‘Ryan, the [Police] Commissioner, he’s an educated man,’ said Gordon, more softly now. ‘He knows what’s going on … Christ, he should be doing something! But he’s not doing anything about it. He’s just talking about it. He’s gunna do this, gunna do that … gunna gunna gunna.’
‘How does it make you feel?’ I asked, hating myself just a little bit for such a braindead question but wanting to know anyway.
‘Absolutely sick to the stomach,’ said Gordon Gallagher, the dying policeman. ‘Sick to the stomach that you were ever involved in it.’
Gordon sued the police service in March 1998, alleging disability discrimination. He had tried to take up his old job in 1994 but had been rejected because his previous sick leave had been ‘excessive’. In fact, his sick leave throughout his many years of physically gruelling and dangerous work had been well within his entitlements, but the service refused to explain the basis for its decision. Legal aid flogged them in the Equal Opportunity Tribunal with his former tormentor, Attila the Hun Jr, having to squirm his way through nearly an hour’s excrutiating testimony as he tried to justify his part in the exclusion. When Gordon won, the tribunal ordered the service to pay damages and publish a full apology in the Police Service News ‘forthwith’.
I attended his funeral and burial service at Sutherland on a bitterly cold day in mid-winter. It was wet and bleak and steam plumed from the mouths of dozens of police officers who had come to pay their respects. Most of them arrived in cheap, rusting cars. They were just workers. As Gordon had been. They sang their hymns, said their prayers and committed their friend to the earth. Months had passed since the tribunal’s decision, but the service had never found time to publish that apology.
So Much for the Afterglow
It was a weird feeling. Really weird. Ten past four on a Saturday afternoon, one week before my birthday, I shut down my Powerbook and stretched back from the desk I’d made my own over the previous four years. The Mitchell Library was quiet, sleepy and warm. Nothing unusual there. It was about this time most afternoons I could be caught flaked out for a little covert nap action. On the next table a couple of high-school kids were already snoozing atop their stack of HSC papers. Half a dozen or so of the Mitchell’s resident freaks and trainspotters were scattered through the huge reading room. I stood and stretched and tried to shake off that weird feeling like a big old dog emerging from a pond. But there was nothing for it. It was too weird.
I had just written the last line of my last chapter and although another few weeks of editing, revising, defamation checking, foot stamping and tantrum throwing stretched in front of me, the long, long run was over and the fat times were coming. For two months I’d been forcing myself through the barbed wire entanglements of my deadline with promises of unimaginably indulgent bludging afterwards. During breaks I’d sit on the steps of the Mitchell washing down mouthfuls of M&Ms with paper cups of instant coffee dreaming of my personal big rock candy mountain. When this baby was delivered to the printers I planned to play quite a few video games, catch more than my fair share of waves and smoke way too many cones. Basically, dear reader, my plan was to boogie oogie oogie until I just couldn’t boogie no more.
It had been such a long journey that now the end was near I wasn’t quite sure of what to do next – after surfing, thrashing my Playstation to death and pulling heaps of cones, that is. And it was only in the last few months, looking up from the line or paragraph immediately in front of me and scoping out the book as a whole for the first time that I realised just how far I’d strayed from my intended destination since 13 April 1995, the day I’d signed on for this King Hell road trip. At eleven a.m. that day I’d pitched Random a history of Sydney in the style of Michael Pye’s Maximum City. The difference between these sorts of books, I explained, and your more conventional histories is partly based on content and partly on technique. Essentially the author brings the methods of American magazine journalism, once known as the New Journalism, to a much longer format.
In Pye’s case this involved writing what he termed a ‘biography’ rather than a standard history of New York. Pye’s story of New York advances through themes as much as through time. It follows a rough line from the founding days of the colonies through to the end of the twentieth century. However, by organising his material in thematic chapters rather than in a more rigid chronological order, he shows how present-day New York is a child of its past. Within each chapter he deploys standard historical techniques of archival research, alongside the journalistic methods of interview, narrative, biography, personal observation and shifting points of reference. In this way his history becomes richer than a standard textbook and accessible to a much wider audience.
