‘It may rearrange boundaries and lessen some anomalies in the process, but the root cause of the Queensland gerrymander is to be ignored … if they follow him [Bjelke-Petersen], the Liberals will make themselves partners in one of the shabbiest deals the State has known – and it has known a fair number.’
Burns drew comparisons to the state of democracy in Queensland with crazed dictator Idi Amin’s Uganda. In 1977, Time magazine described Amin as a ‘killer and clown, big-hearted buffoon and strutting martinet’.
Burns railed: ‘This legislation, without accompanying revision of the entire Electoral Districts Act, takes Queensland one step nearer to becoming a European Uganda. One could say an Oceanic Uganda – a white Uganda. In jest, the Premier recently likened himself to Idi Amin, a comparison which I fear is much closer than he would concede.’
Burns offered a withering character summation of Liberal leader and Treasurer Bill Knox, describing him as a ‘schoolboy obeying his headmaster’, and that ‘he comes quivering to the parliament with a National Party amendment for a National Party redistribution on National Party lines’.
The National Party’s ‘political gangsterism’, he went on, made a mockery of the Westminster-style of democratic government.
Not to be outdone, Kev Hooper, member for the seat of Archerfield, threw his weight into the debate. Following an interjection by Bob Katter, Hooper quipped: ‘The honourable member who just interjected is an expert in figures – but the only figures he is interested in are the ones that he finds available in the Diamond Drill and the World by Night [owned and run by the Bellinos in Fortitude Valley] restaurants.’
That day, as the three parties slugged it out into the evening, Commissioner Terence Lewis went to lunch with several dignitaries, including two knights of the realm – Sir David Muir, former Queensland Agent-General in London and Inaugural Chairman of the Queensland Cultural Centre Trust, and Sir Theodor Bray, former long-time editor of the Courier-Mail and founder of the newish Griffith University.
Bray was a fierce Royalist and an early admirer of Premier Bjelke-Petersen. He said in an interview in the early days of Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership: ‘Mr Bjelke-Petersen, is a man who believes in his own honesty. He believes in his own strength as a man who has made a success of business, he is a business farmer, a man for whom I have great respect and a man who can be quite tough in the party rooms. He has learnt the hard way …’
Lewis may have been oblivious to the accusations being hurled about the parliamentary chamber regarding the erosion of the Westminster system in Queensland, but he was, unwittingly or not, an unsung part of the debate.
Bjelke-Petersen had learned not just the hard way, as Sir Theodor had suggested, but well, specifically from the Springbok riots of 1971. Combining his leadership with the power of the police force was appealing to Queenslanders. And now the Premier had a police commissioner in place who would do his bidding.
Between 1 January 1977, and the day of the debate in the third week of March, Lewis had had contact with the Premier, or his personal staff, no less than 18 times, or roughly once every four days.
Lewis met with the leader of the Opposition, Tom Burns, just once in the same timeframe.
Learning to Work with Joh
From the moment of their frank and wide-ranging discussion together in the winter sun on the airstrip at Cunnamulla prior to Lewis becoming commissioner, Lewis held the Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in some form of awe.
While Lewis had no time for the vanquished commissioner Ray Whitrod, after straining under his leadership for years, he had an instant rapport with the church-going Joh.
For Lewis, the equation was simple – as Police Commissioner, he served the Premier with every ounce of his being.
‘I never had a cross word with him, and he never had one with me,’ Lewis says. ‘As I said he was always out and about, he used to either have Allen Callaghan with him or [private secretary] Stan Wilcox or whoever … he had my direct line and he’d ring you and say, “Oh, Joh here”.
‘Or frequently it would be Allen or Stan ringing and saying, “Look we’re up at somewhere … there are no major problems.” You know? He needed this or he needed that or he wanted a transfer. And you’d have a look at it and sometimes you could do it and sometimes you couldn’t. And you’d ring back and you’d get back to Joh … “Oh, sorry Premier”.
