My grandfather, Joseph ‘Joey’ Campbell, was the light heavyweight boxing champion of the New South Wales police force. He once fought Les Darcy in an exhibition match in Newcastle to raise money to buy horses for the police, but apparently it turned into more than an exhibition match because both Darcy and my grandfather fancied the same woman, Margaret O’Brien. The ten-round bout was declared a draw, but my grandfather considered that he won the biggest prize, because he ended up with Margaret, my grandmother.
Joey was stationed at Barringun, north of Bourke on the New South Wales–Queensland border, and my grandmother used to tell me stories of waking up of a morning to camels in the vegetable patch. My grandfather would be gone for weeks at a time visiting the outlying properties and small settlements, accompanied by his old greyhound, Jack.
Joey only left the force because he got a boil on the back of his neck from the starched collars they used to wear in those days. The boil ended up going through his system and became a big carbuncle in his groin. They had to fly him from Barringun to Bourke hospital, but when they arrived they were told there’d been a fire and there was no anaesthetic available. The doctors reckoned that Joey had gone septic and if they didn’t cut this carbuncle out he’d die. Granny said they brought in all the available men to hold him down and Joey, pumped full of sleeping tablets but no pain relief, just held on to the side of the bed while they cut this thing out. Unfortunately they cut a tendon too, so he ended up with his right leg shorter than his left. He was only three months short of retirement, but because he couldn’t do those three months, the coppers never gave him the pension.
Joey was tough but my dad, George Campbell, was the toughest bloke I’ve ever known. He was six foot two inches and sixteen stone, and always into blues. He began his working life as a steelworker, and went on to have a trucking business; at one stage he owned three semitrailers. The funny thing, though, was that he was also a semi-pro tennis player in the Newcastle league. So Friday nights he’d be down the pub punching on, then come Saturday afternoon he’d be out running round in his little white shorts. That used to crack me up.
He spent a lot of time at the pub but he didn’t really drink. He’d go there to meet his mates and play pool. His only indulgence was one shot glass of Johnnie Walker and a big cigar at night. That was it.
Dad was right into the Scottish ancestry of our family.
He traced our lineage to the Campbells of Cawdor and the Campbells of Argyll. He collected books and clippings about it all. He had this one book about the night the Campbells attacked the McDonalds. The Campbells apparently waited until the McDonalds had this shindig and were all drunk, then went and slit all the dogs’ throats to silence their barking. The Campbells slipped into the castle and wiped out every McDonald there. The ensuing feud lasted for centuries. The first Campbell to be made a knight was called Colin Campbell, and that’s why, when I was born, Dad named me Colin.
I was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, at the Mater Hospital on 18 July 1946. I don’t know if I still hold the record but when I was born I was twenty-seven inches long and weighed nine pounds thirteen ounces. Mum said that was a big baby.
My mum, Phyllis, was a housewife, and one of the quietest, gentlest women you could meet. But she was probably one of the toughest women you’d ever want to meet too. She had to put up with my dad, and she had to put up with fourteen kids. There was me, then Wheels, and then another boy, Steven, but he only lived for two days. Mum said he was what they called a blue baby; his lungs didn’t work. Then she had Bull, and the girls, then Shadow, Snake, Wack and Christopher.
My old man was gone a fair bit, on the road, but we were all pretty good for Mum because we knew what would happen when Dad got home if we’d been playing up. He used to have the razor strop – the leather strap you’d sharpen the old cutthroat razors on – and if you did something wrong it was into the bathroom, bend over the bath, and whack, whack, whack across the arse. He was real hard on me in the beginning. If he was in a bad mood, or something was broken or disappeared and no one owned up to it, being the eldest, I’d cop it. I’d know who did it and I’d be sitting there waiting for them to own up, but three-quarters of the time they never did. So I’d wait and even up with them later. If it was one of the girls I might let it go, but if it was one of my brothers I usually gave them a clip under the ear.
Mum was the opposite to the old man. She never raised a hand to one of us. She was only five foot two but she had this strong will about her. If my dad really went off the deep end and was going to clobber me she’d step in front and say, ‘No, you’re not going to touch him.’ And my old man would turn round and walk off, swearing under his breath.
