As the world mourns for Michael Jackson, a “colourful” Melbourne identity is laid to rest with a tinnie of VB on his coffin. “Tupps” was the last surviving member of a Melbourne “crime dynasty” which has its own police taskforce assigned to it. This is called the Purana taskforce, the name of which I’m convinced was chosen just to make me guffaw when I hear it on the radio.
Just what is it with Victorians and their adoration of violent criminals, drug dealers and standover merchants? The same people who ring into talkback radio or post on news websites to froth about our crime epidemics and complain about too-soft sentences for drug addicts, dealers, burglars and “gang violence” (always “ethnic” gang violence), are all too happy to talk Desmond Moran up as a great guy who was just like one of us, really!.
His mother had a terrible job getting him to come in for tea. Putting his little boot in he’d be, bless him. All the kids were like that then, they didn’t have their heads stuffed with all this Cartesian dualism.
The traders are mourning “Tupps” – a “good guy” one insisted, as she watched the boys from forensics sweep up the street, inch by inch, shoulder to shoulder, working their way to Ascot Pasta and Deli-Cafe, where Moran had gone for his regular coffee. He’d sit on the street there most days.
No, she doesn’t want her name in the paper. But she wants someone to write that he had lots of friends and plenty of respect in this neighbourhood. People knew who he was, what was said, but they took him as they saw him.
“He was always the first to one to put his hand out to anyone who needed a hand. He’s been in the area for years and years, a lot of people will be very upset.”
Whenever she saw him sitting having his usual at the cafe where he died, just down the road from her shop, she’d get a “g’day, love”.
Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.
As the police and others have pointed out, the media focus on the “gangland identity” angle has spawned a grotesque celebrity, epitomised by the “Gangland Matriarch” Judy Moran and the photos of her extensive wardrobe in the press. Life is imitating art. The men have been adopting Sopranos-like black suits and dark glasses at the many funerals that are a frequent event that world. Some of them, it seems, aren’t quite sure where Underbelly ends and their lives begin.
This is lapped up avidly by the same people who would be howling for the stocks to be brought back if they caught one of the poor wretches at the bottom of that food chain selling drugs to their schoolchildren. But then, the Morans and Williamses and Kanes are such lovely, old-fashioned folk at heart!
Mrs Simmel: Oh yes Kipling Road was a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other’s houses with each other’s property all day. They were a cheery lot.
I don’t know if this celebration of (white) criminality is more rife in Victoria than other states. Maybe it’s because when we think of (white) criminal gangs we think of the Kellys (Scenery! Horses! Interesting cyberpunk armour! Robin Hood!) rather than the Rum Corps. The younger ones have Chopper Read, who has his own website, book deals and stints on talk shows. And then we wonder why some of the Yoof see crime as a viable way of life.
The fascination is certainly there, as with misbehaving footballers or corrupt pollies, but Miss Elle McFeast lost her TV gig some years ago after a truly fawning and sickening interview with “Chopper”. In those days, the public was discomfited by TV persons lionising murderers.
Armidale,N.S.W.,a University town has had another shooting with a Police Report that seems a bit vague.Perhaps they need to be. I have heard a few rumours lately,that would make a tomato blush if it had a glass jaw!
Who says Victorians adore these people? The media might do so, but simply because the Herald-Sun fawns over them doesn’t mean the rest of us have any time for them.
In fairness, maybe the public is looking for epic and tragedy, and find it in the likes of Underbelly, or Tupac. It’s true that Lebanese or Aboriginal criminals would not get the same treatment. Nonetheless, Melbourne’s gangland wars are a good story, and with the few degrees of separation and whatnot, many Melbournians feel close to this story.
It goes the other way too, of course. There’s absolutely no doubt that the would be gangster admire The Sopranos and Goodfellas, just as the sources of these movies, in their turn, admire the Godfather and other classic of the gangster genre.
“Just what is it with Victorians and their adoration of violent criminals, drug dealers and standover merchants?”
Yeah, the glorification of organised crime is a uniquely Victorian phenomenon…
What tosh you have written.
BBB
Oh come on BBB, the Victorian government put Chopper in a publicly funded TV ad! For all that it is the worst govt in Australia, I can’t imagine the NSW lot giving a similar gig to Abo Henry. Ms Gore played that interview like a true Mexican, then was surprised to find the rest of the country rather irritated.
My theory is that it’s because Victoria is so over-goddamn-regulated, with its laws about what you can do with fallen branches on your own land and it’s almost point-to-point, non-signposted speed cameras, etc etc etc.
