by Mark Dapin
When Human Resources were called ‘personnel management’ or, even better, ‘recruitment’, it was clear they were supposed to find staff for jobs. HR in publishing firms hardly ever do this, except at the administration level, but nonetheless it was growing. Why do Human Resources exist in companies where all the journalists and designers were hired by editors and art directors? It was obvious what happened at a training centre, but HR at ACP had a ‘learning centre’. What was supposed to go on there? I did not need learned staff. I was not looking for writers and designers imbued with the wisdom of the magi. I wanted trained people, who knew the difference between a colon and a semi-colon; a cleaned-up quote and a made-up quote; an invention and a cliché – but since companies started ‘learning’, they stopped training. There were no true cadetships at ACP anymore, no structured programs of tutelage. As one generation accepted the ‘Australianisation’ of overseas stories, their heirs simply made things up. A women’s magazine might quote ‘27-year-old Kara’, whose boyfriend slept with her best friend on their wedding night, then ‘24-year-old Rebeka’, whose fiancé did the same, and each of them may be figments of the writer’s repetitive imagination, aspects of her personality, caricatures of her friends, less real than the Penthouse Pets with their mixed parentage and their PhDs.
All over the world there was an intentional mystification of the straightforward processes of departments such as Marketing and HR, an attempt to cloak basic, common-sense commercial functions in the jargon of an academic discipline, so as to make their practitioners appear more ‘expert’ and therefore more valuable.
The best thing about pay offices was they were still called ‘pay offices’ – so it was clear they are supposed to pay people. Nonetheless, a misunderstanding about the nature of its role emerged. Pay offices throughout the publishing world appeared to believe that they created ‘pay’, which they then dispensed with glorious but discretionary largesse.
I wanted to storm their offices and yell, ‘You don’t pay these people! They pay you! You only exist because writers and designers make magazines that create profits that make secondary jobs for people like you!’
I did not, though, because that would have been Communist.
I was approached by somebody who worked for an advertising agency, who had heard I was unhappy with Sargent Rollins and asked if his firm could bid for the account. He offered me a free chance to brief them and see what they came up with. I visited their offices in Circular Quay, and they showed me a chart of all the Australian men’s magazines, and asked me where I thought Ralph sat in relation to the others, and where I wanted it to be. I said people regarded it as close to The Picture, but I would like it to share a market with Inside Sport. I explained too many people thought Ralph was a magazine about not doing the housework, and I wanted to lose the image of the readers as lazy, sexist slobs.
A few weeks later, I was called back to their offices at 5 pm. All the creatives opened twist-top beer bottles using the cuffs of their trousers, so as not to leave rust marks on their shirts. They unveiled a series of mock-ups for their projected advertising campaign, which was to change the perception of Ralph in the marketplace. The first was a picture of a filthy dinner plate covered in fat, feasting flies. The catchline was, ‘Washing up, Ralph style’. I could barely believe it, and they seemed hurt when I walked out.
I tried to keep my distance, to remember it did not matter. Over and again, I told myself, ‘Don’t get mad, it’s only a game.’ I regularly spoke with ridiculous people, and realised I should be marvelling at the infinite strangeness of it all, rather than balling my fists under the table and wishing them dead. I tried to divert my cancerous temper by starting a degree in the history of art, through Open Learning. I stared at paintings by Titian, mentally adding breastage, trimming thighs, and removing visible cellulite.
In early 1999, the Office of Film and Literature Classification censors contacted me to warn that I had almost overstepped their guidelines. There had been a complaint made against the February 1999 issue of Ralph, and it was settled in our favour by a vote of three to two. The censor invited me to his office to discuss the matter. The complaint was centred on a six-centimetre high photograph on the contents page, illustrating a story about porn stars, which showed an apparently naked man standing behind a woman dressed in a bra and high heels, who was bent over a couch. A large black circle bearing the page number and a caption obscured the male figure from the back of his knees to his buttocks, and the female’s buttocks and lower back.
