An Anthology of tales from the bad old days, the 70s, and 80s.

Personal encounters with Queensland’s most beautiful, pre-Fitzgerald inquiry.

To kick things off, my own contribution follows below, a very casual encounter, superficial. Perhaps suited to a chapter of ‘One Night Stands”.

Others though, had much longer, more intimate relations, spanning months, even years.

If you like the idea and want to contribute, or want to suggest to someone else that they contribute, please go right ahead. 

My game plan is simply to put this out there and gather and post what comes back, to encourage further contributions. If it builds into something substantial and significant, I’ll approach publishers to see if we can’t get it into print.

Any material appearing on these pages remains the private property of the authors, and no unauthorised reproduction is permitted.

  Any interest, comments, suggestions, doubts or concerns, email me at ric.curnow@anti-bias.com

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A Different World

One summer, more than thirty years ago, Queensland was a different world.

Andy and I left Sydney, intent on seeing as much of this different world as we could, by hitchhiking north as long as our limited funds held out – and perhaps even further then, as we presumed we could also turn to the dole.

Time, and kilometres passed, and by Christmas Eve, we'd made it as far north as Airlie Beach. To celebrate, we had a couple of drinks at a nightclub, an extravagance given our limited funds and failure to impress any of the beautiful young things we met.

We slept rough – not unusual on our budget, especially after our ‘big night out’. Next morning, Christmas Day, we started hitchhiking again, towards the beach for which the town is named.

A guy in a ute, a local, picked us up. With only room for one more in the front, Andy didn’t mind leaping onto the tray. He was standing up, holding onto the crossbar as we drove slowly along, singing, loudly. Joyous, alive, young, adventurous and free.

About twenty-three years old, a lanky six foot three, with a shaved head and a large mis-shapened nose, Andy came to the attention of the Airlie Beach police. 

They pulled over the ute, and ordered us out and off the truck. Andy started to comply, but before he could get down, the cops grabbed his arm, pulling him off balance and causing him to fall to the ground. They started abusing him. One grabbed his backpack and threw that to the ground as well. They told the driver of the ute to ‘piss off’, which he did without a second thought. My own pack crashed against the rear gate of the ute when I realised he was leaving and made a grab for it.

Clearly the wearing of seatbelts, mandatory in Queensland since 1972, wasn’t going to be the issue on this occasion.

I don’t know what Andy was talking to the cops about, but whatever he was saying, it failed to mollify them. They opened his pack, and whipped it around, flinging the contents along perhaps ten metres of roadside, then started to kick their way through his pretty meagre belongings.

And found a small pipe. No marijuana, nor even evidence that he’d had any. Just a small pipe.

“You’re under arrest!” one of them bellowed at him.

“You can’t arrest him for that,” I said, more in disbelief than objection. He turned on me and shouted

“And you’re under arrest too!”

“What? … for?”

“Obscene language.” Oh … right.

We were manhandled to the police station, where a relatively nice (though still thoroughly nasty) policeman took possession of our things, did the paperwork, and explained that the other policemen had had a bad night and were just taking it out on us. Then we were dumped in different but adjoining cells.

Three concrete brick walls and an open grille across the fourth wall, with a similarly grilled door. We could talk, but not see each other, not see anything but the back of the police station twenty metres away.

The less nasty policeman fed us a couple of times over the course of an otherwise uninterrupted day, and explained that we wouldn’t need blankets because it was so warm, or mattresses either. Merry Christmas to you too.

Boxing Day, the not-so-nice guys were back. We were being released, one at a time. I was taken back to the office to watch all the money being taken from my wallet. Everything.

“Bail.” Oh … right.                  

            

The cops then drove us out of town. Not very far out of town, but far enough. Not as far as the highway, just some dusty point on the side of the road at a point clearly 'out of town'. They told us if we ever came back they would kill us.

Standing there, on the side of the road, a few coins between us, our little holiday hearts broke. We got a ride out to the highway, and turned south. I don’t remember a great deal about the trip back – sleeping in fields, eating scavenged mangoes. We split up somewhere in Northern NSW a few days later, and caught up again in Sydney, weeks later, wounds licked.

It comes back to me now because yesterday, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I spoke to Andy on the phone. And one of the things he told me was this:

After his marriage broke down in the early 2000s, Andy followed his ex-wife and kids to Queensland, to Brisbane. One night he ended up at a police station after intervening in an altercation. They looked at him in that policeman kind of way, then looked him up on the system and found an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Back in early 1985, he’d been summonsed to court to answer charges relating to the little pipe and had failed to appear. Twenty years later, he was locked up again. Christmas ’84, revisited twenty years after the fact.

Incredulous at his circumstance, Andy inquired if there was a warrant there for my arrest too. And was answered in the affirmative. Wow, I’m a fugitive from justice!

The next morning, Andy told his story to the judge, and was released without charge and with his wallet intact. Things have changed in Queensland.

Perhaps I’ll go back in 2034, on the fiftieth anniversary of my original arrest, and throw myself on the mercy of the court. Hoping that ‘You can’t arrest him for that’ is no longer considered obscene language. By then though, perhaps Queensland will be a different world again.

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