Enforcer (2 page)

Joey was stationed at Barringun, north of Bourke on the New South Wales–Queensland border, and my grandmother used to tell me stories of waking up of a morning to camels in the vegetable patch. My grandfather would be gone for weeks at a time visiting the outlying properties and small settlements, accompanied by his old greyhound, Jack.

Joey only left the force because he got a boil on the back of his neck from the starched collars they used to wear in those days. The boil ended up going through his system and became a big carbuncle in his groin. They had to fly him from Barringun to Bourke hospital, but when they arrived they were told there’d been a fire and there was no anaesthetic available. The doctors reckoned that Joey had gone septic and if they didn’t cut this carbuncle out he’d die. Granny said they brought in all the available men to hold him down and Joey, pumped full of sleeping tablets but no pain relief, just held on to the side of the bed while they cut this thing out. Unfortunately they cut a tendon too, so he ended up with his right leg shorter than his left. He was only three months short of retirement, but because he couldn’t do those three months, the coppers never gave him the pension.

Joey was tough but my dad, George Campbell, was the toughest bloke I’ve ever known. He was six foot two inches and sixteen stone, and always into blues. He began his working life as a steelworker, and went on to have a trucking business; at one stage he owned three semitrailers. The funny thing, though, was that he was also a semi-pro tennis player in the Newcastle league. So Friday nights he’d be down the pub punching on, then come Saturday afternoon he’d be out running round in his little white shorts. That used to crack me up.

He spent a lot of time at the pub but he didn’t really drink. He’d go there to meet his mates and play pool. His only indulgence was one shot glass of Johnnie Walker and a big cigar at night. That was it.

Dad was right into the Scottish ancestry of our family.

He traced our lineage to the Campbells of Cawdor and the Campbells of Argyll. He collected books and clippings about it all. He had this one book about the night the Campbells attacked the McDonalds. The Campbells apparently waited until the McDonalds had this shindig and were all drunk, then went and slit all the dogs’ throats to silence their barking. The Campbells slipped into the castle and wiped out every McDonald there. The ensuing feud lasted for centuries. The first Campbell to be made a knight was called Colin Campbell, and that’s why, when I was born, Dad named me Colin.

I was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, at the Mater Hospital on 18 July 1946. I don’t know if I still hold the record but when I was born I was twenty-seven inches long and weighed nine pounds thirteen ounces. Mum said that was a big baby.

My mum, Phyllis, was a housewife, and one of the quietest, gentlest women you could meet. But she was probably one of the toughest women you’d ever want to meet too. She had to put up with my dad, and she had to put up with fourteen kids. There was me, then Wheels, and then another boy, Steven, but he only lived for two days. Mum said he was what they called a blue baby; his lungs didn’t work. Then she had Bull, and the girls, then Shadow, Snake, Wack and Christopher.

My old man was gone a fair bit, on the road, but we were all pretty good for Mum because we knew what would happen when Dad got home if we’d been playing up. He used to have the razor strop – the leather strap you’d sharpen the old cutthroat razors on – and if you did something wrong it was into the bathroom, bend over the bath, and
whack
,
whack
,
whack
across the arse. He was real hard on me in the beginning. If he was in a bad mood, or something was broken or disappeared and no one owned up to it, being the eldest, I’d cop it. I’d know who did it and I’d be sitting there waiting for them to own up, but three-quarters of the time they never did. So I’d wait and even up with them later. If it was one of the girls I might let it go, but if it was one of my brothers I usually gave them a clip under the ear.

Mum was the opposite to the old man. She never raised a hand to one of us. She was only five foot two but she had this strong will about her. If my dad really went off the deep end and was going to clobber me she’d step in front and say, ‘No, you’re not going to touch him.’ And my old man would turn round and walk off, swearing under his breath.

