None of this is to deny that the 5T exist. They do and this is the saddest element of all, for their creation was avoidable. When the first stories of the 5T were being laid out at the Telegraph and the Herald, the gangs were little more than groups of unemployed Vietnamese teens who had slipped through the net of the secondary school system and often had no close family to rely on. Coming from refugee camps in Hong Kong where 2000 children were kept under armed guard for months without seeing daylight, they may never have been in school. Some had seen their families killed. They arrived in Sydney, were given a few months English training if they were very lucky, then set loose to fend for themselves. April Pham, a youth worker in Cabramatta, told me that they didn’t think of themselves as having ‘low self-esteem’. They just thought of their lives as shit. They could not even cope with welfare. In March 1991, during a deep recession, the Bankstown, Cabramatta, Fairfield, Marrickville and Campsie social security offices combined had only two Indochinese aged between sixteen and eighteen receiving job search allowance. ‘Half the kids don’t have any income,’ said April. ‘The dole is a huge hassle. We virtually have to drag them in there. They live off and with their friends, a dozen in a one-bedroom flat. They share expenses. If one has fifty dollars, everyone gets it.’
This was the 5T in its earliest days. But even bullshit has a critical mass and past that point it becomes self-generating. Cut off from any other source of identity, the loudest message those young Vietnamese had beamed at them was ‘street gangs’. If they ever sat on the floor of their dismal unfurnished flats and wondered what this strange new country expected of them, they need only attend to their media image. Unfortunately that particular fantasy was powered by an alternating current. Just as the symbol of a powerful underground teen-mafia explained the suburban catastrophe of drug-fuelled crime – and offered salvation through the symbol of an unshackled police force waging their War on Drugs with a nuclear armoury of supercharged drug laws – so too did it provide a reassuring myth for their notional enemy. Cast adrift in an alien world which obviously distrusted and feared them, the rootless beta-version outlaws were presented with an expertly crafted narrative of their own power and significance. They weren’t sloughed off failures. They weren’t pathetic. They were not doomed. They were the 5T. And though they might walk in the valley of the shadow of death they would fear no evil because they were the baddest motherfuckers in the valley. I mean, really, what did everyone expect them to do? Get a haircut and a job flipping patties at McDonalds?
Barbara Tuchman once described the behaviour of governments which pursue policies plainly contrary to their own self-interest as the march of folly. Wilful blindness, self-deception or, as Tuchman calls it, woodenheadedness, has played an important role in governance since the Trojans decided to place within their possession that big, suspicious-looking horse their implacable enemies the Greeks had mysteriously left outside the gates of Troy. It was epitomised, she writes, by Phillip II of Spain, ‘the surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns’, of whom it was once said, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. The policy-makers who responded to the 5T as a cause of urban decay rather than a symptom had only to contemplate the city’s criminal history of a century before to understand the end point of their woodenheaded policies – just as the politicians of the nineteenth century had been informed, at length, time and again, of the grim consequences of allowing slums to arise in their midst.
In the 1880s and 1890s the city’s gangs were composed of poor Australian, Irish and English slum dwellers. Known as larrikins, they were the offspring of those benighted creatures described by WS Jevons and a series of Royal Commissions and reports into the conditions of the city’s working classes. Like New York hoodlums or the gamin of Paris, they were as much a product of the slums as the plague rats of 1900. And just as the slums are still with us today in different form, so are the larrikins, except now they are called the 5T, the 108 Gang, Sing Ma or the Bankstown Boys. If that seems to over-sentimentalise the modern city’s social bandits, it shouldn’t. We see the larrikin through the soft focus lens of time’s passage. When he actually roamed the street he was perhaps even more of a terror to the respectable and the well fed than your average Asian youth gang today. In January 1884 Sydney Quarterly Magazine said the city at night was haunted by what they called a ‘formidable evil’. Of the Victorian youth gangs, it was no exaggeration
to say that they are surcharged with every species of abomination; now ready to murder, in the fierce abandonment of their lust, a defenceless woman; now seizing with gusto the opportunity of stabbing a decent lad, the contemplation of whose respectability has lashed them into unquellable fury.
And just as Bankstown Mall was supposedly turned into a free-fire zone by gang warfare, so were the parks and alleys of Sydney rendered impassable by turf wars between the likes of the Blues Point Mob, the Livers and the Rocks Push as bands of larrikins ‘swollen with insolence and wine’ formed opposing parties to contend ‘with infinite spirit by means of stones and fists’. The larrikins, like the 5T, followed a classic evolutionary path from low-level street offences to organised criminal enterprise. By the 1880s they had gathered into ‘pushes’ which more or less controlled areas like the Rocks, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills or Glebe. Said the Quarterly,
So uniformly dangerous and pestilent is this element becoming in some quarters of this city, and so uniformly insufficient is our august police force to act on their flagitiousness, that – unless a speedy reformation is effected – respectable citizens will have nothing left but to provide themselves with weapons of defence.
