Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘Clarrie just said it [the list] would hang a lot of people in high places,’ the wife added.

  ‘Clarrie said that?’

  ‘… that was sort of what he indicated … that there would be a lot of people in high places in big trouble if that ever got out … so what the police ever did with it, I don’t know.’

  Indeed, a police source who had seen some of Howard-Osborne’s files had said there was enough material there to ‘bring down the government’.

  The wife explained that they had no knowledge of any paedophile activity and claimed to her knowledge Howard-Osborne was just compiling scientific data on children. ‘These were just local kids from around the neighbourhood. Yeah, the kids would drop in and talk to him on the way past his house,’ she said. ‘And that’s why, knowing the calibre of person he was, we just cannot in our wildest imaginations imagine him breaking that trust that he would build with people. I know parents used to bring their children to him.’

  ‘Really? For what purpose?’

  ‘For body building and to get measurements on their kids because he had his own gym there and so he could sort of set a training pattern going and then just monitor the development and yeah, as far as I know, parents used to bring their kids to him.’

  The couple said it appeared Clarrie had little to do with his brother, Leonard Howard-Osborne. ‘I know when Clarrie died his brother didn’t want to get mentioned anywhere in it because he just, didn’t want to get tarred with the brush that Clarrie was going to get tarred with by the looks of it.’

  The question remained – if Howard-Osborne didn’t feel he was doing anything wrong with his photographing and measuring of boys, why did he choose to kill himself?

  ‘He just knew that everything he’d been doing would be misinterpreted and he wasn’t about to start battling that at his age,’ the wife concluded.

  I asked her why the milkman might have gone down the driveway to inspect the car that morning. As the subject turned to Howard-Osborne’s suicide, the woman’s husband interjected into the conversation and told his wife to tell me I’d made another error in the magazine story. In the article I had written that Howard-Osborne had a tape-recorder in the car with him on the night he died.

  The wife said, ‘It was recorded on a piece of paper, it wasn’t on a recording.’

  ‘It was written on a piece of paper in the car? Your husband saw that?’

  ‘Yeah, he saw it on the seat alongside of him [Howard-Osborne].’

  ‘Was your husband there when the police arrived?’

  ‘Yeah, just a tick, I’ll put him on for this little bit …’

  The wife handed the phone over to her husband and we exchanged greetings. I confirmed that he was at the house when the police arrived and asked if there were many police at Eyre Street that day.

  ‘Two or three or something like that, I think that’s all, there was only one car.’

  ‘Just one car?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did they interview you?’

  ‘Not as such, I don’t think. [They] asked a few questions or whatever else. Not even sure whether the first fellas wanted to get into the house or not. They might have brought other people in, I’m not sure … but they wanted to get in the house and I had access. I had to let them in. That’s how come I never got this envelope, I wanted to have a look at. They beat me to it.’

  ‘Your wife just explained it to me but you knew for years about this particular file in an envelope?’

  ‘Yeah, that it would hang quite a few people if that ever got out, and that was it. I never asked him who or what or anything else. It just sat in the corner of the cupboard. One he handmade, a typical thing that opened at the top and everything else … he had crockery in among it. This was just a brown envelope that sat in the corner.’

  ‘The envelope was in plain view of the lounge room?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So the police never formally interviewed you about Howard-Osborne?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that I can remember, no … they did what they had to do and I got on my pushbike and rode home.’

  He said Howard-Osborne’s body was removed by about 10 a.m. I asked the husband if any more police or detectives visited the house that morning.

  ‘I think there was another lot came, and that’s when they wanted to have a look in the house. I think they were all plainclothes actually. I can’t remember uniform police being there.’

  It’s been well over 18 months since Lewis cut all ties with me and demanded the return of his papers, and still letters come in about the trilogy; readers offering new information and insights.