Actually, this has always been the case. Mario Puzo once commented that the real Mafioso he’d met were more inspired in their dress and speech by Puzo’s fictitious gangsters than vice versa. The characters in the Sporanos quoted the Godfather, and no doubt the Carlton Crew and those they inspired did too before they had a TV series dedicated to them. The media (both fiction and non-fiction) plays an important role in perpetuating the mythos of the glamour of organise crime, both within the criminal organisations themselves, and how they’re seen by society more generally.
As an aside, there was a (non-fiction) book once written about the rituals (initiation and so on) engaged in by the Japanese Yakuza. These rituals were generally lost after the war, until someone in the Yakuza rediscovered the book, and the rituals were readopted based on the book. So this purely stylistic part of this criminal subculture was directly impacted by what was essentially media commentary.
Peter Lalor was never prosecuted for the Eureka Stockade despite the fact that when he was on the run from the law he lived as a farmer among a community outside Geelong with the support of his neighbours.
Ned Kelly, Victoria’s most famous public persona, represented the frustrations, bitterness and aspirations of the socially discriminated and the politically powerless.
John Wren, Melbourne’s most famous gangster, provided a range of morally acceptable but prohibited services to Melburnians, funded the Collingwood Football Club and wielded huge influence in the ALP.
Victorians have been long acculturated to at least an ambivalent attitude to persons officially designated to be dangerous criminals.
I think you’ve got it the wrong way ’round, Katz. The Pies might be legal, but I don’t know about morally acceptable.
If Collingwood supporters could read, you’d be in a lot of trouble.
I had a social drink w Simon Overland last week (no, not my usual companion), and he was refreshingly blunt about this, finding it quite bizarre that such thugs are celebrated, and reserving some scathing words for the Hun.
I’m a bit guilty of it all though, I used to think that our crims were a bit more professional than most, they only carried guns to use against each other, and if one shot the other, well so be it, no great loss.
My views have matured a bit since then.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to link this to assumed ‘views of the yoof’ however. Since I don’t think there’s much evidence that Victorian kiddies are any more likely to end up in organised crime than anywhere else in Australia.
Money and status without hard work, that’s all that the attraction of crime has ever been.
These gangs have the advantage of skilled journos like Andrew Rule and John Silvester turning their misadventures into a compelling narratives. This is nothing new. The media has often turned gangsters into stars.
“I don’t know if this celebration of (white) criminality is more rife in Victoria than other states” is meant to indicate that the topic is open for discussion. I do fall a bit on the affirmative side, just because when I think of famous Australian criminals who are mythologised (like Kelly and Read) instead of vilified (like Milat or Bryant) they seem to cluster in Victoria a bit. But I’m not going to put it out there as some kind of overwhelming rule, just an interesting observation.
I wouldn’t put Peter Lalor in the same category – we’re talking about criminals qua criminals, with no other larger agenda!
John Wren was most likely not a gangster. Frank Hardy’s ‘research method’ was to collect every rumour, however bizarre; take seriously CPA stories of the nefarious ALP, and compile. Throw in a wife’s affair (invented), guide the narrative according to CPA requirements. This hotch-potch myth lives on and was re-told by an ABC drama series, etc. A Ripping Yarn.
It becomes part of the Melbourne Myth.
I believe most of it is entirely fictitious. Yes, he ran an illegal tote. Yes he supported Collingwood footballers. Yes, he became wealthy. None of that amounts to being “a gangster”.
Wilful, sometimes it seems like an awful lot of hard work to me. Apparently Judy Moran had a loaded shottie under the cushions of a couch near the back door ready to go at any time. It would be terribly hard work to live like that. Ironically I guess they don’t think about that before they go down the path – and if you’re born into a “dynasty” (another example of glorifying media terminology) you probably don’t get the chance to think about it too much.
I found the most powerful bit of Underbelly, the first series, was the woman who tried to get away from it all and was hiding on a farm in Gippsland, when she was shot in her bed. Her young son (IIRC) discovered her. Poor kid is still out there somewhere in the community, probably in his late teens about now.
Yeah, it’s not just us. The Monty Python sketch was obviously satirising a similar British tendency to make heroes out of criminals. I would have said the Krays were the inspiration, but Wikipedia suggests the Richardsons, whose gang tortured those who had done them wrong, using such methods as nailing them to the floor. One of their gang was “Mad” Frankie Fraser, who specialised in pulling teeth out with pliers and even now is a minor celebrity, with bit parts in gangster films and giving guided tours of criminal London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richardson_Gang
@ Helen, I read in the weekend paper that Alphonse Gangitano was on anti-depressants when he died – apparently traces were found at his autopsy. So it seems that the life was pretty stressful.
