The crash of 1974 destroyed a legion of developers but as they went down they took the BLF with them, removing the main agent of their frustration. An alliance of developers and corrupt officials from the federal BLF connived to destroy the New South Wales branch during an intervention which the Burgmanns describe as ‘a brutal standover’. The odious Norm Gallagher rode in over the wishes of the local membership and purged the branch of its progressive leadership. On the day he lifted the green ban on Victoria Street, Gallagher motored past the scene of January’s battle in Frank Theeman’s car. According to Theeman, Gallagher just looked at the empty desolated structures and said he should have torn the fucking lot down. If true, it’s a moment worthy of a Hubert Selby Jnr story; a fitting denouement to a darkly compelling fable, elegantly sculpted, rich with metaphor and finely calibrated to emotional nuance, character and the victors’ amoral detachment from their sins and ethical conceits. A powerful stream of contempt runs through the story, contempt for the past, and contempt for any measure of value which cannot be gauged with a pocket calculator or an eye to the main chance. Pressing the question of where power lies in such a city as this, you eventually penetrate a place with a cold vacuum for a moral core.
In October 1998, in a week-long series attempting to answer the very same question, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship broadsheet, the Australian, limped to the conclusion that in Sydney, a ‘city of a thousand networks’, power was protean and constantly shifting between separate cells of influence in finance, government, construction, law, the media and primary industry. After two decades of retreat from civic society in favour of rule by market forces, the commercial city was ascendant again. The planning powers assumed by government in reaction to the chaos of the green bans had been eroded, or quietly abandoned, so that when the redevelopment of East Circular Quay provoked similar outrage to SCRA’s original proposals for the Rocks, or Theeman’s for Potts Point, the responsible authorities simply turned up their open, honest palms and declined to accept any responsibility at all. Decisions affecting the lives of the city’s four million people are now as likely to be taken at a meeting of fund managers for AMP or Bankers Trust as on the floor of Parliament, although the cynical might say, so what? The new decision makers are no more remote than the old.
Perhaps the difference is a matter of form. Public power must at least maintain the facade of responsibility, while private power is beholden only to itself. The point at which they intersect, however, is contested and the outcome is politics, that process by which ‘wealth, status and autonomy’ are lost or gained. In politics we can see the sparks thrown off as the powerful contend for turf and leverage, even if the battle itself is too complex to comprehend. More revealing than anything the Australian’s contributors wrote was what they did not write. Their own employer, the eerily powerful Rupert was missing in action. The Australian’s in-house media analyst, the endearingly feral Errol Simper, scratched out a few notes explaining how the Telegraph had usurped the Herald’s influence over the city’s daily political agenda, but of Rupert’s influence over the highest offices of the land, there was no mention, nor of Kerry Packer, playing Gog to his Magog. Perhaps a series on the power structure of Sydney may have benefited from an investigation of the deals cut to alienate public space within the Sydney Show Ground for the private benefit of Murdoch’s Fox Studios; a deal sold as providing Sydney with the facilities to cash in on the digital entertainment revolution, facilities which quietly mutated into a hokey old theme park. Or perhaps not.
The Australian’s series, which opened by admitting that it may be better to ask if anyone is actually in control, confirmed the proposition that power is not a unitary concept or force in this city. Developers like Theeman, who thought themselves the masters of a little universe while government abrogated its responsibilities to manage the city (or connived in its despoilation), awoke after Kelly’s Bush to discover that the power vacuum had been filled. From that moment, their previous freedom to act lay open to challenge. The swift resort to physical intimidation and force revealed another truth, one transmitted earlier in 1808, 1843 and 1931; that violence is not power, that in fact it betrays the absence of power and remains the last resort of the impotent. If Frank Theeman had been a truly powerful man, he would not have needed the likes of Joe Meissner to enforce his will. In a sense, had Theeman been powerful enough he would have simply willed his monstrous creation into being. Culture has always been subservient to capital in Sydney, the will of Edward Macarthur’s chosen few determining the fate of the rest. A truly powerful Theeman would have willed the tenants of Victoria Street away and the city would have disposed of them. I guess it did, in the end, but only after their fierce resistance undid his ambitions.
