THE LOVER AND A FIGHTER WITH UNIVERSAL APPEAL
Soft-hearted former hard man Gary Lawrence is a lead character in ‘factional’ Netflix series
If crime didn’t pay, there would be none – but that’s not good career advice. The downside of the dark side is that the risks are high and the superannuation lousy: old crooks end up dead or dead broke. Few get famous, even fewer live to see themselves in books or on the screen.
Gary Lawrence is not famous. But the old-time hard man this week got to see a “factional” version of himself played by one of the most dashing Australian actors to crack Hollywood, Travis Fimmel.
There was a time when Lawrence reckoned he would not make 30, let alone 80. He was renowned for serving the most time in Brisbane’s Boggo Road Jail without actually being convicted of murder.
Lawrence was a rare creature, a genuinely staunch crook who had never struck a deal with police to stitch up another offender. But it wasn’t until a character based on him featured in the bestseller Boy Swallows Universe that the world glimpsed the streetfighter with a soft heart.
The book’s author, journalist Trent Dalton, drew on a cast of characters from a childhood spent in the suburban badlands among losers and boozers, addicts and dealers and killers. His genius is to sieve gold dust and silver linings from dark clouds and desperation.
Where others, even his own brothers, might recall more misery than magic, Dalton the unsinkable optimist weaves a mesmerising tale that is part love story, part fantasy and part homage to flawed heroes.
One is his mother, named “Frankie Bell” in the new Netflix series based on his book.
One is convicted murderer and serial jail escapee “Slim” Halliday, the “Houdini of Boggo Road”, who babysat the Dalton kids and is played by Bryan Brown in the series.
One is his natural father Noel Dalton, the “Robert Bell” played so powerfully by Simon Baker that Trent was moved to tears about the alcoholic no-hoper who gave him hope through a love of books and reading.
But the most powerful and appealing adult figure in the screen version is Fimmel’s character “Lyle Orlik”, based squarely on Lawrence – who in real life shielded Dalton’s mother from bad choices and treated her and her small boys with rare kindness.
On paper, Lawrence was just another recidivist crook. But he won respect. Even in the snakepit of prison, officers and inmates trusted him as a straight shooter. As head cook, he was the unofficial “king of Boggo Road”.
One jail mate, gambler Robert North, recalls the long-ago Christmas Day when a young prisoner, a redheaded tearaway named Dean King, was turning 21. Maybe the kid reminded Lawrence of his younger self. He made him a birthday cake and the prisoners in his yard signed a card and sang Happy Birthday.
North, who knows Lawrence well, says it was one of the kindest acts he saw in prison, one that ultimately helped steer King away from crime and into a productive life.
Outside, Lawrence amazed the few people willing to employ a tattooed, hardswearing jailbird because he was a hard worker, trustworthy and capable … apart from pulling the occasional robbery during his lunch break.
It was Lawrence who set up the Dalton boys with a big playhouse, complete with an air conditioner, behind the house he got their mother in Ipswich, near Brisbane.
And it was Lawrence the robber turned drug-dealer – and self-taught builder – who made an underground hideaway beneath the bathroom with a disguised entrance in the floor of a cupboard.
The adult Trent Dalton later re-imagined this secret bunker as an escape hatch for his childhood alter-ego, Eli Bell, the wildly imaginative boy whose story of survival is the heart of the story.
It was only later, as a streetsmart young reporter mixing with lawyers, police and seasoned crime writers that Dalton realised how much he knew about who was who in the criminal zoo.
It reinforced how well Lawrence had steered Dalton’s mother and her kids through the sinister scene swirling around them.
Gary Lawrence’s offhand decency was the most surprising thing about him. He had gangster attributes, too. Especially violence, but towards other violent men, not women and children.
Here was a crook with a moral compass, much like the fictitious suburban hitman Ray Shoesmith in the brilliant series Mr Inbetween.
It was after Lawrence went back to jail that the Dalton kids’ world turned dark: their mother succumbed to a heroin habit that Lawrence had helped keep at bay, and she fell in with parasites and predators. She went to jail herself, which might have saved her life.
The most searing scene in the book is one straight from the memory of a terrified child: it is of a bad man dragging his mother by the hair and pushing her face into a dish of dog food. There are many flights of fancy in Boy Swallows Universe but that’s not one of them. It’s from the life that Dalton escaped but cannot forget.
Unsaid is that nothing like that would have happened if Gary Lawrence had still been around. His roughcast chivalry underpins the story.
It explains why a robber with a head like a robber’s dog (the real Lawrence) gets to be played (as “Lyle Orlik”) by Travis Fimmel, who was the world’s most wanted male model before he took up acting, notably as the Viking chief Ragnar Lothbrok in the television series Vikings.
