Leviathan (43 page)

It doesn't really matter that the police ‘knew' the protesters were not actually Russians or Germans. Because beyond the level of mere abuse, down in their brain stems and in their meat, they also
knew
these men represented a threat to the order they were paid to preserve. Lang knew it too. The thousands of people who cheered the staggering protesters to the patrol cars told him so. On the day, the police were always going to prevail. As Hannah Arendt noted, ‘in a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute'. But that superiority evaporates as the consent of the governed fades. Nadia Wheatley makes the point that to have advanced any further the UWM would have needed guns and the will to use them, and the crowd in Union Street would have had to overrun and destroy the police lines. Nor could the violence have stopped there. They would have had to challenge the State in exactly the way the police, the media and the establishment feared.

Who can say whether the spectacle of the police beating on his own people forced Lang's hand? Or whether it was the surge of the crowds outside these eviction protests that lit up his radar. With each new eviction, support for militant and radical action seemed to increase exponentially. Whatever the cause, within a week the Attorney-General had tabled legislation purporting to guarantee fair rents and curtail the evictions. This deflated the UWM's campaign which died away after Black Friday. It was to be some time before the activists realised they had been sold a dud and that the new laws did not really empower them at all. By then it was too late. For Lang, too, the end was nigh. His clash with the commonwealth government and his old enemy the ‘money power' was more purely a political struggle than the street battle over evictions. Within a year Governor Phillip Game would demonstrate that not all the power of his office had been eroded when he dismissed the Premier and finally snuffed out the hopes of any of the working classes who still retained faith in their hero, ‘the Big Fella'.

This perhaps is the dirty little secret of violence; not that it is ugly and unjust, but that it promises so much and delivers so little. This promise, that by a strong arm and valiant heart a man may bend the world to his will, is a recurring dream. Sometimes, on waking, it might even seem that this dream lies within reach, that with one mighty lunge the oppressed might take what is rightfully theirs. Of course, peering at the wreckage of their lives through blackened eyes, the hungry, battered men of Union Street must have known that such dreams almost never come true.

But then, within a generation, for one brief shining moment, they did.

 

Property development, as the refreshingly cynical Deyan Sudjic tells us, is an edgy, maverick industry where successful practitioners constantly morph from street-corner hucksterism to pinstriped respectability and ‘the naked realities of guile, bravado, aggression and ego' are always close to the surface – if not actually free to tear all over the landscape, devouring everything in their path. Even by these high standards, however, Frank Theeman was one of the city's more colourful identities. He came on like nothing so much as a Swingin' Sixties James Bond supervillain, with his Strangelove accent, his Coke bottle glasses and a supporting cast of thugs and weirdos. But unlike Ernst Stavro Blofeld, on whom he seemed to model himself, Theeman didn't want to destroy the whole world, just a little bit of it. By 1973 he had quietly bought up a long string of elegant but decaying Victorian terraces on the high sandstone ridge overlooking Woolloomooloo; the same pleasant heights where the town's A-list of the 1830s had run up their Georgian villas and retired from the fug and bustle of horse-drawn Sydney. Old Tom Shephard had once laid into them for destroying the scarp's natural beauties with ‘the murderous hoe and grubbing axe'. Now Theeman planned to emulate them with a massive development anchored by three awesomely hideous skyscrapers which would bury the neighbourhood's antique charms under immense tonnages of concrete and ugliness. Embodying all of the bestial, breathtaking horror of what was then world's worst architectural practice, Theeman's plans evoked the sort of profoundly antihuman environment you could expect to create if you cross-pollinated the grossest excesses of triumphant capitalism with the aesthetic sensibilities of whatever engineering department the Romanian secret police tasked with fitting out the torture chambers in their blank-faced, ferroconcrete punishment palaces.

Theeman of course was not a lone rider on this awful crusade. For nearly twenty years developers had laid siege to the city, destroying great swathes of graceful sandstone buildings, scattering the serfs before their onslaught and riding away with fistfuls of loot. The fat times of the 1960s were wild enough to blow away any lingering ghosts of the 30s as everyone cashed in on the boom, although of course some profited more than others. Property developers and the wizards of finance who stood behind them were the white-hot internet stocks of the era as their profits and market value rocketed far beyond the gravitational pull of economic reality. The eventual outcome was as inevitable in 1974 as it had been in 1929, 1891 and 1842. The physical legacy of this modern crash was more striking, however, with the mutation of a previously charming if sleepy city centre into a dense labyrinth of unleaseable high-rise office space which was often stylistically repugnant and technically flawed, recasting nineteenth century problems of overshadowing and air circulation on an epic scale.

Like all the previous booms the speculative tornado which ripped through Sydney's property market between 1968 and 1972 spun up out of a confluence of fantastic greed and wilful, bone-headed stupidity, supercharged by a frightening credit binge. The capitalist system, as Schumpeter observes, does not grow slowly and steadily, like a tree, but jerkily, in fits and starts, often linked to technical advances like steam engines or computer chips. Revolutions in business systems, such as mass production lines or radical developments in financial processes, can also act as catalysts to rapid growth. In the early 1960s Sydney, that ‘pure product of capitalism', which had always been wide open to the chaotic jolts of global finance, was the focus of a number of such developments. The city's population had ballooned as a result of massive immigration and the natural increase of the postwar baby boom. Low unemployment and rising wages ensured this emerging metropolis was also a hot market, with demand for housing and services creating a natural boom in construction and consumer goods. The city fringes rushed away from the site of first settlement, although development accelerated around the old core as well, with hundreds of small building companies responding to the demands of millions wanting easy access to the city centre. Their demand increased the density of life in the inner suburbs which began to lose terraces and detached dwellings to larger unit blocks where fifty people could be crammed into the space previously occupied by four or five. The construction giants poured billions of tonnes of concrete into shopping centres, schools and community facilities for the increased population.