These truths then are self-evident: that power in the city is not unitary; that violence is not power; and that human will is primary. But having peeled back these layers of meaning there is something more in here, another shape beneath the surface. Something dangerous. It was there in the dawn of 3 January 1974 when dozens of Theeman’s bandit ‘controllers’ wielding crowbars and pick handles first stepped into the expectant quiet of Victoria Street protected by 200 police officers. At that moment the ghost city, that shadow state of government, big money and the underworld, was exposed for a moment, blinking in the sun. It was an alliance Wendy Bacon called ‘legal and illegal violence working together’, the most frightening thing there is, and it is the last of Sydney’s stories.
4
Pig City
Who was the bagman, who was the hitman,
Who were the front men, who were the bit men
Pig City, THE PARAMETERS
On a winter’s night some ten years ago I sat on the step in front of the old Woolworths store at Kings Cross. I huddled deep inside a borrowed army jacket as the rain came down in a cold, oily film, working its way through three layers of clothing. It had been that way all year, a taxi driver told me. All the squats were filling up and flooding out, and it was cold enough some nights to snap-freeze the occasional wino. My step outside Woolworths was in the middle of things and not a bad place for sitting around, checking shit out. A bit frantic sometimes. I watched a girl get speared through a window once. She lurched around with her head flapping open, blood gushing everywhere. (‘I’m all right, I’m all right, just fucking leave me alone!’) But at least I was out of the rain, and I could doze off occasionally without having to worry too much about getting rolled. I was working. I’d had this crazed idea to shame Bob Hawke for not following through on his promise that by 1990 no child would live in poverty. His spin doctors were going to work on the problem as the date approached, recasting his ill-considered promise into a claim no child need live in poverty. Or something like that.
I didn’t live in Sydney at that point. I was still moving from couch to couch in Brisbane, pulling down about three or four hundred dollars a year working for student magazines. So homelessness and poverty were issues I felt qualified to comment on when I pitched the idea to Rolling Stone of my living on the street for a couple of weeks, sleeping in parks and eating McRefuse from dumpsters until I’d worked my way deep inside the story. Stone’s editor lent me the army jacket and pointed me up William Street where I soon became part of the furniture. My twitchy, angry loner routine, lack of personal hygiene and round-the-clock presence quickly marked me out as someone special even within the incredibly weird matrix of King Cross neighbourhood dynamics. Before long it seemed everybody was trying to score drugs from me, except the drunks, who just wanted to share their battered paper cups of cheap port and backwash with a brother who was so obviously down on his luck.
Two or three nights into my first week on the step at Woolworths I was chewing joylessly on a toasted chicken sandwich, working on my thousand-yard stare. It was early, but a few drunken fist fights had already flared up and died at the train station. I planned to wander over there later, for a drink and a smoke with a dreadlocked hobo named Graham, an ex-Navy man who’d done all
his dough on some ruinous investment scam before taking a long hard slide into the gutter. The warm air which rushed up from the station was a godsend to us outdoor types, and when Graham wasn’t suffering from some sort of psychotic episode he was quite good company. He asked once what I was doing on the streets and I told him, truthfully, that I was a writer. He looked at me for a second before saying, ‘Yeah, I’m outta work meself at the moment too.’
This time of night, even with the rain and the cold, the footpath was thronged with hookers and buskers, some Japanese tourists, bikers, freaks, businessmen, one or two sailors and wandering packs of losers from the burbs. It was still quiet though, with none of that speedy, kind of trippy sensation that comes down later on. A couple of stolen-watch dealers and a lightning-sketch expert set up nearby. Next to them was a thin family man with wet hair and a fat blonde wife. She nursed an infant and shivered on a wet hessian sack while he murdered Dylan on a three-string guitar. They had no shoes and he made just three dollars, one for each string. They had another child who came over once. But she was crying so much the man yelled at her and she took off again.
I finished my sandwich and shifted around, trying to work some warm blood into my cold, numb backside. I decided what I really needed was some new cardboard because the old box I was sitting on was wet and starting to disintegrate. But to go looking for more would mean losing my A-list seat, so I stayed put in the pulpy mess and before long a girl staggered over. She was young, maybe thirteen or so, and soaked through to the skin. Violent chills swept over her every few seconds. Her torn grey miniskirt and pink Minnie Mouse top were no protection against the weather. One dirty white slipper flapped off in the wet crap on the pavement and I moved over as she slid down beside me, holding her head and whimpering. Her legs were chubby and turning blue from the cold. I wondered how long she’d sit there invading my personal space. I wondered what her trouble was, and then he came rolling over. An unhappy pimp. He looked a bit older. About fifteen, maybe seventeen, I figured, but in much better shape. He wore a new pair of boots with acid-wash jeans and a good leather jacket. He crouched down and punched her, a blow which would have sent her head back into the glass door with a crack had she not seen it coming and flinched into a tight defensive ball.
‘I’m getting jack of this, Helen!’ he hissed. ‘This is the third time this week. You’re really giving me the shits, you know.’
He hit her again. He was only half my size and I suppose I could have given him something to go on with, but what was the use of it? Helen would be back every night until she died. And anyway, I told myself, who needs the attention? I stared past them to the road as a minibus full of public servants and drunken bank clerks inched through the traffic crush. Someone had tied balloons inside the vehicle and out. Confetti and streamers swirled around in the back and every now and then a beer can flew out. I asked myself whether their disgusting yet candid voyeurism was any worse than my paid subterfuge. A young woman in a Tarago hurled a bottle of wine cooler from the window, laughing as it smashed on the ground. I muttered, ‘Bitch,’ but it meant nothing to either of us and then my focus came back in a rush as the pimp yelled again.
‘Come on, Helen!’ he shouted, digging his fingers into her arms and shaking her so hard I thought her head might jiggle right off. ‘You can’t keep doing this, can you?’ Slap! ‘You gotta go back to work, dontcha?’ Shake! ‘You can’t fuckin sit ’ere all night feelin’ sorry for y’self, can you?’ Slap! ‘You can’t go home. You gotta get out an’ earn a dollar, eh? Gotta go back to work? Eh?’ Slap! ‘Ah come on, wake up! I gotta get back to work too you know.’ Smack!
But the girl could only go with the blows, lifting her head an inch or so to ask for another shot of heroin before a backhander whipped in and cut her off.
‘Look, you can’t have another! You’ve already had one tonight. You have another one an’ you’ll die wontcha, hey? You know that.’
‘Wannanutha,’ she blubbered as the boy ground his teeth. He stood up and walked a few metres away before turning with his hands on his hips. It looked like he was lining up to punt kick her out of the world. I shivered and leaned away from the girl as the wind picked up. The stolen-watch dealers asked him to move out of their way.
‘Look, are you goin’ back?’ he asked the girl softly, doing a slow burn. ‘You can’t have another hit and you have to go back to work.’
Helen bunched her fists in the shock of greasy brown hair which hid her face and whimpered. He waded in and hit her twice, hard enough this time to send her head into the glass with a couple of thuds.
‘You’re not getting another fuckin shot, Helen!’ he yelled. ‘That’s all there is to it. Now straighten out and get back to work or we’re gonna have a fight. You don’t wanna have another fight now, do you, Helen?’
No. Helen just wanted another shot. I thought then that he might smash her clear through the window. But instead he knelt down to search in his bag until he came up with a packet of cashews.
‘Here,’ he said softly. ‘These are your favourites, eh? Cashews?’ He moved the hair out of her face and pushed some nuts between her lips. ‘Eat up, Helen. They’re good for you. You like nuts, doncha, mate?’
But the nuts wouldn’t stay in. They fell from her slack lips, unheeded as she moaned for a shot. The young pimp kept trying to push them back in but she shook her head slowly and rocked from side to side. Finally she pushed her chin down onto her chest and he muttered, ‘Shit,’ and threw the packet away. ‘Look,’ he sighed heavily. ‘You’re buggering up me schedule, Helen. I gotta go see a bloke up the Wall in a minute and I still gotta do Michelle round the corner. So you gonna go to work or what?’
