Man & Beast

by Andrew Rule

  The hitman was instructed to kill the Wilsons’ dog, Taj, and drop the victims’ car at Melbourne airport to give the impression they had fled overseas. He parked the car as ordered but refused to kill the dog, instead dropping it in the street on his way through Brunswick.

  Another gangster with a weakness for little dogs was Mario Condello, a qualified lawyer who once had ambitions to be a High Court judge and a tooled-up mobster but ended up as a mobbed-up tool.

  The big man liked to take his dog for an early-morning walk, always using the same route past the Brighton cemetery. For a fellow connected with the so-called Carlton Crew and up to his armpits in the Melbourne gangland war, such predictability could be fatal. Sure enough, in 2004 a police taskforce found that drug boss Carl Williams had put out a contract to kill Condello on his morning walk.

  On the day, police made sure Condello was nowhere near Brighton as the two-man hit team assembled. In a sliding-doors moment, another large local with a small dog walked past the cemetery, leading the would-be killers to think they had their man.

  A police bug picked up one crook saying, ‘I’m going to have to walk up beside him and shoot him.’

  As there were 170 police hiding in the area, the gunmen were quickly arrested before they could move. Worried detectives were instantly relieved, as was the bladder of one of the gunmen. We will never know if the wrong man discovered how close he was to becoming a mistaken-identity victim.

  Condello was safe for a time but continued to be a creature of habit. Given bail on the condition he spent nights at home, he fell into a routine of returning there around the same time. He was shot dead two years later, in his driveway. The suspect in this case disliked most people and preferred the company of a parrot he taught to say ‘Not guilty’ and ‘I hate coppers’. Who says stone killers don’t have a sense of humour?

  It is not only the baddies who have affection for animals. Police dogs have a wonderful history of catching crooks and protecting their handlers, something bent drug squad cop David Miechel forgot when caught outside an East Oakleigh drug house he happened to be robbing.

  Found up a tree by a canine unit, Miechel first tried to talk his way out, saying he was looking for the offender. When that failed, he punched the handler, which enraged police dog Silky, who proceeded to latch onto his thigh.

  Miechel then tried to punch the dog, which enraged the handler, who hit him with a police torch, fracturing his cheekbone and jaw. Miechel got a nasty scar and twelve years, while Silky got a plate of Meaty Bites.

  Miechel’s co-offender Terence Hodson made a statement implicating then detective sergeant Paul Dale but did not live to testify. In May 2004 Hodson and his wife Christine were shot dead in their Kew home. Their two guard dogs were locked in the garage, suggesting the victims did not feel threatened and were ambushed by someone they knew. Had the dogs been left out, it might have saved the Hodsons.

  For a time the elite Purana police taskforce had its own office pet—a mature-age yabby found in a Castlemaine dam and kept in a 25-litre glass receptacle previously used to produce amphetamines.

  The container was seized from a lab owned by drug boss Tony Mokbel, and so the freshwater crustacean was named Tony. Both yabby Tony and runaway Tony seemed to like boats. The drug boss escaped to Greece in a $340 000 ketch, while the yabby had a $2 toy one at the bottom of the tank.

  Eventually, administrative staff bought a goldfish dubbed Zarah (after lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, who, incidentally, owned a snake called Chivas) but the yabby ate the fish, proving that Tony neither could be trusted nor was fond of captivity.

  This brings us to one of the great criminological and zoological mysteries of our time—the unexplained death of Australia’s oldest armed robber, Aubrey Maurice Broughill. When, in February 1999, Aubrey’s body was found floating in a flooded Wodonga quarry, his death was treated as suspicious.

  There was no reason for him to be there. He had no car. There was no record he travelled to the district on public transport, and accommodation checks showed no bookings for him. He was seventy-three years old but fit and a strong swimmer.

  When the body was recovered, he was wearing a striped shirt, his blue denim jeans were caught around his left foot, his belt was still fastened, he was not wearing underpants and he was barefoot.

  There was another reason to think this was no accident. Aubrey Maurice Broughill had no testicles.

