Fair Cop: Christine Nixon

By Christine Nixon and Jo Chandler

Christine Nixon became the first female Chief Commissioner of Police in Australia, appointed to head Victoria Police, at a most crucial time—the underworld was in the midst of a bloody war, the spectre of terrorism was emerging as a powerful new threat, and there was a stench of internal corruption.
In this frank and engaging memoir, Christine Nixon reflects on the journey of a woman deep into a man’s world, describing the experiences that shaped her commitment to a model of policing as a community service, committed to caring for society’s most vulnerable. She explores the challenges of managing a police force through a period of profound social and cultural change, explains the hidden tensions at the front line of politics and policing and exposes the poisonous culture war within police ranks.
Fair Cop candidly shares the public and private stories of Christine Nixon—woman, spouse, citizen, constable—on a journey that encounters tragedy, corruption, ambition and humility. In its final chapters, it takes readers inside the events of Black Saturday, the disaster that would so cruelly scar the state of Victoria, claim so many lives, and test Christine Nixon as nothing before. It tracks the intimate story of her days before the Bushfires Royal Commission and recounts her efforts, as head of the Victorian Bushfires Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, to renew ravaged communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522860283

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

THE NEW SOUTH WALES YEARS

1 When Ross Met Betty

2 Family, and Other Crimes

3 The Policeman’s Daughter

4 Women in Uniform

5 On the Beat

6 A ‘Darlo Darling’

7 Police, Power and Politics

8 Fortune and Fate, and Harvard

9 Love and War, and London

10 If You Can’t Take the Heat …

11 And Peter Ryan, Thank You

THE VICTORIAN YEARS

12 ‘Call Me Christine’

13 The Culture

14 Dealing with the Dark Side

15 The Underworld War

16 The State of the Union

17 Rats in the Ranks

18 Managing the Media, and Other Myths

19 Policing in the Age of Terror

20 Power, Politics and Policy

21 Duty of Care

22 Woman, Spouse, Citizen, (Former) Constable

23 Black Saturday

24 The Bushfires Royal Commission

25 Rebuilding, Recovery and Renewal

Lessons I have learned along the way

Notes

Acknowledgements

This book has been a voyage of discovery for me. It has allowed me a chance to reflect on the wide range of influences that make me who I am.

I want to thank my family, friends, my parents, and particularly my husband for all the support and unstinting love.

To all those who have guided and supported me from New South Wales Police and Victoria Police and the broader community, thank you.

To Jo Chandler, a wonderful journalist, writer and a woman of great courage, thank you. To Melbourne University Publishing and my editor Cathy Smith, thank you for your guidance and patience.

Prologue

I am the child of a rare time. Raised in the lull between a world war and a social revolution, I was born into one reality and grew to inherit quite another.

Part of the demographic king tide of boomer babies who washed up across Sydney’s northern beaches in the 1950s, I was raised in a place where the streets of the new suburbs were still unsealed, where the doors to the new houses lining them were unlocked, and where children were free to safely roam and play, watched over by a village. Where in the early years we didn’t yet have a car or a television, but we did have a weekly visit from the dunny-cart man. Where we children were instilled with the values and manners of a vanishing era—at the risk of a cuff across the ear. We would later use these values to navigate our way across a shifting social landscape.

My crowded generation was wrapped safe in communities built around us by our war-damaged parents. My brothers and I would take the bus to the beach and stay there for the long summer, swimming fearlessly way out past the break at Manly, immersed in sunshine and salt water. Heading home hungry only as the sun sank to find Mum in the kitchen, tea on the table, Dad on his way home. At least that was the story in most households. Mine was a little different. My mother may have been at work, or my policeman father may have been at the scene of a crime, both scenarios unfamiliar over the paling fences. Someone peering through the curtains of our home may have mistaken what they saw for the 1950s suburban family idyll, but on any given night there might have been a cache of seized guns stored under my parents’ bed or photographs from bloodied crime scenes splayed on the kitchen table. Whenever my father was called out at night, no matter what hour, my mother would wave him off, just in case.

