Trent Dalton: Houdini and me
Beloved father figure, notorious crim… Trent Dalton recalls a shadowy presence from his childhood.
This is as far back as I can go. I’m a small boy on an expensive brown leather lounge in an inexpensive neighbourhood of working-class Ipswich, south-east Queensland, and I’m sitting in a brown and yellow T-shirt and I’m looking at a freckle on my right thumb. It seems fake, like it was a sticker placed on my finger, but that freckle somehow tells me I’m alive, that I exist, that I’m here on Earth, and then, in this memory, I turn to a man with red hair and tattoos and muscles and I say, “I love you, Dad”.
This man turns to me and he smiles, ruffling my hair, and he says, “I’m not your dad, mate, but I love you, too”. I grew up sitting silently around a series of suburban kitchen tables where adults spoke about this red-haired man, one of the people I loved the most. My dad, my dear real dad, later told me this man was a good man and a bad man at the same time. This man was, in many ways, my mum’s one true love and I know he was the first man I ever loved, too. And he went away. He vanished from my life when one particularly troublesome part of his world finally caught up with him and I grew up trying to reconcile the dark things everybody was whispering about him around kitchen tables with the love I had for him in my heart. I always wondered if you could be good and bad at once and I thought that might be possible because I was kinda that way myself for a while, a careless chip-shouldered scumbag loser boy teen destined to follow the crooked paths laid out before me, if not for the guidance and protection of my three older brothers.
Please forgive the self-indulgence but this is all coming back to my book Boy Swallows Universe, a novel about a boy being raised by heroin dealers in the outer south-west suburbs of Brisbane in the 1980s. When the adult guardians this boy loves most in life are taken away he ventures into a secret room, a secret hole he finds in his house with a secret telephone line at the end of which is a secretive man who tells the increasingly troubled boy he must break into Brisbane’s Boggo Road Women’s Prison on Christmas Day to save his mum’s life. Fortunately for the boy, his best mate is a 74-year-old real-world prison escapologist and convicted killer named Arthur “Slim” Halliday, the man who twice broke out of the “escape-proof” Boggo Road Gaol in the 1940s, earning himself the legendary title “The Houdini of Boggo Road”. There’s nothing Slim can’t break into or escape from, except the cancer creeping through his chest.
My book is about crime and magic and motherhood and brotherhood and good and evil and rugby league and true love. It’s about the ways a child can process trauma. It’s about the fine line between magic and madness and why both should be indulged in moderation. It’s a work of fiction inspired by the stranger and more complex elements of my childhood. It’s also a tribute to my mum. People ask me who my heroes are and I say Eddie Vedder and Alfie Langer and John Steinbeck because it’s too cheesy to say my real hero is my mum, the great survivor, a woman not much bigger than a can of sarsaparilla with a heart the size of Sydney, where she was born and bred and broken by every social issue I’ve ever written about as a journalist, only to be put back together again by four Brisbane sons and all their wingless angel kids who she loves like breathing.
“It’s probably 50-50,” my mum reckons. So a lot of the book’s real and a lot of it’s bullshit. Some of it is how it was and some of it is how I wish it was. The secret room with the secret telephone is real. My brothers and I would sneak into this room as kids. I guess one day I just decided to sit down and write 470 pages of words about who I hoped was on the other end of that phone line. It’s strange putting all this stuff into public print, and terrifying and embarrassing and healthy and good, but I didn’t know why I was really doing it until a reader, Rani Middleton, told me.
I have to tell you how much this book belongs to the readers of The Weekend Australian Magazine, every last person who ever wrote in and told me to keep going, to keep writing stories until you’ve written enough that you’re finally ready to write that big story that’s deep down in your flimsy heart and soul about the quiet boy in the quiet room and the quiet man named Slim who you really did befriend way back when in a different time and universe.
Last month Rani Middleton wrote me a letter in which she shared a beautiful story she thought might work for the “Theory of Objects” series I hope to keep writing for at least a couple of decades or so for the mag, where you dear readers send in pictures and stories about personal objects that mean a lot to you. Rani is a Queenslander living in Broome, Western Australia. An English and drama teacher. Her nan and grandad (“a cheerful 93-year-old whistler and survivor of World War II and two triple-heart bypasses”) put her on to The Weekend Australian Magazine long ago and she’s never stopped reading it, through marriage and motherhood, through good health and the very worst health. I loved her story. It was a love story she called My Beatrix Potter Brooch and it will be a key part of my next object series instalment.
Rani’s been reading the magazine a lot lately from hospital beds. She sent me a link to a blog she’s been writing. This was the opening post:
Saturday 9th December, 2017
My surgeon told me I had bowel cancer yesterday. He’d removed a tumour and half my large intestine last week during surgery. I am 33 years old. I am nine weeks pregnant with my second child.
This is how it started.
What followed was a truly harrowing, often hilarious, always illuminating literary odyssey through DIY enema kits, exploding vomit geysers, morning sickness, midday and afternoon sickness, unspeakable pain and loss and endless motherly love as Rani battles the brutal realities of Stage 3 bowel cancer. I was deeply moved by the blog and I wrote back to Rani saying thanks and I told her I’d written a literary odyssey of my own and, in the spirit of yarn-sharing, wondered if she might like me to send her an advance copy of the book.
I’d barely made the offer when somehow, magically, she obtained an uncorrected not-for-sale proof and it was Rani Middleton who told me why I wrote that bloody book in the first place. “The book helps you deal with darkness,” Rani said. “I’m in my own Black Peter at the moment, Trent. I wish I could command time like Slim. I’m working on it. Rani.”
This is my second oldest memory. I must be four or five years old and I’m sitting on the lap of Arthur “Slim” Halliday at the wheel of an old rattling four-wheel-drive, something beat-up like a rusting Land Rover, and he’s letting me turn the wheel, honk the horn, and I’m thinking this bloke is the funniest, kindest old bloke I will ever call a mate. Slim’s a family friend who does odd jobs for us around the house, mows the lawn, weeds the garden. He’s a green thumb who learnt everything there is to know about plants and soils tending the gardens of old Boggo Road Gaol.
Then I’m a little older and my older brothers are playing in the back yard and they’re whispering about how Slim got put in prison, about how he killed a Gold Coast taxi driver in cold blood in the 1950s, got put away for life. The details are sketchy and I go to sleep at night thinking about how Slim would have carried out that killing and, for some reason, my child’s mind settles on the vision of Slim killing that poor innocent taxi driver by reaching over from the back seat and slicing his neck open with the fine-tooth comb Slim always carries in the back pocket of his blue work shorts to keep his hair slicked back. That’s not at all how it happened but that’s how it happened in my mind.
Then I’m a lot older and I’m a staff writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine about to interview a long-time cricket hero, Bill Lawry, and I’m in the bowels of Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail newspaper archives searching for the clippings folder marked “Lawry, Bill”. Then I realise the “H” filing cabinet is not too far from the “L” and so, on a whim, I check to see if there’s a folder marked “Halliday, Arthur ‘Slim’”. And there are five folders on Slim in the archives, each as thick as Bill Lawry’s cricket bat.
“Slim Halliday was once regarded as the most dangerous man in the British Commonwealth,” says Brisbane historian Jack Sim, addressing a group of tourists on one of his regular Sunday “Escapes Tours” of the imposing red-brick Boggo Road Gaol historical site in Brisbane’s inner south. “Slim did what was supposed to be impossible. He broke out of Boggo Road Gaol. Twice. That’s why he’s known as the ‘Houdini of Boggo Road’.”
Jack and his tour group stand outside cell nine in the prison’s towering D Block. Cell nine was Slim’s cell for the majority of almost 35 years he spent inside Boggo Road. “His bed was a steel frame bolted to the wall,” Jack says. “He had a little stump to sit on and a lump of wood for a table. One blanket. A plastic bucket to poo in and a plastic bucket for his water. Nothing else.”
Slim Halliday was accustomed to nothing. He was born in Parramatta in 1910 and went to live in a Church of England orphanage when his parents died, possibly in an car accident, when he was 12. In his late teens in Depression-era Australia he was a thief, jumping trains and working the odd farm up and down Australia’s east coast. He built fences, milked cows. A hustle here, a hustle there.
“Halliday first came into Boggo as a burglar,” Jack says. “He was sentenced to five years for housebreaking. He’d run his own business repairing iron roofs, putting in new downpipes. He’d fix someone’s roof but leave a sheet of iron loose and come back at night and break in, slip through the manhole cover.
“He was a good cat burglar, good on his feet, agile. He was skinny and tall, able to slip in under roofs and hide behind doors when people were eating their meals and when they went to bed they wouldn’t even know he was there. Thing was, he was a good roofer. One of the ladies who was broken into by him said, ‘I don’t know why he stole from me, he was a very good roofer’.”
