Chapter 6

Heat

In the early 1990s, Denise Hofman was a woman on a mission. It began when her eldest daughter, Karen, chose the picturesque Hawkesbury River as a case study location for her major HSC science assessment. She tagged along on several of the required field trips and quickly realised the once bustling waterway was showing real signs of wear and tear. Worse still, Denise learned, the state government was quietly drawing up plans to build a staggering 250 000 homes – more than enough to accommodate the entire population of Canberra – in the river’s main catchment area, on Sydney’s northwest fringe. The potential impact alarmed her.

For a 44-year-old mother of five with a healthy social conscience, the Hawkesbury’s plight was compelling stuff. And like most causes Denise took up, she plunged in headfirst. The fact both she and husband Brian were also holding down demanding school teaching jobs and running a busy household at Baulkham Hills was by the by. She quickly sought and found a kindred spirit in local doctor and veteran conservation campaigner David Hughes, and in early 1992, they helped form the North West Hawkesbury Environmental Action Team, or HEAT.

The group garnered strong support from a community increasingly keen to preserve more of the Australian landscape for their children and grandchildren. Its voice was soon being heard on everything from the impact of pollutants on the river’s water quality and flow patterns to the damage inflicted upon plant and wildlife populations.

As the fledgling movement gathered speed, Denise found herself in the spotlight addressing community forums and doing newspaper interviews. While each of the relevant green issues were being well aired, though, she realised little or no attention was being paid to an intimately connected matter that had also begun to capture her imagination: the Hawkesbury’s possible archaeological significance.

Among other documents Hughes had handed Denise was an environmental impact statement on a proposed sewage treatment plant at Rouse Hill. The study raised the probability that a series of imperilled Aboriginal sites were located along the river’s three main tributaries, Caddies, Cattai and Second Ponds creeks. As a result, Denise wrote to both the federal and NSW governments, demanding that they independently assess the claim’s accuracy.1

She was surprised to learn there might be a wealth of Indigenous culture at her doorstep. She valued the fact Aborigines had settled the area thousands of years before European arrival and believed their descendants had a right to learn about it before the bulldozers rolled in. To achieve this, though, she knew she’d have to find the undiscovered locations herself.

Indeed, thousands of years of living history rested beneath the soil on both sides of the creeks. Among the treasure, Denise managed to unearth some major finds. In one spot, more than a hundred axe grinding grooves lay hidden in a field of native grass and blackberry bush. Dating back several millennia, they were the remnants of a stone tool market attended by tribes throughout the northern reaches of the Sydney Basin and Lower Blue Mountains.

Down the track, her persistence would trigger the largest study of its type. More than 16 volumes of research were generated under the guidance of the Australian Museum’s archaeology unit and some of the sites excavated during the exercise were classified never to be disturbed.2

Yet there was a measure of blood, sweat and tears required before this all happened, and from the outset Denise realised she would struggle to get things up and running on her own. Luckily, her predicament was recognised by another suburban warrior immersed in a similar fight; someone who knew what she was up against.

Freelance journalist Di Michel had spent months trying to stop Sydney’s M2 Motorway ploughing through her front yard at North Ryde. She’d read of Denise’s exploits in the local papers and was impressed but suspected Denise was probably battling to recruit the expert help she’d need given the small fortune it would cost.

Di rang Denise and explained that she knew an amateur archaeologist with an outstanding knowledge of Aboriginal artefacts who might volunteer a hand. Denise wasn’t personally interested in stopping the M2; she had enough on her plate. However, she was willing to join the cause if it meant furthering her own.

***

Of course, the self-taught expert Di Michel had in mind to assist them was Michael Guider; now 42 years old, somewhat pudgier but no less eccentric than he had been as a younger man, and still single. Since completing his second good behaviour bond stemming from the shop fire, he’d also managed to avoid any further trouble. Indeed, in the intervening years, Guider had obscurely reinvented himself as a lay expert on suburban heritage sites. In his spare time, he’d apparently surveyed more than 400 such locations and formally lodged them with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.3 Denise was unaware of it, but several years earlier he’d been written up in the Sydney Morning Herald, speaking about various relics discovered at Rozelle, in the city’s inner west. The article had been accompanied by a decent-sized photo of him sifting through a midden on the foreshore of nearby Iron Cove.4

According to Di, Guider was considered Sydney’s leading rock art specialist and had recorded more finds than any of his professional counterparts, most of who had quoted Denise exorbitant fees and then hung up when she told them there was no money available. Some of this group later earned top dollar by producing ‘user-friendly’ surveys of the M2 and northwest sites for the overwhelmingly pro-development NSW government. Guider, however, seemed to have no interest in similarly cashing in.

