Firebomb 06 | Track Jack

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Just before we start, this episode contains some strong language and descriptions of violence.

So, since the start of this project, I've been wanting to track down Jack Van Tongren, the leader of the neo-Nazi gang.

For months, our team has been looking for clues that might help.

Morning, must be very early there.

Yeah, it's still dark out here.

And then we get a break.

Okay, so on Friday, I spoke to A ⁇ M guy.

Dunya Karagich is our producer, and she's found someone who used to be close to Jack.

He just volunteered a lot of info on the phone, like a lot.

Obviously, don't know how true bits of it are.

He was one of the other members of the A ⁇ M.

He's still very, very racist and doesn't seem like he regrets anything he did at all.

Dunya says she asked him about an attack during the 80s that she'd heard about.

And he just started hysterically laughing and said, yeah, that was me.

This guy is the closest we've got to Jack so far.

And while he doesn't want to do an interview, it turns out he still talks to Jack sometimes.

They still seem to be, you know, fine and in touch.

Jack is 75 years old now.

So in my mind, he should be slowing down, maybe even just chilling out a bit.

But what Dunya says next kind of makes me worry.

He said that he's not alone.

He says he's got a group of half a dozen blokes that live with him over there, young men with failed marriages.

And I said, What's he doing with these guys?

And he, the exact words, were preparing the next generation.

Oh, wow.

Okay,

that's unexpected.

We don't know if there's any truth to this or what he really means by it.

But just in case,

whatever we do next,

we're going to have to be careful.

This is not the kind of property that we're going to have a door to knock on.

That's the track.

That's running up the fence line.

There'll be an entry just up here.

Hobbits Haunt.

What the f.

But do you see the way they look at each other?

I just darting back and forth.

I get the sense that they know a little bit more than they told us.

Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.

Yeah, I am.

Okay, here we go.

This is Firebomb, the latest season of the ABC's Unravel podcast,

episode 6:

Track Jack.

While me and Alex and the team try to work out exactly where Jack is now, I'm also trying to learn as much as I can about what drives him and where he came from.

Ever since I was at uni, I've been intrigued by this carefully curated brand that Jack Van Tongren had built for himself.

His well-groomed mustache, his hair, his military-style boots and uniform, and how he likes to talk about how he fought in the Vietnam War.

So that's where I decided to start, with the war.

And the guy who served with Jack.

Well, the first time I met Jack was

when we were training up Townsville, before we went to Vietnam.

Bob Bacon remembers Jack Van Tongren well.

The two fought together in Vietnam back in the early 70s.

He

He says that once they got to Vietnam, Jack's small size and lack of physical strength became a bit of an issue.

In his opinion, Jack wasn't particularly cut out for the battlefield.

Jack wasn't a great soldier because he couldn't take the weight and all that we had to carry.

He was always puffing and pinning.

I mean, Jack couldn't go without water.

We'd stop for a break, and Jack would just about drink a penny can of water in one go.

He couldn't ration his water.

So I had to carry some for him.

Bob says he and the other soldiers mostly got along fine with Jack.

But over time, Jack became a target for their ribbing and pranks.

Jack was

easily fooled.

I mean, you could pull pranks on him.

There's this one prank Bob pulled while Jack was asleep.

It was the middle of the night, and Bob and the other blokes decided to target the one thing that was most distinctive about Jack.

One of the things that he treasured most.

Anyhow, when we went out the next morning, our boss was calling the roll.

It was a silly grin on his face, and he said to Jack, you'd better go and have a look in the mirror.

So Jack went out in the mirror, and he came back and he was fuming.

Bob and the other soldiers had shaved off half his mustache.

Jack's pride and joy was his mustache and he took it pretty badly too, just quietly.

Despite this, Bob says he got along well enough with Jack.

The two even shared a hoochie or army tent and they'd talk for hours at night.

Oh, he was just

eccentric.

He knew he knew a lot of stuff.

Well, he thought he knew a lot.

I mean,

we'd lay in the jungle every night and he'd be talking about the stars.

That's Alpha Centauri, that's Alva Vega, and this is such, and he'd point out all the stars and all that.

Bob says that at this stage, there was no sign Jack had Nazi sympathies.

I mean, I get the impression from talking with Bob that Jack wasn't particularly brutal or racist.

I mean, not in a way that stuck out at least.

He was just a small soldier who was easy to make fun of.

