Sergeant Vincent James Collins never used to chase the hoons as they raced their cars and motorbikes through the streets of Landsborough. He didn’t need to. He knew where they lived and would simply sit and wait for them to come home. Or, knowing their families, he would knock on their front door and pop in for a quiet chat, well aware that when the young trouble makers finally showed their faces, there would be hell to pay from their parents. Maintaining the law and order in a small town, he realised, wasn’t just the responsibility of the police. He had allies throughout the close-knit community. An old-style country cop, he cut his teeth on the job in wartime Rockhampton, arriving in his first posting in 1942, the same time as the first wave of American servicemen landed in central Queensland. After four lively years there, he was transferred to Theodore, where he would meet his future wife, Patricia Lovett.
The pace of life there was somewhat slower, he found. For starters, the only transport provided by the Police Force was a horse – this in a day when he was also responsible for the mining town of Moura, some 60km away. He may have moved at an unhurried pace yet always seemed to be one step ahead of whatever mischief was afoot on his beat. And even in an era when a sideways glance from the local police sergeant could stop a bar full of brawlers in their tracks, he had something special about him, an air of authority that could defuse trouble almost before it started.
No doubt some of that he learned at the old Police Depot where he did his training in the early 1940’s, having come straight off his parents’ dairy farm at Djuan, outside Toowoomba. The stern fatherly approach he took to his work can probably be traced back to the fact that he had considerable practice at it at his home. Devout Catholics, he and Pat, his wife of 54 years, raised no fewer than 14 children, with a neat split of seven boys and seven girls. It was the family joke that Sgt Collins received so few transfers during his 35 years in the force – just two after his wedding in 1950, to Bulimba (1950 – 1964) and Landsborough (1964 until his retirement in 1977) – because there weren’t that many places with a police house big enough to accommodate the ever-expanding family.
Back Row: A C Clark, Mathew Jospeh Cranitch, J S Montgomery, V M Robinson, J K Henderson, D Shaw, J Maccheroni, T H Warwick, P L O’Shea.
Centre Row: N V Jensen, D J Rowan, J B Czislowski, D P Cain, R R Weise, D R Goan, V J Collins, E J Burns, R G Youels, V Beutel, E J Aspinall.
Front Row: L P Rowan, R H Gillespie, Insp F Clifford, Insp R M Matheson, M J Cromarty, O D Barrett, J D Mahoney.
Image No. PM2496 courtesy of the Queensland Police Museum.
Bulimba might be a trendy, expensive near-city suburb these days but in the 1950’s it was very much a working-class area, the Bulimba pub the local watering hole for wharfies and meatworkers. They were a volatile mix and many was the time Sgt Collins had to step in and robustly restore the peace. Still, sometimes things got out of hand. It seems unreal today, with genteel coffee shops spilling out on to its sidewalks, but so violent was Oxford Street that the Brisbane Telegraph once even tagged it ‘Hell Street’ in a banner page one headline.
Landsborough offered a quieter life, although it too made heavy demands on Sgt Collins and the two police officers assigned to him. Until his retirement, the main Sunshine Coast highway ran though the town and all too frequently the local sergeant was called out to deal with grim and grisly fatal road crashes. One crash however, he was happy to attend. An ice-cream van had run out of control coming down the Maleny Range and toppled over. Fortunately, the driver wasn’t injured but it was a hot day and the van’s cargo wasn’t going to last long in the heat. By happy coincidence, Sgt Collins knew of a local family with 14 children. It said a lot for his standing in Landsborough and the respect in which he was held there that Sgt Collins chose to retire in the same small community in which he had enforced the law.
In July 2004 Vincent Collins died in a Caloundra nursing home, aged 87. At his funeral, police formed a guard of honour and then, blue lights flashing, accompanied the funeral procession to Caloundra cemetery.
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This article was written in 2004 by Wayne Smith, journalist for The Australian, who was married to the second of Mr Collins’ seven daughters. The Police Museum is open from 9am to 4pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 3pm on the last Sunday of the month (Feb-Nov) and is located on the Ground Floor of Police Headquarters at 200 Roma Street, Brisbane. Contact: E: museum@police.qld.gov.au
“FROM the VAULT- From Brisbane to Bulimba then bush” by the Queensland Police Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode