Leviathan (14 page)
Authors: John Birmingham
Taken in isolation any one of these developments could drastically destabilise a society. At their point of confluence they were potentially tragic. This may be the point Geoffrey Blainey was trying to make in 1984 when he ignited the national race debate. Whatever his intentions though, simply positing a connection between race, culture and social crisis proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Corrosive anxiety about massive economic change suddenly fused with fears of racial and cultural change and National Action unexpectedly found itself called upon to explain its position. These paragons of the master race denied they were in any way racist. National Action didn't believe in the superiority of one race over another. It simply believed that the Anglo-Celtic culture of Australia should not be endangered. As more people noted what they were saying,
Ultra
, the party's internal bulletin, announced that the time had come for taking it to the streets.
Student unions noted an escalating number of bashings of Asian students after dark, both on campus and around the inner city. There was a shift not just in the frequency of political violence, but also in its intensity and focus. The targets began to change. The party bulletin
Audacity
featured a regular âfilth file' in which critics of the party would find their name, phone number and address published with an invitation to the âcurious and adventurous' to dish out a little nationalist justice. Journalists such as Gerard Henderson, Andrew Olle and Adele Horin who covered the immigration debate or related topics in an unsatisfactory manner began to receive phone calls and death threats late at night. Academics and unionists found their car tyres slashed and graffiti daubed on their houses. Greenpeace and Community Aid Abroad shops were broken into and looted.
Subverting the dominant paradigm doesn't come cheap, however, so in early 1984 a scam was cooked up to rip off the GIO and raise money to buy all the shotguns and balaclavas they would need to make people understand the righteousness of their cause. A woman who rented a room at National Action headquarters came home one day to find the place ransacked, her jewellery gone and party member Jim Saleam shaking his head. Later the woman overheard Saleam talking about âsharing out the insurance money' with another party member. He was found guilty of insurance fraud in 1987. His appeal failed in April 1989 and he was later jailed as Jewish Luftwaffe veterans everywhere chuckled quietly into their glasses. Saleam ate another big bowl of Her Majesty's porridge after a bungled terror attack on Eddie Funde, a representative of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. A few months before his failed appeal a couple of NA storm troopers covered the licence plates of their car, drove over to Funde's place, pulled on balaclavas and pumped a couple of rounds through the front door. The shooter and his driver were tumbled and rolled over, but Saleam put the Crown through the inconvenience of trying him for supplying the shotty and organising the job before they could lock him up again.
Regardless of Saleam's personal travails the wider Asian immigration debate continued, often with no real refinement of the sort of arguments which had so inflamed Sydney's rougher element a hundred years earlier. Emboldened by mainstream support for their position â if not actually for them â National Action began working its way down the enemies list, widening their focus from vulnerable students and the occasional journalist to gays, lesbians, Aboriginal, peace and anti-apartheid groups, academics, liberal congregations such as the Pitt Street Uniting Church, the Antidiscrimination Board, union activists and, somewhat recklessly, a couple of Special Branch cops who had been assigned to their case. After National Action raided the meeting of a gay migration lobby group the hammer came down.
Having suffered through months of harassment the gays were ready for a fight. Their resistance seemed to unnerve the storm troopers and a handful of hysterical pansies and angry dykes proceeded to bitch slap them out of the room. Special Branch quickly obtained a search warrant and charged over to a house in Petersham used as an alternative headquarters by NA. They found a tape recording and photographs of the raid. Most of the those who took part were arrested and charged. The cases were heard in Glebe local court and attended by observers from a resistance group called Community Alert Against Racism and Violence. âIt was unbelievably pathetic,' said CAARAV's Betty Hounslow. âShane Rosier, one of their big men, was just this really pathetic bloke in his late forties who was, you know, a bit chubby. He wore these brown trousers that kept riding up the back and an old yukko-looking brown cardigan. They found a lot of weapons in his house ⦠coshs, chains, and studded balls. And his story to the magistrate was that the weapons were part of his collection. He'd always been interested in weapons, he said. His grandfather was a famous gun collector. He and his dad had always wanted to have a gun collection just like old Granddad's, but they'd never had enough money to collect guns so they had to collect cheaper, working-class weapons. And this was why he had all these things. He said the tape of the raid was left on his doorstep one morning. Like a little abandoned baby.'
The pressure told and the right-wing extremists turned on each other as deeply repressed suspicions and rivalries burst through to the surface. Everybody seemed to accuse everyone else of being police spies and sexual deviants. The final slide into ignoble collapse was marked by the gunshot murder of Wayne âBovver' Smith in National Action headquarters at Tempe a few years later. It was an almost perfect example of the hapless farce which so often attended the adventures of National Action in the 1980s. Bovver, twenty-five years old and already weighing 108 kilos thanks to the three or four stubbies of beer he'd consume for breakfast each morning, was shot eight times with a sawn-off .22 rifle by Perry Whitehouse, ten years his senior but less than half his size, during a drunken, confused and basically pointless argument. When Whitehouse blew him away, Bovver was wearing a singlet bearing the message: Say No To The New Gun Control Laws.
National Action's failure could be sheeted home to a number of factors â besides their being totally fucked. The anti-Chinese movement of a century before had enjoyed widespread parliamentary and political support. Most importantly the union movement provided a well-organised structure for protest and, in the dispute over Chinese seamen, had a single, easily exploitable focus for a mass campaign. Also, the press on the whole supported the protesters. A hundred years later there was no single flashpoint from which to launch a mass campaign. The middle classes had no readily discernible problems with Asian migration and had in fact benefited from the contribution of Indochinese settlers to the diversification of inner urban culture â even if this was merely a superficial enjoyment of increasing numbers of Asian restaurants. Until the arrival of Pauline Hanson and One Nation there was no significant parliamentary support for the reintroduction of racist policy making, although Liberal leader John Howard did cause himself considerable difficulties by trying to tap into the anxieties which Geoffrey Blainey identified. National Action also erred in their eagerness to open hostilities against a rainbow coalition of gays, blacks, unionists and the like. As much as these interest groups may have offended the sensibilities of the respectable right there was simply no constituency outside the clubhouse at Tempe for saddling up and charging after them with shotguns and firebombs.
Obscured by all this, however, is the simple fact that like most pseudo-revolutionaries, Sydney's extremists simply could not tear themselves away from the comfortable inner suburbs where their favourite pubs were always close at hand. Had they ventured beyond the cafe zone they would have found more fertile ground for their seed. Out in suburbs like Macquarie Fields, St Marys and Mount Druitt where three generations of one family can be found scratching by on welfare, the likes of Australians Against Further Immigration, and more recently One Nation have found a receptive audience for their slightly more sophisticated protofascism. For despite the abject failure of National Action the past two decades have been characterised by the disintegration of postwar consensus over migration as the threat of cultural annihilation from outside is forgotten and the strain of economic inequality increases.
People who feel themselves threatened, who think they are getting less than they deserve, inevitably cast about for an explanation. In the end that's all Pauline Hanson offered, although she added the force multiplier of blame. Not just blame of the Government or Opposition who are mostly remote media figures, electrons and sound bites, but blame of tangible, immediately accessible human beings. That Vietnamese baker. Those threatening black teenagers. That rich Chinese businessman in the silver Mercedes. Whatever becomes of Hanson, the economic conditions and policies which gave rise to her and fellow travellers like Saleam persist. It may be then that Sydney's first story, a 200-year-long epic of successful migration, is over. And the wealth which was so ruthlessly taken from the first inhabitants will not be so readily handed over to the next.
The Virgin's Lie
There shall broad streets their stately walls extend,
The circus widen, and the crescent bend;
There, ray'd from cities o'er the cultur'd land,
Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand â¦
E
RASMUS
D
ARWIN
, âVisit of Hope to Sydney Cove', 1789
And her five cities, like five teeming sores
Each drains her; a vast parasite robber state
Where secondhand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
A
D H
OPE
, âAustralia', 1955
The morning after the Russians crashed a plutonium-powered Mars probe into the ocean off Chile I awoke before six. It was light, with summer on us and, unable to sleep, I decided on a walk around the cliffs at South Bondi. Bad cabin fever can set in when you're writing a long book and it's a good idea to get out every now and then, breathe some air, maybe talk to somebody. My friend Peter Robb, who was finishing
Midnight in Sicily
while I was trudging through the research for
Leviathan
, told me that he worried he had become strange and eccentric as he sank deeper into the project. I was aware of something similar within me as the weeks and months wore on and the keyboard time started to stack up. So I forced myself to leave the flat occasionally. Just enough to stay in practice.
The weather had been foul at the start of that summer, making my confinement even more severe. The previous week, while friends back in Brisbane had complained of stifling forty degree days, I had hurried, shivering, down Campbell Parade to the Noodle King wearing black jeans, two jumpers and a greatcoat. A few other fools hurried along with hands thrust deep into the pockets of their heavy coats, some of them nuzzling into bulky scarves or clapping gloved hands together. This was summer at Bondi, I kept reminding myself over a huge bowl of hot chicken laksa as the wind blew folding sheets of salty rain and sea spray around.
However, this morning dawn had come hard and bright with only a fresh breeze to take the edge off the promise of a warm day. I had a heavy schedule that week and had already shot Monday to hell, sleeping in then ditzing about on the Net for hours looking for celebrity porn. Waking early on Tuesday, I figured on a walk down the beach to check out the surf and clear my head before a big writing session. I'd become a little more attuned to the vagaries of the surf over the months I'd been living at the beach. I was never much of a swimmer, especially in the ocean, but I'd had a bodyboard years ago and still remembered the reassuring, if misleading sense of control it gave me out in the breakers. I bought another one after moving to Bondi, thinking I could use it to get a little exercise, to temper the effects of a sedentary lifestyle. You'll understand the extent of my cluelessness when I say that I planned to hit the beach and catch tubes every day in summer. It didn't occur to me in any real way that the surf was a living thing, with arbitrary, lethal moods. It was an idea I was familiar with, having grown up in Australia, but not one I understood in my bones. I had never been sucked out to sea by a rip, never been driven into the sand like a tent-peg by a mean, beach-breaking dumper. I knew intellectually that the sea was capricious and uncaring, but she hadn't had her evil way with me and so I didn't really understand.
That changed when I took my walk that morning. I was only a minute or two's stroll back from the strip at Bondi and I could tell something was different as soon as I left the flat. It wasn't just the fine weather. There was something below that, something deeper. After a few moments of idling along, I realised with a start that I could hear the roar of something big over the rise at the end of the street. I'd grown used to the background noise of the surf, especially late at night or now, early in the morning, when there was no traffic to mask it. But this was different. Hurrying a little, I wondered if maybe I should have fetched my board. I realised as soon as I made the rise what a fool idea that had been.
The entire bay, nearly a kilometre across, was alive with snaking ridge lines of cold, green salt water. They were immense, ungodly things, deformities in the surface of the world, piling up and up until they were taller than some of the old apartment blocks clustered around the far side of the bay. They raced in towards the crescent of the beach in sets of seven, eight or nine. Because Bondi's shoreline is turned in at about forty-five degrees, with the northern end of the bay cradled behind the massive rocky outcrop of Ben Buckler, it is the southern reach which normally gets the clean rolling swells loved by surfers. But an intense storm which had swept across the coastline 300 kilometres to the north during the night and spent itself out at sea had drummed a berserk, frenzied rhythm into the surface of the Pacific and that wild energy had travelled back to land in the form of these behemoth waves. There was no sheltered water anywhere in the bay. It had become a giant cauldron awash with precipitous walls of spray and spume, with foaming canyons and cold boiling turmoil.