Di explained that he kept a post office box at the Royal Exchange in central Sydney’s Martin Place. As far as she knew, it was the only way to contact him. Denise didn’t think this so strange. She figured Guider was probably busy enough without giving out his phone number and being pestered by environmental groups at all hours of the day and night. She sent him off a letter and received what seemed to be a reply of genuine interest.

It was exciting to finally find someone else willing to roll up their sleeves and help her make a difference. His credentials were impressive too. Denise had learned that one of the country’s leading archaeologists, Val Attenbrow, had praised Guider’s work and knew him well from some of the digs he’d helped her with around other areas of Sydney. All Denise now had to do was arrange for him to visit the places she’d mapped out so they could get the ball rolling.

Not long after, Guider pulled up in his four-wheel drive outside Denise and Brian’s home in Baulkham Hills. It was an unusual encounter from the outset. Despite having the address, he parked at the bottom of the street and sat at the wheel as though not sure which house it was. After ten minutes or so, Denise went out and brought him in.

He didn’t say so until later, but Brian’s first impression of Guider was that he didn’t like the look of him.

‘He had funny eyes,’ Denise explains. ‘They were an unusual shape and all red looking. Thinking back, he was also quite dishevelled – like he’d perhaps been occasionally sleeping outdoors.’ He had on a kind of quasi park ranger’s uniform – big old leather boots, long, faded work pants and a cotton shirt, untucked. His hands were gnarled by physical labour, his hair longish but at least combed.

At the time, Denise thought Guider probably didn’t pay much attention to how he presented because he was so wrapped up in his work. You certainly didn’t go tramping around the bush in a three-piece suit, she reasoned. And, if it came to that, people probably thought she was a bit odd in the same way. While most women her age preferred Saturdays to be about shopping trips and hair appointments, here she was about to go trudging around the city’s snake-infested backblocks in her shorts and runners searching for sandstone outcrops and stone tools with a bloke she hardly knew.

***

It’s difficult to fathom how Guider might have sized Denise up. She was never going to be someone he could glibly impress with his jolly swagman routine and then fob off if she started asking too many personal questions. It simply isn’t her nature to dismiss people lightly, especially when something about them doesn’t quite add up.

As it happened, Denise would also be one of the few acquaint­ances Guider would make with the ability to really appreciate his knowledge of Aboriginal heritage and the environment. As a result, he found himself unable to resist showing off to her just how much he knew and how well he knew it. The more time they spent together, the more he put himself out there, talking the talk and gradually letting his guard down.

During long hours and over many months, he began unveiling peculiar glimpses of a conflicted personality until it became almost inevitable that a sliver of its ugly flipside would break the surface.

When it finally did, it would spell the beginning of the end for the well-dressed man’s so carefully guarded true identity. Guider would look back and realise that allowing Denise to know him a little too well would prove to be his undoing.

***

After their first meeting, Guider usually arrived by train and Denise would collect him from Parramatta railway station. They began their quest by her showing him some of her favourite sites close by.

‘As we set out, he struck me as quite placid, highly knowledgeable and obviously very much at home in the scrub,’ Denise says. ‘He tended to stride slowly, using a long stick to point out things of interest as we went along, and seemed to be at one with the peacefulness of the environment.’

At the same time, though, Guider was a perfectionist in a way that only a genius could be. He knew the names and details of all the implements and other artefacts they were hopeful of finding and could describe which kinds of rocks the Aborigines used to shape them and how they did so. As well, he was able to recite the botanical names of the majority of plant species they came across. Michael was especially interested in various types of deposited shells, and Denise was struck by the fact he could also identify each of these in turn – more than a hundred all told.

‘Amazingly, he explained to me that he’d left school at 15 and was self-taught,’ she says. ‘Judging from his ability to recall details at will, I was convinced he either had a photographic memory or something close.’

