A hospitality industry adventure
The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down
One man, one bus, one job, and two opportunistic jerks that delivered the hangover to beat all hangovers.
Tenth Anniversary Edition
Prologue
I'm calling this the 'tenth anniversary' because the best version of this story was written while I was in my final year of Journalism at QUT in 2016. The actual incident itself took place in Samford Valley way back in October 2012, and I put the original version together as a three-part blog in 2014 which only included my point of view. In 2016, I interviewed some pals who were there and rewrote it for an entirely different website (now defunct).
Now - in 2026 - it's back home. This update will be the final iteration.
The anniversary of this story comes at an interesting life juncture - just as it did when it first originated. Putting myself back in this headspace one more time really helped remind me how much has changed and how far I have moved forward since that time.
I was 25 years old, and I had stayed at the Samford Valley Hotel (aka The Dungeon) long enough to experience at least three distinct different eras of folks working there. In the end, I utterly hated the work I was doing. In any regular sense it was just time to move on.
The situation in that workplace at that time, while supremely low stakes, was actually quite diabolical. My memory is of a really terrible operating environment with even worse stuff to do. The expectations from minimum wage staff were sometimes ridiculous or illegal, and the vast majority of the clientelle were horrific. Further, heaps of my friends had walked out a few months earlier after a really fiery staff meeting where we were told by the venue owner we were all "born with a silver spoon in the mouth".
Pete - the long-time publican - had also even moved on by this time, and his replacements were neither here nor there (literally).
In this anniversary update, all your favourite characters are back in Pog form. Shanelle's hijinks in the bus. The derro criminals. The fuckwit defence lawyer. Like all your favourite Star Wars action figures - they're all here.
In terms of additions or changes - because it has been so long since the event, I am now much more specific about where everything happened. I also included a few more precious memories, sprinkled around like the salt which is still oozing through every pore of my body.
In reading this again many years later, there were also a handful of reflections and realisations. Such as the side story of the hero actively working to unemploy me for some time up until this event took place. But we'll get to that later.
Speaking from experience - the only truly excellent folks you deal with in the hospitality industry are the ones that work it with you, and I'm delighted that many of you still choose to be my friend, talk to me, and or throw me the odd like on social media.
Some of you feature in this story - either as supportive souls, or perhaps as peripheral perpetrators. No matter where you fit in to it - this tale is dedicated to Pete and my friends from the Samford Valley Hotel.
Buckle up
Navigate through the long read ahead:
Introduction
Plenty of characters have wished for time traveling abilities. Real or fictional, every character follows a narrative all of their own, but the tapestry of life ensures that certain events in every story are shared with others in some way. That is to say: shit happens to all of us, and sometimes others get to stand around and bear witness to your misfortune. The resultant desire to travel through time, in some sort of misguided effort towards fixing a perceived mistake, reflects an innately human desire to make the present feel better at all times. While I couldn't traverse time, what I can say for certain is, plenty of shit happened to me during my extended tour of duty in the hospitality industry.
By its very nature, hospitality combines all the denominations of human in a carefully concocted recipe of compulsion - be it through eating, drinking or gambling - with the offerings of leisure at every turn designed to quickly relieve you of your hard earned dollars. It's a fleecing I willingly participated in and derived income from for a not-insignificant number of years. Your wish was my command, and as such I dealt with a whole slew of degenerate gamblers, drug dealers and users, dropkicks, and otherwise garbage humans with an overinflated sense of entitlement.
Working day-to-day in a business primarily funded by the discretionary funds of its patrons teaches you a lot: that some people have a much higher budget for degeneracy and debauchery than for their personal values. Sure - there were plenty of 'regular people' just looking to have a good time on the weekend, but unfortunately for me, the pleasant people tended to more easily resist the compulsive tendencies of their less desirable peers.
At the time, regrettably, this was my full-time-equivalent jam. Statistically, I was typically hanging out with the dregs of society for most of my working weeks. Hospitality is the classic “recession-proof industry” after all.
The following is perhaps my most arduous tale of woe to date, and a true story detailing one of the many misappropriated weekends of my twenties spent working the Devil’s trifecta of hospitality: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Dream not of time travel, because we're heading back to that one fateful Friday night in October 2012.
"I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if its speed dropped, it would explode!
I think it was called 'The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down'."
-Homer Simpson, modern-day philosopher
Part One: Bush Bashing
Situated somewhere in the otherwise sleepy month of October 2012, this particular Friday had started out just like the fifty-two before it - it was a Friday, I was working, and things were suitably uneventful.
The veritable human soup of denominations I referred to previously were in full drinking-swing by the time I arrived for a 5:00pm shift. The end of their week was just the beginning of mine – a sticking point among a number of contentious issues that were slowly eating me alive. I yearned for what they had.
Pub work is some menial shit to be sure, but many people don’t realise the work can actually have some very real emotional and mental impacts on a person if they have no other focus areas. Your shifts are the opposite of your friends'. Hobbies aside, it would be accurate to say this was my primary 'professional' pursuit.