It was all the more astounding for the still, pleasant nature of the morning. No clouds or smog haze sullied the powder blue sky and the sun still hung low, burning with a fierce white light which the deeper, calmer waters caught and threw off as a silver sheet too painful to look into without squinting. So vast and dense were the waves closer in, however, that as they built up then collapsed in on themselves, they formed cavernous inky-black tunnels which admitted no light. I turned to walk back to the beach as a monstrous wall of water smashed into a rock ledge way below, throwing a geyser into the air above me.
Across the bay white water burst over the rocks at Ben Buckler, churning and billowing and erupting again in time with the pulse of the waves. One huge black rock stood out on the shelf below, big as a truck, unaffected by the millions of tonnes of water slamming into it. It looked fixed and utterly immovable, as though it had been there 10 000 years before Arthur Phillip rowed past and would be there another 10 000 years from now. There is a bronze plaque on that rock, fixed into the face turned away from the waves.
This rock, weighing two hundred and thirty-five tons, was washed up from the sea during a storm on 15 July, 1912.
Locals appear to have had trouble convincing visitors that the sea actually spat up this giant, lifted it three metres from the ocean floor and carried it another fifty metres across the rocky shelf which juts out from the base of Ben Buckler. The plaque was set on the rock in March 1933, but the intervening years had allowed some doubt to set in. Residents said the rock had been used as a makeshift changing area before the turn of the century. However, photographs taken in the 1880s and held by the State Library show the area to be clear and so it seems that a furious sea did in fact disgorge the brute one night before the First World War.
I'll admit I became a little obsessed with that rock. There was something in its legend which muttered to me of our sense of place, a fear that the land itself might just be malevolent, waiting for a chance to do us wrong. The civilized mind's response to Australia's vast ageless spaces has always been deeply anxious; an uneasy awe which local artists have touched to great effect, in
Picnic at Hanging Rock
for instance, or in Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings, those alien landscapes peopled by strange, disturbing figures, filling the hollow places of your heart with dread and desolation. The land was as much the enemy of Watkin Tench and his revengers as the blacks whom they had set out to slaughter. The âIndians' seemed to disappear into it, while the white men nearly disappeared under it when they blundered into that muddy riverbed. Its thin sandy clays begrudged the first settlers even a subsistence crop. Its heat baked and finished off the foolhardy and well prepared alike. Its snakes and spiders and slithering things could kill a man with one bite, or drive him mad with a hundred nettlesome stings. Axes which bit hungrily into sturdy English oaks rang impotently on the ironbark. And the sea, which surrounded them and separated them forever from Mother England, seemed to contain as many terrors as the jungles of Africa.
A couple of guys at the University of Wollongong â Professors Bryant and Young â enlivened my search for information about the big rock at Bondi when I came across their papers on the incidence of tsunamis along the New South Wales coast. They fronted up to the 13th Australian Geological Convention in 1996 to argue that catastrophically large waves had struck the coast around Sydney on six occasions over the past 8000 years. The most recent, between 250 and 300 years ago, topped out at 110 metres and was powerful enough to roar over the cliffs and punch inland for five kilometres. To appreciate the effect of such a monster coming ashore today, you would need to imagine a wall of water sweeping up Pitt Street about level with the thirtieth floor of Governor Phillip Tower. Such a wave, it seemed to me, wouldn't have much trouble tossing around a marble like the big rock at Bondi.
Except of course the BryantâYoung tsunamis were not brewed up by a storm. More likely they were caused by some cataclysmic event like a sea floor collapsing at the edge of the continental shelf. It would not be the only recorded instance of such a disaster in the Pacific region. Something similar probably caused the Lanai Event which threw debris over 300 metres up the steep sides of that Hawaiian island 100 000 years ago, while a landslide in an Alaskan fjord in 1946 caused a wave which deposited debris as high as 524 metres above sea level. The waves which battered the coast of Sydney in 1912, however, were simply generated by bad weather in the Tasman Sea.
