Dear Carolynn

Short Story and contains coarse language

Author: Mark Bolton. Co-written: DeepSeek. Images: Stated underneath.

PART ONE: THE MEETING

The air in the tiny, sun-bleached sitting room of the Paddington cottage is thick with the ghosts of cigarettes and regret. Tracy Standish, a woman of sixty-six who looks a decade older, is a study in erosion. Her frame is gaunt, swallowed by a faded light pink wool cardigan. Her skin, a map of hard living, is parchment stretched over sharp bones. Her hair, thin and the colour of ash, fell aimlessly around her face. But it is her voice that strikes me first—a gravel-road baritone, worn down by a lifetime of White Ox tobacco, Winfield Reds and whatever else she could burn or ingest.

“I’m not just doing this for them,” Tracy rasped, the words scraping out. “The fucking dirtbags. The cops, the papers, the moral guardians who used us as a fucking scarecrow. I’m also setting the record straight for me. Before the lights go out.”

Her hand, knotted with veins, found the steadier one of Elizabeth, who sits beside her on the beige sofa. Beth, as Tracy calls her, is a quiet contrast. Where Tracy is a lightning strike frozen in time, Elizabeth, an introvert who suffers social anxiety is the deep, patient earth that grounds her partner of forty years. She gave Tracy’s hand a small, imperceptible squeeze and what followed is every journo’s dream scoop, but the cost is the loss of a little bit of myself and my sanity, neither of which will ever return. After all, I’m a music journo, not a seasoned crime reporter.

I'm Anthony Bigslow, former drummer for the short-lived but notorious punk band The Assassin's Assassins and now a music journalist with a blog that caters to a niche, nostalgic audience. The story you are about to read is one that has been in the making for decades. As with a few high profile cases in Queensland's history, for fifty-years there were whispers that there was more to the infamous Punk Rock Crime of the Century than met the eye. The missing pieces of the story had its genesis last week after I received an email with the subject line: The Queens Hotel, 1977. I was there. It’s not what you think. 

I responded and arranged an interview. This is my experience and Tracy's story, and it's incredible.

“Take us to the place, Tracy, “The Queens HOTEL That infamous night.”

Tracy’s eyes, a faded dark blue/green that still held a surprising, fierce intelligence, but with a lost focus. She looked past me, through the opened window and out to the Brisbane sky, a hard, brassy blue that hadn’t changed since ’77.

“It was a fortress,” she began, her voice gaining a grim rhythm. “The Queens Hotel. Corner of Wharf and Charlotte. Not a place for the pretty people. Opposite us was the working river—smell of diesel, rust, dead fish. No apartments, no disco palaces. Just us and the river rats. We were on the fringe, see? The CBD with its glitter and polyester was up the road, and they liked us right where we were: out of sight, mostly out of mind. A contained explosion.”

She took a rattling breath. Elizabeth passed her a glass of water.

“We were the anti-everything. Rude, obnoxious, spitting in the eye of the fucking Joh-era sunshine state. We wanted to be unnerving. Unpredictable. But we weren’t the animals they painted us after that night.

We were kids. Angry, lost, brilliant kids. And we had the truth of it right here in Brisbane. Corinda, of all places. The Saints. Bailey, Kuepper, Hay and Bradshaw. They were the prophets. ‘I’m Stranded’ was our gospel. Still is. That sound… it wasn’t three chords and a sneer from London. It was a roar from the sweltering suburbs. A siren.”

Tracy fixed me with a sharp look. “You know the scene, Anthony. You were part of it. I saw you play couple of times at The Queens Hotel. That energy. It was pure. It was ours.”

“That Saturday, the 28th of May, it was packed. Hot as a baker’s armpit, beer sweat and anticipation in the air. The band that night was… shit, I can’t even remember. It doesn’t matter. We were the show. Me and my two mates, Danny and Spikes. We were seventeen, but we looked older, acted older. We’d carved our identities in that scene: ripped fishnets, homemade band shirts, safety pins holding more than our clothes together—holding our fucking souls in.”

Her face darkened. The remembered thrill curdled into something else.

“They came in around eleven. Not our crowd. Older. Clean shirts, but not office-clean. A hard clean. They had the look of men who handled things. One of them, the leader, had a shaved head which was very unusual in the 70’s. I did a sketch a few days later from memory and you can see his eyes were freaky. Like a lizard. Maybe the sketch is a little over exaggerated but this is how I remember him. Cold. Still. He zeroed in on us. On me.”