But Bob says Vietnam did change people in different ways.

Jack was always eccentric, but Vietnam probably had something to do with him falling over the wrong side of the fence.

I'm not saying it did, I'm not saying it didn't, but

it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

Put it that way.

There's this article we found that can give us some clues to this.

It was a long article written in 1990 by Jack's mum, Stella Van Tongren, and it's called Making of a Racist.

As soon as we found it, Alex and I jumped on a call to read it together.

Are you reading this, Crispian?

I am reading this.

Wow.

Sort of goes some way to answering some of your questions.

Yeah.

Jack's mum writes about how much he had changed after Vietnam.

She was a university trained psychologist and she could see how the stress and trauma of what he had seen was affecting him.

She tells how he became even more isolated after his brother died and his best friend got married.

And then it's at around this time that he was introduced to some Nazi literature.

In one sense, this is a very, very familiar story, you know, like social isolation, trauma, Somebody gives you a book to read, you know, that offers a possible explanation for, hey, you know, you're feeling hard done by, well, it's not your fault.

You know, join the club.

It's such a familiar radicalization pathway.

It's how people today are radicalized.

But there's something in this article that still gets me every time I think about it.

And it blows people's minds when I tell them this.

Stella Van Tongeren reveals one of Jack's deepest contradictions, and that's the fact that Jack was actually part Asian himself.

Jack's dad was born in Indonesia, his parents were both part Dutch and part Javanese.

So, Jack was a neo-Nazi white supremacist with Asian heritage.

I'd read about Jack's Javanese background many years ago, and that fact has always fascinated me.

But it wasn't until I read this article by Jack's mum that I realized just how central that might be to this whole story.

Because she writes in this article that just like me, Jack got teased for being Asian when he was a kid.

It's so surreal that this is the voice of Jack Van Tongren's mother.

This definitely gives that family insight on who is his anti-aging campaign is now common knowledge, but a psychologist might suggest that in an attempt to drive Asians out of society,

which he identified, he was in fact trying to drive the Asian out of himself.

Well.

Yeah.

It makes me feel sorry for him in some ways.

I think I understand

the self-hate that you can get when you've been made so inferior.

Even his family couldn't stop him.

Even with this amount of depth and breadth of knowledge about and intimate knowledge about him, even they couldn't bring him around.

His hatred must be so damn fucking deep.

There's a lot of self-hatred there.

I've touched a little bit of that going through growing up when you're getting teased and you have a little bit of inferiority complex, but him to go down to that level that deep that it's a deep dark hole

i wish we could have spoken to jack's mum about all of this but she died years ago

and anyway i i feel like to really get into Jack's head, we need to find someone who was even closer to him than all these people we've heard from so far.

Someone who wasn't just a follower of Jack's group.

What we need is someone who was in his inner circle.

But they're not easy to find.

Call failed.

Yep.

Okay, the next one.

We try calling every number we can find for nearly every person who got locked up with Jack.

Okay, one more, let's try this one.

And for a while, it looks like we failed.

Okay, um.

And then all of a sudden, we find someone.

He unexpectedly agrees to come into a Sydney studio for an interview, like immediately.

And so...

With little time to prepare, before we know it, we're talking to him down the line from Perth.

I can indeed and I've also got with me Crispian Chan.

Okay.

G'day Mark.

How are you?

Good mate.

It was strange to hear this guy's voice again.

His name is Mark Ferguson and I remember him from the TV reports when I was a kid.

After the gang got locked up, he became this sort of de facto voice on the inside workings and thinking of the AM.

Were they even worried they might kill someone?

Well, they set about it and chose their targets very, very carefully so that that would not happen.

And now he's here in a studio speaking to me about how he and Jack first met.

I knew Jack for a couple of years before I went to Perth, which was in November 1986, and I was going to stay at his place for two weeks and I ended up staying

for a number of years.

5,000 posters would go up on a Saturday night.

He was very good at organising that.

He could convince people that they had to do something and they'd pay for their petrol and they'd pay for the posters.

Mark became something of a propaganda ideas man for the Australian nationalist movement.

He still seems to be in favour of reducing immigration from Asia and weirdly still wants credit for some of the racist poster slogans he created for the A ⁇ M in the 80s.

I came up with the idea of 700,000 Asians, 700,000 unemployed.

