Leviathan (39 page)

The disconnection between the fates of the emerging megarich and the masses whose consumption created their wealth was paralleled by another development, one less comfortable for the wealthy. One of the surprising things about the election riots of 1843 was not that they flared and died away so quickly but that they happened at all. Edward Macarthur had not been alone in holding dear to a view of society with a very wide base and a very pointy apex and a very long distance fixed immutably by God between the two. The lower classes themselves had been gulled into accepting their degraded position and the riots were in one sense an aberration. The common man was not meant to think or yearn for higher things. He was to accept his lot, no matter how diminished. The intervening century had wrought great changes however, even if, on the face of it, Sydney's poor fared little better in the Great Depression than they had in the crash of 1843 or the depression of the 1890s. For one thing the labour movement had materialised and held out the promise of a brighter future, if not for the workers themselves then at least for their children. Organised agitation for better wages and conditions was only part of this deal. Through the Labor Party the lower orders had a shot at the brass ring, control of the state itself, a prospect which would have reduced the early Macarthurs to apoplectic derangement.

The coming of socialism and its apparent realisation in the Russian Revolution were ‘for the rest of the world as if an enormous explosion had gone off, followed by a succession of sporadic fireworks of different sizes, some of them very beautiful and unlike anything ever seen before'. (Granted, it does seem a little weird now, but you have to bear in mind that after the bitter experience of the First World War millions of people were looking for a secular creed to replace their decaying faith in institutions such as the Church and the Crown. And the decades of the gulags, mass murder and totally bogus architecture
were
still in the future.) Revolutionary socialism, despite its subsequent disgrace, was as momentous a development as the rise of organised labour because, unlike the union movement or the parliamentary labour parties, it attacked the very basis of modern industrial society. It said that wealth and power were not, as once supposed, God-given. In fact they were not even legitimate, having been stolen or extorted from the working stiff who in turn was morally justified – indeed historically impelled – to violently seize what was rightfully his. That they were capable of such action had been demonstrated to millions of working-class men and women by their service in the Great War, where they had been schooled in organisation, discipline and violent mass action. Just as importantly they had also learned that they were brave and could survive a titanic struggle with the machinery of a hostile state. These lessons – that the system did not love them and that it could be successfully attacked – were crucial to those who led the most militant and radical struggles for the oppressed during the Great Depression. Of course the lessons were not lost on their enemies either.

Reactionary paramilitary groups grew just as quickly as the Communist Party and other, less hard-core outfits on the left. Francis de Groot, the nutjob on horseback who had nearly botched his mission of upstaging Premier Jack Lang at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Harbour Bridge, owed his allegiance to one of the largest and nuttiest of these right-wing private armies, the New Guard. Founded over a few snifters at the Imperial Service Club by Colonel Eric Campbell and half a dozen or so ticked-off former army officers, the Guard was to be a semi-secret force of North Shore dentists, Woollahra shopkeepers and really committed orchardists who would give their all to resist ‘Langism, Bolshevism and Jewish corruption'. Nearly 50 000 strong at their height, they represented a spontaneous expression of fear and loathing amongst the precariously positioned bourgeoisie. The same anxiety for position and relative privilege which had induced the officers of the Rum Corps to launch their coup in 1808 lay beneath persistent, if faintly ridiculous, murmurs of a possible New Guard putsch in 1932.

Campbell, a decorated war veteran and successful solicitor, ran a lucrative practice representing ‘pastoralists, merchants, professional men and financial institutions'. Some of these men would be destroyed by the Depression but those who hung on were much more fearful of the threat to their livelihoods posed by Moscow and Marxist theory than Wall Street and chaos theory. While de Groot's ride on the Bridge will doubtless constitute their slash mark on history, the Guard's campaign of constant low-level harassment of the left was arguably more significant, even if ultimately futile. While hundreds of New Guard yahoos drilled and trained to seize and protect country railway crossings and bridges in the event of an uprising, many more were actively involved in a violent spoiling campaign against left-wing activists in the city.

To the true ruling elite they were useful idiots. To the
Herald
, according to Souter's corporate history, they were less a threat to the State's democratically elected government than a reassuring fallback position should Lang's much despised Labor government itself ‘exceed legal bounds'. Should any attempt be made ‘to upset the constitutional order and establish some system that would please the Friends of the Soviet Union, they will oppose it by open and downright means,' explained the
Herald
on 24 July 1931, before asking, ‘Is there anything discreditable in a policy such as that?' Obviously not as far as the Fairfax press was concerned.

