Matthew Condon

COLLEEN McCullough, the internationally famous Australian author, has died in hospital on Norfolk Island. She was 77.

QUEENSLAND government stenographer and paedophile Clarence Howard-Osborne gassed himself in his car in the garage of his home in Mount Gravatt, on Brisbane’s southside, in September 1979.

QUEENSLAND government stenographer and paedophile Clarence Howard-Osborne gassed himself in his car in the garage of his home in Mount Gravatt, on Brisbane’s southside, in September 1979.

IT TOOK less than an hour into the sentencing of convicted McCulkin killers Garry “Shorty” Dubois and Vincent O’Dempsey in the Brisbane Supreme Court yesterday for a surprise door to spring open and shed new light on the horrific mass murder at the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley in 1973.

In the plane on the way to Sydney for his funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about the photograph of him taken in ­Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens. It’s the late 1960s and there he is, just a boy, with his chestnut hair parted to the right. He’s wearing a collared shirt buttoned to the top and a grey pullover. He’s standing in front of the lagoon at the Alice Street end of the gardens, and behind him is the ­fountain and a black swan.

Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road Gaol, in the city’s inner south, had over time housed its fair share of ­violent criminals, but nothing compared to its roll call of ­inmates during the 1960s.