‘They got the lot’: the mystery of the biggest bank heist in Australia’s history

It was audacious. An old-school bank robbery that kept the northern rivers town of Murwillumbah guessing for decades. Has it now been solved?

The bank building has been standing squarely on the corner of the main street for 133 years. Quietly doing its business as the generations strolled past. Unassuming and solid with its thick brick walls and flat roof. Its unassailable strongroom was once considered the most secure place to stash the cash of the region. But it was not, as it famously turned out, impregnable.

In the sweltering summer of 1978 hippies still roamed the hills around the Tweed valley. What is now suburban sprawl around the New South Wales northern rivers town of Murwillumbah was dairy farms and wooden farm houses. There were large agricultural and farm supplies stores; it was a subtropical, rural place of cows, cane and banana plantations. No one locked their doors. Across town the plume of white steam rose from the sugar mill. In the shadow of the great mass of the extinct volcano that is Wollumbin Mount Warning, it was, says former mayor Max Boyd, a quiet little country town".