In this excerpt from Place of Shadows, PHIL JARRATT describes drug crim Barry Bull’s life and times in Noosa
Between 1971 and 1981, the population of Noosa Shire increased by more than 220 percent – from roughly 7,000 to 17,000. “It was quite exciting,” says lawyer Bob Cartwright. “People were coming to town – a lot of them from Victoria – and going, we’ve found paradise!”
Cartwright continues: “The builders and the other tradies were arriving and thinking, here’s a place I can make money. Legal services like ours were much in demand because of the new volume of property transactions. Noosa Heads in particular was suddenly full of people who’d just arrived, and it was the most un-Queensland town in Queensland. It had the feeling of a boom town, even when the crashes came.”
But not every new arrival was a desirable one. Says Cartwright: “People were buying using aliases, mainly for tax purposes but also because some had dirty money, and most of it was cash. If you were a builder here, you could not get tradies who would work for anything but cash. The cash economy was rife. I remember a bloke from the tax office came into my office in the ‘70s and asked to see my wages book. As he left he said, ‘Do you realise you’re the only person in this street that has a wages book?’”
One of the undesirables who drifted into Noosa in the 1970s was Barry Richard Bull (also known as P.G. Adams, Barry Richards, Brian Hickson and R.N. Petersen). Born in Brisbane in 1943, Bull had been known to police since 1960, and associated with the drug trade since 1970. In 1974 he was convicted of a large-scale cannabis importation and from then on he
was on a police watchlist of possible “Mr Bigs”.
When Bull sought refuge in Noosa a couple of years later, he was not as famous as he would become, but he soon joined the village’s cast of “colourful characters”, having established a Hastings Street hairdressing salon (Hairloom) with girlfriend Sylvia Lux, and hosting frequent
soirees for mysterious guests at his Sunshine Beach hideaway. “Let’s just say there were a lot of Porsches and BMWs driving up and down our dusty road to get to the only other house on the street,” says journalist Jimmy O’Keefe, who grew up in Bull’s neighbourhood.
The one-time butcher told Noosa police he managed to get by on the profits from Hairloom and the odd day laboring on construction sites, but he could afford to engage the town’s leading lawyer. “Barry Bull was just one of many criminals, including rapists and drug dealers, that I acted for over a long period,” says Bob Cartwright. “He was an insignificant client for whom I did a few transactions and deals. I never associated with him.”
Nevertheless, Bull was to cause a considerable headache and embarrassment to Bob Cartwright when he found himself dragged into a voluminous chapter of the 1984 Costigan Royal Commission, courtesy of having represented the criminal in relatively minor matters.
By the time the Costigan Report was published, Barry Bull had long disappeared from Noosa and was soon on the run from a multi-million-dollar cannabis importation charge. He was arrested in Austria in 1986, but daringly escaped from a prison van near Innsbruck when he
jumped onto a motorbike being driven by eight-months pregnant Sylvia Lux.
After serving a few more jail terms, he ended up back in Noosa (minus Sylvia) where he died in 2003.
