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Brett Maston was once Australia’s Most Wanted ... now the career criminal is seeking a shot at redemption

Outside the meeting place, are the cars. Shiny and sleek. High powered, high value — symbols of wealth and profit. Inside, the men and women gathering for breakfast know each other well. Hard lives which have taken a heavy toll, on them and on society. Between them, they have served 700 years of prison time. Serious time for serious crimes. And in their midst — an obvious mentor for many of those gathered — is Brett Ronald Maston. Bank robber. Escapee. Former fugitive. At one time considered by police in three States as “Australia’s Most Wanted”. And now aged 56, he is still an imposing figure. Maston’s body has been abused over the years. By himself, and by others. It bears the scars of a life spent running. From the law and from the past. But on this morning, in this place, Maston is among his people. His crew. It is a rare gathering — not often do they all get to be in one place at one time. They are usually busy on jobs, all over the city. But today, the tools are down for a couple of hours, to listen and learn from someone who has also spent a life dealing in pain and suffering. Someone linked inexorably for life with appalling deeds, and abhorrent crimes. Dr Fiona Wood. Brett Maston’s life started surrounded by Sunshine. The Melbourne suburb is only 12km from the heart of the CBD. Today it is considered one of the most walkable suburbs in the city — a haven for foodies, brought into a shiny new train station amid cinemas, shops and parks. In the mid-70s, with a core of housing commission homes, it was a battler’s base camp. “Our parents come from lower socio-economics and they battled to get through,” Maston says. “My Mum and Dad were blue-collar workers — they all worked, none of them got into trouble. My brother, sister, family, uncles, aunties, cousins — nobody ever got in trouble. “But as kids, you know, you’re bored and I ended up in a bit of trouble.” That trouble included stealing a car. That landed the teenager in front of a magistrate, who deemed the early criminal foray worthy of a fine of $350 — the equivalent of about $1400 today. A lot more than Maston, or his parents could afford to pay. And so, with the fines unpaid, he had to repay his debt to society another way. Through time spent at the Turana Youth Training Centre. Formerly known as the Royal Park Receiving Depot for Girls and Boys, the site was Victoria’s sole reception centre for children placed in state care. In 1955, it was decided the name should be changed to something more stimulating. Turana — one of the Indigenous words for rainbow — was chosen. The only colours Brett Maston remembers of that time though were dark, and bleak. “I was nervous, and scared by it, and I got manipulated and abused.” That abuse, by two staff members, was sexual. It was severe. And it changed the course of Brett Maston’s life. “After that, I found it hard to deal with because it wasn’t something I could come out with. And I turned to drugs, I found drugs. “First off, because when I used to go to sleep, all I could do is dream about this stuff — so then I found speed, which kept me awake so I didn’t have to deal with the dreams. “So then I end up in jail for burglaries and crap, and so at 17 in Pentridge I got introduced to heroin. I found comfort in it, but unfortunately it ruled my life — to try and deal with those demons.” The demons that Maston had to deal with at Turana were not just his. During hearings at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a string of former Turana children told similar tales — of abuse by screws, of a fear of reporting, and of lifelong, devastating impacts. Even in Turana’s own instruction manual, the destructive path could be seen stretching out. “Sometimes boys sent to Turana can become hardened or institutionalised. They are exposed to the company of other offenders who can be a bad influence,” the document coldly stated. In Maston’s case, one of those was Dennis Allen — a notorious Melbourne drug dealer known by some as ‘Mr Death’ because of his reputed role in a dozen murders. It was Allen who gave Maston his first heroin hit inside Pentridge. “I was mixing with murderers and armed robbers and started getting that education — not the murder part,” Maston said. But in the armed robbery part, Maston was a keen student. By 1995, Maston’s particular set of skills had been taken to banks in Osborne Park, Canning Vale, Balcatta and Riverton. When arrested in June of that year, they found a robbery kit which included a flak jacket, two sawn-off shotguns and a .223 semi-automatic assault weapon. Wanted in Melbourne and captured in WA, Maston was looking at many more years behind bars. And more separation from his partner, who had just fallen pregnant. So, after an apparent episode of self-harm, he was taken by prison guards to Fremantle Hospital — where they were met by Maston’s girlfriend and a sawn-off shotgun. For four months, the pair remained on the run — earning the nicknames of Australia’s Bonnie and Clyde, and the country’s most wanted. And after stints in Victoria, and Queensland, Maston was finally recaptured in Quinns Rocks, after walking into an unlocked house and putting his thongs under the couch. On his T-shirt was the slogan: “Everyone who lives dies, but not everyone who dies has lived”. In Brett Maston’s wake were handfuls of damaged victims. Bank tellers, who had stared down shotgun barrels. Bystanders, confronted with confusion and chaos. And one little girl needing