The Good Cop

by Justine Ford

  When he was discharged, Barry was not allowed to play sport or take part in any activities that might aggravate his condition, so he spent time baking with their mum, while Ron helped their dad outside.

  By the time they were ten, Barry was fully recuperated. Nonetheless, ‘We were different,’ Ron says of his twin. ‘Because he was sick, he didn’t do things that were rough and tumble. Back then, he’d be happy doing something with Mum and was more into cooking, whereas if Dad was going out, I’d go and potter outside or get on the tractor.’ The more rugged activities suited Ron, who was content so long as he was active. ‘I had mates I could play with, but often they were doing the same as I was, which was helping around the farm.’

  The Iddles kids had plenty of fun times together, though, and the boys played with each other or with their big sister.

  ‘Monday night was special because we’d put a rug on the dining-room table and play a game called “Bobs”,’ Ron remembers. The younger members of the family would use a homemade cue to shoot a ball with a numeric value across to the other side of the table, while Pop would watch and clean his pipe. ‘The winner was whoever got to fifty first,’ Ron says.

  One of the greatest joys in the Iddles household – particularly at Christmas time – was Phyllis’s lavish country cooking. Her powder puffs, jelly cakes and golden syrup dumplings were the envy of the district. ‘Sunday, we always had a cream sponge – ginger fluff – with four layers of cream,’ Ron recalls.

  The Iddles family lived amid premium dairy country and had a cow in the backyard, which meant an ample supply of milk, cream and butter. ‘My dad would milk the cow by hand and it was my job to make the butter,’ Ron says. Ron enjoyed farm life and it instilled in him a work ethic he carries on to this day. ‘Some jobs on the farm were chores but others I did because I enjoyed them, like driving the tractors and ploughing. I was able to see the end result of my work: for example, when I cut the grass, I’d rake it and then make hay bales. It taught me that work gave you a sense of self-worth, and to get anywhere in life you have to put in an effort.’

  Christmas was always a big family affair, shared with grandparents, great aunts and uncles, neighbours and anyone they knew who had nowhere else to go. It was a traditional, country Christian family in which Bill was the breadwinner and Phyllis stayed home to care for the children.

  ‘We used to collect beer bottles from the side of the road,’ Nancye says, recalling how the Iddles kids realised from an early age that teamwork pays off. The money from the bottles helped save towards a caravan that would be a family holiday fixture for the next ten years. ‘Dad would sell them for a halfpenny each and the money we made contributed to the caravan. We sold a lot of bottles!’

  Come January, Bill would hitch the family’s yellow fibreglass caravan to his pink-and-grey DeSoto, and the whole family – including Pop Iddles and Phyllis’s mum, Nanna Woodland – would set off at six in the evening on their annual family holiday to Barwon Heads on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.

  ‘We left at that time because the car would overheat,’ Ron says. ‘Then, after about an hour and a half we’d hop out, and while the adults had a cuppa, Dad would open the bonnet to cool the engine off, then off we’d go again.’

  Bill and Phyllis would sleep at one end of the caravan while Nancye shared a double bed with Nanna Woodland, and Ron, Barry and Pop occupied the annex.

  ‘There was a lot of love and family life,’ Nancye says. ‘And that’s been Ron’s foundation. That’s what’s made him who he is.’

  When the boys were eight and Nancye was ten, the family moved to Bamawm, twenty minutes’ drive away, where Bill worked for a dairy farmer. Bamawm was where the Iddles kids first learnt to drive. Bill bought a 1938 Ford Pilot V8 from a solicitor as a paddock basher and, in no time, the boys were doing wheelies around the haystack.

  ‘It was polished black with big round silver headlights and leather seats,’ Ron says before wincing, ‘Dad took an axe to it and pulled the seats out so that it could carry hay.’

  The Iddles also owned a Plymouth, which, according to Ron, was ‘built like a tank’. Around that time, Bill also taught Ron how to remove a bung motor from a car and fix it. ‘He was always very mechanically minded,’ Bill observes.

  Ron drove the Plymouth until it blew up and later his dad purchased a mint condition Standard Eight for $24. ‘We had a long gravel driveway with a right-hand bend,’ Ron recalls. ‘We’d go as fast as we could up the driveway and then as fast as we could around the corner!’

