Fortune turns

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’. Tat 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. Te 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’. Te 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. Tis time the bloke who’d been jumped at the pub was there with his gang. Tom overheard him say, ‘Tat’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.

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’:

Tey used to go around, anything that would happen, they would go and round the kids up, and they’d set you up saying you done this, you done that, and there was no saying you never.

Tere was no saying you never, you just had to accept it. Going back then, I can remember the beatings we got of them. Dennis said sometimes the coppers would give you a choice: either point the finger at someone else or they’ll pin it on you. ‘Well you probably wouldn’t see them [the coppers] for a while, but eventually they would sneak up behind you and – bang – they would wail into you’. Dennis was barely 18 years old when he was falsely charged with robbery. One night the police picked him up and assaulted him until he confessed to the trumped-up charges. Tey brought in a witness and, pointing to Dennis, said, ‘Is that him there?’ Dennis was relieved when the bloke looked straight at him and answered ‘No’. But the detective pulled the witness aside and had words in his ear. He asked the question again – ‘is that him there?’ – and the bloke said, ‘yeah, that’s him’. Dennis said they beat him until he signed a statement and that was it. ‘You know that cost me, caused me to go in jail, for nothing, for three and a half years, for nothing, for nothing!’ Dennis retold this story often, each time bitterly listing the names of the three detectives who stitched him up. Years later he consulted a solicitor about getting justice, but he was told it would be expensive and hard to prove. Everyone back in the 60s was railroaded, he was told. After his release Dennis graduated to the violent stand-over business. His friend, Billy, arranged for Dennis, Horse, Eric, Bobby, Big Allen, and Billy’s brother, Boots, to be in the right place at the right time. For a fee they defended certain Greek gaming clubs from rival gangs demanding control or protection money.

Like, we had a racket going in Newtown, with the Greek clubs, because the Greek clubs were all just coming alive. After pub

closing hours, you’d go to the Greek club, you could eat, you could drink, dance and you’d gamble, you’d do what you want. Cofee lounges and social clubs operating as illegal gambling joints dotted the inner west, housing SP betting and unlicensed poker machines. Dennis described one of the biggest clubs in the area, ‘Paul’s’, on the corner of King and Church Street: ‘It was a dark place, because they had the topless dancers and the topless waiters, and a brothel out in one room’. Dennis and his crew would hang around the club, eating, drinking, and waiting for trouble to arrive. Sometimes violence broke out; tables were upended, windows smashed, blokes belted. Reflecting on Tom’s stories of reckless violence, Dennis said it was much the same around the clubs: ‘Beltin’ this bloke, beltin’ that bloke. And when I say beltin’, it was an iron bar, beatin’ this bloke with a baseball bat’. If someone owed the club owner a debt, Dennis and his boys would get him the money. ‘I suppose in a way, like if you look at it that way, we were demanding protection money too’, Dennis conceded. But instead of demanding the money they’d say, ‘If you ever have any trouble, we’re here’. Tey’d send some boys to turn the place upside down if things got too quiet so the clubs didn’t get too secure. Tey made sure their services remained in demand and the perks kept coming. ‘You’d go to the Greek club, sit up all night. Drink for nothin’. Eat for nothin’. Wouldn’t have to pay a penny’. Dennis did well for himself in his 20s and early 30s, although he admitted that the good money he pocketed was lost just as quickly on gambling. ‘I used to love gamblin […] I’d borrow $1000 and go straight out on the trots. Sometimes it got up, sometimes it never’. In his early 30s he married and became a father, but things started to unravel after he and his wife broke up. By his late 30s he was homeless – another thing he shared with Tom:

It’s been the same path. Like I can remember being homeless. I used to squat in a place down in McDonaldtown, me and Regie

Coreless. And then we got thrown out of there and moved into a place on Raper Street and squatted there for a while. Dennis took Tom and I to an undercover carpark at the University of Sydney and showed us where he’d slept behind the concrete stairs for a time. He would get a good feed by rummaging in the bins at the back of restaurants. Tis was familiar to Tom: ‘Tey used to throw some good tucker out. It was amazing what you could get out of a garbage bin’. ‘Sometimes I’d get a whole baked dinner!’ Dennis added, laughing as he joked about lighting a couple of candles for a romantic dinner for one. Dennis’s fortune turned again when an old friend, Harry, ofered him some work and a place to sleep for the night. Dennis had roamed around with Harry and his wife, Lynn, in his late teens and early 20s. Tey had all grown up together. ‘We were great friends’, he told me. Dennis had taken me to visit Lynn during one of our walking tours of Newtown, where she lived in a small terrace on the same street where she grew up. A photo of Lynn, Harry, and Dennis at the Coogee Bay Hotel sat on her dresser. Fresh-faced and fifty years younger, Lynn’s cigarette rested idly between her fingers, Harry’s crisp white shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and Dennis wore a tie around his neck and a band-aid across his brow – evidence of a brawl from the night before. Dennis had been up at the Milton Hotel when Harry asked him if he wanted some work the next day. Dennis was used to picking up work here and there and said ‘alright’. At first Harry told him to meet back there early the next morning, but he quickly changed his mind:

He said, No come down to my place, you can sleep at my place for the night. Ten years later I was still sleepin’ there. A really good family and I lived with them for years. Dennis’s work with Harry made his shadier dealings less necessary but he didn’t drop them completely. He could always do with an extra dollar after all.

It was common for working class houses to be crowded and home to multiple generations of family members back in those days. Harry and Lynn shared their two-bedroom house on O’Connell Street with Mumma, Gurdy, Budda (Brian) and Keithy – Harry’s mum, aunt, and brothers. Dennis and Budda shared the back room. Gurdy, who had an intellectual disability, would pull Dennis’s ears to get his attention. She’d pass the day playing Jacks in the back-yard, yelling

Dennis shows us where he used to sleep rough in a Sydney University carpark, April 2019