Mark was only ever convicted of relatively minor offences, not the fire bombings.

He says when the gang turned to arson, he kept his distance.

And then Alex starts asking some more probing questions.

So I listen in from my corner of the Perth studio and I'm kind of holding my breath.

I was into the propaganda and fully into the propaganda but didn't really want to have anything whatsoever to do with the terrorism.

You would call it that?

You'd call it terrorism?

Well of course it is.

You can't call it anything else can you?

Do you accept that the things that you did in the 80s contributed to this environment in which people felt justified in committing violent acts against the Chinese community?

Yes, well

it's a very unfortunate thing that that's what what it descended into.

It's kind of a passive way of describing it though, right, that things descended into

that you were a part of, you know, you hastened that descent.

Well,

that's the way the situation is, I

have to concede.

What did you think was going to happen when you're putting all these posters up around Perth saying, you know, Asians out or racial war?

Well,

I never wrote that one about the racial war.

Sure, but you were around putting the posters on.

Yes, well, I certainly was.

Do you think the images would have dehumanised that particular group?

Well,

you could assume it that way, yes.

But the project failed, didn't it?

I mean, you know, your program was to end Asian migration or to slow it down to a trickle to Australia.

And that project completely failed, didn't it?

Well, but Paula did, and

there's no denying that.

So it's kind of a waste of time and unnecessary trauma.

Do you accept that?

Well,

it looks as though it certainly is that, doesn't it?

Can I ask, have you ever spoken to a victim of your activities before?

Well, I'm obviously talking to one in the background there, Christian, isn't it?

Is it Christian?

Christian?

Yeah, yeah.

Well this is the first occasion.

What's it like to have Crispian sitting here now?

Well

the thing about Lizbel it's most uncomfortable

the situation of course.

For you or for Crispian?

Well for me for me and obviously for him also.

It's hard for me to know what to say.

I'm mostly just sort of sitting there stunned as I listen to Alex and him go back and forth.

And while I'm trying to make sense of that exchange, Mark tells us something pretty surreal.

The night this whole saga started, the night that Jack burned down my family's restaurant, Mark says he was actually at Jack's house.

I went to a trotting meeting on a Wednesday night at York and I got back 11.30, quarter to 12 and I smelt petrol.

And I thought, what's that?

And were they sitting inside or you could just...

No, there was no one there.

And I opened up the door and I went out to the toilet.

And I smelled, what's this?

And this is

how bizarre Jack was.

He didn't even dispose of the petrol,

the clothing with the petrol on it.

And I couldn't believe it.

Anyway.

You come home and there's this like

overalls, smell of petrol, all the rest of it.

And Jack's not disposing of evidence.

I mean, were you surprised that the police weren't onto this straight away?

Yes, yes.

But

I'm surprised that the police didn't come around and knock on the door after the second one.

I really am surprised that they didn't do it.

I mean,

why are you surprised?

What sort of...

Yeah, why are you surprised that they went around earlier?

Well, because, you know, they have this great investigation.

And if I was an officer in charge, like after the second one, I'd be knocking on Jack's door because of the profile of what they were saying.

What would they have found if they'd done that?

Well, I'll put it this way.

There wouldn't have been the third or a fourth one if they would have went after the second one.

That's what wouldn't have happened.

Mark could have tried to stop it too, but instead it went on and on.

I'm kind of done with hearing from Mark.

What I really want to know now is more about Jack.

How does it feel to know that Jack himself is part Asian himself?

How do you think Jack understood and reconciled with that fact about him?

Yeah, well, it was an anomaly,

to say the least.

And

people and other members used to think, well, what have we got ourselves into here and have a bit of a joke?

But

it was the overriding factor rather than him and his ethnicity

that pushed us along.

I mean given the things that given what happened to my family

I myself of course experienced that attack you know it it got me to look at who I was

and questioned and made me have tensions about who I how I perceived myself and

I wondered whether

something happened in Jack's life growing up that might have explained perhaps his own perception of himself as well and his kind of reconciliation with his identity.

Well, you're on the right track there,

and I've tried to analyse and I've spoken to other people who knew him well,

and we can never

ascertain or come to a conclusion why it is that he chose the path he did.

Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out.

Why he chose the path he did and what he's doing now.

And it seems if we're going to answer those questions, we're going to need to find them.

The last time I seen Jack in Australia was on the 18th of August

2022 in Byron Bay.

