The life and crimes of Australia’s most daring fugitive

A new book detailing the life of one of Australia’s most charismatic criminals also serves as a commentary on the media, the police and the justice system, writes Jim Kable.

I RECENTLY ATTENDED a lecture in the annual History Illuminated series of lectures by writers sponsored by the City of Lake Macquarie. Two writers were featured – Mark Dapin and Michael Adams – the latter since 2019 having an acclaimed podcast: Forgotten Australia.

Adams spoke to his just-published book, They’ll Never Hold Me: The life and crimes of Kevin John Simmonds, Australia’s most daring fugitive, on a daredevil car thief, break-and-enterer and bank robber whose name, Kevin John Simmonds, I recalled when he and an accomplice eluded a giant manhunt by police for more than a month in the latter part of 1959 when I was ten years old.

As the story unfolded in Adams’ re-telling, I detected something of the admiration for this young man I recalled from long ago – the sense of the underdog outwitting the despised authority figures – though with an element of the tragedy of a warder, whose death this book also deals with.

I have to make some things clear from the start. I was a teacher and in the 1980s, peripherally part of a movement known as Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE), working towards the elimination of corporal punishment in public schools (the elite private schools at the time, among the worst abusers according to PTAVE reports and opting to continue with such abuse, supported by their political allies).

For a period, my brother worked as a youth worker (a builder and cabinet-maker by trade) in the worst juvenile detention centre in NSW (maybe the worst in Australia). In this former colonial-era adult gaol, men had been brutalised and hanged in that earlier existence. His stories to me of the brutal treatment of the boys (no more than 20 ever incarcerated at one time) and of their earlier back stories were devastating.

Some of the thugs who were his “colleagues” were either baiting the boys so they could bash them, or else bribing them with pornographic videos, cigarettes and even visits to a local pub. The centre was ironically called “Endeavour House” (established in 1948 as Home for Boys and closed in 1989 after a spate of “suicides”) where the superintendent was embezzling money from the prison finances in order to build his house over on the coast. (A friend since 2015 who recently passed away was a “graduate” of Endeavour House.)

During various graduate studies I undertook throughout the first half of the 1980s, I came across the significant name of prison reformer Tony Vinson who wrote on matters inimical to the prison officer community which, as they always do, fought back against the reforms. So I hold no illusions as to the kinds of attitudes and practices of people who work within the so-called justice system, as Michael Adams outlines in the progress of the story he is telling.

A couple of years ago, I was on a nostalgia tour across the southern and western Riverina to places where I taught before my marriage, including Hay (where I taught for two years), Narrandera and Leeton. Wagga Wagga, too. All feature to some extent or other in the early life of “Simmo”, including his friendship in Griffith with Tony Sergi, whom Adams movingly describes as ‘the beating heart of the book’.

While visiting the museum in the Old Hay Gaol, I noted something about La Volpe (The Fox) — the Lucca-born Italian PoW Lieutenant Edgardo Simoni, who had escaped from its confines in Hay in 1943 and some months later re-taken in Melbourne and returned to Hay. I first heard of Simoni in 2012 when trading stories with a cousin of my wife in The Rock, south of Wagga Wagga. Inspiration for young Simmo.

Born in 1935 in Crown Street Women’s Hospital – he grew up in the Riverina. Especially significant were Hay and Griffith. His father was a hard man who seemed to blame Simmo, then three, for the drowning death of his little sister – 18-month-old Jean – both having escaped a flimsy barricade constructed by their father on thei back verandah – to play in a dangerous unfenced tank.

The writer traces all aspects of Simmo’s life: his schooling, petty crime, his ability to be happy by himself, making the newspaper with his first court appearance at age 14 after taking his father’s secret cache of 100 pounds and hopping a train. He was sent to Boys Town at Engadine run by Father Thomas Dunlea (discharged after 13 months in December 1950) though later, after his retirement in early 1952, by the darker Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco (where Ivan Milat later spent time aged 13).

It is hard to know if Simmo suffered any of the sexual abuse that later became known about Boys Town though one of his sisters did talk about apparent mood changes. This was around the time that D S Ray “The Gunner” Kelly – later to play a key part in the final escape and capture of Simmo – unnecessarily killed Joe Swan, a young driver in a stolen car. He had also been involved as a policeman in the Siege of Union Street in Newtown in mid-1931 — an important anti-eviction battle as the Great Depression hardened its grip on Australia, movingly written about in a novel by Nadia Wheatley, The House That Was Eureka, published in 1985.

Simmo’s next time away was at Mt Penang near Gosford. A friend who spent a brief time as a warder there after his exit from the Navy recently had some interesting stories to tell. All fitting the pattern as elaborated on by Michael Adams.

I am setting the stage, as it were, for what is a gripping story of Australian social history — the media, the police and the gaol system and, I think I can suggest, legal and judicial malfeasance. It is a tragedy at the last, but the reader will be barracking for Simmo to that end. As it seems is the writer, trying to uncover the clearly dodgy findings of the Grafton Gaol medical officer and the coroner. As was I, right to the very last page.

No stone was left unturned in the research. I highly recommend this book and anything else written by this first-rate investigator. 

They’ll Never Hold Me: The life and crimes of Kevin John Simmonds, Australia’s most daring fugitive by Michael Adams is published by Affirm Press. 

This book was reviewed by an IA Book Club member. If you would like to receive free high-quality books and have your review published on IA, subscribe to receive your complimentary IA Book Club membership.

Jim Kable is a retired teacher who has taught in rural and metropolitan NSW, in Europe, and later, long-term in Japan. He is also a member of the steering committee of The New Liberals political party.

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