  One theory put to the coroner was that the local population of eastern snake-necked turtles—which usually snack on insects, small fish, tadpoles and the occasional frog—attacked him after death.

  While the snake-necked turtle is known to be partial to carrion, no one can explain why in this case it supposedly went after only one part of the anatomy. When these turtles find a carcass they use their front claws to shred the flesh into bite-size chunks.

  Which seems at odds with the description of Broughill’s injuries as a ‘well-defined incised like edge measuring seven centimetres and extending to a more irregular ragged tear’. This would suggest that, unless the turtles were armed with scalpels, they are not guilty.

  Broughill had teamed up with some South Australian thieves, and had been charged with nineteen offences, including burglary and car theft, just weeks earlier. Adelaide police had connected this gang to the mysterious disappearance of four men over a seven-year period. Their bodies have not been found.

  If you lie down with dogs, fleas are the least of your problems.

  Mimi and Rosa

  Jeff Sparrow

  I bestow on you the highest honour I can award a mortal being; I shall entrust you my Mimi. [… Y]ou’ll have to abduct her in the car in your arms (definitely not in a basket or a sack!!!) with the help of my housekeeper … she will pack all Mimi’s seven belongings (her little box, cat litter, bowl, cushions and—please—a red armchair which she is used to).

  The instructions might have been written by any contemporary cat lover—perhaps someone embarking on a vacation and carefully instructing a friend on how to care for their precious animal. Actually, though, they’re from the great German socialist Rosa Luxemburg, written as she prepared for jail, a few years before her murder.

  Companion animals—especially cats—can have that effect. They strip away the years. One cat lover recognises another, no matter the temporal divide separating them.

  Yesterday evening this is what [Mimi] did. I was searching all the rooms for her, but she wasn’t there. I was getting worried, and I then discovered her in my bed, but she was lying so that the cover was tucked up prettily right under her chin with her head on the pillow exactly the way I lie, and she looked at me calmly and roguishly.

  Add a photo, and the extract from a 1908 letter by Luxemburg could be a Facebook post popping up on your feed today. Perhaps, then, Mimi can help recover her owner from a hundred years of history—and the various mythologies that have claimed her.

  Luxemburg was born into a Jewish family in an anti-Semitic Poland in 1871. A socialist from her teens, she fled to Zurich, where she earned her PhD. Eventually, she made her way to Berlin, to become a major activist, theorist and orator in the Social Democratic Party, the largest socialist organisation in Europe.

  Upon the outbreak of the Great War, almost all the leading German socialists embraced the kaiser’s military effort. Luxemburg’s refusal to capitulate to the war hysteria made her, with her comrade Karl Liebknecht, a worldwide symbol of revolutionary intransigence.

  After the insurrection that brought the conflict to an end, the pair died at the hands of soldiers from the freikorps (precursors to the Nazis). Thereafter, German conservatives remembered Luxemburg as the terrifying Red Rosa, a sinister Tricoteuse fomenting bloody revolt, while the East German ideologues celebrated her as a stern communist saint.

  It’s difficult to imagine either version of Luxemburg fussing over exactly how a cat should be transported.

  Mimi carried in a basket, taken for a day and then brought back! As if it was a
question of an ordinary creature of the species felix domestic. Well, you should know … that Mimi is a little mimosa, a hyper nervous little princess in cat’s fur and when I, her own mother, once wanted to carry her out of the house against her will, she got cramp due to the excitement and turned stiff in my arms so that she had to be brought back into the apartment with distressed little eyes and only recovered after some hours. Yes, yes, you have no idea what my motherly heart has already experienced.

  Of course, the instant familiarity of the passage can produce a different kind of historical disorientation. We might even say that the gradual awareness of Luxemburg’s letters—published in dribs and drabs since the 1920s and recently compiled in a wonderful collection by Verso—spawned a new myth, one in which Mimi plays a starring role.

