On 6 October 1972, at a one-teacher school in the rural town of Faraday in Victoria, Australia, two plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, kidnapped six female pupils and their teacher for a $1,000,000 ransom.
That evening, the premier of Victoria, Dick Hamer, announced that the State Government was prepared to pay the ransom.
When they were gone, Gibbs managed to kick the door panel out with her heavy, platform-heeled leather boots and escape with the children in the dark, finding help a few kilometres away.
Boland was convicted by a jury in March 1974 after three trials and was sentenced to seventeen years' imprisonment with a non-parole period of twelve years, although Eastwood has maintained that Boland was innocent and that the real co-kidnapper was related to a man Thompson spoke to at Woodend, who had been detained at the scene but later released.
Twenty minutes later, another log truck came along and Eastwood waved it to a stop before taking the driver and passenger hostage.
Finally, with sixteen hostages, he demanded a ransom of US$7 million, guns, 100 kilograms of heroin and cocaine, and the release of seventeen inmates from Pentridge Prison.
[9] On 30 April 1981, Eastwood strangled convicted rapist Glen Davies in the exercise yard of Pentridge Prison and was charged with murder; he was subsequently acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, having been stabbed 10 times during the incident.