I had planned to write a celebration of my city. Some obvious themes in her story suggested themselves; migration; environment; money; power; leisure and culture. I planned to open with an essay called ‘Creation Myths’, covering prehistory to convict transportation and including Aboriginal history. I also intended writing a whole chapter on women and actually mapped out a long section on the city’s gay history. But none of these things happened.
Four years later I sat hunched over my laptop, tapping out the ghoulish details of corpse ratting at the Glebe morgue. At one point I stopped typing, sat back and smiled my most lopsided, fatalistic smile. Well here we are, I said to myself, the emotional low point of the book. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have bottomed out.
How the hell did we end up there?
Not only had the chapter on Sydney’s women disappeared, the women themselves, apart from a few cameos, had gone MIA. And the gays? The burbs? The celebration? The good vibes of living in the greatest city in the world? Forget it. Sometime back in 1995 I wandered off the bright, teeming thoroughfares and down into a very dark alley. I never came back.
I think Arago’s journals might have drawn me down there, all that grim business about the opulent merchants of olde Sydney towne tossing some blackfellas a bottle of rum and some mouldy bread to beat each to death for whitey’s entertainment. I’d always known we’d done those blackfellas wrong but it had never really come home to me before. When I started researching the Gundy shooting and the subsequent Redfern raids I began to understand how little the mindset of white authority had changed, and when I read the story of Gundy to an audience at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival I realised I wasn’t the only one who’d been wearing a white blindfold.
It was a strange gig on which to lay such a heavy reading. A comedy night in fact. Dirk Flinthart and I had just released How To Be A Man and the festival organisers rang to see if we’d like to do a little dog and trumpet routine for the new book. Flinthart was up for it but I wasn’t. They sort of pecked at me a bit, teased out that I was working on Leviathan and asked whether I’d like to read from that instead. I would, I said, but not at a comedy night. Oh, it’s not all comedy, they assured me. We have some really heavy-going performance poetry too. That should bring down a suitably gloomy atmosphere. Oh well, I said, in that case …
I hired a young Aboriginal actor to read out the longer quotes, practised an appropriately grave persona for reading such depressing material and arrived to discover I’d been billed as something like ‘Crazy John Birmingham, Queensland’s favourite funny man’.
Hmmm, good deal.
Anyway, the actor and I took the stage, or rather the couch, from which we would be reading. I gazed across the dreadlocked, nose-ringed, pin-eyed audience and understood with a sick sinking feeling that they were there to hear some hilarious anecdotes about bucket bongs and mad flatmates. I started to read.
Well, you could actually see the pain in their eyes when they realised this was not about the funny things which happened to Crazy John the last time he pulled too many cones. But that was nothing compared to the discomfort and the urge to flee which ran through the room when it dawned on them that the topic for the night was, oh no – oh God no please don’t – Aborigines.
It’s a hell of thing to
perform in front of a room full of people who suddenly don’t want to be there. But I had faith in this story, and I had faith in my reluctant listeners too, so I ploughed on and after a few minutes a really cool thing started to happen. In spite of themselves they were drawn in. Not in a good way of course. They stopped and attended the same way you can’t help but look at a bad road accident as you drive by. But the boredom, the agitation and even the hostility which had been there evaporated. At first curiosity took over, then active interest and finally horror. I could see it in the way their faces went sort of slack, their eyes widened and a few folks lost control of their mouths, letting them fall open.
It was the shotgun that did it. I had slowed the reading right down and reached the line, ‘The Remington 870 is a big heavy-hitting piece of artillery.’ My own voice hitched at that point, which was a surprise, I can tell you. I looked up to catch my breath and composure and saw that for the first time every pair of eyes was boring in on me. As I worked through what happened next some people began to shake their heads slowly, some gave out little groans and one or two began to dab discreetly at their eyes. I think at last the story had come home for them as well.
After that, I don’t know, it was all just a bit difficult to embrace the Good Living Sydney of laughter and forgetting. I was deep inside the alleyway now, perhaps Durands Alley or Abercrombie Lane, and although I knew there was a world of light somewhere above, I only wanted to push further into the gloom. So let me apologise if you think I’ve been too dark, or biased, or unfair; if you think I’ve dwelt too much on violence and alienation and not enough on the triumphs and virtues of this great city. Perhaps I have written a black armband biography and have been unjustly selective in my choice of material. I am guessing, for instance, that Prime Minister John Howard would not approve. But then, John Howard can go fuck himself. And the horse he rode in on.
History is never bloodless. Someone always gets hurt. And I guess, in the end, I couldn’t draw my eyes away from that. Perhaps then, I should it make clear that I love Sydney. She took me in and made me her own when I was just a starving baby writer, living on friends’ brown couches and bludging meals off the Hare Krishnas to get by. I love it that she didn’t care, dirty trollop that she is. She just threw her arms around me and cried, ‘Here I am baby, come an’ get it!’ I love her beaches, her sunshine, her food and her art. I love her arrogance, her greed and promiscuity. I love her parties and the hangovers that inevitably follow. I love it that she loves a good fight. That she knows she is better than anyone else. That you can do things her way or you can shove it.
If I could take the ghost of Arthur Phillip on a tour of the city he founded, I’d want him to be proud. I’d take him to the highest towers and shout him the most expensive lunch. I’d tell him that all things considered, he’d done well. I’d say a free people now live where he pitched his camp so long ago. The city he helped raise is one of the finest in the world. Its treasures would make the London of his day seem like a mean and muddy little village. I’d want him to know that it was all worth it.
The only dark spot I could imagine might come if Phillip asked what had become of his old friend Bennelong’s people. I could take him down to Circular Quay, warp his mind with the Opera House and tell him we now celebrate the memory of his friend in the name Bennelong Point. But of his people? The Iora and all the other tribes? Well, surrounded by the city’s staggering wealth and progress, I suppose that question might prove a little embarrassing.
I could imagine so many things I’d want to say to Phillip if his ghost did turn up. But if he brought his friend Bennelong with him, what would I say then?
Perhaps sorry might be a good place to start.
Bibliographic Notes
Hey there. How you doing? You’ll probably be doing a lot better if you choose to skip this little section. Believe me, you’ve got better things to do. You could have a cup of tea and a nice sit-down, play a video game, toss the old tennis ball around for Rover perhaps. All much better than plowing through an essay on my major sources.
I don’t have much of a choice, however, because I chose not to make you fight your way through a barbed wire tangle of citations and footnotes in the main text. I did that because nobody but pointy-heads (and of course the good folk being cited) ever read the footnotes and because, frankly, I think they look kind of ugly.
Before plunging into a discussion of everyone else’s work I should write a quick note on self-plagiarism. Leviathan took over four years to write, during which time I tried to keep my journalistic commitments to a minimum. Occasionally, however, an editor would offer me a commission which related to research I was already doing, and in such circumstances I’d take the job and write the story because it helped the cause. Hence there are a few minor sections of Leviathan which have been published in embryonic form elsewhere. In the very first edition of the Australian’s Review of Books I held forth on the nature of violence, a discussion which I refined in chapter three of this book. Later, in reviewing Stephen Knight’s Continent of Mystery for the same publication, I drew on some work I had already done on the working conditions of early Sydney. When Peter Craven asked me to contribute to Best Australian Essays 1998 I did so because it allowed me to work out some ideas I’d been having about the appeal of Pauline Hanson, which also appear in here. The linked discussion of Sydney’s neo-Nazis was first published in Rolling Stone under the title ‘Hearts of Darkness’, while some of chapter four’s examination of the 5T first appeared in Juice magazine as ‘Exit Wounds’. Ten years ago I embarked on what I hoped would be a ground-breaking piece of writing for Rolling Stone, living on the streets for a month to document the life of some street kids. The story was a failure largely because I was too immature to make it work. It’s been bugging me ever since and I rescued a few snatches of that feature to use here in the hope that I might redeem the time I otherwise wasted. The abusive episode which opens ‘Pig City’ is taken from that piece.