The complaint was that the picture implied penetration, and the OFLC’s committee had taken a vote to determine whether there was actual penetration going on behind the black circle. I expressed my surprise that adults would choose to spend their time this way, and my disbelief that a member of the public would complain about something they imagined might be going on behind a black circle.
Confidentially, he told me, it was not a member of the public as such, but another publisher. I had to be careful, he said, because if the committee had voted for penetration, Ralph would have to be sold in a plastic bag.
‘If you put my magazine in a bag, I’ll put you in a bag,’ I countered, reasonably.
TEN In which I meet Chopper Read and
Claudia Schiffer, but the two of them don’t
get along, and I discover an English-speaking
people just like you or me
I tried not to write much at Ralph – it seemed like vanity publishing – but I had long wanted to meet Melbourne gangster Chopper Read, whose first and best book, Chopper from the Inside, was published in 1991. It purported to be the memoirs of a standover man and toecutter, who never hurt anybody, who was not a criminal, and had been ‘involved in 19 deaths inside and outside jail’. Since then, Read has backtracked considerably, but at the time it was an astounding claim to make, particularly by somebody who had never been charged with – or even suspected of – most of those crimes.
Read played the drunken grim reaper, dryly recounting the heads he had scythed in the course of his onerous-but-necessary duties, and laughing to keep from vomiting at the memories of the mutilated bodies he had left behind. He passed down observations allegedly distilled from a lifetime in the killing trade, such as, ‘Just as a point of interest, every man that I have shot or stabbed, who lived, looked up at me like a beaten puppy and asked, “Why?” Before a man dies, his last word always seems to be, “No.” Men from certain ethnic groups cry and scream and go to their deaths like screaming females, crying, “No, No, No.”’
The book was beloved by bikies and schoolies, soldiers and crime-fiction buffs, and mild-mannered postal workers with purple, murderous fantasies. It seemed to describe an Australia that nobody knew, a hidden, dangerous country where a nightclub fight might suddenly turn into a gun battle, and the big guy punching you in the head might bend over your face, suck out your eye and swallow it.
In Chopper from the Inside, Read wrote that former Painters and Dockers identity Billy ‘the Texan’ Longley was under his protection in Pentridge. In a later book, he revealed he had fallen out with Longley – who Read had described as ‘a second father . . . an uncle . . . my friend . . . my mentor’ – over this allegation. When I heard Longley had begun to speak to journalists, I sent Melbourne writer Andrew Block to find out about his problem with Read. Longley told a long, bloody story about the Painters and Dockers tearing themselves apart in Melbourne in the 1970s, and said Read did not look after him in jail: ‘I looked after myself inside, but that’s good copy for Chopper,’ he said. ‘It was [the publisher] who made Chopper a celebrity. John and Chopper have got a multimillion-dollar thing going.’
A couple of weeks after I ran the story, I got a six-page, handwritten note from Read, complete with his address and phone number, and Longley’s address and phone number, in case I should think he was an impostor. It was a black, funny letter that claimed Read had only mentioned Longley in his books on Longley’s request, that Longley had wanted to
write his own book, and Read had offered to ghost it for him, that Longley had always believed Read to be a millionaire – ‘which I’m not . . . however, my lawyers aren’t poor’ – and that Longley was angry with Read after having been asked by his father to repay ‘a small sum of money’. It ended with a Read flourish: ‘No, Billy is right, I’m wrong. Billy is alive today because he’s so tough, and I’m so bloody pissweak. I had better be damn careful what I say about such a dangerous fellow, or I might end up with a bullet in the back of my skull . . . Billy, I’m sorry you never made a million bucks out of that book you never wrote, and gee whiz, Bill, I hope this letter don’t get me killed. . .’
I rang Read and requested an interview for Ralph. He asked for $500 for his time, and I flew down to Tasmania to meet him.
He was with his mate, Shane Farmer, who owned Men’s Gallery, Hobart’s only lap-dancing club. We were about to go out for a beer when Farmer warned me, ‘Don’t let him drink too much. . . He changes.’
