The Ballad of Peeter Pedaja

This story was explored on Episode 15 of SUDDENLY, “This is Not a Book.”

Peeter Pedaja should be an Australian icon.

We’re a nation that loves our “characters.” Airport bookshops are full of cruisy non-fiction historical beach reads with titles like Aussie Ratbags, Larrikins and Pisstakers. I don’t understand why Peeter isn’t in any of them.

At his peak, he drew crowds of thousands and his photo was splashed prominently across the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. But when you Google him today, the only relevant result is this podcast. If there’s a Wikipedia article by the time you’re reading this, it’s because I wrote it.

How he became forgotten, how historians let this one go, I have no idea. I seem to have been the first person to attempt to tell his story from beginning to end in at least four or five decades. Why me, of all people? Why did our paths cross in this way? What did I do to deserve this kind of scoop?

My adventure into his life began when I searched the National Library of Australia’s historical newspaper database, Trove, for any mentions of Frank Sinatra’s infamous flop 1949 MGM musical The Kissing Bandit. I’d scooped an unusual, unsung local angle for my Sinatra-themed podcast on Trove before. I dared to hope I’d pull it off again.

And to my surprise, some strange headlines from 1951 started popping up:

"‘Kissing Bandit’ in Real Life"

"‘Kissing Bandit’ Was His Model, Youth Explains"

"Turned ‘Bandit’ to Write Book: Unusual Allegation in Hold-up Charge"

"Film Inspired Hope in Young New Australian"

What the hell?

"BRISBANE, Friday - He had seen the film ‘The Kissing Bandit’ where the bandit married the Governor’s daughter, and he hoped something like that would happen to him, said a 19-year-old Estonian boy (Peeter Pedaja) explaining in the Criminal Court today why he had pointed a toy pistol at a motorcyclist on the night of December 10, on the road to Gympie."

I then did another Trove search, this time for “Peeter Pedaja.” A story popped up from 1959, eight years later:

”New Failure in Oil Drum Raft

SYDNEY, Friday - Estonian Peeter Pedaja, who planned to sail an oil drum raft to New Zealand, was unable to navigate his weird craft from Botany Bay to Manly today.”

What the HELL?

I then Googled his name. Nothing came up.

Oh my god, I thought. What have I found?

Here’s as much of the story as I was able to piece together. Some of it might be wrong, but this is the best I was able to do.

Peeter Pedaja is born on August 8th, 1931 in Tallinn, Estonia, to Rosalie and Johannes Pedaja.

In 1940, he’s nine years old as the Soviets invade. He watches as they march in, and he watches the mass deportations to slave labour camps that follow. In 1941, the Nazis replace the Soviets. When the Soviets return in 1944, many Estonians desperately attempt to leave the country.

In the words of one Estonian World article:

”Estonians started fleeing to Sweden already in the spring of 1943, but the exodus intensified in August 1944 and achieved its peak from 19-23 September 1944, when it became clear that the German front was collapsing and the Soviet military forces were about to occupy Estonia again. The Soviet Union had briefly occupied Estonia from 1940-1941 and caused more suffering to the population than Nazi Germany – which explains why so many Estonians feared the communist state more… In August and September of 1944, tens of thousands of people were desperate to get onto any ship that stayed afloat, including tiny wooden fishing boats, to flee war-ravaged Estonia.”

Peeter is among them. His mother and two sisters find a place in a crowded craft, but there’s no room for the men. He is left behind on the beach with his father. The following year, his father is arrested by the Russians and is sentenced to ten years in a slave labour camp. Peeter is left on his own.

”I just lived around”, he later said about this time in his life. “I got my food wherever I could. I was on the move most of the time, sleeping in railway trucks, under hedges, in barns - anywhere at all, as long as I was out of reach of the Russians and Germans. I was just cold, that’s all. The temperature in Estonia often drops to thirty degrees below. I spent the whole of one night on the run, in freezing weather, with Russian cops after me. I couldn’t hole up anywhere to get warm. I just had to keep going.”

The war ends. In 1946, he learns his family’s whereabouts through the underground. Apparently one of his sisters is in Stockholm, and his mother and other sister are in a displaced persons camp in the American zone in Germany. He spends the summer searching unsuccessfully for a boat to cross the Baltic Sea. He then dedicates all of 1947 to finding a way across the Iron Curtain.

