Authors: Matthew Condon
Lewis now appreciated the sort of damage Dickson could wreak on the department. The next day, 7 June, he telephoned ‘… Judge Pratt re false statements by Mr Goss MLA on 6th inst, on Glen Taylor show’. Lewis then contacted lawyer Pat Nolan regarding Goss’s criticism of him and the force. Could Goss’s comments provide enough substance for a defamation case?
Lewis decided to speak out on Friday 8 June. ‘Mr Dickson is well aware of the reasons for his transfer,’ the Commissioner said. ‘In fairness to him, I do not propose to discuss them publicly.’ Lewis said it involved ‘internal departmental discipline’. The Mareeba detective had already had his files confiscated and his colleagues had been interviewed by senior officers.
Over the next week the big guns were drawn into the mounting crisis. Lewis phoned the Premier’s Department over the matter, and former detective and friend to Lewis, Tony Murphy, called in with information about the ‘Union Executive and D/S Dickson’.
Police Minister Glasson, who had failed to satisfactorily answer the crucial question – Why was Dickson transferred from Mareeba to Townsville? – finally delivered the reason at the heart of the controversy. Dickson, he said, was being transferred for ‘disciplinary reasons’, including defying an order from a senior officer. ‘The transfer of Det. Sgt Dickson – and all police officers – is not solely decided by Police Commissioner Lewis,’ the Minister explained. ‘But is … recommended to Commissioner Lewis by other senior commissioned officers. If I intervened, it would indicate that I had no trust in Commissioner Lewis, nor his senior officers – which is patently not correct – and it would be the thin edge of the wedge of breaking down the transfer system.’
Glasson threw down a challenge to Opposition Police Spokesman Wayne Goss and to Dickson to ‘put up or shut up’ if they had any information on drugs and organised crime in North Queensland. Glasson was talking tough.
Dickson hit back. He dared the Minister to publicly issue any damaging information he had on him, in exchange for a complete waiver from defamation proceedings. ‘There is a backstabbing campaign against me, and I have been told that when parliament resumes in August there will be allegations made under parliamentary privilege to discredit me,’ said Dickson. ‘I am prepared to give the Minister a written guarantee that I will not take any legal action if he will make a full statement so that the public can be told everything right now.’
Goss, backing Dickson, said he had been told by sources within the force that ‘the department intended bringing an internal charge against Dickson in a couple of months and that, after an internal investigation, he would subsequently be sacked. Similarly, the Queensland Police Union came out guns blazing in support of Dickson, placing large notices in the
Courier-Mail
newspaper. IT IS TIME FOR SOME ANSWERS, read the headline on the advertisement. ‘Dickson has stood up, this Union supports him. The people of Queensland need to know the truth …’
Another union advertisement stated: ‘We still do not have any tangible reason for the transfer of Detective Sergeant Ross Dickson.’
On Friday 15 June, Commissioner Lewis got a relieving telephone call in his office. ‘Premier phoned re Cabinet’s support for our stand on D/S Dickson.’ Later that day, Lewis and lawyer Pat Nolan sat down together with the department’s press officer, Ian Hatcher, and five assistant commissioners, and ‘viewed a series of TV programs re: D/S Dickson, Mr W. Goss and others’.
Lewis would also come into the possession of the full transcripts of all of Dickson’s television interviews. Lewis remembers Dickson as a ‘hot little worker’.
‘Bright bloke, he was a cadet, I think three years a cadet … very bright. Hard worker, but [a] hot worker. He was, I think he was a uniform man at Mitchelton, he was pinching anything that breathed, and then later when … [Ray] Whitrod came in, and I think briefly, at the Juvenile Aid Bureau we’d caution a lot of youngsters, and I still think rightly, very rightly so, and we’d put a return in at the end of the year – X number cautioned – but that wasn’t classed as an arrest. That didn’t suit statistically mad Whitrod. So he got the idea of forming this education liaison unit, and that’s when he put Dickson on it.’
Lewis believes the group was formed by Whitrod to intentionally undermine his JAB. ‘That’s the only way of describing it [the liaison unit], and any youngsters they got, they’d be charged, and of course they [the Whitrod administration] relished that,’ says Lewis. ‘They charged them with stealing a pencil … and it got the stats up nicely, and that’s when sort of … I … I don’t know what they wanted to do, I think Whitrod wanted to close us down or something.
‘But getting back to Dickson … well it probably would have happened when I came back [from Charleville in 1976 and became Commissioner]. I would have got rid of the bloody education liaison unit and got the JAB going, and Dickson was back in the CIB … [he was] up there [in Mareeba], and he was an arrogant little possum. He fell out with [an inspector] who was an absolute bloody gentleman – wouldn’t say, “shit” – and anyway, to cut a long story short, somehow it came to [my] notice.’
Dickson travelled to Brisbane and asked to see Commissioner Lewis and Police Minister Bill Glasson so that a reason for his transfer could be offered face to face. Both men refused to meet with him.
On 17 June the high-rating current affairs program
60 Minutes
, hosted by Jana Wendt, got in on the story. During the interview Dickson alleged that the police department was keeping a secret file on him, and that two politicians were investigating him. He wanted to know why he was being investigated. He conceded that his stand against the transfer would probably tarnish his career for good.
‘And there’s nothing in it for me, not a single thing in this for me,’ Dickson said. ‘I will be … I will suffer, probably for the rest of my service, for what I’m doing.’
‘So what is your future, do you think?’ asked Wendt. ‘Where will you be in a couple of years’ time?’
‘Dunno,’ Dickson replied.
The First Guest
In the middle of the enthralling attempted murder trial of Brisbane schoolboy Peter James Walsh, another event was titillating the city’s social set. The Sheraton was due to open its first international-quality hotel in the Queensland capital.
Despite being a ‘soft’ opening and not the ‘formal’ one (that would go ahead in October, attended by the Premier, the Police Commissioner Terry Lewis and his wife Hazel, and a myriad of home-grown celebrities, business identities and socialites), it was still a major event by the city’s standards. It gave the local citizenry an excuse to boast over Brisbane’s increasing cosmopolitanism and sophistication – a perennial debate – and the government bragging rights in relation to tourism and employment creation. On a practical level, there was a posh new watering hole in town.
Befitting such a spectacle, the immensely popular ABC radio announcer Bill Hurrey was brought in on the morning of Thursday 12 July 1984 to broadcast his morning show from the sparkling Sheraton lobby. Local public relations maestro John Lyneham was responsible for securing good media coverage. ‘I did liaise with Billy Hurrey,’ Lyneham recalls. ‘Hurrey had built up a listenership and I wanted him there. We got him. His technicians set up the night before.’
The $63 million hotel – the State Government Insurance Office held a 90 per cent stake – was the first to be built in the city in more than ten years. It boasted Royal and Presidential Suites in its exclusive ‘tower’ section. These rooms – at $350 a night – gave guests access to, among other delights, toilet paper holders finished in 24-carat gold.
Reporting on the event was the
Courier-Mail
’s
popular ‘Day by Day’ columnist, Des Partridge. His page-three column the following day was headlined: FIRST GUEST VERY IMPRESSED. The article quoted a Mr Paul Breslin from Sydney, who had booked the room six months in advance, and was the first person to sample the hotel’s service. ‘It’s as good as anywhere I’ve stayed in the world,’ Breslin reportedly said.
Breslin claimed he was a businessman who travelled overseas regularly, and that Brisbane ‘now had a hotel it could be proud of … It compares very favourably with the Vista International – recently named the world’s number one hotel by the
Business and Travel Magazine
.’ The chuffed guest gave a big tick, also, to the friendly room service and soundproofing of the rooms, declaring his stay ‘a perfect first night’.
Extraordinarily, while Paul Breslin, well-travelled businessman ‘from Sydney’ was enjoying the largesse of the Brisbane Sheraton, Paul Breslin of Coronation Towers, Auchenflower, appeared that very week as a star witness in the Peter James Walsh trial.
