Jacks and Jokers (6 page)

The drug raid, ordered by the relatively newly installed Cairns Police District Inspector Robert Gray, saw 34 male officers and two females storm the communes. They chopped down fruit trees, set fire to huts and terrorised the residents. Many of the hippies were handcuffed. Twelve were taken to Cooktown to face charges of drug possession and vagrancy. In the end, police and Narcotics agents retrieved a glass jar containing 120 Indian hemp seeds, and 120 small Indian hemp plants.

It wasn’t until Tuesday 31 August that a small story about the raid appeared in the
Courier-Mail
: HIPPIES WOKE TO BIG DRUG RAID.

‘Early on Sunday the commune of 34 people, including several children, arose to find their normally tranquil retreat swarming with police and Federal Narcotics agents.’ The story quoted a police spokesman saying there was some resistance as police began to search the huts, but no real violence.

In fact, the story had been broken earlier by Steve Gray, a Cairns correspondent for the alternative 4ZZ radio station, and word had gotten to the impressive young reporter Andrew Olle, a gun on the national television current affairs show,
This Day Tonight.
Olle immediately headed for Cedar Bay.

With a teacher’s strike dominating the headlines in Queensland, the hippie raid disappeared from the news until the evening of Tuesday 7 September, when Olle’s story was aired on the ABC. In an instant the Cedar Bay raid had gone national.

The next day, Queensland’s Opposition police spokesman and the member for Rockhampton, Keith Wright, raised in parliament the allegations of police brutality during the operation, stemming from the television report. He said police had used ‘storm-trooper’ tactics, and demanded an inquiry.

In addition he had seen photographic evidence that revealed huts had been deliberately torched and children’s clothes and food had been piled in a heap and ignited with kerosene. Wright added that water tanks had been ‘shot up’ by police.

The new Police Minister, Tom Newbery, had a different version of events, the truth behind the Olle report that he considered ‘one of the most blatantly biased pieces of so-called objective reporting I have ever seen’.

Newbery said police had seized not 120 small hemp plants, but a virtual crop worth $20,000 on the street. He described the northern Cedar Bay commune as a group of undesirables who lived in complete squalor – ‘the stench of excrement was overpowering and the rotting carcasses of two wild pigs lay near a sluggish creek which served as a water supply’.

Newbery added that many residents of the area were armed and fired shots at police when they fled into the jungle. ‘There will be no haven in North Queensland where people can disregard the law,’ thundered Newbery. ‘This obvious campaign to discredit police action only increases my own resolve and that of the Queensland Police Force to attack the drug problem with renewed dedication and vigour. I give my full support to the Queensland Police Force in their efforts to stamp out the presence of this evil in our society.’

Bill Hewitt, who was then the Liberal Party member for Chatsworth, never hid his distaste for Bjelke-Petersen. He had no problem with police carrying out drug investigations, but he couldn’t understand why ‘they had to be belted, why their homes were burned down’.

‘It was an excess use of authority by the police,’ Hewitt remembers. ‘I made a statement that the police conduct should be inquired into. That made it into the press.

‘At a joint party meeting I had no illusions. I knew I was going to get a bit of stick. Joh barely said a word when the subject of Cedar Bay was introduced. Then six or seven fellows, one after the other, stood up and did me over. It was brutal. I was a mess when I came out. I took it very badly.’

The demand for an official investigation into police behaviour grew louder, with members of the communes threatening to lay charges against police. Bjelke-Petersen said he did not personally order the raid. ‘The first I knew of it was when I read of it in the
Courier-Mail
,’ the Premier said.

Towards the middle of September, ALP Queensland Senator Jim Keeffe tabled in Federal Parliament photographs of the damage done by police to the communes during the raid. The political heat over Cedar Bay further intensified.

To nullify it, local newspapers in Brisbane, particularly the
Sunday Mail
, began running stories week after week about the dangers of drugs to society. In addition, a new method of rating senior police, introduced by Whitrod, was leaked to the press.