His perfect recall wasn’t just confined to the scientific either. There had been a particular rain-soaked day when they’d been forced to wait it out under cover and he’d spent much of the afternoon reciting his favourite poetry. Not just bits and pieces in between idle conversation either, but great slabs of it verbatim.

After completing each survey, Guider would produce a detailed manuscript describing the site and then have someone professionally type it for him and copy in his sketches and additional notes.

‘I didn’t have time to help produce the documents because I was flat out with my teaching work but I found them extremely useful in lobbying councils and government authorities,’ Denise recalls. ‘I also quickly realised Michael’s reputation preceded him. His already published writings were noted for their integrity and accuracy and quite a few had been kept by numerous Sydney libraries.’5

Denise calculates that she spent perhaps two dozen weekends with Guider between 1993 and late 1995, inspecting the M2 locations and traversing the main creeks flowing into the Hawkesbury. In the beginning she thought him gentle and felt safe in his company. Yet it was an assessment she would come to revise.

When they began, their focus was along the 21-kilometre M2 route between Ryde and Baulkham Hills. The $640 million tollway had already been approved and there was a sense of urgency about finding proof of the need to stall its construction.6

‘Among the potential archeological sites we first targeted were sandstone formations known as overhangs,’ Denise says. ‘They resemble shallow cave openings and often bear evidence of earlier Aboriginal occupation.

‘We reckoned several were situated along the main southern ridge overlooking Darling Mills State Forest at North Rocks. I remem­ber us discovering the largest of them fairly early on, in late 1993.’

Some 50 metres long and more than high enough to stand under, the ceiling of the shelter features deep scorch marks indicative of it being used as an Aboriginal cooking spot over hundreds of generations. Hidden just metres from where the M2 now sweeps by the edge of the forest, the existence of the ancient hearth remains known to a relative few despite the tens of thousands who motor past it every day. Reaching the site at the time, though, meant negotiating a heavily wooded path buried at one point under a major rock fall.

‘Michael climbed up and over what was a fairly imposing obstacle and then waited for me to follow,’ Denise says. ‘I tried but became stranded. The incline was what you would call fairly steep, and coupled with the narrow track and my occasional fear of heights, I began feeling a little panicked.’

She asked him whether he wouldn’t mind coming back to give her a hand across. Guider’s response, though, wasn’t really what you’d call reassuring. Instead of helping, he stood looking at her and sort of grinning. The bizarre posturing went on for what seemed quite a while, with Denise uncomfortable to the point of trying not to show it because she was embarrassed.

‘Finally, he said to me in this kind of quiet but really quite dark tone, “You know I could just leave you here, don’t you?”

‘Thankfully, he snapped out of it almost as quickly as it overtook him in the first place and he basically resumed his usual friendly demeanor as if nothing had happened.’

Denise dismissed the episode as a somewhat puzzling aberration. At the time, though, she’d undoubtedly felt intimidated.

***

In mid-1995, after the M2 had become a foregone conclusion, the pair turned their attention northwest, towards Rouse Hill, Dural, Kellyville and Kenthurst.

‘The workload had slowed right down and we’d developed a kind of open-ended outlook,’ Denise remembers. ‘We were looking around at a few other sites as well. Under differ­ent circumstances, things would probably have gone on indefinitely.’

At a certain point, however, something failed to impress Guider about being so far from home. The occasion was a day trip along Old Northern Road to a little known area on the lower Hawkesbury called Canoelands. They’d headed into the bush along a marked track from the former Yoothamurra Kiosk and were looking at hiking for most of the day. Early afternoon arrived, though, and Guider suddenly began questioning why they were there.

‘You know all this walking, I don’t know if it’s worth it,’ he announced, his face beginning to redden. ‘I don’t know if there’s much point in us being all the way out here.

‘I didn’t realise it was going to take this long,’ he added, wheeling around and coming to an abrupt stop. ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve really got to get back; there are places I have to be.’

Denise hadn’t said anything. She’d let him go on, sensing that he needed to make his point without interruption. Yet she thought it quite strange he’d give up an opportunity to survey an area likely to yield them some good rock painting finds. No amount of appeasement was going to change his mind, though. Guider wanted out, period.

