by Justine Ford
Sometimes even the cops were crims, and Ron remembers his first encounter with one like it was yesterday. As Collingwood’s newest officer, it was Ron’s job to drive one of the sergeants out on patrol. ‘We went to the Retreat Hotel in Abbotsford, which was known as a Painters and Dockers pub,’ he says. It was ten minutes before closing time. ‘The sergeant said to me, “We’re going there to show the flag”, which was a police term that meant we were going to walk through in our uniforms to show a police presence.’
The sergeant told Ron to make sure everyone left the hotel on time, and that the doors were closed behind them. Mission accomplished, thought Ron, as the patrons filed out quietly. Afterwards the sergeant turned to him and said, ‘What do you want to drink?’ Ron was startled – they were both in uniform – and said he didn’t drink. ‘You sure you don’t want a beer?’ the sergeant pressed. ‘I’m going to have one.’
Ron relented and allowed himself a pony (a five-ounce glass), but it didn’t sit well with him. ‘He was the sergeant, so you did what you were told,’ Ron says. ‘I didn’t agree with it but it just seemed to be accepted. Looking back now, I wouldn’t have done it. We all have a set of values and I think it would have been easy to become involved in situations that went against your beliefs.’
Encouraging the newcomer to drink a beer on duty wasn’t the worst of the sergeant’s crimes. Near the police station was a sandwich shop, owned by a justice of the peace. One day, when Ron went to the shop to buy his lunch, the JP said, ‘There’s something in the sandwich for you.’
Ron realised what he meant when he went to bite into his ham-and-salad sandwich and found a wad of cash. He went straight back to the shop to confront the owner. ‘There’s $150 in my sandwich,’ Ron announced. ‘What’s that for?’
‘I’ve been told by the sergeant you can fix something for me,’ the JP replied.
‘I don’t fix anything up,’ Ron said, handing back the money, along with the sandwich.
Sometime later, Ron wasn’t surprised to hear the dodgy sergeant was caught out, and ended up spending time in the Big House for drug trafficking.
*
With so many pubs in Collingwood, there were also a lot of drunks.
In the early to mid-1970s, cases of public inebriation were heard during a session at Collingwood Magistrate’s Court known as ‘Drunks’ Court’. It was well known among uniformed police that the magistrates there frowned on officers who referred to their notes while giving evidence. ‘So you had to be able to say, for example, that on whatever date, you saw the defendant swaying down Smith Street, Collingwood; that you approached them and asked them for their name; that they gave their name; that you noticed a strong smell of alcohol; and that they’d urinated in their pants,’ Ron recalls. ‘You’d then say you conveyed that person to Collingwood Police Station, where they were lodged in the cells for four hours. You had to know it verbatim.’
Collingwood Police Station had its regulars, most of whom Ron came to know. ‘There were two or three we locked up all the time for drinking methylated spirits, or “White Lady”, as it was known back then,’ Ron recalls. Without fail, when it came time to release the metho drinkers from the lockup, they’d all ask the same question, ‘You haven’t got a nip there, have you?’
‘The metho drinkers also loved Royal Reserve Port, which was really cheap and had a high alcohol content, and McWilliam’s sherry,’ Ron remembers. ‘So if we had a bottle there, we’d give them a nip and off they’d go. But they’d be back two or three days later.’
Sometimes, Ron would lock up metho drinkers for sleeping in a doorway, not to give them a hard time, but out of compassion. ‘Just to give them a bed,’ he admits.
There was also the problem of drink-driving, which, back then, society tended to tolerate, even though it was dangerous and against the law. To charge a motorist with driving under the influence, police would first call in the Breathalyser Unit to perform a breath test, but the early technology was inconclusive. ‘So we’d also test the person by getting them to touch their nose, walk heel to toe, do a sum or draw three circles on a twenty-cent piece,’ Ron says. ‘We’d present that to court in addition to the breath analysis to show they were impaired.’
Ron believes the process failed those with disabilities. ‘What if that person had a condition that meant they couldn’t write properly, or if they had had a cognitive impairment which meant they couldn’t walk heel to toe? But that’s how it was done.’
