SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY:SOMERTON BEACH, 90A MOSELEY STREET, THE SCENE & THE DUGOUTS LOCATION, IMAGES & MAPS: UPDATED

1.  90A MOSELEY STREET VIEW MAP...

 

....As you walk South along Moseley Street towards Tarleton Street, the house on the Northern side of Bath Street at its junction with Moseley Street is numbered 86A Moseley Street, which would make the house, known as Shandon, a small block of flats, number 88 Moseley Street. 

However, the house we see next to Shandon is 90A Moseley Street. Where is number 90? It turns out that when you walk past and on the Google Street view map above you can see that there is a driveway left and right of the building that shows 90A at the front of the house. It seems to me that numbers 90 and 90A are in the same building but the front door of number 90 is actually on the left side of the building as you look at it from the road. Would this information make a difference? Who knows but at least it’s documented. If anyone has information on the building, it would be very welcome.

For the record, it was a week ago on Wednesday when I walked down Moseley street. It’s a leafy tree-lined street though they’re not too closely pitched. In the 30 minutes or so I was walking, mid-afternoon, there were not many cars that drove past and a couple of buses. Was it that way in 1948? I don’t honestly know. You would think that with a lower population and fewer cars on the road that it would be a fairly quiet street.

2. SOMERTON BEACH…

The scene…

….It has been quite some time since I have visited Adelaide and so when the opportunity arose, all expenses paid, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have relatives and friends there and some new and most interesting people to meet on this particular visit.

Above is the scene where the SOMERTON MAN was found on 1st December 1948. In fact, if you look at the buildings, between the one on the far right and the one on its left, the gap that you see is Bickford Terrace. If you were to draw a vertical line down from the left side as you look at it, the middle building to the base of the rock wall, that would be approximately where the body was found. In fact, the precise location would be around 1.5 meters or so back beneath the rock wall, and that’s because in the intervening years, a wide pathway has been added to the roadside.

3. A WALK TO BROADWAY

In the inquest documents, we read that Mr. John Lyons and his wife had walked past this location on their regular evening walk to the Broadway and back from their home in White Street, the next street south of Bickford Terrace. I took this image about 20 feet, 6.5 metres away from the wall. That’s around the distance that Mr Lyons and his wife were on their outbound trip. They did not notice the man at that stage, at least they did not mention seeing him until their return from the Broadway about 15 minutes later.

I walked to the Broadway and took 7 minutes at normal walking speed.

Below is an image I took on that walk, it shows the road curving to the right and the building that you see directly ahead and in between the two Norfolk Pines, is the current kiosk. You walk past that kiosk for another 9 minutes and you arrive at Moseley Square/Jetty Road Glenelg

4. THE DUGOUTS

Some years after the finding of the body of the man, a witness said that he had seen a man carrying another man on his shoulders along the beach whilst he was out walking one evening with friends. He said that the location was near the ‘dugouts’. For those unaware, a dugout was a roughly hewn shelter into the side of an earth mound.

Having walked along the esplanade a few times in the visit, it seems to me that there was only one location where the dugouts might actually have been and that is along a short stretch of walkway just North of the kiosk shown in the image above.

Here’s the view from the opposite direction :

Just to the left of the lamppost and the distance, you can see the Northern wall of the kiosk. You can also see how the pathway rises up noticeably and slopes down to the seal wall, which I understand was not there until the 1960s. In 1948, whilst some of the pines were there, the earth on which they stood, gave way to sand dunes. (There was a significant tree planting effort that commenced in the late war years and onwards).

This is the only place along the stretch from Glenelg to Somerton where there would have been sufficient height for a dugout to be constructed. This is backed up by the location of the housing line that abuts the esplanade,