Tracy lit a fresh cigarette with a hand that trembled only slightly. The acrid smoke joined the history in the room.

“They bought us drinks. We were flattered. Punk rock, but we were still kids from the ‘burbs, you know? These were city men. They talked music, laughed at our jokes. The lizard-eyed one, he called me ‘ fierce’. I ate it up. When he suggested we get some air, go for a drive to see the city lights from Kangaroo Point, I went. Danny and Spikes came too. Why wouldn’t we? It was an adventure.”

She fell silent for a long moment, dragging on the cigarette until the ember glowed fierce.

“For the record, they didn’t take us to Kangaroo Point.”

The sentence hung in the air, a cliffhanger woven from decades of dread. I didn’t dare prompt her. Elizabeth’s jaw was set, her eyes on Tracy, sharing the weight of a memory she’d carried with her for half a century.

With the hint of a tear in her eyes, a clearly emotional Tracy finally exhaled, a plume of smoke obscuring her ravaged face.

“What happened in that car, and in that… that place they took us… that’s when my life ended. The one I was supposed to have. The one that started again, later, with Beth, was something else. Something salvaged. But that night at The Queens Hotel, that was the fork in the road. And what came after… the bodies they found at Pinkenba the next morning, the international headlines, the ‘Punk Rock Murder Cult’ frenzy… blah blah blah”

She leaned forward, her gaze locking onto my digital voice recorder as if it were a priest in a confessional.

“It wasn’t one of us. It was them. And the cover-up… it went all the way to the top. They used our movement, our noise, our outsiderness, to bury their crime. They made the world afraid of us, while no one would look at them and still today I believe this was all part of a deliberate and orchestrated fuckin’ plan to destroy punk rockers as the CIA did with the hippie movement in the late 1960’s.”

She stubbed out the cigarette, crushing it with a finality that made me flinch.

“That’s the scene, Anthony. The Queens Hotel, 1977. Not a den of killers. A playground. And we were the lambs, dressed up as wolves, who wandered right into the butcher’s yard.”

She leaned back, spent for now. “What followed is the blood. You are now going to have to hear it since you’ve come this far, so don’t fuck me around”

At this point I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs, and simply nodded. The dream, the fiction, was gone. This was the terrible, roaring truth, and for those who know nothing about Brisbane in the mid to late 1970’s, I’ll give you a brief rundown.

It wasn’t so much a city as a state of mind under a stunning blue sky—a slow-burning pressure cooker of heat, conservatism, and a river that smelled of mud and industry. It was the epicentre of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Deep North, a place where the sunlight felt authoritarian, bleaching dissent and spotlighting conformity.

It presented a face of subtropical propriety. The CBD before 6 PM was a symphony of crisp white shirts, safari suits that were already beginning to look ridiculously out of fashion, and the thud of Queenslander heels on bitumen softened by the heat. It was a town of rules: archaic and corrupted licensing laws, a deafening silence on Sundays, and a police force that was less a service and more a moral militia while some of the cop heavy-weights were feasting off the proceeds of crime… and committing them.

The taste was of XXXX beer, steak, and pineapple—simple, heavy, sanctioned flavours. The skyline was low, the architecture a mix of sandstone Victorian grandeur and bland postwar concrete. The brown, winding Brisbane River didn’t sparkle; it oozed, a geographical divide between the haves and the have-nots.

But beneath this veneer, the city had a raw, unhealed wound. Just four years earlier, in March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in nearby Fortitude Valley was firebombed. Fifteen people had been killed, trapped in an inferno of carbon monoxide. Until the Port Arthur massacre, the worst non-Indigenous mass murder in modern Australian history.

The Whiskey was conveniently solved in three days, but surrounded by strong doubt due to a lack of a genuine investigation and a faked (by investigators) confession, a then regular trick by police and called verbal. Its horror had seared itself into the city’s soul. It became a dark, collective shorthand for the chaos that could erupt when the nightlife, the “sin,” the unruliness of the city, spun out of control. For the establishment and the fearful, “the Whiskey” was proof of the violence lurking in the shadows of entertainment. For everyone else, it was a trauma—a reason to look over your shoulder in a crowded room.

This scar tissue directly shaped the cultural battlefield of 1977. A stone’s throw from The Queens Hotel, in the CBD’s plush carpeted nightclubs and hotel ballrooms, the soundtrack was disco and slick corporate rock—the sound of escape, but a nervous escape, always with a memory of thick black and deadly smoke.