One of the worst things about working in an area where there was so much grog was the amount of violence that accompanied it. ‘Thursday night was a big night because it was pay day, and it was back when people used to get paid in brown envelopes,’ Ron remembers. ‘Some men would go to a hotel, stagger home at ten o’clock, behave aggressively or sometimes violently, and then the police would be called.’
Ron suddenly found himself lecturing men twice his age. ‘Here I was, a skinny country kid of nineteen, telling guys who’d been married twenty-five years what they should be doing and how they should be treating their wives. They’d yell, “Who do you think you are? You think you can say that just because you’ve got a uniform!” It was a little confronting.’ But Ron had a knack of defusing potentially explosive situations. ‘I learnt early on in my career the greatest weapon I had was the ability to talk to people. I’d say something like, “Mate, I understand that shit goes on, the best thing you can do is move out for four or five hours, have a sleep and then come back”.’
But there was still the danger that a violent husband could turn on police. ‘There were some occasions when I was frightened,’ Ron admits. ‘But the more incidents you went to, the more you learnt communication skills. You weren’t taught it, but you’d learn to separate the parties, and talk to them.’
Unfortunately, Ron says, there was no focus on family violence in 1974, so police powers were limited. ‘The best we could do was arrest the bloke for being drunk in a public place and lock him up for a few hours,’ he says. ‘We’d advise the women to take civil action and see the Clerk of the Courts, who could issue their partners with a summons for assault, but the women never did it. It wasn’t a police matter then unless it involved a physical assault, in which case you could charge the male, but it relied on the victim coming to court and making a statement. And because family violence wasn’t spoken about in the public arena, the women wouldn’t do that.
‘The only thing that worried me was where a woman may have had a serious injury, but we still couldn’t do anything and we’d have to leave her there for it to happen all over again,’ Ron continues. ‘It was disturbing that men would treat women the way they did. I’d never been exposed to it. I always thought it showed that some men had a weak character; they would never attack a male, but were happy to have total control over a female.’
*
As time went by, Ron got to know the streets, the dodgy haunts and the colourful Collingwood characters. More than anything, he loved the night shift, when he saw them all. ‘Night shift was exciting because the only people who were out between one and four were crooks and coppers,’ he says. ‘You always caught a crook. You always caught a drunk driver. It was fun.’
Two nights out of seven, Ron would man the station, cleaning the firearms and catching up on the clerks’ unfinished typing, but it was out on patrol where he did his best work. Back then, there was very little traffic after dark, so the sight of just one vehicle on the road was enough to raise suspicions. ‘It was pretty quiet by one in the morning, so any cars I saw moving round, I’d pull over and check,’ Ron says.
Unfamiliar vehicles also attracted his attention. ‘After several shifts I soon became aware of where vehicles were parked in particular streets,’ Ron says. ‘While I didn’t know every car, if I saw one I hadn’t seen before it often stuck out, and if it was still there two or three days later, it would warrant checking out.’
Back
at the station, when Ron looked at the police reports, he often discovered the unfamiliar cars were not where they should have been. ‘They’d usually been reported stolen,’ he explains. ‘We found many stolen cars just by knowing our area.’
Ron quickly realised that working in the one place for a length of time was giving him an advantage. ‘If you were stationed there for a while, you got to know the people of Collingwood, the crims and the behaviour,’ he says.
Ron worked out that the best way to catch a crook was to patrol the streets at a snail’s pace, keeping a sharp blue eye on his rear-vision mirror. He knew that he might not notice suspicious behaviour at speed, and sometimes he’d simply park in a shadowy alcove, wait, and watch.
There were signs that told Ron when folks were up to no good. ‘If we were driving along a street and a car turned off in the opposite direction, chances were there was a reason why they didn’t want to go past a police car,’ he explains. So whenever a car tried to avoid him, Ron tailed it, and more often than not, he’d discover the driver had been involved in a burglary or the vehicle had been stolen.
