The success of this alliance led to an awakening of communities across the city. Residents’ action groups sprang up by the dozen to fight unwanted, unrestrained development. A second green ban was placed on a development at Eastlakes in November 1971 after Parkes Development broke a promise not to build on land set aside as a recreation area. Plans to annex vast areas of Centennial Park and Moore Park for a State sports centre, including an 80 000 seat stadium, 10 000 seat entertainment centre and ‘a gigantic parking lot’, were hyped as a massive boost to commerce and industry; although the main beneficiaries would be the developers who poured elephant bucks into the coffers of Askin’s conservative coalition, walking off with fantastic profits – and eleven knighthoods – in return. A residents’ action group, which included Nobel prize winner Patrick White, twitched about in futile opposition until the BLF put a bullet into the whole concept in June 1972.
The confrontation over the sports centre was not the first direct challenge to the State. In 1968 the government had established the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority to convert its ownership of what remained of the Rocks into a geyser of cash. Even after extensive demolitions for plague clearance and bridge-building, a large population of waterfront workers, seafarers and their families remained as tenants of the Maritime Services Board in the clutch of terraces and boarding houses which survived. Gaping at the berserk inflation of land and building prices a short distance away in the CBD, Cabinet decided to realise its asset in one spectacular orgy of exploitation. After ramping up rents for their low-income tenants by 200 and 300 per cent, the State government popped the champagne corks to reveal their blueprint for a 21 hectare, $500 million profanity, featuring high-rise office blocks, apartments, luxury hotels and department stores. Working-class families who had paid rent to the State for generations would be evicted, while private consortiums of multi-national investors were blessed with the certainty of ninety-nine year leases over this ‘public land’.
As with all previous planned developments in the Rocks, no provision was made for the accommodation of the residents. A few token historic buildings would be preserved as curious trinkets but the social fabric of the area would be shredded. In January 1972 bulldozers moved in to begin demolition but a confrontation between residents and drivers led to the FEDFA and the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union joining the ban placed on the project by the BLF in November of the previous year. Askin’s government had amended provisions of the Landlord and Tenant Act, which the Union Street protesters had taken such a beating for in 1931, leaving the Rocks’ residents with no protection against their landlord; i.e., the very government which had just stripped them of their rights. As the Burgmanns explain:
Previously, the landlord had an obligation to the tenant to pay compensation or to adequately rehouse people being displaced; since the amendments, the landlord had no responsibility to the tenant and the tenant had no legal claim on the landlord. Pringle and Owens [from the union executive] objected to these changes in a statement defending the ban: ‘we believe that these amendments are contrary to the rights and needs of the people. Progress should be for all the people and not be detrimental to some for the benefit of others’. Having lived in the area for decades, paying rent to different state authorities over the years, probably paying for their homes several times over, Pringle and Owens insisted these people had ‘a right to dignified consideration’.
What the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority figured was that these people had the right to get the hell outta Dodge. When contractors pushed the issue by trying to demolish some garages and workshops in Playfair Street a squall of protest, violence and industrial mayhem erupted in a two-week-long battle with thousands of unionists walking off sites around the city, five hundred of them storming the disputed building site. Hundreds of police arrested dozens of workers and residents. As with every other clash in this period, however, the initiative lay with the coalition of protesters. As long as the bans remained in place, the developers and their backers, in this case the state, were effectively powerless. While work on SCRA’s grand design was paralysed the residents formulated a ‘people’s plan’ for the area which stressed a continuing presence for low-income housing along with cultural, civic and small business uses in the renovated historic buildings. Restoration work on these properties had not been banned and by 1974 the government found itself in the humiliating position of having to accept the residents’ vision. The restored properties were returning handsome rents while Treasury was haemorrhaging money over the interest bill on loans for the stalled high-rise projects.
The Rocks were spared but sirens were shrieking in boardrooms all over the city. By the mid-1970s BLF green bans had thrown a choke-hold on projects worth at least $3000 million (in 1974 dollars). When told he was taking bread from his members’ mouths, union secretary Jack Mundey replied that they would rather build ‘urgently required hospitals, schools, other public utilities, high quality flats, units and houses, provided they are designed with adequate concern for the environment, rather than to build ugly, unimaginative, architecturally bankrupt blocks of concrete and glass offices’. Fine words, but you don’t snatch three billion big ones from a gang of land sharks and walk away unscathed. A short distance from the Rocks, the scene of the union’s greatest triumph, the hammerheads bared their teeth.