Casually slinging drinks across a bar for eight hours is easy enough, but the real work lands on your plate when you need to process the actions of certain individuals - like the neglectful parents who would drink drive to Samford State School to pick up their kids at 2:50pm every day (until someone tipped off police), or the pokie-addicted souls crawling towards their fifth ATM visit for the day. Coulda, woulda, shoulda; it’s simply not your place as a minimum wage casual employee to tell someone to alter their damaging behaviour, as you see it. Further, your job and those of your friends depend on the continuation of this cycle. To those with a conscience, perhaps it was a type of voluntary vicarious trauma.
Just like any other workplace there were plenty of politics to negotiate too. My favourite moment of that year was getting chewed out by the still-prominent multi-venue owner for giving out free soft drink to staff - something that costs in the range of a few cents per glass in post mix form. It was a widespread, unspoken arrangement so old that it predated my employment there. I was 'busted' because I had dished it out to a brown-nosing member of the upper management team who derived career satisfaction from fucking with minimum wage earners. My mistake was incorrectly assuming the gentleman would be exempt from paying, given his esteemed position in the organisation.
Then there was the time I booked a day off to attend a funeral and wake for a prominent local but ended up working a twelve-hour day because the new General Manager was half-way out the door already, and the rostering was not a particular point of importance to them. Then there was the public holiday I worked as one person running two bars (in physically different locations), as well as the attached bottle-shop and gambling facilities (also in physically different locations) for many hours - in a pathetic attempt to cut down on paying out penalty wages. Understaffing issues regularly plague hospitality due to budgetary and expense margins, but the spectre of mismanagement is also regularly hiding in plain sight. The overall problem is, no one is paid enough to give a shit. Sometimes I was literally run ragged.
At this stage I was seven years deep into hospitality - just shy of long service leave in a feat that defies my own belief really. Hospitality is great - if you like a kind of casualness to your career that could see you fired arbitrarily at any moment. If you get too comfortable and it sort of loosely becomes your full-time gig, like it did for me, eventually you will tend to take the aforementioned bullshit home with you. In terms of high stakes careers, the Samford Valley Hotel was about as low as you get on the leaderboard, but the load of it was completely unreasonable.
By this fateful Friday in October, I was probably in my worst physical and mental shape yet. Unbeknownst to me at that time however, only two months remained of that life.
In my capacity as a bartender that night, and as the oldest male staff member on duty at the elderly age of 25, I was the insured and therefore legal driver of a ten-seater "thanks for your money, now get out" courtesy bus. It was a cute solution to the suburbs rampant drink driving problem - one which only really existed because it was fuelled by the very same venue. Driving it around was a part of my job that was actually enjoyable. It's not hard to guess why - it got me out of the joint for an hour or more. Besides, who wouldn't like a free ride home after a night on the drink? The mood within the bus tended to be fairly merry.
For the uninitiated and as the name of the venue suggests, this formerly monopoly pub is nestled in the leafy, mildewy fishbowl of Samford, some 40-odd minutes north of Brisbane's CBD. Suitably, its employees tend to be sourced from the local area. That quiet October evening I happened to be blessed by a dozen or so casual staff who had recently turned 18, were off-duty, and were there to party. Generations of families and siblings have worked there over the years, including me and my very own sister. That kind of happenstance really added to the ‘family’ vibe of the place and delivered a level of buy-in in terms of supporting your work pals.
In the face of dreadful working hours, more often than not your spare ones were spent on the drinkers’ side of the bar, either with your own friends or with venue patrons who had become your friends.
With the 'family' in full effect that night, the emergent 18-year-old’s eventually wanted a free lift in the courtesy bus to the freshly opened Eatons Hill Hotel, which is only a short (in regional terms) trip away. It was something that wouldn’t have been cool with the venue owner but hey, if a minibus whips down Eatons Crossing Road and no one is there to see it, did it really happen? That would be the first in a series of dominos to fall that night.
The quick dash to the competition was a great idea on paper because it got all of them out of our hair in one fell swoop. In reality however, the relatively short trip proved to be wholly unacceptable.
The school bells had barely finished ringing for these kids - and yet that very same ringing from a barely-gone era was soon reverberating around the cab of that Toyota Hiace and directly into my ear canals with the aggression of an ice pick. The occasional and intense shouting of the drunken 18-year-old brats riding within always seemed to stop just short of delivering the full-on lobotomy I so desperately sought. Surely, I thought, the gates of hell were going to open at my feet and the hands of the devil himself would suck me down into the Earth’s core. It was the only way out.
Really I was just being subjected to some fairly standard teenage hijinks being carried out in the back, but at the ripe old age of 25-going-on-95, I felt a bit like Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon – I was getting too old for this shit.
Just under the halfway point of the twenty-odd minute journey, I began hearing a chorus of screeches over the squelching of the ice pick - which by this time had started to break through into my skull cavity. Several passengers apparently urgently required a ‘pit stop'. The choir singers? Two young ladies. I was in a fully-laden Toyota Hiace barrelling through a semi-regional area very late at night with two girls who were apparently about to wet themselves in the back, despite having only been in the car for about nine minutes. Wonderful.