Luckily, an authoritative contemporary account survives, delivered to the Royal Society of New South Wales by Carl Sussmilch just one and a half months after the freak storm. A balding guy, with a smile which beamed out from behind rimless spectacles, Sussmilch was a chubby-faced, eloquent geologist intimately acquainted with Sydney's coastal environment. Visiting Bondi Beach a short time after the storm, he was instantly struck by the extent of the damage. He had seen nothing like it in fifteen years of study. Sussmilch described the devastation for the other members of the society: large boulders thrown two to three metres up a rock shelf, some sixty metres from their original resting places; huge rocks split as though by dynamite; massive scarring of the sandstone platform, and more marine denudation above the high-water mark âduring the few hours of this one storm than the cumulative results of many previous years'. Sussmilch told his astounded audience that besides being lifted and carried over fifty metres, the big rock had been completely turned over, as evidenced by the marine life now growing on what had been its top. There was no doubt some heavy shit had gone down at Bondi. The
Sydney Morning Herald
had also reported, just after the storm, that swimming baths were swept away, along with changing sheds, refreshment rooms and, at the northern end of the beach, everything but one brick house.
Spectacular as the tempest of 1912 was, the last great inundation to drastically affect the city's coastline was not Sussmilch's freak storm, or even one of Bryant and Young's monster waves, but the rapid rise of the seas about 10 000 years ago. Giant ice sheets had previously locked up much of the world's fresh water, but with the warming of the planet they melted and the seas rose by about sixty-five metres, advancing over the area's broad coastal plains at a rate of about two metres a year. The process stabilised only 6000 years ago. Aborigines had been making their homes in the valleys and plains of Sydney for much longer than that, possibly for more than 40 000 years, and so bore witness to this event, rapid in geological time but just gradual enough in human terms to be manageable.
It was not the first time the area had been drowned. The seas had advanced and retreated through the valleys which now form Sydney Harbour up to eight times in the last 700 000 years, sometimes dropping 100 metres below their present level, opening up stretches of gently sloping, grassy plains where the Pacific now marches off towards the horizon; sometimes submerging vast tracts of currently high, dry and valuable real estate. The city's singular geography assisted in these repeated inundations. Lying in a sort of elongated sandstone bowl, Sydney occupies ground which has remained relatively unscathed by the changes which tore at the rest of the seaboard as the continent floated around, bumping into other land masses, grinding together to form the mega-continent of Gondwana before being torn asunder again.
Geologists like to describe this bowl, the Sydney basin, as Permo-Triassic in origin, meaning that basically it didn't exist as a structural entity until about 250 million years ago. At that time Australia lay in the south east corner of the supercontinent known as Gondwana, slotted in between Antarctica and India. As the forebears of the dinosaurs and later mammals began to evolve, the future site of Sydney, a flat featureless sort of place, started to sink. It was as though an irascible God, unhappy with his first try, had reached down and pressed his thumb onto the coast, leaving a rim at the edge of the land just high enough to keep out the sea. As long as the sea didn't rise of course. This shallow depression had the good fortune not to be badly folded or warped over the next couple of hundred million years. Around it, however, change was taking place. Mountain ranges raised up from the earth's crust to then be worn down over hundreds of millions of years, their coarse quartz sediment carried into the shallow bowl by streams and rivers and deposited in thick beds on the floors of swamps and lakes. Great arcs of time passed as the massive tracts of golden sandstone and later shale were laid down and compressed to form the future city's foundations.
Even with this activity the topography of the basin remained fairly boring until about one million years ago when gentle movements in the earth's crust gradually lifted the sandstone beds nearly 230 metres above sea level. The soft, sandy
tabula rasa
cracked and was then gouged and eroded by rivers and streams to a depth of 190 metres. The islands and bays of Sydney Harbour were created as glaciers melted and the seas flooded into these deep river valleys, some reaching back as far as fifty kilometres inland. To the south, however, in Botany Bay, the site of the First Fleet's abortive initial landing, the plains had not been raised by folding of the crust before the Ice Age. Indeed the area had sunk a little as the Blue Mountains wrenched themselves skywards, with an extensive flood plain being eroded between the Georges and Cook Rivers. This too was then drowned with its sister harbour 10 000 years ago.