How a lost soul vanished in the system

The dusty township of Coen, in the heart of Cape York Peninsula, is not the place to be on a hitch-hiking holiday in the middle of the wet season, especially if you are a woman travelling alone.

So locals were somewhat bemused when Cornelia Rau, 39, fronted the bar of the Exchange Hotel on a steamy March evening last year after hitching a ride into town with a man from Cairns.

“The roads this time of the year get cut off and you don’t have holidaymakers in town,” said Bob Burns, the Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation workshop manager.

“She was in the pub saying she had no money and nowhere to stay. We all wondered what this woman was doing in Coen with no money.”

Mr Burns said Ms Rau was variously speaking in English and German. “It was definitely odd, the way she carried on.”

Ms Rau’s family in Sydney did not know where she was, although she had discharged herself from the psychiatric unit at Manly Hospital earlier that month.

The hotel owners let her stay the night. In the morning, police took Ms Rau to the station for questioning.

“The coppers smelt that something was wrong,” Mr Burns said. “They found she had bags of money on her.”

Ms Rau identified herself to police by two names — Anna Brotmeyer and Anna Schmidt.

In 1998 she had dabbled with a religious cult based in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. Anna Schmidt was a composite of the names of two other cult members.

Her sister Christine told The Daily Telegraph it was while she was with the cult that she started to get sick.

“They seemed very secretive, they wouldn’t talk to me,” she said.

Mr Burns said she had no identification, and neither name matched a passport she was carrying.

Police say the passport was stolen in Airlie Beach, a backpackers’ mecca midway between Brisbane and Cairns.

Ms Rau spent the next four days in the Coen watch-house. Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said police established that both of the names she gave were false, while Ms Rau insisted she was German and had entered Australia illegally.

“She was persuasive in terms of the story she told,” Mr Atkinson said.

Despite the observations of locals and her peculiar behaviour, police concluded there was nothing particularly odd about Ms Rau. “Her speech and her mannerisms were all normal,” Mr Atkinson said.

The German-born Ms Rau — she migrated with her family to Australia when 18 months old — was escorted to Cairns, where she was handed over to the Immigration Department, which deemed she should be held on suspected immigration offences.

She was flown to Brisbane and underwent a psychiatric assessment by Queensland Health.

Premier Peter Beattie said the assessment did not detect anything abnormal about Ms Rau’s behaviour. “There was no indication she was suffering from mental illness.”

Ms Rau was jailed under the name of Anna Brotmeyer at the Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, where she spent the next six months.

Her behaviour grew more erratic and several psychiatric consultations raised concerns about her mental wellbeing, although a further assessment at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in August concluded she did “not require ongoing treatment in an acute mental health facility”.

At the time of her hospital assessment, when the former Qantas flight attendant had been in jail for four months, Ms Rau’s family reported her missing. Queensland authorities say interstate missing persons registers had been of no use to them, because she had given false names.

At the Immigration Department’s direction, Ms Rau was transferred last October to the Baxter detention centre in South Australia. She was released last week after her family confirmed her identity.

“The family is entitled to an apology and so is she,” Mr Beattie said.

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