He sells a coat and buys a train ticket to Batum, planning to go to Turkey. He’s robbed in Moscow and goes back to Tallinn by telling a Red Army captain his father was also in the Red Army. He then sells his father’s drafting instruments to buy a plane ticket to Leningrad and a train ticket to Viipuri. From there, he walks 15 miles to the new Finnish/Russian border, sneaks under a gate pole, walks another 12 miles and finds refuge with a farmer. He then travels by foot, truck and bus, heading northwest.

Eventually he finds a boat and makes it to Sweden, then, finally, reaches his sister in Stockholm with help from the Swedish police. He starts working there and studying English. And he tells the whole story so far to the media, ending up in the Chicago Tribune. This is likely his first appearance in the English language news media.

In 1948, he earns enough money to get to Germany - where, after three-and-a-half years of searching, he finds his mother and other sister alive in the Geislingen camp for displaced persons. They had both assumed he was dead.

His mother tells him to move overseas and start over. It sounds like a good idea to him. He’s sick of Europe. He thinks about going to the US or Canada, but he’s sick of being cold. He’s captivated by an immigration poster for Australia, featuring a blazing hot sun. And so he departs on the HMAS Kanimbla for Perth, leaving his family behind again. He has just turned 18.

As soon as he arrives in Australia, he seems to commit to a lifetime of wild adventures. He travels the country extensively for the rest of his life. He hitchhikes around the entire continent twice, and walks 200 kilometres in three days in North Queensland heat to win a bet.

His mother and two sisters also decide to migrate to Australia, moving to Melbourne in 1949. At this time, Peeter lives in Perth. He decides he wants to join them again, and that he wants to make the journey from Perth to Melbourne on a pushbike. That’s roughly 3,400 kilometres, or 2,000 miles, mostly through desert. Peeter takes it on - in Australian summer.

“I thought I’d be alright”, he later said of this bicycle trip. “I kept going, night and day. I once rode 273km in 24 hours. Somewhere in the middle of the desert, I ran out of water. It wasn’t long before I was in trouble.” The article in which he discussed this does not say what happened next, but simply adds: “He reached Melbourne a fortnight later and rejoined his mother.”

And he apparently didn’t stay long in Melbourne either. He turns up in Queensland less than a year later, still hitchhiking.

Then, at some stage during 1950, he watches The Kissing Bandit.

Let us take a moment to discuss this film.

It’s a campy MGM musical set in 19th century California. A horribly miscast Sinatra plays Ricardo, the mild-mannered son of the deceased ‘Kissing Bandit’, a legendary criminal whose hallmark was kissing the women he stole from.

Ricardo rides into town on instructions to take over his father’s job, which he thinks means means becoming an innkeeper. When he turns up, he realises he has to inherit the ‘Kissing Bandit’ mantle himself.

And so we follow Ricardo on his journey within, seeking the courage to steal from the rich, and - though his victims swoon over him, and the kissing is played for laughs - assault women.

The Kissing Bandit was a huge flop. The cast and crew knew it was bad from the very beginning; apparently “When are we making the sequel?” was a running joke on set. Critical opinion of it has only gotten worse with time. Today, when it is remembered at all, it is often considered the very worst Sinatra movie and one of the lowest points of his long life.

Later, Pedaja would describe his experience of watching it for the first time.

“Something started stirring in my head”, he said, “and I felt I must do something unusual.”

Why The Kissing Bandit became a turning point in Pedaja’s life is unclear. It’s intended to be the story of a weak, effeminate adult man with no life experience rising to the challenge of masculinity and adventure. What possible resonance could that have with someone who had spent their entire childhood on the run from both Soviets and Nazis? Who, at 19, had hitchhiked the Australian continent? Who rode a pushbike across the Nullabor Plain, just months earlier?

And yet, inexplicably, as he watched The Kissing Bandit, of all things, a sentence emerged from Pedaja’s thoughts that he found difficult to ignore:

“There is nothing special about you.”

The incident that follows almost seems to benignly foreshadow the 1980 assassination of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, who said he was inspired by J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. That didn’t make a lot of sense either, but that’s what happened.