In 1897 the State’s enlightened and forward-thinking comptroller-general of prisons, Frederick Neitenstein, reported to Parliament on ‘the causes and prevention of larrikinism’, remarking on the way ‘certain phases of crime’ seemed to periodically bloom, mature and eventually pass away. He commented favourably upon British programs to alleviate the shocking conditions of the slums, which Neitenstein was convinced were the cause of this ‘undisciplined animalism’. He also tagged another culprit, blaming sensational media coverage for inflaming the situation and giving a lead to the easily led.
James Murray, who in 1973 analysed the phenomenon of the larrikin pushes, was struck by the parallels with his own era and wrote, ‘it may be that the last thirty years of the twentieth century in Australia will see migrant pushes as troubled and dangerous as the pushes of the nineteenth’. He was mistakenly prescient. Murray predicted the possibility of gangs arising in Sydney and Melbourne’s Italian and Greek communities. However, political consensus on migration and a relatively strong economy had seen those arrivals integrated quite comfortably. During the 1980s and 1990s, economic restructuring and the erosion of that consensus by a cultural dread of non-European migration denied many migrants from the Middle East and Indochina the same advantages. The picture was not unrelentingly dark of course. Tens of thousands of overachieving Asian-Australian university students suggested another story beyond the Battle of Bankstown. But they stood in apparent contradicton to evidence of ‘gang violence, drugs and related crime among young Indochinese’ noted by even the most sympathic observers, such as Nancy Viviani in 1996.
Viviani reviewed Patricia Easteal’s work on conviction rates for young Vietnamese in the 1980s when the media’s ‘Asian youth crime’ monster had just slipped the leash. She came to the depressing conclusion that Easteal’s positive assumptions were no longer justified. By the mid-1990s young Indochinese were increasingly being jailed for serious offences, taking up ten per cent of the beds in the State’s detention centres even though their parent community comprised only two per cent of the State’s population. Describing the increased conviction rates as alarming, Viviani said the 1990s had also seen a shift towards organised criminality, with Chinese triads, Yugoslavs and Romanians all becoming involved. Even so, she cautioned, the young street bandits were not the kings of the drug trade, only its
pawns. Like their larrikin forebears, however, they had evolved from ordinary street crime to more sophisticated forms of business. The larrikins graduated from mugging and random predation to organised joint ventures with Chinese opium dealers and the illegal gambling trade, just as the 5T progressed from shoplifting and minor assault to increasingly violent robberies and, of course, retailing heroin.
The larrikins were just as politically sensitive as the 5T (or whichever felafel-eating posse the Telegraph’s editor anoints as the gamin du jour). Ambrose Pratt, who claimed to have acted as a lawyer for one of the pushes in the 1890s, said that at their height they had cowed both the police force and the judiciary. The small wooden truncheons carried by police were of no consequence to men who were inured to violence of much greater savagery than anything one or two constables might deal out. And no witness would lightly testify against criminals ‘whose hearts were strangers to remorse, and whose vengeance was known to be implacable’. Pratt alleged that by voting en bloc in the city’s minuscule electorates, and by terrorising candidates who stood without their approval, the pushes even built up a reservoir of tacit support on the floor of Parliament itself. This influence was supposedly brought to bear against legislation which armed the police with guns in 1894. Cabinet pushed a number of legal reforms through with ‘the greatest difficulty’, wrote Pratt. ‘The pushes bestirred themselves, and it was soon made manifest that they possessed astonishing political influence, for the Bill was bitterly contested.’
Pratt claimed that the police were first armed after a pitched battle between a number of pushes at Leichhardt. Like some of the clashes of the 1980s ‘race war’ this showdown was supposed to have been prearranged and the police, on gaining knowledge of the fight, set out to disrupt it. The former push lawyer described the ensuing humiliation as the police arrived late. They rushed the brawlers and took eleven prisoners in the first moments. The larrikins, however, then combined against the common foe and a desperate struggle followed with three constables being seriously wounded. The rest, wrote Pratt, finding themselves outmatched, fled for their lives, taking two prisoners with them.
There ensued the extraordinary spectacle of two score blue coats running like hares before a mob of yelling lads, not one of whom could have been more than twenty-two years of age. After a hard chase they reached and entered a steam tram, the driver of which immediately sent his engine full speed citywards. The pushes, eager to rescue their comrades, followed for half a mile, battering the cars with showers of stones, but were then distanced.
In contrast, Peter Grabosky’s Sydney in Ferment, the definitive survey of the city’s criminal history, cites the Bridge Street sensation in February 1894 as the catalyst for the decision to arm the city’s police. Grabosky, who is sceptical of the wilder claims about the pushes’ influence and power, puts parliamentary opposition to harsher laws down to the simple mechanism of the newly elected Labor Party representing the interests of its working-class constituents. Grabosky argues that the Labor men did not share the property-owning classes’ hysterical fear of the larrikins and simply resisted repressive legislation which would have fallen most heavily against their own people. Parliament did allow the police to go armed, however, after three burglars suspected of turning over the Union Steamship Company’s offices were nabbed by the police in Bridge Street. The burglars defended themselves with iron bars and took down five unarmed police in the melee. The cops strapped on their sidearms shortly after, although the idea had been mooted much earlier.