Our parents came of age in wartime; we graduated into an era of social and political upheaval. Street marchers opposed the fighting in Vietnam, and raised their voices against racial apartheid when the South African Springboks arrived to play rugby. Activism for Aboriginal recognition and rights stirred from Wave Hill to a historic referendum to a tent embassy in Canberra, where Labor gained power for the first time in a generation. As a man walked on the moon, women took huge strides on this planet. Gender roles were rewritten, and with the arrival of the contraceptive pill came the emergence of strong women capitalising on its possibility, claiming rights and opportunities their mothers could never have imagined. I caught and rode the wave of change forward, and no-one could have been more surprised than me to find myself being described, thirty years later, as the most powerful woman in the nation.

There was a moment, between the metamorphosis of the northern beaches girl into a young woman in police uniform, between the tide of one era retreating and the next sweeping in, when life might have taken a very different turn. I spent my eighteenth summer cruising the coast with my boyfriend and a surfboard, with no clear plan as to what might happen next. I’d marry, I assumed. I’d have a baby and then more, raise them in a house probably much like the one I grew up in. Unexcited by this picture but not resisting it either, I’d almost reconciled myself to it when the moment passed. I had a powerful realisation—that I did not want this, at least not yet; and that I had the capacity to contrive a different future. And so, against my boyfriend’s wishes and despite my father’s objections, I joined the New South Wales Police Force and became Woman Police Constable Number 173.

My story from that moment tracks a period of social transition, following it across the landscape of changing public policy and private expectation. I delved into strategies to reinforce communities as the scaffolding of old neighbourhoods weakened; waded through the fraught territory of cultural reform within rigid, resistant, sometimes corrupt police ranks. Personal life was transforming too, shaped by the new choices and possibilities that the era brought for women. It was not easy, but it was challenging and fulfilling and ultimately I felt I had learned, achieved and contributed as much as I could have wished and more than I ever dreamed. Then, just as I thought the hard part was over, a new episode began, one that would test and confront me as nothing before.

I had—in November 2008—announced my retirement from policing when the change came. The firestorm that ravaged Victoria on Black Saturday—7 February 2009—claimed 173 lives, and tragically and irreparably damaged countless others. The way in which it would redefine my life does not bear comparison to the grief and suffering endured by the survivors. Nonetheless, Black Saturday would change everything for me, too. I would be compelled by my conscience and by a royal commission to evaluate my capacity and calibre as a leader, the vocation at the core of my professional life and my identity. I would be called to account publicly for the management philosophies I had devoted my career to developing. I would spend many personal hours asking soul-searching questions of my own.

And something else happened. In the wake of the firestorm I was asked to undertake a job no-one could want—and I couldn’t refuse. It was to head the mission to help communities rebuild and to recover from the ashes of the worst natural disaster in Australia’s recent history, the same disaster that summoned my professional performance into the spotlight. Even if I had been inclined to run and hide (never a part of my character), this was not an option. At the same time as my capacities were being questioned and critiqued, I was being asked to exercise them to the fullest in the interests of people I could not tolerate failing.

The journey had come full circle. I found myself where my parents had been fifty years earlier, constructing the hardware of community from the ground up, buoyed by the spirit of people who had been so painfully reminded of the value of the intangibles that hold society together. I was sustained and humbled by their generosity and their belief, validated by their capacity.

Along the way from the sandy Sydney beaches to the green of budding renewal in the Victorian ranges, my story encounters terrorism and tragedy, corruption and camaraderie, ambition and aspiration. I ride the rollercoaster of public life, from dizzy heights to pits of excruciating humility. Mindful of the stories you might want to hear, and the lessons I want to share, in these pages I will reflect on themes that have resonated, issues into which experience has allowed me insight—like crisis and courage, leadership and community, resilience and respect.

This is an entwined story of a personal and professional journey. It’s about the pursuit of policing as a vocation, and the private and political adventures that invites. It’s about recognising duty, embracing responsibility and facing adversity. It’s about discovering that even when you might assume you have seen it all, there can still be much to learn. It’s about the strength and capacity of community. In the end, it’s a story about how the choices we make as individuals can profoundly shape the society we live in, for good and for ill.