One night in Nambour, Queensland, Pedaja is hitchhiking again and flags down a man on a motorcycle. When he stops, Pedaja pulls out a toy water pistol and says, “Alright, I take over now.” He then rides away towards Gympie, leaving the man behind. “I did not like doing it to him”, he later tells the court. “He was a nice chap and gave me a ride.”

Later that night, Pedaja stops a car with a couple in it by parking the bike across the road and raising his hands, telling them he’s out of petrol. When the man turns off his engine, Pedaja holds him up with the same water pistol and demands money. The man quickly drives away and tips off police. Later that night, police establish a roadblock and eventually arrest Pedaja.

"The Kissing Bandit in the film never meant to do anything bad, and I didn’t either”, he tells the Queensland court. “I’ve been honest all my life and always will be.” It’s impossible to know how much of what he tells Justice O’Hagan is true: that he’s writing a book about his Australian adventures, that he wanted to understand the psychology of a criminal, that he’s been travelling the country compiling interviews with people he met, that he’s interviewed Robert Menzies and Frank Nicklin.

It’s not hard to imagine how entertaining and disarming he must have been, and how much he must have broken up the monotony of a Queensland court in the early 1950s. Here’s this ambitious “New Australian”, not even 20 years old, babbling on earnestly about a bad Frank Sinatra movie. It’s the last thing you’d ever expect, and it’s way too crazy to make up without meaning it. He’s white, too, which no doubt helps.

Justice O’Hagan eventually finds that Pedaja had acted “more out of a sense of irresponsibility than an inclination to crime.” And so he’s released on a suspended sentence with a 100-pound bond and walks away, apparently having pioneered what we could now call the “Kissing Bandit Defence.” In the next few days, he becomes known in the Australian media as “The Real Life Kissing Bandit.” (And this is how, 71 years later, he is brought to the attention of an eccentric trans woman doing research for her Australia-centred Frank Sinatra podcast.)

In 1952, he pops up once again in Melbourne, advertising in The Age for young men to travel with him to Western Australia to start a timber milling, pearl and whale fishing station. He convinces 150 men to give him 16 pounds each. Nothing comes of this, and he ultimately serves three months’ jail for “attempted false pretenses.”

Four years later, he makes the news again for sculpting an ‘Olympic Pageant’ into the rock cliff face of Sandringham and Red Cliffs Beach. By now, he’s for some reason also sometimes using the pseudonym “Stanley Lexton.”

I was recently able to find some newsreel footage shot at Red Cliffs. You can see a crowd gathering to watch him chisel. He looks driven, consumed. The narrator mispronounces “Pedaja” the same way I once did.

And then, once again, he gets sick of being cold. Melbourne residents know too well how much our climate resembles Europe’s, especially in the winter. Anyone living here would understand, given the life he’d had, why he decided to split for the Northern Territory.

This is when things really get weird. The twist at this point is so inexplicable that it’s tough to explain, and harder to fully process.

His next adventure made the news in the US:

”Stanley Lexton, a Swedish-born Melbourne sculptor, is reported floating in the Timor Sea on a weird raft made of five 44-gallon oil drums.”

The erroneous reporting of him as Swedish rather than Estonian makes me wonder how much else of his life story as I’ve collated it is wrong, filtered as it is through the whims of journalists from decades ago. Other articles identify him as Russian. This is not only wrong, and lazy, but also extremely insulting as he spent most of his formative years running from the Russians who destroyed his family.

But here’s the thing. For at least the next few years, he becomes possessed by the idea of attempting a sea crossing in oil drums.

In 1957, a Melbourne man named Gregory Black is on holiday in Darwin when Pedaja approaches him, asking for use of his Land Rover. He wants Black to tow his craft across Mindil Beach, as he’s about to sail to Timor.

Black agrees, but is shocked to find that the craft consists of three oil drums welded together in a row. He later tells the media:

“The centre drum of the raft was cut open to form a cockpit. The cockpit allowed him just enough room to sit down but not enough to stretch his legs. There was no keel, no motor, no sail and no means of ensuring it would stay upright. He had two paddles, a five-gallon tin of water, several tins of fruit and seven tins of meat. He had put his clothes in suitcases, which were strapped on to the rear drums. He said he would pass the time by playing chess with himself. He had a fishing line and hoped to catch fish but would have to eat them raw. He intended drinking a small amount of sea water each day to disprove the old theory that it causes madness. He told me he was going north.”

