True Crime Cases in Australia

The Australian cases I've mapped here trace some of the country's most closely followed crimes, from the outback to its largest cities. Each one I've researched and placed by hand.

Several shaped how Australians remember the period in which they happened. Ivan Milat's killing of seven young travellers in the Belanglo State Forest gave the country its backpacker murders. The 2001 shooting of British backpacker Peter Falconio on a remote Northern Territory highway, and the survival of Joanne Lees, became its own long mystery.

Others sit closer to the present. The 2014 Lindt cafe siege in central Sydney ended with two hostages and the gunman dead, and the 2024 stabbing attack at Westfield Bondi Junction left six people killed.