From the time I was about three years old my grandfather taught me to box. I even had the honour as a young fella of sparring with the legendary Dave Sands, who was a mate of my dad’s and used to train at Henneberry’s gym in Newcastle. He was middleweight champion of Australia and, along with Les Darcy, probably the best boxer ever to come out of this country, yet when I’d go in there with my dad he’d spend an hour with me giving me tips on how to box. He used to float around like Sugar Ray Robinson. He had this natural ability where everything seemed to come easy to him. Fred Henneberry – himself a former Australian middleweight champion – and Dave were always trying to talk my old man into becoming a pro fighter. He never did, but he knew all these blokes that were around the boxing – Dave and Kid Griffo, and the famous wrestler Strangler Lewis – and I was lucky enough to learn a lot off them.

The first time I backed up my old man in a fight I was twelve years old. A car ran us off the road, four blokes got out, and Dad was into them. One of them had him in a choke hold and I was thinking, Oh shit, what can I do? There was a big screwdriver on the floor of the car so I grabbed it and stabbed this bloke in the arse. Put it in about an inch. He let go of my old man and was chasing me around the car, trying to pull this screwdriver out. From then on the old man would take me with him if he was going to get into a fight and he might be outnumbered. He had these two vicious bull terriers and it was my job to hold the dogs. Dad would go into the pub and offer a bloke out the front. The bloke would come out with his mates and I’d be standing there with these dogs foaming at the mouth. My old man would say to the bloke, ‘Righto, it’s me and you or I turn the dogs loose.’ If Dad was winning, I held them. If someone started to get over the top of him I turned them loose. That evened up the fight.

He never went into a pub wanting to get into a fight but he had a real fiery temper. If someone said something about him or gave him a dirty look – it only had to be the smallest thing – that was it. He was a real proud bloke and if he thought he’d been insulted, he wanted to even up. But he got into most of his fights because he’d always stick up for his mates. He used to say to me, ‘Don’t do what I do. You’ll always be in blues. I know half me mates are cockheads, but if I’m with them, I’ve got to help ’em out.’ Blokes used to take advantage of that. They knew my old man would back them up.

Along with the boxing, I was the captain of the rugby league team all through primary school, and I owned a couple of horses. I spent a fair bit of time hanging around Tracey’s riding school up at Merewether. A lot of sheilas hung around Tracey’s with their own horses and that’s where I met a chick called Diane. She was nineteen and I was thirteen, but at thirteen I was five foot eleven. We were out at a place called the Blue Lagoon and she put it on me. I thought all my Christmases had come at once. It was all over in about sixty seconds, but from then on I found that having a horse helped you get the sheilas. It was the same with bikes.

My first encounter with a Harley was when my mate Trevor and I found an old WLA in the back of his dad’s plumbing warehouse. The WLA was a military model Harley-Davidson produced around World War II. We tinkered with it until we got it going, then we’d ride around in paddocks and stormwater channels at the back of Trevor’s place. We kept it hidden in Trevor’s shed. If Dad had found out about it he’d have killed me. His best mate had been killed on a WLA so he hated bikes.

There was a motorcycle club in Newcastle called the Spot Boys and we used to see fifteen of these blokes coming down the main street of Hamilton, an inner-city suburb, on their Triumphs and Beezers. It was just a mad feeling seeing them riding together. I liked the way people all looked at them whenever they rode by. They had the leather jackets with their patch painted on the back, the flying scarves and leather chaps. Slicked-back rock’n’roll hair. Just like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
. I thought, Oh shit, don’t that look good.

They used to go to the pub across from the fun parlour where we’d hang out, and I got to know one of the blokes, Four Fingers Jack. I was telling him about the old WLA and he said, ‘So where is it?’ I told him it was at Trevor’s, and he put me on the back of his Triumph to ride over there. Well that was it. Once I was on the back of his Triumph I knew: this was what I wanted to be.

