15 February 2009
The Sunday Times
(c) 2009 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
In 1971 a bunch of Australian kangaroohunters said they had glimpsed an unusual creature on the dusty Nullarbor plain in the southwest of Australia: a beautiful young blonde woman in animal skins, living in the wild among the kangaroos. They even had film footage of this "Nullarbor nymph", in case nobody believed them.
The world media flocked to this antipodean backwater, no doubt hoping to snare a rampant beauty like Raquel Welch in the film One Million Years B.C. (above) — but the nymph proved elusive.
Eventually the hunters confessed that they had cooked up the story over a few drinks, and had a local woman called Geneice Brooker dress up in roo skins for the pictures, just to wind up tourists and attract publicity to their tiny Nullarbor town of Eucla.
"It amazed us how it kept going, and we got bloody sick of it in the end," admitted one of the hoaxers, Laurie Scott — who ended up marrying Geneice the nymph impersonator. Despite the fact that she never existed, a sculpture of the Nullarbor nymph now cheers up visitors outside the Flinders Medical Centre in suburban Adelaide
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