Behind the line: Nothing ordinary about ‘average copper’ Geoff Nash’s career
He’s been bashed by a gang of teens, pelted with marshmallows alongside Kevin Sheedy and helped protect Princess Diana. Geoff Nash might regard himself as “just an average copper”, but there’s nothing ordinary about his 43-years on Melbourne’s frontline.
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Geoff Nash describes his 43 year career as “just an average copper”, although he was good enough to be hand picked to provide close personal protection for Princess Diana and security for Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy as he was pelted with marshmallows by North Melbourne supporters.
But the job that turned him into a poster boy, the night after Australia Day in 1999, also left him with 34 stitches, broken teeth and a broken nose, among other injuries.
Sgt Nash, who retires next week, became the battered and bloodied public face of violence against police during a Police Association billboard campaign for wage justice and tougher sentencing in 2011.
He was a night shift supervisor in the city when he got out of his car to speak to a group of drunken teenagers who were running in and out of traffic in Russell Street about 3am.
“One of them grabbed my female partner and assaulted her while all the rest were fighting and wrestling with me,” he recalled last week.
“I hit the deck, and you’re trained to roll yourself up into a ball to protect yourself, which I’d done, but then I felt one of them try to grab my firearm.
“That meant taking my arms away from the ball to protect my weapon, and that was when I exposed my face and they kicked me a few times and broke everything. I sort of lost consciousness for a bit and when I came to they were all running off down the road.”
Undeterred, Sgt Nash continued to work night shift and mentor younger, less experienced colleagues until his retirement. He fired thousands of rounds in training, but “never had to fire a shot in anger”.
“I was 24 when I joined. I’m 67 now. It is old for a frontline copper, but every one of those 43 years of service has been as an operational policeman,” he says proudly.
“I just put myself down as Mr Average. The average copper, in the middle of my squad graduating, pretty much the middle of everything.”
Geoffrey Ronald Munro Nash had completed a carpentry apprenticeship before he became a policeman in 1978. His training station was Camberwell, known to the local constabulary as the “city of churches” because there were no licensed premises allowed in the area.
After postings at Russell Street, Heidelberg and Heidelberg West, he joined the force’s Special Operations Group, aka the Sons Of God, to complete his religious full circle.
Nash had two tours of duty with the highly trained, heavily armed SOG, from 1981-84 and 1986-91.
They covered what the late Dr Robert Haldane, the PhD policeman who literally wrote the book on the history of Victoria Police, described as “the bloodiest decade in the history of the force.”
Dr Haldane wrote that a series of events during the 1980s, including random mass killings in public places, “surpassed even the Kelly years for wanton bloodshed”. And Geoff Nash was there or thereabouts for most of them.
He was 17 minutes away, doing sniper training at the Williamstown rifle range, when a car bomb exploded outside Russell Street police complex just after 1pm on the day before Good Friday on March 27, 1986.
That’s how long he says it took the SOG crew to reach the scene, where the enormous blast had shattered every window up to the seventh floor and hurled debris and unexploded detonators hundreds of metres.
I know it was an enormous blast. As Victoria Police media director at the time, I was sitting behind the wheel of an unmarked police car about 150 metres away at the time — heading towards the bomb.
I was stationary, waiting for the lights outside the Trades Hall to change to green, when the noise and the shockwave and the smoke all seemed to happen together.
Followed by the chaos and much, much later, the realisation that if we’d got the green light my passenger, Sgt Glenys Russell, could have been out of the car and crossing the footpath to where the Media Liaison Bureau office door opened onto Russell Street … about 10 metres from where the bomb car and its 50 sticks of gelignite had been left to cause murder and mayhem.
There were a lot of lucky escapes that day and, miraculously, only one fatality when
Constable Angela Taylor, a talented and popular young policewoman who had been dux of her graduating squad only a year earlier, succumbed to severe burns three weeks after the bombing.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Media Liaison Bureau door, Geoff Nash’s wife Linda — who was a constable and worked at the bureau — had her hands well and truly full.
“Everything seemed to happen at once. The bomb went off and a car jack came flying through the office door,” Linda recalled this week.
“Then all the lights and glass and everything imploded on us.”
“I had media calls coming in from everywhere, even overseas, then D24 (radio room) rang and said they were under their desks and couldn’t see anything, so could I go and stick my head out and come back and give them a sitrep (situation report).”
Linda estimated she was in the media office for about 45 minutes before she was ordered out of the building by her husband, a trained bomb technician.
“There was just me and the reception desk staff next door there by then and Geoff came through and said, ‘What the bloody hell are you still doing here? You should be out of here’ and he evacuated me out of the building.
“I told him I’d been trained to remain at post, and that’s what I did!”
Geoff’s second stint with the SOG ended in 1991, when the family moved to Torquay because he’d promised Linda he’d work closer to home for five years to compensate for the hours and long absences typical of SOG members.
He was promoted to a sergeant’s position at Melbourne West in 1996 and that’s where he stayed for nearly 25 years.
“I loved that job. Every big thing that has happened in the city in the last 25 years, I have either been in it or working on that day. When I’m out supervising I may not be able to run any more, but I’ve had troops who could do it for me.
“I might be Mr Average, but there’s nothing wrong with being an average copper.”
** Three “better than average coppers” from the Nash family are still members of the Victoria Police.
** Geoff Wilkinson was Victoria Police media director from 1981-89.
** Four of Sgt Nash’s assailants received six-month intensive correction orders. The fifth was acquitted at trial because he could not be positively identified. Sgt Nash never received compensation for pain and suffering.
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