In faraway Mallacoota we all saw his brooding image that evening on our TV and heard the warnings that he was "dangerous" and "likely to deteriorate without his drugs".

To the alarmed rage of most of the population of the state of Victoria he remained at large through Monday. Further news reports told us that on some of his forty excursions since imprisonment, he had applied for and collected a passport, driving licence and acquired several thousand dollars in cash. He was carrying all of this as the news crews tracked him to a camping goods store and caravan park on the highway east of Melbourne, still seven hours' drive from this little by-way on the coast.

Therefore it was with some incredulity that we heard Thursday morning that he had been re captured on the foreshore of our lake, in fact one minute from our front doors.

By that Thursday evening vigorous verbal interchange involving the majority of the 400 inhabitants of the town had mapped almost every minute of his movements through our locality.

His name is Nigel. It seems he had caught a bus headed the long way around the coast for Sydney, loaded with a tent and camping equipment he had bought near Melbourne. Late on Tuesday night he had left the bus at Genoa on the highway, some twenty miles inland from Mallacoota. At a cafe there called descriptively The Big Nothing, he had bought milk and taken himself off into the scrub for the remaining hours of dark.

The cafe owner thought, "My, he looks like that feller they are all looking for," but it was an idle thought. After all, not many people stop at the Big Nothing, although the owner had always hoped that by calling it that, weary travellers would be ready to stop, even for a laugh. But when Nigel re-appeared from the bushes on Wednesday morning, the owner was suspicious enough to confer with a film maker from the Far Flung Video Festival 2001 which was about to begin and a local herpetologist who knew something about everything. These deliberations resulted in a phone call to the police at Morwell, some five hours' drive away.

This account of his re-capture contains several odd gaps in the narrative and the first occurs at this point. Why did the man from the Big Nothing call Morwell police, when the Mallacoota cop was twenty minutes' away, and at least a dozen other police stations in towns between Genoa and Morwell? A lingering and decidedly alarming suspicion is that the emergency call centre (these days possibly in Singapore) had routed his call there. We in rural Australia were closer to police rescue when Ned Kelly roamed.

However, by Wednesday mid-day Nigel had reached Mallacoota even if the police had not. No-one in town admits to giving him a lift - that is another gap in the flood of information surrounding his movements. He then entered one of the two local supermarkets and asked (in vain) for a job. He also approached a boat hire business for work. Then, understandably, he must have abandoned that enquiry ‹ some people have been looking for employment here for years. Anyway, he went to the local pub where he spent the evening.

Meanwhile a couple of hundred people, maybe more, around and about the town by their own accounts all noted idly, "Boy, he looks like that feller they are all after!" and the day mooched on into evening and night. Panic is not a state of mind that travels off the Princes Highway those twenty-five kilometres into town.

The police from Morwell still had not arrived. We do not know why the Morwell cops could not find Mallacoota when the escapee could. They do not re-appear at all in the story and may yet be in the scrub between Melbourne and Sydney looking for the Big Nothing (or Ned Kelly).

Nigel then went off to find somewhere to sleep. Another curious turn of the tale is why he did not join the three hundred or so other campers in the town caravan park where his presence would not have caused an eye to flicker. Many of them look just like him, especially after an evening session in the pub or first thing in the morning. Instead he headed to an empty area of the foreshore and went again to sleep in the scrub. This time mosquitoes drove him out at dawn and he lay down, exhausted in full and open view, to sleep on the grassy slope while the sun rose and rose.

He must have done this just after I had taken my customary pre-dawn walk past that spot for alas, I have to report that I never set eyes on him and I missed my chance to note the feller they were all after. My walk was serenely undisturbed.

But another early riser noted the sleeper on the grass from his bedroom window. And then something happened that I have always suspected in this town. Out came the binoculars. "My, that feller down there looks like the one they are all looking for". This time the town's lone local cop was telephoned and took some convincing to leave his morning bed. However, he did appear some time later and agreed that the sleeper indeed looked like their quarry. He returned to the police station to summon help from Orbost, an hour and a half away over the mountains towards Melbourne.

He used the waiting time to set up an observation post from his big four wheel drive vehicle which he parked in the shade near the foreshore. Seeing the town cop in an unusual location, several early morning shoppers stopped and asked him what was up. The cop is a friendly one. "See that feller down there? Well, he is the escapee and I am waiting to arrest him." No one believed him.

By now the sun was high and Nigel slept on, undisturbed at last by mossies which had fled with the sun.

When the cop's reinforcements arrived, they turned out to be three Fisheries Department men, perhpas because in our area most big crime is the poaching of abalone. The four men donned their bullet proof vests in full view of the houses along the foreshore where by now residents all had a balcony seat and binoculars or video cameras rivetted to their eyes. It looked as if it was indeed the feller they'd been after all week.

The men approached prone Nigel slowly and surrounded him. One knelt and shook him. He sat bolt upright and shook his head confusedly. The cop explained he was under arrest and we all saw Nigel's shoulders sink in relief. Four nights sleeping in the open had taken their toll. They led him unprotesting to the paddy wagon where he asked to sit in the cabin.

He explained that his medication was wearing off and he might "go beserk" if confined in the back. The policeman ever affable agreed and the vehicle left for the short drive to the Mallacoota lockup. They later drove him to Orbost where he was taken by plane to Melbourne for assessment. We learned later he will not return to the psychiatric institution but to prison to serve out his time.