INTRODUCTION

This book of mine has been a long time coming.  If it had been left to me it would never have happened.  I have never been my own greatest admirer.  There came into my life, however, some thirty odd years ago a somebody who was, apparently, and has remained, a most enthusiastic fan.

For years now my wife, Carol, has persisted in her attempts to persuade me that my life has been of a significance above the ordinary, that my achievements should be recorded for the beneficial information of my descendants, and that my greatest failing throughout my whole life has been my in-built reluctance to blow my own trumpet.

Carol’s continued judicious urging at least caused me to start to think.  Although my initial light hearted response took the form of, “You could have fooled me!” it gradually began to dawn on me that perhaps I was in fact being somewhat insulting to her level of perspicacity.  She is no fool.  Perhaps, and as many acquaintances and friends and casual contacts have remarked during long conversations, I did have a varied and highly interesting career.  Perhaps even living for over eighty years is something of an achievement.  At least being able to recount Australian society’s evolution and the mind-blowing expansion of technology with the difference the latter has made to our attitudes and values and general mores over eight decades could make for an interesting story. But, could the story of the doings of one Colin Russell Bevan over all those years be of interest to anyone?  Carol kept shouting the affirmative.

For what it is worth the book is the story of a boy born to an initially materially comfortable family that suffered a bad luck setback that set a new direction for them when he was not yet two and half years of age.  There followed a period of many years of poverty, struggle, an almost continuously non-providing Dad defeated by his piece of bad luck,  and a battle against odds of a mother of diminutive size but indomitable courage who would rather have died than see any of her three children disadvantaged.  As I began writing about our Mum and Dad I came to feel the book would be worth the begetting if only to tell the world their story alone.

So, stemming from our Mum’s fierce dedication, self-sacrifice and Irish stubborn refusal to be thwarted by circumstances, we three came through our education at the best schools she could manage (Catholic, of course, anything else would have been sacrilege to Mum).  She would have added our indebtedness to the Virgin Mary to the factors influencing our success at school, a little better than moderate in the case of us two boys but brilliant in the case of the middle child,  our sister Eunice.  Eunice did not complete secondary education because the times were the relatively ignorant thirties when it was thought not as important, even by our relatively enlightened parents, to educate girls as it was boys. Hence our sister, although she had just come fourth in the whole of Queensland in her recent Junior Public Examination, was permitted to elect to leave school and take up a position as a typist in the Public Service to help pay the upkeep expenses so I, the youngest, could continue on to Senior.

I am thankful the book goes on to record I did not let them down.  Although it was not possible for me to go directly to University to study Medicine, which was my first choice, I had no trouble obtaining entry to the Teachers’ Training College of the day.  It was so easy to gain entry to teaching in 1938 that I felt if one had the strength to climb the two flights of stairs in the Treasury Building to the Education Department you were in like Flynn.  My plan was to work as a teacher for a number of years, save money and take myself off to do Medicine under my own steam.

It didn’t happen.  First there came a war in 1939, then a marriage, then two children, and, contemporaneously, a growing affection for the practice of teaching and running my own small schools.  As it dawned upon me increasingly just how huge was the responsibility devolving upon us to make ourselves as good teachers of children, as distinct from school subjects, as we possibly could, I undertook years of university study to increase my chances of attaining the level of proficiency I envisaged for myself.

At each stage of my working careers I was at all times lacking in ambition, perhaps culpably so.  I was always happy to be doing what I was doing at the time, directing all my attention and psychic energy to becoming as good at it as I possibly could.  My teaching experience to that point and my studies were leading me to an obsession with finding ways of helping dyslexic children to read, spell and write, and with the contribution made to school failure through emotional and neurophysical difficulties in children.  I would have been happy to remain in that phase for all time except that I was perennially conscious of the need to learn more.

The opportunity came through being selected to undertake a three-year secondment to the Research and Guidance Branch of the Queensland Department of Education in Brisbane to gain experience in clinical, educational and vocational guidance of Queensland school children.  While so occupied I turned my attention to how school failure became so closely associated with behaviour problems and what to do about it.  This interest somehow led to my being offered a five year secondment to the Justice Department to inaugurate and develop a Queensland Adult Probation and Parole Service, as it was felt in political circles that Queensland should not lag so far behind Victoria and New South Wales in this area of criminal justice administration.

Very early into my new duties I realised that I had been induced to rush into an area of endeavour where more cautious and prudent angels would have feared to tread.  Still I entertained not one thought of turning back.  Through my studies in psychology, sociology, philosophy, and educational theory, I had become steeped by that time in the certainty that there was a deep need on the part of those who are entrusted with the administration of the criminal justice system for enlightenment in the area of the mainsprings of human behaviour.  I knew somebody just had to supply that need.  Also I was so sure that the kind of person an individual becomes is so dependent on the quality of his or her socialisation from babyhood, that I was convinced that there are a great many people destined to become, through little fault of their own, the grist for the mill of the criminal justice system from the moment they are conceived.  I was equally sure that it was possible for adequately trained and informed people to help such individuals escape the revolving door of court appearances.  I was perhaps obnoxiously confident that I could supply that sort of training.