Of course, I still sing along to Morrissey’s “the last of the famous international playboys“. And then I learn about “the playboy of the western world” and realise that Moz wasn’t being such a twat after all.
Wren ran his illegal tote in Johnston Street Collingwood with a gang of enforcers, look-outs, and street thugs, in addition to corrupt cops.
I don’t know what you think a gangster is Ambi but that is exactly how Al Capone got started, except Capone was trafficking alcohol, which was illegal at the time in the US, as was off-track gambling in Victoria.
I wasn’t suggesting that Peter Lalor was a gangster. My point is more general than that: gangsters’ cult figure status is inversely correlated to the respect that the populace has for the legally constituted law enforcement agencies.
At critical times in Victoria’s history important figures have emerged to cause people to question the legitimacy of their legally constituted law enforcement agencies.
I agree Katz, the tote was in Collingwood and he had his bunch of hoods. No doubt. But I happen to think that his career and Al Capone’s career diverged, if they in fact started in a similar fashion (I’ve no knowledge of Sgr Capone).
I think John Wren “cleaned up his act” after the tote days. Cleaned up in pounds and pennie, cleared out of Colligwood. Not an uncommon story: a determined young bloke accumulates money. I think it unlikely he ordered murders (as suggested in PWG). Not sure about the boxing-fight-fixing and race-fixing allegations.
But even though I suspect race-fixing may be widespread in Australia: I’d call those boys crooks, not necessarily “gangsters”. I’d call many of the colourful characters of “Underbelly” gangsters, others were pawns, fools, victims or bystanders.
I’m not seeking to make a pedantic point about definitions.
It’s just that I believe the widely-held view of John Wren’s activities is simply false. Colourful, entertaining, sleazy, but false. Factually incorrect. Parrotted but dead. Its maker (Frank Hardy) has gone but his misbegotten offspring of rumour, falsehood and insuinuation lives on.
But of course I may be mistaken.
If your point was that Victoria has its share of crooks, well yes.
Quite. He was a one-time insurgent who got respectable on the back of youthful radicalism and sold out; quite a different thing. The Yasser Arafat of his day.
I think Sean’s right about NSW, incidentally. We haven’t historically idolised our spectacular crooks in quite the same way as the Victorians, in my opinion because they’ve generally had far better connections to the Colonial and then State Government than anywhere else. Idolise people like Abe Saffron, Robin Askin, Norm Allan, Fred Krahe, Neddy Smith, Roger Rogerson, Chook Fowler, Mark Standen? Hardly. Our organised crooks are fairly reviled, universally. In fact there seems to be a stronger public memory for victims here, thinking especially of people like Juanita Nielsen.
“But even though I suspect race-fixing may be widespread in Australia: I’d call those boys crooks, not necessarily “gangsters”. I’d call many of the colourful characters of “Underbelly” gangsters, others were pawns, fools, victims or bystanders.”
Ambi those gangsters were much involved in race fixing. Remember the phrase ‘colourful racing identity’? Tony Mokbel used to have a gang called the ‘Tracksuit Gang’ who were notorious for last minute betting plunges at the track. Gambling is a marvellous way of laundering drug money. The rumour in racing circles is that one of the people behind the first attempt on Des Moran’s life is a well-kmown ex-jockey. Moran’s ‘housemate’ was also another ex-jockey.
For those that are local to Brisbane, I am giving a talk called Myth-Busting Underbelly at the launch of my book “The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay” at West End Library, 5:30 pm Thursday 9th of July.
The way they glamorised Terry Clark, having a teenage heart-throb portray him, was disgusting and that was only one of their sins.
Do you really think they glamorised him? Well it’s all in the beholder, but I don’t think he came across as glamorised at all, more of an evil charismatic cultist kind of guy. I certainly wasn’t disgusted by the presentation, I was disgusted by his acts. But hey, your outrage settings may be lower than mine.
Liam, and if Juanita’s disappearance kept on the front pages of some papers by activists and reporters was a bit removed for the general public in the sense of her being some radical Kings Cross resident (what was she up to anyways etc?)….not so, the screams of innocent children being burnt alive in the Ghost Train and the immediate connection to Abe Saffron, even if they could never get him for it.
