by Denis Ryan
Both Jean and I were worried about the level of health care that would be available in Mildura to Michael, in particular. We wondered about the schools in the town and whether all the boys would have access to a good education. This was going to be a big move, life-changing for all of us, and once we’d made our way up there, there would be no turning back.
As a detective in Mildura, I was required to provide my own car. I’d receive a vehicle allowance, which was fine, but at that stage I didn’t own a car. I put myself in debt to the Police Credit Union and went out and bought an EK standard Holden sedan. I thought I was it and a bit more in my new car.
I rented the house in Aspendale to a friend and his family. It was really my one remaining physical connection with Melbourne.
But Jean and I were determined to make a go of it. Michael’s health depended on us living in Mildura and we had no other options.
The morning after my appointment to the Mildura CIB appeared in the Police Orders, I got a phone call at the CIB office at Mordialloc. It was Detective Sergeant Dinny Barritt, a good friend of mine. We’d played cricket together in the Russell Street side. He wasn’t a great cricketer but he enjoyed the game and loved being part of the team.
‘I see you’re in the Police Orders today for the position at Mildura CIB,’ Dinny Barritt said.
‘That’s right, Dinny,’ I replied.
‘I’m extremely worried about you going up there,’ Dinny told me.
‘Why’s that?’ I inquired, with a sinking feeling rumbling away in my guts.
‘My brother Jim, who you know is in charge of the CIB in Mildura. You definitely will not get on well with him because there’s something really wrong with him in the head.’
‘What are you getting at?’ I asked.
‘Look, why don’t you come in to the police club and we’ll have a beer. I’ll tell you all about it.’
I was more than curious. I was worried. After making the decision to throw the family into tumult, the last thing I wanted to hear was that I was headed into a nightmare. Dinny was keen to fill me in on the details sooner rather than later, so we agreed to meet later that day.
The Police Association Club was in MacKenzie Street, right alongside Russell Street headquarters. I got there around five o’clock and Dinny was there waiting for me. He bought me a beer. I took a sip and cleared my throat.
‘So what’s the problem with your brother?’
‘Jim has set ideas of his own which I disagree with, as do most other policemen who know him,’ Dinny told me, with a look of anguish on his face.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I thought Dinny was being obtuse. I needed some details. ‘In what way?’
‘I know you to a degree but I know Jim much better,’ He said. ‘I’m telling you now for certain that you will not get on with him. Don’t go up there.’
I took my time to explain to him that the only reason I was going to Mildura was for the health of my eldest son. It was something I had to do.
‘All I can do is repeat what I have already told you,’ he said seriously. ‘Don’t go to Mildura.’
‘My hands are tied, Dinny,’ I replied. ‘There’s nothing I can do about this.’
‘All right,’ he said and downed his beer. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t convince you. Don’t forget—I did warn you.’
I finished my beer and made my way home. I caught the train from Flinders Street back to Mordialloc, and as the old red carriage swayed and creaked down the line, I thought about what I might be getting myself into.
My mind went back to an annual police mass at St Francis in Lonsdale Street two years earlier. Afterwards, a group of us crossed the road and went to Myer’s for breakfast. After breakfast, some of us took a stroll down Lonsdale Street to O’Connor’s in Spencer Street. I was walking along with Dinny Barritt and his brother Barney. Barney was a detective sergeant who’d worked down in Geelong for most of his career.
We were having a normal chat about police gossip, with a few funny stories thrown in for good measure. Barney looked back at the coppers walking behind us to the pub.
‘The bastard’s behind us,’ Barney said to his brother. ‘It’s your turn. I had to put up with him last year.’
Dinny made it clear he didn’t want the bastard either.
‘Come on, Barney. Let’s see what we can do to work this out.’
I looked back and saw this fellow. He was a giant of a man, built like a front rower with a head the size of a watermelon. I quickly gathered from their conversation that the large bloke they were each trying to offload was their older brother, Jim. I reckoned the Barritts’ domestic disputes were their business and not mine, so I hurried on and joined up with another group a few metres ahead.
