The Bad Shepherd
Clump, in the Macquarie Dictionary, has several meanings. Namely to gather, to trudge, to punch, plus a cluster of agglutinated bacteria.
Though for Robert Fry, a young Gloucestershire shepherd, clump will eternally refer to the group of trees where he murdered his wife.
The Pom sailed to Adelaide in 1838, and made a decent quid selling milk. Profits bankrolled 500 head of cattle and a spread of land near Balaklava, north of Adelaide.
But depression wasn’t far away. In 1850, hostage to one such black mood, Robert clumped his English rose Louisa, and dumped her body in a wombat hole on the property.
The body was found weeks before the killer. Troopers combed the Gulf region, in tandem with extensive bushfires, with no sign of Fry Esq.
Months passed until a sergeant-major found a mess of human bones a half-mile from the crime scene, strewn by dingoes, along with a pistol, a dire diary and Louisa’s sun-bonnet. The killer had seemingly taken his own life too.
Gothic and grisly, the tale is now reduced to an roadside plaque on the road between Balaklava and Owen, some 100kms north of Adelaide, and a pristine cluster of trees in the middle distance – namely Fry’s Clump.
[Credit to Russell Smith’s Curiosities of South Australia, Smithbooks, 1999 for the ‘bones’ of this entry.]