The fork in the road moments that lured vulnerable schoolboys into bikie gangs – now they want to stop others repeating their mistake
Shannon’s talents were ignored at high school. Owen rebelled at his private college. Steve’s dyslexia meant he felt like an outcast. They found camaraderie in gangs – at a terrible cost.
There were several moments that made private school computer nerd Owen Turnbull think the bikie life was not for him – the first was being fined $1500 by gang bosses for having a Facebook profile.
“I was 19 years old, just patched up. Broke. I’m living in a club. I’m giving all my time to the club and now you’re giving $1500,” he said.
Later, he heard about the execution of a bikie he knew who had been suspected of being a police informant.
“They took him to the bush and blew his face off,” Owen explained. “The same guy who ordered the execution got up at the funeral, in front of this guy’s mother, saying ‘we love him forever’. When I found out the next day he was the one who organised the hit, I thought I really need to get out of this shit.”
Owen and another former bikie, Shannon Althouse, have spoken out about the chain of events starting in their school years that led them into gang life, in the hope of discouraging other young people from following their path.
Both men emerged from very different backgrounds.
Owen felt stifled at his private school, St Mary MacKillop College in Canberra, while Shannon felt unprotected and ignored at schools in Darwin and Adelaide – wishing that his ability in sport had been noticed and nurtured in the public education system.
But their common thread was a lack of direction that started in their school years, and a desire to feel they belonged somewhere – and both ended up in the senior “enforcer” role of sergeant-at-arms.
READ MORE: Where notorious bikies and criminals went to school
From a Rebel to a Nomad
Owen explains that after initially joining the Canberra Rebels, he patched over to the Nomads in the same city.
Not long after, his house and his parents’ house were sprayed with bullets. One lodged in a photo album – right next to pictures of him in his rugby uniform as a child.
It had been quite the journey … for Owen and the bullet. Strict, religious household. Bouncer at a Canberra nightclub at 18, where he first spotted the Rebels.
“They seemed like a big family. Always together. Always hanging out. (They) bought me clothes, paid for my food. They promised to ‘turn me into a soldier’,” he recalls.
“I hung around them for three months and then I nommed up,” Owen says. “My new family.”
“But over time I got over it – mandatory meetings, staying at the clubhouse til midnight. Members annoyed because I was hanging out with non-bikie friends. I started with a bit of resentment; it ended up me just hating it.”
During quiet grind and chaotic spells in prison, watching guys shoot up ice and heroin, he gained a greater sense of clarity. This world was not his. He came to think it lay in his fractured relationship with his strict father as a teenager.
“I guess I wanted to prove something to him. I wanted to make him angry.”
Dark path of teen rebellion
There are 38 outlaw motorcycle gangs operating across the country, with around 4760 patched members and 955 prospects or “noms”.
While the average age is 33 to 58, many ex-bikies say their path began in their teens.
You’re expected to do a lot of free labour to get in, but the exit can be even tougher. One ex-bikie I interviewed, who asked not to be named, said speaking about his old club could put him in danger. Another said he wouldn't participate simply because I told him I was including the following quote from academic Mark Lauchs.
The Queensland University of Technology School of Justice Studies lecturer said many young men come from a place of trauma or feelings of abandonment.
Some are drawn to gangs by a sense of family and purpose, often starting in their teens. “For a small subset, seeing bikies for the first time is electrifying,” Associate Professor Lauchs says.
The black sheep
Blayze Williams, a social media influencer, explains her father Steve felt like the black sheep in his family growing in Adelaide in the 1970s and 80s. Struggling with dyslexia and feeling “rougher” than the other kids at Banksia Park High School, her dad found camaraderie and identity within the Gypsy Jokers.
“They felt like outcasts,” she explains. “Instead of going to a soccer club, they ended up in a bike club. They were rougher, more rugged, and they stuck with people who got their sense of humour and their way of carrying on.”
Steve became part of a counterculture in Adelaide in the 2000s, centred around bikies and a large illegal brothel ran by an infamous madam named Stormy Summers in the centre of town.
Eventually, Steve would be ejected from the club – then he disappeared without a trace six months later.
Recruited for fighting skills
When Shannon Althouse was 12, he broke his hand in a street fight.
After drifting from Underdale High School in Adelaide to street life in Darwin, he came to the attention of bikie recruiters.
By his late teens, the same drive and agile physicality that once made him a promising athlete had carried him into the Rebels bikie gang in Darwin.
Unlike some who seek out membership, Shannon was actively recruited for his street-fighting skills, eventually rising to sergeant-at-arms.
After being caught in a weapons conspiracy – though not involved in the violence – he served 10 years in Alice Springs Prison, crammed into a dorm meant for six with 16 inmates and four standing fans in the desert heat.
From his cell in 2016, he watched the Don Dale scandal unfold, images of boys hooded and shackled to chairs. Reading the Royal Commission report, he saw the pattern: children who had suffered trauma, brutalised again in institutions.
He thought of his own childhood: alcohol abuse, violence, sexual assault by a family friend.
Inside prison, he saw through the myth of brotherhood. Faking “Buddhism” for better food, he ended up reading every book he could on Buddha and Zen, and the world opened up.
He began speaking to younger inmates, encouraging them to stand on their own feet and fight their own battles. “I want to help, not just kids, but anybody who wants to know how to make the most of life,” he says.
Shannon’s now nine years off drugs and travels around communities “talking about life” – which is a lot more “satisfying and enjoyable then the life I once lived”.
Looking back at his “fork in the road moments”, he wishes school had supported his sporting abilities, so his physical skills could have been better harnessed.
“I used to be the only kid at football with nobody on the sidelines watching,” he remembers.
Why teens join gangs
A 2024 study by the Queensland Police Service and the Australian Institute of Criminology found young men typically join bikie gangs through friends – for belonging, safety, money, fame or a love of bikes.
Indeed, it’s the Harley often seen as a symbol of strength, but even more so freedom – even if the reality is often the opposite. Owen Turnbull had rebelled against his strict upbringing by finding his way, ironically, into a world where he was even less free.
He says the turning point came when his father kicked him out at 16. He felt the weight of expectation to become a professional rugby league player in the NRL, and when he grew tired of the sport their relationship fractured.
“I wanted to piss my Dad off,” Owen explains. “And when I joined (the bikies) my Dad was scared – that was what I wanted to happen.”
Looking back, he said he wishes he could have gone down a different path. “I would have found other outlets to get back at him, something more positive.”
His father passed away a few years ago, and the relationship never fully healed. Owen went searching for liberation and found a world even stricter than before.
Now he sells collector cards online, answering to nobody, while hoping to get into youth work – though a working-with-children check has so far blocked him.
For now, he says, “I want to explore the world. I went to Scotland at the start of the year. I would never have got to do that if I was still in the bikie world.”
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Originally published as The fork in the road moments that lured vulnerable schoolboys into bikie gangs – now they want to stop others repeating their mistake
