by Denis Ryan
But he had told other police officers of his wartime gallantry. And the denizens of Mildura were not kept out of the loop. In the four licensed clubs in Mildura—the RSL, the Settlers, the Working Man’s Club and the Mildura Club—Barritt’s war stories were well known and often discussed.
Don Tripp was a detective senior constable in Mildura. He’d been in the Consorting Squad back in Melbourne. He was a tall, well built, dark-haired bloke in his mid-thirties who had been a junior state champion in amateur wrestling. He’d also been a heavyweight boxing champion in the force. I met him at Mordialloc CIB, when he came down to assist in a case I was looking after. We got on well then and continued our friendship when I transferred to Mildura. We became very solid mates.
Trippy was stationed in Mildura four years before I arrived. He disliked and mistrusted Barritt almost as much as I would come to do. I’d heard they almost came to blows behind the police station once. In the end one of the inspectors arrived and mediated the dispute. From that point on, they stayed out of each other’s way.
Barritt had regaled Trippy with his war stories early in the piece. Barritt weaved tales of single-handedly overwhelming Japanese forces—a machine-gun nest overrun here, a Japanese platoon brought to heel there. It all seemed unlikely to Trippy, who was sceptical from the outset, but he was unable to refute Barritt’s boasts with cold, hard evidence.
Not long after I arrived in Mildura, Trippy and I were called in to interview a man in Mildura Base Hospital. The bloke had been involved in a car accident, and uniform police had determined that the car he was driving was stolen. He’d been under police guard overnight. He was a chirpy little bloke who greeted our presence in hospital with a cheery smile.
‘I know your boss,’ he told us straight off the bat. ‘Served with him in New Guinea.’
Trippy’s eyes lit up. ‘You must have seen a lot of action then.’
‘Pig’s arse,’ the happy little car thief responded. ‘We never saw a shot fired in anger.’
Trippy was getting very excited now. ‘Our boss has told us different. He reckons he was in the thick of it.’
The little bloke smirked, then reached down to the cupboard beside his bed and pulled out a briefcase.
‘Well, take a look at this then.’ He fumbled around for a moment or two before finding a photograph and presenting it to Trippy.
‘See, there’s me,’ he said, helpfully pointing to a face in the crowd of about a hundred Australian soldiers. Trippy and I looked at the photo: it showed an AIF company on service in New Guinea, standing ten rows abreast.
‘And there’s your boss,’ the little bloke said, again helpfully pointing to the unmistakable image of Barritt’s giant head two rows from the back. ‘We never saw any Japs. Not a shot fired in anger.’
No doubt the little bloke thought he might try to get himself out of the shit he was in over the stolen car if he could just speak to his former army mate, Jim Barritt. Maybe there was a way out.
‘Why don’t you take me to meet your boss? I’d love to catch up with him.’
This was gold for Trippy. We weren’t going to let him off, but we looked forward to being there when the little bloke caught up with his long lost brother-in-arms from New Guinea.
‘We need to take you back to the station when you’re medically fit to be discharged from hospital,’ Trippy told him. ‘The nurse tells me that will be tomorrow. So we’ll come back in the morning to pick you up. You can catch up with our boss then.’
There was a gleam in Trippy’s eyes and no doubt I had a glimmer in mine, too.
We went straight back to the station and walked into Barritt’s office. Jim was sitting at his desk.
‘How did you go?’ Barritt asked.
‘The bloke who knocked off that car, he reckons he’s a mate of yours. Says he was in the army with you,’ Trippy said, with obvious relish.
‘Let me see this little pizzle,’ Barritt replied.
‘Pizzle’ was a pejorative term Barritt used frequently. He never swore beyond ‘bloody’, ‘bugger’ and ‘bastard’. Pizzle— a bull’s penis—was the term he applied to anyone he disliked. And there were plenty.
The following day, Trippy and I went back to pick up our little mate. He was dressed and ready for us, beaming with good humour again. We got him back to the station and marched him straight into Barritt, who was sitting at his desk waiting for our arrival. The little bloke strode confidently up to Barritt, his hand extended in greeting.