Jack's old army mate Bob says he still sees Jack from time to time at army reunions.

He's still got his moustache.

He did grow back after he shaved it off, shaved half it off.

And from what he says, it sounds like Jack's still pretty extreme in his thinking.

Jack was

talking to me about, you know, the Second World War.

He reckons the Holocaust, and that didn't actually happen.

Jack said that was all propaganda.

It never actually happened.

And, you know, so

his attitude is.

He's definitely a neo-Nazi now, you know.

What do you know about where Jack is now?

Well,

he just wanted to get away from society, so he bought this

virtually desert,

and he's put everything on it.

Last year, he put a tower on it, so he could get mobile reception.

He put all water in that, and he grows all his own vegetables.

He just finished building a roundhouse and he just lives out there and does his own thing.

and

I don't think he comes into contact with too many people.

When Bob says this I'm thinking that's not what we've heard

but I decide to stay quiet.

I'm hoping Bob's right.

One of the things that we're thinking of doing is actually going and speaking to Jack.

I don't know if he'd

He'd talk to you or not.

I'm not saying he wouldn't,

but I warn you there if

you do expect some strange responses

I asked Bob if he thought Jack had any regrets about what he did to my community and to my family I'd say no

to be quite honest I'd say no

and what makes you think that what have you observed oh he just hasn't changed he's like in the last time I've known him he's still got that

Jack attitude, Jack Van Dogger attitude, but I could be wrong.

But it's just the opinion I got

spending so much time at him knowing him that it's just my opinion.

We asked, but Bob Bacon didn't know Jack's exact home address.

We've tried to find Jack ourselves, but he's a bit of a ghost online.

What our research did establish, though, is that Jack likes to send Christmas cards, and on all of them is a return PO box number.

The location of that PO box is on the outskirts of the Riverland region of South Australia.

When Alex gets this key piece of info, he disappears into his computer.

The next time we speak, he's got news.

I've been doing a bit of digging and doing a few

online searches,

and

I've managed to find his actual address

so um

a lot of the o box yeah his home his actual address

yeah

yeah

it really is

very remote it's a bush block it's a bush block yeah that's the address okay put that into

maps he really is in the middle of nowhere

900 hectares of bush

now we know where he lives It's nearly time for us to meet.

Where we decide to meet is another question, but I don't feel super comfortable about doing it at that remote property.

Definitely not.

Definitely not.

On his flight AAA to Adelaide to board now through gate number 17C.

For all other customers, general boarding will commence shortly.

So just before

we left the airport, I wrote an email to Jack.

Hopefully he'll reply to us by the time we land and maybe we'll get our chance to finally talk to him.

And thank you, Cavacu.

Final door has now been closed.

Everyone make sure your phones are in place or airplane mode.

When we get to Adelaide, we grab a hired car and start the three hours drive towards Jack's place.

And I'm feeling this weird mixture of sort of dread, but also anticipation and intense interest in what we're about to find out.

I'm just thinking about

when did you contact me again?

Yeah, maybe like yeah it would have been about October I think last year.

Yeah.

October last year so

I just quit my job

then I get a call from you

And

before you know it,

I'm on the road here

looking for the guy who firebombed my family's restaurant

who

is somewhere out there who apparently has retired

but possibly could be coaching some of the next generation of Nazis.

I think we'll be okay, but it is something that's crossed my mind.

Has it crossed your mind?

Yeah,

for sure.

I'm

to be honest, I'm like

most concerned about you.

Like,

this has been my job for a long time, and it's not an entirely new experience for me, but whilst this is something in an abstract form, you've been thinking about and dealing with for a long time, now we're driving around a remote part of South Australia, about to potentially meet up with this guy.

And like,

yeah, I just want to make sure that

you're okay and that you're feeling

comfortable with where we are and what we're about to do.

Yeah, sometimes I do wonder whether I've maybe bit enough more than I can chew.

There's been a few nights where I've just gone,

Are you really ready to go on this journey?

What do you actually expect from talking to Jack about all these things?

He's most likely just gonna look at me and say, I don't give a fuck.

And I'm prepared for that.

We drive through flat farming country for a couple of hours, you know, passing through the occasional blinking, you'll miss it kind of town.

There's a sign back there that says peak population 60.

Then, as the sat-nav tells us we're getting closer, the landscape starts to change.