  The kids rarely acted up at home; hardworking Bill wouldn’t have tolerated it.

  ‘He was pretty strict,’ Ron says. ‘There was a fair amount of discipline in the home. You didn’t backchat or play up or you got the strap. Looking back, I wouldn’t say I was overly close to my dad but I don’t feel badly about that. He had to work hard to provide for his family. But would he kick a footy with me? Yes. He also made me a fishing rod out of the branch of a tree and was always happy to teach me mechanics. I don’t think it was tough love, but fair love. In those days it was just the way we were brought up. We were expected to obey our parents and do chores. We came to understand you had to work if you wanted to get ahead.’

  For Bill, it was all about instilling strong values in his children.

  ‘It was about knowing right from wrong and being respectful,’ Ron explains. ‘We were never allowed to call an adult by their first name, for example; it was always Mr and Mrs, or Aunty and Uncle.’

  Devout Presbyterians, Bill and Phyllis took their children to church every Sunday, where Phyllis sang in the choir. ‘While my parents were very religious, I think church in the country was where people got to stop for a little bit,’ Ron says. ‘It was a social thing. It was, for the families, a day of rest.’

  According to Nancye, church also provided a formal framework for the morals the children were being taught at home: the importance of caring about others, and sharing with those in need.

  ‘Our family always tried to help local families who struggled,’ Nancye says. ‘We would take a trailer of wood to them, or food. Mum and Dad would kill a sheep or pluck a chook or duck, and we would take our hand-me-downs. We’ve all inherited our parents’ caring, generous nature.’

  From third grade, Ron attended Lockington Consolidated School. Lockington had one primary teacher and two secondary teachers – one who taught English, history and geography, and another, Ted Coleman, who taught agricultural science, science and maths.

  ‘About ninety per cent of the kids at that school were off farms,’ Ted recalls. ‘Farmers have a pretty dry sense of humour; they’re pretty honest, pretty direct, and their livelihood depends on accuracy. Everything’s a challenge in a rural community, and the kids reflected that.’

  Ted loved his students, of whom, at the start, there were only sixteen. ‘There was mutual respect for one another and Ron was looked on by the others as a bit of a leader,’ he says. ‘He spoke his mind.’

  Ted first started teaching Ron in Year Nine (known then as Third Form) in 1969. ‘Ron I admired as a student because he was trustworthy, he was honest,’ Ted says. ‘He had that rural integrity. But he had the capacity to challenge you in the way a farmer would; for example, he might ask, “Would you have that many sheep in a paddock, or that many cows per acre?” ’

  Ron’s intelligence, Ted says, was unique to those who lived on farms and he could apply it in practical ways. ‘To city people it’s not easily understood,’ Ted says. ‘It’s a kind of intelligence that allows you to seek answers.’

  Lindsay McMinn (who Ron nicknamed ‘Fungi’ because of his mushroom-coloured hair) was one of his best mates, and has kept in contact ever since. ‘Ron was a keen footballer and he also played cricket,’ Lindsay says. ‘We all wanted to be on his team because he was so big and strong. He was bigger than everyone in the school!’

  What really stood out to L
indsay about Ron was his humility. ‘He didn’t think he was any better than anyone else,’ Lindsay says. ‘He was very kind to everyone and he was a very generous bloke too. He’d give you anything. He was the same to me now as he was then – a bloody good bloke and a mate, always.’

  Ron never got into any trouble at school. Lindsay says, ‘I used to get the lash but he never did. I don’t think he ever got the cuts at school – he was too nice a person. And he was always in the top-notches in the class all the time.’

  When Ron was twelve, his dad bought a farm of his own at Lockington. The children were allowed countless pets – dogs, cats, ducks, turkeys, ‘special’ cows and even a featherless, sulphur-crested cockatoo that they raised on porridge. ‘We were also each given a calf, and when they grew up, we sold them,’ Nancye says.

  As is the bush way, Bill enlisted his children’s help to run the farm. ‘I used to get up at half-past four,’ he remembers. ‘The three of them were on a roster system, so they’d be in the dairy at five, have a shower, then ride to the school bus.’