The New South Wales Years

1

When Ross Met Betty

Mum and Dad met on Sydney’s Bronte Beach in the spring of 1947 and began courting in classic Australian style—swimming and kicking sand in one another’s faces. He was a lifesaver with the Bronte surf club, she loved the water. He was sitting on the surf club steps with a mate, surveying the girls, when he spotted her sunning herself, reading a book, and went over to strike up a conversation. He was a strapping young bloke in the mould of the day—over six feet tall, with a swimmer’s shoulders and the physique and attitude of a serious footballer, confident and quick. She was ‘a stylish blonde’, he remembers, pretty and petite, though there was nothing fragile about her character. They soon discovered they shared a dry sense of humour. As my father recalls it now, ‘We had a yarn, and from there on in she put her claws into me, and I was gone.’ Before long he was walking her home each night from her late shift as an usherette at the Star Theatre in Bondi Junction. For all the sunshine and skylarking, they had both already had more than a glimpse of the darker side of life.

Ross Nixon was only twenty-one when he met Betty McNeil, but he was already a constable of police, working the night shift in the notorious red-light zone of Darlinghurst, where I would follow him twenty-five years later, and already a navy veteran, having joined up as soon as he came of age in 1944. He was sent south to Victoria, to the Mornington Peninsula’s HMAS Cerberus to train in the anti-submarine school, where he recalls he was more prized for his rugby prowess than his seaman’s skills. Ross was readying to sail into the war in the Pacific aboard the corvette HMAS Kalgoorlie—and young enough to be impatient for the adventure—when the Americans dropped the atom bomb and it was all over. Still he went to sea in the aftermath, travelling aboard the Kalgoorlie on minesweeping missions up around New Guinea, picking up the odd surrendering Japanese soldier and cleaning up ordnance still floating around the islands.

He was the youngest of five, the only surviving son of a bookmaker; his adored older brother Lenny, a formidably talented schoolboy sportsman, died suddenly when his appendix burst. Ross’s arrival was a late-life surprise for his mother, a large woman who was by then in her forties. And it astonished his three big sisters, who had no idea of the pregnancy until they woke up one morning to the cries of a ten-pound baby. He was, and still is, the spoilt little brother of the two surviving sisters, now aged in their nineties.

By contrast, Betty had no family to speak of by the time she met Ross, and dealt with what she calls a ‘difficult’ early life in the way so many of her generation managed personal pain—by refusing to speak of it at all. Her parents had split when she was young, and while her older brother Leslie, the son and heir, was taken in and raised in Newcastle by wealthy grandparents, ultimately graduating through Duntroon as an officer, Betty was sent off to relatives in Sydney as a two-year-old, and endured a childhood blighted by illness and cruelty. Her foster carer was ‘a bastard of a woman’, whom Ross still bristles to recall. She syphoned off money sent by the grandparents to support young Betty, and would take her school uniform to the pawnshop on a Saturday to raise betting money for the racetrack. If her horse failed to win, come Monday morning it would be Betty who would pay the price, enduring a hiding from the nuns waiting at the school gate.

She left school at fourteen and went to work—first in a chocolate factory, then a pharmacy and later as a theatre usherette, the beginning of a lifetime serving customers. Near the end of the war she joined the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service and was sent to the army hospital at Wagga Wagga, seeing first hand the wounds of war, as she cared for repatriated soldiers. She was there when the casualties of a horrific training accident at nearby Kapooka were brought in—twenty-six army engineers died in the explosion. And she was there, six months before the end of the war in the Pacific, when the chaplain sought her out with the news that the brother she barely knew, who had become a lieutenant with the 2/1 Australian Infantry Battalion, had been killed in action. Military records reveal that he died leading an almost successful attack on a Japanese position in the battle for Nambut Hill in northern New Guinea, part of the Aitape–Wewak campaign supporting the United States’ General Douglas MacArthur.

Betty’s time in the medical service was cut short when her foster mother succeeded in petitioning to have her discharged—she wanted her at home, bringing in money to support the household. By the time Ross met Betty, she had finally escaped her foster family and was sharing lodgings with a girlfriend. From that time the romance blossomed in the excitement of post-war Sydney, although it was not without its dramas. To again quote Ross’s characteristically concise (if less than romantic) account of the relationship history, ‘We had one or two breaks. I told her to go to buggery, she told me to go to buggery. These things happen.’ Yet they made it to the altar in April 1950 (a Methodist one—the scars from her run-ins with the nuns meant Betty would have no more to do with the Catholic faith she’d been born to). Some of their friends reckoned they wouldn’t last eighteen months, Ross remembers, as they were both strongly independent, and neither would back down from a blue. ‘We have had ten thousand small arguments and animated discussions, but we have never had an argument which has gone to the next day,’ he says. ‘There is no doubt that meeting and marrying Betty Margaret McNeil was the best thing that ever happened to me as a young man.’ They remain inseparable sixty years later.