Black warns Pedaja that the vessel will capsize. Pedaja insists that if Black doesn’t help him, he’ll find someone else who will. Black shrugs and complies. Pedaja ties himself into the “cockpit” with rope, and is waved off to sea.

The vessel does capsize.

It takes Pedaja 90 seconds underwater to get out of the ropes. He’s lucky not to have drowned.

The next morning, Pedaja wakes up Black in his caravan and tells him what happened. He’s going to try again, he says, this time adding two more to the side for stability and naming it the D.S. Wakefield - after Charles Wakefield, the founder of Castrol.

That night, Black takes a photo. This becomes the most iconic shot of Pedaja, now on file at the State Library of New South Wales.

In this photo, Pedaja is wielding a paddle almost threateningly, like a spear. The scene looks like something out of Heart of Darkness or Mosquito Coast. Pedaja seems determined, even possessed, driven by some force bigger than himself.

This time, the vessel at least won’t obviously capsize. The design has definitely been improved. But it has to be said: It looks like a dick.

Two vessels spot him on the way out to sea but leave him alone, noting that he “seems unconcerned.” Once at sea, he realises that his compass is broken and throws it away. He sees shark fins a few times. He spends a night sleeping in the D.S. Wakefield.

In total, he lasts 24 hours and makes it 20 miles out to sea before turning around, apparently remembering he has “unfinished business” in Darwin. He later tells a journalist he owed people money in Darwin and wanted to clear that up before he left Australia. “Apart from the unfinished business," he adds, “I decided the raft would be much better with a sail.”

Believing he’ll be back on land soon, he eats all his rations and drinks all his water.

He then realises he’s stuck.

Adrift in the Timor Sea in a boat made from oil drums, facing certain death and entirely personally responsible for the situation he’s in, he sings Harry Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell” to himself:

Sad to say, I’m on my way
Won’t be back for many a day
My heart is down, my head is turning around,
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston Town.

Another night passes. He sleeps badly, aware of the sharks, trying not to trail his arm in the water. He drinks seawater in the morning.

He does not die. In what can only be described as a merciful act of God, Peeter is found and rescued by a man named Capt. Peter Petersen of the S.S. Temora.

When he gets back to land, Peeter thanks Peter for saving his life and immediately starts working on another oil drum boat design. “I’ll make it a little bigger, give myself a place to lie down, and put up a sail”, he says, “I’ll want 100 tins of food, 15 gallons of water, and some whisky to keep me company. After that, using the wind for fuel, I think I could become the first man to sail around the world in an oil drum.”

What motivates a person like this? What’s going on in his head? Why oil drums? Is he trying to make some point to the world, or to himself? Is this some kind of response to his traumatic childhood? Is he still thinking about The Kissing Bandit in some way? He is a difficult figure to understand, to put it mildly. I think we shouldn’t even try.

In 1959, he pops up in Sydney and tries the same stunt again. This time, he plans to sail the Tasman Sea from Sydney to New Zealand - an even longer trip, and a truly massive undertaking.

And he’s refined the design once more, calling his new Mark III vessel the Can-Tiki. This time it’s much more respectable, at least by the standards of something made from oil drums.

Newsreel footage exists at the National Film and Sound Archive of Pedaja constructing the Can-Tiki in his backyard. I was able to view it by special appointment.

In this footage, Pedaja is seen welding the oil drums together. He is not wearing gloves. He has a welding mask, but it does not have a proper wearable strap. He keeps holding it manually up to his face, then removing it. This footage is silent, but you can imagine the commentary that would have accompanied it. The editor has pointedly included a shot of welding sparks flashing in Pedaja’s eyes, clearly intending to emphasise that he is not doing this properly.

The jagged edges of the cockpit are clearly extremely dangerous. But Pedaja gets in anyway, testing the Can-Tiki out for size and somehow not hurting himself. He is already in a very unsafe situation without even leaving his backyard. But Pedaja looks very pleased. As he smiles toward the camera, his forehead furrows and he looks uncannily like a young James Dean.