to see a doctor at Fremantle Hospital, who instead saw a firearm, and waiting room full of fear. It was those victims which State prosecutor Patti Chong recalled in January 1996, when she stood up to send Maston down. And it was those same victims that Justice Neville Owen turned to as he sent the 29-year-old back to prison. “I have seen victim impact statements from two of the bank officers concerned in the robberies,” Justice Owen said. “Your actions have had a profound effect on the lives of these two individuals and, I have no doubt, on many others as well. The same can be said for the effect of your antics . . . at the hospital. “I can well imagine the terror felt by innocent bystanders and hospital staff as well as the prison officers concerned.” After Ms Chong’s urgings, Justice Owen jailed Maston for 14½ years. “And that shows you how good she is,” he says now. His time didn’t pass quietly. Jailhouse phone calls, which led to a prisoner’s partner being held against her will, earned another sentence. His partner, also doing time, gave birth to their daughter in prison — where they were also set to get married. And a charge, laid over the death of a security guard during one of his Victorian robberies, was dropped after prosecutors agreed it was “absolutely clear” he had not pulled the trigger. After 12 years, and a vow to go straight, Maston was free, from prison at least. But months later, more charges emerged — allegations of guns, bullets and tens of thousands in cash. And so Maston went walkabout again. This time to the Philippines, with a different partner and a different funding model. Speaking on oath, in a court, Maston described how prison connections had left him with mining tenements he did not know what to do with — but connections he thought might. And so after meetings in boardrooms, and coffee shops, a company worth millions sprang up from the red dirt near Meekatharra, and Maston was paid well. The money allowed a high life in a high rise in Manila. And Maston, and fiancee Rissa, were relishing a new start, with a new baby — Brett Jr. “I had permanent residency, I didn’t think I had any problems,” Maston said. But life, as always, had a way of catching up with him. After a falling out with government officials he believed were friends, Maston’s home was raided, he was arrested and detained — and fearful of years inside the notorious Filipino prison system. “That’s where it’s going to start getting a bit hairy, because there were some blokes in there five, seven years,” Maston recalls. “I lay there, and looked at the bloke laying on the floor. I thought he had mud crabs on him, but they were bedbugs.” On his arrival back in Australia, Maston publicly stated he would plead guilty — in fact he said he would be happy to. Privately, he knew he was back at square one. Nine months inside, and then on the outside: “The same bulls..t again, from the moment I got out — fighting and carrying on. Different problems with different people, just backwards.” And in the background the demons, and the drugs. In 2017 and 2018, charges of burglary, assault, guns. Eking out a living collecting debts. Living, but on the margin. Then, in 2020, in a hidden compartment under a shelf next to a statute of Ned Kelly, police found an ounce of heroin. An unlicensed shotgun under the bed, an unlicensed Colt handgun nearby, ammunition for both weapons, two tasers. More charges. More prison. And more trouble. “I was seriously assaulted — weak as piss really — they assaulted me from behind. I spent two months in hospital, I had bleeding on the brain,” he said. “And I got home and I said . . . I’m going to change things. “But I still wasn’t quite there. Then the TRG rocked up six weeks later, and my son, they were calling him outside. My son just yawned, and walked out to see his mum and dad in cuffs. And just he looked and thought: ‘That’s normal’. “I knew it had to stop. It had to stop there.” For it to stop, Maston knew he had to go back to the start. “I had been running from the law since I was about 13, 12. That’s a long time,” Maston said. “I lived like I had a front, and it was time to get rid of that front. I needed to start my life fresh. “I needed to deal with all my past and if it had to be out in the open, and it was going to help me move into the future, then it needed to be told.” And so he began telling, tentatively, to psychologist Marian Binnie, about what had happened to him at Turana. At the same time, he told his story to George O’Neil — the controversial pioneer of the naltrexone treatment into drug addiction. As one expert extracted from Maston’s memory, another implanted into his stomach. Attempts at self-healing he feels he never got the chance to start in prison. “There’s no rehabilitation in prison. None whatsoever. You’re put on pause,” Maston says. “You just go into your cell, you just get up to muster, back in your cell, get up to muster. It’s just repetitive. Nothing.” And in his significant time, no meaningful training. It was an issue which former WA police detective Chris Bown was already so exasperated about, he had quit the force to do something about it. “I got sick of locking people up, I wanted to start unlocking people. To try and get these guys out working, back with their families, back paying taxes, back in with their children,” Bown says. So he set up Thrive Integration, a company looking to find prisoners a job, while finding companies workers desperate for a chance. “Chuck a guy into prison he is going to be with bad people. He is going to go in a little bit bad, and he’s going to come out ten times worse,” Bown