In the early years they lived for a time with Ross’s parents at Bondi, then rented a flat in Manly while they saved their money and waited on the release of new funds from the war service home loans scheme, which by the time they married had been exhausted by the legions of returning servicemen building new lives and families. Meanwhile, the Nixon family was growing. My older brother Lenny arrived a year after the wedding, and I followed eighteen months after that, in May 1953.

Ross, by now a detective, was learning the emerging science of ballistics on his way to becoming an early expert in forensic techniques. But Betty was determined to keep working. That meant she would sometimes leave us toddlers to be cared for by neighbours so she could work a shift at the theatre, and later at the food bar at Coles, dashing back and forth to check on us. As a result, Lenny and I became quite self-reliant early on, and learned to look out for ourselves and for each other. With no such thing as formal child care available at that time, I was sent to kindergarten at barely age three, and while Betty nursed guilt about this for years (which I mercilessly played to my advantage at various points in our later tempestuous relations), as a very sociable child I suspect I thrived on it.

This family juggling act—familiar these days, but a rarity in that era—was one that deeply discomfited Ross, who was embarrassed that his policeman’s wage could not provide what he wanted for his family. He’d been raised in a world where women didn’t have jobs outside the home—none of his three sisters had been permitted to work by their father. But he recognised, reluctantly, that if the family were to get ahead financially, to get a house, to furnish it with the requisite lounge suite and the new technology of television, it would be Betty’s income that would make the difference; and as we grew older it was her money that paid for the swimming lessons and the sports uniforms and the other small luxuries of those lean times.

The value of Betty’s contribution to the household budget can’t be overestimated. There’s a strong argument that the inadequacy of police pay in that era played a compelling part in enticing individual police into that first favour, that first bribe, that first bit of graft that collapses into a spiral of corrupt behaviour such as came to taint the New South Wales force for so long. And as Ross would say, once the dark side had you, they had you for life. For all the preoccupation with the physical dangers of policing, the most damaging, insidious threat is the moral hazard posed by police power—a truth I would be confronted with too often in the years to come. Later inquiries and royal commissions have sourced much of the entrenchment of corruption among police—and politicians—in New South Wales from the early 1960s and into the 1970s. Pay-offs from gaming and vice became an open secret through that period.

Many had the view then that the greatest corrupting influence was government. For decades successive state administrations, Liberal and Labor, profited from gambling and prostitution, the proceeds flowing into political and personal coffers. Journalist David Hickie wrote of the Liberal Askin years, from 1965, that corruption of Sydney’s power structures ‘became open slather’, the culture leaching deep into the city’s character.1 By 1980, in the Wran Labor years, exasperated Independent MP John Hatton, whose campaigning against corruption ultimately led to the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales police force in the 1990s, attacked the government with the accusation, ‘The stench in this parliament is so great that I, as a citizen, cannot stomach it any longer. Do not tell me that organised crime is not protected … Hundreds of thousands of Sydney people know it … It goes from administration to administration and from government to government.’ It would be 1988 before the Liberal government led by Nick Greiner confronted the cancer by setting up the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Ross and Betty, being the kind of honest characters they were, were insulated against getting caught up in that world. Ross reckons his navy training, with its emphasis on integrity and service, prepared him well for his policing career. And their deep involvement in the community where they made their home also provided a layer of protection, allowing them to exist in a real world of regular hardworking citizens rather than falling into the common trap of a police-only circle, closed in by shift work and on-the-job cronyism. Betty’s income ensured that playing straight did not leave our household deprived. Besides, says Ross, had he ever arrived home with a fistful of inexplicable banknotes and a suggestion that she go buy herself a nice dress, she would have slaughtered him. Ill-gotten gains brought little good in the end to the police he saw profit from them, Ross reckons. Drink and worry and shame saw most of them die long before their time, and the handful who survive are punished forever by the taint of their actions. ‘Their daughters don’t respect them,’ Ross frequently observes.

For Betty, having a job was about more than the money. She enjoyed working—it was plain in her formidable work ethic, and in the verbal flogging she would give to any Nixon indulging in the sin of laziness. Her own resources were also crucial to her sense of independence. Perhaps her ‘difficult’ early life underwrote that need. Perhaps it also allowed her a stronger voice in the household—she has certainly never been a meek presence.

