Ross Gibson
Wimmera Reckoner
The town of Yaapeet is a skein of scabbed streets hollowed out of slack dunes where the Wimmera blows across the Mallee in the northwest of the southeast.
Drive five hours out of Melbourne. Envisage a town of one hundred souls. At this desolate scene, your last misdemeanour loomed into view and thus was your liberty curtailed once again. Six years in the past, during the late days of a dry summer.
To understand, to make judgement, let us trace back even further.
A decade ago, a man known as Abernathy died in Geelong at the destitutes’ hospital.
Happenstance caused his widow—hitherto unknown to you—to move in next door, beside your de facto’s modest abode. During the three years that followed, she suffered extenuated grief—I mean the widow, not your de facto—and she jettisoned documents, trinkets, undervalued mementoes which once upon a time were intimate things. Throughout this sad interlude, under cover of night, you would go tampering with the refuse behind the widow’s drab house. You retrieved special detritus. And you contrived to assume Mister Abernathy’s self as an ancillary to your own self.
It soon came to pass that, in the guise of Mister Abernathy, you engaged a Wimmera estate agent and you bought a vacant, rudimentary home on the outskirts of Yaapeet, at Number 10 Blood Street.
Presently, a blue shipping container appeared and within days neighbours noticed a noxious, cloying stench—sometimes like fertilizer, sometimes like metal scald, sometimes just sickly-sweet—wafting from your property. And at various times on numerous days neighbours saw you attired in grey overalls, wellington boots and a gaudy-coloured muffler.
Half a year trundled past before a paddy wagon arrived and a search warrant was furnished at Number 10 Blood Street. Specialists donned hazmat attire on the verge of your residence and traipsed through to the shipping container, where they found the intricate components of a clandestine drug factory. They found substances, chemicals, equipment, methamphetamines too. Your lab was clinical, meticulous. The main cooking zones were inside the house, in the back bedroom and the bathroom. The work areas fairly sparkled. In extent and in quality, your wherewithal was as considerable as it was culpably illicit. The methamphetamines were a jackpot, criminal and pernicious, a bold wholesaler’s stash, not for personal use.
There is no way around it: the substances were stockpiled in quantities that will bring you obligatory gaol. You manufactured the methamphetamines in three different ways and, considering the quantities, each way must bring you obligatory gaol.
Now we address the matter of the armaments.
The specialists found firearms and ammunition, an alarming amount. It was an arsenal, let’s be frank, boxed in your shipping container. There were machine-guns and grenades, coddled in separate white hessian bags. There was SO MUCH ammunition. The ordnance, illegal and extensive, sized up to truly grievous proportions which—there is no way around it—must bring you obligatory gaol.
Next we need to consider your arrest at Perth International Airport, while you enjoyed the provisions of bail, in February 2014.
You had a one-way Qantas ticket—economy—to London. The passport was your own. The citizenship was UK. Concealed in your luggage you had Mister Abernathy’s passport but with your picture upon it. Concealed in your luggage you had AUD$105,000 – 1000 Pounds Sterling + USD$27,000. Also: a driver’s licence for Mister Abernathy with your picture upon And two bank accounts established with his name.
Combined, these misdemeanours constitute federal and international wrongs which bring obligatory gaol.
When interviewed by police, you exercised your right to silence and gave no responses to questions.
Without doubt, there were other people involved in your enterprise. But you provide no information concerning them or the roles they have played. You seem to be bound by an ill-advised code which leaves you suffering mute consequences while your confederates range free. Perhaps you were lured by others into this venture, perhaps you did not invent it. Even so, you are now stickily quicksanded a long way out of your depth.
Consider: not only the drugs but also the guns.
Which gives me pause to comment right now that I am palpably distraught that a man with such ugly ruction in his past is so avid for guns. I refer to your two separate artillery homicides, no matter that you committed them a long time ago.
Preparing your sentence, I make observations about your life story, observations which will provide context for your conviction and might help us all grasp the objective gravity of your actions.
I will list the most vivid spots of time in your life:
In July 1958 you endured one month’s hard labour in Sydney for vagrancy. You were seventeen years old.
Later that year, you hitched a ride from Sydney to Melbourne. The car that carried you had been stolen and once you had been apprehended in this vehicle you were sent away for one month to the prison at Pentridge. Was this bad luck, or something worse? It is what it is.
By 1961 you had made manifest your fascination with firearms, which were in your possession when you crashed yet another stolen car. So you endured two years of hard labour at the prison farm in Moruya.
In 1965 you were back in Victoria, shooting with intent to cause grief and render bodily harm while committing bloody robbery on a truly grand scale in a gang under arms.
This put you in Pentridge for nine years non-parole.
It was during this time you enacted a notorious escape in the company of a confederate who would become infamously convicted for murdering a prison guard while avoiding your re-capture. The scandal of this escapade and the contentious capital punishment of your confederate have ever henceforth been scowling hard over your head.
Your next two decades in prison were in payment for the guard’s death and for a homicidal gunshot you fired when a separate dispute erupted with an erstwhile acquaintance in a public convenience while you were on the run alongside your confederate.
Point of fact: in the circumstances of this escapade you were brutal, grim, stupid.
Henceforth back in Pentridge you laboured in ‘H’ division, which prisoners and free citizens all know just as ‘Hell’. Or perhaps the ‘H’ is for ‘Horror’. It amounts to the same.
You did not emerge free again until late 1984.
Then for a full generation you became a good family man, loving and well-loved and unmarked by any incident until convicted of larceny and the cultivation of cannabis at Bendigo in 2002.
Which brought three more years incarceration.
Followed by another eight years all quiet with the family until Yaapeet, the guns, the bank accounts, the methamphetamines and Perth International Airport.
So many lost years.
Two men dead that we know about.
Which brings us to where we started, in Yaapeet, at Blood Street.
Or does it, indeed?
Your counsel has requested I pause and consider some mitigating contingencies and a psychologist’s report.
(Imagine a commentator retrieving occult histories that have lain submerged or unespied for many generations in a disenchanted landscape.)
So be it then:
You were conceived in early wartime in London. Home-life was fraught. No father to identify. Your mother gassed herself dead when you were five years of age. (I take note of your story that she had sent you, earlier that day, to buy the fatal hose.)
Thereafter, you lived with your brothers in tunnels and basements and you saw, heard, smelt, and felt the bombs of the Blitz. Bodies in pieces. The stench in the houses. Enormous guns detonating at nighttime, the black sky electric and spastic. Cruelty, mayhem, and hunger. You say, ‘For three days I was buried alive with dead people.’ I can’t vouch it to be true. I can only imagine.
In 1949, at eight years of age, you were taken from an orphanage in Britain to an orphanage in Australia. This did not offer any guaranteed improvement. Cruelty, bedlam, hunger. A life schooled alone in pitiless dormitories. Work patrols on remote farms. A ward of the state. Almost no secondary schooling. A runaway in the countryside. Riding trains. Hitching trucks. A forager’s life without the structure of walls.
What is impulse control? Why should you even consider resisting a temptation?
Up and down the coast and behind the Great Dividing Range, your young life was mostly shiftless and timeless and bound over to crime.
Even so, you have spent some decades, paradoxically, like an exemplar, so your life presents as a puzzle resisting simplified judgement.
All of which I will consider when I hand down your sentence, mindful you will be more than eighty years into old age the next time you walk free.
So, let’s recall: Yaapeet, the guns, the bank accounts, the methamphetamines too. And Perth International Airport. So many lost years. Two men dead that we know about.
I will pass sentence tomorrow.