The beginning of the end…. and especially in respect of Sydneysiders thinking professional crims have some code of ethics which excluded civilians, which was always bullshit anyway – gambling, race-fixing, drugs, prostitution, standing-over shopkeepers, thieving and fencing, armed robs. and so on, have plentee victims.
Sydney was always a working class town compared to middle class Melbourne, so possibly one is less dazzled by career crims when they lived next door and went to the same schools as the people writing the stories, and the people running the State.
Wilful, I think yes, badass glamour appeals to many teenage boys and twentysomethings, most definitely, we see examples of this everywhere.
You’ve said “could” when you meant “would”, there Jo. Quite possible to have a low opinion of both cops and robbers in this state.
yeah helen, but my point is, very few people ever decide on a life of crime, it just kind of happens, they drift into it due to a lack of real opportunities. I question whetehr that the valorisation of the organised crime mobs means anything in the real world, apart from being morally outrageous. Don’t get me wrong, I find it hideous too, but I don’t think it means much in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, I can only argue from belief here, I’m not up with what criminologists understand.
” middle class Melbourne” Yeah south of the Yarra maybe. In Carlton during the 40′s and early 50′s “colorful characters” were well known to all. Jimmy Bazely gave me my first long pants suits when I left school[boy's home]. Sly grog SP’s and fences were the financially better off. And not just horse races were fixed. Boxing [3 boxing gym's in a couple of blocks]and VFL football were as well.
If this, by the way, isn’t the perfect thread for me to mention my favourite relatively unknown Sydney crime figure, Thomas Ley, I don’t know where is.
Not even south of the Yarra, zorronsky. I grew up in Port Melbourne – wharfies, painters and dockers (who were very different than wharfies), SP bookies, buying stuff in pubs that ‘fell off the back of a ship’. Not to mention Billy Longley shooting Pat Shannon in the Druids Hotel and people disappearing supposedly into the foundations of the Westgate Bridge. A whole range of criminal activities.
Google Bazely Fine.
Of course, I don’t mean Melbourne did not or does not have a huge ‘colourful’ underclass and working class and history of etc., (and vice a versa – Sydney and the north shore) it’s just that they weren’t running the show in quite the same way, as was the case up here, and I don’t mean just in terms of cops & wobbers, but we’re heading OT…
Squizzy Taylor (a Melbourne stand-over man, pimp and cocaine trafficker in the 1920s) is more closely related in lifestyle and modus operandi to the Morans, Williamses, and the rest. Squizzy was one of the first to attempt to mythologise the gangsters’ life, starring in his own biopic. (He depicted himself riding the winner in the Melbourne Cup!)
The federal authorities were so appalled by Squizzy’s celluloid self-glorification they banned the movie.
The good folk of Melbourne were never given the opportunity to vote with their hard-earned at the box office.
And on the issue of Melbourne’s middle class persona, it is worth remembering that the Port of Melbourne was by far the biggest in Australia. In the 1920s about 30,000 casuals earned their living on the docks. This group represents an enormous working-class/underclass presence in Melbourne.
Very interesting, zorronsky. I bet my Dad used to know him. As I said, I think the Painters and Dockers were very different than wharfies. The former were murderous thieves, whilst the latter have just always been a little bit dodgy.
As a Victorian I agree with Helen. These people shouldn’t be treated like celebrities. They are criminals that have an overblown opinion of themselves and procure power through bullying and violence.
In Des Moran’s case, I’m inclined to agree – from the facts of his life as they’ve been disclosed so far he didn’t deserve to be hounded by the press like Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson or that Scottish chanteuse who everyone’s forgotten.
Media Watch did this whole topic over last week.
Des Moran hasn’t had a criminal conviction since 1985 (I got that from The Hun). He was up before the Melbourne beaks last year on assault charges (having smacked some bloke called Eades he described as a “woman beater”) but he got off.
On second thoughts, stuff that – why worry about facts when you’ve got racing industry rumour, innuendo and the self-aggrandizing writing of Chopper Read. Des Moran was the lowest of the low and I’d be crazy to think otherwise, or even withhold judgement because I don’t know enough about the bloke.
I’d be interested in hearing peoples thoughts on former Labor politician Al Grassby? I was surprised he didn’t feature in the most recent Underbelly series with serious links to the ‘Ndrangheta and all.
