to box and things like that and they’re people in their 40s and 50s and next minute you’re beltin’ them. You know the poor buggers have got no defense against ya. But he also saw it as a matter of survival, adding, ‘I don’t regret a lot of the other stuff because that would’ve happened to me’. That way of life ‘was just how it was’: Because goin’ back then, like Tom said, you had to stand up and be counted. If you never they would just walk over the top of you. It was just how it was growin’ up in them days. That was what made the brothers more alike than the rest of their siblings, according to Tom.
Life and legend Despite being separated by age and absence, Tom and Dennis both knew well the aggressive camaraderie and survival of the Sydney underworld. ‘I suppose I went through the same thing as Den, but only ten years later’, Tom told me. While Dennis had associated with high profile career criminals – the ‘who’s who of the underworld’, as he called them – Tom had looked up to them as heroes. ‘My generation grew up on all the stories of those blokes … we grew up on that legend’, Tom said. ‘It’s a strange way of putting it but they were sort of like our heroes, because of the lifestyle we were in’. These figures took on a legendary quality for Dennis, too, the further away from that life he moved. As Dennis got older he distanced himself from their criminal dealings but he paid careful attention to their rise and fall in the news. Whenever a name from his past resurfaced in the newspapers he would call me, keen to let me in on the hidden backstory. I could tell Tom and Dennis enjoyed telling me about their unruly former life. In our earlier interviews I nodded as if I knew who characters like Neddy Smith were. Later I often disappointed them by owning up to my ignorance. Tom and Dennis would shake their heads and say, ‘where have you been, Em!’ Sometimes they would
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