Cecil ‘Cec’ Austen was appointed to the Queensland Police on 15 October 1956, he was 22 years old. He has worked in many regional areas such as Townsville, Hughenden, Nambour, Blackall, Jericho, Dunwich, Pittsworth and Charleville. Cec later played an integral role in the establishment and subsequent success of the Queensland Police Dog Squad in Brisbane. Inspector Austen retired out from the Mareeba district in 1986.
This interview was conducted on 10 August 2005 between retired Assistant Commissioner Greg Early and retired Inspector Cecil Austen. In this excerpt Cec describes how difficult it was to find work for police dogs in the 1970s.
Transcript
“Well, in the early stages I had a full time job getting the dog accepted by the rank and file. We worked something like an 8pm to 4am shift, and that was the most chances as far as the dogs would be needed. And even when we went back to the office to finalise we’d do a long road home going through the outer suburbs, hoping somebody would need a dog as far as they’d chased somebody in a car and he’d go out and took off. And you knew the dog would be able to find him. The hours we put in, above and beyond the call of duty, to try and establish the dogs, but we still had the knockers. And it was hard work getting the message across for our police dogs, that there was a place for police dogs in our law enforcement.”… Continue reading