If you grew up in Queensland, Australia, in the late 20th century, you were taught to hate cops. It’s not like they did it in school or there was a standard issue training camp or anything. Knowing happened in things you saw.

I went to the Blue Light Discos in dingy Police Youth Centres that looked different at night with the dance-floor lights spinning. I saw that cops could be kind and teach you how to box, but how sometimes, those things might end up meaning something else. A cop might take your head and bash it into a street curb, because he could.

Knowing happened in the inner city, where the cops could throw your mates with mohawks into the back of a paddy wagon just for walking down the street. Knowing happened in heavy-handed drug raids, where their dogs tried to eat your cats, or at the tail end of loose parties, or in desperate domestic violence calls where it was hard to tell if a man or a woman in blue was your saviour or your enemy.

The fear was all too real, because for a sizeable chunk of the late 20th century, Queensland had one of the most corrupt and broken state police services in the country.

When I apply to the Queensland Police Service to conduct interviews with detectives, I ask myself if I’m crossing some sort of punk line. Hard to admit you wanna go willingly to the dark side. Do I really want to write about detectives, or do I just want to magically morph into Stella Gibson from The Fall, silk shirts and all?

I ask this staring at the email from the Queensland Police Research Council granting me full access to 17 detectives working Homicide and Child Protection on the Gold Coast. I hadn’t expected them to let me in. But there it is. The number of my personal liaison officer.

The first time I thought about cops differently was on a balmy Easter on the Gold Coast, post pandemic, when one of the highest-ranking cops in the country told me he took himself out of homicide because he couldn’t get the image of a dead baby out of his head.

My poet friend Sean and I were out celebrating. A book I was featured in had just come out. True to form, he was mostly into the drinking part. We were in a bar we’d never been to before, run by an ageless Japanese dude who served us perfectly seared strips of Wagyu and wasn’t trying too hard to hide his ex-gangster cred behind the nicely balanced teppanyaki. His bar was a weird mix of hot young things and shady lawyers.

I got talking to an old lawyer. He looked like most rich old guys on the Gold Coast tend to do. Breezy shirt, Bermuda shorts, expensive boat shoes. He was short, but his manner of talking was the same as his manner of winning. Assured.

I’m not sure if I asked the old lawyer what his most high-profile case was, or if someone else told me. Maybe both. He was one of the guys who represented Joh.

Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen, leader of the conservative Queensland National Party, was the premier of Queensland for 19 years. A stronghold cinched by rigged electoral boundaries and the comforting allure of his wife’s pumpkin scones.

And even writing this feels wrong. Like I’m giving the old, dead prick oxygen.

During Joh’s reign, Queensland’s growth skyrocketed at a clip outdone only by its metastasised corruption; rough riding under the rule of a peanut farmer who spoke like a hokey but was actually cunning, a man who engineered an untouchable brand of cops – The Special Branch – to do his dirty work.

Later, at the lawyer’s penthouse, we crack French champagne and smoke inside and the lawyer tells me Joh was innocent. Didn’t have a clue. Says it was all disgraced ex-police commissioner Terry Lewis and The Special Branch running their own show. Says all this in a rush.

And I say, you’ve got to be kidding me?

His friend, top cop, is not a movie star cop. At least not a homicide movie star cop. He looks like the kind of guy Hollywood would cast as the dumbass small town sheriff. Bit of an unfortunate face. Body all packed on top of itself. The difference is, he’s not dumbass. He has the kind of eyes I’ll end up seeing on cops a lot. Blank – more camera than human. Mix of training and stuff they’re trying to forget.

He seems good in a way I can’t quite explain.

I annoy top cop by going on about my true crime obsession. As if true crime is a distant thing and not already here in the room. How I like detectives more than writers. He seems pleased by this.

I tell him I’ve been thinking maybe I missed my calling – should have been a detective. Homicide. Maybe undercover. How detecting is just like writing, how all you’re doing is trying to fit the pieces together, figure out the story. And he nods, sort of amused, and lets me go.

Top cop is very still when he listens, a trait I’ll learn is common to a certain type of detective, as if his whole person needs to stay contained to really hear what I’m saying. Hardly anyone else I know listens like this. So when he puts up his hand to stop me, I go quiet, like he’s my dad and I’m five.

Then he sighs and says, “Yeah, but it gets to a point where the stories no longer make any sense. It’s not that you can’t figure the story out, you just can’t square it.” Taking a big, grateful swig of rum. “I took myself outta homicide last time I dealt with a dead baby, I couldn’t get that dead baby out of my head. The day comes when you just lose the stomach for it.”

And he looks away. Into a past that doesn’t contain me.

Nearly 30 years after the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Queensland concluded, Justice Michael Kirby reflected that........

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