There's not even any fences, it's just scrub.

We slow the car down.

We're getting close, actually.

That's the track, okay.

Okay, I know where we are.

That's running up the fence line.

There'll be an entry just up here, I should think.

We know we're in the right place, but you can't even see a house, it's just bush.

But then we see something:

there's a sign out the front: Hobbit's Haunt.

What the f

it's like a two-plank wood sign with Hobbit's Haunt on it in the front of all of the rings.

I'm not sure what exactly I expected to find out the front of Jack's place,

but this

is not it.

The sign is pretty big and sort of official looking.

It's not hand-painted or scrolled, it's like carved in a proper Celtic-looking font, like the type you'd see on the frontage of an Irish pub.

God, it's weird that it's called Hobbits Haunt.

I'm really curious to know why he's chosen Hobbits Haunt.

Hobbits Haunt?

What's J.R.

Tolkien?

Hobbits Haunt.

While we're stewing that over, Alex starts taking a look around.

Anything you notice about the track?

Uh

look, it does look like I mean the cars are kind of coming in and out of here.

There are

tracks from cars coming in and out, but it doesn't look like it's been, you know, nothing today, I don't think.

Alex and I stare up the sandy driveway.

It's a narrow track that runs up a slight hill before disappearing into these thick trees.

In our email, we let Jack know that we were coming to see him, but he still hasn't replied.

So, does he have any idea that we're standing outside his place, like right now?

In theory, you could walk straight in, but for us, that's

I mean, we're not allowed to.

It'd be trespassing to go any further.

And,

you know, as much as Jack is like an old guy these days,

there still has to be an element of caution with how we approach this.

If it wasn't for this comment that he's out here training the next generation, I think maybe I would

feel less trepidatious.

Our phones don't work out here, so we head back into a nearby town for phone reception and to come up with another way of getting to Jack.

And while we're there, we check out this Hobbits haunt thing.

And it turns out in Europe, there's this weird association between the Lord of the Rings books and certain far-right ideas of so-called traditional values.

So maybe there's something to it.

Or then again, maybe Jack just really likes the books.

Whatever the case, we need to get a clearer picture of what he's up to behind all those trees.

So we get out the car and we start exploring the local town.

Okay, look, I think there's basically there's a few places around here in Loxton that we should visit just to sort of see who knows him through his artwork.

Because reportedly Jack is a bit of an artist these days.

Back in 2012 and 2015 Jack actually exhibited a little bit around Loxton.

It's going back a bit but it's probably worth a visit to these places and see if anyone remembers him or can show us a picture of the artwork.

In our combing through archives we found out that his work had been exhibited at Loxton Visitor Centre which doubles as the town's library.

We find Karen Rubarth, the manager inside.

So this would have been exhibited in the gallery.

Karen doesn't seem seem to know much about Jack, but she agrees to search a digital records for his name.

I don't remember the exhibition being in the library, but that's not to say that it wasn't.

But I do remember that name for some reason.

Karen opens a folder on her computer filled with colourful thumbnails of artwork, and

there they are.

Can you describe what

we're looking at here?

They look like landscapes mainly.

There's no people in them.

It's all trees, sand, water, mountains.

They're kind of peaceful.

This one, I'm not sure.

Could even be a sea landscape.

Definitely a river landscape.

And that one almost could be Lake Bonnie.

They're pretty good.

You think so?

Yeah.

They're certainly not...

They're not rubbish.

No, I like them.

Other than the fact that she has photos of of his work, Karen doesn't seem to know anyone who knows Jack or any way of finding out more information about what he's up to.

I hope you have some success with what you're trying to find, yeah.

Thank you.

Next, we get back in a car and drive to another nearby town.

This one's even closer to Jack's place.

Yeah, there's somebody over here.

I'm about to have a chat to this old fella.

We get out of the car and start knocking on doors.

I'm just just going to get my nose.

Fuck.

When Alex starts talking to shop owners, the vibe here is totally different.

It seems like no one really wants to have a microphone stuck in their face around these parts.

So Alex just turns it back on each time we head back out onto the street.