From the time I was about three years old my grandfather taught me to box. I even had the honour as a young fella of sparring with the legendary Dave Sands, who was a mate of my dad’s and used to train at Henneberry’s gym in Newcastle. He was middleweight champion of Australia and, along with Les Darcy, probably the best boxer ever to come out of this country, yet when I’d go in there with my dad he’d spend an hour with me giving me tips on how to box. He used to float around like Sugar Ray Robinson. He had this natural ability where everything seemed to come easy to him. Fred Henneberry – himself a former Australian middleweight champion – and Dave were always trying to talk my old man into becoming a pro fighter. He never did, but he knew all these blokes that were around the boxing – Dave and Kid Griffo, and the famous wrestler Strangler Lewis – and I was lucky enough to learn a lot off them.
The first time I backed up my old man in a fight I was twelve years old. A car ran us off the road, four blokes got out, and Dad was into them. One of them had him in a choke hold and I was thinking, Oh shit, what can I do? There was a big screwdriver on the floor of the car so I grabbed it and stabbed this bloke in the arse. Put it in about an inch. He let go of my old man and was chasing me around the car, trying to pull this screwdriver out. From then on the old man would take me with him if he was going to get into a fight and he might be outnumbered. He had these two vicious bull terriers and it was my job to hold the dogs. Dad would go into the pub and offer a bloke out the front. The bloke would come out with his mates and I’d be standing there with these dogs foaming at the mouth. My old man would say to the bloke, ‘Righto, it’s me and you or I turn the dogs loose.’ If Dad was winning, I held them. If someone started to get over the top of him I turned them loose. That evened up the fight.
He never went into a pub wanting to get into a fight but he had a real fiery temper. If someone said something about him or gave him a dirty look – it only had to be the smallest thing – that was it. He was a real proud bloke and if he thought he’d been insulted, he wanted to even up. But he got into most of his fights because he’d always stick up for his mates. He used to say to me, ‘Don’t do what I do. You’ll always be in blues. I know half me mates are cockheads, but if I’m with them, I’ve got to help ’em out.’ Blokes used to take advantage of that. They knew my old man would back them up.
Along with the boxing, I was the captain of the rugby league team all through primary school, and I owned a couple of horses. I spent a fair bit of time hanging around Tracey’s riding school up at Merewether. A lot of sheilas hung around Tracey’s with their own horses and that’s where I met a chick called Diane. She was nineteen and I was thirteen, but at thirteen I was five foot eleven. We were out at a place called the Blue Lagoon and she put it on me. I thought all my Christmases had come at once. It was all over in about sixty seconds, but from then on I found that having a horse helped you get the sheilas. It was the same with bikes.
My first encounter with a Harley was when my mate Trevor and I found an old WLA in the back of his dad’s plumbing warehouse. The WLA was a military model Harley-Davidson produced around World War II. We tinkered with it until we got it going, then we’d ride around in paddocks and stormwater channels at the back of Trevor’s place. We kept it hidden in Trevor’s shed. If Dad had found out about it he’d have killed me. His best mate had been killed on a WLA so he hated bikes.
There was a motorcycle club in Newcastle called the Spot Boys and we used to see fifteen of these blokes coming down the main street of Hamilton, an inner-city suburb, on their Triumphs and Beezers. It was just a mad feeling seeing them riding together. I liked the way people all looked at them whenever they rode by. They had the leather jackets with their patch painted on the back, the flying scarves and leather chaps. Slicked-back rock’n’roll hair. Just like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. I thought, Oh shit, don’t that look good.
They used to go to the pub across from the fun parlour where we’d hang out, and I got to know one of the blokes, Four Fingers Jack. I was telling him about the old WLA and he said, ‘So where is it?’ I told him it was at Trevor’s, and he put me on the back of his Triumph to ride over there. Well that was it. Once I was on the back of his Triumph I knew: this was what I wanted to be.