Meanwhile, a new fast and roar type of music was bubbling up from the western suburbs, and soon to flood the world. By early 1977 this genre will be known as Punk Rock. It wasn’t an escape. It was a confrontation. To authorities, it must have looked like a new, more aggressive form of the very lawlessness associated with the tragedy of the Whiskey. Or rather, propagandised to look this way.

The Saints’ “I’m Stranded” wasn’t just a song; it was a diagnosis that the city was still trapped—trapped in its conservatism, by its country-town roots, by its criminality, by its corrupt politics, and by its fear of crossing the dodgy police.

Brisbane in ’77 was spatially perfect for this new cultural civil war. Venues like The Queens Hotel were islands of dissent, strategically isolated by the river and industrial zones. This isolation kept the “problem” contained, making it easier to both ignore and, eventually, to target.

The authorities that gaslit a public still haunted by the image of a burning nightclub, were primed to see any subculture—especially one as loud and defiant as punk—not just as a nuisance, but as a potential flashpoint. They exploited the memory of the Whiskey. When the bodies were found at Pinkenba after that night at The Queens Hotel, the reaction wasn’t just moral panic; it was a kind of grim, anticipated prophecy. “You see?” the headlines would imply. “This is what this kind of thing leads to. We’ve seen it before.”

PART TWO: THE DRIVE

With the glare of the sun setting in our eyes, Elizabeth closed the heavy curtains. As we proceeded, Tracy’s cigarettes had become a metronome of memory, its glow tracing nervous arcs in a room now dimmed.

“The car was a Ford Futura,” she said, her voice lower now. “A big, dark boat shit of a thing. It smelled of Old Spice, Brut 33, pine air freshener and something underneath… something metallic, like old tools. Lizard-Eyes drove. His mate, a bloke with thick forearms and a silence that felt like pressure, sat shotgun. They put us three pups in the back.”

She took a slow drag, her eyes distant and focused on those hours in 1977.

“We drove away from the river lights, away from the bass thump of The Queens Hotel. At first, it was a laugh. We were flying, you know? Not just from the drinks. From the thrill. We’d been chosen. We crossed a small bridge, but not the Story Bridge towards Kangaroo Point. I remember seeing the Breakfast Creek Hotel. I had never been there before but have many times since. We kept driving and the city glow faded. The streets turned darker, lined with warehouses, factories… you know, places that slept on a Friday night.”

Elizabeth’s hand tightened around Tracy’s and looked to me like a muscle memory, an anchor that Beth becomes in a sea of a stormy past.

“The laughter in the car died,” Tracy stated flatly. “Danny asked, just once, ‘This isn’t Kangaroo Point, mate, where are we going?’ Lizard-Eyes just looked at him in the mirror. Didn’t say a word. That’s when the temperature dropped. That’s when I knew the adventure was over.”

She fell silent for a long moment, as if Tracy is steeling herself to enter a haunted room in her memory.

“They pulled into a yard. A high corrugated iron fence, a padlock that opened too easily. Behind a warehouse, by the water. You could hear it slapping against pylons and the shore. They told us to get out. Said they had a surprise. A real taste of the wild.”

It was at this moment that I noticed I was holding my breath as Tracy was speaking. How long between breathes I couldn’t say because my mind was captured by her every word. I do recall looking down to make sure the recorder’s tiny light was blinking and fortunately it was.

“What happened next…” Tracy began, then stopped. She didn’t describe blows or weapons. Instead, her free hand came up and touched her own cheek, her ribs, in a ghostly pantomime. “Let’s just say they showed us their true colours. And it wasn’t a pretty shade. They had a… a professionalism about it. It wasn’t rage. It was a transaction.”

“They separated us. Spikes, he made a run for it. For the fence. I heard his shoes on the gravel, then a… a thud. A wet sort of sound. I didn’t hear his shoes after that.”

She didn’t elaborate. The way she said “thud” gave me the ghastly image.

“Danny… my brave, stupid Danny…” Her voice fractured for the first time, a crack in the gravel. “He tried to be a hero. He put himself between me and them. He said… he said the last thing I ever heard him say. ‘Get off her.’”

Tracy looked down at a framed photograph that Elizabeth had handed her when coming back from closing the curtains. The moment I saw it, I knew I was looking at a memory of two lives removed in an instant fifty-years ago, and one who has been dying a slow and painful death since. They looked so young and authentic to themselves.

