Like a big-game hunter and his ‘bag’, John Quinlan, a renowned sharpshooter, poses with the corpse of Mad Dan Morgan. Quinlan shot Morgan in cold blood and from behind – as Morgan had done to others – with the huge Colt revolver placed in his lifeless hand. Even in death the police description of Morgan, ‘6 Feet, black hair very long and curly… expression of face ferocious’ was, plainly, not understated. Morgan’s head was later decapitated, ‘Dr Dobbyn, the Coroner of the District being under the impression that it was usual to take a cast of the head of any great criminal’.

State Library of Victoria

The four principles in the Monty Python Murder farce. CLOCKWISE from top left: Henry Louis Bertrand, the Wynard Square dentist who was married to Jane, sweet and put-upon, but who lusted for Ellen, the promiscuous wife of Henry Kinder, the unfortunate around whom the knockabout comedy revolved. After Bertrand tried to blow from Kinder’s head what few brains he had he popped a pipe back in his victim’s mouth and went out to make love to Kinder’s wife.

Errol Flynn’s love life is legendary but the Hollywood grapevine had it that he was a man of ordinary sexuality, haunted and mocked by the legend. The most remarkable thing about Flynn was his tempestuous life out of the bedroom. He was a thief, a con-man, a slave trader, a man who fought off cannibal head-hunters, beat a murder charge, wrote two passable novels, went to the Spanish Civil War, lived in a cave in Sydney’s Domain and was three times charged with the rape of under-age girls. And he was a likeable bloke.

In June 1955 the young Queen Elizabeth knighted Sir Eugene Goossens. Nine months later his career was in ruins, undone by 1,700 pornographic photographs, films, books and three rubber masks. The two women in his life failed him. His wife, seen here with Goossens, hid from reporters in a convent in France, and the woman who had introduced him to ‘sex magic’, Rosaleen Norton, probably gave him up to the Vice Squad. The renowned conductor and composer had been pressing for Sydney to have an opera house at Bennelong Point and though he died dishonoured that is his great legacy.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

It was a story that moved Australia, and the press and the people desperately wanted young Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce to become sweethearts. The only survivors of the wreck of the Loch Ard, Tom had risked his life to pull Eva from raging seas and then climbed a steep cliff face to go for help. She waited, ‘Cold and terrified… I heard a strange noise. I imagined it to have been the war-cry of the Aborigines,’ she later wrote. The strange noise was Tom returning and rescuers ‘Cooeeing’. When they reached Eva’s hiding place she was gone.

The only survivor of the wreck of the Dunbar at Sydney Heads, ‘Lucky Jim’ Johnson clung for his life on a tiny ledge high on a cliff. There were 10,000 people – a fifth of the population of Sydney –watching helplessly and in horror at South Head as mountainous waves dashed the mangled and mutilated remains of 121 men, women and children on the rocks and tossed them 20 metres high. Suddenly there was a cry: ‘A live man on the rocks! There he is!’ Johnson became a lighthouse keeper and rescued the sole survivor of a wreck with 60 on board.

Horrie the Wog Dog in command and at home in the ventilated kit bag Jim Moody made for him. In it he travelled into battle in Greece, Crete and Syria and then to his new home in Australia. A hero to thousands of Allied servicemen, Horrie survived the war with just a shrapnel wound to show for it. But in peacetime Australia he faced the greatest threat to his life.

On guard at the AIF camp in the Western Desert, Egypt. Horrie is wearing the khaki army coat cut down to make his uniform. Eventually he won his corporal ensigns.

Australian War Memorial, Canberra