Bloodhouse reveals the previously-untold real story of Australia’s most amazing jail escaper, Darcy ‘Houdini’ Dugan, and exposes high levels of political and police corruption in NSW in the late 1900s.
A career robber, Dugan escaped from custody six times, mostly from ‘escape-proof’ circumstances. He once went through a ceiling, the roof and sneaked over the outer wall at Sydney’s Long Bay Jail in daylight, 30 metres away from an armed guard, only 25 minutes after being imprisoned.
Most of Bloodhouse is written by Dugan from notes he smuggled out of jail and gave to then-journalist Michael Tatlow, who has written the final chapters. It also features 16 pages of graphic illustrations, including numerous front page stories and letters Darcy wrote to Michael from prison.
Tatlow, honouring a promise to Darcy Dugan, had to withhold his manuscript for the book until corrupt enemies they exposed had ‘turned to dust’. Once ‘Mister Big of Crime’ in Sydney, the late Leonard McPherson, for instance, threatened Tatlow at gunpoint never to write a book revealing what Dugan had told him.
The book’s title Bloodhouse, is the nickname for notoriously brutal Grafton jail, where Dugan spent a record eleven years of torture, despite him never being a murderer. Ironically, the prisons department, in July 2012, announced that Grafton jail would soon be closed. Michael Tatlow has said, ‘Heck, they must have heard that the book is coming!’
Bloodhouse tells of a conspiracy in 1970 by then Premier Askin, three Sydney detectives and McPherson to get freed Darcy Dugan back in jail to stop his public accusations of high-level corruption, later proven accurate by the royal commissions.
Dugan was a counsellor at Sydney’s Wayside Chapel when the police told newspaper baron Sir Frank Packer that Dugan planned to kidnap Sir Frank’s grandchildren, Kerry’s children James and Gretel. And that Michael Tatlow knew about it.
Packer believed it, stopped the Daily Telegraph’s support for Dugan’s claims, and sacked his young Chief-of-Staff and Pictorial Editor, Tatlow, who was writing Bloodhouse.
Betrayals of Dugan by McPherson, and convictions for crimes he evidently did not commit, added seventeen years to Dugan’s time in jail.
Darcy Ezekial Dugan was a career robber and brilliant jail escapee. In later life he became a rehabilitation officer, until he died from Parkinson’s disease in 1991. Michael Tatlow was Chief-of-Staff and Pictorial Editor at the Daily Telegraph, News Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Acting Editor of The Bulletin. He also worked as Producer and Chief-of-Staff for ABC-TV News in Tasmania. Michael has published four previous books.
Bloodhouse | Darcy Dugan with Michael Tatlow | HarperCollins | 9780732295523 | $29.99
The launch will be at the Hobart Bookshop, Salamanca Square, at 5.30 p.m. Thursday, August 9.
The Hobart Bookshop