Mick Fowler was a big, bull-necked seaman with a slightly scary Dennis Lillee moustache, sideburns like Texas and a hint of Elvis in his hairstyle. He was fond of playing jazz, spinning yarns and – just quietly – smoking dope. But if you didn’t know him, his hamhock fists, tightly stretched body shirts and drooping cigarettes lent an air of physical menace which your average bohemian would be incapable of synthesising. He had gone down to the sea as a young man and the life there had hardened him some. He’d worked some tough ships, walked some mean streets and was more likely to be roused to anger than fear by the likes of ‘Karate’ Joe Meissner. Like Mick Fowler, Karate Joe presented a fairly intimidating front. With Fowler, a generous, ukelele-playing hepcat, it was just a matter of appearances. With Karate Joe it was business. Meissner (aka Machine Gun Joe, aka Ivan the Hoon) had been hired by Frank Theeman to facilitate the rapid transit of a lot of inconvenient pensioners, battlers and boho spongers who were standing between Mr Theeman and a pile of money. A Very Big Pile Of Money.
Meissner, who would later win fame in the lowbrow derangement of the 1980s Love Boat scandal, was then learning the ropes as a minor villain, looming in the Victoria Street doorways of recalcitrant tenants, carrying an iron bar and speculating on their domestic arrangements and/or travel plans. Most took the hint and fled but some proved disagreeably contrary, Mick Fowler amongst them. Returning home from a long voyage on a bulk carrier, Fowler had been looking forward to stowing his kit in the small room he rented in an old boarding house at 115 Victoria Street. His mother had digs in the same building and there are a couple of versions of what happened next. In a video interview held at the Mitchell Library Fowler himself says he was surprised to find his mother sitting on the front step, surrounded by their belongings, terribly upset, dazed and hopeless, clutching fifty dollars which she’d been given by Theeman to cover the cost of moving and storage. Contemporary press reports said Fowler had received an eviction notice by telegram while still at sea and his mother was missing when he arrived home. The Seamen’s Journal later claimed Theeman’s enforcers had broken into the little apartment, terrorised his mother and stolen his musical instruments and stereo equipment while he was away.
The fine details aren’t that important. Just take it as read there had been some first-class villainy. What was important was Mick Fowler’s decision to contest the eviction. Borrowing some pliers and scratching up a posse of five or six friends, he fronted Joe Meissner and a couple of uniformed cops at the front gate of his home. Ignoring Karate Joe, Fowler addressed the nearest cop with rising anger.
‘Look, I’m Mick Fowler,’ he said. ‘I’m the legal tenant. I live here. My gear�
��s been put out, the joint’s been broken into, I’m very upset. I’ve come 2000 fucking miles to find this and you’re pushing me aside!’
Meissner pushed in, insisting that Mick was no longer a tenant. ‘I represent the owner and I want him arrested,’ he said.
‘And with that I was fucking well arrested and handcuffed and taken up to Darlinghurst Police Station!’ spat a disgusted Fowler on the video.
A heavy vibe lay over the largely deserted street. Of the three or four hundred tenants living there at the start of the month, only a dozen or so remained. They had formed the Victoria Street Residents’ Action Group to resist both the eviction campaign and Theeman’s overall scheme; but a few days before Fowler arrived, one of the group’s principals, a short, tough, nugget of a bloke named Arthur King, was grabbed up from his home and spirited off into the night. He had gone to bed at eleven after chatting with friends for a couple of hours. Waking with a start when the light came on, he saw a man standing by the switch, silently staring at him. The man turned and left as King struggled up to give chase. Hurrying into the hallway he was jumped by another two intruders. They hustled him out of the flat, dumped him in a car and drove to a motel room south of the city. Tied, gagged and blindfolded, he was held until Monday when Theeman’s quiet persuaders bundled him back into the boot of the car and drove to Kings Cross. The boot had a small hole through which King could catch glimpses of the outside world. His abductors pulled up in front of a brothel called the Venus Room, a cheesy dive which formed part of Abe Saffron’s empire. While King was missing, panicky friends searched anxiously as carloads of blocky-looking young men tore through the street yelling, ‘We’re going to get you and you’ll be gone’. When King reappeared on Monday he spoke briefly to friends, collected his possessions and left forever.
Prowlers broke into the houses of the few remaining tenants, smashing windows, removing locks, kicking down doors and wrenching off taps so that the properties flooded. Then, three days after his first set-to with Karate Joe, Mick Fowler returned with reinforcements. Mick, some locals and about fifty or sixty hefty comrades from the BLF and Fowler’s own Seamen’s Union converged on 115 and fought their way through a thin line of Theeman’s hired muscle. Surrounded by this formidable crew and puffing contentedly on a cigarette, Fowler told journalists that they expected violence from the ‘karate experts’ when his furniture arrived. But, already reeling from a storm of insinuation and bad PR after the King kidnapping, Theeman had his men withdraw.
Like his allies in Macquarie Street, Frank Theeman was taking a bath on interest repayments. As Trevor Sykes noted, the fat days were over. By mid-1973 the long bond rate had blown out by a point while debentures leapt to nine per cent. ‘By September of that year long bonds had reached 8.5 percent and debentures were out to eleven, the highest they had been in two generations’. Theeman was pissing away maybe fourteen to sixteen grand every week; bad karma in a highly geared racket like property development.
