Australia is a nation of cops who believe they are larrikins. This mistaken belief has led us down many roads, many ending in massacres, deaths in custody, hotel prisons and little boat-shaped trophies with “I stopped these” on them. It has allowed a country of suburban letter-to-the-editor types to convince themselves that their innate bigotry, hatefulness and tendency towards bullying is nothing but the inevitable result of their being wild colonial boys. The “larrikin” is Australia’s boldest furphy.
No work of media has dissected this lie more thoroughly than Blue Murder, the 1995 miniseries about crooked cops and thuggish hoods following the gangster Neddy Smith (Tony Martin) and the mega-corrupt, mega-violent policeman Roger “The Dodger” Rogerson (Richard Roxburgh). These two men bounce off one another and the law amid the heroin-fuelled Sydney gang wars of the late 70s and 80s.