‘As he went on about it, he became quite agitated, quite angry, and I could just tell it was best to stop and head back to the car,’ she says. ‘He might have just been out of his comfort zone – he was fairly overweight at the time and although it made no difference to me, we’d spent a fair bit of energy getting there.

‘Even so, I did feel that there was something else, something he actually had to go back to. I didn’t ask him about it, though. There wouldn’t have been much point because he wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself.’

From then on, Denise decided, it was best that they stick to the survey areas they’d already established and that she would not ask Guider to venture beyond.

Despite the blow up and the earlier menacing moment they’d had on the ridge track, Denise felt there were days when she’d gained a little of Guider’s elusive confidence.

‘Curiously, he’d divulged several personal and quite obviously painful details of his childhood,’ she says. ‘They included mention of being secretly abused by his mother and by older boys in the various homes he was placed in. He left no doubt as to what he meant by the term “abused” but declined to go into detail about what had actually happened.’

One day, out of the blue, Guider also said that he’d just re-established contact with his brother, who was in jail. He said while inside Tim had earned a reputation for artistic talent by painting murals on some of the main outside walls at Long Bay’s maximum security lock-up.

By now, however, Denise realised Guider was too much of a closed shop to tell her why Tim had been put away. It occurred to her that he more likely broached such subjects not as an entrée to revealing his own hopes, fears and inspirations but to gauge her reaction to matters that some would consider a turn-off. She wasn’t sure why but Guider seemed to be deliberately testing her.

‘In any case, I decided that if he wasn’t going to discuss things openly and of his own accord, I certainly wasn’t going to push him,’ she says. ‘Neither, in this case, was I prepared to reciprocate what was clearly a loaded gesture on his part, alluding to Tim’s notoriety, I suppose you’d call it, but then declining to elaborate.’

All of that aside, Denise considered that they had enough to do without calling a halt to their work to take stock of each other’s personal baggage. Nevertheless, she couldn’t deny that she pitied Guider’s circumstances or at least what she knew of them. If he had been born into a stable family environment, with his talent, she felt he could have achieved academic excellence at any university. Doctor, lawyer, scientist – he could have been anything. He as much as confirmed her judgement when he later told her he’d been accepted into an archaeological program at the University of Sydney in the early eighties as a mature-aged student. However, stress brought on by his mother being diagnosed with non-operable cancer and a lack of means to meet his financial commitments meant he’d dropped out at the end of his first year.

***

At least Guider had managed to stick at his gardening career and climb a few rungs on the ladder. Starting as a crewman at Royal North Shore in 1989, within a few short years he’d been promoted to the plumb position of head man. For one thing, this meant he could dispense with the rigmarole of communicating by post box notes and allow Denise to leave messages with the security guards at the hospital’s main entrance. He’d then ring back within a day or two.

In early March 1996, Denise picked up the phone to arrange their next excursion. She and Brian had been away down the coast over Christmas and she hadn’t seen Guider in some weeks and was looking forward to linking up with him again. Instead of the usual exchange of pleasantries with the guy on the gate who took her call, though, she was met with stinging hostility.

By her own account, she says ‘the fellow basically snapped at me. When I asked him if he could get word to Michael for me, he said he wouldn’t pass on a message “to that bastard under any circumstances”. Then he refused to explain to me why.

‘When I declined to hang up until he told me what was going on, he advised me to contact Manly police.

‘“Manly, what on earth for?” I asked him.

‘“Don’t you read the Manly Daily?” he said.

‘“No, I don’t live in that area.”

‘“Oh well, you’ll need to ring Manly detectives.”

‘I put down the receiver thinking there must have been some kind of outlandish mistake.’

However, Denise found herself almost immediately lifting the phone from its cradle again to find out if Guider really was in trouble. The response she got from the police after explaining why she’d rung through floored her.

‘The officer on the other end basically said, “Yes, Michael Guider has been arrested for the sexual abuse of two young children.” He’d allegedly been visiting a tiny strip of beach next to Manly Skiff Club in the company of two little girls and one of them had later woken in the night calling out in the grip of a nightmare. After asking her what the matter was, the child’s mother realised she’d been assaulted and without hesitation contacted the police.

