Thomas Sutcliffe was a mid level Canberra bureaucrat who
worked in intelligence for thirty years. However finally he decided he had had enough and wanted revenge on the bastards loosely
described on his tax return as his employers. He did have a plan involving a water tower and a shot gun, but decided that
moving to the Gold Coast and writing a book would be more fun and provide years of psychological angst for all those creeps
he used to work with who would spend ages trying to work out if the wanker on page 197 was, in fact, based on them or really
Terry from intelligence analysis.
Sadly Thomas Sutcliffe died suddenly in his Gold Coast
home, merely minutes after contacting Channel Nine and agreeing to tell all in return for an incredible amount of money. Kerry
Packer and Ray Martin flew down there on the Channel Nine chopper armed with promotional T-Shirts, sun visors and Eddie McGuire
to tempt Sutcliffe to tell his story, but unfortunately by the time they got there Sutcliffe was dead.
There is speculation that he was murdered by Australian security
agents in an attempt to stop him from revealing sensitive information. This theory has never been proven as experts have argued
it is inconceivable: The probability of an Australian security agent getting the address right is virtually impossible.
Although the coroner officially ruled Sutcliffe’s
death as suicide, many questioned the probability that, although Sutcliffe was a very stupid man, how he could have managed
to drown himself in his own dishwasher. There has also been much speculation on his ability to programme the rinse cycle to
run twice from inside the machine.
However six weeks after his death I found his journal under
a large rock in the communal rock garden and, after the payment of various body corporate fees, retrieved and transcribed
Sutcliffe’s drunken scrawlings.
Although only working as a casual lawn mower at the time
I immediately saw a chance to put those three years in an undergraduate journalism course, the two years working on a masters
of investigative journalism, the three years working on a PHD in analytical journalistic studies and that two week Centrelink
course in typing to good use. I realized it was my journalistic duty to uncover the truth of Sutcliffe’s story, make
a shit load of money and tell Chris Masters to go take a running jump.
To that end I began to piece Sutcliffe’s slightly
nawed notes together. The gaps in Sutcliffe’s story have been painstakingly filled in using secondary sources, recollections
from disgruntled colleagues and outright lies.
I discovered that, like most government employees Sutcliffe
was a very bitter and twisted individual in serious need of all sorts of professional help.
If the old adage ‘looking at the world from the bottom
of a beer glass’ could be applied in Sutcliffe’s case, it would probably be more accurate to say he looked at
the world through the bottom of a vodka bottle. Hence Sutcliffe’s constant ‘tired and emotional’ state, and the somewhat scatty and disorderly state of this journal.
This, combined with the government invoking just about
every national security rule they could think of to try to stop the public from being able to get hold of information has
meant Sutcliffe's story has never been told...
Until now.
Trevor Spall 2010
See the Hilton fiasco of 1994… ‘oh 26 a…. sorry – I thought this was 27 a. I’ll
just get these sub automatic machine guns out of your face then shall I?’