At the time, though, I was still at the Marist Brothers’ high school in Hamilton, vice-captain of the football team, focused on my horses and the boxing. I took one of my mares, an ex-riding school horse called Apache, to the Royal Newcastle Show. She was that quiet you could slide down her back, crawl under her legs and lie beneath her. She was a top horse and won first prize in the quietest horse category. Later at the show, we came across a boxing tent with a little thick-set bloke in a bowler hat, spruiking out the front, banging a drum. My old man wanted me to have a go, but I was only fourteen so I wasn’t keen. Dad wasn’t going to take no for an answer, though, and there was a young fighter in the troupe who only looked about twenty, so I decided I might have a chance against him.
You had to go three rounds, but in the second round I clocked this bloke, he went down on his bum and didn’t want to get back up. I won a quid.
I went through to about third form at the Marist Brothers’. I was in woodwork class one day and everyone hated doing woodwork because the teacher was so creepy and strict. This day I put my plane down the wrong way and he decided to give me six with the cane.
I put my hands out to get six and he said, ‘No, turn them over the other way.’ So I copped six across the knuckles. I must have said something under my breath as I was walking away, because he said, ‘Campbell, back here.’
‘What for?’
‘You’re getting another six,’ he said.
‘Like fuck I am. You can go and get rooted.’ And I walked out.
Mum got the phone call so by the time I’d walked home the old man knew. Soon as I walked in the door I could see I was going to cop it.
‘Hold on! Hold on!’ I said. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘You got ten seconds to tell me why not,’ he said.
I told him the story.
‘Really?’
He went down to the school, fronted the woodwork teacher and flattened him.
That was the end of school for me. After that I helped Mum around the house and went along on jobs with the old man. He continued training me with the boxing and introduced me to knife fighting. Taught me how to hold a knife properly, how to block, how to slash with a blade rather than stab. He always drummed into me, ‘You never want to kill someone in a knife fight. If you can get out of it, do, otherwise you’ll end up locked up for life.’ So he showed me the best spots to target to disable a person (across the bicep and, if you could get down to it, the Achilles tendon), and the places to avoid so as not to kill them (the jugular and the femoral artery in the leg). I don’t know where Dad learnt all that stuff. Just growing up I suppose. He also showed me how the corner of the old matchboxes were so sharp that if you slashed down hard at the right angle it was like using a razor. The coppers couldn’t figure out for a long time how all these people with such bad wounds were getting them.
Not long after I quit school, we left the Newcastle area and moved around a bit. We went to Toukley, Ettalong and Umina on the New South Wales central coast, then to North Narrabeen, Narrabeen and Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches. I was fifteen when I got work on a fishing boat, then as an offsider to a milko, but the jobs never lasted long because we were always moving. I don’t know why we shifted around so much. Dad never told us. But we never stayed anywhere more than a few months. Next thing we kids knew we’d be packing up all the bunk beds and moving again.
We ended up down in Victoria, at a big guesthouse on ten acres called Sassafras Lodge. It had six bungalows out the back, and ten or twelve bedrooms in the main house. Seeing as my old man wasn’t using it as a guesthouse, I took one of the guest rooms down the far end of the house.
Even though I was seventeen by this stage, my old man used to insist I be home by eleven pm. That was his rule. So I’d dutifully return by eleven, but then I’d go down to my room, where I had this German shepherd called Zig. He was the biggest shepherd you’ve ever seen and he was trained so that if anyone came near me he’d rip them to pieces. I would put Zig on watch, and the old man knew he couldn’t come into the room or the dog would get him. Hence he didn’t check on me. I’d go out the window and back down to my mate’s. We’d drive around in someone’s car or get the bikes and go for a ride.
One night we were driving through Box Hill in my mate Johnny Nankervis’s FJ when we were attacked by about eight cars. Johnny did a U-ey and headed for home, but four cars kept up the chase and ran us off the road. As soon as the FJ went into the bank on the side of the road, Johnny and my other mates all hit the toe and I was left there to punch on by myself. I grabbed this great hunk of wood that was lying on the side of the road and laid into everyone that came near me.
After a while they chucked it in and pissed off in their cars. I had to hitch home, which meant I didn’t get back until about two in the morning. I was sneaking in the back door when the old man piped up, ‘Is that you?’
