by Ray Whitrod
10
Retracing our steps
(1976-1993)
I had no fresh appointment to go to when I decided to leave the Queensland Police Force, but within two days I had been offered academic posts at La Trobe and at the Australian National University. We decided upon Canberra because we had a married daughter living there, and many old friends. Mavis quickly sold our nice old home at St Lucia to a friend of ours who had admired it for some time. We arranged with a well-known firm of removalists for our furniture to be transported to Canberra — this included my filing cabinets and all the documents inside them. When the removalists’ van was a week overdue in Canberra I began to phone the company asking about our furniture. After three weeks, I was told that everything had been burnt. On its way to Canberra, the truck had hit the side of a bridge and burst into flames. This was distressing enough, but I had strong doubts that the fire was accidental. I thought of having the matter investigated, but this would have involved using the Queensland police, now under the control of Commissioner Terry Lewis. I hadn’t the heart to even try.
In Canberra I taught criminology to law students and lectured on deviant behaviour to sociology students in George Zubrzycki’s department. I remember my first academic staff meeting. Various lecturers wandered into the room and plonked themselves down at the table. When George came in last, I stood up. Everyone looked at me in surprise, as if I were about to say something. So I said: “Don’t you clots stand up when the boss comes in?” There was a certain amount of laughter and someone said: “We don’t do things like that here, Ray.” But George seemed to appreciate the gesture, so I repeated it at subsequent staff meetings, usually to good-natured laughter. I got on very well with most of my students, but one or two went to George and complained that I wasn’t teaching them enough theory, that I kept talking about the way things actually happened when new laws were introduced or new enforcement procedures adopted. George told them they were lucky to have someone who could talk about these things from first-hand experience. He said that if what I was telling the students appeared to contradict some theoretical point, they should change their theories. About four years after I left Canberra, I received a letter from one of the students saying how much he now appreciated my frankness in talking about what life was really like when one was trying to enforce unpopular laws.
While I was teaching at the ANU, I was given an MA student to supervise. The girl was from Bangkok where her father was a major-general in the Police Special Branch. I had never met the man, but I knew of him. His daughter’s Master’s work involved measuring crime rates in Bangkok from a sociological rather than a statistical prospective. I asked her where she was going to get her data from — it could hardly be from existing literature, as there wasn’t any about Bangkok crime rates. I told the girl that if she could gather reliable data in this area she would be doing something really significant, but I was dubious about her ability to do so. She said that she had already been to all eighteen district police headquarters in Bangkok and obtained access to their records. I asked her how she had managed this and she said: “Oh, my father arranged it.” I told her that if the material she’d collected was valid, it was solid gold, as no one else had ever been granted access to these records. I gave her some hints as to how one goes about verifying police records — matching arrests against reports and so forth — and she set to work. She produced a colour-coded map of Bangkok that showed, amongst other things, that the Christain enclave had a lower crime rate than anywhere else.
“Don’t Christians commit crimes?” I asked her.
She was quite dismissive. “Not serious ones,” she said.
A few weeks later, George Zubrzycki came to me and said that the student had petitioned the department to have her MA candidature upgraded to PhD level, citing my claims about the significance of her research. The Department had agreed. In some ways, this was a disappointment to me: the girl now needed a more qualified supervisor and I lost the opportunity to gain privileged insight into the workings of an Asian police department.
We lived in a university flat and Mavis quickly made friends with our new academic neighbours, who were mostly from overseas and strangers to Canberra. She was able to help them adjust to their new locality. She was also able to spend some time with our Canberra family and got to know our grandchildren. She recommenced her tertiary study and in February 1979, then aged seventy-four, qualified for election as a member of the Australian Institute of Horticulture. But it was becoming clear to us that we could not live in Canberra for ever.
The principal reason for our return to Adelaide was family responsibility. I had completed two years as a Visiting Fellow at the ANU and was asked to continue, but short visits back to Adelaide had made me feel guilty about leaving my widowed mother, then living independently, as the sole responsibility of my younger brother. In addition, we had a married son, Ian, whom we had not seen much of since he left home and he had a growing family. Mavis agreed that we would return to the city we had both grown up in. We purchased a house near the beach and resumed the life we had left in 1949. We even rejoined our old church.
While in Canberra, I received a grant from the Australian Institute of Criminology for a project designed to produce a way of measuring a community’s fear of crime and I continued this research in Adelaide. Most studies up to that time had relied on subjective accounts of people’s feelings. I looked for objective indicators of a person’s level of concern about the potential threat of crime and found three factors that looked interesting. One was the number of dogs that people kept for protection. Another was the number of people who had had safety door locks installed in the last twelve months. The third was the percentage of people who went out to post letters at night. I picked three suburbs in Adelaide and door-knocked all the houses in two randomly selected streets in each suburb. Six months later I returned to conduct a follow-up survey. I found that in those six months: (a) two of the local councils had raised the dog licensing fee from fifty cents to ten dollars with a resultant fall in official dog-ownership numbers; (b) one of the councils had advertised the services of a handyman for elderly people living alone and one of his main tasks had been the fitting of new and improved door locks; and (c) the time of the last postal collection had changed from nine o’clock to six o’clock. As research projects go, this one was not a great success.