‘G’day, Jim. How are you, mate?’
Barritt ignored the offer of the little bloke’s hand.
‘What’s this bullshit about you knowing me?’ he demanded.
The little bloke reached into his briefcase and produced the photo. He leant across the desk and pointed at it with his right index finger.
‘That’s you, Jim. See? And that’s me.’
Barritt took the photo and studied it for a moment, his brow furrowing as recognition set in. I looked across at Trippy, who was beaming with delight at Barritt’s discomfort. Barritt handed the photo back and didn’t say another word. Trippy and I took Barritt’s old army mate back outside to the CIB office and charged him.
And that was the last we heard of Barritt’s war stories.
A couple of years later I was having a beer with Stan Mornane. I’d known Stan back in Melbourne when he was a crown prosecutor. He was up in Mildura taking care of a case. He liked a beer and when in Mildura often sought out my company.
Trippy and I met up with him at the Grand Hotel on the corner of Seventh Street and Langtree Avenue, and it wasn’t long before the subject turned to Barritt. Trippy told the story of the little car thief we’d charged and how he’d put Barritt’s stories of wartime heroism to the flame.
‘I know,’ Stan said. ‘I was his commanding officer in the army. He was a problem then. But I managed to work out a system to get the best out of him. I’d put him in charge of trivial stuff. I had him collecting firewood for the camp kitchens. He went about it with great enthusiasm and would start bossing people around. That was all he was good for. I’d give him a little bit of authority and he’d be like a bull at a gate. But I’d never give him any serious job to do. That was asking too much of him.’
It was a perfect assessment of Jim Barritt.
I quickly got used to the sight of George Tilley coming into the office at the end of each day. Tilley was the editor of the local newspaper, the Sunraysia Daily. He’d been a journalist at the Truth in Melbourne. I got on quite well with him. He was a solid Labor man and pretty good company. But his background at the Truth told me he was not a bloke I could trust. Our dealings never got beyond the social, an occasional chat over a beer. But he and Barritt would sit together in Barritt’s office for hours on end, talking in low voices.
I didn’t pay much attention as, more often than not, I was walking out the door at the end of my shift. But a quick glance at any copy of the Sunraysia Daily around that time would almost invariably contain a photo of Barritt’s boofhead under a screeching headline detailing some crime that Barritt would claim to have thwarted.
It was obvious that Tilley and Barritt used each other— Tilley to get information about police activities for his newspaper and Barritt to advance his credentials as a champion of the common good. A smart bloke like Tilley nourished Barritt’s gargantuan ego to get information. He saw his visits to Barritt’s office as a way of keeping in touch with the gossip, innuendo and scuttlebutt of Mildura and the district.
Barritt may have been a cartoon fool but he was smart enough to realise that if he had an ‘in’ with the media in and around Mildura, this would add considerably to his power.
On my second day at the Mildura CIB, Trippy told me that Barritt had a show on the local radio station, 3MA. I listened in the first chance I got, eager to hear what stories of bravado Barritt would impart to a grateful township. True to form, Barritt gave his radio show the old J. Edgar Hoover treatment.
The show star
ted with a drum roll that reached a crescendo, followed by a solemn, grave voice-over: ‘And now we cross to the office of Senior Detective Jim Barritt at the Criminal Investigation Branch at Mildura.’
It was all very film noir—for Mildura local radio, that is.
‘Good evening listeners,’ Barritt’s gruff voice would intone, ‘from the thin blue line at Mildura CIB.’
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. This was a trumpet-blowing exercise of the most obvious kind. If it wasn’t so serious I would have fallen about laughing at Barritt’s antics. He used his thirty-minute spot as a strident piece of self-promotion. He told stories of crooks he’d locked up, criminal conspiracies he had foiled and his overall outstanding service to the community.
It soon became obvious that ninety per cent of it was bullshit. The arrests he referred to were made either by the uniform boys or Trippy in CIB. The conspiracies were contrived and his service to the community was invariably self-serving.
Sometimes he would use his radio show to even up old scores. I remember he had a particular grudge against a publican in Ouyen who bore the unfortunate surname of Greed.
‘There is a Gree-eedy man south of Mildura who is causing great consternation regarding the licensing laws of Victoria. I want this man to know that I will catch up with him sooner rather than later and, when I do, he will come off second best. To this man I say, “I am watching you.” ’
God only knows what the man had done. I met him years later and he seemed like a decent bloke and a good publican. But he had banged heads with Jim Barritt, who could not let that go unpunished.
Before I arrived in Mildura, Barritt used his radio show to announce that I was on my way up from Melbourne. Over the course of three or four weeks, Mildura’s airwaves resounded to his description of me as an outstanding investigator, a good family man and a devout Catholic who would be an asset to the community. In his gruff voice, he painted me as an Eliot Ness on my way to assist Barritt in his never-ending crusade against crime.
If I had known I would have cringed with embarrassment. I only found out when Trippy gave me a heads up.
‘Before you came up, Barritt was blowing his bags about what a fine man, great detective and policeman you are,’ Trippy told me. ‘The uniformed boys and I were suspicious of you. We thought you were going to be a carbon copy of him.’
The Victoria Police force has always been an Australian Labor Party (ALP) stronghold. It goes back to the days of Ned Kelly, maybe before. Police were paid atrocious wages and the Police Association—the police trade union—struggled hard to achieve better wages and conditions. The unions and the ALP work hand in glove. The Police Association supported the ALP for the most part, and most members of the force followed suit.
I’d been a Labor voter all my life. I was brought up in a strict Labor family. My father was an active unionist during the Depression and copped more than his fair share of beatings from union busters and thugs.
In 1955 the Australian Labor Party split along sectarian and ideological lines. In New South Wales, the Catholic Church opposed the split, but in Victoria the schism was driven by the meddling of St Patrick’s Cathedral and Archbishop Daniel Mannix with his puppet, Bob Santamaria. The Catholic Right in Victoria was made up of white-collar unionists and professional types. Its political wing after the split was the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Santamaria was the head of the National Civic Council, the administrative and fundraising wing of the DLP. Like the rest of the Catholic Right in the state, he was virulently anti-communist.
I was no fan of communism either but, unlike Santamaria, I did not see Soviet-style communism as a threat to our way of life in Australia. Santamaria was a zealot with far too much influence on Australian politics. I was also disgusted with Mannix’s influence on the ALP, and once the split occurred I thought the members of the DLP had set the labour movement on a path to oblivion. I had no doubt that the DLP took its orders either directly or indirectly from Mannix and his henchmen. It was during these years of despair that I voted Liberal twice, but my allegiances eventually returned to the ALP.
It was in those heady days that I had my only real political discussion with Jim Barritt. As usual, it didn’t take long for Barritt to express his views and dismiss mine. The trigger for his outburst was a discussion in the CIB office on capital punishment. Don Tripp, like me, was a Labor man and, like me, was stridently opposed to hanging. He liked to needle Barritt and knew the topic would quickly draw a response from him.
‘When are Victorian politicians going to get around to repealing the death penalty? This is 1962,’ Trippy said, casting an eye in Barritt’s direction.
‘It’s barbarity,’ I responded.
‘You blokes don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Barritt said with his usual tact. ‘Hang the bastards. That’s what they deserve.’
‘What about the innocent fellas?’ I asked. ‘You want to hang them as well?’
‘There’s no capital punishment across the river,’ Trippy chimed in.
‘It’s Labor policy,’ I said. ‘A change of government in Victoria and that’d be the end of it.’
‘You blokes don’t know what you’re talking about. Labor Party! Bunch of bloody commos. We’re just bloody lucky that we’ve got a man like Bob Santamaria keeping the red bastards at bay.’
Barritt was a fanatical Catholic. I believed in the faith of the Church but Barritt’s belief stretched only to its politics. He attended church for mass almost every day, but Sunday would be enough for me, and I’d see him there then.
In any mass, donations are sought at two points in the service. The plate is first passed around for donations for the welfare of the priest. Later in the service, the plate is passed around again. This dough, designated for the church’s building funds and for consolidated funds in the diocese, would more often than not come in envelopes.
Barritt was one of four parishioners charged with the responsibility of collecting donations. The big man would strut down the centre aisle with a pious look on his face, peering down as each parishioner reached into their pockets and placed their contributions on the plate. Not a word was ever spoken but Barritt’s eyebrows would rise slightly if he deemed that a parishioner was not forthcoming or not sufficiently generous. These weren’t donations. The parishioners were being stood over, extorted by this big copper.
Barritt was a fool. It did not take me long to figure out that he was also a dangerous one.
In Barritt’s opinion there were ‘Catholics and other bastards’. In church he might stand over Catholics with the collection plate in hand, but he regarded everyone else in Mildura with deep suspicion.
Driven by his strident Catholicism and the exhortations of Mannix and Santamaria, Barritt had become an agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). This was a very murky business to say the least.
Mildura was a seething mass of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Its population at the time was a melting pot of Italians, Greeks and people from the Balkan states—all fleeing the privations of post-war Europe—mingled with the white Anglo-Saxon faces, most of whom had come to Mildura after World War I on government farmer settlement programs for war veterans.
Everyone who was settled in Mildura at the time had come to start a new life. Many had come to the town to avoid persecution or hardship. Some had come to escape an uncertain future in other parts of the world. Some, too, had come to avoid the harsh light of scrutiny—fugitives from the big cities of Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne.
Barritt himself was a refugee of a kind, having been dispatched from Melbourne, where he had become an embarrassment to the Victoria Police force. His heavy-handedness as a uniformed sergeant in Footscray had led to complaints. There was a story floating around Mildura that he had belted the wrong man, the son of a Victorian parliamentarian. The son’s story of a physical assault and violence at the hands of Barritt got back to the MP, who had the pull to get senior police to look into Barri
tt’s activities.
In any event, Barritt was sent north to Mildura, effectively in exile. For the force, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Provided there were no outrages, no cries of scandal or disgrace heard in Melbourne, Barritt was free to establish his own personal fiefdom in Mildura.
With his ASIO hat on, Barritt would bully and intimidate ethnic groups in the district and beyond, wherever his CIB duties would take him. He developed a network of informers in the Italian, Balkan and Greek communities in Mildura, and would inveigle information of the most trivial kind from them, then embellish these morsels into vast conspiracies in his reports to the intelligence agency.
God only knows what ASIO made of these reports. I dare say most of Barritt’s intelligence would have found its way into the bin in Canberra, but it didn’t stop him banging out reports to ASIO. Sometimes I’d see him in his office in the wee hours of the morning, hammering away on his old typewriter like his very existence depended on it.
He was obsessed with the Mafia and believed that the international criminal cartel had reached deeply into Mildura. It was a nonsense, another part of his contrived J. Edgar Hoover persona.
Hoover had ignored the existence of the Mafia in the United States until 1957, when a copper chanced across a lot of sleek black limousines inexplicably parked outside a farmhouse in the sleepy village of Apalachin, New York. Hoover had been stung into acceptance, if not action, from that point on.
Barritt, the cartoon crime fighter who doted on Hoover, didn’t need his own Apalachin moment. He thought if you shook a tree around Mildura, a Mafia capo with a violin case in his hand would fall out.
Imagined crimes, where he saw himself as the heroic upholder of the right, were Barritt’s go. It was the real ones, the sexual assaults against children, he chose to ignore, perverting the course of justice to shield the paedophile John Day.
Sergeant Michael O’Donnell was one of the uniform boys who’d come up from Melbourne with his young family, looking for a new life. Mick was a big lump of a bloke, a former champion surf lifesaver in Melbourne and the first of the force’s frogmen in the Search and Rescue Squad.