  Receive one this week from a man in Toowoomba that goes to the very heart of one of the biggest mysteries in this entire saga – the day Lewis and Bjelke-Petersen found themselves alone on the airstrip outside Cunnamulla following a country Cabinet meeting in May 1976.

  The then Inspector Lewis, based in nearby Charleville, had been in Cunnamulla for the duration of the meeting and was at the airstrip seeing off ministers returning to Brisbane. The Premier was one of the last to leave.

  Lewis told me that he and Bjelke-Petersen just exchanged idle chit-chat, although there has been speculation for decades that on that day at the airport the Premier had offered him the job of Assistant Police Commissioner, second in charge only to Commissioner Ray Whitrod.

  In Three Crooked Kings I had asked the obvious question: What had they talked about?

  Now this long and colourful letter from Toowoomba, written with considerable verve and attention to detail, comes in – another little fish.

  The author explains he was raised in Brisbane but in 1959 he moved to Cunnamulla for work. He in turn met Jack Tonkin, editor of the local newspaper, the Warrego Watchman, and also a Paroo Shire Councillor, and they became friends.

  The letter says that in May 1976, Jack Tonkin was the shire mayor, and he too had been on the airstrip along with Lewis and the Premier that fateful day.

  ‘The [Cunnamulla] chapter in your book is exactly as Jack Tonkin described it to me,’ he writes. ‘The Cabinet dinner in the Hotel Cunnamulla definitely took place but after the first course, Jack said Joh and [his pilot] Beryl [Young] excused themselves as Joh wanted to go out to the airport that evening and get some night flying hours in the Government plane for a licence endorsement.’

  He then writes: ‘You asked what was going through Lewis’s mind on that drive back to Charleville after his meeting with the Premier?

  ‘Jack Tonkin told me. After Jack and Lewis waved the last plane off, Jack told me that Lewis said to him, “I won’t be around Charleville for long – I’m off to Brisbane.”

  ‘Jack believed that Joh had given him the nod at Cunnamulla that he was jumping him up over many, many Inspectors to give him Assistant Commissioner. The plot was hatched in Cunnamulla.’

  Forty years later, a hint of what was discussed on that little country airstrip bobs to the surface. They keep coming forward, these bit players, these ordinary Queenslanders, offering their stories. They have cornered me at book events and writers’ festivals, they have phoned and emailed and committed their words to paper and come into the office with their offerings. I have their business cards, names on serviettes, phone numbers scribbled on envelopes and inside the covers of the volumes of the trilogy. Small but graphic pieces in a puzzle that seems to have no end.

  Good Friends

  Once the trilogy was complete, I spent weeks filing the many thousands of documents the books had generated and came across a single piece of paper that had puzzled and frustrated me for years. It was a photocopy of the inside of a Christmas card that Lewis, when he was still Police Commissioner in the early 1980s, had sent to Paul John Breslin.

  Breslin, at the time the card was sent, was in charge of a group called the South Queensland Prisoners’ Aid Society, an organi
sation that assisted youthful prisoners to transition into society after periods of incarceration. In the 1960s, with Brigadier Harold Hosier as its honorary secretary, the society’s charter was ‘to take a friendly and active interest in the welfare of prisoners, assist in their rehabilitation on discharge from prison, and to assist wives and other dependants of prisoners where desirable and practicable’.

  In the early 1980s Breslin was the society’s president, and Lewis had handwritten in the Christmas card around a generic Yuletide wish:

  Dear Mr. Breslin and members of the Society,

  (Best wishes for a Happy Christmas and peace and prosperity throughout the coming years)

  Terry Lewis

  Breslin, it transpired, wore many hats. Born and raised in Gladstone, he moved to Brisbane in the early 1980s. At the time the card was sent, he was an executive at the Ford Motor Company in Brisbane. He was also a conspicuous presence at the Police Club in the city. It appeared he had a fascination with police and policing, and he spent many long nights at the club – on the fourth floor of the old Egg Board building in Makerston Street – making friends and meeting some of the police top brass. He promised mates’ rates on Ford motor vehicles, and even donated a trophy – The Breslin Cup – to the rugby league footballers among the rank and file. The police team would play the fire brigade and the ambulance teams for the cup honours.

