Life and legend

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 stuf because that would’ve happened to me’. Tat 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. Tat 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’. Tese 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

talk about these individuals in a way that elevated their names to a class of person – ‘the Lenny McPhersons’, ‘the George Freemans’, ‘the Abo Henrys’ – walking the line between life and legend. Other times they would reflect earnestly on the things they’d seen and done. Tom talked about the Dodger as a completely diferent person. ‘It’s like there’s two of me’, he once told me. ‘I beat myself up still to this day. I hate him. If I could actually physically grab him I’d belt him’. We laughed at the ironic violence of this response and joked that the new Tom might find a gentler way to express himself. Finding family had changed him – not overnight, but gradually. Tom was serving a sentence in prison when his wife, Judy, visited with a letter from his adopted father. ‘Even though I sorta changed me life around a bit having met my wife I still dabbled in the criminal side of things, so I was in and out of jail for quite a few years in our early marriage’, he told me. Tis was just after Tom’s daughter was born. His adopted parents had visited to meet the baby and, after learning he was in prison, sent him a message. It read: ‘Your real name is Tomas Charles Mofatt. Your father is James and your mother is Kathleen. We think there’s a possibility that you have a brother’.