‘After I was told this, I guess what I immediately wanted to know was whether it was possible that there had been some kind of dreadful misunderstanding. But when I asked the detective, he said it wasn’t likely.’

The copper matter-of-factly said there was no question of Guider even being released on bail. Their immediate inquiries had led them to think it wasn’t an isolated incident, and ultimately it would be up to the courts to determine when and if he would be allowed back into society.

The first thing Denise did was ring Di Michel, who, she was quite certain, knew nothing of what had happened.

‘I think you better sit down,’ the conversation started. ‘I’ve just rung to make another appointment to go out with Michael and they wouldn’t talk to me. They told me to ring the police. I did … and they’re saying he’s been arrested for sexually abusing young children.’

‘Michael?’ Di echoed, confused.

‘Yes, Michael. He was apparently over at Manly with two little girls. The detectives doing the investigation say they’ve found other offences as well – a lot of them. The one I spoke to said they were “horrific”.’

Di was undoubtedly just as shocked as she was, Denise reckons. ‘But not knowing what else to say beyond the fact we couldn’t believe the whole thing, we didn’t hang on the line. We needed time to process what we’d been told before talking about it.’

Denise spent most of the next hour at her kitchen table, attempting to reconcile the Michael Guider she knew and the wretched figure Manly police had sitting in their cells. She dwelled on how desperate he’d be feeling. Eventually, it occurred to speak with Di again but no sooner had she had the thought than the phone was ringing.

Lo and behold, it was Di.

‘She said to me in this nervous kind of voice, “Maybe you should be the one to sit down this time. There’s something else you should know.” With no inkling of what to possibly expect, I pulled up a stool at my breakfast bar.

‘She said the last time she’d gone into the bush near Lane Cove with Michael, over the Christmas break, he’d suddenly started talking about a young girl who disappeared from Bondi in 1986.

‘Then she asked me whether I remembered Samantha Knight.

‘Absolutely, I thought immediately. Virtually everyone I knew knew about her and that in all likelihood her parents would never see her alive again.

‘Then came the clanger. Di said to me that as she and Michael had sat resting on a large sandstone overhang near the water, he’d told her that he’d personally known Samantha and her mother – but not just known them, known them “very well”.

‘She said he’d also told her that he often felt drawn to Bondi in search of the truth about what had happened the day Samantha vanished. So much so, he’d actually gone there quite a few times over the years and tried to retrace her steps.’

Needless to say, it was enough to make anyone’s head spin. Denise knew Di wasn’t the kind of person who’d exaggerate or make up a story but what she’d told her could have leapt straight from the pages of a crime novel.

‘All I could say to her was, “Oh Di, you have to go to the police. If Michael’s a paedophile, he may have been abusing Samantha. He might know what happened to her.”

‘Again, though, both of us seemed to need more time to think things through, so we signed off and then Di called back again later that afternoon.

‘All she could then say to me was, “I don’t know if I can do it, Denise.” She said she’d spoken to her partner, John, and that they’d agreed they couldn’t inform on someone who’d been their friend, who’d done so much to help them with the M2 campaign, and especially since he’d told her what he’d told her in private before he’d actually been accused of anything.

‘She said she would be betraying a confidence.’

It didn’t take Denise long to conclude she’d have to go the police herself. Di might not have been able to summon the personal wherewithal to speak up but there was no point in her passing on the information in the first place if she expected it to go no further. In doing so, she’d given Denise her tacit approval to pass it on.

Practically everyone in Australia had at one time wished they could somehow help find Samantha and bring her home. In August 1986, Denise had been among them. With five young children of her own, her heart had gone out to Tess Knight and Peter O’Meagher, hoping as they had that Sam would just walk through the front door and back into their lonely, devastated lives. Yet it wasn’t to be.

Samantha was never coming back. It was a sad and horrible story made worse only by the fact that the person who took her had never been brought to book. As Denise correctly assumed, neither did anyone – the police included – have the foggiest clue to his identity or what he’d done with Samantha’s remains after he’d finished with her. Until now.

She might not have been sure exactly how the finer points were going to play out but Denise knew she had a job to do.

‘What I didn’t realise at the time was that it would take up my whole life for years to come,’ she says, looking back.

‘It was March 1996 and the saga didn’t finish for me, personally, until 2003. In some ways, it still hasn’t.’