He was ten minutes into a walk he'd done before, on a clearly marked trail, with his family close behind. Then he rounded a bend, and there was nothing left to find but a yellow rain hat.
A Family Walk on a Familiar Trail
In June 1987, the Hildebrand family — mother Christine, her sons Joe and Paddy, and a few cousins — set out to walk the Lilly Pilly Gully track in Victoria's Wilsons Promontory National Park. It's not a difficult hike. The track runs about four kilometers through lush rainforest, well-maintained and clearly marked, the kind of walk considered safe and manageable for visitors of almost any age or fitness level.
Paddy was nine years old, energetic, and — according to his older brother Joe, who was eleven at the time — happiest when he was bushwalking. Paddy was also autistic and lived with epilepsy, conditions that shaped how he experienced and responded to the world around him in ways his family understood deeply, even if the people searching for him later wouldn't.
Gone Around a Bend
About ten minutes into the walk, Paddy did what he often did on hikes — moved ahead of the group, curious and a little restless. His family let him go a short distance, the way you might with a kid who knows the general shape of the trail.
He rounded a bend in the path. He didn't come back.
Joe Hildebrand would later describe the moment with a kind of plain, devastating clarity in his memoir: "Then he rounded a bend and we never saw him again. In a single tick of the clock, we were all broken."
When calls into the bush brought no response, the family searched the immediate area themselves with no luck, retraced their steps back to the car, and realized Paddy genuinely wasn't with them. They drove to the nearest ranger station to report him missing.
The Largest Search of Its Kind in Victoria
What followed became, by most accounts, the largest search operation in Victorian history up to that point. Police, the State Emergency Service, hundreds of local volunteers, and eventually Aboriginal trackers joined the effort. Helicopters winched searchers down into dense ridge terrain, dropped them to comb the ground, then winched them back up to do it again somewhere else.
The vegetation in parts of Wilsons Promontory is thick enough to function almost like a wall — capable of hiding a small child standing just a few meters away from a search line. By the fifth day, searchers had covered and re-covered the area so thoroughly that, as one veteran volunteer put it, the whole region had effectively been trampled flat by the search itself.
It made no difference. The only thing ever found was Paddy's yellow plastic rain hat, resting near a bed of ferns. Joe has said his brother loved that hat and wouldn't have left it behind on his own.
A Search That Haunted the Searchers, Too
The case left a mark that went well beyond the Hildebrand family. One senior police sergeant involved in the original search, who had a son around Paddy's age, reportedly continued returning to the area on his own time for years after the official search ended, unable to reconcile how a search with that much manpower and equipment could come up with nothing at all.
Investigators have generally settled on the explanation that Paddy became disoriented after stepping off the marked trail into the surrounding scrub — a plausible, if unsatisfying, theory given how easily the terrain there can swallow a person from view. But "plausible" was never the same as "confirmed." No remains have ever been found, then or since.
A Brother Who Became a Public Voice
Joe Hildebrand went on to become a well-known Australian journalist and television presenter, and in 2013 he wrote about Paddy's disappearance at length in his memoir, An Average Joe: My Horribly Abnormal Life — something he's said he'd been waiting years to be ready to put into words, describing it as possibly the most important thing he'd ever write.
He's continued to speak about Paddy publicly in the years since, using both his platform and his own background in journalism to keep some attention on a case that, for his family, never actually closed just because the official search did. A memorial marker for Paddy now stands near the spot on the trail where he was last seen — a quiet, permanent reminder on a walking path that, to most visitors, looks exactly like the safe, ordinary hike it was supposed to be that day in 1987.
Sources
Patrick (Paddy) Hildebrand — Australian Missing Persons Register https://australianmissingpersonsregister.com/ampr/Hildebrand.htm
Patrick James "Paddy" Hildebrand (1978–1987) — Find a Grave Memorial https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/207710655/patrick-hildebrand
"Into Thin Air – how does a bushwalker go missing, never to be found?" — Ricky French / Weekend Australian Magazine https://rickyfrench.com/into-thin-air-how-does-a-bushwalker-go-missing-never-to-be-found-weekend-australian-magazine/