Dr. Bogle and Mrs Chandler case (19)

Welcome to the forums Conduit, again! In case you didn't see my other welcome. And again thank you for agreeing with me. Ah it feels so good to be right.

Yes, what I didn't make clear in my original post was where the H2S came from. The Lane Cove River was in 1963 highly polluted with years of industrial waste and sewage. H2S was forming in the mud of the bed and periodically huge bubbles of it would rise to the surface, as attested by a scientist who did river sampling there back in the day.

"Swamp Gas" is actually methane from rotting vegetation. Very common being a by-product of sewerage systems and also released from rubbish dumps (see Cranbourne Tip and Methane Gas class action attempt by Slater and Gordon).

Also found in swamp areas and is often the "mysterious lights" people see in swamplands. Commonly seen in the US Deep South after several gurnies of moonshine and flicking cigarette butts into the swamp.

The Lane Cove River is fairly pristine in the sense that it has urban runoff feeding it. Except for the area up around Lane Cove Road where Channel 10 was located, CSIRO, Ryde Cemetry and now a large industrial area that was very small when the Bogle/Chandler happened.

I did a bit of work around there in 1970 and there was the House of David religious order that owned vast tracks of land, ran a private zoo and also had the Volkswagon Australia distribution centre and also owned the North Ryde Drive-in. IBM had just set up their complex at that time and the 70s did see a lot of hi-tech industry start around then.

Now if this happened on Duck Creek, Duck River and those parts of Parramatta River between Parramatta and Concord, I could believe that toxic chemicals could have been the cause. In 1973 I worked for the Maritime Services Board NSW and this was one of the "hot spots" for toxic pollution.

Union Carbide where at Concord and their output was extremely toxic from the manufacturing of batteries. They shut down that plant after the massive pollution problem from a similar plant in India where many people dies. The site now has mega-expensive apartments, and is just on the edge of Homebush Bay and the Olympic site.

Hi Wash, you're correct that Swamp gas is methane. The assertion in the doco was that at that time the river was anything but pristine. Toxic chemicals were not the issue, it was waste from a factory that had been discharging into the river for 60 years. i can't remember what they made exactly - something with food I think. Anyway it was claimed that there was a lot of sulfur in the waste , leading to the H2S. A weir had also been constructed d/s of the site which had stopped tidal flushing. Sewage was also being discharged u/s of the weir. Local residents had been complaining about smell and illness for some time, leading to the authorities initiating water sampling in the area.

Now this is going to task me on answering this bit for a couple of weeks until I get together with a mate who lived in the area. And if I remembered to talk to him and a few others who were around at that time in Sydney.

Sewage overflows were a common occurence during high-intensity storm events. And still are. But the overflow is very diluted. And usually only noticeable for about 1 or 2 days after any event if the winds are not around to carry away the smell, or going back towards the more eflluent affluent areas. yeah, they don't believe their crap stinks.

Okay, you have mentioned 60 years previously. Something pre-WWI. Thik about what type of industry was upstream that would have operated then and for another 60 years. Ummmmm. Heading back up to Hornsby were the ridge is. Ummmm. Hang, Mr Delaney's (mentioned him very recently in another post) mother did manage to acquire the original Hornsby Post Office and had the building relocated to where he then lived (we did discuss about relocating it to some historical environment). Maybe it was the pollution from the postage stamp glues that entered the sewage system (bit of an anomatical lesson there).

Obs, I do believe that the Bogle/Chandler case may have had something to do with the Cold War and all those nerve gases they were experimenting with at the time. Who did it is something else.

Sometimes the "experts" don't have a clue and when they find something, they follow that very closely and ignore a lot of other things. Okay, things have changed over the years but the Lindy Chamberland case is very classic when the experts found what was "blood" in the car as "positive evidence" but other later experts also showed that it might have been a form of rust-proofing paint which was not commonly used in Australia at the time.

Case overturned and a pardon given.

oh sure, it's not a done deal, but as I said, it sounded convincing.
Here's a link to the documentary on ABC. It will expire after some time (weeks?)

Ok, here is the link this time:


They don't discuss the sources of pollution until near the end. "A flour and starch factory, pumping raw waste high in sulfur", and also sewage spills, much more frequent in those days than now. There was an emergency relief outlet there.

The espionage theories and LSD or other drugs, made good copy for years but seem far-fetched to me.

I do doubt that 1 flour and starch factory could pump enough waste containing sulphur to have caused it. Would have been very diluted unless they were pumping out highly concentrated sulphuric acid. And would have been easily noticed.

If you ever go to Queenstown in Tassie, you will see the impact from the gold mines where sulpher dioxide gas was released into the atmosphere and developed into sulphuric acid when it rained. In the 60s, the surrounding hillsides were bare of vegetation and even 10 years ago you could still see the impacts after being closed for many years.

Every sewerage system has "Emergency Relief" valves or oveflows. A lot of homes have been connected to the sewerage systems illegally and during very high intensity storm events, the systems cannot always cope. However, the sewage is very, very diluted when this happens as there is also an exceptional amount of stormwater runoff in the drainage systems and creeks and rivers at the same time.......................unless the storm event is occuring during halftime of the footy grand finals.

I agree with you Obscuritan,the espionage theories are definitely far fetched. It was polluted by the flour and starch factory as the documentary stated. I wonder if the area was cleaned up by the proper authorities. I hope it is cleaned now so that people living in the area do not die.

Wash can you try and be a bit less patronising towards me?
I'm a civil engineer like you and I can point to a paper on emergency relief structures with my name on it, so you don't need to tell me how they work.
As I said before the jury is still out, but the case developed by the documentary maker, Peter Butt (no pun) was convincing enough to be passed on to the NSW coroner, but I don't know what became of it. This docco was made in 2006 and the recent showing was a repeat, I hadn't realised that. Insufficient evidence I'd guess.
Sulfuric acid is used in the manufacture of starch and yes, they were pumping it out for 60 years. Sure it was noticed but they were allowed to.
According to:




Of course that was in 1948 and presumably by 1963 things would have improved.

The website above goes into detail about all the other theories that were put forward. Some make sense, some don't.