That was the only time I’d ever seen Jim Barritt. I’d heard about him. I knew he’d been stationed at Footscray, where he’d developed a reputation for being very hard on the slaughtermen who worked in the abattoirs around there. He used to beat the shit out of them, or so I’d heard.
Another little glimmer of memory came to me.
Back in 1957 when I was relieving at Frankston CIB, my boss, Detective Sergeant Len Walsh, and I were having a beer at the Chelsea Hotel. A bloke came up to us; Len knew him and introduced me to him. It was Lloyd Brewster, a violent standover man who ran some of the big baccarat schools around Melbourne. Brewster was whingeing to Len about policemen in general, about how we were all cowards and would only go the thump when we knew we were safe.
‘The only copper with any guts that I know is Jim Barritt,’ Brewster said. ‘He didn’t wait for the doors to open at the baccarat school. He’d go straight through them.’
Did Jim Barritt rule the Mildura district like his own personal fiefdom? Was he corrupt? Was he a violent bastard who threw the standing orders away? Was he sane? How the hell was I going to get on with him?
I decided then that I was going to go out of my way to work with this man. There were very few policemen I’d met whom I couldn’t get along with. In general I had no problem working with any other police officer in Victoria.
As they say, ‘All the world is a little queer other than thee and me, and even thee art a little queer.’
Besides, Jim Barritt couldn’t be that bad, could he?
3
THE DEEP NORTH
Once I cried: ‘Oh, God Almighty!
if Thy might doth still endure,
Now show me in a vision for the wrongs of Earth a cure.’
HENRY LAWSON, 1867–1922
I knew little about Mildura before I got there in 1962. What I did know was that Jean and the children and I were headed to a far-flung township in the north-west corner of Victoria.
The heat bore down on us throughout the journey. It was a stifling day as we motored along in my new car, with the mercury hovering around 35 degrees Celsius, the boot laden with our prize possessions and clothing. A van with our furniture was awaiting our arrival in Mildura. When I’d bought the car, I’d considered air conditioning a luxury I could not afford, a decision I would desperately regret as the temperature in the car climbed higher the further north we drove.
Even in the heat, Martin, Michael and Gavin chattered away excitedly throughout the trip, pausing only to take in a landmark here and there before resuming their enthusiastic conversation. They saw our move to Mildura as an adventure. Children have no fear of the new, only curiosity.
But Jean and I remained anxious. We sat quietly in the front seat as I drove, taking in the shape of the landscape as it changed from the grassy pastures around Bendigo to become flatter and dryer, the land now shifting to broad-acre farming—sheep and wheat—until we hit Sea Lake and the Mallee.
The children’s chatter ceased as they peered through the open windows at a scene that was unknown to all of us— strange and forbidding. On either side of the road lay flat scrub, pockmarked with the famed mallee gums, their limbs reaching out crazily in all directions, eking out an existence among the salt bush in the
dusty pink soil. Every living thing there seemed overpowered, dominated by the shimmering heat.
I looked across at Jean. She was crying, her head bowed, sobbing into her handkerchief. The Mallee, named by someone with a sense of humour as ‘the Sunset Country’, was a bleak and tormented place, and the sense of remoteness and isolation hung heavily in the air. We were just six hours’ drive from Melbourne but we might as well have been on the other side of the planet. I drove on, wondering what I had done and how my family would deal with the challenges of living in Mildura.
Twenty kilometres out of Mildura, the landscape changed again, the bleak semi-desert transformed into farms with their neat rows of grape vines, a sign of the area’s dried fruit industry.
The irrigation channels around Red Cliffs, a satellite township of Mildura, had been open since the 1920s, creating an inland oasis wedged between the cartographers’ lines on the map and separating Victoria, South Australia and the Murray River to the north and into New South Wales. In Red Cliffs and then in Mildura, neat, uniform little houses lined the streets with their lush and green front lawns, trimmed to precision, while the sprinklers hissed and clanged, their fine mists spreading life to the thirsty gardens.
