A cuddle I’ll never forget. Me with my client Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read. Photo: Briony Winchester.
It’s May of 2002 and I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a station wagon at a BP servo, waiting for Chopper Read.
He’s inside. Not paying for a tank of fuel or even buying a packet of Winnie Blues to get him through the busy day ahead. He’s buying sunglasses.
Why?
Because his old sunnies have become loose and he has no ears to actually hang them on, he needs a new, tighter pair that will cling to his head.
I’m so excited and terrified by his return to the car; my hands are shaking against the steering wheel.
How the hell did I get here?
Back story: I’m the publicist at Canberra Theatre Centre.
Chopper and AFL star and fellow bad boy Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson have joined forces to stage – of all things – a theatre show.
Wild Colonial Cowboys needs some publicity. The producers are paying me to chaperone Chopper to and from his interviews with the local media.
What that means is I’m a 24-year-old PR chick driving around a man who’s spent more than two decades behind bars for – among other things – armed robbery, kidnapping, arson, assault and attempted murder. (Though famously never convicted of murder itself.)
Chopper first caught Australia’s attention in 1991 when his first memoir, Chopper: From the Inside, co-written with crime reporter Andrew Rule, became a massive, unexpected bestseller.
He’d been a notorious figure in the Melbourne underworld in the 1970s and 1980s, but it was this book – and subsequent books – that propelled him from feared criminal to public celebrity.
Chopper’s fame exploded into the mainstream in 2000 with the release of the hit biopic Chopper, starring Eric Bana. The brutal removal of Chopper’s ears – undertaken by a fellow inmate of Pentridge Prison at Chopper’s insistence – was portrayed in the movie to a horrified and nauseous global audience.
Eric Bana’s portrayal of Chopper is Oscar-worthy if you ask me. Photo: Mushroom Pictures.
I’d been a huge fan of the movie, but it wasn’t until I met the real Chopper that I realised just how genius Bana’s performance had been.
“These look good?” Chopper asks about his new sunglasses as he climbs back into the station wagon. My response is a high-pitched, nervous giggle.
On our way up the road to ABC’s Canberra studios, we pull up at a set of lights. Next to us is an older, meticulously dressed woman in a convertible. Chopper winds down the window and gives her a wave.
“You look pretty happy with your hairdo,” he yells at her.
She frowns and dismisses him. But as she looks back at the road in front of her, she realises who he is. I will never forget the look of shock and horror on her face as she turned back and a grinning former underworld criminal continued to wave.
What I need to tell you about Chopper Read is that he had this energy. Like celebrity energy.
As a showbiz publicist, I’d go on to meet Keanu Reeves, Jamie Oliver, Kylie Minogue and kd lang, but none of them came close to how Chopper felt.
He was magnetic. You were terrified, but you couldn’t look away.
People were drawn to him. We’d walk through the city between media interviews and people would recognise him (was it the tattoos or the lack of ears, or both?) They’d say G’day, and Chopper would stop for a chat. They’d ask him how he was going and what he was doing in the capital. They loved him.
We went to a cafe for lunch and the kitchen staff and chefs all came out to meet him. He signed the plate he’d just eaten his burrito from.
Me visiting Chopper’s ‘second home’ – cell number 16 at Pentridge Prison – in 2016. Photo: Briony Winchester.
In the car, between radio, television and media interviews, something started to shift. I found it easier to be in his company. And then, like the others, I became drawn to him. We started to flirt a little.
“Were you happy with the size of your penis in the movie?” I ask of a scene in Chopper when Eric Bana waves what is clearly a giant prosthetic but meant to be Chopper’s penis at a group of mortified women in a bar.
“What? That little thing? Didn’t even come close.”
Later on, he says: “I like you. You remind me of my ex-wife. You’re funny, but you’re fatter than she is.”
He talked more and more about growing up in Tasmania (I’d lived there the previous year) and what he would and wouldn’t share in the show. He was articulate, reflective and – dare I say it – incredibly emotionally intelligent. In his media interviews, he was pure Chopper, but I was starting to share the car with Mark Read.
And then it hit me. Chopper was a character created by this man. Maybe to allow him to do the unthinkable things he needed to do as a career criminal. But more likely, as a means of survival.
He confirmed it on stage in Wild Colonial Cowboys.
“When I went to prison in 1978, I had to become the most psychotic and the most feared bloke in the place,” he said of his first stint in Pentridge.
“Otherwise, I would have been dead.”
The stars of ‘Wild Colonial Cowboys’ – Chopper and Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson. The show was a sell-out in Canberra. Photo: Facebook.
One of the first things Mark did in jail was drag a convicted pedophile into his cell, tie him up on the floor, and jump off the bed directly onto him until every single bone in his body was smashed.
Was that the birth of Chopper?
Or was he created by an even younger Mark who, by all reports, had a turbulent childhood and became a ward of the state at 14?
This is the thing that haunts me. I know there are plenty of things that should haunt me more, like the violence, or the matter-of-fact way he’d describe breaking another human being as though he was explaining how to change a tyre.
But what has to happen to a human being before they decide they need to invent someone else to survive?
I’m not asking anyone to forgive Mark Read. Or admire him. I know you probably have your own views about the crimes he committed, and you’re entitled to them.
I’m simply telling you what happened when I spent a few days in a government station wagon driving Australia’s most infamous criminal around.
I expected to meet a monster. Instead, I met a man who’d created one.
And 24 years later, I still can’t decide which of them got back into the car after buying those sunnies.
Original Article published by Briony Winchester on Region Canberra.
