okay this is so fucking hilarious let me summarize some info i found from the notes and from wikipedia:

-he was in office less than a year

-he disappeared literally in the middle of the day

-before the disappearance, he refused to have bodyguards until a sniper shattered his office window and then finally gave in EXCEPT FOR on holiday, which his wife later suggested “was to hide his extramarital affairs”. not important to the story but i think it’s kinda funny

-he thought air tanks were “inauthentic”?

-he had “‘incredible powers of endurance underwater’, and sometimes kept himself amused during parliamentary debates by seeing how long he could hold his breath”

-his friends were worried about him doing this and he once told his press secretary, "Look Tony, what are the odds of a prime minister being drowned or taken by a shark?"

-he almost drowned TWICE that year already

-one of the headlines that day was about his doctor advising him to swim less

-they named a pool in his honor

I just wanna say that we cared very much about him! Here are some more facts:

• he was overall a decent PM and not a terrible human being, which is especially impressive because he came from our conservative party
• unfortunately he was super pro-Vietnam War and gave us the highly regrettable yet hilarious slogan "All The Way With LBJ"
• at the time of his death, he was in danger of being sacked as PM (this is a thing we do, it's called a spill, it's basically a national hobby) because his fellow conservatives felt that he was too adept at compromising and finding common ground with progressives
• he really did have a lot of affairs -- "not a terrible human being" doesn't mean he was a good husband (or had a good opinion on the Vietnam War)
• his widow, Zara, was a socialite, and became a major fashion designer in the '70s -- her work was heavily muumuu based. My mother, who was a kid in the '60s, has this idea that Zara was "crazy", but it turns out she was just a woman with a lot of personality who didn't want to be defined by her philandering husband, and she wore a lot of muumuus
• for many years conspiracy theories circulated about his death -- the big one was that he was killed by the Chinese/was a Chinese agent who swam out to a submarine and went 'home'
• no I don't know either
• my friend's dad grew up in the area he vanished, and he and his brother were in the front yard, cleaning their little boat, when two guys in suits came running up to use their phone and commandeer the boat because the PM had disappeared
• consensus in my friend's family is that he got tangled in the thick kelp that grew around there and drowned
• have been tangled in the kelp nearby, can confirm it is terrifying
• he loved the sea
• that's what it says on his memorial stone
• because the sea killed him
• #maytheseareturnhim
• every single time there is a political crisis in Australia, we hope Harold Holt comes back to fix it
• our current PM has a regrettable habit of just disappearing whenever there's a crisis, and we really do wish the sea would return Holt