To the true ruling elite they were useful idiots. To the Herald, according to Souter’s corporate history, they were less a threat to the State’s democratically elected government than a reassuring fallback position should Lang’s much despised Labor government itself ‘exceed legal bounds’. Should any attempt be made ‘to upset the constitutional order and establish some system that would please the Friends of the Soviet Union, they will oppose it by open and downright means,’ explained the Herald on 24 July 1931, before asking, ‘Is there anything discreditable in a policy such as that?’ Obviously not as far as the Fairfax press was concerned.
To the likes of relief worker Jim McNeill, however, the New Guard were simply fascists, his experience with them prompting him to join the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. ‘I could see what vicious types they were and what they would do in power,’ he told Lowenstein. ‘I understood then what fascism meant and that they had to be defeated’. McNeill saw them arrive to break up Communist Party or Unemployed Workers Movement rallies time and again, in their expensive cars ‘from Vaucluse and Potts Point and other silvertail suburbs’. Hattie Cameron, who lived in a street at Bankstown in which only three men had jobs, witnessed one such assault on a small market near the local railway station. ‘The local unemployed organisation collected donations of vegetables, used clothing and other odds and ends, and they had permission to run stalls in the park,’ she said. The New Guard drove out from Sydney one night to attack the market. ‘It was a bloody business,’ recalled Cameron. McNeill had an even fiercer encounter on the North Shore.
A New Guard shot at me at a meeting in Drummoyne. The Council elections were on and we had a meeting, and the New Guard started holding a meeting on the opposite corner. After about five minutes their leader hopped down and led them over to our platform and the crowd parted, all except the solid core around the speaker, the stalwarts who always stayed to defend the platform. When they got within hitting distance they launched out with their fists. Steve Purdy, who was chairing the meeting, beat one of them to the punch and the bloke fell to the ground. One of the New Guard pulled a pistol and as he did I went over to Steve to be alongside of him, and the bloke said, ‘Stand back!’ I hesitated – he was only a few feet away – and then I ducked and went towards him. One New Guard had grabbed Purdy by the chest, and the other was raining rabbit killers on the back of his neck. I pulled this bloke away. And I felt a bullet whistle just past my ear. I was hit once or twice in Spain, in the International Brigade, but I never felt one come closer than this without actually hitting me! Later the story got around that it was a dummy, but it was a real bullet all right!
The passion for biff was by no means one-sided as a Labor Party man explained to Lowenstein.
The ALA (Australian Labor Army) was formed to protect Labor’s speakers from attack by the New Guard and it did this. It’s impossible to recreate the atmosphere of that time. It was electric. Walking about the streets, you could feel it in the air. Everybody was talking about it – what’s going to happen! We were drilling. Because on the North Shore we had the New Guard, all two bob toffs. It was a fascist organisation. We were drilling to oppose them. We were carrying loaded sticks to meetings with the centres drilled out and filled with lead. We wore a red badge with ALA on it, Australian Labor Army. We had to have protection for our speakers. There were thousands of members of the New Guard …’
We had white tape sewn round our coats under our collars and coat lapels so in a fight we could fold them up and we’d see the white tape – so we wouldn’t be hitting one another. We weren’t playing. The rank and file of the Labor Party was in it, and trade unionists too. Our local branch of the Labor Army would probably have had about two hundred members. We were dinkum! For instance, we were running a meeting at Flemington in the Auburn electorate and Billy Lamb who was subsequently the Speaker in the State Parliament was on the platform. The New Guard members came rushing in and started pushing us around. We resisted and it was on for young and old for a while. As soon as they saw we weren’t going to run away, they did! But Lamb himself pulled a revolver to keep them at bay.
