Just over a decade ago, I lost my youngest daughter at a shopping centre. She was in aisle three one moment, gone the next.
I remember racing between aisles, oblivious to the stares. Sweaty palms. Racing pulse. Shallow breathing. Crying out her name so everyone could hear.
Most parents will have a similar story. Your mind goes immediately to the darkest corner: has she escaped to the busy car park? Is she with a stranger? All rational thought is stolen by something heavy that grows in the pit of your stomach before threatening to choke you. Could someone have snatched her?
My four-year-old, with a huge grin, was found hiding in another aisle 15 minutes later, squashed in between cans and boxes in a game of hide-and-seek only she was playing. I hugged her, shaking, until she pleaded with me to stop.
This week that same feeling was palpable. Cleo Smith is four too, and we could all see the distress etched into the face of her young mother, Ellie.
In those first few minutes, Ellie might have wondered if her little princess had wandered off. But now she knows that’s not the case. She was not tall enough to undo the zipper of the tent where she was put to bed. Besides, if she had wandered off, wouldn’t her sleeping bag have been found?
Stolen. Abducted. Kidnapped. Taken. Snatched. Seized. The words don’t really matter. Cleo does, and that first 15 minutes is now creeping closer to 15 days.
How could a child disappear from a busy camping ground, metres from the adults who’d put her to bed only hours earlier? How could Cleo, like William Tyrrell in September 2014, just vanish — in his case, still not found seven years later?
When Madeleine McCann disappeared from her family’s holiday rental at a resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007, it made world headlines. We all hugged our children a touch tighter, vowing to vet babysitters better, and to keep them close always. We joined millions of others looking for little Madeleine, with that unusual coloboma mark in her eye, in malls across the globe. And we’ve never forgotten her name.
Why is it different with Cleo? Are we trying as hard as we did back in 2007?
Surely policing has advanced since then. Surely CCTV cameras, despite the remoteness of the camping site, are filled with clues somewhere. Surely someone heard something, saw something.
Cleo’s life depends on it.
Police, no doubt, are doing their very best. But can’t we help too? Why aren’t the big corporates digging deep to add to the million-dollar reward, or charter search planes, or offer to fund ground walkers? Facebook says it wants to work for the good of our children. It’s got an almighty opportunity now. And it’s silent.
What technology might help track her movements, or the movements of every single person in the area that evening?
What have we learnt from the William Tyrrell investigation that we might do better this time?
Could our politicians do more, rather than blather on about issues that don’t mean much to any of us?
This nation needs a smile in a news landscape littered with coronavirus and climate change and political horse-trading. Finding Cleo alive is becoming that needle in the haystack.
Someone knows something, and that someone cannot be as clever and as well-resourced as a nation determined to find a little girl who should be home today, playing with her baby sister, Isla.
A heartfelt mothers’ perspective I really appreciate as a bloke that can never completely understand that mother-child intense humanity. I love my children in a different way. I hope not in an inferior way.
Thanks so much. There is somehow a horror that a child so young vanishes, taken, quite clearly. Politicians should do more, of course but the WA Premier stepped up. Overall though, look at Alex Hawke, no doubt a puppet of Morrison, denying any safety and peace for children locked up here and trapped in Middle East wars. The children of Afghanis are already forgotten, many of whose parents were Australia’s allies. Our country is a pariah state.
I’d add I like seeing more professional female reporters too! In passing, I am fed up with the pictures of stern men on your website. Where is any humility?
“I’d add I like seeing more professional female reporters too! In passing, I am fed up with the pictures of stern men on your website. Where is any humility?”
Seriously, when four out the ten Crikey staff listed on the home page are female? Is that ration so very bad? And why would anyone care if any of those journalists look stern? I can see why hectoring is a verb.
Thank you Madonna. I confess that I still cannot fathom how little ones can disappear so very quickly and yet, nobody can provide details to assist families and Police of the child’s whereabouts?
As you so correctly state, ” What have we learnt from the William Tyrrell investigation”?
Apparently nothing! Nobody sees, hears, cares enough to step forward apparently?
I understand we are a big country with an awful amount of land in between towns and cities, but as you also pointed out, CCTV is everywhere, as are in-car dash cameras…. which begs the question, why nobody has come forward with information?
It absolutely infuriates me that these horrible cases, of little children disappearing, still occur in a century where everyone appears to be watched by someone 24/7 and yet the child cannot be found?
I further agree that it’s every mother’s worst nightmare – and now as a grandparent, it’s still my worst nightmare.
My heart goes out to little Cleo and her family.
Many crimes are only solved through luck or because the perpetrators are careless. People go missing all the time, in areas with high cctv coverage, and are never seen again. Go and look on YouTube at the last sightings of missing persons. It is perplexing. And while you’re at it, look up the stats on unsolved murders. Basically, if it’s a ‘stranger’ murder, chances are pretty good you’ll get away with it.
They were in the middle of nowhere. How much cctv do you think there would be? It is certainly totally mystifying how a child could have been taken from a tent in such a quiet place, if you discount the family being being involved, which frankly is a pretty big discount. But I doubt very much that a larger reward will solve the case. The perpetrator is hardly likely to hand themselves in, and is also unlikely to take anybody into their confidence.
There are sure to be lines of enquiry that police are following that we’re not privy to. I’m surprised they weren’t running a dual investigation from the start, that is searching for her near the camp as well as looking at whether she could have been abducted. I would have thought it was fairly clear from the start that she couldn’t have wandered off. Hopefully the delay, if there was one, isn’t fatal to the investigation.
In the end this may, sadly, be another great Australian mystery.
$5,000,000 should be the number, but I don’t know enough about crowd funding. If someone else could get the ball rolling I would certainly put in.
I could go $500 anyway.
Assuming abduction, this bastard will do it again, anytime, anywhere. As a child I grew up close to the Moors Murders in the UK. Myra Hindley and partner. Look that up and you’ll know what I mean. Grossly horrible.
Or has done it before, but it wasn’t as high profile. I wonder how many Indigenous children go missing without this much attention being paid?