Crossing paths

at the thieving pigeons that would make of with her jacks when she tossed them. Another brother, Jack, lived up the road. On Saturdays Dennis and Budda would drink and play cricket with Jack’s kelpie as slip fielder, until Budda would start drunkenly singing and Jack would send him packing. Dennis moved with the family to Alexandria and later Stanmore. He was there to welcome Harry and Lynn’s two children, Shane and Kim, to the extended family. ‘Tere are times I’m lying in bed and I’d give anything to be back with that family’, he once told me. Crossing paths

Each time Tom and Dennis retold memories of their youth in and around Newtown, one of them would wonder aloud how many times they’d crossed paths without knowing they were brothers. We stood outside the Marlborough hotel on Missenden Road one afternoon. It was the place where Tom and his Sharpie gang would often start their nights out. In the same pub his Dadda – a drinker in his day – would knock back schooners. Shirl’s place on Longdown street, where Dennis and Jimmy had hidden out to escape the welfare, was only a few blocks away. Nowadays the interior of the pub was unrecognisable to the brothers, with its polished wood paneling and sparkling fairy lights. A few doors down was the Campos cofee shop. It amused Dennis that the people queuing for their fancy cofee had no idea the kinds of sordid things that used to be housed there. His Dadda had been a stand-over for the brothel and sly grog joint housed in the narrow terraces. Standing in the doorway of a closed Italian restaurant, Dennis told me matter-of-factly, ‘I was sitting on this step when Dadda was shot’. He was only a small boy when it happened – the memory lingered from before the nightmare of the orphanage. Dennis pointed to the spot where his father had stood. Te story went like this:

I can remember when they shot Dadda, cause there used to be a sly grog place – gambling and all that. Well Dadda used to look after that. And Dugan and Mears, they were tryin’ to take over.

And I remember I was sittin’ not far from Dadda when they shot him. Darcy Dugan was an infamous crook that came to be known as ‘Houdini’ for his bold attempts to escape custody. Dennis pointed across the road to the corner of Missenden and Longdown Street: ‘I can remember Dugan and Mears they come from over there and shot Dadda in the leg’. When I asked if he survived Dennis assured me, ‘Oh yeah, it was just a warning shot’. Tere was no police investigation or charges ever laid. Tese things were best sorted inhouse and ‘half the coppers were just as bad’ anyway, so there was no use involving them. Tom would go on to know the man who shot his father when the two became friends in Maitland Gaol. Dugan counseled him to quit getting himself into trouble. ‘I remember he said, When you get out

(From lef) Lynn, Harry, and Dennis at Coogee Bay Hotel, March 1969. Photo courtesy of Lynn Fahey]

Dennis shows us where Dadda was standing on Missenden Road when Dugan shot him, January 2019

mate, just give it away, you don’t want to be doing this, you don’t want to be coming in and out of here’. Dennis laughed, ‘Of course, ‘cause he never told you what he had done to Dadda!’ Not that Dennis held a grudge; he knew and respected Dugan on the outside. Tom still didn’t know about his family, let alone the shooting, and wasn’t going by the name Mofatt at the time. Te brothers remained separated. Tey had a few more mishaps ahead of them before they’d come out the other end to find one another.