‘The file says I have a criminal record since the age of two’: the not-so-extraordinary story of Uncle Larry Walsh
It would take 60 years for Larry Walsh to realise why he had been harassed by police even as an eight-year-old. He’d been given a police record as a toddler. Now his story is being made into a play
Taungurung man Larry Walsh has more reasons than many to be angry. When he was just two-and-a-half the state took him and his sisters from their home, a riverside hut at Mooroopna, northern Victoria, where he was being cared for by his nana while his mum was in hospital. From there he went to a series of children’s homes. By the age of eight he was living with a foster family in which the father was a violent drinker.
He was endlessly racially abused and bullied at school, and blamed for starting fights when he physically retaliated or defended himself. Meanwhile, he was subject to constant attention and harassment by police – alleging that, even as an eight-year-old, he was a no-good criminal responsible for crimes he hadn’t committed – which both tested and confused him. For he had never at that stage committed any offence against the law. Or so he thought.
Unknown to Uncle Larry Walsh, now 71, he did have a criminal record. Although it wasn’t until he was in his 60s that he discovered the Kafkaesque farce that had in no small part shaped the course of his life: that the very act of state removal of an Aboriginal child from their family bequeathed to the minor a criminal record. Under “offence” his police record says “care/protection application” and under sentence it states “committed to care of Child Welfare Services”. The age of the offender is stated as “two years 6 months”.
Until 1989 it was standard practice for Victorian children removed from their families purportedly for welfare reasons to be given a police record. Walsh was among thousands of Aboriginal children in the state whose traumatic experiences of removal from often functional families (there was no evidence the infant Larry Walsh or his sisters were in danger) were criminalised by the state.
When Walsh found out in 2016 about the fallacious criminal history that had shadowed his life, Victoria was the only Australian state or territory without a scheme to expunge from the record irrelevant convictions. His white-hot anger transformed into a positive energy for social change and law reform. Walsh became a leading advocate for justice for the thousands of Aboriginal people branded criminals simply for having been removed from their families, manifesting in the passage of the Spent Convictions Act 2021.
Now his long life of tragedy, sadness and triumph is about to be celebrated in a stage play, Lazarus, opening in Melbourne next week.
To describe “Uncle Larry” (as he is known in Victorian Indigenous communities) as an activist, story-teller and scion of Victoria’s Indigenous communities underestimates the complexity of his life in a way that the play, written and directed by John Harding, aims to more fully illustrate.
Walsh is anxious about seeing his life unfold on stage (it is based on a long series of interviews with him, although he does not appear in it), but he believes it will help people, even those who know him, to more fully understand why he is who he is.
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As a child and teenager the false criminal record became partly self-fulfilling for Larry Walsh. “Because I had a police file from the age of two, the police started picking me up from the age of eight or so and blaming me … you know I’m an eight-year-old and the file says I have a criminal record since the age of two,” he says.
He became anxious. Hyper-vigilant and depressed.
He says his foster father tried to teach him “hand to hand combat” manoeuvres he’d learned as a soldier. And while Walsh did learn more about how to fight and protect himself, he also received permanent damage to his shoulders by being battered about in the process.
He has endured serious physical pain ever since.
Walsh was the only Black child in his school, he says, and he got banned from fighting at around the age of seven or eight. “There was a grade sixer who picked on me and I lost my temper and hurt him … so they just banned me in primary school from fighting, which left the bullies able to get me. I just wasn’t permitted to fight back,” he says.
This is when he started to learn about pain and the power of anger.
“When they wanted to fight me, they couldn’t hurt me. That’s the thing. Because I’d been hurt more than they ever had – they couldn’t imagine how much I’d been hurt. So [physical] pain didn’t matter to me. I had not so much an anger but a rage inside me. So I would dodge as many [punches] as I could and block as many as I could … I was trying to protect them from my rage but at the same time I already knew how to hurt people.”
Walsh talks about himself analytically, as only someone who has done enormous soul-searching and psychological analysis and self-examination might. He speaks warmly, with great humour and devoid of any evident anger.
Picked on at primary and then secondary school, subject to violence in his foster home, “picked on by the cops” because he was essentially branded “criminal”, Walsh says he “was trapped in a cycle of being labelled for things I’d never ever done. So then I felt I had to do them.”
At 14 he was convicted of breaking into a house and sent to Turana youth training centre.
As an adult his interactions with the police, due to his criminal record, continued. He became “a loner”, choosing seasonal jobs often out of the city. He still lives in rural Victoria with his partner and daughters.
He is a respected elder known for his welfare and outreach work, and his cultural advocacy across Aboriginal communities.
Walsh says that while he is represented in the play, he did not want to personally appear on stage.
“I felt that it would be better if I wasn’t in it because part of it is to do with my memories and sometimes it gets a little bit emotional for me,” he says.
“So you know if I do it people might like it but it’s, like, how am I going to feel at the end of doing it?” Even though Walsh is not on stage as part of the performance of Lazarus, the play will still be emotionally exposing for him. He knows that watching it will be challenging. Sharing his story (as he has done by working in outreach with young offenders and speaking publicly about it) and the need for self-preservation is a fine balance, as he explains. “It’s like the other day I went to a deaths in custody rally and found it difficult – I haven’t spoken very often at them over the last few years because I had to bury one of my uncles and I also had to bury one of my baby brothers [who died in custody]. And so even 30 years later it’s still a bit of an emotional thing for me.
“Because when he [my brother] died I was saying I’d come up and see him on the Friday night for the weekend and on Thursday night he was found dead in a police cell. That’s what I mean about how it’s still a bit emotional with me.”
He says he relates to the title Lazarus because he “always comes back” from life’s challenges.
“I hope people come to understand my motivations so I can stop always trying to explain who I am. That is what I am hoping to get out of it – to show how it is that I used the other side of anger as the motivation for change rather than just to lash out.”
Lazarus is playing at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne from 1-3 May