Leviathan (45 page)

Meissner, who would later win fame in the lowbrow derangement of the 1980s Love Boat scandal, was then learning the ropes as a minor villain, looming in the Victoria Street doorways of recalcitrant tenants, carrying an iron bar and speculating on their domestic arrangements and/or travel plans. Most took the hint and fled but some proved disagreeably contrary, Mick Fowler amongst them. Returning home from a long voyage on a bulk carrier, Fowler had been looking forward to stowing his kit in the small room he rented in an old boarding house at 115 Victoria Street. His mother had digs in the same building and there are a couple of versions of what happened next. In a video interview held at the Mitchell Library Fowler himself says he was surprised to find his mother sitting on the front step, surrounded by their belongings, terribly upset, dazed and hopeless, clutching fifty dollars which she'd been given by Theeman to cover the cost of moving and storage. Contemporary press reports said Fowler had received an eviction notice by telegram while still at sea and his mother was missing when he arrived home. The
Seamen's Journal
later claimed Theeman's enforcers had broken into the little apartment, terrorised his mother and stolen his musical instruments and stereo equipment while he was away.

The fine details aren't that important. Just take it as read there had been some first-class villainy. What was important was Mick Fowler's decision to contest the eviction. Borrowing some pliers and scratching up a posse of five or six friends, he fronted Joe Meissner and a couple of uniformed cops at the front gate of his home. Ignoring Karate Joe, Fowler addressed the nearest cop with rising anger.

‘Look, I'm Mick Fowler,' he said. ‘I'm the legal tenant. I live here. My gear's been put out, the joint's been broken into, I'm very upset. I've come 2000 fucking miles to find this and you're pushing me aside!'

Meissner pushed in, insisting that Mick was no longer a tenant. ‘I represent the owner and I want him arrested,' he said.

‘And with that I was fucking well arrested and handcuffed and taken up to Darlinghurst Police Station!' spat a disgusted Fowler on the video.

A heavy vibe lay over the largely deserted street. Of the three or four hundred tenants living there at the start of the month, only a dozen or so remained. They had formed the Victoria Street Residents' Action Group to resist both the eviction campaign and Theeman's overall scheme; but a few days before Fowler arrived, one of the group's principals, a short, tough, nugget of a bloke named Arthur King, was grabbed up from his home and spirited off into the night. He had gone to bed at eleven after chatting with friends for a couple of hours. Waking with a start when the light came on, he saw a man standing by the switch, silently staring at him. The man turned and left as King struggled up to give chase. Hurrying into the hallway he was jumped by another two intruders. They hustled him out of the flat, dumped him in a car and drove to a motel room south of the city. Tied, gagged and blindfolded, he was held until Monday when Theeman's quiet persuaders bundled him back into the boot of the car and drove to Kings Cross. The boot had a small hole through which King could catch glimpses of the outside world. His abductors pulled up in front of a brothel called the Venus Room, a cheesy dive which formed part of Abe Saffron's empire. While King was missing, panicky friends searched anxiously as carloads of blocky-looking young men tore through the street yelling, ‘We're going to get you and you'll be gone'. When King reappeared on Monday he spoke briefly to friends, collected his possessions and left forever.

Prowlers broke into the houses of the few remaining tenants, smashing windows, removing locks, kicking down doors and wrenching off taps so that the properties flooded. Then, three days after his first set-to with Karate Joe, Mick Fowler returned with reinforcements. Mick, some locals and about fifty or sixty hefty comrades from the BLF and Fowler's own Seamen's Union converged on 115 and fought their way through a thin line of Theeman's hired muscle. Surrounded by this formidable crew and puffing contentedly on a cigarette, Fowler told journalists that they expected violence from the ‘karate experts' when his furniture arrived. But, already reeling from a storm of insinuation and bad PR after the King kidnapping, Theeman had his men withdraw.

Like his allies in Macquarie Street, Frank Theeman was taking a bath on interest repayments. As Trevor Sykes noted, the fat days were over. By mid-1973 the long bond rate had blown out by a point while debentures leapt to nine per cent. ‘By September of that year long bonds had reached 8.5 percent and debentures were out to eleven, the highest they had been in two generations'. Theeman was pissing away maybe fourteen to sixteen grand every week; bad karma in a highly geared racket like property development.

It was no coincidence that around this time arsonists seemed to discover a particular affinity for the surviving buildings of Victoria Street. Squatters had taken heart from Mick Fowler's stand, gradually appearing by the dozen to take over the abandoned and rapidly decaying terraces. The campaign, which was originally concerned with the bankrupt aesthetics of Theeman's plan, shifted to encompass expressly political demands for the retention of low-income housing. Dozens of squatters flocked to the street on the heels of a few hardy pioneers. Some were just footloose activists looking for action. Some were awakened environmentalists rallying to the cause. But most were poor workers and students, among them a large number of women, who were attracted by the cheap accommodation and communal atmosphere which blossomed as everyone set to work cleaning and restoring the decaying properties.