Between them they scraped together a deposit and a serviceman’s loan, though Ross lost his battle with the bank manager for enough money to build a three-bedroom home; we had to make do with two. My parents found a block in the new suburb of Allambie Heights, sandwiched between parkland to the west and the surf beaches of Queenscliff and Manly to the east, and started building. All around them other young battling families were doing the same, constructing their futures from fibro and brick veneer in a neighbourhood where the streets were named to ensure they never forgot the past—Tobruk Avenue and Libya Crescent, Roosevelt Avenue and Churchill Crescent.

It was a place where services were minimal and luxuries were scarce. You had to pump the water up to tanks and then let gravity feed it into the house. The washing was done in a copper. It was a couple of years before the houses were sewered, so the night cart would still come, and it would be Lenny’s task to take me out, as a small girl, into the darkness for the last walk to the distant dunny before bed. When the Sydney torrents fell hard, the unmade roads would turn into knee-deep mire. But there was little traffic for that to worry other than the bus to Manly—a fifteen-minute ride away—as few families had yet found the money to buy their own cars.

For all that, it was a great place to grow up. There were kids everywhere, their friendships quickly lassoing their parents into a tight-knit community. We were so close that when one child got sick, fifty of us together would come down with chickenpox. On weekends the whole street would share cars and go for a picnic. There was always someone to talk to. If a kid played up, someone would tick them off; if they fell over, there was always someone to run out of a house and pick them up. It meant the weight of parenting was shared—it did take a village.

There weren’t the same boundaries between households that we have today. I spent many happy hours two doors up with a mother and daughter who I regarded as old women, though looking back they can only have been in their forties and fifties. There were many single women in that era—women who had lost their men or their prospects for marriage in the war. These two would make me cups of tea. They loved having the neighbourhood kids come by, and in turn we loved them. When the house across the way got television, we kids would go over in our dressing gowns on Sunday night and sit in the front row in children’s chairs. The adults would seat themselves behind us, and we would all settle in for a night in front of the box. The parents played tennis and golf together, the kids netball and football, and the summer was for swimming and surfing.

Ross and Betty are still there today, in the same house. It’s changed and grown a bit over the years—Ross finally got the third bedroom when we extended after my brother Mark arrived, ten years after me, and it now sits in perpetual readiness for visitors like my husband John and me. The kitchen has been remodelled a few times, a garage added, and decks built front and back, crowded each morning and night by the rainbow lorikeets Betty likes to handfeed. The house is full of books and the detritus of fifty-five years of family living, of snapshots of ancestors and descendants—Lenny’s girls Emma and Amy, Mark’s boys Sam and Brady—and of talk of our collective achievements and disappointments. The biggest change to the household I grew up in is Ross’s place in the kitchen, having taken over what was always Betty’s domain as her memory is cruelly fading. Mum sits at the kitchen bench, speaking up to second-guess his cooking and cleaning, still stridently Betty for a minute or two, before she vanishes again. Little by little, Ross lets go of bits of his busy life outside home to stay close to her, ‘because she’s me mate’.

About fifty years ago they started a tradition of having a few people around for drinks before Christmas lunch. They’re still doing it. Old neighbours, their children and grandchildren, turn up from all over every Christmas to the Nixons’ because it’s an open house and an open invitation. They come for a drink, and many linger long into the afternoon. At its height there might be a hundred people through over the course of the day. Over the years I’ve been exasperated and even embarrassed by this arrangement. When I was young I’d rush off to see friends, or a boyfriend or his family, just to get away. I’ve spoken up at various stages: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, do we have to do this again?’ But I can cheerfully report that I was ignored absolutely, and every Christmas for the past fifty years or so we’ve all been there together.

What I couldn’t see from the perspective of a child, but is now plain as I look back, was how the security and structure that underpinned our childhood adventures were fostered by the feverish work of our parents, and so many other parents, who built a community around us from the ground up. They raised funds and rolled up their sleeves to build churches and playgrounds. They set up Brownie packs and Scout troops, swimming clubs and netball competitions. Ross joined the Masonic Lodge, as the word was that a policeman needed the handshake to get on in the force.

