I would never walk away because I had this mentality, well you had to learn to be able to stand up for yourself otherwise you were in big trouble if you couldn’t. Winning or losing a fight didn’t matter as much as showing you wouldn’t give up. ‘I just always wanted to make sure that the bloke I just fought knew that I would never back down and the next time he was going to have a go at me, he might think twice’. His private motto was ‘never walk away from a fight’. That was how Tom met the lads in his gang. Louts from all over Sydney would converge on the pubs and youth centres to see bands like ACDC play before they were famous, often ending in brawls. At a pub in the city one night Tom recognised a bloke he’d seen around at these gigs. The bloke went out to the back lane to fight some fella – nothing unusual about that – but Tom noticed two others walk out behind them. ‘And I thought, these two blokes are gonna jump in here and they’re gonna three out this bloke’. The three of them were laying into him when Tom ran in and helped belt them back. Later that week Tom was at his regular milk bar opposite Central Station. He called it ‘Ma’s’, after its owner. Later he found out Dennis and Dadda ate there too and knew it as ‘the hole in the wall’. Narrow white booths lined the walls on either side of the entrance. A serving hatch in the very back exposed Ma in the kitchen. This time the bloke who’d been jumped at the pub was there with his gang. Tom overheard him say, ‘That’s the bloke I was telling you about’. He stood up in front of Tom, who thought there was about to be trouble. Instead the bloke reached out his hand to shake Tom’s and said, ‘that was a gutsy thing to do. Good on ya’. From that day if Tom wasn’t on his own he was with his gang of Sharps.
Fortune turns While Dennis was often nostalgic about his teenage years in Newtown, he also told stories of brutality. Roaming the street as a kid, he became familiar with police harassment. He described the police as ‘another lot of child bashers’:
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