But Halliday possessed an ‘indomitable spirit’, the prison’s superintendent told media at the time, ‘which rigorous punishment failed to break, and he was never known to complain about his treatment no matter how harsh or uncomfortable it may have been’.
As his lengthy sentence diminished, so did Halliday’s obsession with escape. By his late 60s, he was simply too old to scale the red brick walls of Boggo Road. After years of good behaviour he was given the role of prison librarian, which allowed him to share his love of literature and poetry with increasingly interested inmates. They would gather regularly in the yard to hear Houdini Halliday recite the poems of his beloved Persian philosopher-poet Omar Khayyám, whose work he had discovered in a prison library in the 1940s.
His favourite poem was Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát, which he’d recite over the chessboard and pieces he meticulously crafted out of machine-turned metal in the prison workshop.
’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
REPORTER STRIKES GOLD
In the end the greatest trick Houdini Halliday ever pulled was surviving Boggo Road Gaol. He eventually escaped the prison by walking out the front gate after serving 24 years for the murder of Athol McCowan, with smiles of congratulations from inmates and prison officers alike.
In April 1981, Brisbane Telegraph reporter Peter Hansen found the long-reclusive Slim Halliday puddling for gold in a creek near Kilcoy where he had paid $5 to the Forestry Department to live lawfully on forestry land as a prospecting hermit.
‘I never confessed,’ he said of his controversial murder conviction. ‘Bischof simply made up the confession he produced in court. Bischof was a ruthless man, you know. It was my case that made him Commissioner of Police.
‘I left Brisbane two days before the murder . . . I was convicted because my name was Arthur Halliday.’
Halliday said he would not fear returning to Boggo Road as an old man. ‘I practically own the place,’ he said. ‘In the end they were using me as a security consultant.’
Two years on, Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. He was last seen living out of the back of his truck in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s north side. But the legend of Slim Halliday lives on inside the red brick walls of Boggo Road Gaol, where Houdini’s cell, number nine in the D wing, remains empty. Simple logistics, prison officials say. Though inmates are convinced they’re yet to find a prisoner worthy enough to fill it.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘It says Irene said she would stand by her man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, she didn’t, did she?’
‘Yes she did, kid.’
Slim hands the article back to me, his long tanned arms reaching across the kitchen table.
‘You don’t always have to be standing by someone to stand by them,’ he says. ‘How’s your letter going?’
‘Almost done.’
Dear Alex,
Do you think Bob Hawke is doing a good job as prime minister? Slim says he has just the right amounts of guile and guts to be a good leader for Australia. Slim says he reminds him of Roughie Regini, the old Jewish German fella who ran the Number 2 Division tote with Slim in the mid-1960s. Roughie Regini was a diplomat and a standover man all in one. He took bets for anything: horseraces, football, boxing matches, fights in the yard, chess games. Once he set up bets for what the boys were going to have for Easter lunch 1965. Slim says it was Roughie Regini who developed the cockroach courier system. Do you guys still use the cockroach courier system? Winnings were paid in White Ox tobacco mostly but cons started kicking up a stink about delays in getting their rightful winnings on night-time lockdown, just when they appreciated a cigarette the most. To separate himself from other potential bookies, Roughie Regini developed the cockroach courier system. He kept a collection of fat and well-fed cockroaches in a pineapple tin beneath his bed. Bloody strong those cockroaches were. Using threads of cotton from his blanket and bedsheet, Roughie learned to tie up to three thin rolled White Ox cigarettes to the back of a cockroach and slip it under his cell door, send it off on its way to his intended punter. But how would he make sure the cockroach went where he wanted it to go? A cockroach has six legs, three on either side. Roughie started doing experiments on his little couriers. He soon realised the cockroaches would go in certain directions according to which of their six legs had been removed. Take a front leg off and a cockroach will start moving in a north-east or north-west direction. Take a middle left leg off, the cockroach will start leaning to his left so hard he’ll start doing circles, anti-clockwise. Take a middle right leg off, he’ll start doing clockwise circles. Put that cockroach against a wall he’ll follow it right along a straight line and be grateful to do so. If Roughie needed to get a package to Ben Banaghan, seven cells down the aisle to his left, he’d remove a cockroach’s left middle leg and send it off on its great adventure, its top cigarette scrawled with the name of its destination cell, ‘Banaghan’. The brave cockroach would slip under every cell along its journey and honour-bound cons would dutifully send it off again on its great odyssey along the wall. I keep thinking about how gentle their hands must have been. All those killers and robbers and crooks. I guess they had time to be gentle. All the time in the world.
I’ve been thinking lately, Alex, that every problem in the world, every crime ever committed, can be traced back to someone’s dad. Robbery, rape, terrorism, Cain putting a job on Abel, Jack the Ripper, it all goes back to dads. Mums maybe too, I guess, but there ain’t no shit mum in this world that wasn’t first the daughter of a shit dad. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to hear about your dad, Alex. Was he good? Was he decent? Was he there? Thanks for your thoughts about calling my dad. You make a fair point. Two sides to every story, I guess.
I asked Mum for an update on Days of Our Lives. She said to tell you Marie was showing signs of improvement in hospital. Liz went to ICU to confess but when Marie woke she said it was too dark to identify her assailant so Liz kept her mouth shut and she seems to be able to live with the guilt. The first word Marie said when she woke was ‘Neil’, but despite Neil being her true love, she said she could never be his wife and gave him consent to go be with Liz and their child.
Talk real soon,
Eli
P.S. I’ve enclosed a copy of Omar Khayyám’s poem, The Rubáiyát. Slim says it got him through prison. It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Arthur Dale. That new name you took.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Dale.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That was the name of that screw, Officer Dale.’
‘Yeah,’ Slim says. ‘I needed the name of a gentleman and Officer Dale was about as close as I ever got to a gentleman.’
Officer Dale stretched back to Slim’s first lag in Boggo Road, early 1940s.
‘See, kid, there’s all kinds of bad inside,’ he says. ‘Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren’t bad at all; and then there’s the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they’re born that way. That about describes