Betty was a Brown Owl, overseeing the local neighbourhood Brownies, though in a precocious act of defiance I quit her pack and joined another in Manly—catching the bus there and back on my own at just seven years of age—because I was convinced she was unfairly picking on me. On reflection, given that I never graduated into the Girl Guides because I flunked my semaphore signalling, perhaps there was some substance to her criticisms.

Ross, meanwhile, was a driving force in setting up the swimming club under the tall rocks on the point at Queenscliff. He also helped recruit champion swimmer John Devitt, gold medallist in the Melbourne and Rome Olympic Games, to coach hundreds of us on countless trips up and down the Manly baths, braving bluebottles and jellyfish every morning and every afternoon of the long summers of my youth. I was put into the water because of childhood asthma that mostly vanished with the regular drills, and I developed over the years into a strong swimmer, though Lenny was the one with the speed to have some potential for competition.

I was among the first 144 students to walk through the school gate at Allambie Heights Primary School back in 1959. Our parents lobbied for services and volunteered on committees and wove the fabric of a safe, embracing society around us. And the notion of community extended beyond the bounds of family. There was a strong sense of an obligation to also take care of the downtrodden and the damaged—an acceptance that this was in all our interests. Their efforts may have been invisible to children like me then, taken for granted, but it provided the bedrock on which my boomer generation could build our ambitions, our adventures, our aspirations.

As I reflect now on how central the notion of community and its value has been in shaping my philosophy of policing, I can recognise its foundations being hard-wired into me on the landscape of that beachside neighbourhood, in the house that Ross and Betty built. And their example became the template when I began the task of overseeing the rebuilding of the Victorian communities devastated by the bushfires of 7 February 2009.

2

Family, and Other Crimes

In shaping our household Betty didn’t have a memory of family life, or even a mother figure, to draw on as a model. She saw around her a strong culture dictating what was expected of a policeman’s wife—primarily to stay home, keep house, network with the wives, help the man ascend the ranks—and found little appeal in it. I couldn’t help but think of her when I read—much later—this observation by social scientist Hugh Mackay:

For most of the 20th century, Australian women were conditioned to accept that they were living in a society dominated and controlled by men and that, in most cases, they would acquire a kind of second-hand identity from the men they would marry. They may have resented it; they may have been deeply frustrated by it; but they generally accepted that this was their lot.1

Betty was not one who accepted her lot quietly, and she mounted her own small campaign of home-and-hearth resistance. In many ways she set forth in the task of being a wife, being a worker and raising a family by relying on her wits and instinct and figuring the rest of it out along the way.

Perhaps the need for some template, some guidance, in that effort led to what became a lifelong involvement in the local Methodist congregation, her role there dating right back to the foundations of the local church, just around the corner from our home. She became an elder, a position she held for many years, serving as church secretary for much of that time. She was responsible for running the fetes and stalls but always, as a woman, was pointedly blocked from any position of authority or control. She’d enlist us kids into her projects with the church, recruiting us into fundraising and sending us to Sunday School, where I achieved my first position of rank—superintendent—by the time I was fifteen, providing instruction to other kids. While my enthusiasm for religious services and observances would wane, that church connection eventually flowed into a youth group that would be the core of my social circle through my late teens, and my support base through the sometimes fraught early days in the police force.

Ross would often be gone for days at a time if he got a call out to investigate a shooting in some far-flung part of the state. In the days before the phone was connected or he was issued with a car, there would just be a knock at the door from the local police and away he’d go. My mother made a ritual of getting up to wave him goodbye whenever he went, even if it was in the small hours; and she would be up again to greet him with a cup of tea or a meal whenever he came home. I can’t imagine now the anxiety she must have gone through for so many years. She was under strict orders never to call him at work, and even if she did, she might have found that he was out on the road, unreachable for days and nights on end. In this era long before the mobile phone, she had no means of checking on his wellbeing, and would have no assurance that he was all right in his dangerous line of work until she heard him walking in the front door.