There followed for me fifteen (not five) years of hurling myself against ignorance, opposition, and even some subversion, not only from the media and the man in the street, but also from some politicians, police hierarchy, prison authorities, and even from officers in high places in the Department of Justice itself.  I was told very early on by the then Clerk of the Brisbane Magistrates Court in person that the Queensland Adult Probation and Parole Act of 1959 was a piece of legislation the justice system in the State could well have done without.

And that was the tone I waded through.  Early on, I had to battle a parliamentary committee appointed to inquire into the question of the employment of convicted persons in the Public Service.  Regulations existent at the time demanded that people with prior convictions were ineligible for employment as public servants, and those who were convicted of an offence during public service employment had to be summarily dismissed.  The Act I was charged to administer, however, decreed that persons who were granted a probation order were not deemed to be convicted in the traditional sense.  So, when a departmental head sacked a public servant who had been granted probation I used ring him to advise he was acting illegally.  This caused great concern, resulting in the appointment of the aforesaid committee.  I was a random sample of one on that body, but my minority dissenter’s report to State Cabinet resulted in alteration of the regulations to conform with the probation legislation.

I won again against a determined attempt on the part of the government of the time to reinstate the death penalty in this State.  That was the story for most of my fifteen years as Chief Probation and Parole Offficer of Queensland.  Protesting and fighting and winning.  Protesting and fighting and winning.  All the stories are featured in my book as well as some of the human interest stories emanating from our duties as supervisors of offenders of all description, the perpetrators of crimes of every kind.

After fifteen years, with no more battles in sight, I was becoming conscious that the progress made by probation and parole throughout Queensland, and the ever growing size of our staff, were causing me to fear that my job was becoming that of a public service administrator of a burgeoning empire and nothing else.  I could see staring at me diminishing opportunities to have actual personal contact with prisoners, probationers and parolees.  I was becoming apprehensive that at long last I might be saddled with a job I was not enjoying.  I was fifty-five years of age.  Still ten years to go.  What to do!

I should not have been surprised at the next development.  During the previous fifteen years I had been a regular attender at all relevant conferences and seminars held in this country.  I was also not known for reticence.  I held executive positions as high as vice-president of the Australian Crime Prevention Council and thus was experienced in conducting national and international conferences over a number of years.  Interest sparked, therefore, when I was interrupted one morning in one of my near morbid day dreams about my future by an announcement from my secretary that a gentleman from Canberra wished to see me.  He was Mr David Biles, Assistant Director (Research), from the Australian Institute of Criminology, a body newly established under the auspices of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department in the ACT.  Would I be interested in applying for the post of Assistant Director (Training), at this new establishment?

Then began another ten years of a highly fascinating career.  My principal function was to design seminars, forums, meetings, conferences, etc. for all persons active in criminal justice systems in all states of Australia and for similar people from any country in the world who might indicate an interest in attending.  It was not uncommon for persons from south east Asian and Pacific rim countries to seek attendance at one of our events.  Accordingly my division was likely to be a venue attended by judges of all ranks from the High Court down, by magistrates, police commissioners and superintendents, prison governors, Aboriginals, crown prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, ministers of the crown, psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, educators, articulate ex-prisoners, and so on from all over Australia and the countries above indicated.

It is impossible for me to cover in the space of this synopsis the huge spread of the concepts and subjects covered in the course of my ten years at the Institute.  We even ran a six-week course for an international list of invitees for that branch of the United Nations devoted to “The prevention of crime and treatment of offenders”.

It was also among my duties to attend all annual meetings of government ministers responsible for prisons, probation and parole from all Australian states and territories, plus those from New Zealand, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea, to offer advice and/or information whenever called upon.  On more than one occasion I was asked to either gather information or conduct a research exercise to help them in a future meeting to come to an informed decision on some particular matter.

I was requested by the Australian Development Assistance Bureau, part of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, to travel to Western Samoa on their behalf to review the criminal justice system in that country and report back on what assistance might be offered their government to improve their prison and embryonic probation systems, and to assist them to institute a system of parole.  I was later selected and funded by the Attorney-General’s Department to travel to Japan, as one of two international lecturers, to deliver three papers on the management and treatment of violent criminals in prison and in the community.  This event was a five-week international course being conducted at the United Nations Asian and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders at Fuchu, Tokyo.

The above very condensed version of my working life makes little mention of my private life which I have dealt with to quite an extent in my book – growing up in Brisbane during the twenties and thirties, my divorce and remarriage, some experiences as a top administrator of golf in Queensland, and my eighteen years of retirement to date, during which I endured the harrowing experience of bringing up two sons of my second marriage in competition with TV, drugs, the cult of ugliness in music, speech and dress and other peer group pressures.  The only really difficult event to write about was the tragic death of our much loved younger son, Russell, at a mere seventeen years of age, killed in a trail bike accident within three hundred metres of our home.

The reader may rest assured that my retirement has not been in any way characterised by fossilizing in a squatter’s chair on the verandah, warm in slippers and a dressing gown, sipping a glass of hot milk.

*****

*The Walrus and The Carpenter
Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings