Authors: Matthew Condon
From the police inquiries conducted during the CLARKE investigation it became quite apparent that many people in the northern Queensland area were aware of the activities of CLARKE and his associates.
Vassallo’s conclusions certainly pointed towards the need for a more thorough investigation that would probably have to involve Federal authorities. It was the slaughter of the Clarkes that had opened a small window into this murderous business, and the tentacles that stemmed from it reached across Australia.
Incredibly, just 16 days after Vassallo’s briefing to Cabinet and the top rung of Commissioner Lewis’s force, police raided a farm north of the Daintree River, between Cooktown and Cairns. They took possession of rifles and hunting knives, and arrested drug dealer Terrence John Sichter, 31, of Gold Hill, the same man mentioned on page 44 of Vassallo’s report as a drug dealer who had dealt with William (Paul) Clarke.
Sichter protested his innocence and told them, as he had years earlier, he knew nothing of the Clarke murders. He was duly arrested and charged. Sichter entered no plea and was remanded in custody.
Vassallo was astonished. He believed that by charging Sichter, the Queensland police had successfully deterred any national agencies from further investigating the links between Clarke and other major figures in the drug trade in, at the very least, North Queensland and New South Wales.
The matter was now before the courts. The Queensland police had bolted the door.
Death of an Auditor
In the winter of 1985 the acerbic Brisbane
Sunday Mail
journalist Marion Smith wrote a four-sentence item in her weekly ‘Exit Lines’ column that, on the surface, appeared innocuous. The state had just celebrated Queensland Day on 6 June to coincide with the date Queen Victoria signed the Letters Patent in 1859, formally granting Queensland its separation from the colony of New South Wales.
Smith’s piece was a tasty tidbit of gossip about the Queensland Day Committee.
Well, didn’t Queensland Day go off with a flourish? Which brought some relief to those in the public service bureaucracy responsible for approving expenses. Seems they retrospectively approved a swag of expenditure incurred earlier this year by one public servant on an overseas trip supposedly in relation to this year’s Queensland Day activities. Nice to know it was all worthwhile.
The Queensland Day Committee had been formed by Bjelke-Petersen’s Cabinet on 17 March 1980, as a way of recognising the historic moment and promoting Queensland achievement. Its secretary in the early days was Judith Callaghan, wife of the Premier’s former media unit hot shot and advisor Allen Callaghan, who had left his press role in 1979 and entered the lofty ranks of the public service.
By 1985, Allen was Under Secretary of the Department of Arts, National Parks and Sport, as well as Chairman of the Queensland Film Corporation and a member of the Queensland Day Committee. His second wife, Judith, would become the committee’s executive officer.
Smith’s cheeky column earned a rebuttal from the Chair of the Queensland Day Committee, Sir David Longland, in the form of a letter to the newspaper three weeks later. The identity of the jet-setting public servant had remained unknown, until Sir David’s letter.
‘The Committee is most concerned with the unfounded innuendos in this item,’ Sir David retorted. He said no public servant incurred expenditure on an overseas trip, and that the staff of the committee were on contract. ‘The Executive Director, Mrs Judith Callaghan, is a consultant,’ he continued. ‘If the item purports to refer to her travel overseas in February, this was at her own expense, accompanying her husband who was on official business. Mrs Callaghan did not seek, or receive, expenses from the Committee even though she could have.’
He said the committee’s accounts were all audited by the Auditor-General ‘in accordance with normal Public Service procedures … The Queensland Day Committee seeks a retraction of this item which reflects adversely on it and its hard-working staff,’ Sir David stated.
This rebuke, in turn, caught the attention of Ross Goodhew, an accountant for the Department of the Auditor-General. He began an investigation, and discovered discrepancies. Goodhew found that about $40,000 had been transferred from the Queensland Film Corporation to the Queensland Day Committee.
‘During my audits of the Queensland Film Corporation and Arts Department I thought long and hard about the potential political damage to the … Bjelke-Petersen Government and the careers of Allen and Judith Callaghan,’ Goodhew later recalled. ‘After a lot of soul-searching I decided to pursue the Callaghans and anyone else involved to the fullest extent.’
He was given two days to complete the audit. It would ultimately take ten months. Goodhew conceded that it was Longland’s brusque and dismissive letter, published in the
Sunday Mail
on 30 June, which triggered his investigation.
‘In Longland’s vigorous defence he said that Judith had met all her bills herself … I found that letter most interesting when I discovered her bills were, in fact, either met by the QFC [Queensland Film Corporation] or the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation.
‘That discovery led me to investigate transfers of money totalling $40,000 to the QDC [Queensland Day Committee] purely on the basis of letters of request from the QDC director [Judith] to the QFC director [Allen] and approved by the latter.
‘With the help of auditor Pat Gallagher, I discovered the $40,000 had been deposited into passbook accounts accessed solely by Judith as signatory. I also found that Sir David Longland and other members of the QDC had no knowledge of these accounts.’
Goodhew needed to confirm that the money transferred from the QFC had hit the Premier’s Department accounts. He assigned Hank Coblens, 32, then a Premier’s Department auditor, to check. Coblens found no trace of the money.
Goodhew reported this to Auditor-General Vince Doyle, and it was decided that Coblens would conduct a thorough audit of the Queensland Day Committee. This was dangerous territory. This young and ambitious auditor was being asked to go through the books of the Premier’s Department. Also, Allen Callaghan’s reputation within the government was powerful. He was close to the Premier, whom he had always referred to as ‘Chief’.
Hendricus (Hank) Coblens was highly regarded as an auditor, and had what would later be described as ‘an extremely high and finely tuned sense of pride in his work’. He had recently been involved in the audit of the Dairymen’s Organisation State Council report. He asked in writing for clarification of the legal basis for the Queensland Day Committee audit and that detailed instructions to him as auditor be fully documented ‘in order that I can ensure that my actions, in such a sensitive situation, are totally in conformity with the directions from my senior officers’.
Coblens got to work. Despite being well regarded around the offices of the Auditor-General down in Edward Street, he had no real close friends among his colleagues. ‘He was a very meticulous person, straight as an arrow,’ says contemporary Pat Gallagher. ‘He was married [to Mary] and lived out at Belmont. He wasn’t one of the boys. You’d take ten blokes out west or to the islands up north [for the purposes of audits] and it was like a rugby league tour. Hank didn’t fit into that culture.’
Another colleague says: ‘People in the office were very, very impressed with him, both professionally and personally. He came from a very serious minded Dutch family. He was a perfectionist.’
Auditor-General Vince Doyle – who had only been in the position since December 1984 – later reported that sponsorship payments to the Queensland Day Committee from the Queensland Film Corporation funds ‘had not been brought to account through the official accounts of the Premier’s Department’.
Coblens interviewed Judith Callaghan and then compiled his evidence. On 2 October, he told Goodhew that he planned to present his findings to Judith Callaghan the next day. She duly protested her innocence. It was believed, too, that Coblens met with her husband Allen Callaghan later that same day. (Mary Coblens would later state that her husband got home late that evening and that he was angry and upset about something.)
On Friday 4 October, several co-workers noticed a change in Coblens’ demeanour. He phoned Barrie Rollason, who had worked with him on the Queensland Dairymen’s Organisation State Council audit along with Pat Gallagher.
Rollason was concerned for Coblens’ welfare. He was with Gallagher when the call came through.
‘What do we do?’ Rollason asked.
‘Hank might do himself in,’ Gallagher said.
Rollason was shocked. He immediately called Vince Doyle, seeking advice. Doyle, in turn, phoned Police Commissioner Terry Lewis later that morning. Lewis, with personal assistant Inspector Greg Early, headed out to the police academy that morning on business then returned to his office. He noted in his diary: ‘Vince Doyle, A.G., phoned re Hank Coblens, auditor, missing and probably suicidal.’
