Albury’s own Aussie larrikin Rod Halsted has turned his rather bumpy life into a 356-page book, Take My Advice, I’m Not Using It! Photo: Supplied.
As a boy, Rod Halsted didn’t mind school. He just didn’t like the work.
“I had a far greater interest in life,” he laughs.
Perhaps this goes a long way to explaining his reckless ride through a life many couldn’t dare to imagine, let alone experience.
From outback pubs to dealing drugs, sharing a beer with Bob Hawke to dodging bullets from the law … from doing time to doing life stone-cold sober, the 74-year-old’s story is, ahem, as intoxicating as it is extraordinary.
It was when he stumbled into an AA meeting in Sydney some 25 years ago (he’d been sober a year) that the first small seed for writing his memoir was planted – by the late Barry Humphries of all people!
Halsted got to talking with the Aussie entertainer and actor (who long credited AA with getting free of the grog) after the meeting, and Humphries asked if he’d ever thought of writing his life story.
“I told him I had, but I wanted to get it right,” Halsted recalls. “He said to me, ‘I’ll give you a tip – don’t get it right, get it written!’
“That stuck in my head.”
But it wasn’t until Halsted sold his highly successful Albury HiLo pressure cleaning business about four years ago that he found the time to begin.
“I rolled out of bed one day and had 2000 words on the page in four hours and I did the same the next day, and the day after,” Halsted says. “After six weeks, I found I had a book.”
Now this rather irrepressible (and largely reformed) larrikin finds himself on his next great adventure – a whirlwind book tour promoting his rollicking 356-page memoir, Take My Advice, I’m Not Using It!
Joined by his lifelong mate and retired solicitor Geoff Romero, Halsted will speak candidly about his rollercoaster life at the Wagga Library on 19 November from 6 pm before heading to Yass, Queanbeyan and Canberra.
The pair, who met in Albury when they were 13, survived a Christian Brothers education, became best mates and were best men at each other’s weddings.
While Romero went on to become a solicitor for the Crown prosecuting those importing narcotics, Halsted would find himself in business with deadly crooks, embarking on overseas drug runs.
“He became a lawyer, I became a criminal,” Halsted says matter-of-factly.
It was actually at Wagga in 1981 that Halsted’s drug dealing would end abruptly with a police pistol to his head – and a six-year jail sentence.
“I had collected five kilos of the best grass ever grown in Australia. Well, that’s what the courts said, anyway,” he writes.
It was meant to be his last deal.
The boy who’d left school as soon as he was able and set off to Kalgoorlie looking for adventure would soon find himself in Sydney looking after a mate’s “business” selling marijuana.
“I was not an advocate for drugs, I was in my early 20s and lots of people were smoking dope so I thought I could make a buck out of it,” Halsted says.
He caught a bus to his first drug deal because he didn’t own a car and didn’t have enough money for a cab.
Halsted soon got caught up with “some very dangerous people”, working for a boss he refers to as ‘Gator’ in the book.
Over the years, “wild things happened”, including an overseas trip to London and Pakistan to deliver money to members of the powerful Bhutto family.
“At the time they were in opposition to General Zia, who had just hanged the incumbent president of Pakistan and head of the Bhutto clan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,” he writes.
While in Pakistan, Halsted was taken on a rather surprising outing – “I actually thought we were going to be executed” – to watch the giant green turtles laboriously make their way up the beach at Karachi to lay eggs during their breeding season.
“We watched them for four hours – I was enthralled,” he recalls.
When he returned home, he decided to get out. “But I was tempted to do one last deal – and I got caught,” Halsted says.
“That changed my happy-go-lucky attitude.”
‘He became a lawyer, I became a criminal’ … Rod Halsted with his lifelong mate and retired solicitor Geoff Romero during the book tour for Halsted’s 356-page memoir. Photo: Supplied.
The story of how he managed to serve only six months rather than six years in prison is possibly a book in itself, but let’s just say it involves his father’s intervention, friends in high places and an ordinary bottle of Scotch.
A four-day stopover at Goulburn’s maximum security prison on his way to Mannus Correctional Centre at Tumbarumba still haunts him.
“I saw things in that jail that revolted me and made me a very hard man,” he admits.
Halsted survived the experience by relying on his trademark bluff and bravado. “I had a ‘Don’t f— with me cloak’ but the thing is, I didn’t take it off,” he says.
Incredibly his wife – whom he’d married against her father’s wishes – stuck by him, and Halsted started a landscaping business before the couple moved back to Albury to raise their two daughters.
Booze had become a constant and crippling companion.
“I was drinking heavily, because I was deeply disappointed in myself,” Halsted says. “I had become bitter and twisted and I was hard to live with.”
Six years later he lost his marriage and eventually found AA and a path to sobriety. He’s been sober 26 years.
“I realised my problems were my own and I set about diligently changing my life. I didn’t want to be who I was.”
Halsted lives an honest life now and he’s “made amends to the people I’ve hurt as best I can”.
In many ways, Halsted marvels at the fact he’s still alive “given some of the risks I took”.
He’s stared down the barrel of a gun pointed at him six times.
“I think a lot about the people I’ve mixed with – many of whom I liked a great deal,” he says.
“But in the criminal world, money is second to not getting caught. I thought I was tied to a bunch of blokes but really you are on your own and it’s a dog eat dog world.”
Halsted has done just about everything you probably shouldn’t – and a few things you couldn’t make up.
But he says in ditching the grog and putting himself on the straight and narrow, a whole new world opened up.
He’s acted in four plays, completed a parachute jump and bungee jumped in Nepal.
And written a book. And got it published.
“Well, you know, it might just give somebody else hope,” he says.
Don’t get him wrong, though, Halsted says his book is laugh-out-loud funny in many parts.
Critics agree, describing the memoir as a “great story of a ‘lived in’ life”.
Former Albury journalist Tony Wright has endorsed the book as: “A wild, brawling and regularly hilarious tale of a country boy’s descent into the vicious Australian and international drug-running underworld, into near madness … and on to redemption. Frighteningly, it’s all true.”
Halsted says none of this would have been possible without the many friends (and unexpected acquaintances) he’s made along the way who’ve stood by him through thick and thin.
Older and slightly wiser now, he’s exceptionally grateful for the companionship and support of Romero on the book tour, and the expertise of Albury film-maker Helen Newman who has helped churn the publicity wheels.
“It’s pretty exciting to be 74 years old and have a project of this nature on the go,” he says.
Speaking with Halsted feels as much like a confession as it does a celebration of Aussie resilience and, ultimately, redemption.
He’s unapologetic, cheeky and refreshingly honest about the demons he’s faced:
“Because, finally, after I lost absolutely everything, I found the one thing I’d strayed from years before – my true self.”
Hear Rod Halsted (in conversation with Geoff Romero) speak at the following venues this month – visit his website to find out more:
- Wagga Wagga Library, 19 November, 6 pm
- Yass Library, 20 November, 5:45 pm
- Queanbeyan Library, 21 November, 2 pm
- Kingston ACT at The Book Cow, 21 November 6 pm.
