Leviathan

by John Birmingham

  This perhaps is the dirty little secret of violence; not that it is ugly and unjust, but that it promises so much and delivers so little. This promise, that by a strong arm and valiant heart a man may bend the world to his will, is a recurring dream. Sometimes, on waking, it might even seem that this dream lies within reach, that with one mighty lunge the oppressed might take what is rightfully theirs. Of course, peering at the wreckage of their lives through blackened eyes, the hungry, battered men of Union Street must have known that such dreams almost never come true.

  But then, within a generation, for one brief shining moment, they did.

  Property development, as the refreshingly cynical Deyan Sudjic tells us, is an edgy, maverick industry where successful practitioners constantly morph from street-corner hucksterism to pinstriped respectability and ‘the naked realities of guile, bravado, aggression and ego’ are always close to the surface – if not actually free to tear all over the landscape, devouring everything in their path. Even by these high standards, however, Frank Theeman was one of the city’s more colourful identities. He came on like nothing so much as a Swingin’ Sixties James Bond supervillain, with his Strangelove accent, his Coke bottle glasses and a supporting cast of thugs and weirdos. But unlike Ernst Stavro Blofeld, on whom he seemed to model himself, Theeman didn’t want to destroy the whole world, just a little bit of it. By 1973 he had quietly bought up a long string of elegant but decaying Victorian terraces on the high sandstone ridge overlooking Woolloomooloo; the same pleasant heights where the town’s A-list of the 1830s had run up their Georgian villas and retired from the fug and bustle of horse-drawn Sydney. Old Tom Shephard had once laid into them for destroying the scarp’s natural beauties with ‘the murderous hoe and grubbing axe’. Now Theeman planned to emulate them with a massive development anchored by three awesomely hideous skyscrapers which would bury the neighbourhood’s antique charms under immense tonnages of concrete and ugliness. Embodying all of the bestial, breathtaking horror of what was then world’s worst architectural practice, Theeman’s plans evoked the sort of profoundly antihuman environment you could expect to create if you cross-pollinated the grossest excesses of triumphant capitalism with the aesthetic sensibilities of whatever engineering department the Romanian secret police tasked with fitting out the torture chambers in their blank-faced, ferroconcrete punishment palaces.

  Theeman of course was not a lone rider on this awful crusade. For nearly twenty years developers had laid siege to the city, destroying great swathes of graceful sandstone buildings, scattering the serfs before their onslaught and riding away with fistfuls of loot. The fat times of the 1960s were wild enough to blow away any lingering ghosts of the 30s as everyone cashed in on the boom, although of course some profited more than others. Property developers and the wizards of finance who stood behind them were the white-hot internet stocks of the era as their profits and market value rocketed far beyond the gravitational pull of economic reality. The eventual outcome was as inevitable in 1974 as it had been in 1929, 1891 and 1842. The physical legacy of this modern crash was more striking, however, with the mutation of a previously charming if sleepy city centre into a dense labyrinth of unleaseable high-rise office space which was often stylistically repugnant and technically flawed, recasting nineteenth century problems of overshadowing and air circulation on an epic scale.

  Like all the previous booms the speculative tornado which ripped through Sydney’s property market between 1968 and 1972 spun up out of a confluence of fantastic greed and wilful, bone-headed stupidity, supercharged by a frightening credit binge. The capitalist system, as Schumpeter observes, does not grow slowly and steadily, like a tree, but jerkily, in fits and starts, often linked to technical advances like steam engines or computer chips. Revolutions in business systems, such as mass production lines or radical developments in financial processes, can also act as catalysts to rapid growth. In the early 1960s Sydney, that ‘pure product of capitalism’, which had always been wide open to the chaotic jolts of global finance, was the focus of a number of such developments. The city’s population had ballooned as a result of massive immigration and the natural increase of the postwar baby boom. Low unemployment and rising wages ensured this emerging metropolis was also a hot market, with demand for housing and services creating a natural boom in construction and consumer goods. The city fringes rushed away from the site of first settlement, although development accelerated around the old core as well, with hundreds of small building companies responding to the demands of millions wanting easy access to the city centre. Their demand increased the density of life in the inner suburbs which began to lose terraces and detached dwellings to larger unit blocks where fifty people could be crammed into the space previously occupied by four or five. The construction giants poured billions of tonnes of concrete into shopping centres, schools and community facilities for the increased population.