“They took that as an invitation. They focused on Danny. I was… discarded. Pushed down into the gravel by the water’s edge. I had to watch, from the ground, in the shadows. But I didn’t watch with my eyes. I shut those. I watched with my ears. And what I heard…”

She took a sharp, ragged breath. Elizabeth murmured something too soft for the recorder to catch.

“It wasn’t human,” Tracy whispered. “The sounds they were making. Or the sounds they were getting out of him. It was like they were… dismantling something. Not a person. A thing. And when they were finished… there was a silence heavier than any sound I’d ever known. Then a splash. Not a big one. A careful one.”

She finally looked up, her eyes dry and burning. “The splash, Anthony. That was the worst part. It was so… final. Like a full stop at the end of a sinister sentence.”

I found that I had no words. The implied violence, painted in sounds and silences, filled the room with a more profound horror than any graphic description could ever achieve. It took every ounce of strength inside of me to not burst into tears such was the look on Tracy’s face and the energy in the room.

“Lizard-Eyes walked over to me,” Tracy continued, her voice now eerily matter-of-fact. “He hauled me up. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He put his face close to mine. I could smell Danny on him. He said, ‘You’re a punk. A noisy, filthy little anarchist. The police will love you for this. Now, get lost. And if you ever speak… remember these last fifteen minutes to remind yourself to say nothing.’”

She stubbed out her cigarette, crushing the life out of it.
“So I got lost. I ran until my lungs burst. I left my friends in that dark water. I can’t even remember how I got home to Ipswich. And the next day, when the radio stations and newspapers screamed about a punk rock killing, when the TV showed the bloody shirt they’d ‘found’ near The Queens… I knew. I knew exactly how the story had been written. And I was too terrified to speak.”

She leaned back, the confession hanging in the smoky air, more chilling for what it left unseen.

“That’s the blood, Anthony Bigslow. Not splashed across the newspapers. Not on our clothes. It was in the water, under a pier. And it was on the hands of two men in clean shirts who knew how to make a whole world look the other way, to look were they wanted them to look.”

She paused, the memory of her flight a vacuum in the room. Then her face hardened into something different. It was bitterness.

“But they weren’t finished with us. With any of us. It was like a fever broke over the city. Only it wasn’t a fever of rage. It was a fever of relief.”

“Relief?” I asked as my voice seemed to echo as I involuntarily leant forward.

“Oh, yeah,” Tracy sneered, a dry, awful sound. “The body of Spikes washed up first. A ‘punk rocker’, the papers said. Our kind. And before the tide had even properly gone out, they had their monsters. Not the ones in clean shirts. Ours.”

Nobody but me, Lizard and his equally fuckin’ evil mate or colleague knew there was another body out there somewhere. It took two days before a couple of kids fishing nearby had Danny’s body snagged on their hook. Those poor traumatised young boys out for a bit of fun and they catch a body”

She described it not as “an investigation, but as a fuckin’ ritual. The police, who usually gave The Queens Hotel a wide berth, descended on the pub like a cleansing tide. They weren’t looking for clues; they were collecting evidence—of a culture. Ripped band shirts became gang regalia. Safety pins were potential weapons. A sneer was proof of guilt“.

“They grabbed two boys,” Tracy said, her voice hollow. “Mick and Stu. Good lads. Angry, sure. Loud. They’d been at The Queens Hotel that night, miles from that warehouse. But they had the look. They had the ‘prior attitudes’. Stu had a record for swearing at a cop. Mick’s notebook had lyrics they called ‘incitements to violence’ Mick was Aboriginal so he was up against it from the start because of his skin colour.“

The trial, as she recounted it, was “a foregone conclusion—a staged exorcism“.

“This so-called music,” the crown prosecutor, Stanley Longbotham QC had thundered, “this cult of filth and anarchy, is a motive in itself. It is a rejection of all order, of all decency. And here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is where that rejection leads.” 

The lack of physical evidence tying the boys to the scene was framed by the prosecution as “punk cunning“. A bloody shirt, was conveniently ‘found’ miles away from the crime scene under a vehicle in the small carpark next to The Queens Hotel. The prosecution sold the jury that the bloody shirt was “the centrepiece—a totem of their savagery“. As with the Whiskey Au Go Go and many, many other dodgy convictions in Queensland, the jury in this case was just as gullible as those juries that preceded this one.

