By Jordan Baker
Avalon stonemason Scott Matthewson was chipping rocks with Dougie, a local labourer who had become a friend, when their conversation turned to how the convicts of the early settlement also cut sandstone until they were freed. Dougie went quiet. He turned to Matthewson. “I’m a convict,” he said.
There, covered in dust, Dougie confessed a secret he’d held close for decades. His real name was Darko Desic. He’d been jailed for cannabis cultivation in the early 1990s but broke out of Grafton prison with a blade and bolt cutters, fearing he’d be sent to the front line in war-torn Croatia when he was released.
Stonemason Darko Desic, whose friends are hoping will remain in Sydney after his release from jail.
He’d been on the run ever since. For almost 30 years he laid low on the northern beaches, avoiding anything that would require identification or interaction with authorities; driving, drinking at a club, seeing a doctor. He’d used pliers to pull out his own rotting teeth.
Matthewson had no idea his friend was a fugitive. But he was not surprised. Suddenly, Dougie’s idiosyncrasies – his Spartan lifestyle, his solitary pursuits, the way he was visibly moved by small acts of kindness – “all made sense,” he told the Herald.
Desic handed himself into police in September last year, when the pandemic left him without his home and much of his meagre income. When Matthewson arrived to take him to the police station, he was ready with his shirt freshly washed and his tatty, hole-pocked work boots polished. “We said our goodbyes,” said Matthewson. “It was awful.”
Both knew that going back to jail was the only way Desic could set himself free from the burden of his secret, and a life in the shadows.
Desic is due to be released at the end of December, but Matthewson fears that without the intervention of the federal government, his friend will be sent straight to Villawood Detention Centre before being deported to Croatia, where he will have to create a life from nothing at age 65.
Under Australian law, the visas of non-citizens who have served more than 12 months in prison are cancelled. However, the minister can use their discretion, taking into account the risk someone poses to Australians, and problems the person might face if they are sent home.
Matthewson argues Desic has been through enough. He’s a gentle chap, and if he can return to the northern beaches, he will have friends, work – his stonemasonry skills are exceptional and rare – and an apartment beneath Matthewson’s home.
His friend has done his penance. He hasn’t had any kind of life for three decades. “I just want to give him some years,” says Matthewson. “I want to see him a free man.”
After being sentenced last year, Desic was sent back to Grafton. He had little idea that his tale – that of a man who’d tried so hard for so long to go unnoticed – had captured imaginations across the world.
Scott Matthewson has built a flat for the friend he knows as Dougie beneath his Avalon home.Credit: Peter Rae
Until Desic is free, Matthewson is the keeper of his friend’s story. He knows little of Desic’s early life, beyond that his mother died when he was young, and his father was a security guard on a prison island when Croatia was part of Europe’s communist bloc. They’d been poor.
He puts Desic’s skill with stone down to his years of building with rocks as a child. Those years gave him survival skills, too, which would prove useful.
One Christmas a few years ago, when Matthewson gave Desic a new guitar – he’d taught himself to play on one he’d picked up from a rubbish pile – his lonely friend’s eyes filled with tears. He’d only ever been given one other present; a plastic Daffy Duck, when he was a kid. “He’s a tough, tough man, and his eyes started to well,” Matthewson said.
Darko Desic, 64, was part way through his prison sentence when he escaped.
Desic came to Australia in the 1980s, sponsored by a distant relative. After a brief marriage, he became a resident. He spent time on the northern beaches, then moved to Kempsey on the NSW north coast. It was there he was arrested for growing and possessing cannabis, and sentenced to three and a half years in the notorious Goulburn jail.
Midway through his sentence, Desic’s thoughts turned to escape. It wasn’t jail that bothered him, Matthewson said, but the thought of what might come after, if he was sent back to war-torn Croatia where men his age were dying on the front lines of battle.
His plan involved escaping through the barred window. He practiced falling and rolling from the top bunk. He also ran around the yard, working on his endurance.
Desic stole a hacksaw and bolt cutter, and, when the wind and rain were wild enough to drown out the sound, would hang by one arm at the top of his window, sawing the bar with the other. Eventually, he was able to pull the bar down and climb through. He shimmied along the window ledge and dropped two storeys, rolling as he hit the ground to avoid injury.
He lived in the bushes, blackening his prison-green overalls with mud and charcoal to camouflage himself. After a few, freezing days, he stuck his thumb out next to the highway and the first car picked him up. It was going to Avalon.
Thus began three decades of hiding out on the northern beaches. He worked as an odd jobs man, taking cash. He rented a room in a dilapidated house, where he lived like a monk. At one point, he was featured on Australia’s Most Wanted, but no one around him noticed.
His food was cheap and plain, his habits fastidious. “Dougie had his little bed, and everything was neat,” Matthewson said. “All his tools were in place. He had a few clothes. He was very, very frugal. Every cent counted.”
He never drank. He meditated, played guitar and taught himself to fix discarded computers. He pulled out several of his own teeth, including one of his foreteeth, with a pair of pliers. “I’ve never seen someone who can cop so much pain,” Matthewson said.
One of the ‘Free Darko’ signs around the Northern BeachesCredit: Peter Rae
Desic was popular with tradesmen across the peninsula for his skill and work ethic, but never worked for anyone long enough to raise questions. “He’s a very intelligent stonemason,” Matthewson said. “Years ago, you could shake a tree and a stonemason would fall out of it. Now there’s very few of us left. I get a call every week from one of them, saying, ‘where’s Dougie’?”
The real estate boom during the COVID-19 pandemic signalled the end of Desic’s 30-year run. The house in which he rented a room was sold, so he and his flatmates had to leave. Now he had nowhere to live.
“He said ‘mate, this is really bad for me’,” said Matthewson, who offered his boat as a temporary berth until Desic came to a decision about what to do next. “I knew the solution was for Dougie to go back into jail, do his time, whatever happens, happens, that’s how you get on with your life.”
So Matthewson drove Desic to the police station, hugged him, and, at his friend’s request, drove away. Desic didn’t go inside. He spent one last night as a free man, sleeping in the sand dunes, before presenting himself to baffled police officers at Dee Why.
Desic has strong supporters on the northern beaches, ranging from a local millionaire who organised his lawyers to the local builders, whose support is tinged with self-interest because they want him on their worksites. Across the peninsula, there are “Free Dougie” stickers on bumper bars and telegraph poles.
A Go Fund Me page has raised more than $30,000. “Doug was my next-door neighbour for many years,” wrote one donor. “He is a truly kind person and a great bloke. He taught me how to use computers and even taught me and my best friend karate after school sometimes.” Another said, “The 30 years agony is the heavy price he already paid.”
One of the “Free Dougie” bumper stickers around the northern beaches.Credit: Peter Rae
Dreyfuss’ office referred the Herald’s queries about Desic’s fate to the Department of Home Affairs. In a statement, a spokesperson said the department did not comment on individual cases.
“The Australian Government takes seriously its responsibility to protect the Australian community from the risk of harm posed by non-citizens who engage in criminal conduct or other behaviour of concern,” it said.
“Non-citizens in Australia, who do not hold a valid visa will be liable for detention and removal as soon as practicable, pending resolution of any ongoing matters.”
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