Coblens telephoned his wife at about 1.30 p.m. that day, and then disappeared. The next morning, he was found dead in his white Mazda which was parked in Clay Gully Road at Victoria Point, west of the CBD and by the bay. He had suffered a single gunshot wound to the head from a .308 Parker-Hale Midland rifle.
He also left a note: ‘Dear Mary, Sorry but I made a blunder. I’m too disgusted with myself. It’s no one’s fault but my own. Don’t blame the people at work. It’s really I who am flawed. I love you. Hank.’
Rumours went around the Auditor-General’s office that Coblens had been threatened from ‘high up’ over the Callaghan audit. There was another story that he was last seen dumping documents into a street bin not far from the Executive Building in George Street.
Allen Callaghan says he can’t remember meeting Coblens prior to the death of the auditor. ‘I don’t recall dealing with him directly,’ Callaghan says. ‘If I had contact with him, it would have been fairly brief. If I met Coblens – and I possibly did – it would have been a fairly brief meeting.’
Coblens was cremated at the Mount Thompson Memorial Gardens in Nursery Road, Holland Park. His plaque was inscribed simply and efficiently:
In Loving Memory / of Hendricus Coblens / Who Passed Away/ 5–10–85 / 32 Years
.
Good Knight
Police Commissioner Terence Murray Lewis, the little boy from Ipswich with a fractured family, the young man who had left school aged 12 and later, by force of will, earned himself a university degree, and the ambitious police constable who had become Commissioner less than 27 years after he was sworn into the force, was now of an age where he was thinking about his legacy.
Of course, he had to run the police force day to day, but his position was so elevated, his friends the cream of society, the rich and powerful, that it must have been a constantly difficult transition, from administrator dealing with police transfers, departmental paperwork and correspondence, to performing his ceremonial function which took him into Government House, Parliament House, art galleries, boardrooms and aboard yachts.
The highly organised Lewis, however, handled it with aplomb. His diaries expose a man constantly on the move, darting from place to place as dictated by his full appointment schedule. For any ordinary citizen, it would have been a punishing job. But he soldiered on, working through everything from a bout of winter influenza to family problems, year in, year out.
But by the end of 1985, he had his eye on life after the police force, and what he might leave behind. Plans for his new family home at 12 Garfield Drive, Bardon, were well advanced, and so too was his hugely ambitious decision to build a new Queensland Police Headquarters in Roma Street, around the corner from the old digs in Makerston Street. It seemed no coincidence that Lewis’s plans for both buildings were unfolding at the same time. The house in Bardon would shelter Lewis and his wife Hazel comfortably for the rest of their lives, and for decades into the future Brisbane’s population would look at the new headquarters building and know it was the brainchild of Commissioner Lewis.
This was the state of play as the end of 1985 neared. And come November, a man with a more than keen interest in ceremony and ritual, Lewis approached, as he did each year, the anniversary of his appointment as Police Commissioner. This particular anniversary would have about it a secret electric charge.
The month heralded the annual merry-go-round of Christmas parties for Lewis, as well as lunches and dinners with old friends. On Thursday 7 November, he invited several of them to ‘luncheon’ at police headquarters. ‘… with senior officers and Mr Justice Angelo Vasta; Hon. Don Lane; Ron Richards, Sun Newspapers; Ron McConnell, McConnell Holdings Ltd; Kevin Driscoll, National Homes; Barry Maxwell, Belfast Hotel; and Reg Tegg, Petrie Hotel’.
Still, after all these years, Lewis could not shake his dislike for former commissioner Ray Whitrod – or KoKo as they had called him behind his back – and fastidiously kept up to date with what Whitrod was doing in his life. Later that week he made a point of reading ‘Mr R[ay] W. Whitrod’s submission to “The Comm. Of Inquiry into Youth,” 58 pages.’
On Sunday 10 November at five minutes to midnight, the phone rang up on Garfield Drive. Lewis recorded in his diary: ‘Sir Edward Lyons phoned to say he had over 3 hours with Premier and discussed Knighthood …’