Former cop and now Anglican priest, Brenton Daulby, does not “take bullshit”, is sometimes slow to forgive, and suffers fools poorly.
He lists these few of his character traits as failings. And the 50-year-old husband and father of three adult daughters articulates that confessional list with seeming ease. Ordained in 1987, he still has the police officers’ penchant for calling things – even about himself – as he sees them.
So, if an LSA commander needs a lesson in the impact of inadequate staffing on his or her officers, Daulby will supply it – as he has in the past. He is, as a police chaplain, intensely concerned about the sometimes overwhelming pressure he sees cops work under today.
“They’re incredibly busy compared to when I was on patrols,” he says. “The workload’s far greater, and I do see that they’re under a great deal of stress. They’re certainly under more accountability today, too, particularly in patrol areas.”
Perhaps the less pressured work environment of the 1970s and early ’80s is part of the reason Daulby loved his own time in the job so much. But life in the Major Crash Investigation Unit – in which he worked for several years – did not then, nor does it now, come easy.
While he enjoyed the investigative process, Daulby remembers the job of sifting through vehicle wrecks and dead bodies, to uncover crash causes, as emotionally tough – even traumatic.
“Certainly death with children was always very difficult,” he says, “and we had several occasions when that happened.”
Daulby has never forgotten the crash and explosion of a fuel tanker on the Birkenhead Bridge at Port Adelaide. The tragic fire death of the driver is one reason the accident has remained so vivid in the former investigator’s memory.
Another reason is that the crash led to a run-in Daulby had with his then boss. When he and his partner had finished their work at the “messy and traumatic” scene, they received an order to return to Thebarton police barracks.
Daulby figured they were in line for “a pat on the back” for the excellent job they had done, in the most horrific of conditions. He was to be disappointed.
“Instead (of a pat on the back),” he explains, “I was threatened with a breach of general orders, because my boss saw me on TV and I didn’t have my police cap on. There’s still a lot of bitterness about that – having someone burn to death in your presence and, then, all you get for it is (someone) trying to put you on a charge.
“It forced me to review the accident many times in my head, to see what I’d done wrong. I thought I’d done a good job, as did my offsider. We worked damn hard. But I’ve certainly now forgiven the person concerned.”
Daulby learned a valuable lesson from the boss’s petty approach to a ludicrous headwear rule. “It made me very aware that police sometimes suffer an administrative trauma, or a systems-failure trauma,” he says.
“That can often have repercussions that are just as longstanding and nasty as seeing a dreadful event.”
Despite the odd bitter incident, Daulby speaks of his 12-and-a-half years in SAPOL as “a terrific time”. He not only enjoyed the lifestyle, which he found highly disciplined, but also the many close friendships he made.
The former Gilles Plains High School boy had come from a working-class Hillcrest family, which was never particularly religious. His exposure to Christianity came when a Salvation Army major and neighbour began taking the then five-year-old Daulby to church.
With the emphasis on camping, meeting other children and sport – rather than learning scripture – Daulby had great fun. But as a churchgoer, he remained a lone figure among his parents and three siblings.
“I look back and it’s quite strange,” he concedes, “but I’ve always been drawn to the church, in many ways.”
From the Salvation Army, he switched to a Baptist church until he began religious education at school. There, an RE teacher invited him to join the Hillcrest Anglican Church. He took up the invitation, and has remained an Anglican ever since then.
He left school at the age of 15 to take on a job as a messenger, before joining SAPOL as a 16-year-old in 1971. He had spent time as an air force cadet, so the move into police life seemed, to him, a natural progression.
After he graduated with Course 39 in December 1974, Daulby worked as a Para Hills patrol officer before he served a term as a traffic cop. Then came his foray into the Major Crash Investigation Unit.
Firm in his memory, apart from the fuel-tanker crash, is a collision between a Mini Minor panel van and a semi-trailer at the intersection of Port and South roads. Six young people ended up trapped inside the Mini Minor.