Many times I’d wake up to find Ross eating in the kitchen at 3 am because he’d missed his dinner. I’d see Mum sitting up with him and wonder why she didn’t just go to bed. But she had a yearning to know his stories, to understand his world, and Ross—a natural yarn spinner—had a powerful need to tell them. Like the one about the late-night raid on a bordello where his crew persuaded a woman reputed to be one of the hardest working madams in the Cross to make them all a cup of tea. They then sat down for a chat about some of her better known clientele. ‘Mum, I had my morning tea in a brothel,’ Ross announced to Betty. She was all ears, this upright Methodist Church matron, intrigued by his insights into a whole other world. Like the time he discovered the body of a man in high heels, lacy corsetry and full make-up swinging from a rafter in his Kings Cross hallway, a bicycle pump inserted in his bottom, and a chair kicked tragically out of reach in a long-expired moment of excitement. The police surgeon took one look and diagnosed something called autoeroticism, a concept that clearly flummoxed Ross and Betty back at the kitchen-table debriefing: ‘We’d never heard of such a thing!’ he still proclaims, shaking his head.

Ross was never reticent about sharing his work with his family, even the grubbier, gorier side of it. Murder became part of the wallpaper of our home life. As this was long before the days of holistic support programs, case debriefings and trauma counselling, this arrangement was probably crucial to his healthy handling of often confronting work—an ordered life, and a wife he could talk to. Mum told me later that she came to know too well the smell of death from the stench he brought home on his clothes—these were the days before forensics investigators were issued with overalls. Sometimes she just had to burn them, because no amount of washing would get rid of the smell. Ross Nixon gave evidence through his career in some two hundred murder trials, and provided evidence overall in fifteen hundred cases.

Sometimes the lingering odour of a case would never be dispelled. One that stays with Ross even today occurred in 1973 near the end of his long career in forensics, by which time I had left home and was a new police recruit myself. It was the murder of Virginia Morse, a farmer’s wife and mother of three who was seized at gunpoint by two men, a random victim taken by strangers from her home in northern New South Wales. She was bound and blindfolded, raped and tortured by the men as they drove to Queensland, where she was staked out on a riverbank and shot as she begged for her life. It was horrendous, shocking the public imagination when the details of the case, albeit sanitised, emerged as the men were brought to court.

Ross spent days with the two murderers, handcuffed in too-close quarters to one of them, taking them on a long drive to the remote scene, recovering the poor woman’s body, listening to their relentless boasts of their sickening exploits. It was all he could do to stop one of his fellow officers taking the law into his own hands. Ross remembers it as the vilest crime he ever attended; the worst cruelty he ever saw inflicted by one human being on another.

Because it was a commandment of Betty’s household that the family sit down to eat together at the table for breakfast and dinner, police work was served up with our daily bread. We’d study the photographs Ross brought home and the cellophane sachets with their typewritten notes specifying the evidence on which he would later build his case—bullets, samples of clothing, fragments from crime scenes, even pieces of skin. If he came home late from a case with guns that needed to be impounded the next day I would rush out to help him, a small girl staggering inside loaded up with weapons that we would store carefully under Ross and Betty’s bed for the night.

I did, almost literally, cut my teeth on the realities of fighting crime. I’d study the big black-and-white prints of bodies, sometimes with horrific injuries, the heads blown away by shotguns. I’d hear the stories of what happened to them, of who might have done it and the passions or crimes that had inflamed them, and of the challenges of finding a culprit and bringing them to justice. I didn’t take a salacious interest in the material; I was always more interested in the process of policing than in the commission of the crimes. While it would be some years before the notion of joining the police force came to me, when it did arrive my long exposure to the culture and politics of policing, as well as my kitchen-table grasp of the language and constraints of the law, would prove invaluable in navigating my way through the labyrinthine system.

Ross was taking a lot of courses, travelling even to other states to study and gain new skills, becoming more specialised, more in demand. Because he was frequently in the newspapers giving evidence in various cases, he had quite a high public profile. I was at netball practice one afternoon, having caught the bus direct from school, when the mum who was also our coach expressed some surprise that I had turned up. ‘Why?’ I asked, perplexed. ‘Well, because of your father getting shot!’ She quickly realised from the stricken look on my face that I had no idea. I’d ridden on the bus past newspaper stands with the afternoon edition headlines screaming ‘18 shoot it out at bank’, and ‘Police officer shot’ without giving them a second thought.

