Leviathan (42 page)

Having driven the rock throwers inside, the majority of the police made for the small path by the side of the house. At the same time half a dozen plain-clothes men and uniforms who had gained access to the house next door started to force their way past the partition dividing the upstairs balconies. The house was ‘fantastically barricaded' at that point, with loops of barbed wire around the iron railing and sheets of galvanised iron fixed to block any approach. While these police fought with frantic communists who wielded bludgeons, lead piping, fence palings and wooden batons ripped from the furniture, dozens of their colleagues leaned with all of their weight against the fence at the side of the house which ‘collapsed with a crash of rending timbers'.

The
Herald
couldn't really explain how the police managed to pass, one by one, through the narrow opening at the rear without being bashed unconscious by the gang of well-armed thugs inside. It was as though the commies were actors in a really bad martial arts movie, only attacking one at a time, at the protagonist's convenience. In fact, the police cleared their passage by firing through the aperture at such a rate that those inside thought they were under attack from a machine gun. Nadia Wheatley points to the
Sun
newspaper's unwitting corroboration of the pickets' claims by its description ‘of bullets striking below policemen coming downstairs'. The squad which had broken through on the upstairs balcony were almost shot by their own colleagues firing blindly into the back of the house.

While the picketers admitted to throwing rocks at the police, they said it was in self-defence, after the first shots were fired. And rather than a heavy, unremitting bombardment of the street below, their volleys were sporadic, poorly aimed and futile. In contrast with the conflicting evidence of the police, every single picket who was in a position to witness their arrival described the same scene. About half a dozen patrol cars and a large red bus, unmentioned by the
Herald
, slewed into Union Street and drew up a short distance from the house. The police jumped out with their guns already drawn and ‘stampeded' towards 143, firing into the air and then at the balcony. This account was supported by numerous witnesses outside the house, some of them independent, in the large crowd which had been listening to speeches all morning.

There were eighteen men inside the little terrace when someone yelled out, ‘Here they come!' Upstairs on the verandah stood Percy Joshua, twenty-nine, from Redfern. He would end the day with a fractured skull, a busted, cut-up shoulder, contusions to his left ear and cerebral concussion. Next to him stood Joseph Garbett, the man Ray Kelly accused of trying to run him through with a barbed length of gas piping; Robert Clark, who had been speaking to the crowd below; a feisty young dude named James Miller; the even younger and feistier Reg Hawkins; and a returned soldier named Leslie Goldberg, a married man with four kids who wouldn't make it home to Darlington that day on account of a fractured skull, a fractured jaw and a badly pulped face. Clark was standing next to Garbett as a bullet tore through his arm and sent him staggering back into the room. ‘Bullets were thudding into the walls, scattering dust and pieces of plaster everywhere,' said Clark. They crouched down and started heaving bricks in retaliation, but the gunfire continued, with hot rounds pinging off the rails, slamming into the iron sheeting with a loud metallic clang, biting huge chunks of plaster from the walls, filling the air with choking dust and debris. The men gave up, dropped to the floor and crawled for the exit. Constable Hughes from Newtown testified that when he and his colleagues fought their way into this balcony room an ugly brawl erupted with a large group of communists who were waiting for them with clubs and pipes. In contrast, the pickets said that they had fled into the rear bedroom to avoid being shot and had just noticed a couple of cops sneaking across the kitchen roof when about five plain-clothes men appeared at the door and charged into them. Young James Miller had heard the glass breaking on the balcony doors and wanted to smash the back windows, perhaps as an escape route, but his mates said, ‘Don't! There are coppers out there, they'll shoot you!'

‘I picked up an iron bar and said they'll shoot us all the same', said Miller. ‘So we might as well die fighting'.

Suddenly a cop yelled, ‘Here's the bastards!' and Miller had his chance.

Garbett, with his useless, dangling arm, dropped to the floor and crawled through the ruck of flailing men, heaving himself over the banister of the staircase and landing with a crash down below where Constables Kelly and Hollier were making heavy work of the armour-plated back door. A brace of pistol shots roared through the hole they had battered. Hiding under the stairs, where he had scuttled as the bullets began zipping past, Len Emmerton, one of the older men, saw the police break through at the back and come down from above. A couple of his comrades had tried to shore up the sandbags at the rear but they had been driven away by the gunfire. Raymond Dare had heard the banging at the back door.

Dare ran through to the front room where most of the men were now waiting. Some fearful. Some furious. Some calm and some crazed. Norman Mailer once wrote that fighting aroused two of the deepest anxieties men contain; not just the fear of getting hurt, ‘which is profound in more men than will admit to it', but the contrary fear, equally unadmitted, of hurting others. Those men in the front room, caught in the confluence of these two types of panic, were at a mortal disadvantage as the cops piled in and the numbers of combatants swarming through the narrow halls and tiny rooms soared towards fifty. Unlike the police they did not live their lives immersed in random and banal violence. Many had seen combat in the war, but for some that simply meant shellshock rendered them unfit for this sort of action. As the riot-beast kicked and gouged, pushed and shoved, screamed, shouted, cursed, punched and batoned its way towards them, it must have robbed many of their courage. All those straining bodies so closely confined, all smashing into each other and running at white heat. All those hearts racing, eyes darting. The room would have been warm, maybe even hot, with their closeness. It stank. It reeked of human funk and fear. The police did not hesitate when they breached that last sanctuary. They charged in ‘and started to baton us unmercifully', said Dare.