Then we cut to a shot of his mother, Rosalie. She is sitting on a bench, watching. She does not look happy.

Captain H.I. Phillips of the maritime authorities tells the media:

“My department’s surveyors found yesterday that Mr. Pedaja’s craft is unquestionably unseaworthy. We strongly suggest that he not sail. We have no legal means of stopping him but we impressed on him that any air and sea search for him could cost lives. We have tried to formulate some way of stopping Mr. Pedaja, but there is no way. I wish he could see the futility of this from our point of view.”

Pedaja responds:

”I don’t know anything about all these people thinking that my scheme is harebrained. I am determined to sail and nothing will stop me.”

On December 13th, 1953, three thousand Sydneysiders turn up to La Perouse Beach to see him off.

I managed to obtain an original 1959 press photo of Pedaja in the Can-Tiki on this day, straight from the former archives of Keystone Press in New York City. It now has pride of place in my kitchen, framed above the stove.

In this photo, the wild man of Darwin is gone. Here, Pedaja is wearing a suit and Stetson hat, genuinely looking confident. He almost resembles a bootleg Indiana Jones. You can tell he’s worked really hard on this new design.

The Can-Tiki has a sail and stabilising fins, reinforced by a steel rod welded to the drums. The “sail” is a car cover cut diagonally in half. He’s tied a door to the top of the craft and plans to sleep and sunbake on it during the four-week journey to New Zealand. A canned food company has stocked him up for the trip.

Rosalie is quoted in the media as being reluctantly supportive of her “very lucky” son.

Pedaja’s wife is also mentioned in the same article. She apparently “does not support the venture.”

I was surprised to learn he had a wife. At no other point in his story could I find any reference to her.

***

Thanks again to the National Film and Sound Archive, I was able to view newsreel footage shot by Cinesound Movietone of Pedaja leaving for New Zealand.

In this footage, we see a huge crowd of thousands gathered around his launching spot on Frenchmans Beach. Many have turned up in their own canoes and boats. There are about 20 people who are helping him carry the Can-Tiki out to sea. (The narrator of this footage again mispronounces “Pedaja.”)

According to one article, one of the people in the crowd is a boatbuilder who tells him that every shackle in the rigging is unsafe. He also points out that the sharp, neck-high edge of his cockpit could decapitate him and at the very least would likely lacerate his back. (Having seen the backyard footage, I agree. It is extremely obvious.)

But Pedaja does not listen, once again stubbornly refusing another attempt to be saved from himself. He tells the media he’s doing this to draw attention to the plight of his father Johannes Pedaja, fate unknown, last seen behind the Iron Curtain in a Soviet slave labour camp.

In the Cinesound footage, we see the Can-Tiki take to the sea and begin bobbing on the waves.

There are several shots of thousands of people standing on wharves, watching all of this. It is difficult to estimate the mood of this audience. Are they there out of pity? Are they making fun of him? Do they admire him? Are they just bored and looking for something to do? It could be a mixture of all of those things. It’s really hard to tell.

But the hardest person of all to read is Pedaja. Sitting in the Can-Tiki, heading out to sea, he looks completely unfazed.

His trip ultimately lasts an hour and five minutes. The Can-Tiki drifts in the wrong direction and is towed back to sea by the Volunteer Coastal Patrol vessel Pudaloo. They had been watching him the whole time, expecting this to happen.

On December 14th, the story makes the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The headlines read “Canoe Voyage Held Up By Rudder Trouble - Oil Drum Trip Lasted an Hour.”

On December 15th, he tries again. “I’m in it too deep now to back out”, he says, perfectly illustrating the sunk cost fallacy.

He drifts for about a mile in the wrong direction, again, and decides to turn back. The crowd boos him as he returns again to La Perouse.

Two days later, in yet another inexplicable twist, the Can-Tiki is sold to Manly Pool so that children can play on it during the Christmas school holidays. It is not known what they intended to do about the razor-sharp edges of the cockpit. But Pedaja agrees to the deal, perhaps thinking this allows him to back out of the plan with some degree of pride and/or perhaps, on some level, finding the whole thing funny.

I imagine the Manly Pool people would have offered to send a truck to pick it up. But he insists on sailing it over to them. This time, he adds a motor.

And so he leaves by sea, yet again.

La Perouse to Manly is still quite an ambitious trip. That’s all the way out of Botany Bay, up the coast past Maroubra, Coogee and Bondi, then between the Heads into Sydney Harbour and all the way into Manly Cove. Sure, it’s nothing compared to Darwin to Indonesia or Sydney to New Zealand. But in local terms, it’s a pretty long way. It’s something. Pulling it off would be an achievement in its own right.

He does not pull it off.

The motor breaks down less than halfway there, and Pedaja washes ashore at Maroubra. He is towed back, and returns to La Perouse for a third time.

At this point, he becomes something of a folk hero. Australians begin to see something in him that resonates with our nation’s concept of itself. Mockery transforms into a deeper, unusual kind of admiration. On some level, you just have to hand it to the guy. There’s something so human about his sheer force of will, his utter determination to ignore reality, risk his own life and persist with his ridiculous plans. He fits right into the Australian dream, simply because he isn’t afraid to "have a go.” And then another go, and then another go, and then another go after that.

I’m not entirely clear on what happened after this. Things go quiet for a while. Whether that’s because of some things that happened or just because I’m limited in what I’ve been able to find out, or a combination of both, I’m not sure.

***

In 1967, Rosalie Pedaja is hit by a car while attempting to cross Brighton Road, St Kilda, in front of the 67 tram. She dies immediately.

The tragic incident is documented in paperwork from a Coroner’s inquest, available at the Public Record Office Victoria. A manila envelope sets out the facts. There are diagrams of Brighton Road, witness statements and a few sterile photos of the scene.

Missing is any sense of her humanity: Rosalie from Tallinn, wife of Johannes. Rosalie, former resident of the Geislingen camp for displaced persons. Rosalie, mother of Peeter, watching him weld together oil drums in his backyard. Rosalie, survivor of the Nazis and Soviets. Removed from this world in an instant by a car in St Kilda.

***

At some stage, Peeter moves back to Darwin then becomes an Australian citizen in 1972. He pops up again in the media in 1974. Incredibly, by this time he has once again hatched an oil-drum sea travel scheme. He tells the media he wants to drive from Darwin to Africa (country and city unspecified) by putting his old station wagon on a raft of oil drums and connecting the raft to a propeller. He is identified in this article as an “invalid pensioner.”

“People put car engines on boats”, he says, “Why not put a car on a boat? I can’t think of anything better to do.”

Two years later, in 1976, he turns up in Florida and Guatemala.

The Tallahassee Democrat runs the front-page headline:

”Ravaged Town Pins Hopes on Adventurer.”

According to this article, Pedaja is at some stage injured in a car accident and ends up on an Australian disability pension. He then travels to the United States and Mexico in search of a retirement community, before arriving in Guatemala on February 4th, 1976 - coincidentally, the same day as a massive earthquake.

Witnessing the devastation, he springs into action right away and is sent to the town of Acatenango to work as a builder. Somehow, he then ends up being sent back to Miami on a one-way ticket in order to begin a Florida-wide doorknocking campaign to fundraise to rebuild the town. He calls his new initiative the Acatenango Rebuilding Fund.

”I was a little bit down when I went to Guatemala”, he says at the time. “I had no real aim in life. This has given me a purpose. The whole town is depending on me now. I can’t let them down.”

In the context of everything we’ve learned about him so far, you have to wonder if there’s something fishy going on. The whaling expedition comes to mind. It’s almost too on the nose. But I have no more information about what ended up coming of this, nor any details of the Acatenango Rebuilding Fund, or any other record of what he got up to in Mexico and the United States.

And so the trail runs cold once again, while the story just gets bigger and bigger. I’ve heard he also had a Timor adventure, though I’m yet to learn anything specific about that.

There’s still so much I don’t know.

Aftermath of the Guatemalan earthquake, 1976.

***

Peeter Pedaja passed away on October 17th, 1985, at age 54. His cause of death was listed as “Hepatic encephalopathy - 10 days. Hepatic cirrhosis - years.” Both are often associated with prolonged alcohol abuse.

He is buried next to his mother in the Estonian Lutheran section of Fawkner Memorial Park in Melbourne.

