The Ice Age (11 page)

The mid-1990s were also a time when different kinds of social misfits were working out how to make something of themselves, outside the boundaries and expectations of acceptable society. As
Breaking Bad
would later teach us — in spectacularly entertaining fashion — meth production and distribution could bring the kind of wealth that people working in everyday jobs could only dream of.

Before this time, the passing-on of meth recipes was limited to physical delivery and word of mouth. This all changed, of course, with the advent of the internet. Soon there were dozens of websites publishing the biker method for making methamphetamine hydrochloride (crystal meth) using pseudoephedrine. Other recipes also made their way to Australian living rooms. The results of meth production would show up in some very random places. In 1995, in the stunning inland Sunshine Coast town of Gympie, a place full of palm trees and beautiful old buildings — surrounded by tree-covered hills — layman Dale Francis Drake made meth using an incredibly simple formula. He, in turn, showed various other people how to make meth by this method. Soon, meth cooks weren't rare commodities, but simple, everyday crooks who just needed to be trained. Over the next four years, clandestine labs in the Sunshine Coast would triple, and amphetamine-related hospital admissions in Queensland would skyrocket.

Starting around 1997, Australian bikie gangs, in particular, began making methamphetamine, thereby giving ‘speed' — that inferior Romanian sulphate version — the flick. One young man who started to see a cloudy, exciting combination of powdered meth and dollar signs was a 25-year-old truck driver by the name of Richard James Walsh. Walsh left his job in the country town of Maryland, north of Sydney, to take up a very different sort of heavy lifting — he became a meth dealer to bikies. A heavily built, fearsome-looking bloke with dark skin, a goatee, and five earrings in his left ear, he was already a member of the Nomads bikie gang. With meth becoming increasingly popular around Sydney, Walsh would travel to a manufacturer in Queensland about every three weeks to purchase several pounds of the drug. His business grew quickly. As a dealer at the top of the chain, Walsh also quickly ascended the leadership ladder to become a senior figure within the Nomads. Over time, he formed an important relationship with one particular cook on the Gold Coast — Todd Little, president of the Nomad's Gold Coast chapter. Little, despite being nearly illiterate, had taught himself how to cook meth. Little got his precursor material by paying people to go from chemist to chemist purchasing huge quantities of Sudafed, from which he would then extract pseudoephedrine.

Over the space of four years, Little would make no less than 19 kilograms of powdered meth for Walsh, who in turn passed the gear on to dealers who distributed it further down the chain. Walsh would eventually look beyond Little, and between 1997 and 2001 is estimated to have supplied about 450 kilograms of methamphetamine to the drug markets of Melbourne and Sydney. He would, in the end, play an important role in Australia's first major meth trend — the bikies' involvement in spreading methamphetamine around the nation. By the 2000s, police estimated that Australia's bikie gangs had a 75 per cent control of the meth market.

Like many truck drivers, 37-year-old Darri Haynes took speed to help him get through his shifts. While he didn't understand it at the time, by about 1997 what he was taking, in fact, was meth. Haynes had been using it to try to get through some extremely tough shifts (which later resulted in his employer being successfully prosecuted in court for having failed to provide safe working conditions). After having driven more than 5,400 kilometres in the last week of August 1999, he called fellow truckie Duncan Mackeller, and told him he was so tired that he was ‘even starting to hear voices'.

‘I am even talking to them now,' he said.

To which Mackeller replied jokingly, ‘As long they don't talk back.'

On 1 September, Haynes' vehicle collided with a truck on the Pacific Highway, near Grafton, in the northern rivers region of New South Wales. The truck veered off the road and caught fire. Haynes took just over three minutes to die after the impact, and was little more than a ‘sack of ashes' when emergency crews arrived on the scene.

Things were changing in fits and starts, on the global, local, and individual scales. As Malcolm Knox writes in his book
Scattered
:
the inside story of ice in Australia
:

Up to 1999, there was still scepticism about the term ‘ice'. Many in law enforcement, health and academic research believed that ice was a new dealer's brand name for speed … but it wasn't so. Ice was, in fact, new. A profound revolution was taking place — a revolution in composition, the manufacture, the economics of supply and usage — a true cultural revolution.

By now, Beck had left school and taken a job as a checkout chick in a supermarket. She went on a few minor, joyful fucking sprees, and eventually fell pregnant. At seventeen, in the middle of autumn, she rang me from a drab, deserted children's playground in her hometown, saying she had finally made a decision about whether to keep her baby.

‘A baby will be unconditional love,' she said, sounding as if she was blowing out the smoke from a cigarette. ‘It's something I've never had from my parents, and something I've never had from all those guys who dumped me. A child loves their parent no matter what, and I really want that. I'm going to have this baby.'

Chapter Four

The hazardous bush

ON A BRIGHT
spring morning in November 1969, just after 7.00am, 48-year-old Mildred Williams woke up in her musty East Bentleigh home. Her husband, Ronald — who was not usually awake at this hour — was not asleep next to her. She called out for him. Five minutes went past, and she called out again. Mildred pulled herself out of bed, still in her nightdress, and walked around the house. She must have looked in every room twice before finally deciding to venture outside. She called out when she first walked out the back door, and then again when she reached the clothesline halfway up the yard. She headed over to the garage, which was closed up, opened the side door, and found Ron with his back to her, perfectly still, hanging from a steel rafter, his feet a metre off the ground.

In 1942, my grandfather — Ronald Arthur Williams, already married and the father of two children — decided he would enrol in the army. He was signed to the 58/59th Battalion, which fought against the Japanese in New Guinea. He had never been to battle before, and had never left the country. He arrived in New Guinea in October of that year. Two years later, he had some kind of mental breakdown amid the gunfire and the mud and the rain. He was medically discharged with a diagnosis of ‘war neurosis' in 1944.

