Parliament House, State of Victoria

The height of it has, and it echoes the Cold War era.

Ayelet likened it being on the steps of the Politburo behind the Iron Curtain rather than the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne, Australia, a free democratic country.

Like that's,

there's nothing veiled about that.

So Sally, I think a good place to begin our conversation might be with setting up both the mystery and the object that are central to this book.

So on the 9th of October, 1891, the ceremonial mace of the Victorian Parliament disappeared from Parliament House.

But what exactly was this object? What did it represent? And what do we know about the moment it vanished?

Okay, so as you say, the mace is ceremonial, but its function is really important because it symbolises when Parliament's in session.

There's this one man, a parliamentary engineer, Thomas Jeffrey.

Who was he, and why did the police become interested in him? And why is he largely absent from the mythology of this story, up to the point where you wrote this book today?

So, interestingly, this story became fairly quickly a story about the politicians and perceived corruption in Parliament House.

And the person that is most commonly blamed for stealing the mace in popular commentary these days, until the book hopefully, was Thomas Bent, who was a politician.

They were, they were building the next wing of that ...

God, it's a mighty building, the Melbourne Parliament.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And yes, they were working on, uh, another wing of it underneath.

So as well as launching this at giant events in Perth and Sydney and Brisbane and Melbourne, it put Tadworth on the list as well.

The Melbourne launch was on the 1st of September 2004 in the magnificent Queen's Hall in the Victorian Parliament House.

Those in the room included a raft of well-known female directors and government representatives.

But I think that after the initial wave and after those events around the country, we were very much in danger of being written off as just another good idea, just another wave that would amount to very little.

This massive, over-the-top Gothic Revival-style structure that if I was in Australia right now, this is exactly where I'd be going.

Because right next door we also have the Parliament of Victoria, where we get to see pictures like this.

We all know that the scaffolding is not to construct the building.

We know that the scaffolding, it's there for them to paint the building, just like we saw in Episode 49, where the guy has a paintbrush in his hand right here and a paint can right over there.

Painting all of these buildings white again, because these buildings were not being used for a few hundred years after the advanced previous civilization that was here, after they left them sitting there.

The Parliament of Victoria.

What an incredible picture.

Wooden shacks that we build sitting right next to this massive palace.

In 2022, she got elected.

In 2023, she went to the Women Will Speak rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament House.

And that's where everything blew up with a bunch of neo-Nazis.

And then her leader, John Pasciuto, accused her of being a Nazi, even though the Nazis had nothing to do with her and the other women.