Off The Rails

April 29, 2018·23 min·2 clips

In Larrimah, accusing your neighbor of stealing a train means a 76km drive for a cup of sugar.

The cup of sugar test hits differently in Larrimah. The closest shop is really a dim corner of the pub, with a shelf heavy on asparagus cans, so asking next door can feel like a serious decision. The town is short on people, which only makes the old lines feel louder. Residents describe an us-and-them place where some neighbours have stayed away from the pub for 10 or 15 years. Paddy Moriarty's absence sits over the whole yarn. Christmas 2017 is remembered as one of Larrimah's worst days, with Paddy gone for nine days and people starting to lose hope that he'd be found alive. Carl and Bobby carry much of this stretch. Their house is the old post office, a detail that lands sharply now that the pub acts as the post office and they still won't cross the road. Instead, they drive to Mataranka. Every fortnight, the 76 kilometre mail run becomes a plain little map of how stubborn, and how ordinary, the feud has become. Still, the tape has warmth in it. Carl and Bobby talk about bushfire call-outs, a road train catching fire, and a house that used to be packed with kids, grandkids, and sleepers on the lounge. The past sounds noisy and full. Then their grandson Ben Roth comes in, remembering the mid-1990s as a boy with motorbikes, football, cricket, and not many children his own age. Mostly, he kicked the footy by himself. That says plenty about Larrimah without asking for pity, especially in a town where about half the residents were Roths or close enough. The tone stays dry but tender. A place can joke about asparagus tins and lonely football and still have people called murderer in the street. The investigation remains open. Anyone who travelled through Larrimah on 16 December 2017, or has information about Paddy Moriarty's life or disappearance, is asked to contact Crimestoppers.

As heard by us

A missing-person case told through a feud, a pub, and a town that never fully agreed on itself.

Lost in Larrimah turns a missing-person case into a study of a town that never quite settled its own faults, with the nearest thing to neighbourly ease being a pub shelf holding 13 cans of asparagus.

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Why you'd press play

You want a true-crime listen that treats a tiny town like the real scene of the case.

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