Foreword

Melbourne! Recently voted, along with Vancouver and Vienna, as one of the world's most liveable cities.

But what if it wasn't. What if it was rundown, dominated in the many poorer suburbs by gangs who did as they liked. What if it was possessed of an ineffectual police force who decided that the best thing they could do for the people of Melbourne was to let the gangs and the criminal element do what they liked to each other and worry about protecting the law-abiding citizens.

The most logical, the most likely result is of course that it would create a vigilante society in which people would feel obliged to take matters into their own hands, a society where guns of all sorts and many other types of weapons became readily available. Nearly as readily available as the drugs that financed them.

Two such vigilantes were Cyril Hillman, his son Winston and a band of very loyal and very close friends. They also controlled a business that made a lot of money from the drug trade.

Now this is never going to happen, not in a great town like Melbourne, not in a country like Australia. But it might make for a helluva story — Berwick Bob!