much loved father and father-in-law of PAUL, MANDY & GEOFF AMIES,
loving Grandad of EMMA, NICHOLAS and RACHEL.
Loved brother and brother-in-law of DAVID & BARBARA, ROBYN DUNCAN and uncle of their families.
The Family and Friends of BRIAN are warmly invited to attend a Celebration of his Life to be held in the New Belmont Chapel, 444 Pacific Hwy, Belmont (parking via Henry St) THIS FRIDAY 15/07/16 Service commencing at 3pm.
GONE FOR A DRINK
Published in The Newcastle Herald on July 13, 2016
Mike Stephens Visual Storyteller · March 31, 2019 Posting two group photos taken 40 years apart of the same members. My Class 87A from 29 May, 1961 and our 1st reunion 40 years later 2001 at the Swansea RSL Club Lake Macquarie.
The reunion photo identified as follows ( 2001 ):
Left to right – back rowMike Stephens, Rod Fulham, Paul McGowan, John Imeson, Merv Braithwaite, Kevin Mongton, Barry Luckie, Brian Rowley, John Baker, Brian Borthwick, Barry Cooper, John Hayes, Tony Madigan, Bruce Spencer, Barry Lawson, Bernie Lee, Roy Fry (partly obscured by Ian Robb standing at end of middle row), Roy Leadbeater (Instructor).
Middle row –
Ross Goodwin, Brian McIlvenna, Leo Gately, Gordon Doyle, Harvey Juergens, Wally Lark, Helen Clark ( later Magnus ), Ida Luke, Fred Sewell, Ron Blake, Terry Lester, Tom Powick, Ian Robb (standing).
Front row –
Trevor Neill, Les Wyatt, Bob Drooger, Warren Taylor, Brian Johnson, Brian Warwick, Les Miller, Bill Dent, Clem Long, Lloyd Taylor, Len DeAudney, Col Bell.
We held a 45 year reunion at the same venue 2006. If anyone interested I can post a group photo – let me know.
Donald Mackay knew he was marked down as an enemy of the drug-growing families of the irrigated farmlands around Griffith, and the secret syndicate that ran them. He had been exposed as the covert informant of drug squad detectives who had used his furniture store in 1975 to plan secretly what was then Australia’s biggest drug bust – $60 million worth of marijuana growing on a property at Coleambally, 65 kilometres from Griffith.
In July 1977, two days before he was assassinated, his body spirited into a 36-year mystery, Mackay sat in that same furniture store and told me his blood had ”run cold” when he discovered that his involvement in the bust had been subsequently exposed.
One of the drug squad members had been forced to hand over his notebook at the trial of four men alleged to have been involved in the crop. Mackay’s name and the drug squad’s use of his store as their Griffith headquarters were documented within its pages.
Mackay did not, of course, contemplate being murdered – he was a former political candidate and a pillar of Griffith’s community.
But he knew that Griffith in the mid-1970s was not a good place to make enemies.
He also knew strange things happened when citizens tried to tip off police about what was occurring. In 1974, an agriculture inspector named Joseph Patrick Keenan had stumbled across a group of men and women, including a fellow from a district winery, packing marijuana into green plastic bags in a farm shed.
In rural Australia in 1974, it was an astonishing sight. When Keenan reported what he had witnessed to Griffith police, Detective Sergeant John Kenneth Ellis didn’t seem interested and took no statement. Within a day, Keenan got a call from a relative of one of the marijuana packers informing him the family knew he had spoken to the police.
Several weeks later, the body of a man named Joseph Patrick Keenan was found floating in a canal near Griffith. This Joseph Patrick Keenan was no relation of the agricultural inspector.
Ellis, who was in charge of the investigation of the unfortunate man’s death, reported at his inquest that Keenan was an alcoholic and there were no suspicious circumstances. Just an amazing coincidence, apparently.
Mackay and others in Griffith detected things were crook. They proved to be right.
Ellis and the other two detectives from Griffith at the time, Senior Constable John Francis Robbins and Detective Sergeant Brian James Borthwick, were later to be given prison stretches for perverting the course of justice in relation to two drug crops.
Thus, when Mackay got wind of a big crop at Coleambally in 1975, he went undercover – and very likely sealed his fate.
To know that marijuana growing was flourishing and to condemn it was one thing. But to skirt around the local law and provide information and accommodation to the quiet men from the NSW drug squad, with spectacular damage to the growers and the syndicate, was quite another.
Yet Mackay, a conservative man given to smoking a pipe and wearing tweed jackets on his large frame, disliked being called an anti-drugs campaigner.
His mission was not simply to expose the small number of families who owned vineyards and citrus groves and lived in ”grass castles” – huge brick mansions on tiny farming blocks – whose mysterious profits were corrupting his town.
The reunion photo identified as follows ( 2001 ):