It is tempting to see such eruptions of violence as an aberrant jolt to a more refined narrative of liberal political development, to view them as ‘un-Australian’, that unctuous cliche so beloved of tabloids and politicians. But of course political violence is inherently conventional, even banal, and those describing it as unpatriotic or anathema to some presupposed national culture are either deceiving themselves or, more likely, trying to hoodwink a wider audience as their own interests come under attack. It is not enough, however, to simply ascribe such eruptions to anger, frustration or some other inflamed passion. This, as Murray Edelman points out in Politics as Symbolic Action, is tautological. Adopting for a moment Edelman’s own framework, which has the appeal of being both breathtakingly cynical and enlightening, the clash of left and right in the 1930s, of Anglo and Asian in the 1870s, of ‘Irish’ mobs and Wentworth’s ‘respectable’ citizens in 1843 can all be profitably examined within the richer context of contending myth and symbol. So too with Bligh and the Rum Corps in 1808 and the neo-Nazi attacks on National Action’s exposed, peripheral victims of the 1980s. This is not merely to render abstract an otherwise functional and bloody process, but to try and understand some of the brute forces which have shaped and continue to shape life in the city. It is about the most basic elements of power, about recognising the inherently coarse process of who does the fucking and who gets fucked.
In this scheme politics is relevant to everyday life to the extent that it addresses immediate concerns for wealth, status and autonomy, the last being a matter of individual freedom; freedom to act in pursuit of one’s goals and its corollary, freedom from constraints whether concrete – such as early legislative attempts to suppress the rum trade – or abstract, such as cultural norms which kept Catholics or women under the thumb until well into this century. Edelman’s contribution is to fashion a study of politics in terms of mass psychology rather than simple ‘outputs’ such as legislative programs. He assumes, in the language of a policy geek circa 1968, that people’s beliefs and positions ‘are mobilisable rather than fixed’ and that the significant outcomes of political activity ‘are not particular public policies labelled as political goals, but rather the creation of political followings and supports: i.e., the evocation of arousal or quiescence in mass publics’. From this point of view, political manoeuvring itself becomes the endgame, ‘for in the process (rather than in the content of statutes, court decisions, and administrative rules) leaders gain or lose followings, followers achieve a role and a political identity, and money and status are reallocated’.
What this means is that an understanding of the power structure of Sydney at any time in its history becomes as much a matter of penetrating the mind of the city as cataloguing the most significant players and the resources at their disposal. It segues neatly with Hannah Arendt’s contrasting of violence and power. Deciding where power lies is not simply a case of totting up who commands the big battalions, but must also take into account issues of consent, allegiance and belief. The instruments of the Rum Corps – four hundred bayonets and a couple of field guns – were always going to overwhelm Bligh and his dinner guests. But the traditional submission of the military to lawful authority, the coup leaders’ apprehension about their own legitimacy and their concerns about the continuing loyalty of small landholders to the King’s representative were all problems of individual or mass psychology rather than logistics and firepower. The rebels had to place their story within an acceptable context and this required them to fashion the myth of an impending revolt amongst the wider populace.
Such a myth, explains Edelman, is an unquestioned belief held in common by a large group of people which gives complex and bewildering events a particular meaning. Political events, which are frequently tangled and ambiguous, and which often relate to such intimate and powerful concerns as one’s actual survival,
are among those most likely to engender anxiety. The political universe thus ‘needs to be ordered and given meaning’.
For those who do feel threatened because of a gap between what they are taught to believe they deserve and what they are getting, attachment to a myth replaces gnawing uncertainty and rootlessness with a vivid account of who are friends, who are enemies, and what course of action must be pursued to protect the self and significant others.
The belief that William Bligh or Jack Lang is about to impose a dictatorship; that a police SWOS team murdered David Gundy in cold blood; that the poor are simply part of God’s design for society; that protests in favour of welfare payments are controlled by communists acting on behalf of Moscow; or that hordes of Chinese are steaming towards Sydney to smoke dope, build disgracefully cheap polished furniture and copulate with all the white women they can get their hands on are all examples of myths, widely subscribed to, which have at different times channelled Sydney’s ‘anxieties and impulses’ into shared expectations, freeing thousands of people from responsibility for their own fates or actions. Each evoked ‘a specific political role and self-conception’ for those who accepted the myth in question; the Rum Corps rebels, the New Guard, anti-Chinese protesters and so on. That each myth touched, however fleetingly, on some aspect of political reality made them all that much more vivid and tenable.