The warm trickling fact was, cleaning up urine was not within my job description. So with a discrete enough turn off coming up I made a decision which would turn out to be another critical error in judgement, and the second domino to fall.
I pulled up somewhere without a street light and the girls exited to take care of their business as their friends continued to carry on at some length in the back. You know those parents that threaten to turn around and return home on the way to Movie World because their kids are being uncontrollable turds in the back? That should have been my resolve. Either that or I should have just kept going. Anyway, after what felt like an eternity, they got back in and I resumed the journey.
I’d barely turned the Starship Hiace around before one of the squat girls - who I'll do the courtesy of awarding the pseudonym "Shanelle" - suddenly shouted, "Oh my god I've lost my purse!” By this stage I'm at least ten minutes behind on the trip - cleared by my immediate manager mind you, but one that I probably shouldn't have been on anyway. I was keen to get back to the Starbase before anyone questioned it further, so the suggestion that I would have to return to the spot of bush defilement was not a great way to impress me.
At this point of course, I calmly turned the bus around again and returned to the spot of bush defilement. I could feel my pulse pounding away behind my left eyeball from the pressure of Shanelle's drunken incompetence. As each second of searching ticked by, my blood pressure continued to increase towards the level my dad once experienced when he gave himself a blood nose by being upset at another driver (still pretty funny).
The next ten minutes of my life can be summarised as follows: it was the wrong spot and several of us spent too long looking for the illusive purse with 2012-era mobile phone torches. I assure you, my care factor regarding the lost purse was shorter than this sentence. A seemingly simple pit stop had turned into a super quirky rag-tag adventure and I wanted no part of it.
With steam pouring out of my ears like 'Yosemite' was a prefix to my name, it was time to hit the road. Cruising back to the main road, a voice again pierced my searing rage - it was Shanelle: "There it is!”
And there it was indeed: the purse, a full hundred meters closer to the main road than we were searching. Tremendous.
With Shanelle's purse successfully recovered from the edge of dense bushland, we were quickly back on our way in a responsible manner at the signed, legal speedlimit. I gained us approximately one kilometre further towards our destination when suddenly: "I've lost my shoe." Can you possibly imagine who broadcast a thought so profound? My response was and is not repeatable, though the feeling of rage is a much stronger lingering memory than the words. My new favourite colleague Shanelle had now cemented herself as the messiest drunk I had possibly ever seen (up to that point anyway).
I was miles behind schedule by the time we had marched to our imperial destination some kilometers away. Having scared the children into submission with my quality driving and otherwise increasingly calming, pleasant banter, they thanked me and quickly extricated themselves from my immediate vicinity. Oh, and Shanelle? Her rogue shoe was on the floor of the bus the entire time - a fact that was confirmed after it fell out onto the road upon opening the door. That's really great.
The drive back was quick and smooth as I pumped the radio through the bus’s single working dash speaker. That was the first futile attempt to calm myself down that evening. My voice while underwater was clearer than that tinny old thing, but by then I really didn't care.
Finally, I pulled up and parked in the driveway at home base - more than an hour after I'd originally set off on a 30 minute round trip. The significant time blow out was the third domino to fall, and despite the saying about bad things coming in threes, the real party hadn't even blown up yet.
As it turns out, my buddy back at the Batcave that night, Isabel, had been dealing with her own set of problems in my absence. Our two worlds were about to collide.
Part Two: The Derro Dimension
"They didn't look like the most straight-edge people I'd ever seen."
-Isabel
Engrained within Australian culture, banter is and should be a part of any decent bar. Hanging shit on your mates is almost as much of a national past-time as torrenting the newest episode of a popular new HBO series. Rarely did it end in fisticuffs at our bar, though people would often talk about the “golden days” where fights would spill on to the street outside.
As a quick aside - one of my fondest memories of hell was with the old publican, Pete, who, when such a scuffle broke out, would calmly enter the main bar and remove his watch and tie before stepping out to deal with it himself. It was a properly old-school approach and something which was sorely missing in the 2012 version of the Samford Valley Hotel.
While I was on a magical adventure taking some brats to the zoo and surveying the local foliage, Isabel was back at base dealing with some fairly standard Friday night argy-bargy.
She was faced with the usual kind of Friday bar flies - only this time she had a bonus side serving of another classic Australian stereotype: the scummy derro. Two men sporting some suitably trashy tats, hoodies, and an apparent lack of a sense of humour in the face of a local that was cracking jokes at their expense.
Around the time I was on my way back from dropping off zoo animals, and totally unbeknownst to me, a situation was unfolding.
"It was all fine and then somebody said something negative. And then somebody else reacted. It ended up in one of the two guys trying to glass (the local),” Isabel says, explaining that their overreaction got them cut off.
