The Probationary

The storm blew in from the west around 6.10 p.m.

It had been a humid Sunday, and the wind and rain roared over the tree fringes of Mount Coot-tha and down into the bowl of the inner-Brisbane suburbs of Bardon, Rosalie and Paddington, strafing the ridges and gullies and the suburbs' timber and corrugated iron houses. Other dangerous cells were ranging across greater Brisbane, throwing lightning to earth.

Trees were felled. Rectangles of roof iron lifted off and sliced through electrical wires. Flower beds were beaten down.

By 6.30 p.m. the storm had passed, and residents of the city's inner west, their evening dinner interrupted, emerged to inspect the damage. It was 16 January 1949.

Up on the neighbouring ridge of Petrie Terrace, 110 young police cadets, in training at the police depot – an imposing brown-brick edifice and its attendant two-storey wooden sleeping dormitory facing the Brisbane River and the wild pubs and bordellos of South Brisbane – had had their tea in the ground floor canteen.

For nine weeks the recruits, young men from all over the state, had lived shoulder to shoulder. Most had little formal education. Some had worked as post office boys, or on the land on the family property, or behind the counter in grocery stores, before entering the machine of Queensland's postwar constabulary.

The Americans had left Brisbane a few years earlier, and the town had settled back into its quasi-rural mediocrity. Pike Brothers menswear in Queen Street no longer had a need for its specialist military cutter, and orders for 'Imperial' winter coats dropped to nothing.

In the wake of war, Brisbane was forced to stare, once again, at its own face – plain and unremarkable; a sub-tropical tableau that, for a few years in the 1940s, had doubled in population with the arrival of the US military, and become something resembling glamorous. The city – all ox-blood iron awnings, sandstone banks and the Salvation Army Band playing in King George Square – was inexplicably at the forefront of things that mattered in the world. And it was crawling with US military men in their expensive and beautifully made salmon-hued uniforms. Hollywood no longer belonged on the screens of the Regent and Her Majesty's and the Metro. It was living and breathing on the streets of Brisbane.

Then the chic evaporated, and Brisbane went back to being Brisbane, and in the residue of a city once bristling with wartime strength and force and protection, and missing some of its young women, caught in the slipstream of the Americans' departure, came an inevitable vacuum. The Queensland capital needed to firm up its local police force.

So on that Sunday night, in the aftermath of the storm, the city cleansed and steaming, the police cadets at the depot returned to their quarters – a long, rectangular dormitory crammed with steel cots and lockers.

Some of the men were nervous. From this night on, there would be no more lectures from former school teacher Senior Constable Merv Callaghan. No more marching with old rifles on the parade ground. No more memorising and tests.

For those several weeks they had risen at 6 a.m., made their beds with precision, attended classes on policing and the law, performed physical training exercises, and retired to their cots by 9 p.m.

They were not permitted to socialise, despite the Christmas and New Year season. They could not catch a quick tram into town and buy yuletide gifts for their families, their girlfriends. They had to sit through fifty-two lectures before their training was done.

As the storm headed out into Moreton Bay, the men joked and smoked, or contemplated the view of the parade ground through the lattice on the verandah of the dormitory. They had, the day before, been issued their navy police uniforms: two pairs of trousers, two shirts, four detachable collars, a tunic, a tie, a white helmet and a pair of black boots. Each was also handed a wooden baton and a pair of handcuffs, some so ancient they didn't function.

On that weekend, they made sure their collars were starched at the local cleaners. That Sunday night after tea, a young cadet, Terence (Terry) Murray Lewis, twenty, sat on his bed and buffed his new boots.

Just a few months earlier, he'd been manning a counter at the Main Roads Commission's Liquid Fuel Control Board office at the corner of Adelaide and Turbot streets. And before that he'd worked as a messenger boy for the US army, Small Ships Branch, Water Transport Division, across the river at Bulimba during the war. And prior to that he'd manned another counter, at Pike Brothers menswear. And another, at Greer and Jamieson clothiers, before that.

Lewis had been looking for direction, for some semblance of a career, since he left school at the age of twelve following the separation of his father and mother. By chance, at the Liquid Fuel Control Board, opposite the Roma Street police station, he'd found one.

He'd got to talking with former detectives and constables who worked with him at the Fuel Board, and they suggested he join the police. Young Lewis was a little in awe of one of the men – Walter (Wally) Wright. Walter had been a detective. Another was Stewart (Stewie) Willis, a constable based at Nundah police station who'd retired early due to injury.

'Why don't you go up to the police depot and join?' they suggested.

'They're desperate for keen young men,' they told him. 'If you can breathe in and out, you'll qualify.'

Lewis was tall, over 180 centimetres, and weighed in at 67 kilograms. He was living in Hawthorne with his mother and stepfather, though he would never think of him, let alone refer to him, as his stepfather. Lewis played no sport. He had few, if any, male friends. As a child of the Depression, he was tight with his finances. Recently, though, he'd met a pretty young woman, Hazel Gould, who had come into the Fuel Board for the motor loss assessor she worked for.

He was tired of his living arrangements, and of working on the busy counter. He saw no future for himself. But he did quite literally see the Roma Street police station every day when he came to and left work. And suddenly it made sense. The police force. It was structured, and its administrative demands – record-keeping, diaries, logbooks, charge sheets – would complement his fastidious nature. It was regular pay. It would take him away from counters.

And there was Hazel, sixteen, who would soon become his first ever formal girlfriend, to consider.

So colleagues Wright and Willis took Lewis up past the rail yards to the depot on the Petrie Terrace rise, where he met two sergeants and lecturer Callaghan, and had his medical. He was a little underweight, but they needed new recruits. Although he was twenty, he had the face of a hurt, vulnerable boy. And about him, too, was a vague aura of disappointment. He'd already been out working in the world for eight years, and it seemed to have prematurely wearied him.

He was estranged from his father, who was still living in Ipswich after his wife abandoned him. Lewis's mother – originally from Brisbane and a part of the large Hanlon family, prominent in the city's horse training and racing circles – never took to Ipswich. It was devoid of glamour. It was too far from the charmed racing suburbs of Ascot and Hamilton and, specifically, the Doomben and Eagle Farm racecourses.

Lewis, then ten...