It explains why the riot which erupted in the depression of the 1840s simply died away in a fog of alcohol, exhaustion and bad weather; while protest and reaction in the Great Depression of the 1930s was sustained at much more intense levels for much longer. The city had changed its mind. Whereas Edward Macarthur’s mythology of a divinely ordained if deeply unfair social order was almost universally accepted in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth, as we have seen, it had been violently rejected by those at the bottom of the heap and was even out of fashion with those at the top, who no longer held their property and privilege on the basis of divine right, but because of worthiness, by dint of hard work, intelligence, thrift or whatever. ‘In a caste system assumed by all its participants to be divinely sanctioned,’ writes Edelman, ‘subordination and unequal benefits mean that the world is as it should be; in a polity with a norm of social equality the same facts come to mean deprivation and an incentive to resistance.’
That resistance would not go unanswered of course. Nor was it restricted to low-level clashes between the cutouts and agents of much greater forces. At the highest stations of the city the passions were just as intense as those aroused in the gritty, street-level combat between the New Guard and the left. Such extreme times called forth an extreme man, State Premier Jack Lang, a working-class hero or Satan incarnate, depending on which side of the battlelines you stood. Like Bligh, Macarthur and Wentworth before him, Lang’s character encompassed a Shakespearean maelstrom of great potential and mortal frailty. His private contest with the demons of a spiteful, paranoid, overweening ego and a wildly aggressive will to power translated to the wider world because of the crucial position he held in both the city’s and the nation’s power structure during the Depression. Within Sydney the battle for dominance between State and municipal authority had long ago been decided in favour of Macquarie Street. Ninety years of resource starvation and countless defeats in the war for autonomy had pretty much rendered the city council an irrelevancy for all but the most basic purposes. One of its last great missions, the provision of electricity, was slowly clawed from Town Hall’s grasp in the 1920s and finally removed altogether in 1935. The vaunted concept of a government for Greater Sydney had been destroyed by an alliance of State politicians and suburban aldermen, none of whom were willing to cede the smallest measure of their own power. Federal government was still in its infancy and had not yet even seized from the States the right to levy income tax. The primary site of government power thus lay not in the eerily quiet and desolate sheep paddock of Canberra, but in the various State capitals and especially, given their population and economic dominance, in Sydney and Melbourne.
The nineteenth-century idea of the minimal government, which did little more than build and protect infrastructure, had been beset by the political rise of the working class and the constant carping of those middle-class do-gooders who argued that private charity could not alleviate the suffering of the urban poor – and indeed that their suffering deserved relief, a truly radical position. Lang himself had an early schooling in the bitter gospels of deprivation when his father’s illness reduced the family to Dickensian poverty during the boom of the 1880s. You can draw a straight line between this experience and Lang’s pioneering of government welfare in the 1920s, including child endowment, widow’s pensions and worker’s compensation. These were State-wide measures of course, but they were appreciated most keenly where the poor were most numerous and this meant in those densely populated inner-city slums which had escaped demolition after the plague, and further out in the threadbare industrial suburbs which were growing in the south around Botany Bay and in the west at places like Auburn, which Lang represented in Parliament. It was not appreciated by the rich, as you’d imagine, who did not see why they should be forced to pay for such dangerous socialist experiments. And just as power had progressively shifted from Government House to Parliament House, so too had it leaked from the public into the private sphere.