  This natural boom underlay another explosion of investment in office construction. During the 1950s and 1960s American multi-national firms had built up enormous reserves of US dollars in European, especially British, banks. This money, the germinal form of today’s global capital markets, was hot, liquid and promiscuous, not caring where it went or what it did as long as there was a payoff on the deal. MT Daly writes of millions of dollars surging from London to Sydney and into the accounts of Australian mining companies such as MIM, Comalco and Hammersly Iron to fund their expansion during the sixties. And just as the city’s growth spurt of the 1830s occasioned a diversification of the primitive agrarian economy into slightly more sophisticated manufacturing and services, so the minerals boom of the 1960s helped transform a provincial capital into a true global city. The pastoral–commercial combine which still dominated the local economy before the Second World War was rendered subordinate, if not totally irrelevant by the shift. Daly outlines the change in Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust, tracing the rise in power of merchant banks, life assurance companies and foreign lenders as local developers gorged themselves on bloated lines of credit while they annihilated block after block of old warehouses, hotels and shopping arcades to raise homogenised stacks of offices to meet the needs of newly wealthy mining companies and the banks, lawyers and accountancy firms which served them. The perennial clash of municipal and State authorities distorted an already unbalanced system when cabinet sacked the elected city council for a third time, replacing them with commissioners. During the twenty-two months that planning authority rested with these three appointees, development applications went orbital, as the building industry dived through the window of opportunity. Throughout 1969 and 1970, urban planning in Sydney ‘entered the realms of absurdity’. Paul Ashton describes meetings of the City Planning and Improvement Committee, which assessed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects, taking an average of two to three minutes. Every application was passed.

  As before, the system formed a sort of synergistic feedback loop, the process consuming itself while simultaneously growing fatter and hungrier. At first, land in Sydney was cheap compared with New York and London. The yield on office space in Sydney was twice that in London, and with interest rate differentials the potential returns were stratospheric. The market behaved like a magic slot machine, showering the players in gold doubloons as they desperately tried to feed in more coins. The frenetic pace of development quickly ate up all the easily exploitable land so that the few blocks left to develop ‘acquired a scarcity value and were bid up strongly’. It was madness of course. Like the crazed speculation of 1841 and the blind rush for nonperforming internet stocks of the 1990s. When the hysteria of the crash receded and the survivors looked about them in 1976, they found a city where thirty per cent of its new high-rise offices sat waiting for tenants in empty, ticking stillness.

  A glutted market and spiralling interest bills played as important a role in this crash as they had in previous crashes. But there was a significant difference between this disaster and those that preceded it: the role played by the
city’s lower orders. Of course by 1974, people didn’t use the phrase lower orders any more, at least not in public. Edward Macarthur’s simplistic division of society into the owners of capital and everyone else, with the riding boots of the former wedged firmly on the throats of the latter, was losing its validity. Class divisions were still important – vitally so as it turned out for the city’s property magnates – but other lines of division were also cracking open. Postwar prosperity had enriched the working class and enlarged the middle class. The struggle for survival, which had still been such a close-run thing for the poor during the Great Depression, was much less acute for white Australia after 1945, allowing it the luxury of gradually fracturing along those stress lines which would permanently alter society’s contours in the last quarter of the twentieth century; lines which included race, gender, sexuality and educational privilege. This process of splintering the formerly rigid tungsten axis around which the city’s power structure had coalesced can be placed within the context of Sydney’s natural tendency towards shifting patterns of dominance and conflict. The difference, for a few short years at least, was that whereas the poor and the workers had once been irrelevant to the process – or victims of it – in the 1960s and 70s they emerged for the first time as players and winners. The vehicle by which they took this trip down the glory road was a strange and wonderful collection of hard-knuckled, unskilled labourers; figurative descendants of all those other labourers who had been bundled into the stinking holds of England’s convict transports.

