Sirens Across the Water

Squad 72 reported to the Tasmania Police Academy at Rokeby on a warm, still morning. There were nineteen recruits, the smallest squad the Academy had taken in seven years. The reason was money. The Academy's operating budget had been cut by a fifth, and the cuts showed everywhere: in the textbooks the recruits would have to share, in the reduced ammunition allocation for the range, and in a training schedule compressed to save weeks of wages.

The squad was still signing forms in the administration building when Hobart's first counter-terrorism exercise began across the river. State and federal agencies were staging a simulated chemical incident at Salamanca Place, and the sirens carried faintly over the Derwent to the eastern shore. Commandant Patricia Wheeler, eight months into her command, set aside the opening programme. She had the squad taken to the lecture theatre, where the live television coverage was put up on the screen, and for most of an hour nineteen people who had not yet been issued a uniform watched police, ambulance and fire crews work through a contaminated city block.

The youngest of them was Duncan Edward Flack of Devonport, seventeen years old and five weeks short of his eighteenth birthday. Around him sat a former Army medic discharged after service in East Timor, a social worker who had left child protection exhausted, and Bradley Matthews, a mechanic from Launceston whose brother's murder had never been solved.

The cultural competency session in the afternoon was led by Dr Marcus Thompson, a Palawa educator brought in under the Academy's new curriculum. His scenarios were short and uncomfortable. A third of the squad could not answer his questions on Aboriginal sovereignty with any confidence. Two could not explain why a police officer should not call asylum seekers illegals. Flack answered slowly and drew on the mix of families he had grown up among on the Devonport waterfront, and Thompson marked him down as one to watch.

Inspector James Carlisle, recruited from Victoria Police to rebuild the fitness programme, ran the physical assessments at the pool. The obstacle course included arithmetic problems set at the point of exhaustion, and the swim test required ten minutes of treading water. Three recruits failed it. Matthews was one of them, hauled to the side after six minutes. Flack, who had swum off Mersey Bluff since childhood, stayed in the shallow end with him after the session ended.

The new computer laboratory, paid for by a federal counter-terrorism grant, was opened to the squad in the late afternoon. Half the recruits had never written a work email. The social worker took to the databases at once. Matthews typed with two fingers.

Wheeler's evening briefing was held with the squad seated in a circle rather than in rows. She spoke about community partnership and about the difference between guarding a community and fighting it. A handful of senior constables at the Academy for in-service training watched from the back of the room and did not hide their scepticism.

Rooms were assigned in pairs, and Flack was paired with Matthews. The accommodation block had been due for repair for two years. Its windows would not open more than a hand's width, the night stayed hot, and Matthews snored.