Wherever I have drawn directly on somebody else’s work, I have either said so or tried to make it obvious. But sometimes the same ground might have been covered by four or five different writers, each with a subtly different spin and, once again, I wasn’t about to make you wade through half a dozen names every couple of lines just for the sake of good form. Which brings us here, at the end of my own personal Vietnam, to this awkward, disjointed sort of essay where I’m going to try to put myself right with all of those guys in whose books, articles, essays and theses I’ve been buried for the past four years or so. The following isn’t really exhaustive in the same way as the formal bibliography, but I hope this does cover everyone whose diligence and hard work I profited from. If, God forbid, you’ve been reading Leviathan and have suddenly leapt from your dusty old armchair in the commonroom, spittle flying and temperature rising because you think I’ve swiped your life’s work without sufficient acknowledgment, well, uh, sorry. Give me a bell or drop me an email and I’ll see you’re cited properly in any later editions.
1. The Long Goodbye
Additional details of the last days of Saigon were drawn from The Fall of Saigon by David Butler, Vietnam at War by Davidson, Tim Bowden’s One Crowded Hour, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Time magazine’s special issue commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the war’s end, ‘Saigon: the final 10 days’. I found Dinh Tran after reading his story in the Herald.
When researching conditions in Georgian London, besides those works cited in the text, such as those by Engels and Mayhew, I also referred to Selections from Cobbet’s Political Works, AGL Shaw’s Convicts and the Colonies (specifically chapters seven and eight) and MD George’s London Life in the Eighteenth Century, from which came some of the great detail about the effects of the gin trade. Manning Clark’s 1956 articles in Historical Studies were a good source of data and tips for further reading in this section. Shaw also did sterling service in the re-creation of the First Fleet voyage, along with Bateson’s The Convict Ships, John
Cobley’s ‘The Crimes of the First Fleet Convicts’, Hazel King’s ‘Villains All?’, Anne Conlon’s ‘Convict Narratives’ and of course Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (which I still think is really cool, even if lots of pointy-heads don’t). The best source of information about the First Fleet however, remains the foundation journals. If the government is looking to throw some money at digital ventures, perhaps it could think about putting these babies on a single CD-rom.
I re-created the Gundy shooting and its aftermath from the investigation by the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody and the New South Wales Ombudsman’s report into ‘Operation Sue’.
The section on Australia becoming an El Dorado for the English poor drew on dozens of different authors’ work and they are so closely woven it is difficult to tease out the most important; but if I had to point the finger at the culprits responsible, you’d be looking at Townsend’s ‘The Molesworth Enquiry: Does the Report Fit the Evidence?’ in the Journal of Australian Studies and ‘Document: Sir Richard Bourke’s Afterthoughts, 1838’ in Push From the Bush and ‘The British Parliament and Transportation in the Eighteen-Fifties’ in Historical Studies. Ritchie’s ‘Towards Ending An Unclean Thing: The Molesworth Committee and the Abolition of Transportation to NSW, 1837–40’ got a good workout, as did Conlon’s ‘Mine is a Sad Yet True Story’. Margaret Kiddle’s research on Chisholm forms the basis of my version of that great story. Hayden’s ‘The NSW Immigration Question and Responsible Government, 1856–1861’ provided a useful starting point in understanding early anti-migrant feeling, while Pyke’s ‘Some Leading Aspects of Foreign Immigration to the Goldfields’ provides the description of the Chinese arrival on the goldfields. As I mentioned in the text, Curthoy’s chapter in Who Are Our Enemies? was my template for laying out the ensuing anti-Chinese movement, with lots of material provided by contemporary press reports, the Final Report of the Committee to Enquire into Crowded Dwellings, which you will find attached to the Eleventh Progress Report of the Sydney City and Suburban Sewage and Health Board, Appointed 12 April 1875, and the Report of the Select Committee on Common Lodging Houses, V&PNSWLA, 1875–6, Volume 2.
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