Dennis Hauenstein never thought of himself as a hero. ‘I am as ugly as they make them,’ he’d written home during the war, ‘and the makings of a rotten hero.’1 In truth, Paddy (as he liked to be called) was rather handsome in a rugged kind of way. Six feet tall, a talented rower, wrestler and runner, he quickly gained renown as one of the ‘crack athletes of the army’.2 Out in the field, Hauenstein served with distinction. Attached to the 1st Field Ambulance, he worked as a stretcher-bearer on the Somme and found himself selected for officer training in England.

Even when they sent Paddy back to ‘Blighty’, wounded by shrapnel and stricken with rheumatic fever, the young man continued to excel, playing for the West of England XV. And Paddy’s physical prowess was matched with equal courage. Far from being a ‘rotten hero’, one general thought, ‘there were no braver man on God’s earth’3 than Paddy Hauenstein.

Lieutenant Hauenstein survived the war, but coping with the peace proved quite a different matter. On his return to Australia, Paddy found work wherever he could. Always ‘a trier’, he scratched out a living rabbiting, building and painting. But for Paddy, and many more like him, it was a case of one step forward and two back. Long before the Great Depression of the 1930s, jobs were hard to find in Australia. Drought, economic uncertainty, and a glut of returned men on the market meant getting ahead was pretty unlikely.4

By February 1923, Paddy had been six months without work. The banks had closed on him and people all around town were chasing him for money. Paddy couldn’t provide for his wife, Grace, let alone their four young children. It hurt his pride not to be able to pay the bills and it broke his heart to see the kiddies hungry. Paddy felt he had failed as a husband, a father, and a man. He decided to take drastic measures.

Late one Tuesday in February 1923, Paddy waited outside the Government Savings Bank in Hurlstone Park. It was a sunny afternoon, so he stood in the shadows, watching from the street, waiting for his chance. When the last customer left, Paddy moved quickly. Creeping through the building, he could see the manager counting that day’s takings. That money seemed the answer to everything.

Paddy rushed at the counter and grabbed the manager by the throat. He hit him in the head, knocked him to the ground and punched the man repeatedly. Partly it was desperation, partly fear and panic, and partly his training. In a matter of moments, Paddy had overwhelmed the manager, clutched him firmly round the throat and planted his knees on the man’s chest. The manager called out to his wife for help and in an all too familiar rush of adrenaline, Paddy broke away from the scuffle and fled from the building.

Paddy ran away from the town towards Canterbury Racecourse. It was a good stretch and all the way the police were gaining on him. At the racetrack the exhausted, starving man surrendered meekly to arresting officers.

‘I am desperate and hard up against it,’ he told them. ‘That job looked easy, and I thought I would give it a go but . . . a woman came on the scene and that settled it.’ Paddy panted loudly between each sentence, still struggling to catch his breath. ‘It’s not for myself that I care; it’s for the wife and kids.’5

Soon after arriving at the police station, Paddy buckled over. His breathing was even more erratic now and he clutched at his stomach. ‘It is all over,’ he said, ‘let me go, do not try to save me.’ Paddy fell to the ground, lurching with convulsions, and died just a few minutes later. He’d swallowed poison as he watched the police close in on him – the only way out for a man unwilling to rot in prison. And as Paddy himself had said, the wife and children would probably be better off without him. His last wish was that someone say goodbye for him.

Paddy’s crime and his death shocked the community. He was eulogised in the press, ‘a good soldier, a good husband and father, and, until his fatal lapse . . . a good citizen.’6 A public subscription was raised to help his family – Paddy’s children were aged 15 months, 9, 11 and 13 years old. ‘Australia,’ the papers piously announced, ‘owes these bonny youngsters something.’ The money flooded in, over two hundred pounds, deferring, at least for a few years, absolute destitution for the widow and her children. But help had come far too late for Paddy Hauenstein.

Australia owes these bonny youngsters something: Grace Hauenstein and her children pictured in an appeal for charity, ‘the family of a man who never had a chance’.7 Evening News, 23 February 1923 courtesy National Library of Australia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This account is based on contemporary newspaper reports and Paddy Hauenstein’s service dossier NAA: B2455, HAUENSTEIN Dennis Dunbar. For further reading on readjusting to life after the war see Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009).

1 Evening News, 23 February 1923.

2 Riverine Grazier, 23 February 1923; Evening News, 21 February 1923.

3 Evening News, 22 February 1923.

4 Evening News, 21 February 1923.

5 Sydney Morning Herald, 21 March 1923.

6 Evening News, 21 February 1923.

7 ibid.