“You know when you meet someone and you pick up a vibe off them? It wasn't necessarily the way they were dressed or anything like that, but it was the way they spoke, the way they handled themselves,” she says, adding that she felt uncomfortable dealing with them.
Sure - the Responsible Service of Alcohol guidelines are a bunch of formal words that exist in black text written on paper, but in reality, enforcement is a lot looser once you reach an outer-suburban pub with no immediate competition. It was a profoundly rare feat to get cut off at the Samford Valley Hotel, and because there was no where to go within 10km, the cut-ees would just hang around regardless of whatever they’d done. 2012 was a time well before rideshare existed, and cabs had a well established reputation of simply not coming to Samford at all. The free courtesy bus placated both problems by offering punters a safe way to get home.
A combination of the venue’s geographic isolation, utterly ineffective security, and invisible figures in management that were chained inside the office doing admin, all worked ensured there was generally very little recourse available to us when troublemakers were on deck. In this case, those on-duty attempted to minimise the risk of any further incidents by simply arranging for the two men to leave with me on the next bus run.
Isabel explains: “They were in this high, hyped up mode and it was like ‘get them out of there’… Then they’re out of that situation.”
If a domino falls in the public bar and I'm not there to see it…
Anyone that's ever owned or borrowed a vehicle knows that you should take the key out of the ignition when you leave it parked. You should also lock it up. I did both of those things before making my way inside to brief Isabel on my Eatons Hill experience.
Over a few minutes and (merely) a glass of water, I shared with her the entire story about my exploits in the bus, the bush, and my personal opinions regarding the conduct of her pal and our co-worker, Shanelle.
"You were pissed off. And then you came back to me having this situation with these guys being freaks and it was like - let’s wrap this shit up, we’re over it for the night.”
With my glass of water finished, story told, and Isabel's attempts to console me processed, I was ready for the second run of drunk free-loaders - still blissfully unaware of the previous tensions.
In a regular night I would do a handful of trips, so trip two was just a formality. By this stage it was well past 11:00pm and within 90 minutes of close.
Although it was now fairly quiet in the exhibit without the zoo animals, I scoured the place for additional free loaders. The best drinkers have the hardest time leaving and some can be difficult to pry away from the tap - hoping to buzz around until the final bus run.
Cue our two derros from earlier: one I recognised, and one was his friend that I'd never seen before. Somewhat ready to hit the road again, I escorted them to the bus parked in the driveway and unlocked it in the process. I even got into the driver’s seat because I figured some of the others I’d encouraged would be following closely behind.
They were not.
In an effort to save myself from making another trip, I decided to leave the two men in the bus, get out, and walk the 15 meters back into the bar to more forcibly round up the rest. This was not out of the ordinary.
I was out of it no longer than thirty seconds before one of the passengers and subsequently, me, realised I'd left the key in the ignition. That was the fourth and final domino to fall.
They took off in it.
Let's do a bit of plain speakin' - this was a tremendous slap and the worst patron-led conduct I'd faced during my time in the industry up to that point. I had already been under fire for months already with increasingly horrendous working conditions, rude customers, management that was asleep at the wheel, and a wolf in sheep's clothing who had been running a quiet campaign to wedge me out.
This incident was the pièce de résistance; the coda to my employment. It was as if someone had marked the full stop at the end of my custodial sentence with a permanent marker.
I'd seen some shit on my tour of duty, but this opportunistic theft would end up just being the left hook in a knock-out combo.
The Right Hook
Let's take a breather for a moment and talk about the personal characteristics of certain charmed individuals we all cross paths with. The kinds of folks who work their way up towards punching down. The kind who pretend to be your friend as they wait for you to turn around. You might even get along with them; share a few laughs.
These people are not your friend. These people are only looking out for themselves. I had one of those friends at the Samford Valley Hotel.
When I looked back at this time again, that person emerged from the shadows into broad daylight. At first they were just another nerd just like me, hired to sort out the back-end till system. Eventually they became sort of a second-in-charge, and the work towards ejecting me began.
There was the free soft drink thing, sure - a gotcha obtained under the false pretense of being "off-duty". Congratulations on your achievement. But I realised there were actually a number of other low-fi attempts to direct blame towards me as an individual for things that were shared at a group level. The individual's goals were generally similar to that of a puppy - rounding up balls of illicit operational knowledge to drop at the owner's feet, begging to be patted for their ill-gotten detective work.
That is not honest work, and it's not good work. I wouldn't say you did a particularly good job of it either. I was a casual so it's pretty easy to manage someone out in that scenario.
Unfortunately for me, the bus thing was a ball I had thrown. And while they didn't really have grounds for dismissal on that incident either, it was ultimately the catalyst for my exit. They made the decision for me and delivered it after I had returned from a trip to India in 2013 because, "I didn't want to ruin your holiday". Frankly, it would have improved it.
I hope both sides of your pillow are hot permanently.