‘Wannanutha …’
He tapped her lightly with the back of a finger to drag her attention back to him. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you go to work now and come up the Wall in an hour or so, we’ll see about getting you another shot, eh? How’s that sound?’
It must have sounded okay because she looked up at him for the first time. Then she slowly gathered together whatever it takes for thirteen-year-old junkies to push themselves off the tiles and back onto the footpath to ask strange men to fuck them for money.
I never saw her again, but that’s not unusual. Faces come and go all the time up the Cross. After I had lived in Darlinghurst for a couple of years I realised there were some stayers, perennial hookers and doormen and local crims who never seemed to leave or change or even breathe in some cases. But they were all old hands who had cut some sort of Faustian deal to survive on the edge of the abyss. The younger faces almost never lasted. They just disappeared or grew so old so fast it was like watching a special effects movie. In that way heroin was almost occult in its power, a magic dust which could suck the life right out of your face. This was ten years back of course – a long time before the Wood Royal Commission, before the 5T or heroin chic – and Sydney did not dominate the national heroin market as it does now. In those days interstate syndicates tended to run their own shows, importing, wholesaling and distributing independently, whereas now Sydney’s control of the trade is nearly absolute. Even Melbourne’s massive appetite for China white is largely fed by hundreds of kilos of Number 4 arriving in shipping containers at Darling Harbour every year.
Helen was very much a bottom feeder in this food chain and most likely her nattily dressed pimp was not that far above her. She was just a user. He was probably a user-dealer and above him were another three or four levels of ounce dealers, brokers, wholesalers and importers. The ounce dealers were visible, still having to get down and dirty in the marketplace, but the more rarefied levels were, and remain, virtually invisible. At that point, in the late 1980s, the cops would have fingered the Chinese and the Lebs as the most likely candidates to head up the biggest and best organised import networks, but beyond that speculative leap it all became a little pear-shaped and confusing, with distribution from the warehouse via hundreds of networks of local players, mostly Anglos, some of whom, it t
urned out, carried badges and guns. While a lot of disorganised criminal activity saw weights of up to one or two kilos come in strapped to the body of courier ‘mules’, or simply sent through the mail to a series of post office boxes, the really heavy hitters might never even lay eyes on the stuff they imported in job lots of ten, twenty or thirty kilos. They would arrange the finance and logistics of a payload, most likely from Burma, through Thailand and into Sydney via shipping containers or air freight. That purchase through a broker in Hong Kong or Bangkok at twelve to fifteen grand per kilo would then arrive to be broken down into one or two kilo packets for distribution to any number of wholesalers, all buying in at up to a quarter of a million dollars a kilo. The wholesalers would step on the product for the first time, diluting it with glucose, icing sugar, caffeine, chalk, soap powder or even plaster of Paris for sale in five and ten gram lots to their ounce dealers at two or three hundred dollars a gram. The ounce dealers, most often profit takers rather than users, would dilute their buy again before dealing to one or two dozen regulars, at which point the likes of Helen’s pimp became involved.
While the machinations of the drug industry’s royal families remain mysterious, the activities of the soldiers and serfs are not. The fix which Helen’s pimp had allowed her earlier in the evening had probably come from a five gram score, either bought in a dealer’s car while on the move or paid for and retrieved from a nearby stash. When I lived near the Cross a coffee shop owner in Roslyn Gardens grew so tired of junkies and user-dealers plucking their purchases from where they had been pinned to the tree outside his cafe that he took to rushing out with a baseball bat and threatening violence every time he noticed someone moving towards the spot. The original importers and wholesalers of the batch from which Helen scored would have been almost one hundred per cent certain of never being detected or arrested. Those hassles were a hazard which she, her pimp and his supplier were much more likely to face, although the risk could have been minimised by a judicious alliance with whichever syndicate was at that point running the local drug and sex rackets with the active connivance of the local police.
Leviathan Page 38