Just over 100 years later, constables saddle up for patrol with equipment remarkably similar to that of their turn of the century peers. Most refinements have been a matter of increasing, rather than radically altering, the potential force an officer can call on. The modern baton, for instance, is much longer and heavier and could easily shatter a man’s arm if swung with sufficient intent. Handcuffs are still made of steel, but the old service revolver has been replaced by a fifteen-shot semi-automatic Glock. The only two items of kit a nineteenth-century constable might not recognise immediately are the can of capsicum spray and the rubber gloves. A quick squirt in the eyes of a rambunctious larrikin would quickly demonstrate the effectiveness of the former. It might take some time, however, to explain why contact with the bodily fluids of a modern offender can be as fatal as a knife slash or pistol shot; hence the need to carry gloves.
It is a moot point whether Sydney is more violent now than in 1900. Technical advances have certainly improved the weaponry available on both sides of the thin blue line. At the same time there isn’t a cop alive who won’t tell you that drugs, especially heroin, have introduced a level of viciousness to the criminal milieu that was unthinkable a generation ago. Before smack, one Mac Fields detective complained, there was a healthy respect for law enforcement. But not now. A junkie might kill a cop just to avoid arrest on a minor possession charge. Almost on a whim. ‘The junkies, they don’t care about themselves,’ said the detective. ‘They don’t care about each other or their friends or their family and certainly not the police.’ Another detective, fourteen years on the job, said simply, ‘They’re not scared of us now. We really have lost control of the streets.’
What is beyond dispute is the significance of the city’s treacherous and ambivalent politics in shaping the perceptions of crime and the cops’ response, especially to the drug trade. Few of the artefacts of postmodern life have the capacity to inspire the new deadly sins of fear, loathing and cluelessness – as well as the older ones of envy, gluttony, lust, anger and sloth – as do drugs. Their ubiquity, their omnipotence, their amorality make them symbolically powerful and thus objects of fierce political contention. AsP. Manning wrote in 1980,
Most persons have learned, as a result of socialization to the conventional meanings attached to government, policing and the law, to view policing and especially drug policing as a series of dramatic confrontations between good and evil, in which the police possess the preponderance of resources, skills, and virtue. We expect that they will emerge victorious, given adequate resources, if they display sufficient courage and determination. We focus attention, therefore, upon successes, are given little information on failures, and naively view police action as exclusively creating solutions to the drug problem.
When you punch through the static of PR and bullshit surrounding the war on drugs, however, ‘it is quite clear that they rarely achieve success, even defined in their own terms, that they often produce unanticipated negative effects’, and that much of what is achieved happens through the ad hoc efforts of poorly resourced and over-extended men and women whose working reality is almost completely disconnected from the rhetorical fantasies of their political masters. The extent of that gulf came home to me when I sat in on the morning briefing at Macquarie Fields where I was spending a few days trying to understand the workaday concerns of a suburban police station.
At least a dozen or more of the station’s senior officers wandered into the briefing room just before nine a.m. Apart from the mug shots and records of sixty-two repeat offenders Blu-tacked to the rear wall, there was very little to distinguish the room from a small lecture theatre in a suburban TAFE college. Cheap plastic chairs were scattered around an overhead projector which had eaten a big slice of the station’s annual budget for capital works. Everyone looked washed out under the fluorescent lighting and nobody rushed to claim the seats at the front. One of the sergeants sitting down the back deadpanned, ‘At least the boss can’t kick my arse from here.’
The station boss, Superintendent Les Wales, arrived looking slightly incongruous, more like the old accountant he used to be than the area commander he is. Wales’s professional background had equipped him for the demands of the new police service, however, which runs on business plans, mission statements and corporate strategies, unlike the old force which got along famously on meat pies and Toohey’s Old. Wales had spent the previous day at a meeting of regional commanders which had endlessly repeated the Gregorian chant of m
odern management: do more with less.
‘This is the message from yesterday,’ said Wales as he placed a transparency of a simple hand-drawn dollar sign on the overhead projector. The command had been praised at the meeting, he said, but he had also been told they could do better. Wales ticked off a number of cost-saving measures before revealing that another region was under-strength by eighty officers. ‘So,’ he said somewhat apologetically to Jude, his human resources chief, ‘we’re being ordered to give up eighty because we’re apparently over-strength.’ Jude, a civilian not constrained by the chains of rank and discipline, left nobody in any doubt as to her opinion of this audacious raid, demanding to know why they should put up with it. Les Wales smiled a gentle knowing smile. ‘Don’t ask the hard questions, Jude.’
Leviathan Page 41