  For instance, in her book The Demon Lover, the radical feminist Robin Morgan depicts Luxemburg as torn ‘between a relentless political activism and her yearning for a contemplative life of writing, thinking and caring for plants and animals’. This (surprisingly common) perception of Luxemburg as an almost Tolstoyian pacifist awkwardly shoehorned into the socialist movement comes, in part, from the devotion to Mimi chronicled in Luxemburg’s prodigious correspondence to friends and comrades.

  We read of the cat’s misbehaviour (‘Mimi is a scoundrel. She leaped at me from the floor and tried to bite me’) and the cat’s affection (‘Mimi showed she was happy with me right away and has again become high-spirited, comes running to me like a dog and grabs at the train of my dress’). She bites the nose of a marble bust and she chases the light refracted from a prism (‘Soon she deduced that there was “nothing” to them, that they were just an optical illusion, and then she would watch the dance with her merry little eyes, without bestirring herself’). She helps her owner spray flowers; she reads a letter by ‘sniff[ing] at it lovingly’.

  ‘Mimi is loved by all,’ Luxemburg boasts in 1911, ‘and today in the presence of the Adolf [Warski] family she caused universal amazement, because she was standing on two paws, holding onto the water faucet and with one paw catching the falling drips and accompanying them on their downward course.’

  Alongside pride in Mimi’s accomplishments (again, so very familiar from social media), Luxemburg’s letters do, sometimes, voice her utter exhaustion, her desire to escape the whirlwind of activism, ‘to paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals’.

  ‘How glad I am,’ she writes, ‘that three years ago I suddenly plunged into the study of botany the way I do everything, immediately, with all my fire and passion, with my entire being, so that the world, the party, and my work faded away for me and only one passion filled me up both day and night: to be outdoors roaming about in the springtime fields, to gather plants until my arms were full, and then at home to put them in order, identify them, and put them between the pages of a scrapbook to dry.’ When, on another occasion, a fellow socialist describes a starving worker staring hungrily at meat bought for Mimi, Luxemburg snaps back: ‘Why are you telling me this? Don’t I do everything in my power to fight for all the poor? You shouldn’t spoil my joy with Mimi.’

  Yet, if Mimi represents for Luxemburg a refuge from political turmoil, the cat is also, without question, a companion within it. Luxemburg discovered the injured animal at the SPD school where she taught political economy—and her relationship with the cat unfolded more or less entirely within the well-organised world of the German labour movement.

  ‘I should be working,’ she writes in 1912, ‘but I’m feeling lazy. Mimi is rolling over teasingly on the carpet, saying prau [meow] and letting herself be tickled on the tummy.’

  That feline-assisted procrastination will strike a chord with any cat-owning writer today. But, precisely because of that, it’s easy to forget that Luxemburg’s ‘work’ was that of a professional revolutionary in the midst of world-shaking events.

  Furthermore, if she discusses the stresses of her public life, she also explains the satisfaction politics provides her. She describes, for instance, the period she spent writing her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, as the happiest time of her life—a happiness she shares with Mimi.

  ‘Really,’ she recalls, ‘I was living as though in euphoria, “on a high”, say and heard nothing else, day or night, but this one question which unfolded before me so beautifully, and I don’t know what to say about which gave me the greater pleasure: the process of thinking, when I was turning a complicated problem over in my mind, pacing slowly back and forth through the room, under the close and attentive observation of Mimi who lay on the red plush tablecloth with her little paws curled under her and kept turning her wise head back and forth to follow my movements; or the process of giving shape and literary form to my thoughts with pen in hand.’

  It’s a passage that inspires Kate Evans (in her terrific graphic novel Red Rosa) to depict Luxemburg expounding her theory of imperialism to a scowling Comrade Mimi.

  The cat is also present in 1911 when Luxemburg meets with Lenin. ‘I enjoy talking with him,’ she writes later, ‘he’s clever and well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.’ Naturally, she also claims that Mimi impresses Lenin ‘tremendously’:

  He said that only in Siberia had he seen such a magnificent creature, that she was a baskii kot—a majestic cat. She also flirted with him, rolled on her back and behaved enticingly toward him, but when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a tiger.