My naive understanding of the demographics in Samford initially led me to conclude they might just go for a spin and bring it back. In all honesty, that wasn't a completely unreasonable assumption as it's a cashed up area which, at that time, was still pretty quiet and hidden away. I'd grown up, lived and worked there for more than a decade. I thought most likely they would just dump it - fun had. I had critically underestimated the situation.
After the disbelief at what I'd just witnessed set in, I calmly walked out the door and onto the street. There it was, steaming towards the roundabout. They took a right... and just kept on goin'. No point chasing after something that's moving several magnitudes faster than you can. The Looney Tunes whimsy wasn't far from the actual reality though.
I sat down in the driveway and stared vacantly in their direction, completely dumbfounded, processing the sum and total of events that evening as Isabel got on the blower to the police. Having healthily repressed most of it myself in the aftermath, Isabel remembers my demeanour at the time.
“You were shattered,” she says very dramatically.
“It was like somebody had killed your puppy in-front of you, you know what I mean? You were just gutted. It was just one of those things that was not meant to happen.
"I think you went through all the emotions that night. Anger. Rage. Happy to get people out of there. Shocked. Sad. Distraught. Angry again.”
Eventually, I picked myself up off the driveway and sheepishly walked in to the main office. It was time to tell the duty manager, who had been dutifully chained to his desk while all this was happening. As the words left my mouth I saw them have the same impact on his face that the actual theft had on me some minutes earlier. I don't think he could quite believe it either.
A few people tried to reassure me that I hadn't actually done anything wrong, but for the first time in my life someone had stolen something of not-insignificant financial value which was in my direct custody. It was stolen because I had a few seconds of relaxed decision making in an unknowingly tense situation.
Soon enough the local constabulary arrived to take statements. If I thought I wanted to commit the ancient Japanese act of seppuku by that point, you should have seen me when one of the officers’ radios went off within earshot: "We've found it on Wights Mountain Road on fire. One in custody."
It had been gone for less than 30 minutes.
Our two impulsive champs, having fully committed by making the sound decision to steal a ride that was already free, asked themselves a simple follow-up question: what is a sensible thing to do next? Why, just dump and burn it of course!
But it gets better still - the aforementioned derelict referred to in the police radio call had taken off his t-shirt, rolled it up and inserted it into the fuel tank, and used it as a wick. He was arrested because he was still there, watching it burn. And they said I was stupid.
Of all the possible outcomes, I still don't believe there was one worse than dumb arson. A few smashed windows and some dents? Sure, I guess I might have had to cop that. But this? A ‘hilarious’ drunken joyride is one thing, but did they really think the best way to get out of the situation was to destroy it? Alcohol does not fully suspend the faculties of adult thought or decision making - unless of course they never existed for the individual to begin with.
The other guy was arrested when he got home the next day because his firebug mate had given it all up. The police just waited for him to return home.
I haven't seen anyone execute such a baffling level of stupidity quite like that since, and I may never again. Never mind the impact of the brazen theft on my already average health - as the dominos continued to fall down in the aftermath, the pain factor of the situation only increased.
The Aftermath
“Somebody text me that night: ‘the bus got stolen’… I was drunk at the time and thought it was funny... It wasn’t until I got to work the next day that I realised how hectic the situation actually was.
That (sort of thing) just doesn’t happen in Samford. And if it was going to happen to anyone, of course it happened to Sam.”
-Lauren
A passenger from the ill-fated Shanelle run
The venue owner heard about it the next day and self-combusted - but not because a leased bus had been stolen off me. He self-combusted because I'd used it to take drunk off-duty staff members directly to the competition. Keep in mind - he would never have known about it had the bus not been stolen in the first place. Fallen trees in the forest and all that.
It was the bonus fifth domino, toppled over by two criminals who had managed to leave me a shitstorm of unimaginable magnitude in their fiery wake.
Having completely disregarded the four hours of solid drinking money that Shanelle and company had happily contributed to his organisation, the owner thought that I was a moron for removing them as a burden and personally dropping them off as a convenient little package somewhere else. Ninety minutes of potentially lost profits from ten people, versus a torched bus worth many thousands? Come on. I wonder what he would have thought if I'd told him I almost crashed the same bus after driving it through floodwater at Cedar Creek taking a local pisspot home a few months earlier (not sure I ever told anyone about that one).
As a major and unfortunate participant in this story, I was also required to give a formal statement at the local police station on my own time. The detectives assigned to the case typically dealt with drug offences and crimes involving children, so this was like a breath of fresh smokey air to them. They also thought that this was the funniest, dumbest and most unfortunate thing they'd seen so far that year. Many a laugh was had at my expense. I'm glad my misfortune at least served to give the detectives something lighter to talk about for a while.
One of them joked that I could actually be charged under Queensland law for leaving the keys in an unattended vehicle. How funny.
Anyway, despite assurances from police that my actions were entirely reasonable I still didn't feel any better about it. While I was sorting that out, the Samford Hotel gossip circle swirled like the perpetually flushing toilet it is. Then I was straight back to work the next day.
If ours was a banter bar, then you better believe I copped it. I was the talk of the town - not that they ever had much to talk about outside of how drunk they were last weekend.
They joked about hanging one of the burnt doors up with the rest of the garbage that was propping up that bar. Hilarious. They even had a photograph of the thing burning blown up to A4 and laminated. Incredible. I'm not a total plank of wood; on the face of it, the story is funny. I could see the humour in the situation but I was definitely way too raw for the flames I received.
Through seconds of fairly routine absent mindedness I'd managed to: a) get myself in trouble, b) get other staff in trouble regarding the free ride that no one important would have otherwise known about, c) got a leased bus worth some thousands stolen, and astoundingly; d) torched - all because of a single key and a split second choice. Add to that my personal torture time spent retelling the story over and over, and over to locals, and then over to the police on tape. Surprisingly the story never even made local papers.
Notably, in what I thought was pretty clearly an open and shut case, there was a risk of Isabel and I having to testify as witnesses if it ever went to court. If the two gentlemen in question hadn't torched the bus, the detectives told me, the entire situation wouldn't have been anywhere near as serious in criminal terms. I mean, there are easier ways to light a cigarette for fuck's sake.
Thankfully I got a call a couple of months later to tell me we were off the hook regarding "Monday’s court proceedings”. That's good, seeing as we had no idea a case was pending. Communication from police was non-existent in the aftermath and the courthouse rang out when I tried to find out more specific details about charges laid in the case.
Reflecting on it years later, it's clear that the barely-18s were a catalyst for the entire debacle. Had I not taken the beasts of burden directly to the competition, this whole thing may never have happened. Shanelle's stalling led to a whole cascade of bullshit back down the hill. If I hadn't been so badly delayed by needless searches for phantom items with no relevance to me personally, perhaps the two criminals would never have gotten on the bus, or I would have witnessed the argy-bargy back at base and refused to take them. Maybe some potential witnesses would have gotten on the bus with them and zeroed out their opportunistic desires. Who's to say.
Given how charged up they were after the glassing incident, there’s also the possibility they could have jumped me had the ill-fated trip actually gone ahead. That's a point I hadn’t considered before until recently. The situation was potentially a lot more dangerous than I realised at the time and there was actually quite a lot of risk in the courtesy bus driver role broadly in personal safety terms. We were just bartenders at the end of the day.
Regardless, all of these thoughts are irrelevant. There's no point in trying to change the past because it is what it is, and there's no going back through a worm hole. We all make split-second decisions every day aiming for good outcomes, but sometimes it will just go bad no matter what choices you made. My cards were already at play in a primordial mix of circumstance - I got dealt an embarrassing drunk, criminals, and a torched bus that wasn't mine. C'est la vie.
As it turns out however, the dealer at this table was like the banker embezzling during a game of Monopoly. While the actual bus fire had long been extinguished, the dealer's hand was simmering face down on the table waiting to be shown.
Part Three: The Rocket Man and Lord Defence
Oh, the dealer had packed my bags alright, and I was the rocket man. Only the rocket in this case was the aforementioned burning vehicle I had previously driven; the embers of which, as it turned out, continued to be stoked through the Queensland court system until late 2014. Lit almost two-years to the day prior, the simmering card on the table was a District Court subpoena I thought couldn't possibly come.
Coincidentally it was stamped by a judge on my birthday, of all days. It was a present from the defendant via the Queensland Government, rubber stamped by the Director of Public Prosecutions and hand delivered to me at my new job via a silver-badged, plainclothes policeman from the Criminal Investigations Branch. Oh, you shouldn’t have. They at least had the decency to wait a week to deliver it.
Defendent Derro - the brain dead accomplice who had bailed from the scene and had police waiting for him at home the next day, was the one fighting criminal charges. He had apparently decided everybody concerned had not been inconvenienced enough yet and had almost-unbelievably pleaded not guilty. Dynamite.
Speaking of alcohol, I'd also made the tactical decision to not allow the threat of a pending court date continue to undermine and ruin my life. This pro-life decision had two immediate impacts: 1) I was socialising at a city pub when I received the phone call from our friends at CIB to inform me that yes, the trial was going ahead and yes, I would in fact be required the very next day; and 2) I was tired and hungover during my entire appearance in court.
The court dates just happened to fall during a break week at university - a place I was now regularly finding myself - in what was probably the only piece of good fortune I’d encountered during this entire saga.
Determined to not let the terrorists win, I defiantly stood in front of the slow-moving steamroller like that security guard in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. All of those dusty, fallen dominos from 2012 had been scooped right into the pestle and were getting increasingly pulverised with every sip of beer on the night before court. This saga was officially the longest hangover in my own recorded history, including the actual one I was about to bring before a judge. After everything that had happened, a rubber-stamped birthday subpoena was just the cherry on top.
As a fresh journalism student, I had already visited the very same courts a few months earlier to chase down a story. From doing that I at least sort of knew what to expect. This was going to be my first experience actually participating in a court process.