  They were long days. ‘Before I went to high school I’d milk 120 cows,’ Ron says. ‘I didn’t get home until nearly five. Then on weekends I’d be cutting hay, carting hay and slashing paddocks with a tractor.’

  Once the cows had calved, it was the siblings’ job to teach them to drink from a bucket, but rather than feed them one at a time, Barry invented a ‘Calfeteria’ made from a forty-four-gallon drum, cut in half, with rubber teats and hoses that could hold forty litres of powdered milk. It enabled Barry, Nancye and Ron to feed twenty cows at once.

  Barry says that Ron has only acted dishonestly once, and even then, it was more of an omission than a lie. Concerned that a crow in a gum tree had been menacing a lamb, Ron decided to blast the blood-hungry bird with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Unexpectedly, the gun went off and hit the front passenger door of Nanna Woodland’s car.

  Rather than tell her he’d blown a two-inch hole in her car, twelve-year-old Ron figured that, with a little ingenuity, he might just get away with it. ‘He panel-beat it with a hammer,’ Barry says, recalling how their grandmother’s car was green, as was their house, so Ron fetched a tin of house-paint and began applying it to the car. It was a dubious colour match, however, and for the rest of the week, their grandmother tried to wash the strange green mark from her 1964 Zephyr sedan. ‘He admitted it once he was sprung,’ Barry laughs, ‘but he’d tried to cover it up!’

  Nancye remembers her brothers were always respectful but occasionally teased her. ‘We used to swim in the irrigation channel on the farm,’ she says. ‘If it wasn’t fresh flowing, you’d get leeches on you. Ron and Barry would chase me with the leeches!’

  Throughout his teenage years, Ron’s love of football continued to blossom, and he played for the Bamawm Under Sixteens, then for Echuca, first as a ruckman (which didn’t surprise anyone, as he was fast lurching towards 194 centimetres), then in the forward pocket. He played in the firsts, but would back up for the seconds when they didn’t have enough players. ‘Quite often I played two games on a Saturday,’ he says.

  ‘I was talking to his football coach recently and he said it was a shame Ron went to Melbourne because he would have been a good footballer,’ Bill says.

  Things might have been very different had Bill Iddles not purchased a television set. ‘I was one of the last to come to television because I could see it was going to be a hindrance to work,’ he says. ‘But we got a black-and-white set when Leonard Teale was in Homicide, and you could be sure on the nights it was on, they’d finish up early and watch that.’

  Ron mostly kept his ambition of joining the police to himself, but one day in class, when Ted asked his students what they wanted to do after school, Ron casually mentioned it.

  ‘I thought, Where would that have come from?’ Ted wishes he had pressed Ron to find out why he wanted to investigate murders, but admits that, in those days, teachers rarely discussed students’ future plans in much depth.

  Ted found the teenage Ron to be kind and community-minded, someone who put others before himself. ‘He’s not a vain person. He never was at school, either,’ Ted says. ‘He was not, “Look at me, look at me”. There’s a consistency about the boy that is in the man, and that consistency reflects those underlying principles as a result of his family experience and genetic make-up.’

  By the time Ron was fifteen, he wanted to quit school. There were only four secondary students left at Lockington Consolidated, which only went up to Year Ten. He’d had enough and leaving school would not prevent him from one day joining the police. ‘Mum and Dad said, “No, that’s not happening, you’re getting a certificate,” so they enrolled us in Echuca Technical School, which went up to Year Twelve,’ he says. Nancye had already completed her studies and was helping out on the farm, but that wasn’t what Bill and Phyllis had in mind for the boys.

  On their first day, Phyllis – who made sure the twins were neatly decked out in their new school uniforms – drove them to the bus stop at Lockington, from where it would take them an hour to get to their new school. ‘We were wearing new short-sleeved shirts, shorts that went nearly to the knee, white socks and black shoes,’ Ron says. ‘But when we got on the bus, everyone was wearing long pants.’ Unfortunately, the childishly dressed teenagers would have to endure the walk of shame onto the bus for at least another week. ‘I remember getting home and saying, “Mum! You’ve got to get me some long pants!” ’

  Ron was surprised to find there were teachers for every subject. ‘There were probably six hundred students and at least four Year Eleven classes, so I felt that the pressure was on,’ he admits.