She quickly hustled me into her car and drove me home, where we found Ross out the front watering the garden, a bandage across his temple where a bullet had grazed him. He’d been caught in a gunfight at the scene of a bank robbery in Katoomba. ‘I didn’t get out of the way quick enough,’ was his gruff explanation to me. All a matter of perspective, I guess—he was quick enough to miss the worst of it. The fine print in the afternoon newspaper revealed that the gunfight had resulted after a tip-off on a robbery. Fifteen police, Ross among them, spent the night hiding outside the bank waiting for the three would-be robbers, who showed up with their loaded rifles. ‘Detective Sergeant Ross Nixon … received a minor wound to the head from a stray bullet,’ the paper reported. Dad can still produce the bullet on a minute’s notice—he went back and dug it out of the wall, and it resides today in a small cellophane evidence bag in the mess of old stuff that police of his generation will never part with.

He was also one of the fifty heavily armed police who ended the manhunt for jail escapees Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker in January 1966 at Concord Repatriation Hospital, seventeen days after they had broken out of Pentridge Prison and shot a guard dead in the effort. Police were waiting at the hospital on a tip-off that Ryan and Walker were coming to pick up a couple of nurses. (As it happened, the episode put the emerging role of policewomen in the public gaze, as pioneering officer Del Fricker was used as ‘bait’ to lure them in.) Ross was asked along on the exercise by a senior colleague because he knew the hospital well, having spent time there for surgery on a shoulder injury in his navy days. The fugitives arrived in a big old convertible ‘Yank tank’. Ryan got out to use a public phone, and Ross and another detective crept up on Walker as he sat revving the engine. When they had the two men in custody, the New South Wales police were under strict instructions to say nothing to them for fear of jeopardising Victoria’s case. So when Ryan looked at his captors and said, ‘I suppose Bolte is going to take me back and hang me,’ it’s Ross’s carefully phrased police memory that ‘we didn’t disagree’. Ryan was returned to Melbourne, and in February 1967 became the last man in Australia to be executed.

While Ross cut a big figure in the outside world, at home his presence was, for long periods of time, more implied than actual. As he readily concedes, it was Betty who largely raised us. When he was home he was devoted to us, taking us to the beach, where he taught us to bodysurf as we clung to his back, running

Reviews for Fair Cop

[austcrimefiction · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Even taking into account the idea that a biography, particularly biography from someone with a very recent high public profile, will have a certain "take" on events, FAIR COP is an extremely worthwhile read. Adore or abhor Christine Nixon she is a woman who achieved astounding heights, and therefore had a long way to fall (be it that she jumped, was pushed, or deserved to trip). FAIR COP takes the reader back to Nixon's childhood and then through family life with her policeman father, and very forthright mother, to joining the NSW police force. It tracks her career, her education and her achievements up to the point at which she retired as Commissioner of the Victorian Police force and ultimately headed the Bushfire Reconstruction Authority formed by the state government following the 2009 bushfires. The book constructs, chapter by chapter, Nixon's life and advancements in her career, as well as the factors that formed her policing philosophies. There's even some glimpses into her personal life - her choices regarding family, her marriage and her home life, as well as what it is like for her husband to be married to such a high profile wife in a world which still seems to have a percentage of ... well idiots ... who behave like the fools that they are at the very thought (yes - this reader is biased) of an individual woman, making choices, setting an agenda, believing in change. It answers some of the stupid and mindless commentary during her tenure as Police Commissioner (some of us could care less what her weight is like / how tall (or not she is) and all the other mindless crud that leaks from the dark recesses of these idiot's caves). More importantly, it discusses her philosophy, how she formed her attitude to community policing, and what happens when you attempt to affect change - not just in her case, but earlier in the NSW force as well. It covers her relationship with Police Member Associates (NSW and Victoria), it talks about the scandals around her media advisor and certain high profile police members, as well as the fight to limit corruption and the Victorian Underworld murders.And of course it touches on the Bushfire Royal Commission and the revelation that she was both at the hairdressers early in the morning, and ate dinner in the evening. It also looks at the management structure she'd carefully constructed, it looked at her analysis of what she did / didn't do wrong, and it discusses what she would change. (For what it's worth, and living in a rural area of Victoria, the Royal Commission seemed to be a lot less about discovering what could be done better and more about looking for blame, all of which resulted in a series of recommendations that, frankly, are underwhelming. Interestingly the management structure that Nixon had implemented being compatible with those recommended by external experts).Whilst allowing for the fact that the book is written with Christine Nixon, by journalist Jo Chandler (and interestingly started way before the end of her tenure as Police Commissioner), there's an honesty about the book which is fits with Nixon's persona. If nothing else FAIR COP seemed like a fair chance for Christine Nixon to finally put her side of the story.