My pals from that fateful Friday were also subpoenaed but were not required. Lucky me.
At any rate, I had arranged to be chauffeured to-and-from court in an unmarked police car. I ran into a co-witness at the Ferny Grove cop shop that morning who had made a similar arrangement. Another witness - informed that he was required at the very last minute - was to meet us in the city. The ride in was uneventful outside of polite small talk, which was occasionally interrupted by my brain questioning how the hell this was going to court after all this time. I thought the evidence was pretty clear.
With my actual hangover in full swing by 9:30am, I was ready to get in there and finally close the book on a saga caused by a 30-second lapse of judgement two years earlier.
The gut-churning ride in the District Court elevator (there's something weird about that damn lift) was just the beginning of an entire day of fun. If by 'fun', you actually mean garrotting yourself with piano wire until all the pain ends and the sweet embrace of death follows. Although I don't really know where I could have procured anything to that end, I certainly had plenty of time to work through those details as I sat there in the witness waiting room. For hours. And hours.
What I’d failed to take into account is just how glacial legal folks can be when they’re being paid in the hundreds-of-dollars-per-hour range to prance around a courtroom, picking from a trolley of documents. You can also make the wheels of justice turn mighty slow when your number one job is to keep a client out of jail by pursuing every minor legal point or interpretation, right down to the wire I desperately needed in order to choke myself.
10:00am rolled around. Then 11:00am. Then 12:00pm, and sure enough: "Lunch break, see you in an hour". Meanwhile a room full of inconvenienced witnesses, a jury, and police were meandering about.
The drawn out day at least helped to clarify a few things for me. As it turned out, our friendly firebug from that night had pleaded guilty to theft and arson shortly after it had all happened. His two year sentence was suspended after four months. Strangely, Captain Firestarter was in the witness waiting room with us, along with his dad for moral support. By this time in 2014 he had apparently gotten his shit together and was appearing as a witness against his former friend, Defendant Derro.
The blame for the arson aspect was being shifted, and Captain Firestarter was there to tell the jury who really did it. You'll forgive me if I didn't join them for lunch.
Once lunch was over the waiting game resumed on schedule. I was ready to go home before I'd even gotten out of bed that morning. 3:00pm rolled around and my mind began to race in panic with a creeping realisation: "Fuck me - I'm going to have to come back tomorrow". By 3:30pm I was certain of it.
Then, to some relief, the Crown Prosecutor's whip-boy came in: "You're up".
I entered the court with the customary bow to the judge and was shown into the stand. For time saving, I took the oath with a bible irrespective of any actual religious leaning. I would have praised whatever deity to get this shit on the road.
Defendant Derro was in the hot-seat, tuned out, with his family in the stands. His defence lawyer, the jury and various other people filled out the rest of the seats. The Crown Prosecutor got the party started and asked me to spell out my recollection of the night in nauseating detail. Having been pre-armed with my sworn statement, I leaned on those details pretty heavily. Then the standard Law and Order-brand cross-examination began.
I was drilled on the specifics as you would expect, and the defence had me draw the route of their joyride on a dodgy touch screen that would be displayed on large televisions to the jury. Easy enough - I'd already explained that I worked in the area for 7 years and knew it like the back of my hand.
But there was a problem. The photocopied map they used was so old and poorly copied - as if it had been drawn by a person with no fingers, or taken from a charcoal transfer of a 15-year-old Refidex. It barely resembled the place I was describing and I could hardly make heads or tails of it while I was answering the questions. This was just the first deliberate effort towards making me, a minimum wage earner, look like a simpleton.
By now, the defence had tipped the pestle of crushed dominoes out on the desk and divided them up into lines with a black Amex. They should have handed me a rolled hundred-dollar note so I could snort my way out of the diabolical mess I was in. Instead, I had to grapple with a purposely awful scan and a clunky touch screen drawing system to explain my story to the jury.
This process was drawn out for some time as I repeatedly, in a relatively politely manner, informed him that his map was awful and that I was having trouble deciphering it. If I had asked a 5-year-old Australian who has certainly never visited North Korea to draw a map of Pyongyang from memory, that sketch still would have been clearer than this copy.
The defence lawyer: "What if I told you the pub wasn't actually where you say it is?". My look of disbelief was intercepted by the judge who finally piped up and told him to get on with it. The location was a fact. The arson was a fact.
I was then interrogated on a flame grill about the specifics of filling a Toyota Hiace 10-seater with petrol. Was there a lever to open the cap, or was it accessible without a key? I drove one two years ago, I should know. Was it a manual or automatic? I drove one two years ago, I should know. Never mind the fact the bus company regularly swapped out the leased vehicle, and it had in fact been two years since I'd driven one.
Alright. I get the idea. Give the key witness a shit map. Poke and prod every detail of memory from years ago down to the sorts of nauseating details like which side was a fuel cap on. Remind everyone the key witness was a bartender on minimum wage. Erode the idea that the witness can remember the details of the client by drawing attention to all the neglected details. I've watched enough courtroom procedurals in my time - I understood what field this parasite was playing on.