said. “Chuck a guy on a building site — it is the perfect boot camp to get back into society. Get them into the routine of working, getting here 7am, drug free.” In recent years, Teamwork WA — run by Aaron Visser — has begun putting those workers on site, and in front of managers and bosses. And one of those bosses is Gerry Hanssen. Building skyscrapers in Perth for 50 years, Hanssen has always done things his way. And he says he has always wanted to find a way to give second chances on his sites. “I always wanted to do something like this. Something that drives change. But I didn’t want to take a dollar from the government to do it — as soon as you do, you lose control of what you are trying to do,” he said. The program began with 10 men. The ambition is reach 1000. They currently have about 100, working on various building sites around Perth. And Brett Maston is one of them. “You give people hope. Give them a give them a chance at a future. And I think you get a surprise because we work hard. They’ll work six days a week.” Maston has been, since May. In that time, he has become an on-site leader to many. His now wife Rissa also works with the program. And on this morning, the majority of those men and women — who between them spent all those years in prison — are at a breakfast to listen to the woman whose work during the Bali bombings made her a national icon. She talks of scars, of healing, of positivity, of forward thinking, and of her own dark moments since those bombs exploded 20 years ago. “The only way I can keep in front of that trauma is by continuing to do better, learning from today to make tomorrow better,” she told those listening. They include Brett Maston. And sat next to him was Patti Chong — the lawyer who put him away for all those years, all those years ago. Who now considers him a little like a son. When Brett Maston was arrested again in 2020, and then lay half dead in hospital, he remembered the woman who had put him away. This time he wanted her on his side. So he hired her, to defend him against the charge which could, yet again, put him back to square one. And so a month before they sit together at breakfast, Chong and Maston are sat together before a smaller audience — 14 men and women making up a jury at Perth’s District Court. They are the ones who will decide whether Maston will go back to prison, again — this time on an allegation of planning to sell that heroin which fell out of that shelf above that Ned Kelly statue. Prosecutors say he must have been dealing, because of the amount, because of the guns, because of the bags, and because of the scales. But Ms Chong says the amount was down to Maston’s chronic habit. The scales were to weigh the doses he gave himself, the bags to help administer that dose. And the guns, due to a fear his past may again come back to haunt him, by way of a visit from those he may have crossed. “He has done his crimes, he has done his time — and you need to understand his past to understand what he was going to do with those drugs. Walk a mile in his shoes,” Ms Chong urged the jury. Maston walked them through his life step-by-step — tearfully starting with the abuse which started it all. After three days, the jury believed the drugs were for him, not to sell to others. Judge David MacLean was also convinced, as he spared Maston immediate jail. “It is the very sad experience of humanity that violence begets violence, and you are a living example of that,” Judge MacLean said. “People understand, if you’re violent to people, particularly children, if you treat them unkindly, you can only expect more violence as a result of that unkindness. “And who knows? Perhaps one day in this State, we might see an apology in 30 years time for things that might be happening more recently. “It certainly does speak volumes to your credit that you are a positive role model and that you are prepared . . . to expose yourself to the community and to put yourself out there to work with people, to encourage them to be the best that they can be. “And in that time, do the same for yourself. And your life is a stunning example, if I can say, of the positive steps that might be made by a person who is properly supported and kindly reintegrated into the community.” Brett Maston knows that reintegration has a long way to go, but is getting there. The Government of Victoria, through their redress scheme, has acknowledged his experience, and have agreed the granting of significant compensation. With that, Maston also intends to say sorry to the people he hurt — by paying back every dollar of criminal injuries compensation paid to his victims because of his acts. “I need to do that. I need to apologise for my past. I need to apologise to people that I’ve hurt. At the time I had no thinking — I didn’t think of anybody else,” he says. “And I apologise. I can’t do nothing else. I know apologise is just a word, but I feel it.” Three more words will also follow Maston for the rest of his life. “Australia’s Most Wanted.” They were printed more than 20 years ago. And for much of that time, they have also been imprinted across Maston’s back, in the shape of a large, blue tattoo. Those words are still there, in his history, and on his back. But as they were once a symbol of what he wanted to be, now he says they are a symbol of what he was. “It is all behind me mate.”

The West Australian exclusiveBrett Maston was once Australia’s Most Wanted ... now the career criminal is seeking a shot at redemption

exclusive
Brett Maston was once Australia’s Most Wanted ... now the career criminal is seeking a shot at redemption