‘ “Oh, that’s a shame Terry,” he’d say. “Can’t do it? No. Oh well, thanks for trying”.
‘He wouldn’t say, you know, go and get nicked.’
Lewis’s working relationship with the Premier was also at times casual and always cordial. ‘Joh used to say, “Come and see me from time to time,” ’ remembers Lewis. ‘He’d say, “I get around the state and I’d like you to fill me in if there’s anything I should know.”
‘So I’d go and see him … every time I went to see Joh about anything, the next day or two I would see the Minister … so that I never, ever, ever went behind the Minister’s back.’
Lewis says his relationship with the political leader of the day, as far as he saw it, never compromised the doctrine of the separation of powers – the division of the institutions of government into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial, working interdependently.
‘No, that didn’t matter,’ says Lewis. ‘How do you not have it? [A strong relationship with government.] If you have a Premier or Minister they’re supposed to be the supreme power, okay?
‘You have to have a working relationship with your Minister and they can, as I understand it, say to you we’re going to give you another hundred men, the government wants you to put 50 of them, say, on traffic work, 50 in the country.
‘That’s not unreasonable I don’t think. They’re providing the resources. I would put an application in each year saying, we need this, we need that, we need them here and there – and normally they’d go along with that. But your Minister is entitled to have … he can sack you if he wants to.
‘You can’t tell the Premier or the Minister that you’re not going to take any notice of them.’
Lewis says Bjelke-Petersen’s greatest virtue was his singular focus on the job as leader. ‘He wasn’t interested in getting full of piss or backing it on race horses or chasing sheilas as some of them were,’ Lewis says. ‘And he devoted his energies to being the bloody Premier and I don’t know if anyone could do it now.
‘I can’t recall him ever having malice in what he did. He never rang me and said, “Look Joe Blow’s a shithouse who is … is there anything you can find on him?” I don’t think it would be in his nature to do that, I think he’d be more likely to tell the fellow to his face what he thought of him.’
If Lewis had found a father figure in former commissioner Frank Bischof during the 1950s and 1960s, he had another in the former Kingaroy peanut farmer.
Crossing the King
As escort services began cropping up throughout the city, the Vice Squad employed some creative tactics to nab girls and their pimps. One was to take a hotel room and order in a lady. Once she arrived the negotiation for sex would be made, the money paid, and the cash taken by her to her pimp waiting in a vehicle on the street. She would then return to acquit the contract and the police could make an arrest.
One evening, Detective Dennis Koch of the Vice Squad was employing that precise tactic in the city. He and another officer booked a hotel room and phoned an escort service for a girl. Koch’s partner, the ‘John’ or client, waited for the prostitute on this particular night while Koch hid in the closet.
‘She came in and we busted her,’ recalls Koch. ‘We went out to grab the pimp but by the time we got there he was gone.’
A short time later they tracked him down. It turned out it was ‘Graham’, the husband of Mary Anne Brifman, who had established her own prostitution service – Quality Escorts – following the suspect death of her mother, p
rostitute and madam Shirley Brifman, in 1972.
Graham seemed unconcerned when he was questioned by Koch and the other officer. ‘You can’t touch me,’ he said confidently. ‘Murphy will look after me.’
‘Who?’ the detective asked.
‘Tony Murphy.’
‘You mean Superintendent Murphy?’
‘Yeah,’ Graham said.
‘Why would he look after an arsehole like you?’ asked the detective.
‘I’ve got letters from Shirley Brifman,’ he said. ‘She was my mother-in-law.’
He told the stunned officers he could prove through letters – supposedly authored by Murphy – that Brifman had been ‘scared’ of Murphy prior to her death, and that ‘Murphy was out to kill her’. Brifman, on her death in March 1972, was just weeks away from appearing in court as chief witness against Tony Murphy, who had been charged with perjury following allegations Brifman had made on This Day Tonight the year before.