Fimmel, tall and athletic, had been a contender to play elite football for St Kilda before he had the luck to break a leg, which turned him towards working on camera and fame and fortune.
Lawrence, by contrast, was a twice-orphaned street kid, teenage wharf labourer, apprentice jockey and bloodhouse boxer who did his weight training in jail, not in fashionable gyms frequented by talent scouts. He never caught a break himself, but when he met Dalton’s mother while visiting a friend in a women’s refuge it was lucky for her.
Now, a lifetime later, a fictionalised and modified version of their love story hits the screen. It raises the question of who the real Gary Lawrence is – or was.
Track Lawrence to his retirement hideaway, a farm outside Gympie in Queensland, and he tells the story of a childhood of Dickensian deprivation as casually as the average pensioner might talk about gardening.
It goes roughly like this. Gary John Cook was born in 1943 in Brisbane Women’s Hospital to a 21-year-old woman. He didn’t know her full name for 50 years. He never knew who his father was, only that his mother, too young and poor to raise him, “gave me to the neighbour”.
He thinks the neighbour who fostered him was Gladys Lawrence, youngest of a family who ran a picture theatre in the Brisbane seaside suburb of Brighton. He can’t remember her because she died tragically early.
He was told Gladys was burnt in a fire. The true cause of her death is vague, but old newspaper reports show that a 23-year-old Gladys Irene Lawrence of Brighton died in a Brisbane hospital in early 1946.
As far back as Gary remembers, he was cared for by “the old lady”, Gladys’s mother Fran Lawrence, a Salvation Army stalwart. She hid him in drawers and cupboards to stop the authorities taking him.
After their daughter’s death, Granny Lawrence and her husband moved to Caboolture, where the old man was a “bottleo” collecting empty bottles until he was hit by a train at a level crossing.
The kid ran wild, dodging school and hiding in the bush when truant officers and police came by. Granny Lawrence could not legally adopt him because she was too old.
Faced with being sent to Tasmania to another member of the Lawrence family, Gary ran away to Brisbane. Which is how he came to be living on his wits, squatting in a condemned railway building, at the age of 10. He met another tough kid, Doug Meredith, who’d run away from a hated stepfather.
It was the start of a lifelong friendship on the wrong side of the law. The boys watched each other’s backs.
Lawrence was short but unusually strong and willing to work. He passed himself off as 15 and toiled as a day labourer at the Hamilton Cold Store on the waterfront, loading ships.
At 14, he started working around racing stables, and was apprenticed to a trainer called Carmody at Nundah in the suburbs, then later “in the bush” near Kingaroy.
He rode a few winners on country tracks. He liked horses but also liked to punch trainers or other jockeys who crossed him. Like most apprentices, he got too heavy.
Lawrence trained in the same gym as the legendary fighter Tony Mundine and was a sparring partner for Tony Ryder, later Australian professional flyweight champ. But he could not stay light enough to keep race riding after 1963, when he turned 20.
When rising weight took him from the saddle, it was another crossroad taking him towards trouble.
“I was meeting the wrong kind of people,” he says. He did his first jail in 1964 on a minor charge, followed by a monster sentence, over a savage beating, that took out most of the 1970s.
He spent more time inside prison than outside until 2001, when he was 58. In jail, he learnt to read slowly, mumbling his way through pulp westerns, and to cook fast.
Between jail sentences, he often worked for roofing contractors who loved his work ethic. He also acted as a bodyguard for a bent Brisbane businessman, Malcolm McGregor-Lowndes. Apart from bird smuggling, McGregorLowndes was a race fixer caught up in the Fine Cotton ring-in scandal of 1984 along with fellow businessman Robert North. The affable North helped Lawrence get roofing work on the outside, and Lawrence returned the favour in prison by getting North a coveted kitchen job. By the time Lawrence finished his third big “lagging” he was nearly 60 and knew it was the time to “get out of Dodge”.
He’d been a human wrecking ball, all muscle and reflex. “Now I’m just an old fat (expletive),” he says contentedly.
These days, he sees more cows than people and likes it that way, living in a happy relationship that has lasted more than 20 years.
He has not seen Trent in person for years but they talk on the phone a lot. He made a rare trip to Brisbane in 2021 to see the live stage production of Boy Swallows Universe and has been looking forward to the Netflix version.
His character Lyle Orlik “got his head cut off – but that didn’t happen to me,” says the great survivor, laughing. He’s not big on sentiment, but he’s proud that the little boy who loved him and called him “Dad” is such a success.
A few years ago, he had to get a birth certificate. It tells him his birth mother was Patricia Yvette Cook and that she was born at Echuca in Victoria. Which is, strangely, the same district that the actor Travis Fimmel comes from. It’s a small universe, after all.