Take My Advice, I'm Not Using It! by Rod Halsted Extract

Allen & Unwin
Jul 30
2 min read

Read an extract from Take My Advice, I'm Not Using It! by Rod Halsted.

Rod Halsted has done just about everything you probably shouldn’t—and a few things you definitely couldn’t make up. From hitching across the country in search of trouble to running drugs on public transport, he’s spent a lifetime dancing on the edge with a grin.

Now, older but only slightly tamer, Rod kicks off his story in his own words—raw, funny, and completely unapologetic.

PREFACE

I caught a bus to my first drug deal. At the time, I lived in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Newtown, where you could leave your front door open without fear of being burgled—but only because so many of Sydney’s criminals lived in the area. It was the early seventies and I travelled by bus to the upmarket harbour- side suburb of Abbotsford because I didn’t own a car and didn’t have enough money for a cab.

My last deal ended abruptly in 1981 in a country town with a police pistol to my head after I had collected five kilos of the best grass ever grown in Australia. Well, that’s what the courts said, anyway.

In between those two events, I made and lost millions of dollars. I had guns pointed directly at me on six occasions. I was part of the inner circle of an extremely successful drug importation ring run by a ruthless man whom I liked a great deal.

I travelled to Pakistan in 1978 in the company of an easygoing bloke, now one of London’s crime tsars, to deliver money to members of the powerful Bhutto family. At the time they were in opposition to General Zia, who had just hanged the incumbent president of Pakistan and head of the Bhutto clan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

I picked up from Sydney customs two shipments of drugs so large they required trucks to transport them. I went from pauper to prince and back again and lived to tell the tale.

I married a woman whose father would rather she had taken vows with anyone other than this hard-drinking reprobate. I managed to prove some of his suspicions about me correct. I got myself busted in Wagga Wagga after setting up a cocaine bust for the cops that went so wrong that I, along with two police officers, ended up with a contract on my head—and, in my case, gaol time to serve.

I ended up a hopeless alcoholic with arrest records in four states, including six drunk-driving convictions. I have written off seventeen motor vehicles and three motorbikes, and have had to deal with the fact that I abandoned my two daughters when they were seven and five.

And finally, after I had lost absolutely everything, I found the one thing I’d strayed from years before: my true self.

It’s been interesting. Here’s my story.

Extracted from Take My Advice, I'm Not Using it!

by Rod Halsted.