Koch, acting by the book, felt compelled to contact Murphy and let him know about Graham’s allegations. He had had some minor disagreements with Murphy over past investigations and wanted to keep the peace with his boss.
‘This guy says he has all these Brifman letters,’ Koch told Murphy. ‘I’m just letting you know.’
Murphy had an immediate solution. He sent over to young Koch a sawn-off .22 rifle with instructions that Graham be loaded up and charged with possession of a concealable firearm. It was an age-old Murphy method – the planting of a ‘present’ on defendants the police believed were good for the charge but may legally slip the net. Graham was also charged with living off the earnings of prostitution.
When the case got to court, Koch was stunned to see that Graham was represented by one of the state’s finest lawyers. ‘I was surprised to see [the lawyer] in the court,’ Koch says. ‘I was accused of trying to frame Murphy with the planting of the gun. They accused me of the plant.’
It was alleged in court that the suspect gun supposedly belonging to Graham was on the books of the Queensland Police Force. Koch felt he was being framed. The case against Graham was thrown out.
‘My name was mud,’ says Koch, who had a reputation as a straight-shooter. ‘Murphy was great at getting things on fellows and keeping them in reserve. [The defendant] walked out of there. I’m surprised Murphy didn’t have him bumped off. I was told that the attack on me was to get me out of the way.
‘Shortly after that I was shuffling papers over at the Fraud Squad.’ Not long after, Koch was transferred to western Queensland.
Koch remains in awe at the power and sway of Tony Murphy during his prime. ‘Murphy was the head honcho,’ Koch recalls. ‘He had his fingers in everything. Lewis was at his beck and call – a puppet. Murphy wouldn’t dirty his hands. He was too smart for any of those other fellows. All of his instructions, they were all verbal. Nothing was in writing – he was intimidating. He was like a “Godfather”.’
The Premature Death of Bob Walker
On the morning of 18 April 1977, Mrs Elaine Walker, having seen her two sons and daughter off to school earlier in the day, made her way up the hill to the wooden house on the 33-acre property she shared with her husband, Bob Walker, at Upper Brookfield, west of the Brisbane CBD.
The bushy property at 435 Upper Brookfield Road – with less than two acres cleared for the house and gardens – had been in the Walker family since the 1920s. Recently, however, Elaine had been living with the children in a caravan some distance from the house. Bob had been drinking heavily – mainly beer – and was violent when he was drunk. She was loyal to her troubled husband, but things had become untenable.
That day, Elaine entered the house and found her husband dead in bed. A post-mortem revealed he had suffered an enlarged heart and the ravages of alcoholism. Robert Thomas Walker was just 48.
Walker had been born in Brisbane and attended Brisbane State High. His father Thomas was a policeman, and while Bob flirted with the idea of settling in Melbourne and training to be a professional dancer, he remained in Brisbane and also entered the force in 1950, just one year after a young Terry Lewis.
In the late 1950s he was working in the Special Branch and made the acquaintance of a teenage Greg Early. ‘I always got on well with him but he was a bit different,’ Early recalls. ‘From recollection he had a rough crew cut. He lived at Upper Brookfield on, I think, acreage. He ran a Morris sedan into the ground and left it there and then bought from me an Austin A40 for $100.’
Walker had a stable career and after a transfer to Townsville with the Special Branch in the early 1960s he had settled back in Brisbane by 1964 – the epitome of a happy family man – enjoying holidays at the beach with Elaine and the children, Tony, Fiona and later young Robert.
In the early 1970s – upon the arrival of Commissioner Ray Whitrod – Walker entered the Licensing Branch. There he came into contact with Jack Herbert and Tony Murphy. An early supporter of Whitrod’s reform, Walker was excited by the new boss’s commitment to further education. He began studying a part-time course at the University of Queensland.
At work, Walker quickly became aware of the incessant undermining of Whitrod. He learned that when Whitrod took the top job certain police had conducted a thorough search of his background looking for any skerrick of dirt they could use against him. They found nothing.