To the likes of relief worker Jim McNeill, however, the New Guard were simply fascists, his experience with them prompting him to join the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. ‘I could see what vicious types they were and what they would do in power,' he told Lowenstein. ‘I understood then what fascism meant and that they had to be defeated'. McNeill saw them arrive to break up Communist Party or Unemployed Workers Movement rallies time and again, in their expensive cars ‘from Vaucluse and Potts Point and other silvertail suburbs'. Hattie Cameron, who lived in a street at Bankstown in which only three men had jobs, witnessed one such assault on a small market near the local railway station. ‘The local unemployed organisation collected donations of vegetables, used clothing and other odds and ends, and they had permission to run stalls in the park,' she said. The New Guard drove out from Sydney one night to attack the market. ‘It was a bloody business,' recalled Cameron. McNeill had an even fiercer encounter on the North Shore.

The passion for biff was by no means one-sided as a Labor Party man explained to Lowenstein.

It is tempting to see such eruptions of violence as an aberrant jolt to a more refined narrative of liberal political development, to view them as ‘un-Australian', that unctuous cliche so beloved of tabloids and politicians. But of course political violence is inherently conventional, even banal, and those describing it as unpatriotic or anathema to some presupposed national culture are either deceiving themselves or, more likely, trying to hoodwink a wider audience as their own interests come under attack. It is not enough, however, to simply ascribe such eruptions to anger, frustration or some other inflamed passion. This, as Murray Edelman points out in
Politics as Symbolic Action
, is tautological. Adopting for a moment Edelman's own framework, which has the appeal of being both breathtakingly cynical
and
enlightening, the clash of left and right in the 1930s, of Anglo and Asian in the 1870s, of ‘Irish' mobs and Wentworth's ‘respectable' citizens in 1843 can all be profitably examined within the richer context of contending myth and symbol. So too with Bligh and the Rum Corps in 1808 and the neo-Nazi attacks on National Action's exposed, peripheral victims of the 1980s. This is not merely to render abstract an otherwise functional and bloody process, but to try and understand some of the brute forces which have shaped and continue to shape life in the city. It is about the most basic elements of power, about recognising the inherently coarse process of who does the fucking and who gets fucked.

In this scheme politics is relevant to everyday life to the extent that it addresses immediate concerns for wealth, status and autonomy, the last being a matter of individual freedom; freedom to act in pursuit of one's goals and its corollary, freedom from constraints whether concrete – such as early legislative attempts to suppress the rum trade – or abstract, such as cultural norms which kept Catholics or women under the thumb until well into this century. Edelman's contribution is to fashion a study of politics in terms of mass psychology rather than simple ‘outputs' such as legislative programs. He assumes, in the language of a policy geek circa 1968, that people's beliefs and positions ‘are mobilisable rather than fixed' and that the significant outcomes of political activity ‘are not particular public policies labelled as political goals, but rather the creation of political followings and supports: i.e., the evocation of arousal or quiescence in mass publics'. From this point of view, political manoeuvring itself becomes the endgame, ‘for in the process (rather than in the content of statutes, court decisions, and administrative rules) leaders gain or lose followings, followers achieve a role and a political identity, and money and status are reallocated'.

What this means is that an understanding of the power structure of Sydney at any time in its history becomes as much a matter of penetrating the mind of the city as cataloguing the most significant players and the resources at their disposal. It segues neatly with Hannah Arendt's contrasting of violence and power. Deciding where power lies is not simply a case of totting up who commands the big battalions, but must also take into account issues of consent, allegiance and belief. The instruments of the Rum Corps – four hundred bayonets and a couple of field guns – were always going to overwhelm Bligh and his dinner guests. But the traditional submission of the military to lawful authority, the coup leaders' apprehension about their own legitimacy and their concerns about the continuing loyalty of small landholders to the King's representative were all problems of individual or mass psychology rather than logistics and firepower. The rebels had to place their story within an acceptable context and this required them to fashion the myth of an impending revolt amongst the wider populace.

Such a myth, explains Edelman, is an unquestioned belief held in common by a large group of people which gives complex and bewildering events a particular meaning. Political events, which are frequently tangled and ambiguous, and which often relate to such intimate and powerful concerns as one's actual survival, are among those most likely to engender anxiety. The political universe thus ‘needs to be ordered and given meaning'.

The belief that William Bligh or Jack Lang is about to impose a dictatorship; that a police SWOS team murdered David Gundy in cold blood; that the poor are simply part of God's design for society; that protests in favour of welfare payments are controlled by communists acting on behalf of Moscow; or that hordes of Chinese are steaming towards Sydney to smoke dope, build disgracefully cheap polished furniture and copulate with all the white women they can get their hands on are all examples of myths, widely subscribed to, which have at different times channelled Sydney's ‘anxieties and impulses' into shared expectations, freeing thousands of people from responsibility for their own fates or actions. Each evoked ‘a specific political role and self-conception' for those who accepted the myth in question; the Rum Corps rebels, the New Guard, anti-Chinese protesters and so on. That each myth touched, however fleetingly, on some aspect of political reality made them all that much more vivid and tenable.