At the time, though, I was still at the Marist Brothers’ high school in Hamilton, vice-captain of the football team, focused on my horses and the boxing. I took one of my mares, an ex-riding school horse called Apache, to the Royal Newcastle Show. She was that quiet you could slide down her back, crawl under her legs and lie beneath her. She was a top horse and won first prize in the quietest horse category. Later at the show, we came across a boxing tent with a little thick-set bloke in a bowler hat, spruiking out the front, banging a drum. My old man wanted me to have a go, but I was only fourteen so I wasn’t keen. Dad wasn’t going to take no for an answer, though, and there was a young fighter in the troupe who only looked about twenty, so I decided I might have a chance against him.

You had to go three rounds, but in the second round I clocked this bloke, he went down on his bum and didn’t want to get back up. I won a quid.

I went through to about third form at the Marist Brothers’. I was in woodwork class one day and everyone hated doing woodwork because the teacher was so creepy and strict. This day I put my plane down the wrong way and he decided to give me six with the cane.

I put my hands out to get six and he said, ‘No, turn them over the other way.’ So I copped six across the knuckles. I must have said something under my breath as I was walking away, because he said, ‘Campbell, back here.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re getting another six,’ he said.

‘Like fuck I am. You can go and get rooted.’ And I walked out.

Mum got the phone call so by the time I’d walked home the old man knew. Soon as I walked in the door I could see I was going to cop it.

‘Hold on! Hold on!’ I said. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘You got ten seconds to tell me why not,’ he said.

I told him the story.

‘Really?’

He went down to the school, fronted the woodwork teacher and flattened him.

That was the end of school for me. After that I helped Mum around the house and went along on jobs with the old man. He continued training me with the boxing and introduced me to knife fighting. Taught me how to hold a knife properly, how to block, how to slash with a blade rather than stab. He always drummed into me, ‘You never want to kill someone in a knife fight. If you can get out of it, do, otherwise you’ll end up locked up for life.’ So he showed me the best spots to target to disable a person (across the bicep and, if you could get down to it, the Achilles tendon), and the places to avoid so as not to kill them (the jugular and the femoral artery in the leg). I don’t know where Dad learnt all that stuff. Just growing up I suppose. He also showed me how the corner of the old matchboxes were so sharp that if you slashed down hard at the right angle it was like using a razor. The coppers couldn’t figure out for a long time how all these people with such bad wounds were getting them.

Not long after I quit school, we left the Newcastle area and moved around a bit. We went to Toukley, Ettalong and Umina on the New South Wales central coast, then to North Narrabeen, Narrabeen and Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches. I was fifteen when I got work on a fishing boat, then as an offsider to a milko, but the jobs never lasted long because we were always moving. I don’t know why we shifted around so much. Dad never told us. But we never stayed anywhere more than a few months. Next thing we kids knew we’d be packing up all the bunk beds and moving again.

We ended up down in Victoria, at a big guesthouse on ten acres called Sassafras Lodge. It had six bungalows out the back, and ten or twelve bedrooms in the main house. Seeing as my old man wasn’t using it as a guesthouse, I took one of the guest rooms down the far end of the house.

Even though I was seventeen by this stage, my old man used to insist I be home by eleven pm. That was his rule. So I’d dutifully return by eleven, but then I’d go down to my room, where I had this German shepherd called Zig. He was the biggest shepherd you’ve ever seen and he was trained so that if anyone came near me he’d rip them to pieces. I would put Zig on watch, and the old man knew he couldn’t come into the room or the dog would get him. Hence he didn’t check on me. I’d go out the window and back down to my mate’s. We’d drive around in someone’s car or get the bikes and go for a ride.

One night we were driving through Box Hill in my mate Johnny Nankervis’s FJ when we were attacked by about eight cars. Johnny did a U-ey and headed for home, but four cars kept up the chase and ran us off the road. As soon as the FJ went into the bank on the side of the road, Johnny and my other mates all hit the toe and I was left there to punch on by myself. I grabbed this great hunk of wood that was lying on the side of the road and laid into everyone that came near me.

After a while they chucked it in and pissed off in their cars. I had to hitch home, which meant I didn’t get back until about two in the morning. I was sneaking in the back door when the old man piped up, ‘Is that you?’