But Read insisted, ‘I’ve never shot anyone when I was drunk. It’s when I’m sober at five o’clock in the morning, knocking at your door, that you’ve got to worry.’
Like many retired killers, Read just wanted to be loved. He would like to be remembered for making people laugh, rather than for blowtorching their feet, stealing their money, shooting them in the face and burying them in unmarked graves. ‘I don’t think I’m a dark and sinister person,’ he said. ‘I think I’m a very comical person. I used to shoot people in the guts and say, “Gee! I bet that hurts!”’ He laughed.
Read laughed the most when he was talking about things that were not funny, like murder, torture and cutting up corpses. When he was being witty – which was a lot of the time – his voice was deadpan and flat, his timing as sharp as the icepick that had almost pierced his heart. I wanted to know why he admitted to so many murders.
‘I said I was “personally, in company or involved in the planning of” the deaths of nineteen people,’ he said (although the actual word he used was simply ‘involved’). ‘That means if you come to me and say, “How shall I knock off my mother-in-law?” and I say, “Throw an electric fan in her bath” and you go and do it, I’m involved in the planning. It doesn’t necessarily mean I threw the fan in the bath. It doesn’t necessarily mean I killed nineteen people. . .When you get down to it, it’s been a damned sight more than nineteen. I cut it down to a modest number.’
Read was trapped in the kind of commercial and emotional snare that only bites reformed villains. On the one tattooed hand, he needed the credibility of his death toll to sell his books. On the other, he would have liked to be thought of as a larrikin outlaw poet who was having a lend of everybody.
When I met Read, he was forty-four. He had done twenty-three years inside, ten of them in Pentridge’s maximum security H-division. He had been convicted of assaults, burglaries, armed robbery, malicious wounding and kidnapping – but never murder. He had faced the judges for one killing, the shooting of Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam outside Bojangles nightclub in St Kilda, which was ruled justifiable homicide on the grounds of self-defence. Nineteen deaths is a hefty claim to make for a man who has barely been on the streets for nineteen months of his adult life. As the books rolled out – there are now nine of them – their relation to fact became increasingly distant. Chopper 5 was subtitled Pulp Faction. Chopper 7 is a novel.
Once he started drinking – Melbourne Bitter from the bottle – Read quickly struck a rhythm: roughly, one, two, three, empty. He gulped it down like a man who had been locked away from beer for twenty-three years – which he had. He said he used to be a psychopath, but he was alright now. He insisted his prison war with elements of the Victorian Painters and Dockers was one of his happiest memories. ‘You spend so long in jail,’ he said, ‘a little trigger goes click in your head and you don’t care anymore . . . I thought, “This is my life – prison, get out of jail, shoot a few more, torture a few more, get a bit more money, come back to jail, do a bit more.” I had the advantage over everyone else: they hated jail. I thought it was wonderful – iron-barring people over the head every day of the week.’
Read threw back his head and laughed hysterically at the memory. Chrome dentures flashed in his mouth: he smashed his own teeth on the taps of a prison sink, so as to get into hospital. The false teeth are one expression of the way Read’s life has changed his body. When he lifted his shirt to show off his famously damaged torso, he traced a map of prison violence on his chest: ‘That’s where I got stabbed – eight-and-a-half-inch butcher’s knife, stabbed up here, icepick through the heart, razor . . . razor . . . I got razored here . . . razored down there . . .’ He twisted his neck around. ‘Icepick through the back . . . bullet-hole through the back.’
Most notoriously, Read had a mate saw off parts of his ears in prison, so as to get him out of his cell and into a mental hospital. The twisted navels where his ears once were look like rudimentary hearing holes, the kind fish might have had before they evolved into humans. He said he did not miss his ears – ‘Van Gogh did okay’ – but fate played him a malicious trick when his eyesight started to deteriorate. ‘I’ve got glasses at home,’ he said, ‘but I don’t wear them in public because I look like a silly bugger.’ Besides, he has insufficient ears to support the frames. ‘If I sit perfectly still, they’ll stay on,’ he said. ‘I can’t go bouncing around the street wearing glasses, cos they’ll keep dropping off.’
