Leviathan (40 page)

It explains why the riot which erupted in the depression of the 1840s simply died away in a fog of alcohol, exhaustion and bad weather; while protest and reaction in the Great Depression of the 1930s was sustained at much more intense levels for much longer. The city had changed its mind. Whereas Edward Macarthur's mythology of a divinely ordained if deeply unfair social order was almost universally accepted in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth, as we have seen, it had been violently rejected by those at the bottom of the heap and was even out of fashion with those at the top, who no longer held their property and privilege on the basis of divine right, but because of worthiness, by dint of hard work, intelligence, thrift or whatever. ‘In a caste system assumed by all its participants to be divinely sanctioned,' writes Edelman, ‘subordination and unequal benefits mean that the world is as it should be; in a polity with a norm of social equality the same facts come to mean deprivation and an incentive to resistance.'

That resistance would not go unanswered of course. Nor was it restricted to low-level clashes between the cutouts and agents of much greater forces. At the highest stations of the city the passions were just as intense as those aroused in the gritty, street-level combat between the New Guard and the left. Such extreme times called forth an extreme man, State Premier Jack Lang, a working-class hero or Satan incarnate, depending on which side of the battlelines you stood. Like Bligh, Macarthur and Wentworth before him, Lang's character encompassed a Shakespearean maelstrom of great potential and mortal frailty. His private contest with the demons of a spiteful, paranoid, overweening ego and a wildly aggressive will to power translated to the wider world because of the crucial position he held in both the city's and the nation's power structure during the Depression. Within Sydney the battle for dominance between State and municipal authority had long ago been decided in favour of Macquarie Street. Ninety years of resource starvation and countless defeats in the war for autonomy had pretty much rendered the city council an irrelevancy for all but the most basic purposes. One of its last great missions, the provision of electricity, was slowly clawed from Town Hall's grasp in the 1920s and finally removed altogether in 1935. The vaunted concept of a government for Greater Sydney had been destroyed by an alliance of State politicians and suburban aldermen, none of whom were willing to cede the smallest measure of their own power. Federal government was still in its infancy and had not yet even seized from the States the right to levy income tax. The primary site of government power thus lay not in the eerily quiet and desolate sheep paddock of Canberra, but in the various State capitals and especially, given their population and economic dominance, in Sydney and Melbourne.

The nineteenth-century idea of the minimal government, which did little more than build and protect infrastructure, had been beset by the political rise of the working class and the constant carping of those middle-class do-gooders who argued that private charity could not alleviate the suffering of the urban poor – and indeed that their suffering deserved relief, a truly radical position. Lang himself had an early schooling in the bitter gospels of deprivation when his father's illness reduced the family to Dickensian poverty during the boom of the 1880s. You can draw a straight line between this experience and Lang's pioneering of government welfare in the 1920s, including child endowment, widow's pensions and worker's compensation. These were State-wide measures of course, but they were appreciated most keenly where the poor were most numerous and this meant in those densely populated inner-city slums which had escaped demolition after the plague, and further out in the threadbare industrial suburbs which were growing in the south around Botany Bay and in the west at places like Auburn, which Lang represented in Parliament. It was not appreciated by the rich, as you'd imagine, who did not see why they should be forced to pay for such dangerous socialist experiments. And just as power had progressively shifted from Government House to Parliament House, so too had it leaked from the public into the private sphere.

The commercial interests of the city, which Lang snarled at and berated as ‘the Money Power', had grown explosively in importance and influence from the days when the Rum Corps turned official status to private gain. The crude nature of that primeval economy stood in relation to the complexities of the modern metropolis as a bark canoe to an aircraft carrier. Heavy and light manufacturing, telecoms, power and transport systems, media, finance, construction and service industries – all the elements of advanced civilization – had been raised over Sydney's pastoral– commercial foundations with remarkable speed. And just like that earlier combine, the new potentates were not averse to deploying superior firepower to protect or advance their own interests. Unremitting attacks on the Labor Party, and in particular on Jack Lang by the Fairfaxes'
Sydney Morning Herald
were a good example. Despite once being described as ‘one of the best treasurers' by Sir John French of the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac), Lang was portrayed in the press as a sort of violent, troglodytic berserker who would unleash an orgy of Marxist butchery on the State the moment he thought he could get away with it. Lang unfortunately was often his own worst enemy in this confrontation, drinking from the bottomless well of his many hatreds and lashing out at his enemies with blasts of vicious, unthinking rhetoric which would have left even William Bligh grasping for an answer.

He was an exceptional guy, Lang, a real stand-out character, for good reasons and bad. Like Wentworth a large powerful-looking man, he was uncouth yet yearned for respectability. The
Australian Dictionary of Biography
records that he seldom laughed. He suffered from insecurity and had many followers but few intimates. Like his admiring protégé Paul Keating he aroused extreme feelings of loathing and loyalty amongst both peers and the general public. He was a real-estate auctioneer, not a traditional trade for a Labor man, but the auction block fashioned his crude, effective speaking style: ‘rasping voice, snarling mouth, flailing hands, sentences and phrases punctuated by long pauses'. With a bald, high-domed head, a thick moustache and garbed in ‘the uniform of the successful Edwardian man – the three-piece suit, watch and chain, stiff collar, sober tie, polished boots, and obtrusive felt hat', he should have been more at home in the billiards room of the Millions Club. But he was a hater, a brawler and a true believer and he turned his evangelical skills against the big-money families such as the Fairfax clan and their small-change champions on the North Shore and in the east, in those stiff-necked, respectable middle-class suburbs where the word of the
Herald
was holy writ and the New Guard's recruiters did such good business. The anarchists of high finance played with the lives of common folk for ‘sheer personal gain', growled Lang, ‘putting them to work under the whips of hunger, throwing them into idleness to keep them in discipline, manning them for war, dividing them in peace' and drawing a toll in gold, ‘counted over in human tears and blood' from every activity into which they were thrown. ‘Are we to be driven to desperation … before the Governor dismisses him?' pleaded the
Herald
in 1931.

