I was sure she was going to prove them all wrong one day; she was one of the deepest people I had ever met.
The 1971 UN convention became a watershed moment in our global problem with meth abuse. During the 1980s, the US government restricted access to and increased penalties for possession of P2P — the key ingredient for making meth. But such is the plight of good intentions that this only resulted in bikie gangs discovering they could make meth from ephedrine, resulting in a more powerful formula that could be easily obtained from Mexican labs that professed to be making the substance purely for legal cold-and-flu tablets. As amphetamines came back into fashion, with ecstasy and MDMA pills spreading around nightclubs and raves around the world in the late 1980s, crystal meth gradually got a stranglehold on a small proportion of American’s population. In a survey conducted in 2012, approximately 1.2 million Americans reported having used methamphetamine in the previous year, while 440,000 reported using the drug in the previous month. This was a smaller user percentage of the population than when the drug had been legally prescribed — but the legal Methedrine, Desoxyn, and Syndrox had been made from the powdered formula, whereas crystal meth was the substance that was dominating the American black market.
The rise of crystal meth in Australia would follow the same pattern, albeit a few decades later. Why so much later? Well, Australia’s biggest drug problem from the 1960s right until the new millennium was heroin, due to the island nation’s proximity to poppy fields across South-East Asia.
Like most people in the mid-1990s in Australia, Beck and I had never heard of or seen meth. In fact, the data shows that from the 1970s through to the 1980s, amphetamine use sat at around 4 per cent of the population — most of those were using amphetamine sulphate, and most had had it prescribed to them. It was a cheap, working-class drug, different in both its cultural identity and chemistry from cocaine. MDMA (ecstasy) would also make its way to Australian shores in the 1970s. MDMA, which is both an amphetamine and a psychedelic drug, appears to have been brought here from India by a religious group called ‘The Orange People’, who used the drug as part of their mystic process, whereby they saw sex as a path to enlightenment. Some psychiatrists in Australia, as part of their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, even used ecstasy on their patients, before the practice was made illegal by the Australian government in 1985. Speed, and in some cases meth, was made in clandestine labs here and there across the nation, but hardly any Australians used either drug throughout the 1980s. The first batches of powdered methamphetamine arrived on our shores in the early 1990s; a minor rise in use followed, but none of this, as far as we know, was crystal meth. Government research from that time showed past-year use of amphetamines was less than 1 per cent in 1993 and 1995; lifetime use was around 4–5 per cent. The use of amphetamines was largely restricted, it seemed, to nightclubbers, and people wanting to increase their work hours and output. In the 1980s, in ‘relaxed Australia’, heroin remained king; some estimates suggest that there were as many 172,000 people injecting heroin in Australia in 1986 alone.
So, while the drug barely registered a ripple here, it was a different tale overseas. By the late 1980s, the recipes used by US biker gangs, and the many home-labs that followed, had made their way to parts of South-East Asia. Throughout the early 1990s, crystal meth was manufactured en masse in China, becoming the most widely abused drug in Burma and Japan, and the second most widely abused drug in the Philippines. When the US government then moved to restrict ephedrine, the bikers started using pseudoephedrine to make their meth, resulting in a more powerful formula again. More importantly, the formula was easy to make, and home labs began popping up all over the US.
A few years earlier, an unknown chemist in Hawaii had manufactured a smokeable form of crystal meth. This led to full-scale production on the US island, with the nearby nations of Taiwan and Korea soon learning the recipe and following suit. These trends alarmed many crime authorities here in Australia. In 1989, South Sydney drug detective Brent Martin told journalists he thought the Asian experience showed that meth might replace cocaine as Australia’s choice stimulant. Come 1991, and Customs and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) followed suit, warning of the new threat of a drug called ‘ice’, and lobbying the federal government to develop a campaign to stop its spread. Even so, the drug either continued to fly completely under the radar, or perhaps it didn’t even make it to our shores for at least another four years — nobody quite knows. What we do know is that the increase in the supply and use of methamphetamine in Australia appears to have begun around the mid- to late 1990s, while the more potent forms of ‘base’ and ‘ice’ methamphetamine were first detected in 1999.
Also in 1991, the same year that the US government gave speed to its war pilots in the first Gulf War, two momentous events occurred sequentially in Smithy’s life. He was eighteen, driving home one night on a near-empty Burwood Highway under orange lights through never-ending suburbia. He had just sold some pot and a bit of speed at a friend’s house, and Led Zeppelin was blaring through his speakers as he bopped along to the rhythm of the road, sipping on a VB, the stale smell of cigarette smoke drifting around him. When he caught a reflection of himself in the rear-view mirror, he realised he was smiling like a Cheshire cat. But the next time he looked in the mirror, he saw blue lights flashing. Smithy was arrested, and charged with drug trafficking. The second event occurred after his mum contacted his father about the charges. After twelve years of complete silence, his father responded, paid for a lawyer, and told Smithy that everything would sort itself out. And it did: Smithy was put on a good-behaviour bond without a conviction.