‘Yeah, but I’ve got a good reason.’
I had my hand just inside the doorjamb, and he booted the door, crushing my hand. My hand was killing me but I went inside and told him what had happened.
‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘Go to bed and I’ll talk to you when you get up.’
Next day he bandaged my hand and asked, ‘Would you know any of these blokes if you saw ’em?’
‘I’d know two of the cars.’
So that night we went down to Box Hill – Dad with a pick handle – and I spotted the two cars parked outside a milk bar. Dad walked into the milk bar, smashed every bloke in the place, then came out and smashed their headlights and windscreens before hopping back in the car.
‘When you grow up,’ he said, ‘that’s how you do it.’
‘Yeah, okay Dad.’
AFTER YEARS of boxing, in Victoria I moved into the wrestling scene. I found that the wrestling could outdo the boxing because, when you’re a boxer, you really just learn to throw punches, but if you’re a wrestler, you can grab a person, get him in close, and put arm locks on him, leg locks, head locks. You can immobilise a person in so many ways. And when you combine the boxing skills with the wrestling, it sets you up to be a very strong fighter.
At seventeen, I won the Victorian under-twenty-one Greco-Roman championship, but I came away with a more lasting legacy, too. I met an old Italian bloke who’d been a champion wrestler in Europe, and he said to me, ‘The way you wrestle, you wrestle like gladiator. You like little Caesar.’ After that people started calling me Little Caesar, and before long they dropped the ‘little’. From then on I was known as Caesar.
I bought myself an AJS 500 twin bike, had my hair styled in an Elvis peak, and started hanging round a motorcycle club called Bad Blood from Emerald at the bottom of the Dandenong Ranges, near where we were living. They’d started back in 1941 as the first outlaw club in Australia. They weren’t a big club, but that’s how they liked it, small and real tight.
They were mad as cut snakes. They were always in blues and caused themselves a lot of trouble with the local coppers. They used to do things that I wouldn’t do. They’d switch off their headlights at ten o’clock at night and scream down these roads through Sherbrooke Forest. I thought, Fuck this. If a truck came round a corner you were gone.
We used to go for runs together or meet up at milk bars and play pool, put songs on the jukebox. I was just about to become a nominee for them when my old man decided the family was moving back to New South Wales. I could have stayed in Victoria, but Dad was getting pretty crook with diabetes and a bad heart, so I’d been helping him out a lot and we’d become real close.
We ended up back on Sydney’s northern beaches, at Avalon and then Dee Why, then shifted to Dulwich Hill and Surry Hills in the inner city. While we were living in Surry Hills, Mum went into the Women’s Hospital to have her last babies, the twins, Cathy and Pauline. It was 1965 and I had just got my first tattoo. It was a panther on my arm, but Dad absolutely hated tattoos, so I had to keep my shirt sleeves rolled right down to hide it from him. I went to visit Mum in the hospital and for some unknown reason, sitting there opposite Dad, I started rolling up my sleeves.
Dad sharpened his focus. ‘What the shit is that?’
Whoomp, I was off, hotfooting it out of the hospital with the old man after me. I was nineteen and Dad was crook, but I wasn’t taking him on. He was still the toughest bloke I’d ever run into.
No matter how sick Dad got, he was still a mad bluer and wasn’t going to take crap from anyone. If someone insulted him or put the family down, he didn’t care how bad his heart was, he’d want to punch on or get even. He came home from a pub at Taylor Square one day in a pretty bad way, spewing and not real well. I got it out of him that this bloke and four of his mates had ganged up on him. I knew who the bloke was, and knew that he walked past the same factory in Surry Hills every afternoon. We went down there and I hid in the doorway while my old man waited out the front of the factory. This bloke eventually turned up with a mate of his and obviously thought they were going to do the old man over again. Well I grabbed them and dragged them inside the entrance alcove and gave them a good hiding. Then I said to the old man, ‘All right, Dad, do what you wanna do.’ The old man could hardly make it up the steps, but he got up and gave them a kicking.
Another time we were driving together when he spotted a bloke who’d pissed him off. The old man pulled over and I grabbed the bloke and had him in the back. The old man was saying, ‘Punch him in the ear, belt him there, twist this, break that.’ I ended up breaking both his thumbs, a couple of fingers on each hand, and thumping the shit out of him. Then we threw him out of the car at about thirty miles an hour. He bounced down the road.
MEANWHILE I was doing a bit of work driving utes and vans, doing deliveries. But my old man had a lot of friends up at Kings Cross and I started picking up some work from them. I think he got to know them through his trucking business; he did a lot of carting interstate. Some of them were on the shady side, but to Dad, that was their business. Dad never got charged with a crime, he never went to jail. He got on as well with some of the top cops as he did with the blokes at the Cross. It was funny, one night we’d have the regional police commander over for tea and the next it would be a well-known underworld identity. I think Dad was respected because he had the balls to say no to a lot of stuff that people wanted him to do. And he would never tell the coppers a thing about the people he knew up the Cross. He had his own code, which was loyalty and honour.
The Cross became my main haunt. It was buzzing from all the American Marines on R&R from Vietnam. There was rock’n’roll at Surf City, illegal casinos, the transvestite stage show Les Girls and the Whiskey Au Go Go Nightclub on William Street. There were characters like the strip-joint spruiker ‘Half a Mo’ who wore funny-coloured suits and a bowler hat; strippers like Alexander the Great who had the biggest tits in the Cross; and the most famous of them all, Sandra Nelson at the Pink Pussycat. I took out Bambi, the second most famous stripper in town. Chequers nightclub was for the posh types. No bikers allowed, but Dad and I were allowed in.
Behind it all were the standover men like Chow Hayes and Chicka Reeves. And then there were the big players above them.
I was coming out of the dark backrooms of the Carousel Club on business one time when I bumped into a very well-known underworld boss surrounded by bodyguards. He turned to me and said, ‘You’re Caesar.’
‘Yeah. And I know who you are.’
‘If you’re ever looking for a bit of work, get in contact with me through the club here.’
He was known as the Little King, and from then on I worked for him – collecting and doing other bits and pieces. The going rate for most collectors was ten per cent, but I used to charge thirty-five per cent, so I’d get the real hard jobs, retrieving money from people who’d purchased goods and hadn’t paid for them. Not straights, these were people on the other side of the law. I wouldn’t go near a straight.
WE UPPED and moved again, this time to Annandale in Sydney’s inner west. It was pretty rough around there in 1966. There was a local bowling alley that was known as Blood Alley because if you were there on a Friday or Saturday night you’d have three or four groups of blokes punching on. They didn’t give a stuff that there were families there with kids.
We had one gang up the street that considered themselves to be real heavies. Sometimes there’d be twenty or thirty of them hanging round of a weekend. I was at home one day when someone came in and said one of these blokes had pulled a gun on my younger brother. I was straight out the door, running as fast as I could, but who was already halfway up the street in front of me? My mum. She got there just before me and grabbed the barrel of the gun. The bloke was standing there in shock, so I pushed Mum out of the way and grabbed the gun off him. I hit him straight in the face with it and just kept pounding till he went down. Another couple of them came out and I did the same with them. Then I unloaded the gun and threw it over their roof.
From then on whenever they saw one of us it was a running blue. By this stage the old man was so crook he’d taken to carrying a big shifter and a bottle of ammonia in his back pocket, so that if he got into a blue he could throw the ammonia in the bloke’s face to blind him and take his breath away, then lay into him with the shifter. This one time he was on the main drag, Parramatta Road, when he ran into some of them and pulled out his tools.
He put a few of them away and came home but they must have got on the blower because next thing about thirty of them turned up and were mobbing up the end of the street. The old man told Mum to boil up some water on the stove, so she was filling up the pots, and all these blokes were marching down the street and banging on the front wall. We had an eight–foot cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, which some of these blokes were trying to scale. The old man and I were belting them with pick handles.
Dad yelled out to Mum to tip the water, so she and my sister Patricia started pouring the boiling water from the second-storey windows. These blokes were jumping up and down while Dad and I kept laying into them. One bloke got halfway over and my German shepherd leapt up and grabbed him by the leg. He was stuck on the barbed wire, with my shepherd hanging off his leg. It only ended when the coppers turned up after about fifteen minutes.
***
STRAIGHT ACROSS the road from us at Annandale lived a couple of sisters, Sandra and Cathy. Sandra was seventeen and one of those real glamour-type sheilas who would have the blokes hanging off her left, right and centre. Even my sister’s boyfriend wanted to go out with her. I was up the milk bar one day buying a couple of bottles of Coke when she walked in and said, ‘Caesar, how come you’ve never asked me out?’
‘Because I don’t fuckin’ like ya.’ I turned around and walked out of the shop.
I’d seen the way she treated her younger sister Cathy like shit so I didn’t want a bar of her. Cathy was fifteen and a pretty good-looking girl, and she had a really nice personality. I used to spend an hour or two each day sitting on the step with Cathy outside her joint because I felt sorry for her. A week before her sixteenth birthday she came up to me and said, ‘Do you wanna do something for me for me birthday?’
‘What?’
‘Will you go to bed with me?’
‘Yeah all right.’
She was a nice sheila and we started hanging out together. She fell pregnant and started to show. One day my old man finally asked me, ‘Are you the father of Cathy’s kid?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well you’re gunna have to marry her.’
The old man marched me down to the house and Cathy came out. The old man said, ‘Do you wanna marry him?’
‘Yes, I’d love to,’ she said.
Then her mother came out: ‘Your bikie scum’s not getting anywhere near my daughter.’
The old man cast his eye over Cathy. ‘Well it looks like he already has.’
That was the end of it for Cathy and me. Her parents forbade her from seeing me, which was a shame because I liked her a lot, so after a while I hooked up with this other bird, Irene. It was more out of convenience than anything. Irene’s girlfriend was going out with a mate of mine, Pete Davies, so we were all knocking around together. Pete was into bikes and we used to go riding a lot. His old man owned a car yard and if ever I needed a flashy car like a Corvette or a Jag or a Porsche I only had to ring him up and say, ‘I see you got a new Ferrari in there.’
‘When do you want it?’
I’d rock out there and leave my bike in his garage, pick up the Ferrari and go for a pose up the Cross.
Irene had just come onto the scene when I took her home one day. My old man gave us the big speech: ‘Just remember, you get her pregnant, you gotta marry her.’
‘Yeah, Dad.’
Next thing I knew she was pregnant. She told my old man before she even told me.
I was spewing. There was just nothing between us. As far as I was concerned she’d cracked on to me. But the old man was on at me: ‘You gotta do the right thing.’ I thought, Here it comes.
Even though, as a kid, my old man had belted me from pillar to post, I had that much respect for him that there was just no way the thought ever entered my head to fight back. If someone else had belted me I’d have ripped their head off, but if Dad’d belted me in the mouth, I’d have stood there and taken it.
So at twenty-one I married Irene. Meanwhile Cathy had given birth to a baby boy, Michael Anthony, and had taken to wheeling the pram past the house to piss off Irene. It worked.
I would have liked to have spent time with Cathy and the baby, but Cathy’s parents eventually moved her away from me and we lost contact.
On 11 March 1969, Irene gave birth to a baby boy, too. We named him Chane, and as much as there was nothing between me and Irene I was very proud to have a son.
Within a few months of Chane’s arrival my old man’s heart finally gave up and he died at the age of forty-six. We were really close at the end, and for the first time in my life I shed a tear.
I was twenty-two and took over the role of looking after the family. Mum still had thirteen kids at home, including me, right down to Cathy and Pauline, who were only three years old.
The older brothers were all bringing in a bit of money: I was still collecting for the Little King, Wheels was driving trucks, Bull and Shadow were putting up sheds, doing some brickie’s labouring. Everyone was chipping in. I didn’t have to do much in the way of discipline. Once my brothers got to seventeen or eighteen they were out doing their own thing and getting into blues. I just did my best to make sure they didn’t end up in hospital or jail.