The commercial interests of the city, which Lang snarled at and berated as ‘the Money Power’, had grown explosively in importance and influence from the days when the Rum Corps turned official status to private gain. The crude nature of that primeval economy stood in relation to the complexities of the modern metropolis as a bark canoe to an aircraft carrier. Heavy and light manufacturing, telecoms, power and transport systems, media, finance, construction and service industries – all the elements of advanced civilization – had been raised over Sydney’s pastoral– commercial foundations with remarkable speed. And just like that earlier combine, the new potentates were not averse to deploying superior firepower to protect or advance their own interests. Unremitting attacks on the Labor Party, and in particular on Jack Lang by the Fairfaxes’ Sydney Morning Herald were a good example. Despite once being described as ‘one of the best treasurers’ by Sir John French of the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac), Lang was portrayed in the press as a sort of violent, troglodytic berserker who would unleash an orgy of Marxist butchery on the State the moment he thought he could get away with it. Lang unfortunately was often his own worst enemy in this confrontation, drinking from the bottomless well of his many hatreds and lashing out at his enemies with blasts of vicious, unthinking rhetoric which would have left even William Bligh grasping for an answer.
He was an exceptional guy, Lang, a real stand-out character, for good reasons and bad. Like Wentworth a large powerful-looking man, he was uncouth yet yearned for respectability. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that he seldom laughed. He suffered from insecurity and had many followers but few intimates. Like his admiring protégé Paul Keating he aroused extreme feelings of loathing and loyalty amongst both peers and the general public. He was a real-estate auctioneer, not a traditional trade for a Labor man, but the auction block fashioned his crude, effective speaking style: ‘rasping voice, snarling mouth, flailing hands, sentences and phrases punctuated by long pauses’. With a bald, high-domed head, a thick moustache and garbed in ‘the uniform of the successful Edwardian man – the three-piece suit, watch and chain, stiff collar, sober tie, polished boots, and obtrusive felt hat’, he should have been more at home in the billiards room of the Millions Club. But he was a hater, a brawler and a true believer and he turned his evangelical skills against the big-money families such as the Fairfax clan and their small-change champions on the North Shore and in the east, in those stiff-necked, respectable middle-class suburbs where the word of the Herald was holy writ and the New Guard’s recruiters did such good business. The anarchists of high finance played with the lives of common folk for ‘sheer personal gain’, growled Lang, ‘
putting them to work under the whips of hunger, throwing them into idleness to keep them in discipline, manning them for war, dividing them in peace’ and drawing a toll in gold, ‘counted over in human tears and blood’ from every activity into which they were thrown. ‘Are we to be driven to desperation … before the Governor dismisses him?’ pleaded the Herald in 1931.
Not all of the fire which zeroed in on the Premier during the Depression came from his right flank, however. The left maintained a guerilla campaign of sniping and harassment, partly on general principles because the Labor Party was regarded by communists as a ‘social fascist’ organisation, or as one anarchist put it ‘socialiste de café latte’, and partly because Lang’s position at the head of the State’s repressive machinery made him a natural if unwilling ally of the very same ‘Money Power’ with which he was locked in mortal combat. The issue, as so often in Sydney’s history, was real estate.
The speculative land boom of the 1920s had thrown up thousands of new houses and apartment blocks, but by the early 1930s many of these, as well many thousands more in the older, established suburbs, lay empty whilst an army of the homeless unemployed, like Tom Galvin, drifted about the city seeking shelter in parks, drains and shanty towns. In Twentieth Century Sydney Nadia Wheatley cites a figure of nearly 11 000 empty dwellings in the metro area in 1935, two years after the worst of the Depression had supposedly passed. Widespread home-ownership was a phenomenon of the 1950s, with most people renting before the Second World War. As unemployment rocketed towards thirty per cent, the big real estate companies which owned or managed swathes of rental housing found their cash drawers bare as tenants fell behind in their payments. Without the dole or rental subsidies of a modern welfare system, the outcome was inevitable – mass evictions.
Leviathan Page 33