‘A new system under which it is claimed commissioned officers – ranked at inspector and above – are being secretly assessed by other commissioned officers has sparked off a bitter new row in the Police Force,’ it was reported.

The messages of the twin diversion from the Cedar Bay story were obvious – drugs were the bane of a moral, civilised society, and those associated with them were therefore immoral and a danger to the community; and the hapless Queensland Police Commissioner, Ray Whitrod, had lost control of his men.

(Lewis himself underwent two such ‘secret’ assessments around this time and emerged with almost perfect results. One described him as a ‘shrewd, intelligent thinker’, whose ‘potential should be used and stretched to the utmost while he is still a comparatively young man’. Another concluded: ‘Has capacity to carry higher ranks and acquit himself well in those ranks.’)

These media distractions, however, managed to halt the march of the story of the Cedar Bay fiasco.

In the middle of all this Whitrod suffered another serious blow from a different quarter. He had lost an ally in his minister, Max Hodges. Then one of his most trusted men and assistant commissioner, Norm Gulbransen, retired on 15 September.

By the end of September – a month after the scandal began – the Liberal Party state executive called for an inquiry into the police actions at Cedar Bay, as did the president of the Young Nationals state council, Peter Slipper. Bjelke-Petersen and his colleagues ignored the pleas.

Then came the bombshell: Janice Lambert and Michael Ballister, both victims of the Cedar Bay raid, filed complaints against police in Cairns.

On Friday 2 October Commissioner Whitrod declared he would decide the following Monday if he would order an investigation into the growing controversy. He was once again between a rock and a hard place – the raid had gone ahead on his watch, though it appeared to be an initiative directly out of Cairns and divorced from decision-making at headquarters in Brisbane.

Did Whitrod stay quiet and take responsibility for it? Or, as in the student protest incident at the William Jolly Bridge just weeks earlier, did he go forward and investigate the poor behaviour of his officers?

Whitrod took the latter option. He was also deliberately provoking the Premier. It would be a final test of Whitrod’s authority and that of his office in the face of Bjelke-Petersen. On the Monday of Whitrod’s decision – 5 October – state Cabinet was meeting in Cairns, and the Commissioner would be there coincidentally to open the new Cairns police station. A showdown loomed.

Bjelke-Petersen, to be expected, stood firm. He said the government would not abdicate its responsibilities by setting up inquiries. ‘Allegations are being thrown at our police force that they are guilty of violation of civil liberties. I reject the claim.’

The next day, in direct defiance of the Premier, Whitrod ordered that his top investigator, Don Becker with a junior officer, immediately travel to Cairns and directly question the complainants from Cedar Bay. They were due up north within 24 hours. It was a direct order in contravention of the Premier’s directive.

On Friday 29 October, Whitrod received Becker’s 403-page report and forwarded it to the Crown Law office.

The next Monday, 1 November, the new Police Minister Tom Newbery took the report, in his locked attaché case, into a Cabinet meeting.

The press speculated that the report was ‘hard-hitting’ and that at least two police were expected to be charged with arson as a result of its recommendations. In reality, four were to be charged, including Cairns inspector, Robert Gray.

In the midst of this drama, Lewis in Charleville had a phone call from somebody – was it the member for Merthyr Don Lane or the Premier’s Press Secretary Allen Callaghan? – that he was likely to be Gulbransen’s replacement as assistant commissioner.

His old mate Tony Murphy, in Longreach, drew up a typed list for Lewis to contemplate. It was a cheat sheet of who he could trust or not trust down at headquarters: Guests (Bischof); Friends (Sgts. Ron Redmond and Noel Dwyer, Ross Beer, Pat Glancy, Graham Leadbetter); Capable (Insps. Syd Atkinson and Brian Hayes, Sgt Graeme Parker); and Others (Whitrod, Bill Taylor, Jim Voigt, Arthur Pitts, Basil Hicks and Lorelle Saunders).

Lewis extended the ambit of those he couldn’t trust. He handwrote at the bottom of the list: ‘all present CIU [Crime Intelligence Unit]’.