“The fuckin’ police,” Tracy spat, “held a press conference. They stood there, these tall, beer bellied weak men in sharp uniforms, and they talked about ‘restoring the moral fabric’. They called the conviction a ‘watershed moment’. A line in the sand against the ‘surge of degeneracy’. The politicians echoed it. The editorials sang from the same hymn sheet. They’d taken a random, brutal crime committed by these pricks, these wolves in plain clothes, and pinned it on the town’s most convenient scarecrows. And the public… the good, decent people… they bought it. They slept easier knowing that the Bee Gees, John Travolta and Olivia Newton John were the chosen culture, while the threat was in a cage, and that cage was labelled ‘Punk Rock’.”

Tracy looked directly at me, her gaze fierce. “They didn’t just kill Danny and Spikes that night. They murdered something else too. They murdered the truth just like they did with that nightclub mass murder a few years earlier. And they used our own scene, our own noise, as the murder weapon. They made us accomplices in our own persecution. Every time a kid got bashed for having a mohawk, every time a band got banned, every sneering headline… it was built on the foundation of that lie. On Mick and Stu, rotting in Boggo Road Jail for a crime they didn’t commit and both died lonely alcoholics in the early 2000’s.”

Her energy faded, leaving a profound exhaustion. “So you see, my silence wasn’t just about fear of those two men. It was… it was bigger. I’d seen how the whole machine worked. The corrupt police, the gutter press, the vile government… they’d all nodded in agreement over the story they wanted to tell. Who was I, a seventeen-year-old girl from the wrong side of fuckin’ everything, to try and rewrite it?”

Tracy fell silent for a few moments. The three of us needed to catch our respective breaths anyway. I let the silence stretch, the hum of a distant motor mower the only sound that could be heard in the half dark room heavy with shadow. I looked at Tracy’s ravaged, defiant face to Elizabeth’s calm, unwavering one.

“Tracy,” I began, with my voice gentle to bring us back to the subject. “One last question. Why now? After forty-nine years of silence. You’ve seen the machine. Many of those cops, those politicians, the editors… they’re gone. But not all. And the ones who remain, the institutions they built… they protect their own. You’re about to rip the lid off a grave the whole state agreed to forget. It could cost you. Maybe even…” I hesitated, glancing at Elizabeth, “…more than just you.”

Tracy didn’t look at Beth. She just gave a short, barking laugh that turned into a wet cough. When she recovered, she fixed me with a gaze that held no pity, least of all for herself.

“Cost me what?” she asked, the question hanging in the air. She leaned forward, and for the first time, pulled the collar of her cardigan aside. The skin there was a terrible, bruised yellow, stretched taut over her collarbone. “Stage four. Liver. The doc says three months, maybe less. I’m too far gone for a transplant. “They can’t kill me, Anthony. The reaper’s already on the clock, and he don’t take bribes.”

It was then that Elizabeth spoke, her voice soft but clear as cut glass. “And if they try to make her pay before her time? If they come with their threats, their old-man revenge?” She took Tracy’s hand, lacing their fingers together, a gesture of the best part of half a century. “Then that is the price I am willing to pay. Let them make a martyr of an old woman and her wife. Let the world see what truth costs. It’s the last thing we can do for Danny. For Spikes. For those two broken boys, Mick and Stu, who also never got to be old men.”

Tracy nodded, a grim finality in the gesture. “Death doesn’t frighten me anymore,” she said, and it was simply a fact, as true as the diagnosis. “It’s the living that’s terrifying. The fear of losing your life… that’s what they trade on. That’s what kept me quiet. When you think you have a future, you want to protect it. You’ll swallow any lie, bury any truth, to keep breathing. But when you know… when you have the fuckin’ invoice in your hand and the date’s circled in red… fear becomes a currency you don’t need anymore. All you have left is what you owe and a debt you need to pay before you go.”

She leaned back, spent, but her eyes burned.

“I owe Danny and Spikes the truth of how they died,” Tracy added. I owe Mick and Stu the truth of how they lived—not as monsters, but as patsies. I’m cashing in that debt. The machine can do its worst. But it can’t scare a ghost, and that’s what I am now. A ghost with a story. And you, Anthony, are my medium.”

She looked at the blinking red light of the recorder. “So get it right. Tell it all. The splash in the dark. The headlines in the light. And the forty-nine years of silence in between. That’s the real story.”