Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks. Bob Magor
up with the name Roy James Wright. Next thing I’m up before the Stipendiary Magistrate. My luck was running well because he was the same one that sent me to Fremantle Gaol and had let me out of there a couple of days before.
‘He didn’t appear very impressed when he said, “Wright. You’re incorrigible. You’re a menace to society!” ‘I tried to profess my innocence. Rightly for a change. I said it was only a blue over a girl. I’d been locked up for twelve months and a man’s gotta do what man’s gotta do. If I knew the two cops were cops I’d have sat straight down and behaved myself. They never said they were cops so I was quite entitled to defend myself from two blokes who I thought were trying to stitch me up. One of the cops in question was in court in uniform with a big rip across his nose so the evidence of my crime was there for all to see.
‘The magistrate gave me a long hard look.
‘ “I don’t know,” he said. “I almost believe that you didn’t know the two constables were police but I’ve got to give you three months for disorderly conduct, fighting in a public place and giving a false name.”
‘I asked about the big blond bloke who threw the first punch but the magistrate wasn’t interested. Rumour was that he’d left town with my almost girlfriend.
‘They gave me three months in Geraldton Gaol and I hated it. A few days after I got there I said to the superintendent, “Look, sir. How about a transfer to Fremantle to be with my mates. That’s not a big ask seeing how I’ve been framed!” He rolled his eyes and looked at me.
‘ “Three months isn’t long enough to warrant all the paper work so you’re staying at Geraldton.”
‘ “I’m not happy!” I told him. “I’m going to piss off.”
‘He glared at me and said, “You mean you’re going to escape?”
‘ “Bloody oath!” I replied.
‘He laughed and said, “In that case I’ll make it easy for you.” He drove me eight miles out of town to where they were building a new gaol. All that was there were lots of pegs in the ground and string lines. He gave me some bottles of water with a couple of sandwiches. As he left he said, “See that string line around the outside? I want a two-yard strip cleared of stones on both sides the whole way around.”
‘I grinned at him. “You don’t really expect me to be here when you come back?”
‘ “Well that’s up to you,” he said, with a funny look on his face. “This area here is legally a prison even though there are no walls. If you’re not here when I come back you will have escaped from gaol and that will be another twelve months when we catch you. Here’s your big chance to go.”
‘He came back at five o’clock and I’d cleared about three hundred yards along the string line. We got on pretty well after that and I even got three days early release for good behaviour. That was a first!
‘When I did my time I went back to Broome to Angie and my daughter but the relationship had soured. While I’d been in boob she’d moved on. I decided it was time for me to move on as well so I headed for Darwin to start again. I was pretty thick but I was starting to realise that I was wasting a lot of my life being locked up. A fresh pasture was going to start with the turning over of my new leaf. Well … I had good intentions.’
‘Over to the left,’ Allan waved as we came into sight of the pot line. Roy had been engrossed in his story and wasn’t concentrating. With Allan in the boat I just sat up the front and watched in awe as the catch was sorted and trussed up in a blur of fingers amongst the lethal nippers. I didn’t mention how impressed I was because I feared Roy would make tying angry crabs part of my Top End education.
‘Going straight? I remember quite a few times when he tried it,’ Anne grinned as she threw some meat on the grill for lunch. ‘Many times he’d had good intentions to get a real job but his “dark side” always reared its ugly head. Remember back in the mid-50s when you were being harassed by the law in Adelaide?
You’d been hooning around on your motorbike with no licence, fighting and lots of other minor offences. You always endeared yourself to the police by saying things like, “ah, you screw our mother you pig!” and other niceties. Real toffy stuff, Roy. then you wonder why the police have no senses of humour!’
‘It wasn’t all the blues I had with the coppers that gave me the shits,’ Roy answered. ‘I enjoyed them. It was the bloody fines. They hurt and I hated them with a passion.
‘I remember the very first time I cleared out to start again,’ Roy said thoughtfully. ‘It was the end of 1955 when a mate of mine, Brian Bradshaw, got a job on Kangaroo Island and I decided to go as well. I’d heard that a change was as good as a holiday, so when we boarded the old Karatta at Port Adelaide I sniffed the salt air with excitement.
‘A lot of soldier settlers from the Second World War were clearing the land over there and one of the ways they could get a bit of cash was by harvesting yakka gum. Yakkas were everywhere and the gum was highly sought after in the process of making varnish.
‘We’d spread a tarp on the ground and drop a yakka onto it. Cutting the fronds back exposed all the sticky gum. The gum went into a container and you moved on to the next yakka and started the process again. It wasn’t much of a job out in the scrub, and the pay was lousy, so I soon got bored.
‘We eventually chucked it in and got a job with better pay on the edge of Kingscote. There were big heaps of gravel in a clearing and our job was to shovel tons of it up into trucks to be delivered around the island. There was no front-end loader – just a mob of us young bucks shovelling like hell. We were fit so it didn’t worry us very much but it wasn’t a long-term career.
‘Always on the lookout for ways of making a few extra bob, I soon spotted a few items I could heist and sell for a tidy profit. Free enterprise was alive and well but my plan needed a truck. I found just the vehicle I needed on the wharf in Kingscote. It was used to tow trolleys off the jetty. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t to know that the close-knit community of Kingscote was the ultimate Neighbourhood Watch. Everyone noticed anything out of place and especially some young stranger driving a well-known truck where he shouldn’t be. As a result of this I didn’t get very far before I got caught and ended up before the magistrate. A twenty-five pound fine for illegal use of a motor vehicle got me booted off the island. So much for my fresh start!
‘Thieving was taking over my life and I didn’t know why because I wasn’t brought up that way. While I was waiting to go to court on the island I had no money so I committed one of the two crimes in my life that I’m truly ashamed of. It showed what an idiot I’d become. We hadn’t eaten for a few days so we called into a house to cadge a feed. A lovely lady took us in and made us cups of coffee and a batch of scones. Her purse was on the table so I emptied it out when she wasn’t looking. I thought I was being smart at the time, but that was the lowest act I ever committed. I still think about it to this day.
‘The other low act was when I was on the run from the reformatory in Adelaide a few years later. I went to Bob Waite’s place at Port Noarlunga to ask him for a few quid. He was a great bloke who I used to go fishing with on my pushbike. He and his wife weren’t home so I broke in and went to the teapot where I knew they kept their money and stole a fiver. Bob would have given it to me without question but I went and stole from him instead of waiting for him to come home. That was another low act. I don’t know what was wrong with me! I was becoming a menace to myself and everybody who knew me.
‘Anyway, I hitchhiked to Darwin to start again – again. As usual my reputation hitchhiked faster and beat me there. As far as the coppers were concerned I was immediately Public Enemy Number One, Two and Three so they gave me grief from Day