Patrick Storen, who had played cards in the front room until the patrol cars arrived, was one of the hardy crew who ran to throw themselves against the sandbags when the sledgehammer first pounded against the back door. He had never believed the police would move against them, placing his faith in Jack Lang's Labor government. But when someone yelled out that the cops were there he grabbed his overcoat for fear of losing it ‘in the fight which I knew was in front of us' and hurried out. Something struck him over the eye in the back room and he missed most of the fighting there, coming to on the floor of the front room again, where a scene of bestial intensity was playing itself out.

Up to this point the police and protesters' stories diverge significantly, sometimes on major facts, sometimes on questions of nuance and understanding. From the moment the UWM was finally ‘beaten down', however, the divergence was total. Inspector Farley's dry recital of the facts as he knew them had the activists taken into the arms of blind justice and delivered to the holding cells at Newtown. The prisoners themselves described an hour or so of unceasing brutality, starting in the back yard of 143 where they were thrown in a heap on the remains of the broken fence and flogged without mercy. Most of the men were unconscious said John Stace, but still the coppers stood on their necks and flayed them with batons which were already sticky with congealed blood and shreds of human scalp. Frogmarched down the side of the house, John Murphy had his head rammed into the rough brickwork by a jack who said, ‘We'll kill you, you red bastard'. Raymond Dare had earlier seen Murphy fetched out of the house by a cop who said, ‘You look pretty red now, you red bastard', and ‘punched him on the face a few times'. They were all dragged into the street where the crowd was howling in impotent rage. The
Herald
described the UWM's men as ‘almost insensible' when dragged to the patrol cars. The crowd, it reported, was definitely antagonistic to the police. Numbering many thousands, and stretching for half a kilometre on each side of the house, they hooted at the appearance of each bloodied constable and cheered their heroes from the UWM. They grabbed rocks and chunks of concrete from a nearby road excavation, hurling them at the receding patrol cars.

At Newtown station, said the protesters, they walked a gaunt-let from the car doors to the charge room. Said Dare, ‘As we were going into the charge room each one in his turn was given a horrid time. The police were lined up all the way inside and as one of us went past they either punched or kicked us. I was kicked on the knee and nearly knocked over'. He saw Murphy knocked out again and pummelled all the way out of the room on his way to hospital. Patrick Storen watched five or six cops bashing one of his mates. In James Miller's car every prisoner who alighted was given one massive punch to the jaw by a bizarrely efficient policeman, almost as though he was ticking them off his sheet for the day.

Garbett, nursing his gunshot wound, saw Les Goldberg smashed on the jaw and knocked out by a plain-clothes officer. It was a ‘brutal blow', according to Robert Clark, which sent him ‘crashing to the floor like a pole axed steer'. Goldberg was perversely fortunate though. He remembered alighting from the patrol and starting to walk across the station yard, then ‘nothing more till I woke up in the hospital having my ear stitched'. Garbett heard a cry for help, turned around and saw Hawkins who was handcuffed to Emmerton. Emmerton was unconscious and Hawkins was desperately trying to drag him away from the blows of the police, their arms a blur as they worked him over like threshing machines. ‘Hawkins got a hold of my hands with his free hand and we dragged Emmerton into the corner of the charge room', said Goldberg. Clark, standing nearby, peering through the red haze of his own pain, could not even recognise Emmerton, so gross were his wounds. Hawkins, who had broken two police batons with his thick skull that day, described the assault.

Many of the activists mentioned the police calling them Russian, or in one case German, despite their mostly Anglo names and thick Australian accents. More than one protester lying broken and bleeding on the pile of fence palings behind 143 heard the police say, ‘We'll give you Red Russia, you bastards', before hopping into someone with their boots and nightsticks. It raises the interesting question of just how strongly the police held to this myth. Rationally, of course, they knew that their enemies were simply working-class men from Redfern, Leichhardt, Surry Hills and so on. They may even have surmised, had they cared to, that most of the older men, those aged in their early thirties and above, probably served in the army during the Great War. Looking at Black Friday now, we don't have to work too hard to tease out any number of strands running through our Anzac mythology, such as courage under fire or persistence in the face of futility. But of course the Anzac legend was long ago appropriated by the national establishment, and the fact that many of the Anzacs turned ‘red' in response to economic chaos and violent repression simply does not compute. It is dissonant information which, if accepted, would threaten the significance of a national legend. It would, as Edelman said, ‘destroy meaning'. Meaning imposes order on chaos, which allows us to see patterns in confusing events, to anticipate the future and negate any ugly surprises. The belief that some shadowy Marxist conspiracy is behind violent anti-eviction protests ‘gives meaning to the riots and precludes surprise when they recur'. On the other hand information, the truth of what happened that day, as opposed to meaning ‘involves complexity or lack of order' and an inability to foresee the outcome of such violence. Unlike meaning, says Edelman, information is transmitted, and what is transmitted is complicating premises; for instance, that protesters are not agents of Moscow but simply hungry and pissed off.