So again, we've just jumped into like an ag suppliers shop and

had a quick chat to the guy behind the counter and now we asked him about the property and he says, oh, nobody goes in there.

no one knows anything about the guy who lives there he's an ex-vet I think very interesting

Jack is a Vietnam vet so it seems like people here actually know of him the next stop is another farm supply store

okay so that was super interesting we've just come out of an ag supplies place

okay so the first thing that stuck at me was that people used to ride their motorbikes through this block up until a couple of years ago when somebody new moved in and now they're like

word in town is basically that it's not kind of safe to do that anymore that they're so they what did they say there might even be booby traps out there but do you see the the way they looked at each other yeah that minute you start even describing when you said hobbits haunt and you decide to describe this the block they were looking at each other eyes darting back and forth to the other guy that was in there.

I like his body language.

I mean, yeah, I get the sense that they know a little bit more than they told us.

She said people don't come out here when they buy land like that and don't come out here for farming, they come out here to hide something.

They did give us the name of somebody

who, along with their kids, used to ride motorbikes through the property.

We stop at one final shop, and bit by bit, a clearer picture of Jack's life here starts to emerge.

So we've just been into another shop.

The guys asked us not to say which shop it is but

we got some pretty interesting pretty interesting stories that

he's actually spoken to Jack and confirmed that it is Jack's property.

It's also the second time somebody's confirmed that he's building a roundhouse on the property so we know he's like building some kind of property.

I mean I don't know what a roundhouse is.

What are we talking like a

you know like a gazebo or is he talking are we talking about a house?

Like, it's not clear to me what's going on.

It's not doing an Airbnb, that's for sure.

If Jack doesn't already know we're in town, he will soon.

Everybody's going to know.

If anyone that we've spoken to has any kind of relationship with Jack, we're just going to get back to him likely today.

Definitely.

After door knocking almost every business in town, we've got a clear idea now that locals love to gossip and a patchy idea of what Jack's up to.

It seems like he moved to his Hobbits Haunt bush block about three years ago, but no one really knows what he's doing there beyond building that roundhouse thing.

All we've found out is that he's growing his own food and harvesting rainwater to provide for a mob of local emus and kangaroos.

Now, I want to believe that's all he's doing.

That and painting, but I'm just not convinced.

So we head back towards his house because we're told that some of those kids who were warned away from his property work on a farm near there.

And before we know it, we're driving along this soft sandy track.

Okay, keep up, you've invented three here.

Don't get bogged.

No, keep going, keep going, keep going, don't slow down.

That's right, yeah, no, no.

Yeah.

Okay, so we're just like driving along a dirt track into the middle of a farm.

We're a little way away from Jack's place now.

We're being taken

to somebody who's working on this farm who apparently knows a bit about Jack and has met him and

actually knows what's going on on the property.

And we're gonna have a chat to them, hopefully.

It's been a pretty funny afternoon of

conversations with people.

You know, each person is leading us to another person, who's leading us to another person, and now we're in this weird situation where we're

following somebody in a

four-wheel drive out through the middle of a

farm.

Oh, here we go.

Okay, here, there's a harvester sum.

Can you see it?

We stop the car get out and chat to a group of workers.

They're sitting on the back of this large harvesting machine and like everyone around here they don't want to be recorded so we switch off the mic.

When we turn it back on we've got heaps to unpack.

Oh my god, there's so many things out of that conversation.

Basically there's like he's apparently been living in a bus on the property while he

has been building this kind of roundhouse out of recycled materials and that's the thing that he's talking about with the Hobbits haunt.

It's like as if it's some sort of Hobbits house.

It sounds like he's gone and down this

sustainability eco hobby project.

One girl there says she's actually been helping Jack out on his property.

She also said Jack loves to talk, like he'll really chew your ear off.

But what took me totally by surprise is how she said that to her, Jack seemed like a nice guy.

The picture the locals have painted of Jack today isn't one of a neo-Nazi training the next generation, but of an old hermit who sits at home growing vegetables.

And

I think I'm starting to believe that's really all he's doing.

If he has changed.

If he is trying to change his life.

And

I guess that's the thing we want to put this on record for him, don't we?

To say that, look, this man has changed and everyone should leave him alone.

Because I, you know, I...

It was interesting.

For a moment there, I saw...

And...

In that conversation with that girl, for a moment there, for temporarily, right now, I see a life of Jack

having this

productive relationship with these younger people in building an eco-sustainable project.

And that was actually a nice moment just then, hearing the way she talked about him

in that way.

Not about

all the other terrible things he's done.

But it's nice, right, for that moment, for me, some ways to hear her talk about Jack in this way as if he was just this fuddy-duddy.

