Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Greg Scott moved to the gritty Melbourne suburb of Collingwood 15 years ago to discover his next-door neighbour was the notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read, who claimed to have used blowtorches on his victims and bolt cutters on their toes.
“It was a pretty interesting way to be introduced to Collingwood,” Scott recalls. He had recently graduated from the University of Canberra, where he’d studied industrial design. The young man who’d grown up in genteel Canberra had never met anyone quite like Read.
“I felt it was important not to be too intrusive on a bloke like Chopper , but he’d often be sitting in his front yard, drinking – of all things, Vodka Cruisers – and we’d have a bit of a yarn. We got on OK.” Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, the face of an old Collingwood.
Credit: Jon Reid Here was a sharp intersection in the rapidly evolving culture of Collingwood, which vies with Fitzroy for the title of Melbourne’s oldest suburb. Read, though retired from crime, was an extreme symbol of a disappearing Collingwood: hard and violent and unpredictable. Advertisement Scott was part of a new tide of young, educated creatives intent on converting the edgy history of Melbourne’s inner north into something that might capture the future.
Read died of l.
