M ark Longden and his wife, Lucy, have been walking the ocean beach between the Victorian towns of Ocean Grove and Point Lonsdale for 30 years. Sometimes they pick up shells and sea glass, pieces of pottery, scraps of flotsam and jetsam. Once, they found a tiny, headless porcelain figurine of a woman in an old-fashioned dress.

Then one Friday morning in early October, they found a shipwreck.

“Generally, the beach is pretty flat. It might have seaweed or wood washed up, or bits of trees from the river after floods,” Longden tells Guardian Australia. “But on this day, there were actually bits of wood sticking out of the sand on an angle … It wasn’t anything that had just washed up on the shore.” Madness, murder and rape on the Batavia: new theory on Australia’s most horrific shipwreck

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