Quite, Sean @ 29, although there were inquiries and attempts to link him over the years.
on the fire itself:
And a good roundup of this still unsolved stain on this city’s soul. Like Martin Sharp, I believe these arson/murders and then the subsequent
renovationdestruction of Luna Park was one of the most tragic, sinister and reprehensible acts committed against the citizens of Sydney.You don’t get much lower than this mob.
the link
(wouldn’t link to the ‘single page’ view…only links to page 1 of the story, maybe the question mark in the longer address..ah, ya learn some new html everyday.)
Best article I’ve seen on this phenomenon. I thought Underbelly made them all look pathetic, so the celebritisation process is a surprise to me as well.
If you’re going to bang the ethnic drum though, why does Victoria consistently have the nation’s lowest vote for One Nation and its ilk?
wilful: also out there are the kids of Jason Moran who witnessed their father being murdered. Their mum was a Kane, their uncle and grandfather were also killed, and now their gran has been charged with killing their great-uncle. Those kids are out there, they’d be in their late teens/early 20s, and while I’d like to think they have been “scared straight” I doubt it, somehow.
The stuff about “opportunities” is crap. Alphonse Gangitano could have been a respectable, hard-working guy if he had wanted to be – but he wanted glamour, violence and easy money, he wanted good people to be scared of him rather than respect him, and he wanted his fellow spivs to be impressed. Adam Shand, a business journalist who wrote a book on Carl Williams, said that he could have been highly successful in any business he went into – just like John Elliott.
Ambigulous: consider that the enforcers of whom Katz spoke, and the Collingwood footballers of that day, bore striking resemblances to one another. I doubt that much “debt collection” took place on Saturday afternoons.
JdM: he did, briefly: the badly-dressed figure on stage taking orders from Trimbole was meant to be Grassby.
Jacques, I’ve read quite a few of Grassby’s policy documents and know a bit about him as a Minister, far less as a local Member, private individual or alleged criminal stooge. I do note that most if not all the allegations against him have come about since his death.
Whatever his other acts—and whatever they were, he certainly paid for them by being hounded from his seat in a notedly racist 1974 campaign—he gave the first kicks to the old assmiliationist-integrationist ideology in Immigration and he’s largely responsible for Australia taking on multiculturalism as official policy. He introduced the word: Fraser’s Ministers did the hard yards, but they were pushed by Al. I give him credit for that, and though I don’t think he’s amongst our best Immigration Ministers, he’s creditably close to the top, and far from the worst.
As Minister for Immigration, Grassby apparently had one staffer, and often answered the phone himself. I defy modern Ministers to compete.
Gummo raises a very goodpoint: I (olong with most if not all commentators here) don’t know anything about this subject apart from what I hear via the media, who have always been very partial commentators. My criminal experience is strictly limited to small-time pot dealers – I basically don’t know what I’m talking about, I wonder how many do?
Helen, you sound a bit like a shock-jock. Do we have any evidence for the yoof of today being more likely to see crime as a viable way of life than before?
Chookie, not necessarily. More like: “not helping”. I am saying that the presentation of the drug / criminal gangs in the MSM is often calculated to make them look cool and interesting one day and jokey and clownish the next, rather than the rather tortured and uninteresting souls they in fact appear to be. There is also an interesting two-way relationship between film and TV portrayal of gangsters and the adoption of such fashions by younger criminals who didn’t dress or comport themselves that way, necessarily, to start with.
I’ll ignore your ad hominem for now.
Clive Small raises some very colourful questions about Grassby in his book Smack Express, published earlier this year. Grassby’s record on multiculturalism can’t expunge his criminal connections, anymore than Chopper Read’s media darlin’ status should expunge the fact that he’s a violent thug. A bloke I went to uni with grew up in the same housing commission street as Chopper, and from his accounts, Chopper & his equally unpleasant family certainly didn’t passively meander into the shadowy world of poor bugger me criminality but happily embraced it as a way to gain income & status.
Fine: I didn’t mean to suggest that gangsters are NEVER involved in race-fixing.
I’m inclined to think there must be some non-gangster-led-fixing at least at country horse and greyhound races. Think of it as stimulatory, a betting-plunge investment in economic demand, or sumfink. I reckon the petty crooks probably outnumber the big gangsters & “drug czars” by a factor of 100.
But I may be mistaken, and press coverage almost certainly distorts the picture.
Hey wilful- I can one up – I know some big time ex pot dealers.
Most of the so called “organised” crime are about as organised as a university lecturer at a staff meeting.
They nearly all end up either owing a lot or doing the centrelink shuffle. White, black or middle eastern appearance.