A new pattern had been set: Smithy — quite a likeable person for the most part, I might add — would work at odd labouring jobs, where he’d do pot and speed all day, until he found the speed more interesting. He would then leave his job to become a small-time drug dealer. He never made a profit, but the trade meant he had a steady supply of drugs, and of people — including women — knocking on the door. When he ran out of drugs, his phone often fell silent, leading him to lie on the floor when he was coming down, staring at the wall and thinking, They are not my real friends, they are not my real friends, they are not my real friends — nobody visits me when I’ve run out of drugs. He would feel miserable, alone and unloved, until the next speed delivery, after which his house would once again be full of people and grog, and the rooms would be filled with the warm sounds of his deep, wheezy cackle.
The mid-1990s were also a time when different kinds of social misfits were working out how to make something of themselves, outside the boundaries and expectations of acceptable society. As Breaking Bad would later teach us — in spectacularly entertaining fashion — meth production and distribution could bring the kind of wealth that people working in everyday jobs could only dream of.
Before this time, the passing-on of meth recipes was limited to physical delivery and word of mouth. This all changed, of course, with the advent of the internet. Soon there were dozens of websites publishing the biker method for making methamphetamine hydrochloride (crystal meth) using pseudoephedrine. Other recipes also made their way to Australian living rooms. The results of meth production would show up in some very random places. In 1995, in the stunning inland Sunshine Coast town of Gympie, a place full of palm trees and beautiful old buildings — surrounded by tree-covered hills — layman Dale Francis Drake made meth using an incredibly simple formula. He, in turn, showed various other people how to make meth by this method. Soon, meth cooks weren’t rare commodities, but simple, everyday crooks who just needed to be trained. Over the next four years, clandestine labs in the Sunshine Coast would triple, and amphetamine-related hospital admissions in Queensland would skyrocket.
Starting around 1997, Australian bikie gangs, in particular, began making methamphetamine, thereby giving ‘speed’ — that inferior Romanian sulphate version — the flick. One young man who started to see a cloudy, ex
citing combination of powdered meth and dollar signs was a 25-year-old truck driver by the name of Richard James Walsh. Walsh left his job in the country town of Maryland, north of Sydney, to take up a very different sort of heavy lifting — he became a meth dealer to bikies. A heavily built, fearsome-looking bloke with dark skin, a goatee, and five earrings in his left ear, he was already a member of the Nomads bikie gang. With meth becoming increasingly popular around Sydney, Walsh would travel to a manufacturer in Queensland about every three weeks to purchase several pounds of the drug. His business grew quickly. As a dealer at the top of the chain, Walsh also quickly ascended the leadership ladder to become a senior figure within the Nomads. Over time, he formed an important relationship with one particular cook on the Gold Coast — Todd Little, president of the Nomad’s Gold Coast chapter. Little, despite being nearly illiterate, had taught himself how to cook meth. Little got his precursor material by paying people to go from chemist to chemist purchasing huge quantities of Sudafed, from which he would then extract pseudoephedrine.
Over the space of four years, Little would make no less than 19 kilograms of powdered meth for Walsh, who in turn passed the gear on to dealers who distributed it further down the chain. Walsh would eventually look beyond Little, and between 1997 and 2001 is estimated to have supplied about 450 kilograms of methamphetamine to the drug markets of Melbourne and Sydney. He would, in the end, play an important role in Australia’s first major meth trend — the bikies’ involvement in spreading methamphetamine around the nation. By the 2000s, police estimated that Australia’s bikie gangs had a 75 per cent control of the meth market.
Like many truck drivers, 37-year-old Darri Haynes took speed to help him get through his shifts. While he didn’t understand it at the time, by about 1997 what he was taking, in fact, was meth. Haynes had been using it to try to get through some extremely tough shifts (which later resulted in his employer being successfully prosecuted in court for having failed to provide safe working conditions). After having driven more than 5,400 kilometres in the last week of August 1999, he called fellow truckie Duncan Mackeller, and told him he was so tired that he was ‘even starting to hear voices’.
‘I am even talking to them now,’ he said.
To which Mackeller replied jokingly, ‘As long they don’t talk back.’
On 1 September, Haynes’ vehicle collided with a truck on the Pacific Highway, near Grafton, in the northern rivers region of New South Wales. The truck veered off the road and caught fire. Haynes took just over three minutes to die after the impact, and was little more than a ‘sack of ashes’ when emergency crews arrived on the scene.
Things were changing in fits and starts, on the global, local, and individual scales. As Malcolm Knox writes in his book Scattered: the inside story of ice in Australia:
Up to 1999, there was still scepticism about the term ‘ice’. Many in law enforcement, health and academic research believed that ice was a new dealer’s brand name for speed … but it wasn’t so. Ice was, in fact, new. A profound revolution was taking place — a revolution in composition, the manufacture, the economics of supply and usage — a true cultural revolution.
