You Find the Joys in Life

Reflecting on her life with Tom, Jude says they are in a good place now. ‘You find the joys in life’, she tells me. Teir kids have grown up good, respectful, and decent. Tey keep busy with hobbies and relish their time with their grandkids. Life has settled down and they don’t have the same struggles they used to. While Tom is settling into the peace and quiet of his 60s, Dennis, now in his 70s, is kept busy by a young family. Te struggle to provide for his kids as an older father leaves Dennis feeling strung out at times. But if anyone has the energy to keep it up, it is Dennis. He is still wily and fit; on any given day I could call to find him laboring, training boxers, or even breaking in horses. When I ask Tom and Dennis about the best thing in their life, they both answer without hesitation: family. ‘Having me own family, having me own wife and me kids ‘cause that’s what saved me. If not for them I wouldn’t be here, I know that’, Tom says. He wipes away tears as he remembers the happy times with Den and ‘the old mate Jimmy’. Dennis answers, ‘the family; the kids’. He asks me to acknowledge the people he has walked through life with ‘even if they’re not named in the book’. Dennis struggles to keep it together as he talks about the importance of Tom in his life: ‘One of the best things about my life is Tom. He’s me brother, he’s me best mate, everything to me’. Dennis insists he wouldn’t change anything about his life if he had the chance: ‘I think I would have walked the same road as I walked back then and I walk now’. For one thing, he has found Tom:

I had a good life, and then I look at things now, and I’ve got a better life now because of Tom. I’ve got Tom. I wouldn’t have

Tom if things would have been changed. You know what I mean?

I’m happy when I look back.

Tom has also found comfort in accepting that ‘you can’t change the past’: what’s done is done and you just have to learn to accept it. I don’t ever say get over it, because people never get over things, but you’ve just gotta move on with life ‘cause if you’re gonna worry about what happened five years ago or ten years ago or twenty years ago you don’t get anywhere. Coming to terms with this has helped Tom to let go of his aggression. Life doesn’t aggravate him like it used to; he has learnt to ‘just go with the flow’. I ask the brothers if they have any advice for their kids or grandkids to help them through the hard times. After a thoughtful pause Dennis says, ‘really, I don’t think there’s no advice you could give them, you’d have to work it out for yourself’. Tom agrees: ‘I think you just get through it. I think you just, I don’t know, there is something within ya’. After a moment he adds, ‘the only advice I would give: don’t back down and don’t let the bastards beat ya. If you’re gonna take a beating, take a beating. I always said there’s no shame in losing’. Teir kids finding out about their wild past doesn’t worry them. As Tom put it to his daughter: ‘I’m your dad, the person that you know now, not that fella in the book. He became your dad but he’s somebody else’. For Dennis, the lesson is in the story: ‘looking back on me life I can say, well I come out the other end. I’m still here; I’m still standing tall. I might not be tall but I’m still standing’.

Author bios

Tom Mofatt has written a memoir of the long road to finding family and a sequel of portraits of the characters he met along the way. Dennis Mofatt coaches the Sydney University Boxing Club. He still gets around lending a helping hand to anyone who needs it. Emma Mitchell is a researcher at Macquarie University and the University of Technology studying experiences of housing. She is the Secretary of the board of Outloud, a youth arts organisation in SouthWest Sydney.

Still Standing tells the life history of Tom and Dennis Mofatt, two brothers who were taken from their family by child welfare services and raised apart. Tey lived strangely parallel lives during a colourful period of Sydney history that drew them into the orbit of some of the city’s most notorious gangland criminals. Tom and Dennis were reunited as adults and forged a new purpose out of their commitment to family. Tis is their story of finding and reclaiming stolen identity.

Still Standing ofers a unique perspective of local history from the vantage point of two men who grew up in the underworld of Sydney’s Inner West in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s before eventually settling in South-West Sydney and the Central Coast. Teir story is testament to the maintenance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family and social ties that stretch across neighbouring local government areas and greater Sydney and extend to regional NSW and beyond.