Jack leads the tour group outside to the high brick perimeter wall of the prison, points to a section at the top. “Going over a wall was natural to Slim,” he says. “That spot is legendary. It’s known as Halliday’s Leap. Prisoners and prison officers spoke about it in reverential terms because of how clever he was.”
In January 1940, a prison screw was leading a group of cons around the central circle yard when, says Jack, “the very last man in line, just short of six foot, slipped away from the group”. It was a Sunday and Slim knew the prison was working at lower staff capacity. “Most of the officers are engaged in the movement of prisoners,” Jack says, walking to a 3m wall separating the main yard from what was known as Number One yard.
“Slim jumps over the brick wall there into the next yard, scales another timber fence and runs around the back of the prison workshops. Just about everything that was in the jail was made in the workshops. There was a boot shop, a hammock shop, a mattress shop, prisoner uniforms were made there. Slim breaks into the workshops and retrieves his escape kit.”
For months, Slim had been working in the mattress and hammock shop, secretly beavering away on a grappling hook — painstakingly turning about 45m of hemp into a threaded and incrementally knotted 8m-long escape rope strong enough to pull a 6ft-tall man more than seven metres up a prison wall, tied to a cross-shaped hook made from two hammock end sticks. For kicks, Jack recently began fashioning his own escape rope out of materials available to Slim in 1940. “I think I’ve perfected it but it’s taken me six months to figure it out and I’ve been throwing ropes up on the wall and testing them out, trying to climb up.”
Jack leads his group closer to Halliday’s Leap. “Slim identified the only corner in the entire prison wall that he could hook the grappling hook on to. It was the only spot on the whole perimeter where the wall dropped down one step as the land fell.” Slim found himself a wedge to lodge the hook into. He’d been finessing his all-important grappling hook swing by studying the dynamics of a cotton string tied to a hook made from matchsticks that he would repeatedly toss over the edge of his bed frame.
Halliday’s escape made headlines across the country. He was on the lam for almost two weeks. Some Brisbane kids were kept home from school by parents fearing the crim on the loose while other kids were elated by the news, forming wild-eyed posses to hunt down Slim through the sleepy suburbs. “He eventually gets brought back to Boggo,” Jack says. Slim had six more months added to his sentence with hard labour for his efforts. “You’d think you’d pull your head in but not our Slim. In December 1946, Slim does it again.”
The legend of Houdini was cemented in that second breakout. Slim was recaptured, had his sentence extended, and walked free once more in June, 1949. “But in 1952, he comes back to Boggo Road,” Jack says. “And this becomes his home for the next 23 years. He’d been convicted of murder.”
Slim was sentenced to life imprisonment for the Southport Esplanade murder of taxi driver Athol McCowan, 23. The chief investigator, Queensland Police Detective Inspector Frank Bischof, claimed Slim had fled the scene of the McCowan murder and rushed to Sydney, where he was captured by police after shooting himself in the leg when his own .45 calibre handgun went off during a violent wrestle with a valiant Guildford storekeeper he was attempting to rob.
In a packed court, Bischof testified that Slim confessed to the McCowan murder while recovering from his wound in a Parramatta Hospital bed. Bischof claimed Slim’s confession detailed how he slipped into McCowan’s cab in Southport on the night of May 22, 1952, later holding up the young driver at a secluded spot at the Currumbin Lookout further south. When McCowan resisted, Bischof claimed, Slim battered the driver to death with the same .45 calibre handgun he would use to rob the Guildford storekeeper more than a month later. Bischof testified that Slim recited a poem during his confession: “Birds eat, and they’re free. They don’t work, why should we?”
Slim told anyone who would listen that Bischof framed him for McCowan’s murder; the confession was, he said, a figment of Bischof’s imagination.
The Courier-Mail reported on December 10, 1952 that Slim “caused a stir in court when Bischof said Halliday had told him, ‘I killed him’”.
“Halliday sprang to his feet,” the report said, “and, leaning over the dock, shouted, ‘That’s a lie’.”
Slim always said that on the night of McCowan’s murder he was in Glen Innes in NSW, about 400km away. Frank Bischof would go on to become Queensland police commissioner from 1958 to 1969, resigning amid widespread allegations of corruption. He died in 1979. Before being sentenced to life in prison, Slim declared from the dock: “I repeat, I am not guilty of this crime.”