By now, Beck had left school and taken a job as a checkout chick in a supermarket. She went on a few minor, joyful fucking sprees, and eventually fell pregnant. At seventeen, in the middle of autumn, she rang me from a drab, deserted children’s playground in her hometown, saying she had finally made a decision about whether to keep her baby.
‘A baby will be unconditional love,’ she said, sounding as if she was blowing out the smoke from a cigarette. ‘It’s something I’ve never had from my parents, and something I’ve never had from all those guys who dumped me. A child loves their parent no matter what, and I really want that. I’m going to have this baby.’
Chapter Four
The hazardous bush
ON A BRIGHT spring morning in November 1969, just after 7.00am, 48-year-old Mildred Williams woke up in her musty East Bentleigh home. Her husband, Ronald — who was not usually awake at this hour — was not asleep next to her. She called out for him. Five minutes went past, and she called out again. Mildred pulled herself out of bed, still in her nightdress, and walked around the house. She must have looked in every room twice before finally deciding to venture outside. She called out when she first walked out the back door, and then again when she reached the clothesline halfway up the yard. She headed over to the garage, which was closed up, opened the side door, and found Ron with his back to her, perfectly still, hanging from a steel rafter, his feet a metre off the ground.
In 1942, my grandfather — Ronald Arthur Williams, already married and the father of two children — decided he would enrol in the army. He was signed to the 58/59th Battalion, which fought against the Japanese in New Guinea. He had never been to battle before, and had never left the country. He arrived in New Guinea in October of that year. Two years later, he had some kind of mental breakdown amid the gunfire and the mud and the rain. He was medically discharged with a diagnosis of ‘war neurosis’ in 1944.
He returned home to Melbourne, where he had six more children — my father was a twin and the second youngest — and they all lived in that cramped, grotty, dark timber-board home in East Bentleigh. Nanna Mildred was an illegal bookie; Pop made sawdust, and sold it to butchers. Dad remembers his father waking up in the middle of the night, screaming over and over that the Japanese were coming. At other times, Pop had waking nightmares where he believed he was still in the war; he would hide in closets and under the bed, as if under attack. When these waking nightmares lasted more than a week, he was put in a mental institution. He seemed to get worse as he got older.
Nobody in my family knows exactly what Pop did in that war. All the older siblings have since died — one from suicide — and so nobody is alive to tell me what he was like before he went to war. A little while ago, I started looking around for a book to read to find out more about the New Guinea war. Many have similar-sounding titles: Hell’s Battlefield by Phillip Bradley, The Hard Slog by Karl James, Bastard of a Place by Peter Brune. Eventually I settled on The Toughest Fighting in the World, a book by Australian journalist George Johnson, who was embedded with Australian troops in New Guinea throughout the war. From this book, I would learn that Pop moved from the oak-lined suburbs and often chilly winds of inner Melbourne to the terrible mountains, constant rain, mud, malaria, water snakes, crocodile-infested waters, kamikaze attacks, and sniper’s nests of the war. Men would return from mission back to main camp unshaven, with sunken cheeks. When Australians were killed, it was usually right in front of their war mates, sometimes in their arms, and sometimes gradually, after incurring mortal, slow-burn wounds in rugged, remote areas where help could not reach them. Johnson recalls the ‘whining drone of Japanese aircraft ... the whistle of bombs descending through the humid blackness of the night, the sullen thunder of high explosive falling around the waterfront’. This was a place where a walk through the jungle — while water-logged, covered in mud, and carrying a heavy backpack — would frequently attract gunfire from an unknown source; each step could be your or your mate’s last.
As a child, I knew nothing of this war. I spent hours and hours in a battle-fantasy world in the backyard with toy guns and swords. In my childlike fantasies of war, battles didn’t come to an end because you were throwing up, or you’d sprained your ankle, or because you’d started hallucinating, or you couldn’t stop crying. When things got awful in my war, it was all the more exciting. I always did something heroic to save the day. The battle scenes — as they no doubt were for many other kids playing out these epic fantasies — were movie-like, all encompassing and awesome. To my mind, war was a barrel of monkeys, which both gave me a sense of power and reinforced my idea that the world — even in chaos — flowed with moral righteousness.
Dad was sixteen when his father died. He has nothing positive to say about his upbringing. He recalls the filth of the p
lace most of all: once, when they were cooking a roast, he discovered that a rat was cooking alongside the leg of mutton on the oven’s floor. He remembers that all the children slept in the same bed, that he had no shoes or socks, that his feet were cold in the winter. He remembers not being able to read or write at school, and how the teachers called him stupid. When Pop died, Dad still hadn’t been taught how to read or write. He had already left school, and was working in a piggery. He worked with a knife mainly. He cut deep into the skin, through tendon and muscle, with power and precision. He sometimes came home with his all-white work uniform splattered with dark-red pig blood. It smelt like off roast pork. He looked like an axe-murderer, but was as friendly — in substance and style — as Crocodile Dundee. He was muscular, tattooed, gentle, hard working, insular, and, at times, inconsolably angry at the world.
‘The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises,’ wrote the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900. He would go on to say:
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
The Ice Age Page 8