Read’s father lived in Launceston, his mother near the large Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Church in Kingston, Hobart. Read was raised an SDA. He said, ‘I spent fifteen years in the SDA church. My father used to be an Elder. Those people were complete brain-benders . . . I remember going to the church with my father on a Saturday morning, and all the blokes would open the boots of their cars and pull out their semi-automatic weapons and examine each other’s artillery, because they feared the Catholics were going to come and drive them into the hills, and all they’d be left with was a .303 and a tin of baked beans. They used to see the Pope as the head of the beast as revealed in Revelations. You get brought up with this attitude of “Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.” I just stuck with the ammunition.’
Farmer kept warning me to keep Read under control. Read said, ‘I have a problem with alcohol . . . There was an occasion when I went into Shane’s nightclub with a can of mace . . . He says I sprayed mace into his air-conditioning unit, and the whole nightclub had to stand out on the pavement, coughing and spluttering. I don’t remember any of this.’
‘It was you, Chopper,’ Farmer assured him.
‘I humbly apologise,’ said Read.
The previous year, Read’s drinking had wrecked the first episode of Libby Gorr’s live-to-air ABC TV series, McFeast Live. Read turned up pissed on set, and recited part of a poem about a drug dealer he was supposed to have killed: ‘Ziggy was a drug fixer/He got laid to rest with a Pink cement mixer.’ Read creased with laughter and added, ‘That was funny, too. It took us hours to get him in, the bastard. He kept climbing out.’
Hundreds of viewers complained. Read told me, ‘I have a few drinks at Hobart airport, a few drinks on the plane, a few drinks when I get to Tullamarine, a few drinks when I get back on the plane, a few drinks at Mascot. Then when I get to the McFeast show, they say, “You’re on in two hours time.” There’s a fridge over there.’ So I sit there in the green room knocking back Melbourne Bitter, white wine, every other drink they’ve got in there. It took two people to virtually carry me to the doorway. One had to forcibly remove the can of Melbourne Bitter from my hand. Poor old Lisbeth Gorr hasn’t the faintest idea that her next guest is as drunk as a skunk. I’ve just got out of jail. You don’t say, “You’re on in two hours time, wait by the fridge.”’
Four days later, about the same week as I appeared on The Midday Show, Kerri-Anne Kennerley cancelled a scheduled interview with Read, and filled her Midday slot with a quiet chat with talkback bigot Alan Jones. Jones was telling the nation a
bout his disgust at the ABC for running the Gorr-Read interview, when the Midday floor manager waved a handwritten sign saying Read had called up the show and wanted to speak. Jones offered Read another serve of his trademark moral outrage. Read replied, ‘People who throw stones better make sure they don’t live in glass houses, Alan . . . I never got arrested in a public toilet in London.’ Jones was stunned into a rare and blessed silence.
The call was ended, and Kennerley later described the episode as ‘one of the worst days of my professional life’ and said she was ‘genuinely surprised’ when Read called.
Read told me, ‘WIN TV, which is a subsidiary of Channel 9, invited me. They get me down to the green room in Hobart, give me the special number to ring up, invited on Alan Jones, there he is bagging the guts out of me, they tell me to ring. I ring, they hold up a sign saying, “Chopper on phone”. Well, you don’t just go to a public phone box and ring up Kerri-Anne Kennerley, and they suddenly put you on television . . .’
We drank steadily in the club and, in true Tasmanian style, the lap-dancers included Farmer’s wife and her sisters. Read showed no interest in the girls. While a dancer slipped out of her G-string, Read’s gaze was fixed firmly on the past. ‘We can sit here like a pack of imbeciles watching her wiggle her bum all night,’ he said. ‘In the seventies, we could fuck her.’
As Farmer had warned, Read slowly changed. He became more concerned with me than with the strippers. ‘Why don’t you ever smile?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
I guess I’m just a miserable bastard.
