“He was an oddball at school, a year or two older than me, turned up at the mardi gras day at the end of the school year when I was in form 4 at Colac, in uniform,” sergeant Mark Holloway says.

“He was one of those kids you didn’t talk to, he was a bit rough.”

Though they only spoke for a short time that night, the 15-year-old’s interest was piqued.

“He and I chummed up that night, told me all about this great job he had and it interested me,” Holloway says.

“I didn’t really have an ambition to be anything else other than perhaps a teacher or maybe join the navy, like a lot of people you don’t really know.”

In 1974, after initially being dismissed as too skinny for police work – “I came back exactly the same height and weight and got in” – Holloway signed his name on the thin blue line and was “whizzed into uniform” in Melbourne’s short-staffed east.

“We had a uniform within a month, but no training in dealing with people, no instruction on the law, we didn’t carry handcuffs or batons, we were given a brand new constable about a year older than us to look after us and sent out on foot patrol,” Holloway says.

“They don’t teach you how to be a policeman in uniform, everybody looks at you, you grow not just a second head, you grow a third and fourth and fifth head, people look at you like you’re weird, it takes a long time to get used to that.”

After graduating as a police constable 12 months later and being promoted to sergeant in 1985, Holloway relocated to Bendigo in 1988, where until his retirement next week, he remains the station’s longest currently-serving police officer.

In those days, Holloway says, all policemen smoked and wore mustaches, and while Holloway still sports his, he says much else has changed in 43 years.

In the mid-1970s, Holloway says bank hold-ups were big news and all too common, while today random, violent robbery far exceeds anything from back then.

These days, random violence and domestic violence have become everyday occurrences, often many times a day, and are the calls to which Bendigo police have to respond most often.

“Too many people lack respect for each other, themselves, the law or the law enforcer,” he says.

“Gone are the days of a cruise around town in the divvy van catching a speeder or stop sign offender or chatting with the locals, gone are the days of putting a 17-year-old into a uniform and sending him out to patrol a Moomba crowd.”

But Holloway says he has largely enjoyed his time in uniform, with some particularly fond memories of nights spent mingling with the locals while patrolling Bendigo’s nightclub precinct.

”Bendigo was a nightclub Mecca, we’d have busloads of AFL footy teams coming up to Bendigo to go nightclubbing because we had seven or eight nightclubs – that often had far in excess of their prescribed limits,” he says.

“Maybe two or three thousand people on the streets in Bendigo, carrying stubbies, drinking and fighting up and down the street and I enjoyed working in that environment.

“I was connected with the Newbridge footy club, and particularly the Newbridge netball club because I was coaching it – those kids, I was their sarge, so I was part of their community.”

More changes were to come, from a baton and handcuffs (with an optional World War I Browning or Colt 32 pistol) to ballistic vests, tasers, capsicum spray and modern semi-automatic pistols – and the introduction of computers in 1975.

“I had to do a stint in [the communications centre] in Melbourne and I saw the first computer terminal arrive for Victoria Police,” Holloway says.

“It was a fixed box, single-colour screen, it had no intelligence at all, it wasn’t a word processor, it was just enter in the space the data that you wanted, either a name or a rego number, and it would come back with whether it was stolen or he was a recorded offender.

“At Brunswick, my first police station they had a huge box the size of a dishwasher, full of steel pen nibs – we still had ink wells and ink – fortunately Biros were about, though we had to ask the boss for a new one each time.

“Today we’re just talking about giving Victorian police tablets to carry around in the car.”

Before he hangs up his badge and leaves the station for the last time, Holloway will take a moment to thank those who have supported him through his time on the force, including “the 100 per cent support of my wife, family and friends and the very inclusive police family for the past 43 years”.

“I am proud to be Mark, Sarge or Sergeant Holloway to the people here in Bendigo,” he says.

“The Bendigo police station has many members who are Bendigo-born and bred and as a result the Bendigo community is very supportive of their police.”