Says Daulby: “As I’m pulling the kids out, (I see) that one of the girls is the daughter of a close friend of mine. I found that a very traumatic situation. It gave me a hell of a shock.
“She had broken limbs, cuts and bruises and fairly severe facial injuries but went on to survive.”
Daulby the clergyman looks back at Daulby the police officer and describes him as a “pretty robust copper”, who worked hard and took no nonsense. Perhaps his former colleagues’ perception of him would differ from his own. But few of those with whom he worked ever knew of his strong religious convictions.
“I kept it fairly close to my chest,” he says. “In those days, the environment was one where you didn’t often talk about religion.”
Daulby eventually left Major Crash and went to work in Organizational Services at Tara Hall, a stately Greenhill Rd building in which SAPOL’s upper echelon once housed itself. He joined a project team working on a new uniform, but found his role “very hard”.
“I didn’t always agree with some of the decisions as far as the uniforms went,” he says, “but I had the job of selling it around SAPOL. That was bloody hard, because you had to sell something you may not have liked in some respects.”
Throughout his police career, Daulby had always felt as if the church had, in an intangible way, been drawing him toward life in the clergy. So, in 1984, he finally made the tough decision to succumb to that church magnetism and quit SAPOL.
He still remembers the day he walked into his superintendent’s office at Tara Hall and handed him his resignation. But the most difficult task, he found, was to tell his then colleagues he had quit.
To his surprise, they responded with “a terrific lot of support”, and no negative spin on his alternative career. On reflection, however, he suspects that some probably thought him crazy to substitute the clergy for law enforcement.
“But,” he says, “policing and the ministry are very similar jobs. After all, we both listen to people pleading not guilty a fair bit of our time. We both deal with people; we both deal with humanity, at its best and worst.”
Daulby went on to undertake his theological training over three years at Flinders University. Today, he is qualified in ministry, management, mediation and conciliation, and loss, grief and trauma counselling.
And, to that list, he is always quick to add his “doctorate of life in the school of hard knocks”.
With his qualifications, he went to work in a parish before joining the RAAF as a chaplain. In that role, he served air force personnel in Point Cook, Victoria, and the tactical fighter group – which flew the Hornet aircraft – in Williamstown, NSW.
Still with the RAAF in the early 1990s, he began a two-and-a-half-year stint in Butterworth, Malaysia, where he rose to the rank of squadron leader. But, by 1996, he had returned to Adelaide for a more settled life for his family.
“It was then that I rekindled my association with the police and became chaplain to Henley Beach patrols,” he remembers. “I enjoyed that thoroughly.”
Daulby has, for the most part, revelled in his 18 years as a man of the cloth, too. “I enjoy ministry; I enjoy working with people; and it’s certainly been a broadening experience for me,” he says.
Today, at Fort Largs, he serves as chaplain to police recruits and staff, and teaches ethics, map-reading and navigation.
Those who seek his ministerial counsel might have “relationship issues”, or simply trouble coping with their studies. He generally sees them after hours and away from the academy.
Bible-bashing, however, is not Daulby’s style. “I’ve never been like that,” he insists. “I’m not like that in parish life, with my family, or anyone else.”
He holds cops in the highest regard, but also harbours great concern for their current-day plight. Some officers, he asserts, have “been to hell and back” as a direct result of their work.
“And, often,” he says, “they’ve had very little support to help them through that. However, one thing about police is that, no matter what they might express about morale, they still give 110 per cent to the job. They’re incredible people, who do a very hard job – and bloody well.”
Daulby’s hope for police is to see them afforded greater recognition by governments, and the public.
Away from his work with police, Daulby chairs the Homicide Victim Support Group of SA, and serves with the Anglicare Loss and Grief Centre. But, as a young-looking 50-year-old, would he ever consider re-entry to SAPOL?
“Capital N, capital O,” he exclaims. “I just look at the workload now, the accountability, and the types of jobs they’re doing. I’m glad I’m on my side of things.”
– Brett Williams
