Faraday School kidnapping

On 6 October 1972, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, two plasterers armed with a sawn-off shotgun, entered a one-teacher school in the rural town of Faraday, Victoria, Australia. At about 3pm, they forced 19-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six female pupils, aged between five and ten, into a red delivery van. The men left a note at the school threatening to kill all the hostages unless a $1,000,000 cash ransom was paid, then drove the group into a remote bush area.

That evening, Victorian Premier Dick Hamer announced the State Government was prepared to pay the ransom. Education Minister Lindsay Thompson was driven to the scene by Assistant Commissioner Bill Crowley, who posed as the minister's driver and carried a concealed derringer pistol; future Chief Commissioner Mick Miller hid in the rear of the car with a high-powered rifle. Thompson waited to personally deliver the ransom, but it was never collected. In the early hours of the following morning, the kidnappers told Gibbs they were leaving to collect the ransom and departed, leaving her and the children alone.

Gibbs then kicked out a door panel of the van using her heavy platform-heeled boots and led the children to safety in the dark, finding help a few kilometres away. Eastwood and Boland were subsequently captured by armed Victoria Police officers following an extensive manhunt.

Eastwood pleaded guilty to seven counts of kidnapping in December 1972 and was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment with a ten-year non-parole period; three armed robbery charges against him were taken into consideration in exchange for his evidence against Boland. Boland was convicted by a jury in March 1974, after three trials, and sentenced to seventeen years' imprisonment with a twelve-year non-parole period; Eastwood later maintained that Boland was innocent and that the real accomplice was someone else. Boland was released in November 1983, having served eleven years of his sentence.

On 22 January 1973, Mary Gibbs was awarded a George Medal for bravery, and Lindsay Thompson received a Bronze Medal for Bravery from the Royal Humane Society.

Eastwood later escaped from Geelong Prison in December 1976 and, in February 1977, kidnapped a teacher and nine pupils from Wooreen State School in Gippsland, Victoria, in a similar incident involving numerous additional hostages before his recapture. While imprisoned, Eastwood strangled convicted rapist Glen Davies in the Pentridge Prison exercise yard in April 1981; he was charged with murder but acquitted on grounds of self-defence after evidence he had been stabbed ten times during the confrontation. Eastwood was eventually released from custody in 1992 after serving his sentences, with a subsequent unrelated conviction and re-arrest recorded in later years.