‘Still Kelly country’: Life in Porepunkah after Dezi Freeman, as locals pick up the pieces

There is a little hut at the foot of the mountain, just minutes down the road from where Australia’s biggest-ever manhunt began.

It was built more than a century ago in Victoria’s high country, so close to the Buckland River in Porepunkah that you can hear the water rushing past under the wind. Back then, that river still gave up lumps of gold like Easter eggs. But today, you might think the hut long abandoned, if not for the patchwork of solar panels wired along its roof. They were put there – using an elaborate “Batman-style” abseiling rig – by its reclusive yet nimble 73-year-old inhabitant, Ray Kompe.

When we arrive, the former gold prospector has just hoisted a huge new lithium battery onto the roof. It weighs more than he does. “The neighbours did have to check I hadn’t done myself in,” grins Kompe. He emerges from behind his little hut’s screen door with a torch still aglow on his beanie and the sleepy look of a miner stumbling back into the light.

Almost a year ago, on another misty day like this, it was the police who came checking on Kompe. They were looking for a man he once knew well. Kompe first met Desmond Filby down by this river in the 1980s, and began teaching the long-haired teenager bushcraft. Forty years on, Filby was living in his own solar-powered retreat, off-grid, just a few kilometres up the hill, but he had taken a new name: Dezi Freeman.

It was those tactical police, with their big guns, who told Kompe that Freeman had shot and killed two police officers and injured another when they’d gone to his home to serve a warrant in a child sexual abuse investigation. Freeman, 56, had stolen a police pistol and vanished into the trees down by the Buckland River, and he was still on the run.

It would be another seven months before police caught sight of him again – when he emerged, wrapped in a doona, from a shipping container at a remote hideout more than 100 kilometres away near the NSW border. After a three-hour standoff, Freeman dropped the doona to fire that stolen revolver and was shot dead by the tactical snipers calling for his surrender.

I’ve come to see Kompe because I’m trying to understand how someone could survive in the wild here – or at least how they could be smuggled out of it under the noses of what felt to locals at times like half the state’s police force. But then there’s so much more to understand about what happened in Porepunkah than that, especially for the families still mourning and the remote community still divided by the violence at its door.

Inside Kompe’s hut, we squeeze past a bicycle in the hall and a shower in the kitchen. He apologises for the mess while his white chihuahua Luna darts around our ankles. Kompe watched the police comb through it all a year ago – the start of hundreds of raids on properties across the high country in search of Freeman and those who helped him. They flew a tiny drone “the size of two cigarette packets” straight through his place, politely weaving between towers of books and cassette tapes, into cupboards. Officers even shone a light down into the outside dunny. No Freeman.

“Well, he wouldn’t be welcome here any more,” says Kompe.