The timing of Whitrod’s show of defiance was spectacularly bad. The Commissioner’s lie about the ‘kill sheets’ was fresh in Bjelke-Petersen’s mind, and now the police chief had the temerity to publicly snub his boss’s directive. In addition, Whitrod wanted to push four more police through the courts on serious charges, despite the string of failures prosecuted out of his Crime Intelligence Unit.

The last straw came a week after Whitrod received his hefty Cedar Bay report – Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert and his co-accused were acquitted after their epic Southport Betting Case corruption trial. Herbert, who had retired from the force medically unfit prior to the verdict, crowed to the press that the force was in need of an administrative ‘shake-up’.

Herbert said he was set to seek new employment. ‘It will be hard because I’m not trained for anything except police work,’ Herbert said. The Bagman had, indeed, been doing it tough in the limbo of his trial. Out of work, and in and out of court during a case that lasted almost two years, Herbert relied on the charity of his friends.

One was Lewis’s old mate Barry Maxwell, proprietor of the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street. Belfast manager Les Hounslow remembers Maxwell taking pity on the Herbert family. ‘I always drove Barry Maxwell around because he was always pissed, but I recall one day him saying he had a couple of boxes of food – meat and vegetables – that he had to go somewhere and drop off,’ says Hounslow. ‘We went to East Brisbane. It was a pretty low-class looking unit. We went in there and it was Jack Herbert and his wife and the kids. I think he was out of work, yeah. That’s why he got the food. I [also] saw Maxwell handing him over a wad of money.’

A Monster Comes Calling

Over at the University of Queensland campus in St Lucia, Lewis’s friend in academia, the criminologist Paul Wilson, was working in his office when he received a very curious visit from a man called Clarence Osborne.

Osborne, then in his late fifties, had been a chief court reporter in Brisbane before being transferred to Parliament House as a Hansard reporter. He was meticulous, exact, analytical and did not suffer fools gladly.

Osborne was so accomplished at shorthand that experts from the Pitman college in London contacted this diminutive public servant in Brisbane if they had a problem. He was, arguably in the opinion of his colleagues, one of the finest shorthand writers in the world. His obsessiveness not only applied to his professional work but to his hobbies. At one point he was a global expert on the breeding of budgerigars.

Malcolm McMillan, then chief of staff to leader of the Opposition, Tom Burns, remembers Osborne as an affable oddball.

‘Osborne was a short man with a very friendly, outgoing personality, more often than not with a big smile most of the time,’ McMillan recalls. ‘He used to wear a chain or a leather band around his neck which had something on it. I’m not sure, but it might have been an elephant. The quality which I vividly recall was that he always used to holiday in Thailand – all the time. He would share that with people, not conceal or hide it.’

Apart from travel, it transpired that Osborne had another more disturbing past-time. Since the mid-1950s he had engaged in sexual relations with over 2000 underage boys. In addition, he had kept meticulous files on each one – the majority of them children – including tape recordings (eight kilometres worth), explicit photographs and data on their genitals kept in an index card system.

A colleague of Osborne’s, who worked with him as a trainee in the early 1970s, recalls dealings he had with the public servant: ‘He used to take and develop his own photos – eight by tens – of the boys he went with. He would show these photographs around at work. I saw hundreds of them. There were even pictures of babies.

‘He was on about it every day in the office, about picking up hitchhikers and rooting them. He was a little muscular fellow, had plenty of money and was very clever.’

Osborne lived quietly in a single-level weatherboard house at 54 Eyre Street, Mount Gravatt. The southern fence line of the deep block fronted onto Orb Lane. Neighbours found the bachelor a bit eccentric but never had any trouble with him. In the backyard were two self-contained sheds with windows, as well as a garage down the side of the house. He owned a number of weights and other gym equipment and was often seen in the yard conducting health and fitness classes with young boys.

When Osborne travelled to the University of Queensland campus to see Dr Wilson on that day in 1976 however, he was an agitated man. He arrived at Wilson’s office door with a bag stuffed with paperwork and other documents.