooma, drove out of Cooma, got to about here at night time, used this as a base
01:05to hide out
01:06or to stay in. In the back of the truck they found a brown paper bag. Inside it, two bottles
01:12of what
01:13appeared to be beer. Two of the men drank the contents of the beer bottles and they were found dead
01:20the next
01:20morning. Turns out in those beer bottles, it wasn't beer, but the person before that owned the truck,
01:27before it was stolen, had stored some sort of poison, some sort of weed aside in the beer bottles,
01:34and the two men had drunk themselves to death. Right here, they were found underneath the blanket
01:41the next day. Terrible tragedy. I wonder what's in my brown paper bag. Hopefully not a beer bottle,
01:48well hopefully there is and I can have a drink. Ah, it's a coffee cup. I may not try my
01:55coffee after
01:56hearing that story. I'm gonna put it back in.
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