On 20 April 1990, Adolf Hitler's birthday, a group of Melbourne skinheads gathered in a small house in Pascoe Vale South. They saw themselves as warriors in a coming race war. By the end of the night a man was dead, killed with an axe and a kitchen knife over a drunken remark. The man with the axe was Dane Sweetman. This film follows him from that house into Pentridge, where he helped build one of the most violent racist gangs in Australia's prisons, and follows the man who once stood beside him, Andrew Kirby, who took a different road out.
Pascoe Vale South, 1990
David Noble, an English-born neo-Nazi, was drunk, maybe too drunk, when he turned to Sweetman and made a remark about his girlfriend: they did not make women like her in England, and maybe he should borrow her for the night. Sweetman barely hesitated. The axe came down and split Noble's skull. Noble stayed conscious, reached for the wound and said, bewildered, that there was something in his head. Sweetman's associate, Martin Darren Bayston, took a boning knife from the kitchen and stabbed him 18 times.
The next morning Noble's body was dragged outside. His legs were cut off, and his remains were put in the boot of a car and dumped near the Yarra River at Kew.
Andrew Kirby was not convicted of this killing, but he was an integral member of Sweetman's gang, and he was charged over the bashing and killing of a man the gang had attacked earlier.
A political freedom fighter
Long before the axe, Sweetman was a violent outsider. By 16 he had been convicted of attempted murder. He had an affinity for knives and an explosive temper, and he first went to prison for armed robbery in the late 1980s. Behind bars he found a purpose. In his own mind he was no longer a head case but a political freedom fighter. He covered himself in far-right tattoos and wrote to friends outside urging violence and sending plans for explosive devices. "Give the dogs what they deserve," he wrote to one sympathiser, "full on racial warfare."
Kirby did not start out a racist. He was bullied as a child, at school and at home, and older boys took him in and he fell in with a skinhead group. He met Sweetman through a friend at a barbecue. He went over to Sweetman's parents' place, he says, and the next thing he knew they were shaving his head. For Kirby the ideology came later. Sweetman was all in: skinhead music, hate messages, everything. Kirby says they turned Melbourne into a war zone, and that you did not want to be caught out if you were a different race.
The Guard
Kirby was jailed over the attack on a man who died after 16 months in a coma. Inside, the name followed him. In a unit in South Australia he heard that a prisoner blamed him for the Noble killing and planned to cut his throat. Kirby got in first, throwing boiling water in the man's face and beating him, an attack he says the guards called the most horrific thing they had seen. In another prison a group of Aboriginal prisoners came to his cell over it, and he thought he would not leave alive. It was settled with a fight.
Pentridge should have been the end of Sweetman. Instead it gave him an audience. He aligned himself with a secretive white supremacist group called the Guard, founded by extremist prisoners and, the film says, backed by sympathetic officers. It claimed links to skinhead groups outside. His diaries, later seized, held plans for firebombings, instructions for homemade explosives and hit lists. He wrote that they had recruited men within the jail "and even some in blue".
Kirby describes a close gang of about six men around Sweetman, a big and intimidating figure people gravitated towards. They started a war with everybody, he says, and took over the system. Even old-school criminals feared them because they were so unpredictable.
The General
According to Kirby, Sweetman went too far, and made enemies he could not afford.
The recklessness drew the anger of seasoned armed robbers, drug dealers and enforcers who had built their own power inside, and who decided Sweetman had outlived his usefulness. The job of leading an attack on him and another notorious prisoner, Gregory Brazel, went to Matthew Johnson, the General, who later killed Carl Williams. Kirby says they smashed through bulletproof glass to reach them. Sweetman survived, but he was now a prisoner in disgrace, on protection. Prisoners of Lebanese, Pacific Island and Asian backgrounds were no longer standing for racist attacks, and new gangs were forming.
After
By 2005 Sweetman was out, and soon back in the news: barred from Melbourne pubs, attacking people who questioned his tattoos, breaching his parole. Where he is now, the film says, is unclear.
Kirby was released in 2019. He was a violent prisoner, he says, but he did not want the system to break him. Today he warns young people about radicalisation, and tells them to stop their mistakes while they still can.