Ron was also wary of men carrying sports bags in the middle of the night; he knew they weren’t going to jazzercise. ‘I’d check them and find pliers and jemmy bars in their bags,’ he says. Invariably, he’d find out the men toting tools had just broken into a nearby house or factory. ‘I don’t think there were many night shifts where I didn’t catch a thief.’
‘He was the best thief catcher I’ve seen in my whole life. He was fearless. Tireless,’ says Ivan Smith. ‘It’s unbelievable to think someone could be that good. We were very glad he walked through the door.’
No one was happier that he’d walked through the door than Ron, but he admits there were times he was apprehensive. ‘You’d feel that way sometimes when you were going into the unknown,’ he says. ‘You might get a call for an “Offender’s On”, which meant someone was breaking into a house or a factory, so you’d drive there like crazy and hope to catch them in the act. It was an adrenaline rush as it meant you drove fast without any siren as you didn’t want to alert potential suspects.’
But an ‘Offender’s On’ could also be downright creepy because police never knew who they were going to find when they got there, or what kind of mood they’d be in. ‘On arrival you’d always find the premises had been broken into, so you were on edge,’ Ron says. ‘We always expected the worst – in other words, some kind of confrontation with the offenders. But if you entered a building with that in mind, at least you were cautious.’
Often, by the time police arrived, the criminals had fled, but other times, Ron – who’d usually called for backup so that the front and rear of the premises were covered – caught them red-handed. And what he came to learn was curious: ‘They were often more frightened than we were,’ he says.
*
After a couple of years, it was Ron’s job to take a new recruit on patrol. ‘Ron, can you help me catch a car thief?’ the rookie, who’d heard about Ron’s growing reputation as a thief catcher, had asked.
‘So we backed into an alcove and I told him what to look for,’ Ron remembers. ‘I said if a car goes by and it looks like the quarter-panel window at the front is open, more than likely it’s been smashed. If there were three people in the front of a car sharing a bench seat, that was also a clue the car had been stolen.’ Ron didn’t know why thieves huddled together like that; they just did. ‘Within an hour we’d caught one, just by looking out for those clues.’ It was a buzz for the rookie but just as exciting for Ron, who felt like he’d won Tattslotto every time he nabbed a crook.
Ron received four commendations for thief-catching during his time at Collingwood, and frequently passed on vital information about illegal activities to the Collingwood CIB. His impressive record attracted the attention of the other officers at the station. ‘After a short space of time when he was showing his thief-catching ability, people wanted to work with him,’ his former boss Ivan Smith says. ‘They learnt from him.’
Ron’s instincts for the job could have come from all those episodes of Homicide he’d watched growing up. Smith offers an interesting perspective: ‘He must have so much suspicion. I come from the country myself and I think we have a bit of an advantage. It’s a combination of country knowledge and city cunning.’
It wasn’t just on the night shift that Ron shone. ‘He brought thieves with him to work that he’d caught along the way. There was crime all around. All you had to do was look for it, and that was what Ron did. He had an unerring instinct for it. It’s a natural instinct, I suppose,’ says Smith.
Colleen was proud to see her husband thriving. ‘While he was at Collingwood he became admired for being a good cop,’ she says. ‘A fair cop.’
‘The thing with Ron, everyone said he was a lucky crook catcher, but I don’t think he was,’ says Leigh Gassner, a fellow constable at Collingwood who became a friend. ‘He didn’t let up for eight hours. He was always out there, constantly pulling over cars. It was his instinct combined with his commitment, which is why he quickly got a name for himself for catching crooks and finding stolen cars.’
The other thing that stood out to Gassner about Ron was his integrity. ‘Very quickly with Ron, you pick up on his values and authenticity,’ he says. ‘He would never dip into any behaviour that could be called into question. And you never got the impression he was driven by ego.’
The Collingwood days were a time Ron will never forget. ‘I was having fun but I was also seeing another element of life,’ he reflects. ‘I was seeing violence, death, suicides and major car accidents where people were maimed or harmed, and I saw the pain. As a police officer, you see things that no one else sees in their lifetime. In my time at Collingwood I certainly saw more about human behaviour than when I was growing up.’
*
While Ron was at Collingwood, Colleen was working as a nurse’s aide at Willsmere, a mental health hospital in Kew, a job she held until she was pregnant.
The first house they lived in after they got married in 1975 was in Abbotsford. ‘The managing director of Phoenix Biscuits went to Ivan Smith and asked if a policeman could live at the back of his house in Abbotsford, like an unofficial security guard,’ Ron says. ‘So we went to live there for $15 a week rent.’
During that time, Ron took in a boarder so that he and Colleen could save for a home of their own. ‘I didn’t like the idea, but Ron talked me into it,’ Colleen says. ‘Ron charged him $15 a week in rent, even though that’s what we were paying!’
Soon, however, the boarder set Colleen on edge. ‘I just sensed there was something about him that wasn’t right. He was weird,’ she says. ‘He stayed in his room all the time and he didn’t change his sheets. I didn’t like him.’
He didn’t seem to have a job either. ‘He’d initially told me he was a company director,’ Ron recalls. ‘Back then I thought it was a big deal, but I later learned you can be a director of your own tin pot company.’
‘He was the entrepreneur of nothing,’ Colleen adds.
Despite the boarder’s unwelcome presence, Colleen fell pregnant in August 1975. ‘I wanted a baby quickly,’ she reveals. ‘I think we got rid of the boarder about halfway through my pregnancy. It got to the stage where I finally kicked him out.’
Colleen went into labour ten days after the baby was due, but didn’t realise it at first. ‘That day, Ron took me to Dimmeys in Richmond to go shopping,’ she says. ‘By the evening, I thought something was definitely happening.’
Ron drove his twenty-year-old wife to Cabrini Hospital in Malvern, where the labour lasted twenty-six hours. During that time Colleen’s mum, Jean, insisted Ron join her for breakfast, but Ron made sure he was back when his baby girl came into the world.
‘He was really moved and he cried,’ Colleen remembers, though he’d found the trauma of watching her through labour very intense.
The couple named their daughter Joanne Elizabeth, and even though Ron wanted to spend as much time as he could at the hospital with his wife and daughter, back then, hospital protocol restricted new dads’ visits to ‘father’s time’, a measly half-hour every night. He wasn’t even allowed to hold the baby; he had to look at her through a glass window.
Colleen didn’t get to see much more of their daughter during her seven-day stay in hospital, either. ‘I didn’t even know for sure that Joanne was a girl!’ Colleen says. ‘I wasn’t allowed to change her nappy or dress her; the nurses just brought her to me to breastfeed – ten minutes on one side and ten minutes on the other. They were quite ruthless in those days.’
The night after Colleen gave birth, Ron asked if the boarder could come back to stay for one night. ‘For some reason he came back because he had nowhere to stay,’ Ron recalls. ‘It was a bad decision on my part because it caused stress for Colleen. And I worked out that he was strange, too. Women have a better antenna.’
After a short stay, Colleen again ejected him, but while Ron was at work he’d sometimes turn up unannounced. ‘He used to come and bang on the door,’ Colleen says. ‘It got to the point where I had to have the house in darkness at six o’clock so he’d think I wasn’t home. It was scary, and I don’t think Ron realised that until later.’
Eventually, the boarder tired of his unfulfilling visits, but Colleen always remembered what it was like to feel frightened in her own home.
*
When Joanne was seven months old, Ron and Colleen fulfilled their dream of home ownership, and on Boxing Day 1976 moved into a three-bedroom brick house at Launching Place, a picturesque rural township an hour’s drive from Collingwood. Other young families had started to move there but infrastructure was poor, public transport almost non-existent, and the closest major shopping centre was twenty kilometres away. Being so far from the action did, however, make Launching Place affordable. ‘Interest rates on home loans had risen to eighteen per cent, so this was where we could afford to buy a new home without overcommitting,’ Ron says. ‘The house-and-land package cost $21,000.’