Very shortly after my return to Adelaide, I became involved in forming a new voluntary organisation to help victims of crime. I had been to a meeting where an old aquaintaince of mine, Ray Kidney, had talked about the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners. In the discussion that had followed Ray’s talk, a woman who sounded as if she was a retired school principal and probably was, said: “Mr Kidney, it is all very interesting to hear about what you are doing for criminals, but what are you doing for their victims?” Ray had said that it was unfortunate, but nothing was being done — it wasn’t within the charter of his organisation to spend money on anything other than the rehabilitation of offenders. Not being one to sit back quietly, I stood up and pointed out that convicted criminals had money spent on them because people like Ray Kidney had created an organisation. I said the victims of crime were an almost randomly selected cohort of isolated individuals; they had no organisation so it was hardly surprising that no money was spent on them. My comments were reported in the Advertiser the next day. A couple of nights later, I was rung up out of the blue by a woman who said that her name was Ann-Marie Myketa and that one of her daughters had been murdered. She had been talking to another mother in a similar situation and they had decided that an organisation was in order. They’d been impressed by what I was reported to have said at the meeting and they understood that I’d spent my life organising things — would I like to found an organisation to represent the victims of crime? I said: “Not me, I’m going fishing.” But Ann-Marie had a powerful personality and she wasn’t accepting this sort of cop-out. I finally agreed to host a small meeting at our place. Ann-Mar
ie, Judy Barnes and some other parents of murdered children, as well as some people who had themselves been badly beaten up or raped — about a dozen in all — met in our lounge room on the following Sunday afternoon. Mavis provided hot scones and tea and immediately expressed her support for the notion that those present establish the Victims of Crime Service (VOCS). I became the unpaid executive officer and, after securing an unwanted city office, our home telephone became the out-of-hours contact point.
I worked long hours talking to victims, delivering speeches to service clubs, seeking sponsorship and writing regular newsletters. By the end of twelve months, we had 1800 members. We had made contact with the Attorney-General Chris Sumner, and then with his replacement, Trevor Griffin, who promised us a small grant. We also helped initiate a government investigation into the needs of the victims of crime — the first of its kind in the world. As a result, the government established a fund, using money raised by a levy on court-imposed fines, to compensate the victims of crime. As far as I know, South Australia is still the only state in Australia to have such a scheme. Members of VOCS formed a Court Companion Scheme, of which Mavis was the first member. Victims frequently sought our help on weekends and holidays, and often it was Mavis who responded. She helped in our volunteer office and, with a small team, folded and posted thousands of newsletters.
I became an Australian spokesman for the World Society of Victimology and was elected to a small international executive of academics which met in Europe each year. I was the only frontline worker on this executive. I thought it important that victims have a direct voice in policy issues and so determined that for the six years of my appointment I would attend the annual executive meetings. Since VOCS had no funds, Mavis agreed that I could use the money we had put aside for our own holidays in order to attend. The cheapest airfares required a three-week stay, so each year Mavis spent a lonely three weeks in Adelaide while I worked in Europe. But the executive did achieve good results. It was primarily responsible for a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Crime Victims, although getting this accepted by the UN took some doing, and this party justified my absence from home.
The executive had drawn up a draft of the declaration and sent it to all member states of the UN seeking a sponsor. Every country, including Australia, refused. The only government prepared to back the declaration was that of South Australia, hardly a UN member in its own right. Chris Sumner was back in office as attorney-general and was keen to do what he could. In the interim, the executive of the World Society of Victimology had discovered that it was possible for declarations such as ours to be proposed at the UN by certain non-government organisations, although these organisations had no vote. The executive arranged for the declaration to be sponsored by an NGO and the process was put in train. But before the declaration could go to the full body of the UN, it had to be considered by a sub-committee meeting in Milan. I went at my own expense and Chris Sumner led a small government delegation. I booked into a cheap hotel within walking distance of the UN meeting place and was mildly astonished when I went down for breakfast on the first day to see Sumner and his delegation walk into the dining room. I said: “Are you blokes slumming or something, come to have breakfast with me?” I knew perfectly well that they had all been booked into a four star hotel. Chris said: “Yeah, we checked in last night, but I looked at the prices and decided it was all too much for the taxpayer. So we’ve moved down here.”