He returned home to Melbourne, where he had six more children — my father was a twin and the second youngest — and they all lived in that cramped, grotty, dark timber-board home in East Bentleigh. Nanna Mildred was an illegal bookie; Pop made sawdust, and sold it to butchers. Dad remembers his father waking up in the middle of the night, screaming over and over that the Japanese were coming. At other times, Pop had waking nightmares where he believed he was still in the war; he would hide in closets and under the bed, as if under attack. When these waking nightmares lasted more than a week, he was put in a mental institution. He seemed to get worse as he got older.

Nobody in my family knows exactly what Pop did in that war. All the older siblings have since died — one from suicide — and so nobody is alive to tell me what he was like before he went to war. A little while ago, I started looking around for a book to read to find out more about the New Guinea war. Many have similar-sounding titles:
Hell's Battlefield
by Phillip Bradley,
The Hard Slog
by Karl James,
Bastard of a Place
by Peter Brune. Eventually I settled on
The Toughest Fighting in the World,
a book by Australian journalist George Johnson, who was embedded with Australian troops in New Guinea throughout the war. From this book, I would learn that Pop moved from the oak-lined suburbs and often chilly winds of inner Melbourne to the terrible mountains, constant rain, mud, malaria, water snakes, crocodile-infested waters, kamikaze attacks, and sniper's nests of the war. Men would return from mission back to main camp unshaven, with sunken cheeks. When Australians were killed, it was usually right in front of their war mates, sometimes in their arms, and sometimes gradually, after incurring mortal, slow-burn wounds in rugged, remote areas where help could not reach them. Johnson recalls the ‘whining drone of Japanese aircraft ... the whistle of bombs descending through the humid blackness of the night, the sullen thunder of high explosive falling around the waterfront'. This was a place where a walk through the jungle — while water-logged, covered in mud, and carrying a heavy backpack — would frequently attract gunfire from an unknown source; each step could be your or your mate's last.

As a child, I knew nothing of this war. I spent hours and hours in a battle-fantasy world in the backyard with toy guns and swords. In my childlike fantasies of war, battles didn't come to an end because you were throwing up, or you'd sprained your ankle, or because you'd started hallucinating, or you couldn't stop crying. When things got awful in
my
war, it was all the more exciting. I always did something heroic to save the day. The battle scenes — as they no doubt were for many other kids playing out these epic fantasies — were movie-like, all encompassing and awesome. To my mind, war was a barrel of monkeys, which both gave me a sense of power and reinforced my idea that the world — even in chaos — flowed with moral righteousness.

Dad was sixteen when his father died. He has nothing positive to say about his upbringing. He recalls the filth of the place most of all: once, when they were cooking a roast, he discovered that a rat was cooking alongside the leg of mutton on the oven's floor. He remembers that all the children slept in the same bed, that he had no shoes or socks, that his feet were cold in the winter. He remembers not being able to read or write at school, and how the teachers called him stupid. When Pop died, Dad still hadn't been taught how to read or write. He had already left school, and was working in a piggery. He worked with a knife mainly. He cut deep into the skin, through tendon and muscle, with power and precision. He sometimes came home with his all-white work uniform splattered with dark-red pig blood. It smelt like off roast pork. He looked like an axe-murderer, but was as friendly — in substance and style — as Crocodile Dundee. He was muscular, tattooed, gentle, hard working, insular, and, at times, inconsolably angry at the world.

‘The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises,' wrote the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud in his book
The Interpretation of Dreams
, published in 1900. He would go on to say:

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Drawing on the work of eighteenth-century German romantic philosophers, enlightenment-era science, Platonic theory, medieval thinkers, and ancient Hindu texts — and after decades of work — Freud gradually pieced together and popularised a theory that there was more to the mind and to what makes us human than that of which we are consciously aware. Freud believed that there is an unconscious part of the mind that contains our instincts, and thus many of our behaviours, thoughts, and feelings cannot be consciously controlled. Freud saw this part of the mind as also containing memories that had been forgotten but could be recalled, and a place that stored socially unacceptable wishes and desires, trauma, and pain.

Around 1910, Freud's student — the debonair Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung — added another layer to Freud's theory of the mind: the idea of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the collective unconscious is not formed by experience, but inherited. This universal, human psychic structure, Jung said, is much like Freud's notion of ‘instincts', but it exists in a series of archetypes, symbols, and myths. These innate projections, this readiness to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols, is why, according to Jung, children fantasise so much: because they haven't had enough experience to temper their connection to this metaphysical world. Jung believed there were certain archetypal events: marriage, initiation, birth, death, and the separation from parents. He also believed there were archetypal figures — hero, trickster, great mother, great father, child, and devil — as well as archetypal motifs such as deluge, creation, and the apocalypse.

Jung believed
it was our culture, history, and personal context that shape these archetypes, thereby giving them their particular shape and form. He also described something called ‘The Shadow', which can be both a repressed aspect of ourselves that we don't like or can't deal with, or, in some cases, the entirety of our unconscious mind.

Take it or leave it. Indeed, many leave it, and don't buy into Jung's notion of the collective unconscious, although it's an interesting lens through which to view what I am about to tell you.

‘It's fourteen-hundred hours, the subject is inside, all men in their positions, on the ready for when I say “attack”,' the general said over a CB radio, from inside his station wagon. He wasn't in uniform, but he was a military man nonetheless, with a rugged face. ‘I'll stay put, out the front. You men wait around the corner.'