They Called Me a Hitman: A Suitable Case for Treatment

By Mark Edmonds

Born into a communist family which he describes as a cult, Mark Edmonds went on to study at the International Communist School in Moscow.

His father, Lloyd, had fought against the army of the Spanish fascist, Gen. Francisco Franco, who launched a civil war in Spain against the popularly elected Republican government. But Mark chose to not live as a red rebel on the fringes of society. Instead, he went out into the real world while keeping some of his inherited rebelliousness.

He worked as a taxi driver in Melbourne and as a rookie journalist on a Communist party newspaper. He was a photographer, bookshop owner, and community radio program presenter. He ultimately achieved his dream career as a mechanical design engineer, becoming a high-flying engineering project manager and family man. Eventually, he earned the nickname “hit man” for protecting his employer’s financial interests against the manipulations of a bullying construction site manager.

Join the author as he looks back at how he escaped a political cult, the people he’s met and loved, and those he’s crossed swords with along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982292782

Mark Edmonds

Mark Edmonds is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of York. He has published books on material culture and landscape, many of them exploring the intersections between archaeology and the visual arts. His recent books include Conversations with Magic Stones, The Beauty Things (with Alan Garner), and Stonework – a collection of poetry and prints with Rose Ferraby. Mark is co-founder of West Side Cinema in Stromness, Orkney, where he now lives.

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Copyright © 2021 Mark Edmonds.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9277-5 (sc)

ISBN:978-1-9822-9278-2 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:  11/20/2021

CONTENTS

Preface

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PREFACE

Mark Edmonds was born into a Communist family that he describes as a cult. He grew from a newspaper delivery boy and model aeroplane enthusiast to become a student at the International Communist Party School in Moscow.

It was true; they were a Communist family. Mark’s father, Lloyd, had fought against the army of the Spanish fascist General Franco, who had launched a civil war in Spain against the popularly elected Republican government. He had gone to England to study at the London School of Economics, where he learned about the creation of the International Brigade, which attracted volunteers from around the world. They were preparing to go to fight against the Spanish fascists. Lloyd was a pacifist and knew nothing about fighting or the military, but he was anti-fascist. He joined the International Brigade. But Mark chose to not live as a red rebel on the fringes of our society. He decided to get out into the real world and mix it with the best and the worst. However, he retained some of his inherited rebelliousness.

He worked as a taxi driver in Melbourne and a rookie journalist on a Communist Party newspaper. He was a photographer, bookshop owner, and presenter on community radio. He ultimately achieved his dream career as a mechanical design engineer. He became a high-flying engineering project manager and family man.

He was called a hitman when he was tasked with protecting his employer’s financial interests against the manipulations of a bullying construction site manager.

This is the story of the peaks and troughs Mark experienced during his lifetime. He speaks of the people he met and loved, and the people he crossed swords with along the way. Mark quotes the saying You can never run away from your past, but it doesn’t hurt to get a good start.

At the time of writing, the world is simultaneously confronting three major crises. The pandemic COVID-19 is rampaging across the entire world, leaving a path of death and serious illness. Climate change has struck with a vengeance. Weather patterns everywhere have changed for the worse. Droughts, floods, and wildfires have hit many countries badly. Right-wing politicians and their acolytes have been proven incapable of formulating polices and actions to mitigate the problems the world is facing. Optimism is in short supply.

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You couldn’t make this stuff up.

                        — Christine Keeler

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us.

                        —John le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Carolyn and our descendants.

CHAPTER 1

When I was a little kid, I saved my entire family from certain death. One dark night, we had been driven by a friend to Altona to inspect a mysterious flame that was lighting up the night skies.

Our friend navigated by driving towards the flame. He found a road which looked as though it could take us close to it. Things were looking promising. We drove down the road to get up closer to the flame. When we got closer, we realised that it was a flare burning waste gases from a newly built oil refinery. By then, we were only separated from the refinery by what looked to be a disused railway line.

We stood on the railway track, admiring the flare, when my sharp little child’s hearing picked up a distant rumbling sound in the rail tracks. I called out, I think there is a train coming; I can hear something.

The adults didn’t know whether to believe me or not, but to be safe, everyone jumped off the rail tracks onto the grass beside the line. We jumped only just soon enough. A goods train came thundering along the track. We had unknowingly been standing on the main rail line to Geelong. It was a huge scare for us all. We had come very close to annihilation that night.

At a very young age, I learned that I was from a Communist family, but I didn’t get this information from my parents. I was hanging out with a bunch of older neighbourhood kids when a visiting cousin asked the group, Which one is the Commo kid? Total silence, then all eyes turned to me. Him. I went home and asked my mum and dad, Are we Commos? The kids next door seem to think we are.

I could see from my parents’ reaction that they were dismayed to hear that Cold War attitudes had now reached the kids in our street.

I had no concept of what Commos were, and it didn’t make any difference to me to learn that this was what we were. Like all little kids, I loved my mum and dad. If they were Commos, well then, so was I.

Being born into a Communist family was akin to growing up in a small cult.