The greater Mildura area appeared to be bigger than its then population of 27,000 people. There was an air of productivity, of success against the odds. It was March and the picking season was under way, the town swelling with itinerant labourers, many of whom arrived from Melbourne on trains to torture their bodies in the orchards and piss their wages up against a wall in one of the two hotels in the town.
Jean was troubled and I knew immediately that she felt the sense of distance from home, family and friends. With the warnings about Jim Barritt still ringing in my ears, I determined that I would make a go of Mildura for Jean and the children, even if it meant befriending the devil himself.
Just one day into the job at Mildura and I knew what Dinny Barritt was talking about.
Jim Barritt wanted to give me the guided tour. The first stop on the way was a meet and greet with the local parish priest. I thought this was strange but any protest was out of the question. I went along for the ride.
Barritt and I arrived at the presbytery. And who did he introduce me to? None other than Father John Day. I knew at once that he was the drunken, lecherous priest I had encountered six years before. He might have been as pissed as a newt back then, but he remembered me too. I could see the glimmer of recognition in his eyes; his body language was immediately defensive.
I didn’t say a word at the time but on the drive back to the station with Barritt, I decided to speak up. ‘You know that priest has got some unusual habits,’ I said.
Barritt swung around. ‘What do you mean by that?’
I told Barritt about detaining Day in Melbourne—the prostitutes, and Day lying there on the front seat of the car with his head in a prostitute’s lap and his dick hanging out.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Barritt roared. ‘Get your facts right before you open your gob.’
Barritt may have been the senior officer, but I never took a backward step when I knew I was right. I was surprised at his reaction and I was not about to be bullied. ‘I’ve got my facts right. It’s you that needs to get your facts right.’
After that, the guided tour was over. We travelled back to the station in silence.
We had similar exchanges throughout the day. He would approach me and yell at me from less than a foot away and I would return the favour.
At the station the following day, Barritt yelled out that I was wanted on the phone. I picked up the phone at my desk and introduced myself.
‘It’s Father Day, Denis. I’d like you to come over to the presbytery now, if you could.’
I had an inkling that Barritt had told Day what I had said. Curious, I jumped in the car and headed straight over. I knocked on the presbytery door, and it opened almost immediately. Day had been waiting. He launched right into me.
‘You need to get your facts straight. You don’t know what you’re talking about. That wasn’t me. There was another priest named John Day. He was down at Apollo Bay. I’ve never been to the place.’
I adjusted my volume to equal his. ‘It was you. You and I both know it was you in the company of prostitutes and in a disgraceful condition.’
His voice rose another few decibels. ‘Get out of my sight. Don’t you spread malicious rumours about me. Get out.’
Too late. I’d already turned and was making my way out the door.
Again I made my way back to the station. As I walked into my office, Barritt was standing there, waiting for me. Much like Day had done earlier, Barritt went on the attack. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get your facts right.’
In time I would get used to hearing those sentences from Barritt. He prefaced most of his remarks to me and other police officers, to crooks, to anyone he had a disagreement with that way. And Barritt was a disagreeable bastard.
‘What I told you, I told you in confidence,’ I said to Barritt. ‘You’ve broken that confidentiality.’
He glared back at me, his massive frame looming over me. ‘There was another priest whose name was John Day. He was the priest at Apollo Bay. So get your bloody facts right.’
He stormed back to his office.
I had received my first insight into the association between Barritt and Day. It was obvious to me that the two men were more than just friends. I would learn that Barritt was Day’s protector, and somehow Day was able to manipulate Barritt and get whatever he wanted out of him.
As an avid member of the Catholic Mafia, Barritt understood that the Church must be protected at all costs. I would also learn that Barritt’s protection extended to keeping Day’s prolific child sex crimes unreported and unacknowledged.
