Authorities as far away as the Northern Territory have been alerted to a missing woman last seen in outback Queensland 11 days ago, as the search through rough cattle scrub is also extended to her family’s home town.
Police on Thursday alleged that a vehicle that Tea Wright-Finger, 19, had been driving on the day she disappeared had been reported stolen eight days earlier from the Whitsunday town of Proserpine.
Wright-Finger was last seen on the afternoon of Sunday, 16 October, by a friend who dropped her by a blue Toyota Prado 4WD outside the town of Richmond, which is home to about 580 people and located about 180km north of Winton and 630km inland from Mackay.
Neither Wright-Finger nor the 4WD have been seen since.
Insp Damien Crosby said on Thursday that police were concerned for her safety but had no evidence of foul play.
The farm hand was reported missing on 18 October, and police have been conducting a land and air search, involving two helicopters and cars scouring roads, with initial efforts focused on the Flinders River area close to the Richmond township.
That search was based on information from the missing teen’s mobile phone, which was switched on very briefly at about 9.30am the day her family reported her missing.
Crosby said the ground search was “one component of the overall missing person investigation”, with police now making inquiries in the NT, the territory of her last listed address, as well as in Bundaberg where her family lives.
“But I will reiterate our focus and our priority is to ensure that Tea is safe and well,” he said.
“Obviously we just want to confirm that Tea is safe. And we want to confirm that as soon as possible. Any other parallel investigation can be resolved after we’ve confirmed that.”
He said police would be analysing social media posts, including one made in the weeks before she went missing; Wright-Finger posted a video on TikTok captioned “I don’t feel so good, I want to go home”, followed by a series of pictures of a cattle station captioned “home”.
A separate, distressing video from late last year showed a series of pictures of the young woman crying with bruises and cuts captioned “when it’s toxic, it’s toxic”.
Mount Isa SES area controller Gordon Graham told the ABC that, if she were lost within the search area, hot, humid and stormy weather would be conspiring with a lack of water to make her situation increasingly dire. Graham said his crews were “concentrating on the thick-growth areas”.
“We have covered all the open areas now,” he said. “We are really getting into the thick country that we have to get in and start walking through it.”
Graham said the heat and humidity were making for “very dangerous” conditions and that, if Wright-Finger was in the scrub, she wouldn’t be able to move and would be under shade.
Temperatures are in the high 30s, but the mercury is forecast to reach 42C this weekend.
“We are getting storms coming in all the time now,” he said. “It is getting wet – the humidity, all that is adding up to the timeframe of survival.”
Police urge anyone who has seen Wright-Finger, or the blue 2013 Toyota Prado with Queensland registration 210-TLA, to immediately contact them.