In his youth, he spent three-and-a-half years chasing her across the Iron Curtain. Now, they are spending eternity together in Australia.

The only obituary I’ve been able to find is from an Estonian language paper. It’s a single line of text: his name, date of birth and date of death.

I reached out to the Estonian-Australian community and was able to find a few people who knew him. The Estonians who replied to my Facebook post remembered a man who had managed to get on disability payments and then “bludged his way around the world” in the years missing from my timeline. Maybe this explains something about Guatemala. On the whole, I did not get the impression they were overly thrilled that someone had uncovered this story and it was all coming back up again.

I did manage to get in touch with a family member. They told me over Messenger that I had a few details wrong, and that I was missing some of his overseas adventures. We spoke on the phone briefly and I tried to explain that this absolutely could be a movie, that he should be as famous as Ned Kelly. I’ve reached out since, but have not really heard back. I got the feeling that they were not particularly eager to have this story told either.

I hope I have done it justice anyway. I believe this is all in the public interest. It is safe to say that in a strange way I have come to admire him a great deal. But I have also tried to avoid psychoanalysing, pathologising or romanticising this man. A lot of reporters may have got things wrong, and Pedaja himself may very well be an unreliable narrator. But I think that at the end of the day, here is a complicated and fascinating Busman’s Holiday-esque 20th century life led by someone who perhaps we can all see a bit of ourselves in.

I do have to wonder how his antics actually affected the people around him. I don’t want to overlook that being reckless with your life can really hurt the people who love you.

I keep thinking of Rosalie, watching him sail off in an oil drum after having spent so much of their early lives in jeopardy.

And then there’s the wife. Recently, I found out her name: Marjory Leone Pedaya, nee Heron. She used the phonetic spelling, just as he often did later in life.

All I really know about Marjory is:

* she married Peeter in 1958;
* when Peeter set off for New Zealand in 1959, she “(did) not support the venture”;
* they later divorced.

I also think about the holdups, the whaling scam and the Guatemalans. The Guatemalan incident, frankly, feels particularly dark. And God knows what else happened. But overall I think it would do him an injustice to form a moral judgement in any way, positive or negative.

My favourite scene in The Kissing Bandit is the one in which Chico, the innkeeper, consoles Sinatra’s character Ricardo about this new direction his life is taking. Ricardo, nervous and babbling, says “This isn’t like I read in books.”

“Books?”, Chico replies. “This is not a book, Ricardo mio. This is not a dream you are dreaming. This is your life now - a bandit’s life. Hard. Sometimes very short.”

I have visited Peeter’s grave several times. Sometimes I go up and see him when I need to think.

Someone else is visiting Rosalie. I don’t know who they are, but I’ve seen a flowerpot and a single stone left for her as per Jewish custom. I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone else is visiting Peeter.

Why am I visiting Peeter? I don’t know exactly. It’s definitely not hero worship. Rather, I sit and think to myself: Here is a man that only God can judge.

I believe the world deserves to remember Peeter Pedaja, the Real Life Kissing Bandit.

***

Recently, a friend sent me an article about Reza Baluchi.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading:

“The Coast Guard assessed Baluchi's vessel — known as a hydro-pod — and determined he was ‘conducting a manifestly unsafe voyage.’

He told officers his destination: London, England — more than 4,000 miles away.

He has attempted voyages in a similar homemade vessel in 2014, 2016, and 2021, all of which resulted in USCG intervention.

Baluchi, who lives in Florida after being granted asylum from Iran…”

***

This is an expanded (and expanding) text adaptation of a story told in two episodes of SUDDENLY. The first one, “This is Not a Book”, adds a lot more to this story - and I have also added a lot of information here since then that does not appear in the original episode.

Felix and I were joined by Tim Batt of The Worst Idea of All Time, and drew parallels between Pedaja’s adventures and Batt’s determination to watch Grown Ups 2 and Sex and the City 2. Plus, a voice acting cast played the roles of several people in Pedaja’s life. Unfortunately, ‘Pedaja’ is mispronounced throughout.

To prepare for this, I also watched The Kissing Bandit 11 times in 14 days and kept an audio diary of the experience. The unedited tapes became a follow-up episode, “The Kissing Bandit Diaries.”