‘So Halliday has been given solitary confinement,’ wrote L.V. Atkinson of Gaythorne to The Courier-Mail on 11 December 1953. ‘The miserable caged wretch, for instinctively seeking his freedom, is to be penalised to the fullest, foulest extent of our medieval prison system? The principle of modern legal punishment cannot allow the infliction of human torture.’
Halliday emerged from Black Peter an urban legend. The schoolyard kids of 1950s Brisbane didn’t whisper tales of Ned Kelly and Al Capone over their morning tea Anzac biscuits, they told tales of ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road’.
‘His knowledge of buildings, rooftops and tools, combined with his viciousness and daring, make him the jail’s most closely watched prisoner,’ wrote the Sunday Mail. ‘Detectives who have known him through his years of housebreaking say he can climb walls like a fly. Probably, Halliday will never stop trying to escape. Police who know him say he will have to be watched every minute of his life sentence, which, if he lives to be an old man, means another 40 years at least of maddening existence behind the red brick walls of Boggo Road.’
For the next 11 years of his sentence, Halliday was strip-searched three times a day. The only clothing allowed in his cell was his pyjamas and slippers. Two officers escorted him everywhere. His studies were cancelled. Additional locks were fitted to his cell, D9, and additional locks were fitted to D wing. Boggo Road’s Number 5 yard was converted to a maximum security yard where Halliday could move at daytime within the confines of a steel mesh cage. Only on weekends was a single prisoner allowed inside the cage with him to play a game of chess. He was not allowed to speak to other prisoners for fear he would pass on his endless escape strategies.
On 8 September 1968, Brisbane’s Truth newspaper reported on Halliday nearing the age of 60 with an article headlined: ‘BROKEN KILLER TALKS TO NO ONE’.
‘The gleam has gone out of the eyes of Queensland killer and Houdini jailbreaker, Arthur Ernest Halliday,’ the report read. ‘After years under constant double guard and the most elaborate security precautions ever taken with any prisoner in this State, 60-year-old Slim Halliday has become a walking vegetable inside the grim walls of Boggo Road.’
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.