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other. As I expected, I was accepted, and the necessary application forms plus assorted other paper work and travel instructions arrived. I filled out the application form and sent it back. A letter returned to say I had to fly to South Africa and then take a bus up to Salisbury, Rhodesia, as you couldn’t fly from Australia to Rhodesia direct.
    I told the Parole Board via my parole officer that I was leaving. ‘No you aren’t’ said the parole officer. ‘You’re on parole; you’re going nowhere’.
    Had I been allowed to leave we wouldn’t be bothering with all this now, and the Victorian Government would have saved a fortune in jail and courts, police and legal costs.
    Some men dream of dying in a hail of bullets, and in 1977 I was one of those men. But my dream was not to be. You could die of old age and boredom in Melbourne if you were hoping to die in a hail of gunfire in face to face combat in the streets. Let’s face it, the Australian crim isn’t a great one for any form of gun-in-hand face to face shoot-it-out combat. If they ever get me, it will be in the back.
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    When I ran away to Queensland when I was a teenager I worked for a while on the cane fields in Mossman, 40 miles north of Cairns in Queensland. One day I caught a skinny black snake about two feet long. I had no idea what it was, and still don’t — I’m no snake expert. But it was handy.
    I was having some bother with some Abo cane cutters, so I held the snake around my neck and said ‘Come on’. They backed away, so it must have been a nice, evil type of snake.
    I emptied the hut real quick the night I brought ‘Speedy’ back from the cane field. I fed him live mice. He would eat two a week. He didn’t seem to drink, and he would cough his mouse bones and muck up the day after he’d eaten. I lasted a month on the cane fields — cane toads, snakes, 100 degree heat, dirt and sweat — chopping cane by hand for $35 a bloody week. It was twice as much as a 15-year-old was paid in 1970, but I didn’t like sleeping in a hut with farting, snoring, drunken cane cutters.
    I brought my snake back to Melbourne and swapped him for a carpet snake and a python. Boy, did I have fun with them. I would push the face of the carpet snake into the faces of my enemies while my friends Dave the Jew and Cowboy Harris held them. The carpet snake would bite down. You could pick my enemies around Prahran — we moved from Thomastown to Prahran in 1970 — as a fair few of them had badly swollen and festering faces from the bite of the carpet snake.
    The carpet snake and the python were called Reggie and Ronnie after the Kray brothers in London. The Krays had been my boyhood heroes, and I’d read that they, too, had kept pet snakes.
    My teenage gang was made up of Terry the Tank, Dave the Jew and Cowboy Johnny Harris. We were the Surrey Road gang. We hung around at the Try Boys youth club with Lee and Wade Dix — Billy Dix’s boys. I did Greco-Roman wrestling, swimming, and weightlifting and I boxed at Ambrose Palmer’s gym in West Melbourne. I used to wrestle with big Lee Dix. He is now a top nightclub bouncer and still a good mate of mine.
    Try Boys youth club was our headquarters. We had a collection of iron bars, knives, sawn-off shotguns and .22 calibre rifles, tomahawks, and meat cleavers. With ‘Ronny and Reggie’ in their carry bag we were a young but violently advanced crew. Dave the Jew owned his own handgun, but refused to part with it, which made me very jealous. We would engage larger gangs in combat with our World War One issue Australian Army bayonets, and we were undefeated.
    Terry was bigger than me, and I wasn’t small. Cowboy Johnny was a few years older than me, and a bit punchy. He wasn’t a big thinker, but loyal.
    Dave the Jew and I nearly fell out — it could have come to bloodshed and death — after Reggie the carpet snake bit him on the hand and he cut Reggie and Ronny both up with a meat axe.
    Dave was sentenced to