Communist families were isolated in the community and becoming even more isolated as the all-pervasive Cold War ramped up following the Second World War. Looking outwards from inside the family, it felt as though we were encircled by an invisible hostile fence.

Comments I made as an eighteen-year-old engineering student regarding Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolutionary ascension to power in Cuba led to my downfall in the eyes of the authorities at Footscray Institute of Technology, which I attended as a government scholarship student.

Those comments also led to the creation of my file at the Australian government’s spy agency, ASIO, where I became categorised as a dangerous subversive. My file at ASIO then tracked my movements in Australia for the next sixty-odd years. I have no doubt the file is still in existence.

In their wisdom, the developers of the curriculum announced that our narrow technical course needed to be broadened. They had engaged a social studies lecturer for this task.

The lecturer’s first attempt at enlightening our insular bunch of budding engineers was to explain what he believed were the evils of the Castro-led revolution, which earlier that year had overthrown the notoriously corrupt, US-backed Batista regime in Cuba. Although I had only a passing interest in what had happened in Cuba, I spoke during the subsequent discussion and expressed a view that perhaps Batista deserved to be overthrown by what was perhaps a popular uprising. The lecturer reacted by putting down my views with strong rhetoric. He rejected any concept which entertained acceptance of the evil Cuban revolution.

At home later that day, I spoke with my father, who backed me for speaking up and gave me some further details about the events in Cuba.

During the following social studies lectures, the argument raged between the lecturer and me on the topic of Cuba. The discussion then morphed into other contentious areas, with much the same differences of opinion. Meanwhile, the rest of my class of would-be engineers sat silently, mystified at the hubbub.

It was soon apparent that I was developing a reputation within the college as a dangerous subversive. The gossip seemed to be running strongly in our narrow little environment. It was probably a new experience to have a political controversy raging at this engineering-only campus.

My new reputation was conveyed to me in various ways, some more subtle than others. I learned many years later, after I had gained access to the government archives, that a well-meaning but anonymous patriot at the college had gone to the trouble of reporting to ASIO that I was a fanatical red-tainted subversive. ASIO then got to work on creating my file.

Some of my fellow engineering students said they believed that I was becoming mentally disturbed.

It seemed they thought I was a suitable case for treatment.

Leo Jones, a classmate, told me he had spoken with his priest about me. He said the priest had offered to meet with me to talk over things. But I had zero interest in religion and declined the offer. Leo came from a large Catholic family who lived in Williamstown, not far from the college.

Many years after my time at college, I was working as a full-fledged mechanical engineer in Melbourne. My work involved some dealings with a senior engineer at a consulting company. The engineer was named Jones. After we were introduced, he told me he was Leo Jones’s much older brother. He said he remembered having heard of me from when I was a fellow student with Leo. He said he believed I was a person who harboured very strong opinions. I wondered whether this was now going to cause problems in our business relationship, but nothing more was ever said.

Looking back on this situation with hindsight, I now think that the Jones family were very compassionate. I knew Leo but I didn’t know his family, yet they had spent some time thinking and worrying about my situation, and one family member still remembered me many years later. I also recalled that Leo had been the only person amongst my fellow students who had approached me and offered compassion after my best pal Graeme Beer died in a tragic car crash.

On a memorable weekend, Leo Jones threw a big birthday party bash at his family’s home in Williamstown, where I met Sandra, a gorgeous girl of about my age. Sandra and I clicked straight away at the party, and I began seeing her regularly. I would travel to her family’s home in Yarraville, which was difficult to get to from my home in Essendon, and we would go to music performances at the Festival Hall and the Sydney Myer Music Bowl. We often went to the movies. We walked to the old, dilapidated picture theatre in Yarraville, which was much later refurbished and converted into an art-house film venue.

I went to some family gatherings with Sandra and got along with her parents. I had many late-night taxi journeys home to Essendon (there was no public transport available at that hour). I was very taken with Sandra. We had a wonderful time together for a while, but we drifted apart after I got a job picking fruit in Shepparton during the next long break from college.

When I returned home from Shepparton, I went to another engineering student’s birthday party. Everything was bubbling along nicely at the party until I began chatting with a friend of Sandra’s. When I asked after her, she seemed disturbed and puzzled by my question. Suddenly her happy expression collapsed.

She gasped and started shaking and said, Oh no, you don’t know!

She got her boyfriend to take me aside, where he quietly told me Sandra had been killed in a horrific car crash while I had been away in Shepparton. I had been out of contact for a while with everybody in Melbourne.

My body turned to jelly at this news. I could hardly stand up, and I stumbled from the party sobbing and shaking and thinking I was probably to blame for what had happened to Sandra. My first thought was that my split from Sandra had left her vulnerable.

Sue Hill, the girl who had come with me to the party, drove me home but offered no sympathy at all, even though I was sobbing and groaning and totally out of things. She could not reconcile with my grief. She felt that I was not paying sufficient attention to her.

I should have taken this as a warning for what would transpire between Sue and me in the future. On the following day, I went to see Sandra’s family in Yarraville to offer my condolences. They were