“Frank wasn’t particular about who he told lies to,” says Ken Blanch, the legendary Brisbane crime reporter, almost 90 today, who “was in on that story right from day one”. “Frank got something like 32 convictions out of 35 murders that he investigated. That’s the best strike rate I’ve come across. Verbals were his specialty and they were the specialty of some detectives he surrounded himself with.”
In 2006, Blanch wrote a book, Slim Halliday: The Taxi Driver Killer, that detailed glaring flaws in Slim’s trial, namely the exclusion of a witness who told police at the time of the killing she saw a “slightly corpulent” man with “hair receding from his forehead” moving suspiciously around a cream-coloured taxi, which Blanch believes was the murder vehicle, near the Southport Esplanade.
Make no mistake, Blanch is no Slim Halliday sympathiser. Another witness said he saw two men surrounding the potential murder vehicle that night and one of those men, says Blanch, could well have been Slim. “Slim was a nasty piece of work,” he says. “He’d always been a crim, but he hadn’t been a violent one. I feel that he might not have been the killer. He might have been party to it in so far that he was present but he might not have been the actual killer. For me, that’s the mysterious part — who actually killed Athol McCowan?”
Historian Jack Sim says he met prison officers who’d spent hours with Slim each day in Boggo Road. “They’d impressed on me their own personal beliefs that he wasn’t a killer,” he says. “Ken found some serious inadequacies in the police investigation and, even worse, of actual withholding of important evidence from Halliday’s defence team that could have turned the tide in his trial. His trial would fail any appeal in a modern court.”
Jack once spoke to a now-deceased relative of McCowan’s. “This relative informed me that, among the family and many Southport people at the time, they were incredulous that Halliday was found guilty of the offence,” he says. That said, he does not dismiss Slim’s ability to commit the murder in an act of desperation; a violent and uncharacteristic snap. He shrugs. “He was a bad man,” he says. “But maybe Halliday was a victim of his own notoriety. A notorious jailbreaker.”
I don’t call Slim’s innocence either way. All my sympathy goes, first and foremost, to Athol McCowan and his family. But if Slim was innocent it might explain the flight instinct that saw him try several more times to escape Boggo Road, once earning himself a 14-day trip down inside Black Peter, the jail’s notorious underground isolation cell, sparking a public outcry across Brisbane.
“So Halliday has been given solitary confinement,” wrote L.V. Atkinson of Gaythorne to The Courier-Mail on December 11, 1953. “The miserable caged wretch, for instinctively seeking his freedom, is to be penalised to the fullest, foulest extent of our medieval prison system? The principle of modern legal punishment cannot allow the infliction of human torture.” It was high summer in Brisbane. Slim later said he was given only “half a loaf of bread and a few cups of water in 14 days”.
Rani Middleton’s letter to me noted the peculiar ability Slim developed to manage the darkness and manipulate time in that hole and, indeed, in his cell for 23 years. “I learnt the best way to do time,” Slim told Brisbane’s Telegraph newspaper in 1981, five years after his final release and six years before he died. “You raced the clock. You psyche yourself up and pretend there’s not enough hours to fit in all the work. You get surprised when the day’s over. It makes the clock’s hands go faster. I’ve read books on the stars and galaxies, and I’ve roamed out among them, you know. You consider yourself when you’re roaming the heavens. You get to realise how unimportant we all are.”
I know for a fact that Slim shared his many slow-gathered wisdoms about managing darkness with those that he cared about most. Something my book explores is the question of whether good wisdom is still valid when delivered by bad men.
Something else it explores are the holes we can all find ourselves in and right now Rani Middleton from WA is doing time in hers. But she has beautiful friends and family down in there with her. They’re crowd-funding to pay for the mounting travel, accommodation and six-month chemotherapy treatment costs that come with managing cancer in remote regions of Australia.
The last time we corresponded she was in “Day 6 of Round 7” of her chemo journey. She’d just returned from searching a beach for hermit crabs with her son. Those moments with her boy always pass too quickly, while the hands on the clocks in all those hospital rooms still move too slowly. Rani hasn’t yet learnt to manipulate time. But she’s working on it.
Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton (Fourth Estate, $32.99) is out Monday.
-
Want to hear more from Trent Dalton? Book tickets now to our subscriber Q&A in Sydney and Brisbane.