The “glorification” is accompanied by the casual yawn of indifference to their demise at the end of a stolen handgun and the subsequence 100 year sentence of the perps.
Meanwhile Wednesday is bin night here.
The suggestion that Carl Williams could have made it big in anything other than a teachers assistant in a TAFE course on Eating at McDonalds is interesting to say the least.
Bernice, surely performance as a Minister of the Government requires a bit more than the writing of gossipy tell-all books from a prison cell?
If Grassby had criminal connections, Chopper is a violent, murderous criminal, it’s not really fair to compare the two of them.
I’m very uncomfortable with the recent trend to demonise Grassby’s legacy as Immigration Minister and CRC director because of alleged criminal links. First because, as I said, everyone waited until he died, and second because it’s unfair. He certainly wasn’t a saint, he was definitely a sexist pants-man, but he was a rather good Minister and advocate for migrants’ rights, criminal links or no. Much, I have to say, in the vein of the Americans’ President Kennedy.
“We haven’t historically idolised our spectacular crooks in quite the same way as the Victorians, in my opinion because they’ve generally had far better connections to the Colonial and then State Government than anywhere else. ”
Yes there is that. My market contacts (oh snicker) tell me that quite a no. of pollies and govt. officials were at the Trimbole funeral. Whom they saw with their own eyes. Okay I will stop or I will start sounding like Patricia from WA.
I always thought the Melbourne gangland wars were unique because the unfolding of that conflict hooked into the universal theme of two houses at war with each other. The spectacle of two tribes canibalising each other over a decade or so and the rising tally of the deaths is quite compelling. And while Roberta Williams is the certainly not the Lady Macbeth we wanted, but the one we got, it still is all a bit Shakespearean with intricately wrought characterisation and improbable plot lines. Its hyperbolic. Benji Veniamin heard voices from God. Gangitano styled himself on Goodfella’s. Lewis Caine died and his beautiful lawyer who had ben a virgin until he came along, wanted to impregnate herself with his frozen sperm after his death. But this is the legendary stuff of royal houses normally conferred with Shakespearean gravitas and staged at the Globe isnt it?
And its a global fascination. The Mafia has always been romanticised. After all – it was the first union movement..
There is that too Ambi @ 49, especially in the bush where prize money is low and there are fewer people looking.
Definitely in the treatment, the material is often much the same story with a few twists etc.
How does Underbelly compare with Michael Jenkins’ Blue Murder & Scales of Justice and ABC-TV’s Janus and Phoenix, all hugely popular and award winning programs in their day – none criticised for glamourising their protagonists.
Having not seen Janus since it was screened on ABC-TV in the early 90′s..my recall is a little wobbly, but the Hennessey’s (the Melbourne crime family du jour) were rendered all ugg boots and packets of winnies, but maybe that’s just Richmond
I remember listening on the radio some years on, when all the boys were locked up etc, that old Ma Hennessy was done for dealing pot to school kids in some coastal Victorian town…glam-o-russ.
Fine: a friend took pet dog to vet’s (in a regional town) and observed several greyhounds lining up. The vet joked that a couple of the greyhound owners could never afford the fees, but offered dead cert hot tips at the next dogs meeting in lieu of cash.
Who woulda thought? These were NOT gangsters.
Shakespeare, Casey? Some of the dramatis personae have trouble with grunts and smirks. Shakespearean dialogue?
“Two families at war” wasn’t obvious to me in the early stages of the Great Melbourne Frisson, though I’ll admit I’m not good at reading between the lines of press reports or TV news items.
Yep, Ambi – who woulda thunk it? Although the only time I’ve been to the greyhound races, there was so little money floating around you felt like Kerry Packer if you put $20 on a dog. The bookies went all grey and sweaty and reeled in the price.
Actually, I took my whippet to a greyhound chiropractor in Altona last week. Fantastic old bloke. Loves to yarn about dogs. Manipulated a vertabra that was out and gave her a massage for ten bucks.
And Casey, I think you’re right about how the gangster narratives are so compelling for some really basic reasons. They’re great drama and people respond to that, not the mundane reality of their lives.
Andrew E, up there a ways (no counter at work ;( ), I’m surprised you exclude John Elliot from the world of spivdom.
Indeed, Fine
Unlike your good self, the greyhound-owners in question weren’t exactly rolling in cash. So they paid in kind. Probably the vet didn’t use the info; apparently he was very amused.
David: I didn’t.
FXH: it doesn’t do to sneer at TAFE.