That was the way it would be between Barritt and me from that moment on.
It turned out that Detective Sergeant James Patrick Barritt was a big fan of J. Edgar Hoover. Barritt collected clippings and ravenously read anything he could get his hands on about the FBI boss. He worshipped the man. At Mildura police station he would often break into long rambling speeches to me and others about Hoover’s pursuit of communists and other enemies of the state.
Had the two men stood side by side, Barritt would have dwarfed Hoover but, like the FBI director, he had very small feet and hands, almost comically out of proportion to the rest of his gigantic frame. I have no doubt that Barritt viewed himself as a crime fighter, a little piece of J. Edgar Hoover in Mildura, with the same no-nonsense approach to bringing offenders to justice.
Like Hoover, Barritt’s pursuit of criminals was entirely arbitrary. He ignored the most egregious examples of wrongdoing by his benefactor, Day, but when it came to locking up drunks, he had no peer.
I have no idea what Barritt would have made of Hoover’s lifelong devotion to Freemasonry, or the gossip about Hoover’s transvestism and homosexuality. Presumably, Barritt regarded these accusations as the outrages of rabble-rousers, a term he used to describe anyone who opposed his political or religious views.
Barritt even used the term to describe people who held views on chickens that were contrary to his. He was an ardent chook breeder. He had bloody big chooks, too. The scuttlebutt around Mildura was that he might have given them a touch up every now and then. If so, it certainly accounted for their large size.
I never went to Barritt’s home for a meal nor as a guest. I was never invited nor would I have wanted to go, but there were occasions where I was obliged to call in on police business.
The first time I visited the Barritt home on Eighth Street, Mildura, I did so with Bill Brodie, a police reservist in the CIB office and a retired mobile traffic policeman. Bill and I knocked on the flywire door at the front of the house. After a brief wait, Barritt’s wife appeared as a ghostly image through the screen. She told us that her husband was out in the backyard. It would be the only time I ever met Alma.
; Bill and I walked around the back. There was this massive man, his sleeves rolled up, with an enormous chook in one hand and a hair dryer in the other, tending to the chook’s coiffure. Barritt showed his chooks around the agricultural shows in the district, the Mildura Show being the main one. He took particular pride in this arcane business. The Light Sussex, a big white bird with a black speckled neck and wing tips, was his breed of choice.
At the shows Barritt raked in the prizes for his chooks. Trophies for all forms of animal husbandry were up for grabs. Breeders lucky or skilful enough to have won prizes for fat lambs, bulls or growing tomatoes or pumpkins would march off triumphantly with modest trophies in hand.
Barritt’s prizes for chook breeding were far more substantial. He had seen to that, inveigling and standing over the businessmen in the district to force them to donate more glorious fare. The trophies awarded to Barritt for his chooks were the size of the Bledisloe Cup and were proudly displayed in the shop fronts in town, dwarfing the trophies in other agricultural and horticultural pursuits.
Barritt had faced the ultimate ignominy as a chook breeder—banned from showing his chooks at the Ouyen show after he had fallen for the trick of oiling his birds’ feathers to give their plumage a healthy sheen. This is a distinct no-no among chook breeders, the equivalent of using performance-enhancing drugs in sports these days. The Ouyen judges called Barritt up to explain himself. The stupid bugger attended the hearing in Ouyen, arriving with a raft of legal textbooks and a compelling argument for his innocence. The judges didn’t want to know and banned him on the spot. Barritt picked up his books and swept out of the room, muttering about wreaking a terrible vengeance on the judges.
But Barritt was more than a buffoon. He was a pathological liar and a fantasist.
Barritt had served with the Second AIF in New Guinea. I learnt about the stories of his heroism under fire around the Mildura traps. Barritt hadn’t told me about his war service directly. He’d marked my card after I’d told him about pulling up Day back in St Kilda. Barritt viewed me as an interloper from that point on and did not take me into his confidence.