It was no coincidence that around this time arsonists seemed to discover a particular affinity for the surviving buildings of Victoria Street. Squatters had taken heart from Mick Fowler’s stand, gradually appearing by the dozen to take over the abandoned and rapidly decaying terraces. The campaign, which was originally concerned with the bankrupt aesthetics of Theeman’s plan, shifted to encompass expressly political demands for the retention of low-income housing. Dozens of squatters flocked to the street on the heels of a few hardy pioneers. Some were just footloose activists looking for action. Some were awakened environmentalists rallying to the cause. But most were poor workers and students, among them a large number of women, who were attracted by the cheap accommodation and communal atmosphere which blossomed as everyone set to work cleaning and restoring the decaying properties.
A pack of mad libertarian drinkers and fornicators, known as the Sydney Push, were drawn into the battle on the side of the residents and BLF. They helped organise street patrols to ward off arson attacks – although a young black woman was still killed by one deliberately lit blaze. Theeman, too, had his own patrols out. At any one time at least twenty or thirty goons could be found lounging against the street’s wrought-iron fences, having a smoke, glaring at any nearby protesters. These were 70s goons of course, so they tended to turn out in hipster flares, Adidas sneakers, nylon Gloweave shirts and long greasy hair. But what they lacked in sartorial impact they made up for by toting pick handles everywhere.
The improvised weapons proved themselves more than mere ornaments in January of 1974 when Theeman, having beaten the squatters in the Supreme Court, was able to deploy fifty or sixty hipster goons with the active support of the police force to clear out his investments. The protesters knew a confrontation was coming after the State’s Justice Minister green-lighted the use of police to turn them out of their new homes. They took to the barricades with the ghosts of 1931 at their side. Most boarded themselves up behind their dilapidated Victorian facades, some receiving help from striking labourers to erect more substantial defences with scaffolding taken from city building sites. Theeman’s ‘controllers’ – as he styled his outlaw band of karate experts, nightclub bouncers and standover men – launched their assault watched over by two hundred police at seven o’clock in the morning. Unlike the riot of ’31, this was extensively covered by print and broadcast media so the scenes, although pretty wild on the black and white news footage, were not as savage as they might have been. The controllers ordered the occupants of each house to leave and when they didn’t, set to demolishing the front door with crowbars, pickaxes and sledgehammers. The video looks almost comical now, like a bunch of roadies and bass players from Slayer and Spinal Tap trying to smash their way into a concert venue or something. But the screaming women and children, the swirling punch-ups and crashing glass convey an intense sensation of madness and fury. Val Hodgson, one of the action group organisers, said she felt secure in the opening moments, while her house was still full of old friends. ‘But it was just the banging and the thumping’, she said excitedly, urgently, ‘and knowing of the imminent destruction and seeing the ceiling fall down and the lightbulbs flicker … and they tipped caustic soda on Eric … it was really quite terrifying. They were menacing, through the holes they made in the window, snarling and snapping and saying, “We’re gonna get you.” It was so frightening I was pleased when the police rushed in to prevent them doing us any damage’.
‘Well I’m sorry’, said Theeman in his spooky Blofeld voice sometime later. ‘But I didn’t think to call the Salvation Army to get these people out would be the right thing’.
With squatters forced out, Fowler was once again left as the sole tenant. He was talking with BLF secretary Joe Owens when Theeman suddenly appeared with a couple of bodyguards, ex-cops. Owens joked that Theeman didn’t have the numbers for negotiations and suggested he go grab a couple more heavies, but Fowler invited his arch nemesis inside.
‘He opened up straightaway’, said Mick, pointing out that the squatters were all gone and that he was ‘the only fly in the ointment now’. “‘We’ll move you into a nice place across the road,” offered Theeman. I said, Frank, you’re missing it baby, don’t you understand what it’s all about? This struggle hasn’t been for you Frank Theeman to sit down with me Mick Fowler and offer me the fuckin’ world. You know. There’s been 399 other people come into this. There’s been men out of work and people arrested and beaten and handcuffed and Christ knows what. There’s been death. There’s been kidnapping. Don’t you understand? I don’t want any money’.
What he wanted was the past made new again. He wanted wharfies and working mums and old men and young students to be able to live quietly in the shabby but pleasant tree-lined street he had shared with his own mother and friends for so long. They may have owned no property, had no connections, amounted to nothing, but they did have ‘a right to dignified consideration’. The alliance of residents and building unions achieved this unlikely goal in the Rocks and down the hill from V
ictoria Street in Woolloomooloo, but success in Potts Point was not as absolute. The bans and squatters delayed Theeman for so long that when construction did commence, his initial design – described by even the Visigoths of the State Planning Authority as one of the worst pieces of visual pollution they had ever encountered – was much compromised. The ugly stubs of apartment blocks which blot the northern end of Victoria Street today are one-third the size Theeman first planned. But they did get built.
Leviathan Page 37