  One of the first business empires to take a blow from these shovel-toting bandits was AV Jennings, that ‘very proud old builder’ who had survived a traumatic birth during the Depression to thrive in the postwar years. In 1968 they found themselves in possession of 4.9 hectares of rare, pristine bushland at Hunters Hill. The scenic riverside locale had remained largely undisturbed throughout white settlement and now presented a remnant wilderness of banksias, sheoaks, grevilleas and kunzeas in which thrived colonies of ringtailed possums and native birds. Development-minded local councillors referred to the area as ‘a tick-infested rubbish dump’, although the dump they described was in fact ‘an Aboriginal midden dating back to 1200 AD’. Having shelled out four hundred grand for the midden and surrounds, these very proud old builders were in no mood to listen to a bunch of housewives who were a little ticked off at their plan to run up a couple of high-rise apartment towers on the graves of the poor old ringtailed possums.

  The bushland had been preserved since the 1890s by its long-time owners the Kelly family as an informal nature reserve for the local community. In the can-do civic spirit of Menzies-era stay-at-home mums, Monica Sheehan, Chris Dawson, Betty James and Kath Laheny worked the appropriate political channels for all they were worth to keep it that way; writing to local aldermen, to State and federal members, to responsible ministers, to the Premier and getting exactly nowhere and nothing in return. Jennings were prevailed upon by the State Planning Authority to finesse their design from a high-rise concept to a low-rise village of luxury houses, and Premier Robert Askin did send the lobbyists an unctuously deceptive telegram on the eve of a tight election, saying: ‘Very hopeful of a helpful decision on your problems and will advise within 24 hours’. But after winning the ballot he never did get around to calling them back and of course Jennings’ new plans still ended with those possums buried in concrete. Betty James explained how their accepted reality began to dissolve and that ghost city which lay beneath the surface of things was revealed.

  We were inexperienced in the ways of business and politics but we learned week by week as one step led to another. We found out quickly that politicians had a language of their own; that decisions were made behind closed doors; that power and money came first and that people’s wishes came second, if considered at all.

  In June of 1971 therefore, the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush, as they had become known, turned to an unlikely ally, a rowdy, two-fisted band of actual, swear-to-God communists and industrial brawlers known as the Builders’ Labourers Federation. Or BLF for short. The startling, unprecedented quality of this manoeuvre is difficult to appreciate in a post-Cold War world. For the class these women represented, communists had crawled out from under the same rock as Nazis and paedophiles. Communists were killing their sons in Vietnam. Communists hated the Church. Communists ran gulags and death camps. They liked brainwashing and espionage and cheating at the Olympics. They were probably mixed up in drugs and lesbianism. They had definitely taken over the universities. They had enslaved half of Europe, all of China and were no doubt plotting their advance on Hunters Hill at that very moment. Communists in the union movement leapt out of their bug infested beds every morning to wolf down a bowl of cold borscht and plot the destruction of the sort of decent, God-fearing small to medium sized businesses owned by the husbands of women like Monica Sheehan, Chris Dawson, Betty James and Kath Laheny. Communists were not to be trusted.

  But the communists of the BLF, as it turned out, were the last hope of the ringtailed possum. After the minister for local government, Pat ‘the Mortician’ Morton, signed a rezoning order which cleared the way for Jennings’ bulldozers, the Battlers approached the labour movement. The Federated Engine Drivers and Firemans Association (FEDFA), whose members would drive those dozers, tabled the women’s request for assistance at the Labor Council on 3 June. The unionists agreed to not to carry out any ‘bulldozing, grading and land clearing work’, delighting the women and encouraging them to seek further help from the BLF, whose members would ultimately build the planned luxury homes. The BLF was then a weird, exotic form of life which could probably only have existed in the atmosphere of the sixties and early seventies. Described by Meredith and Verity Burgmann as ‘a corrupt and conservative’ gangster regime in the 1950s, the New South Wales chapter of the BLF was remade into something entirely different by a group of reforming idealists during the following decade. The Burgmanns’ history of the BLF, Green Bans, Red Union, exhaustively details this struggle, describing a union which at the height of its powers was as much of a threat to the mummified dinosaurs of the labour movement as it was to the insatiable greedheads of the private sector. Under the leadership troika of Joe Owens, Bob Pringle and Jack Mundey the BLF grew into the most militant, radical and successful union the city or indeed the country had ever seen.