  It was at the Police Club that Breslin met Police Commissioner Terry Lewis and Senior Constable Dave Moore, who caused Lewis one of his administration’s greatest headaches when it was rumoured the part-time television star and police public relations whiz was a homosexual and mixing after hours with the likes of Breslin and radio star Bill Hurrey. (Moore was originally charged with conspiring with Hurrey to commit homosexual acts on boys under 17 years, between January 1982 and November 1984. Moore was also charged with sodomy, having permitted sodomy, and five charges of indecent dealing and attempted indecent dealing. Although he pleaded not guilty, in November 1986 he was found guilty of all charges and was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. However, in March 1987 Moore appealed the verdict. The Court of Criminal Appeal found that justice had miscarried in the November trial, and Moore was released from prison. A few months later, in June, Moore was re-tried and found guilty on two sex charges against a 16-year-old boy. He was sentenced to 30 months’ gaol.)

  A close associate of Moore’s had described Breslin to me: ‘Moore had a friend who was in the radio industry and because he was associated with [radio station] 4BC, Moore was introduced to Breslin. He pretended to Moore that he was the government medical officer, a guy called Dr Forde. That was Breslin’s modus operandi, his pattern … impersonating police officers, saying he was the general manager of Ford. Saying he was a police officer, high up in government and all this stuff.’

  While Breslin owned a unit in Alice Street in the city with views of the Botanic Gardens, he had also purchased off the plan Unit 24 at the prestigious Coronation Towers in Dunmore Terrace, Auchenflower. In January 1984, ten months before the Moore scandal plagued Lewis, police had received a complaint from a 16-year-old Indigenous boy who had been sexually assaulted by a man who lived in an apartment at Coronation Towers. Following a raid, they discovered that man to be Paul John Breslin.

  Senior police, including Lewis, had been aware of doubts about Dave Moore for at least two years before allegations were raised in parliament in late 1984, and Lewis and his then Police Minister, Bill Glasson, were forced to act.

  Word of Moore’s salacious reputation had made it to the offices of then Assistant Commissioner Tony Murphy and that of Deputy Commissioner Syd Atkinson. Atkinson had in fact counselled Moore as early as 1982 and warned him about associating with Breslin. Atkinson later swore that after each incident involving Moore, that he passed the information on to Lewis. Similarly, Glasson had secretly interviewed a young JAB officer, Mike Garrahy, who claimed that a file had been prepared on Hurrey and Moore as far back as 1982. Garrahy claimed the file had been passed on to Murphy and that Lewis ‘would have to have known’ of its existence.

  At the Fitzgerald Inquiry Lewis defended his decision not to act in response to allegations made against Moore. ‘I certainly would not have allowed him to roam around free if there was any possibility that he got involved with offences with children,’ Lewis said. On Channel Seven’s Today Tonight program, Lewis again defended his professional treatment of Moore, ‘You have got to know the full story before you can make a judgement like that. It’s not quite as simple to deal with anybody without adequate evidence.’

  As it transpired, the Christmas card to Breslin was sent in late 1983, just prior to Breslin being arrested. In the raid on Breslin’s unit police found, among other things, the Christmas card from Lewis. At the time the card raised a few questions that were put to Lewis by the Premier himself.

  At the height of the Moore, Hurrey and Breslin scandal in 1984, Lewis and his wife, Hazel, flew to Hamilton Island as guests of tycoon Keith Williams to celebrate the stage one opening of Williams’ resort in the Whitsundays. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was also there to make the official opening. On that same day, 8 December, Lewis was interrogated by the Premier and Police Minister Bill Glasson about Breslin and the Christmas card.

  Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘On Sat[urday], saw Premier re inform. on Christmas card to Breslin, and other allegations re lift in car, permission to drive Police cars, meeting Breslin etc. all false except Christmas Card. Hon. Glasson present re same matter.’

  Lewis would later formally commit his denials in relation to Breslin to paper: ‘Christmas card sent to Mr. Paul Breslin, The South Queensland Prisoners Aid Society, 41 Dixon Street, Wooloowin, Q., 4030, in December 1983 in his capacity as President of that Society and in return for one sent to Police Headquarters.’ Lewis also denied ever giving Breslin a lift in a departmental vehicle. He stated: ‘Breslin has never been given the use of any Police Department vehicle by Inspector Early or me.’

  As I started to dig deeper into the mystery behind Clarence Howard-Osborne and paedophilia in Queensland through the decades, I found myself once again thinking about Breslin. In light of what I had learned I was particularly keen to ask him about a sheaf of papers I had found buried in Lewis’s extensive archive. These two sets of papers, just ten pages in total, had been written by an unnamed group of disaffected but honest police officers. The papers included a series of questions, which had been prepared for the opposition ALP to potentially fire off at the government on the floor of Parliament House in the wake of the Moore scandal.

  The questions largely focused on the depth of Paul John Breslin’s association with not just the then Commissioner Terry Lewis, but other police as well. The papers raised disturbing allegations about a secret group of men in Brisbane, known among themselves as ‘The Society of Friends’ – a group that supposedly consisted of men from the top end of town, including judges, lawyers, teachers and even some members of the Queensland police.

  The allegations stated that The Society of Friends met regularly in a hotel in the city. The questions included:

  Did the Commissioner … attend a function at an inner-city hotel? Was the function a gathering of gays known as The Society of Friends?

  Was a Family Court judge, a Supreme Court judge, two magistrates and a number of senior and junior police present among the 150 men present? Did the Commissioner not tell them that what they did in their own bedrooms was their own business?

  On Tuesday, April 24 this year, did the Commissioner at the request of [a homosexual police officer] … attend a function at an inner-city hotel that was a gathering of gays known as The Society of Friends?

  What I now wanted to know, given all that my research had revealed, was could these allegations be even remotely possible?

  When I had interviewed Breslin he denied any knowledge of such a group. ‘Am I alleged to have been a member of The Society of Friends?’ Breslin asked
. ‘Isn’t that Quakers? That’s the only Society of Friends I know of,’ he told me.

  At the time the allegations were circulated Lewis also responded in writing and denied any association with Breslin. ‘On 24 April 1984 worked from 7.10 a.m. to 6.40 p.m. and did not attend any function.’ He insisted: ‘Have never told any sort of gathering of people that what they did in thier own bedrooms was their business.’

  It appeared these mysterious allegations raised by former police were just rumour, but then several weeks after the final volume of the trilogy was published, a woman who had read the book telephoned me from her home on the north-west coast of Tasmania. She had lived in Brisbane with her husband in the late 1970s and into the 1980s and the scant information in the book about the Society of Friends had triggered something in her memory.

  She told me she had worked for years as head of security for large department stores like Myer, and was a regular at the Police Club due to her friendship with a couple of senior police. She recalled an evening at the Police Club that she said had concerned her at the time. On this night she had been speaking with an officer who was visibly upset. When she asked after the officer’s welfare, he indicated to her that he might have to resign as a policeman given the nature of a ‘job’ he had recently been given.

  The officer told her that he had been ordered to ‘guard’ a conference room in a Brisbane city hotel where a function involving judges, senior police and others, was held. ‘They had children in there,’ the officer told her. ‘They had children.’

  Could he have been referring to a gathering of the mythical Society of Friends?

  I had written off any hope of gathering any further information about the group when, out of the blue, I received a text message on my phone from an anonymous source. The source also claimed to have observed unusual behaviour at the Police Club in the early 1980s when these rumours first surfaced.