Half a century of science and intrigue.
It was a spring Sunday, September 28, 1969.
In the small farming town of Murchison, two hours north of Melbourne, many locals were making their way to church. One was celebrating his 21st birthday, and the Gillick brothers were building a ferret cage in their back yard.
But at 10.58am everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to the sky.
They didn't know it yet but a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite had just rained down on their town.
"My husband and I were getting ready for church," recalls Marianne Begg.
"Our 11-year-old son and our seven-year-old daughter were out on the front verandah and I heard this 'ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom'.
"I called out, 'John stop jumping on the verandah!' and he said, 'It's not me mum, it's up in the sky.'
"We rushed outside and we could see this puff of blue smoke, right up in the clear blue sky and we realised something had happened."
Aside from the noise, Marianne says there was also a strong smell of methylated spirits.
Running late for the 11.00am church service, the Begg family piled into their car and rolled out of their driveway.
"We looked down the paddock with 115 milking cows and they were all just about heaped in the corner of the paddock, trying to get away with their ears up," Marianne says.
Over the course of the morning, everyone came up with their own theory as to what had caused the unusual noise and smell. A dairy exploding, or maybe a plane crashing.
"I jokingly said I thought it was two spaceships shooting at each other," says Marianne.
Others thought it was a fire or car accident, and expected the sirens at the nearby fire station to spring to life.
And some thought it must have come from Puckapunyal, the nearby military training base.
"Everybody was of course speculating … Was it the guns going off, a gas explosion or something had happened on the [train] track?" says Don Polkinghorne, another local.
But it was 1969: there was no way of looking up or confirming what had actually happened.
"We just went on with what we were doing, because nobody in those days could find out."
That evening, on a farm just minutes from town, the late Arnold Brisbane went to milk his dairy cows for the second time that Sunday.
"Having left the yard pristine, he noticed this black charcoal substance on the yard," explains Beth Brisbane, Arnold's daughter in-law.
"He had no idea what it was but obviously it had fallen out of the sky because there was no other reason for it."
Arnold scooped up the bulk of the "charcoal", threw it over the fence and then proceeded to hose the yard down — flushing the unusual substance into the farm's manure pit.
But the next morning, as Murchison residents continued to corroborate their stories of lights, smoke and noise in the sky, Mr Brisbane decided to take a sample of this strange, black, charcoal-like substance to Shepparton News.
Journalists then took the sample to the nearby police station.
The police report states: "Substance found at Murchison after sighting of falling object in Northern Victoria on 28/9/69."
After telling the police, the Shepparton News called the geology department at the University of Melbourne.
"That's when the fuss started," says Beth Brisbane.
From moon rocks to Murchison
On the day of the Murchison meteorite landing, John Lovering, professor of geology at the University of Melbourne, was slightly preoccupied.
"I was coming back in the aircraft from America, having picked up the first lunar samples to analyse in our labs here in Melbourne," he recalls.
It was three months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Professor Lovering had been nominated as one of the principal Australian investigators for analysing the samples the astronauts brought home.
It was as he was standing in Melbourne airport, clutching a bag of moon rock samples, that Professor Lovering first heard about the meteorite landing.
"A bloke from The Age came and said, 'something has fallen out of the sky in a place called Murchison'."
Meanwhile, a group of University of Melbourne geology students had already made their way to the town to start looking for pieces of meteorite.
Andrew Gleadow was a third-year geology student at the time. Today, he's an emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne.
He was designated the grim task of sorting through the manure pit on the Brisbanes' farm.
"I was assigned to stand in the pit with gumboots on, sleeves rolled up, sieving through manure, feeling for gritty little lumps like gravel," Professor Gleadow recalls.
'The rarest of meteorites'
It wasn't until a couple of days after the landing that the true significance of the meteorite was recognised.
Caught up with official proceedings following his return with the moon rocks, Professor Lovering hadn't had the opportunity to go to Murchison.
As it happened, he was in the Melbourne ABC TV studio, waiting to be interviewed on current affairs program This Day Tonight, when he finally laid eyes on a piece of the meteorite.
"The door flung open and a bloke came in carrying a plastic bag, all blown up [from the gases coming off the rock]," he remembers.
"I opened it up and I got the smell of all these very complex organic compounds— an incredible potpourri of all the smells that you ever imagined.
"I looked inside and there was this black, coaly looking material and I said, 'My god, it's a carbonaceous chondrite!'
"These are the rarest of meteorites, the most primitive of them. And here was this beautifully fresh one."
Because the rock had landed in the daytime and was discovered quickly, its precious cocktail of organic compounds wasn't contaminated.
Overwhelmed by the significance of the find, Professor Lovering began leaping around the TV studio.
"[Presenter] Peter Couchman said 'hold on, hold on we're not on the air yet', but by the time we got on the air I was all calm and collected," he says.
"As far as I was concerned, the meteorite was more important than the moon rock that I'd come back with on that very same day."
It wasn't long before scientists and meteorite collectors from all over the world began to descend upon the tiny town of Murchison.
An impact without a crater
Carbonaceous chondrites break up as they enter the atmosphere; the booming the locals reported was these meteorite fragments breaking the sound barrier.
So unlike most meteorites, there was no impact site, no crater. Instead, the Murchison meteorite was scattered across a swathe of farmland 11 kilometres long and 3km wide.
With clues like a big piece that went through a hay shed in Murchison East, people had an idea of where to look, Beth Brisbane remembers.
Countless scientists showed up at the Brisbanes' farm to take a look at the dairy.
But it wasn't just scientists looking for meteorite samples: the locals got involved too.
Loading...It was the Gillick brothers, Peter and Kim, aged 10 and 11 at the time, who became most dedicated to the cause.
The boys were very methodical in their search efforts.