I was getting pretty visibly pissed off by this point and began leaning heavily on the detail in my sworn statement. How dare this fuckwit hang me out to dry in front of a room full of strangers, challenging me to recall irrelevant and unimportant details, and then demeaning me when I couldn’t reasonably remember.
All of this bullshit was over a minimum wage casual job I hadn’t worked in over two years by this point. As you can imagine I was just having the most tremendous time, and before you knew it, the lengthy exchange had dragged me right back into the headspace of 2012. All of a sudden I was working five days a week in that godforsaken shithole again. The faces of all those alcoholics, abusers, drink drivers, grossly irresponsible parents, and dear Shanelle – it was all coming back.
After I made some references to the security footage the judge sent me back out while they worked to make it available for the jury to watch. I was told to sit "not far" from the doorway of the courtroom as a procession of the defendant’s family members made their way in and out of the court. I got to overhear a phone call from the fiancé (lucky girl) telling a family member that it looks like he's going to get off. Wonderful.
After they grappled with the complicated playback, I was brought back in around 4:00pm to describe what was going on in the footage. The defence lawyer didn't even understand what he was looking at. Are four different areas on display, or is it four angles of the same room? The recording, I explained, is actually meant to be panned around in 3D as that was half of the gimmick with those security cameras. Not me - a minimum wage casual - explaining high tech security cameras to a shitheel on a six figure income.
As time went on, even the judge started getting annoyed with my perfectly reasonable answers – both the informed ones and the vague. "I believe so", or "to the best of my recollection" are not acceptable. "I can pan through this footage in 3D" was also not okay. You'd have almost thought I was on trial.
The final line of questioning can be summed up with a single quote from the defence:
“Can you remember if anyone else in the venue was wearing a white hoodie that night?”
No you six-figure fuck wit, I cannot.
At this point, I simply didn’t care what any of them thought about me or my character, and as such I was cleanly defeated by Lord Defence in the Battle of the Bus Embers. After this, I was excused and thanked for turning up. I insist, thank you.
Thank you for finally freeing me of this saga and from the long reaching tentacles of the The Dungeon forever.
I was marched back into the witness room, at which point I informed the detective that I would be stepping downstairs for a beer at the conveniently located bar just across from the courthouse. While I was in the process of doing that, the Crown Prosecutor - having obviously witnessed my rapidly declining exchange with his opposite number - apologised to me and told the detective that Lord Defence was renowned for focusing on small irrelevant details to the point of obsession. Sadly the other two remaining witnesses – Captain Firestarter included - would have to return the next day.
Once my beer was down and with the horror seemingly over once and for all, we piled into another unmarked police car and began our trip back to the Ferny Grove police station.
While riding in the back of that car - mere minutes from our destination - I suddenly saw an "oh shit" look appear on the detective's face.
At that time, there was a tyre shop on the corner of Samford and Osborne Road in Mitchelton. At the exact moment we were driving past, a delinquent employee apparently had the bright idea of doing a burnout in an AU Ford Falcon to impress his work mates - in the middle of peak hour traffic. The detective's look came around the time said delinquent lost control and crossed four lanes, writing off two other cars and (presumably) his own in the process. Beam me up Scotty.
My response to the detective once we'd figured out everyone was okay?
"I didn't see shit."
Final thoughts
Hangover aside, I wouldn't say I received a particularly detailed briefing about what to expect as a witness in the box. I wasn't briefed on the equipment in use, or about who the defence lawyer was. I was not briefed about giving clearer yes or no answers and why that's important. Some advice to that end really would have helped me be a better witness. Instead, I walked out feeling like I was a completely hollowed out shell with a poor memory and no societal value. Worse still, it made me never want to testify again.
Before this whole thing happened, I always (perhaps naively) thought court cases were generally a tool to decide a contentious issue through a neutral and fair process. My personal experience in the witness box and this case completely changed this viewpoint and has since strongly discouraged me from getting involved in any other case. If I am a witness to a serious incident in the future, it's really going to require a strong and lengthy consideration before I make any kind of statement.
As it turns out, I was right about there being a fuel access lever in the cab in that bus, and it was a manual. I was also told there was a taped confession with Defendant Derro admitting to the arson.
In the end, he was acquitted with no conviction recorded. All of that in the face of the obvious hard evidence and a confession. Outstanding. What a waste of everyone's time. I only discovered the details of this outcome after an old friend looked into it for me (thanks again).
It's nice to know that with enough money thrown at legal counsel, I have a good chance at getting myself out of very sticky criminal situations. Particularly if it takes years for the courts to get to my case and the details from the key witnesses start getting a bit hazy.
By some coincidence, after The Right Hook had finally struck me down, I managed to land a job at everyone's favourite cafe - across the road from the Samford Hotel.
On one quiet Samford Saturday afternoon after the court case wrapped, you'd never guess which two "former friends" and partners in crime I happened to see dropping in to the local for a tipple...