Chopper Unchopped (200 page)

Young Ty died in a car crash while on duty not long after, may he rest in peace. He wasn’t a bad kid, full of laughs and life and fun and not a snob. Policemen who walk up to me and say hello and have a drink are made up of two sorts: the old hard heads and the young carefrees. One lot have the rank, the other lot don’t care. It’s the ladder climbers who become snobby. Both young Ty and his old dad Barry Bennett are (were in Ty Bennett’s case, sadly) cut from the same cloth. They reckon only the good die young. That was true in Ty Bennett’s case. A nice young bloke and a good style of a copper.

On the second night I acted as bouncer at the Richmond Arms I was going to belt some wombat and young Ty stepped in and pulled the young mug up, saved me and the other bloke a bit of trouble.

I didn’t bounce at the pub after that. If a normal bouncer hits someone, big deal. If I do it, big trouble. You get a strange feeling when a bloke you know dies, even if you have only known the chap for a few drinks and a few hellos over a few nights. The here today, gone tomorrow thing hits you.

I’ve waved some good friends and bad enemies goodbye and death sort of blankets you in a wave of strange sentiment. It’s hard to explain. You might think that for someone like me it would be easy but it gets harder. Outside of war, I would think I have seen more of friends and enemies die than anyone in Australia. I feel that although I have left the world of violence that death will be near me forever. I didn’t know Ty at all well but he was a good bloke. Anyway young Ty, this one’s for you, via con Dios, amigo.

IT IS lamb marking season. We have to clip the lambs’ ears and ring their tails and nut the young males — where’s Nick the Greek when you need him? Let me tell you there is no Silence of the Lambs out here. They bleat like buggery after the ‘operation’ until they get a drink from their mums to calm them down, and you can’t blame them.

Poppy season is on us again, too. Opium poppies, peas, barley, oats, wheat, the lot. The poppies are a funny crop — $1650 a ton from the factory, that’s what the farmer gets. Or you can gamble on the juice content being higher and get two thousand a ton — or two hundred if its lower — but the factory will gamble and pay a straight out $1650 a ton.

The young kids and would-be crooks who rob the poppy fields are a smart lot. I was walking home late one night on one of my few rare nights out and caught or saw three teenagers standing in the pea paddock. The peas were in full flower, and they were pulling the peas out and stuffing them into bags.

The paddock on the other side of the road had the poppies in flower but some local had wisely hung a strictly prohibited area sign on the pea field. The three kids ran off with their garbage bag full of peas on seeing me. Even now, would-be drug dealers run when they see The Chopper. Could you imagine those clowns? They would boil up their bounty and then expect to get high. It would give them as much of a buzz as smoking sweetcorn. Anyway, the poppies are only any good if you have a multi-million dollar processing factory and unless you’re willing to rob a harvester and a truck full of poppies and hijack the factory you’re kidding yourself.

There are ways and means and the right time of the year so forth and so on but a lot of kids have killed themselves in the foolish attempt to become drug kings by boiling up poppies and playing with the leftovers.

I mean, if everyone could become a millionaire overnight by pinching a bag of green poppies in flower there would be a hell of a lot of rich bastards in Tassie.

Nothing is as it appears. The poppy police are there more to stop idiots killing themselves than anything else. The deadly wives’ tales relating to the backyard processing of the poppy plant are legend and, by the way, the farmer makes more dough out of a good pea year than an average poppy year.

It’s like sheep. It would be cheaper to shoot ’em then shear ’em. Anyone who has spent a day in the hot sun dipping sheep would agree. I would shoot the dumb bastards just for pleasure. The day of the small farmer with 250 to 300 head is over.

My father-in-law ran a few thousand sheep when wool was a pound a pound but these days it’s all crops. My father-in-law, old E.V. Hodge, reckons that they are turning us all into vegetable growers. Aussie land don’t ride on the sheep’s back no more. Buggered if I know whose back we are riding on, but he’s not going bah bah, that’s for sure.

Sheep are more a meat market now. The wool is a pest sideline. My father-in-law tells a story about an outraged shearer who showed him the local newspaper. It read ‘Man and Shearer Die in Car Crash’. The shearer was complaining that the newspaper didn’t even consider a shearer to be part of the human race. I’ve spent a few days in a shearing shed and that’s why I’d rather shoot ’em than shear ’em. The sheep, that is. Not the poor bloody shearers. The old Banjo Paterson romantic notion of the shearer is a load of crap as well. Bloody hard work for no thanks and even less money if you ask me, and sheep are the most stupid animals God ever shovelled guts into.

The farmer was once the backbone of the nation, or so the story went. Some of them are precious, delicate, whinging old pansies from what I’ve seen so far, although there is always exceptions and contradictions to every rule.

I’ve met some good strong hard and true men on the land. As for the rest I’d plough the bastards in and bury them under the bloody land.

The gossiping, back stabbing, pack of old girls, they can dish it out but they can’t take it. The man on the land is a great comic with a sense of fun and hi-jinx that so delighted men like Banjo Paterson as long as it is on their terms. It’s still out there in the bush and alive today but when the laugh turns in their direction they don’t like it, let me tell you.

I’m afraid I hold a more Lawson type view of the land and the men on it. In the words of my father-in-law, let it be known if you have a Chubb safe, then hide your money elsewhere. Remember no-one in the bush can keep a secret, and if your sheep is eating someone else’s grass then it’s someone else’s sheep.

IF IT rains the farmer will say we could do with a bit of sun, if the sun shines, we could do with a bit of rain, if there is no wind he wants wind, if it’s a windy day he will complain, and every year is a bad year.

The poor farmer is always broke. The cost of keeping his wife’s Jaguar on the road is killing him, as he scrapes the mud off his boot on entering the bank the old farmer is a sad sight indeed.

But while the city yuppies stand in line to see the teller the farmer is allowed to moan his troubles to the manager.

Mateship in the bush? The word mateship was forged before and during World War I. Of course all country towns have their war monuments but ninety percent of all men who went to the First and Second World War came from the dusty, dirty cities because farming came under the heading of a reserved occupation, as did waterside workers, another stalwart, courageous breed of Australian who believe they carry the nation on their backs just like the sheep.

You know who went to war, the Aussie battler, the unemployed, the farm worker, the factory worker, shopkeeper, street sweeper, ditch digger, shit carter, the butcher, the baker and the candle stick maker, wood choppers and rock breakers. Every bastard Banjo Paterson forgot to write about. You see, Banjo came from the landed gentry so naturally his view on Australia and the Australian was seen through the eyes of a gent who never did a real day’s manual work in his life. It hurts me to say so, but he was a self-admitted lawyer, and we all know about them. (See above.)

I’m starting to sound like a Communist. I’m sorry. I was on about mateship. If you check your nation’s prisons you’ll find city boys doing life sentences and manslaughter sentences for coming to the aid of a mate with a broken bottle, iron bar, or baseball bat.

You won’t find many country lads doing time for backing up their mates. Now there are contradictions and exceptions to every rule, but as a general thing, if you get in a fight in a country pub then, mate, you’re on your fucking own. If you win they will talk about you afterwards — and if you lose they’ll leave you in the gutter to be eaten by the foxes. I’ve never been left posted in a fight in Collingwood, meaning my mates didn’t run and leave me, but I’ve seen some poor bastards get kicked near to death and left for dead and not a mate to help them in country pubs.

You can be the loneliest bloke in the world lying on the floor of a country pub while about six bronzed Aussies sink the slipper. The rest will sit and watch as though it’s a bad play.

Then the buggers make a liar out of me. During a bush fire everyone pitches in without being asked. I think the bush fire or fire in general is a common human enemy and that might be the contradiction.

Anyway, as you can see, I don’t view the bush or the people in it with any Banjo Paterson style romantic nonsense. People who get misty-eyed about the bush usually live in cities, wear their Blundstone Boots to go shopping and the closest they get to stock is when they check their share portfolio.

Good blokes are good blokes be they in the bush or in the city and a maggot is a maggot wherever you find him and the bush is no exception. However, when it’s all said and done where would I rather live? The bush or the city? The bush, of course. The snakes are just as deadly but they move a little slower.