"We started to piece together where it fell and how it fell," Kim Gillick says.
"We realised quickly that the small pieces travel less and fell quicker to the earth, and the large pieces carried and went further."
Using maps of the area, the brothers gridded a path of where the meteorite fell and which direction, and that told them where to look.
Each day at 10 or 11am, when the sun was high in the sky, their mother would drive them to an area that they had determined as a potential spot for meteorite fragments.
"We'd just go walking, get in lines and just go up and down, up and down," Kim says.
They sometimes went for long periods without finding any pieces, but Kim says that just made the search all the more satisfying.
"Each piece was different. It was a thrill," he says.
The Gillick brothers quickly gained a reputation for knowing where to find fragments of meteorite.
"Scientists would come down to Murchison and stay at our house, and they'd go out with Pete and me and find a piece of meteorite," Kim says.
Professor Lovering was one of these scientists. In a sort of scientific exchange, he brought along the samples of moon rock he'd recently brought back from America.
"We had the test tubes in our hands looking at the moon," Kim says.
"That was unbelievable."
For at least 12 months after the meteorite landing, the brothers conducted regular searches.
And it paid off. Of the 100 kilograms of Murchison meteorite that was recovered, Kim says he and Peter recovered roughly a third.
A secret fortune
While the meteorite was obviously of scientific value, it also had a price tag.
In an interview with This Day Tonight in 1970, Kim's mother Emily Gillick was asked what was being done with the meteorite samples.
"We have exchanged a lot for different stones and minerals, we have donated a lot to the Melbourne University and Sydney Museum and we have also sold a lot to American institutions," she said.
When asked how much the family had made from the sale of the meteorite, Emily hesitated.
"I really wouldn't like to say. We really have got quite a bit and it's going to educate the children," she responded at the time.
To this day, Murchison locals are reluctant to speak about how much was made from the sale of meteorite fragments, or whether they souvenired a small chunk for themselves.
"Somebody told me it was worth $3,000 a gram, is that right?" Beth Brisbane asks.
And then of course there are some residents who are fairly certain there are still pieces of meteorite to be discovered.
Loading..."They think that the main piece of it might be in the middle of the Waranga Basin," says Marianne Begg.
"Of course you'd never find that, it'd be down in the mud."
50 years of science
Half a century since the fall of the Murchison meteorite, it remains unrivalled in its scientific significance.
Philipp Heck is a cosmochemist at the Field Museum in Chicago.
He lives thousands of kilometres from Murchison but has spent much of his career studying this particular rock.
"The Murchison meteorite was the most important meteorite for me and for many other scientists who study meteorites," he says.
"I started studying the meteorite when I was a student and still study it today and I have my own students working on Murchison."
This single clump of ancient minerals, Dr Heck explains, is constantly offering scientists fresh insights into the solar system and our origins.
Loading..."I anticipate in the next 50 years we'll learn more from Murchison every year."
Older than our solar system
Carbonaceous chondrites like the Murchison meteorite are rich in carbon and make up just 4 per cent of meteorites that fall today.
And the 1969 impact in Murchison is the biggest of its type ever witnessed.
What's more, at 4.6 billion years old, the Murchison specimen is older than our solar system; it's a small, smelly snapshot of the conditions that set our planetary neighbourhood on the path to what we recognise today.
"Similar to an embryo in an animal developing, what happens to the embryo determines the future outcome," Dr Heck explains.
Before our Sun and planets formed, the solar system was a messy disc of gas, dust and debris. The Murchison meteorite is a mixture of some of the chunks that were never collected into a planet or a moon.
It probably knocked around in the asteroid belt beyond Mars, Dr Heck says, until much more recently, something kicked it towards central Victoria.
"The meteorite came from a carbon rich asteroid, probably from the outer asteroid belt, and it travelled more than a million years until it reached Earth."
Filled with a range of organic compounds, the Murchison meteorite contains "the very origins of life itself" such as amino acids, water, sugars and alcohol-related compounds.
That concentration of organic molecules is the reason for the stench of methylated spirits that Murchison locals reported when it first crashed through the atmosphere. The odour can still be smelled in samples of the rock today.
Dr Heck says a meteorite much like this one could have hit Earth very early on in its history and "delivered the prebiotic building blocks that enabled later life to form".
Other discoveries from the Murchison meteorite have taught us about the behaviour of the Sun when it was a very young star.
"When the Sun was in its infancy, it was much more active than today," Dr Heck says.
"That means there were many more eruptions going on, high-energy particles shooting out in all directions, hitting everything in their path."
He says scientists are able to see a record of that activity in certain minerals contained within the Murchison meteorite.
"Quantifying this will take many more years of studying these different types of minerals with different techniques, but we can actually do early solar system astronomy by studying Murchison in the laboratory."
What's more, Dr Heck says the Murchison meteorite is the most prolific source on our planet of pre-solar stardust grains.
"These grains are very rare," he says, explaining that different grains represent material from different ancient stars.
"This tells us that our solar system formed from a multitude of different stars … so we're essentially a product of these different stars.
"At first sight [the meteorite] looks not very spectacular. If you look at it closer, it is actually a sample of our galaxy and it is extremely valuable."
All of these insights might not have materialised, Dr Heck says, if the rock hadn't struck in broad daylight, in a populated area where word passed quickly from the local residents to scientists.
Now 50 years since the meteorite fell, standing in the family dairy in Murchison, Beth Brisbane considers what would have become of the space rock if her father-in-law hadn't taken a sample to the local newspaper.
"I often wonder … what would've happened if it had been ignored, whether other pieces would've been picked up.
"I have no idea."
Credits:
- Words and pictures: Fiona Pepper
- Digital producer: Tegan Taylor
- Video editor: Nick Kilvert
- Drone footage: Will Kendrew