The Curious Case of the Stolen Mace

The book that finally solves Australia’s most infamous political crime.

In 1891, the sacred symbol of the Victorian Parliament, its ceremonial mace, was stolen. A long, heavy club topped with a crown, it was popularly thought to be made of solid gold.

The colony’s best detectives, a dour Scot named Tom Nixon and the famous Ned Kelly hunter Mick Ward, were assigned to the case, but the mace was never recovered. No one was ever charged, and a substantial reward remains unclaimed.

Was the thief a corrupt politician who took the mace to a brothel on a drunken lark? A parliamentary worker who was seen with an odd-shaped package? A carpenter who snuck in through an open window? Or a political activist?

Historian and award-winning author Sally Young pieces together old and new evidence 135 years later – including letters, witness statements and police reports – to reveal the thief and how he got away with the political crime of the century, just as Melbourne was sinking into economic chaos caused by theft on a much grander scale.

‘Who stole the Victorian parliamentary mace? It’s the most enduring mystery in Australian politics, and it really looks like Sally Young, in the finest traditions of Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Phryne Fisher and Cliff Hardy, has finally managed to get to the bottom of it. But she has done more than give us a history that reads like a detective thriller. Here is a vivid account of a recently prosperous and optimistic society being torn apart by the seven deadly sins, as perfected by some of Melbourne’s most upstanding citizens and leading politicians, while the city descends into a whirlpool of economic misery, urban myth and social despair.’ – Frank Bongiorno

‘A journey through Melbourne's history and a crime mystery wrapped in one ripping yarn.’ – John Silvester, The Age