FOR cops and robbers, it’s a haunted world. Every cop and every gangster walks with the ghosts of the men who went before them, reminding them all that there was always someone bigger and better before they ever came along.

I was determined to defy my ghosts and go far beyond the normal and the extraordinary and even superhuman. I was determined to become the biggest, most insanely feared criminal identity in Melbourne. I had a sense of history, I knew what the hard men before me did so I did what they all did and more, removing my ears at the age of twenty-four was my simple way of welcoming the Melbourne police, prison and criminal world to my nightmare and it was a nightmare none of them was ready for.

I introduced a level of violence, torture, murder and sheer fear unheard of before. I took it to the limit, then beyond. I entered the shadow of the valley and for nearly twenty five years I was in that world and the valley became a darker place.

I shouldn’t really count my few years in the Tasmanian prison system and criminal world because that is like comparing a barbie doll with a rattle snake. But from late 1969 to 1991 Melbourne was my valley and no-one stood in my way. A large boast but a true one.

Kill me or cop it sweet, that’s the way I saw it. In or out of prison no-one could take more pain than me, no-one could dish out more pain than me. I wasn’t about to stand in the shadow of any man who went before me.

Every crim in Melbourne stood in the shadow of Ned Kelly and Squizzy Taylor, Jackie Twist, Normie Bradshaw, Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley, Jimmy ‘The Pom’ Driscoll, the Kane Brothers, Ray Chuck, Freddie ‘The Frog’ Harrison’. I said fuck ’em all.

I said as a kid that one day when they write the criminal history of the nation there will be only three names, Ned Kelly, Squizzy Taylor and Chopper Read and all the rest can buy a ticket and watch the fucking movie although I don’t think Mick Jagger would play me, do you?

I mean, I ran on an insanity level never before seen and I doubt will be repeated and the fact that I came out of it alive to end up a fat-arsed chicken farmer with glasses, a local piss pot in a local town is, in my opinion the most insane part of my whole insane story. It also helps that hanging was pretty well abolished by the time I got stuck into it. I might have ended up having a hearty last meal in the condemned cell if I’d been born a century ago. They were still necking crooks in the 1920s and 1930s. But I lived to tell the tale, as a writer of books and the spinner of yarns. Why, oh, why didn’t I end up dead? And they say there isn’t a God, well if there isn’t, then I’m the luckiest bastard alive.

After a run in with Graeme Jensen in Bendigo Prison he told me later I was either the maddest bastard he had ever heard of or I had more guts than God. I think guts was the word. I don’t really believe I was ever mad, I prefer to think — in my saner moments, at least — that I was just a straight out tough bastard with a twisted sense of humour.

The criminal world is an ego-driven place but it is also full of piss weak bastards. I mean physically the biggest crims in Australian history before me and Neddy Smith and Ned Kelly were basically little better then dwarfs, pip squeaks and runts, not physically strong men. Drugs haven’t made them any bigger or stronger, just more treacherous. Big, strong, healthy bastards really stand out in the criminal world. Your average crook is 5 foot 7 inches tall and 11 or 12 stone and that’s saying something.

Big physical crims really stand out and physically big strong crims who are as nutty as fruit cakes and carry guns — well, they are few and far between and demand some respect. Had I taken up football I’d be Mr Average, but I was bound for glory in the criminal world. Let’s face it, how could I lose? Ned Kelly was a horse thief who wore a bucket on his head and Squizzy Taylor was a dwarf with a gun in his hand. Let’s face it, you don’t have to try too hard to earn a criminal reputation but you do have to get to the other end alive to tell the story and that part, I admit, is tricky. I was a shooting (literally) star who didn’t quite burn out. I don’t know why. I would like to think it was because I was so tough and smart but the truth is, in the end, it was luck.

If Bluey Brazel had stuck that knife in one inch to the left I was dead back during the overcoat war in Pentridge, and no books would be written and I’d be just another crazy dead crim.

People think most crims want to keep in the shadows but many of them are ego-driven and love the headlines and publicity. They don’t know that the biggest headlines they will ever make is when they are lying in a pool of their own blood, shot dead by an unknown gunman as they walk home.

They finally make the big time but they are lying on the slab in the morgue at the time. I got out alive — God knows how. Tricky, indeed.