Our draft declaration came up on the UN agenda and a proposer was called for. The non-government organisation that had arranged for its inclusion had no vote and perforce remained silent. For a second or two, it looked as if no one was prepared to propose the declaration. Then Chris stood up and declared that Australia was backing the declaration. To the best of my knowledge, he had no authority to do this whatsoever — he was only the representative of a state government and the Australian federal government had already indicated that it was not prepared to support the declaration. But no one questioned Chris’s status, Argentina indicated that they would second the declaration and it went to the committee stage. We then had a week during which we lobbied every national delegation we could get access to, talking long and hard. We had to redraft the declaration to satisfy an Israeli desire to include victims of oppressive power but, at the end of the week when the declaration was voted on, it was passed unanimously. We had turned almost universal indifference into universal support. It really was a magnificent result.
During these years, however, Mavis and I never had a family holiday together except for one year when Mavis came with me to a biennial symposium on crime victims in Tokyo. This lasted a week after which we spent another week visiting the ancient Japanese capital, Kyoto.
Les Radcliff’s nine-year-old daughter vanished from the Adelaide Oval a few years before we started VOCS. She and another girl had been at a sporting event with Les. The girls had gone to the toilet. Les waited and waited for them to return, but they never came back. Judy Barnes brought Les to our first VOCS meeting. I liked Les a lot, but he had one overwhelming obsession: he thought he would be able to recognise the man who had kidnapped his daughter. I questioned him about this and in reality he only had a very vague idea of the features of the man he suspected. Indeed, I was not sure that Les had any valid recollection on which to base his conviction.
Les felt the loss of his daughter very deeply and I suspected that he was experiencing guilt over her disappearance, that he felt he should have looked after the girls better at the oval. The disappearance totally dominated the Radcliff family for years after the event. Les used to take his son to Rundle Street and wait outside the picture theatres, watching the patrons emerge after a film because he felt sure that if the man appeared he would recognise him. He did this for years, going anywhere there was a large crowd. It really was a complete obsession.
Les and I became friends, although I didn’t see as much of him as I’d have liked. I was fairly busy with other victims and Les felt he had this duty to find his daughter’s kidnapper. The case was a complete mystery and remains so to this day. Some years ago, Les’s wife rang me and said that Les had not been well for some time. He had cancer and only had a few days to live. I went out to their home and knocked on the door with some trepidation. I wasn’t sure in my own mind what I could say to Les. I had never faced such a situation. Their son came to the door and welcomed me and led me into the lounge where Les’s wife told me Les was in bed and expecting me. I went through into the bedroom and found Les in a nicely made-up bed, propped up with pillows.
Les said: “Come in Ray, sit down.”
I said: “Les, I’ve just come to see if there is anything I can do to help you.”
He said: “No, it’s all arranged. I’ve drawn up a list of pall bearers. I’ve been through the service with the minister. It’s all organised, Ray, you needn’t worry. Now, what about you? It seems to me you haven’t spent all that much time on yourself these last few years. What would you have liked to do?”
I said: “I’d have liked to have gone fishing. I’m no sailor, I’d have had to fish off the wharves.”
He said: “Ray, you’re one of us. I really enjoyed the time I spent fishing down at Port Adelaide.” He turned to his son and said, “Go and get the street directory.”
The lad got the street directory and Les opened it at the map that showed the Port Adelaide wharves.
“When the tide’s high,” Les said, “you fish here, at this spot, I’ll mark it with an X. But if the wind’s blowing from the north you have to transfer over to the other side and fish there. Now, there’s a seasonal change you have to take into account, but my son knows all about that. So when you next want to go fishing, ring him up and he’ll take you down to the wharves.”
Then Les asked his son to bring him his supply of hooks and the lad fetched a glass jar of fishing hooks. Les went through the collection, placing some aside in a smaller, vaseline jar. He said: “Now, Ray, these are special hooks. The best I’ve
got. I’ll give you two samples of each. My son will show you how to rig up the line, and which hooks to use and which sinkers to use. And I hope you have many happy years of fishing.”
I suppose I must have spent an hour with Les, fifty-five minutes of which involved Les seeing how he could help me get fun out of fishing. When I left Les and his wife and son, I left in a much happier frame of mind than I’d been in when I arrived. Les died two days later. I couldn’t get to the service because I had to visit another VOCS member who urgently needed to see me. But Les’s complete disregard of his own situation when he knew he was dying touched me deeply and has stayed with me ever since. I’ve not yet been able to take up his offer of having his son show me where to fish, but I still have those hooks in a glass jar. They occupy a special place in my study.
By 1993, VOCS had become recognised by the state government and was in receipt of a substantial annual grant which enabled it to employ a full-time professional staff of seven people. Mavis and I were given a public dinner in recognition of our contribution to the founding and developing of VOCS. Over two hundred people attended, including the state attorney-general, judges, barristers and many crime victims.