Indeed, just the day after the
Courier-Mail
reported on Breslin the impressed hotel guest, it carried a report of the trial hearings and the evidence given by ‘Paul John Breslin of Auchenflower’. At the time of Walsh’s trial, Breslin was still awaiting a hearing date for his own charges relating to the alleged assault of Indigenous minor, Ricky Garrison, in January.
What could explain the fact that Breslin, of Brisbane, was appearing as a witness in a major trial in the city, while at the same time turning up in the newspaper as a well-heeled and well-travelled businessman purportedly from Sydney?
The Assistant
Apart from his wife Hazel, Commissioner Lewis had no more loyal an associate than Gregory Early, his personal assistant.
Early had grown up on a series of dairy farms in the Kilcoy region, about 100 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. He had wanted to become a carpenter but his father directed him towards a career in the police. He joined up in 1956 and showed considerable organisational flair. He also became an accomplished shorthand writer. During the 1970s he was personal assistant to Commissioner Ray Whitrod before Whitrod’s resignation, and upon Lewis becoming Commissioner in November 1976, Early slipped into the same role.
Given the animosity that had developed between Whitrod and Lewis, and the latter’s pained efforts to ultimately exorcise all Whitrod acolytes from the force, it appeared a minor miracle that Early was kept on by Lewis. One police colleague recalls: ‘With Greg it wasn’t a case that he made a decision to sit on the fence whoever the boss was. He didn’t. He was just one of those people who offered his loyalty.’
Early, too, was a master of discretion. His job was never dull, and the variety of tasks was extraordinary. ‘On many occasions I used to field telephone calls from Mona Lewis, the Commissioner’s mother,’ Early says in his unpublished memoir. ‘She was quite aged and had a son named Gary. Gary was on a disability pension and generally was a pain in the arse to Mona and anyone with whom he came in contact. He was a half-brother to the Commissioner. [Assistant Commissioner] Ron Redmond knew Mona well from seeing her at the races and I am sure that after Lewis became Commissioner Redmond and Jim O’Sullivan, both regular race attendees, used to give Mona a lift home to her flat at Hamilton or nearby.
‘I recall occasions when I have rung [Ron] Redmond or [Jim] O’Sullivan and asked them to go down and quieten Gary down or lock him up. I also recall Mona telling me that on occasions Redmond and maybe O’Sullivan used to give her a bottle of whiskey, which she claimed to like.’
Early also accompanied his superior on sporadic tours into far-flung regions of Queensland. Lewis was adamant that he visit every single police station in the state during his tenure. It spoke volumes in terms of Lewis’s almost fanatical attention to detail.
‘It took him four-and-a-half years to visit every police station in the state. That had never been achieved by a Commissioner before and probably will never be done again,’ says Early. ‘This was when there were about 320 stations with over 200 of them being one and two officer stations.
‘Originally we used to do a district at a time and have no social function at the district headquarters. But after a couple we realised the worth of such a function, to which officers and spouses were invited. We used to get information up on each station before we went out and this enabled us to know who was at the station, what they had asked for and what had been denied or was still outstanding.’
It was during one of these trips that Early experienced the rarely expressed wrath of Terry Lewis. On a visit to the Proserpine police station in North Queensland, Commissioner Lewis had somehow arrived at the station before Early. There had been a schedule mix-up. ‘For some reason the Commissioner got there before us and was embarrassed because he had not read up on the station and, more particularly, who was in charge,’ remembers Early. ‘He was not impressed and told me so. However, he was not one to bear grudges or mull over things. He made his point, which was accepted, and we moved on.’
Early says Lewis was grooming him for the position of Commissioner on his retirement, just as Frank Bischof had groomed Lewis. ‘One morning during our usual session [the] first thing he said to me [was] words to the effect: “When the time is right I am going to recommend that you replace me as Commissioner. You should start thinking about anything which you would like to implement as Commissioner and make a list of these things so that if I can I will start on them myself to make it easier for you.”
‘He was quite definite in his advice to me as though it was just a matter of time – not if or maybe. I have thought now that he mentioned a couple of times staying on as Commissioner to beat the record of Frank Bischof and at this time I am pretty sure he had passed Bischof’s record.