  What separated it from other traditionally combative unions was the BLF’s commitment to radical democracy inside their organisation and a novel coalition of social movements outside. The BLF of that time was not like other unions. Its office-bearers were paid no more than the members. They could not stay in office indefinitely, being required to return to their tools after a couple of years. Consulting and involving the membership was not just an empty phrase but something of an obsession. The union leaders would not make a move without the say-so of their membership, and once that sanction was given they could not be moved from it by threat or inducement. (Mundey was once offered a twenty million dollar bribe ‘to allow half of a proposed development to take place’, according to the Burgmann history, an approach which was flatly rejected.) Their power sprang from a militant solidarity and technical changes within the building industry itself. The gargantuan nature of the projects underway in the city concentrated thousands of builders’ labourers in a relative handful of sites, and the significance of their role in high-rise construction was amplified by the new production techniques such buildings entailed. As the Burgmanns point out, ‘the developers’ need for speedy completion of speculative projects, financed by venture capital loans at high interest rates, gave a tactical advantage to the building industry unions, which they were loath not to exploit’. Refusing overtime or ‘a strategic sick day became an industrial weapon of great potential’. Interrupting concrete pours could have disastrous consequences and the ‘ability of builders’ labourers to walk off, or threaten to, before completing a pour was an important bargaining point’.

  The BLF would use any weapon in it
s armoury to prosecute the cause of its members who, it must be said, worked in one of the most uncivilized and fractious industries of modern times. The management ethos which had replaced a whole work crew with a starving, desperate Jack Acland in the Depression – because the boss knew a family man could be whipped that much harder – was alive and kicking forty years later. Builders’ labourers died on construction sites every year because the development companies would not spend money on safety until forced to. The seething hostility which existed between boss and worker is probably incomprehensible to anyone without first-hand experience. They were, quite simply, enemies. The success of the BLF in confronting this enemy welded the largely uneducated membership of working-class white males, newly arrived migrants and, most surprising of all, women labourers, to the union leadership. Encouraged by their success in battles for the more traditional objectives of improved wages, safety and working conditions, the supposedly conservative working-class BLF members fought campaigns for women’s rights, homosexuals, students, prisoners and of course the environment.

  Kelly’s Bush, the first green ban, was put in place after union president Bob Pringle met with the Battlers’ full committee of thirteen women. (According to the Burgmanns the women were a little intimidated by the prospect of meeting this mad leftie who had recently been photographed by the Herald ‘sawing down the goal posts at the Sydney Cricket Ground to prevent the South African rugby team playing’.) Pringle suggested the union could place a ban on the site, but only if the membership agreed and only if the local community demonstrated that opposition to Jennings’ proposal was widespread. A neighbourhood meeting of 600 residents confirmed their support for the ban after which the BLs put their hands up for it. The significance of this action should not be underestimated. By declaring the site black, the workers were denying themselves employment in an industry where job security was more a matter of wish fulfilment than reality. The residents seeking their help were scions of the upper and middle classes, the sort of people who’d signed on with the fascist New Guard to take pot shots at starving workers in the 1930s. And, when you got down to it, no builders’ labourer was ever going to be welcomed into their neighbourhood, even if they could afford to move in, which of course they couldn’t. However, the labourers’ antipathy for businesses like AV Jennings, the incredibly buoyant conditions across the rest of the industry, and the leadership’s evolving concern with New Left issues such as the environment and urban planning overrode these objections. The ban came down on 17 June 1971. When Jennings shrugged and said they’d simply go ahead with nonunion labour, they received a swift, brutal lesson in the altered state of their relationship with residents of Hunters Hill. A telegram arrived from a Jennings building site at North Sydney. It threatened that if the company tried it on, if even one tree was lost, ‘this half-completed building will remain so forever, as a monument to Kelly’s Bush’. The Hunter’s Hill site remains virgin bushland to this day.