She called him a pretty cool dude.

That's what she said.

Yes.

Wouldn't it be great if Jack was just a pretty cool dude now?

You know, Uncle Jack, he did some shitty shit in the past.

But now

he's reading his JR token and he's going to build a mound.

And he's doing it sustainably.

Like how cool is that?

And he owns emus!

That's the jack I want to know.

That's the jack I want to meet.

So the picture we have of Jack has changed.

Alex reaches out to some contacts and we find out that local police are aware Jack lives out here and they know about his past but they don't think Jack's up to anything concerning at all.

But we still want to talk to Jack so we want to try one last thing.

We have this phone number that we found in our searches.

We didn't want to try it until we were nearby and ready to meet up with him and until we had a better idea of what he was up to.

We never tried the number and we're not even sure if it really is his.

You ready?

Yeah, I am.

I can video call him.

That's not a good idea.

Okay, here we go.

Swinging.

Hi, this is Jack Stoning.

Please leave a message, your name and number, and he'll get back to you as soon as he can, if he wants to.

That's not the voice I expected to hear, and I have no idea who it is.

The whole thing catches me off guard, and I stumble through trying to leave a message.

Hi, Jack.

It's Christian Chan here.

Don't know if you've received our email or our text message last night, but we're here in Loxton right now, and

we're going to be be here for um for most of the day you can call me back on this number anytime and i would love to hear from you thanks bye

oh i'm shaking a little bit

wow okay

it is jack's phone obviously because

that's what the message said um

yeah but look i'm really i really hope she

tries to call me back

The next day, we call Jack again, but he doesn't call us back.

We're sitting in our car on the main street, wondering what to do next, when we get a call from a pretty heavy-sounding guy who knows my name.

Yeah, it's Crispian.

How you doing?

It's a mate of Jack's.

He's polite, but his message is pretty clear.

Back off.

When he hangs up, we suddenly realize that we've been so tense listening to him that we've been cooking ourselves in an airless car

fresh air let's just open the door

i wasn't expecting that

i wasn't expecting that either

wasn't expecting that at all

It's probably time to get out of here, but before we head off, Alex makes one last call to one of Jack's veteran mates who we know also lives nearby.

Did you hear that?

Could you hear what he was saying?

So

he's talked to Jack today.

Yeah, he spoke to him this morning.

Jack called him this morning.

And what did Jack say to him?

He told him that we'd been in touch with him and

he told this person we just spoke to on the phone that he's not going to talk to us, that he doesn't want anything to do with us.

Does that mean he did see the phone ring when we called him and it wasn't as if he missed it?

He chose not to pick up that phone.

He listened to the voice messages and decided not to pick up or require the call.

You know,

I'm in two minds.

You know, I'm kind of like,

yeah, I would have liked to have that conversation.

But

But the other part is, yeah, okay.

Enough is enough.

If what that girl yesterday has said about describing you as the person as being,

then I'm okay with that.

So it seems like Jack is done, finally.

Nothing I've seen has convinced me his views have changed, but there seems to be no evidence that he's got half a dozen blokes living with him or that he's he's training the next generation.

But I'm glad I came here with Alex.

It felt like we had a responsibility to investigate these rumors that he was still active.

And I'm glad we haven't found anything like that out here.

But I have one other thing that I need to look into.

Because while it seems like Jack has moved on, Today's right-wing extremists, they haven't forgotten about Jack.

We can see someone like Jack Van Tongren becomes an inspiration years later.

Authorities are increasingly dealing with an undercurrent of right-wing radicals.

I'm worried that all of this could happen again.

Neo-Nazis marched in formation, performing the Hitler salute.

Fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

I think people need to know that it hasn't gone away, really.

It's all back on the rise again.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Crispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Gadaguland and Watjaknunga Land.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolter.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Brennan and our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

To make sure you're the first to get the next episodes, follow the Unravel podcast.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.

If you're enjoying Firebomb and you like storytelling podcasts for the sort of twists and turns you've heard here, have a listen to the new season of Days Like These made by our colleagues at the ABC.

There are chance encounters, uncovered secrets, half-truths, and straight-out lies.

You'll laugh out loud, and sometimes you'll cry.

Days like these bring you stories about ordinary Australians and the day where everything changed.

Just search for the Days Like These podcast.

Find it on the ABC Listen app.