If they’d gone all the way back to Whitrod’s childhood in Adelaide they would have sourced the man’s dedication to honesty and truth. As a boy, Whitrod had once hopped the fence at a local Australian Rules game without paying admission. Later, wracked with guilt, he had returned to the grounds and paid up. He vowed from that moment to lead a clean life.
As for Walker, he was acutely aware of the reputation of the Rat Pack – Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan – and their pursuit to unseat the Commissioner. Near the end of the notorious Springboks tour, the Queensland Police Union held a meeting at Festival Hall in Albert Street, the city, on the night of Thursday 29 July. More than 400 police, including Walker and Whitrod supporter Basil Hicks, attended. The meeting was closed to the press.
Almost immediately, a ‘no confidence’ motion in Whitrod and his handling of the Springboks state of emergency was put to the floor. The union, led by Ron Edington at the time, later declared that the motion had been carried by at least six to four in favour. It also claimed this was followed by a unanimous vote of confidence in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. (The Premier, days earlier, had promised extra recreation leave for any officers involved in the Springboks fracas.)
At the meeting, which in itself threatened to become riotous, Walker tried to speak against the motion of no confidence in Whitrod. He was told that enough speakers had already been heard.
Lewis remembers: ‘They had a mass meeting down at the bloody Festival Hall … of no confidence in him [Whitrod]. I think it was Bob Walker was probably the only fellow that walked over the other side and wouldn’t support it … he was quite odd.’
Outside the hall at the end of the meeting, an indignant Detective Sergeant Walker spoke to a reporter from the Courier-Mail. He claimed that when the vote was taken a large number of police remained in their seats and ‘no attempt was made’ to check their attitude to the vote. Walker’s opinions were quoted in the newspaper the following morning.
A week later, a still-simmering Walker attended a meeting of the University of Queensland Strike Committee over the Springboks issue and violence against students and civilians. More than 300 people were in attendance, including the press. Walker took to the stage and detailed that the previous week’s Police Union meeting had been held in a ‘state of anarchy’, and that any officers opposing the motion against Whitrod had been shouted down by an angry mob.
‘To this day, no one really knows whether the motion was carried or not,’ Walker told the meeting. He said the real issue at hand was conflict between a ‘larrikin’ element in the fo
rce and the office of the Commissioner. ‘And we cannot have our public image ruined by larrikinism.’
Walker dared to say in public that the force had never been properly trained, which was why Whitrod had been brought in. He added there was no doubt police brutality had been used during the Springboks riots, and questioned its justification. More dangerously, he said the ‘doors in the corridors of power’ within the police force had been closed to ‘a certain clique of policemen’ since Whitrod’s arrival. It was an oblique, but powerful, reference to the Rat Pack.
Union president, Detective Sergeant Edington, immediately hit back. ‘The union feels this matter has been completely resolved and it is distressing to think that Mr Walker is attempting to continue a slanging match for his personal satisfaction to the detriment of the good name of the Queensland Police Force.’
From that moment, Walker was a marked man.
Edington clearly remembers the issue: ‘There was a fellow named Bob Walker, he used to be in the Special Squad [Branch] going around looking for Communists and things like that, and Bob was a bit eccentric. But Bob went out to the university and he addressed a team of bloody university students and he told them that the police were corrupt and that the police used to bash people to get confessions out of them. And anyway, somehow or other Whitrod got onto it and … he took advantage of it to … nominate them [Lewis, Hallahan and Murphy] as being corrupt and he called them the Rat Pack.’
Murphy was apoplectic. He demanded Walker be expelled from the union.
At this time son Robert Walker, who was only six years old when his dad took his dangerous stand, had fond recollections of his father leading up to mid-1971. ‘I have really good childhood memories,’ he says. ‘He would take me into the surf when we went to the beach. I remember catching my first wave. I remember a good man. Then it turned bad. It all just imploded.’
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