  When they returned to school, Ron continued to feel weight on his shoulders. ‘You had to perform, so I worked hard,’ he says. It paid off when he became dux of Year Eleven.

  Ron toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a railway station assistant. ‘But I realised I’d be putting sand in ashtrays and blowing a whistle when a train came in.’ And that just didn’t excite him, not in the way that Leonard Teale and John Fegan’s fictitious adventures did.

  2

  THE BIG SMOKE

  ‘I hadn’t been in the police cadets for very long when I met Colleen. She was a diamond in the rough who would turn out to be my rock.’

  – Ron Iddles

  In Ron’s day, there were two ways to get into Victoria Police.

  If you were eighteen-and-a-half, you could join directly and go into training as a recruit. The other option was to complete Year Eleven and start as a cadet. Unable to wait, Ron applied to join the cadets while he was in Year Eleven, and travelled to Melbourne for a fitness test and interview.

  ‘I was very excited when I received the letter to say I’d been accepted,’ he says. ‘Mum and Dad saw it as a very good profession and I remember other relatives being at the house that day and congratulating me.’

  And so it was that Ron Iddles, just shy of seventeen, left Lockington in February 1972 to live in Melbourne, two hundred kilometres and a world away. ‘Mum and Dad brought me down in their 1966 HR Holden station wagon and Mum was in tears,’ Ron recalls.

  Ron moved into a boarding house in Hawthorn, six kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD. The boarding house was run by a small-framed woman called Ada who worked tirelessly upstairs while her husband ran a real-estate agency downstairs. ‘I paid fourteen dollars a week and that included breakfast and dinner at night,’ Ron recalls. ‘And for an extra dollar I got my washing and ironing done, although being young, sometimes I held onto the extra dollar and did it myself.’

  The routine at the old boarding house was the same every night. ‘At six o’clock, Ada would ring the bell, and for half an hour we sat and yakked,’ Ron says. Ada always ate with her four lodgers, while her husband, perhaps tired after talking to clients all day, dined alone. ‘Normally we had meat and three veg, but occasionally Ada served ox tongue with white sauce,
’ Ron says with a shudder. ‘I couldn’t handle that.’

  Ron’s twin, Barry, who still lived on the farm, recalls going to see his brother at the boarding house. ‘I was very excited to go and visit him in Melbourne,’ he says. But Barry’s excitement turned to disappointment when he compared Ada’s lacklustre cooking to their mum’s. ‘The cakes would be dry and the bread stale, so Ada would plunge them in water and stick them in the oven to freshen them up,’ he says. Barry didn’t care for his brother’s new digs at all. ‘The boarding house was long, narrow, dark and cold, like a city miner’s cottage. It cost two cents an hour for a heater. It didn’t feel homely.’

  City life was vastly different from life on the farm, where Ron woke to the sound of cows mooing, dogs barking and tractors ploughing the soil in a distant paddock. ‘Our neighbour would start to round up his cows for milking at 5.30 am and they would walk along the road outside our house,’ Ron recalls. It had been the most bucolic of lifestyles.

  Now, Ron was waking up to cars, trucks making pre-dawn deliveries and the sound of early-morning trams rattling by. Welcome to the big smoke.

  And then there was cadet school. ‘We had the shortest of haircuts and the drill instructors would yell at us, telling us we were out of step,’ Ron says. ‘Our shoes had to be spit-polished so every day I’d catch the tram back to my boarding room and spend at least forty-five minutes polishing them with Kiwi Parade Nugget and an old stocking. It was the first thing we all did when we got home. Everyone had their own technique, but if you couldn’t see your face in the toecap, you weren’t up to standard. Most of us thought, What have we gotten ourselves into?’

  Part of a cadet’s training was to carry out mundane jobs at police stations. Ron’s first placement was at Kew, where he worked for three months. ‘I was sent to supervise school crossings in the morning, and in the afternoon, I did the filing,’ he says.

  His next placement was at the Dawson Street Transport Branch, where, again, he filed documents. ‘I’d come in in the morning and they’d give me a pile of cards – hundreds of them – to put in big steel filing cabinets,’ he says. ‘And that’s what I’d do all day.’