  (Lenin’s own affection for cats would require an entirely separate article.)

  Luxemburg loved animals—and it’s clear that she used Mimi to express different facets of her complex personality. Many of her references to the cat come in letters to her lovers, particularly Kostya Zetkin. ‘I kiss you,’ she writes, in a typical passage. ‘Mimi does too.’

  Yet, politically, she remained, as she said, ‘as hard as polished steel’—even as she delighted in ‘Mimi … sleeping next to me on the easy chair, curled up like a snail.’

  Hearing of Luxemburg’s exhaustion, her friend (and sometime lover) Leo Jogiches commented: ‘If Rosa lived differently, she would be even less satisfied. She cannot live differently.’

  That seems entirely true.

  In another letter to Kostya, she encloses ‘as a gift a picture of Mimi, which I got yesterday and which gave me great joy’. That photograph, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have survived. In its absence, we can’t say much about Mimi—her colour or breed or size. Nor is it clear what happened to the animal after Luxemburg’s death.

  With characteristic courage, Luxemburg accepted the danger she faced.

  ‘I would not flee,’ she told a friend at the start of the war, ‘even if I were threatened by the gallows, and that is for the simple reason that I consider it absolutely necessary to accustom our party to the idea that sacrifices are part of a socialist’s work in life, that they are simply a matter of course.’

  After the failed uprising in 1918, the government (led by one of Luxemburg’s former students) placed a price on her head. Soldiers, whipped up into an anti-Semitic frenzy by the right-wing press, arrested Luxemburg in an apartment on Mannheim Strasse and took her to their headquarters at the Hotel Eden. She walked through a crowd of uniformed men showering her with abuse. They clubbed her unconscious, shot her dead and dumped her body in the Spree river.

  In the paragraph below she writes to her friend about her attitude to World War I—and, in the process, explains something of what the animal she calls ‘my most blessed cat Mimi’ meant to her. It seems, then, an appropriate epitaph, both for the cat and the woman who loved her.

  ‘Don’t you understand,’ Luxemburg says, ‘that the overall disaster is much too great to be moaned and groaned about? I can grieve or feel bad if Mimi is sick, or if you are not well. But when the whole world is out of joint, then I merely seek to understand what is going on and why, and then I have done my duty, and I am calm and in good spirits from then on. Ultra posse n
emo obligatur [none are obliged to do more than they can]. And then for me there still remains everything else that makes me happy: music and painting and clouds and doing botany in the spring and good books and Mimi and you and much more.’

  Roo Dogs

  Paul Toohey

  Tough guys like their pit bulls. But do they know there was a time when tough guys were really tough? They were explorers, hunters, pastoralists and hungry Aboriginal hinterland probers, forced off their country into the wastelands. All of them had only one kind of dog at their side: the kangaroo dog.

  Until thirty years ago, it was still possible to see kangaroo dogs on some cattle stations and farms. They were tall, rangy and heavier-chested than a greyhound. Mean-looking. Some carried subtle tiger markings—hinting at both Tasmanian and Bengal varieties. You knew a kangaroo dog. They carried war scars from wildly scratching kangaroos.

  And there always seemed to be two of them. They wouldn’t vault and slaver, or necessarily bite. They’d sit back, frigidly observing through sideways eyes. Waiting to see what happened.

  What happened was that our national dog, which long predated the blue heeler as the preferred canine sidekick, all but disappeared. Probably only a couple of hundred true-to-type kangaroo dogs still exist.

  ‘They were once part of our history,’ says James Callan, a hunting-dog breeder from Warren in central New South Wales, who has one young female kangaroo dog in his pack. But his family has had them for generations. ‘They were the first type of dog to be developed in Australia.’

  The kangaroo dog was not a breed but a type. It was basically a cross between a greyhound and a deerhound. The greyhound was fast and clever but its feet were too soft; crossed with a deerhound, it became tougher and had a better instinct for running off or killing the dingoes that circled the settlers’ herds. The ideal kangaroo dog leaned towards the greyhound’s short coat. Prickles didn’t attach and it was low-maintenance.