The disappearance of Harold Holt, prime minister of Australia
Portsea, Victoria, Australia, 1967
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On Sunday, December 17, 1967, Australian prime minister Harold Holt, 59, was spending the weekend in Portsea, on the Mornington Peninsula. Around 12:15 p.m. he went for a swim at Cheviot Beach, facing Bass Strait, despite the heavy surf and visible currents. With him were Marjorie Gillespie, a neighbor and close friend (years later she would confirm that the two were having an affair), her daughter and two family friends. Within minutes the water carried him away from the shore, and he vanished in the foam.
The search began at 1:30 p.m. and grew to more than 340 people, including police, military personnel, divers and volunteers, without finding the body; it was officially ended on January 5, 1968. On December 22, a memorial service for him at St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne drew heads of government such as Lyndon Johnson of the United States and Harold Wilson of the United Kingdom. The police report, released on January 5, 1968, reached no definitive conclusion and ruled out suicide.
Sources
In the game
Ebb Tide
Portsea, Mornington Peninsula, Australia, Sunday, December 17, 1967, 9 p.m. In the living room of a beach house above the dunes, the wind rattles the windows and, down below, searchlights from boats sweep the dark water.
With no body, theories were born: suicide, assassination by the CIA (published by a newspaper in 1968) and, most famous of all, the one in journalist Anthony Grey's 1983 book, according to which Holt was a Chinese spy and was picked up by a submarine; reviewers pointed out factual errors in the work. Victorian law did not allow an inquest without a body until 1985; in 2005, as part of a review of dozens of drownings in which no body was ever found, coroner Graeme Johnstone held an inquest into Holt and found that he had taken an unnecessary risk and drowned in the rough sea off Cheviot. In 1969, Melbourne opened a public swimming pool named after him.