This natural boom underlay another explosion of investment in office construction. During the 1950s and 1960s American multi-national firms had built up enormous reserves of US dollars in European, especially British, banks. This money, the germinal form of today's global capital markets, was hot, liquid and promiscuous, not caring where it went or what it did as long as there was a payoff on the deal. MT Daly writes of millions of dollars surging from London to Sydney and into the accounts of Australian mining companies such as MIM, Comalco and Hammersly Iron to fund their expansion during the sixties. And just as the city's growth spurt of the 1830s occasioned a diversification of the primitive agrarian economy into slightly more sophisticated manufacturing and services, so the minerals boom of the 1960s helped transform a provincial capital into a true global city. The pastoral–commercial combine which still dominated the local economy before the Second World War was rendered subordinate, if not totally irrelevant by the shift. Daly outlines the change in
Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust
, tracing the rise in power of merchant banks, life assurance companies and foreign lenders as local developers gorged themselves on bloated lines of credit while they annihilated block after block of old warehouses, hotels and shopping arcades to raise homogenised stacks of offices to meet the needs of newly wealthy mining companies and the banks, lawyers and accountancy firms which served them. The perennial clash of municipal and State authorities distorted an already unbalanced system when cabinet sacked the elected city council for a third time, replacing them with commissioners. During the twenty-two months that planning authority rested with these three appointees, development applications went orbital, as the building industry dived through the window of opportunity. Throughout 1969 and 1970, urban planning in Sydney ‘entered the realms of absurdity'. Paul Ashton describes meetings of the City Planning and Improvement Committee, which assessed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects, taking an average of two to three minutes. Every application was passed.

As before, the system formed a sort of synergistic feedback loop, the process consuming itself while simultaneously growing fatter and hungrier. At first, land in Sydney was cheap compared with New York and London. The yield on office space in Sydney was twice that in London, and with interest rate differentials the potential returns were stratospheric. The market behaved like a magic slot machine, showering the players in gold doubloons as they desperately tried to feed in more coins. The frenetic pace of development quickly ate up all the easily exploitable land so that the few blocks left to develop ‘acquired a scarcity value and were bid up strongly'. It was madness of course. Like the crazed speculation of 1841 and the blind rush for nonperforming internet stocks of the 1990s. When the hysteria of the crash receded and the survivors looked about them in 1976, they found a city where thirty per cent of its new high-rise offices sat waiting for tenants in empty, ticking stillness.

A glutted market and spiralling interest bills played as important a role in this crash as they had in previous crashes. But there was a significant difference between this disaster and those that preceded it: the role played by the city's lower orders. Of course by 1974, people didn't use the phrase lower orders any more, at least not in public. Edward Macarthur's simplistic division of society into the owners of capital and everyone else, with the riding boots of the former wedged firmly on the throats of the latter, was losing its validity. Class divisions were still important – vitally so as it turned out for the city's property magnates – but other lines of division were also cracking open. Postwar prosperity had enriched the working class and enlarged the middle class. The struggle for survival, which had still been such a close-run thing for the poor during the Great Depression, was much less acute for white Australia after 1945, allowing it the luxury of gradually fracturing along those stress lines which would permanently alter society's contours in the last quarter of the twentieth century; lines which included race, gender, sexuality and educational privilege. This process of splintering the formerly rigid tungsten axis around which the city's power structure had coalesced can be placed within the context of Sydney's natural tendency towards shifting patterns of dominance and conflict. The difference, for a few short years at least, was that whereas the poor and the workers had once been irrelevant to the process – or victims of it – in the 1960s and 70s they emerged for the first time as players and winners. The vehicle by which they took this trip down the glory road was a strange and wonderful collection of hard-knuckled, unskilled labourers; figurative descendants of all those other labourers who had been bundled into the stinking holds of England's convict transports.

One of the first business empires to take a blow from these shovel-toting bandits was AV Jennings, that ‘very proud old builder' who had survived a traumatic birth during the Depression to thrive in the postwar years. In 1968 they found themselves in possession of 4.9 hectares of rare, pristine bushland at Hunters Hill. The scenic riverside locale had remained largely undisturbed throughout white settlement and now presented a remnant wilderness of banksias, sheoaks, grevilleas and kunzeas in which thrived colonies of ringtailed possums and native birds. Development-minded local councillors referred to the area as ‘a tick-infested rubbish dump', although the dump they described was in fact ‘an Aboriginal midden dating back to 1200 AD'. Having shelled out four hundred grand for the midden and surrounds, these very proud old builders were in no mood to listen to a bunch of housewives who were a little ticked off at their plan to run up a couple of high-rise apartment towers on the graves of the poor old ringtailed possums.

The bushland had been preserved since the 1890s by its long-time owners the Kelly family as an informal nature reserve for the local community. In the can-do civic spirit of Menzies-era stay-at-home mums, Monica Sheehan, Chris Dawson, Betty James and Kath Laheny worked the appropriate political channels for all they were worth to keep it that way; writing to local aldermen, to State and federal members, to responsible ministers, to the Premier and getting exactly nowhere and nothing in return. Jennings were prevailed upon by the State Planning Authority to finesse their design from a high-rise concept to a low-rise village of luxury houses, and Premier Robert Askin did send the lobbyists an unctuously deceptive telegram on the eve of a tight election, saying: ‘Very hopeful of a helpful decision on your problems and will advise within 24 hours'. But after winning the ballot he never did get around to calling them back and of course Jennings' new plans still ended with those possums buried in concrete. Betty James explained how their accepted reality began to dissolve and that ghost city which lay beneath the surface of things was revealed.