Not all of the fire which zeroed in on the Premier during the Depression came from his right flank, however. The left maintained a guerilla campaign of sniping and harassment, partly on general principles because the Labor Party was regarded by communists as a ‘social fascist' organisation, or as one anarchist put it ‘socialiste de café latte', and partly because Lang's position at the head of the State's repressive machinery made him a natural if unwilling ally of the very same ‘Money Power' with which he was locked in mortal combat. The issue, as so often in Sydney's history, was real estate.

The speculative land boom of the 1920s had thrown up thousands of new houses and apartment blocks, but by the early 1930s many of these, as well many thousands more in the older, established suburbs, lay empty whilst an army of the homeless unemployed, like Tom Galvin, drifted about the city seeking shelter in parks, drains and shanty towns. In
Twentieth Century Sydney
Nadia Wheatley cites a figure of nearly 11 000 empty dwellings in the metro area in 1935, two years after the worst of the Depression had supposedly passed. Widespread home-ownership was a phenomenon of the 1950s, with most people renting before the Second World War. As unemployment rocketed towards thirty per cent, the big real estate companies which owned or managed swathes of rental housing found their cash drawers bare as tenants fell behind in their payments. Without the dole or rental subsidies of a modern welfare system, the outcome was inevitable – mass evictions.

In April 1930 the Unemployed Workers Movement, a ‘fraternal organisation' of the Communist Party, resolved to oppose the evictions. Their pragmatic campaign, organised around ‘a series of small scale demands' seemed to galvanise the unemployed. Membership grew rapidly, with UWM branches expanding in number from about thirty at the end of that year, to seventy by July of 1931. Each branch boasted approximately 200 members and the reach of the movement stretched from the inner city out to Bankstown, right into the personal fiefdom of Premier Lang himself. Wheatley explains that Lang's 1930 changes to the Landlord and Tenant Act, which he had promised would end the daily spectacle of families being strong-armed into the street, had done no such thing. Nor had he increased the dole as promised, although he had appointed nearly 100 inspectors, known as ‘dole pimps' to generally menace and aggravate welfare recipients.

To be fair, Lang did have his own problems at this point. All Australian governments had borrowed heavily during the 1920s and were now being gouged by interest repayments. Having embarked on a massive re-engineering of the State capital with projects like the Harbour Bridge, the underground rail system and the electrification of the city and suburbs, New South Wales found itself insolvent in February 1931. Adding to this tide of woe, the Government Savings Bank, in which forty per cent of the State's population held their money, had been undermined by an awesomely reckless election campaign in which Lang's conservative opponents repeatedly asserted that he would steal depositors' savings to pay for his election promises. Lang did not help matters by refusing to pay the State's debts to London, saying that English bond holders could wait until he had fed the unemployed before they received any money. The politics of the time were confused, brutal and terrifying. Lang's Labor followers went to war with the federal Labor Government while simultaneously fending off attacks by radical left-wingers in the Communist Party and right-wingers in the New Guard. The Government Savings Bank went belly-up in April 1931, with thousands of desperate depositors packing Martin Place to withdraw their savings during a cyclonic storm which saw mountainous seas bursting way up the sheer cliff faces at South Head, while blinding cataracts of rain scourged city streets. Governor Phillip Game faced intense pressure to sack the Premier, with the first rank of Sydney society cutting him dead as long as he refused.

Lang's problems were of no concern to the homeless, however. The same rain squalls roared over them as they herded their children under trees or bridges while their few remaining sticks of furniture were washed away or simply fell to pieces in the deluge. The Unemployed Workers Movement established local committees to fight the evictions. When a family approached the movement a delegation would head off to confront the landlord and argue their case, more or less menacingly, depending on the response they received. If no joy came from negotiation, pickets soon appeared outside the real estate office responsible and, if necessary, outside the property itself. Particularly odious real estate agents soon found themselves with large glazier's bills for window repair. When the bailiffs arrived to seize or remove any furniture, large threatening crowds would block their access or simply pick up the family's belongings and take them back inside. Should all this fail, an occupation of the house commenced, with up to two dozen UWM activists remaining in place, around the clock, for weeks at a time. It should be noted that these tactics were only ever employed to protect family homes. Single men who found their way to the movement through forced or threatened eviction often finished up in hostels, dossing down with Communist Party organisers. These young, tough ‘political bushrangers', as one activist called them, provided the hard core of a sort of militant flying squad which could be despatched on short notice; if a bit of boot and fist work was needed to see off a posse of New Guards for example.

The final tactic, occupation and armed resistance, seems to have evolved naturally from the preceding manoeuvres some time in May 1931. The Surry Hills committee had heard at the end of February that a worker was about to be evicted but, having foiled the bailiffs the next day, found the agents refusing to give in. The police, the bailiffs and the agents all returned twice more in quick succession. The protestors reached the fairly pragmatic conclusion that they would have stay in place until the workers had gained a complete victory. This aim was not entirely preposterous.

The UWM were completely committed to their fight and viewed any eviction ‘not merely as a personal tragedy for the family involved, but as a setback to the whole struggle against evictions'. It was this perseverance, argues Wheatley, as well as a 100 per cent success rate, that so alarmed the property-owning establishment. The undivided and often threatening support of hundreds and even thousands of local residents lent a great deal of street cred and leverage to the UWM. However, recalling Hannah Arendt's caution about the nexus between a failure of state power and the subsequent inevitability of state violence, the response of the government, whether Labor or conservative, was predestined. There would be bloodshed.