A pack of mad libertarian drinkers and fornicators, known as the Sydney Push, were drawn into the battle on the side of the residents and BLF. They helped organise street patrols to ward off arson attacks – although a young black woman was still killed by one deliberately lit blaze. Theeman, too, had his own patrols out. At any one time at least twenty or thirty goons could be found lounging against the street's wrought-iron fences, having a smoke, glaring at any nearby protesters. These were 70s goons of course, so they tended to turn out in hipster flares, Adidas sneakers, nylon Gloweave shirts and long greasy hair. But what they lacked in sartorial impact they made up for by toting pick handles everywhere.

The improvised weapons proved themselves more than mere ornaments in January of 1974 when Theeman, having beaten the squatters in the Supreme Court, was able to deploy fifty or sixty hipster goons with the active support of the police force to clear out his investments. The protesters knew a confrontation was coming after the State's Justice Minister green-lighted the use of police to turn them out of their new homes. They took to the barricades with the ghosts of 1931 at their side. Most boarded themselves up behind their dilapidated Victorian facades, some receiving help from striking labourers to erect more substantial defences with scaffolding taken from city building sites. Theeman's ‘controllers' – as he styled his outlaw band of karate experts, nightclub bouncers and standover men – launched their assault watched over by two hundred police at seven o'clock in the morning. Unlike the riot of '31, this was extensively covered by print and broadcast media so the scenes, although pretty wild on the black and white news footage, were not as savage as they might have been. The controllers ordered the occupants of each house to leave and when they didn't, set to demolishing the front door with crowbars, pickaxes and sledgehammers. The video looks almost comical now, like a bunch of roadies and bass players from Slayer and Spinal Tap trying to smash their way into a concert venue or something. But the screaming women and children, the swirling punch-ups and crashing glass convey an intense sensation of madness and fury. Val Hodgson, one of the action group organisers, said she felt secure in the opening moments, while her house was still full of old friends. ‘But it was just the banging and the thumping', she said excitedly, urgently, ‘and knowing of the imminent destruction and seeing the ceiling fall down and the lightbulbs flicker … and they tipped caustic soda on Eric … it was really quite terrifying. They were menacing, through the holes they made in the window, snarling and snapping and saying, “We're gonna get you.” It was so frightening I was pleased when the police rushed in to prevent them doing us any damage'.

‘Well I'm sorry', said Theeman in his spooky Blofeld voice sometime later. ‘But I didn't think to call the Salvation Army to get these people out would be the right thing'.

With squatters forced out, Fowler was once again left as the sole tenant. He was talking with BLF secretary Joe Owens when Theeman suddenly appeared with a couple of bodyguards, ex-cops. Owens joked that Theeman didn't have the numbers for negotiations and suggested he go grab a couple more heavies, but Fowler invited his arch nemesis inside.

‘He opened up straightaway', said Mick, pointing out that the squatters were all gone and that he was ‘the only fly in the ointment now'. “‘We'll move you into a nice place across the road,” offered Theeman. I said, Frank, you're missing it baby, don't you understand what it's all about? This struggle hasn't been for you Frank Theeman to sit down with me Mick Fowler and offer me the fuckin' world. You know. There's been 399 other people come into this. There's been men out of work and people arrested and beaten and handcuffed and Christ knows what.
There's been death
. There's been
kidnapping
. Don't you understand? I don't want any money'.

What he wanted was the past made new again. He wanted wharfies and working mums and old men and young students to be able to live quietly in the shabby but pleasant tree-lined street he had shared with his own mother and friends for so long. They may have owned no property, had no connections, amounted to nothing, but they did have ‘a right to dignified consideration'. The alliance of residents and building unions achieved this unlikely goal in the Rocks and down the hill from Victoria Street in Woolloomooloo, but success in Potts Point was not as absolute. The bans and squatters delayed Theeman for so long that when construction did commence, his initial design – described by even the Visigoths of the State Planning Authority as one of the worst pieces of visual pollution they had ever encountered – was much compromised. The ugly stubs of apartment blocks which blot the northern end of Victoria Street today are one-third the size Theeman first planned. But they did get built.

The crash of 1974 destroyed a legion of developers but as they went down they took the BLF with them, removing the main agent of their frustration. An alliance of developers and corrupt officials from the federal BLF connived to destroy the New South Wales branch during an intervention which the Burgmanns describe as ‘a brutal standover'. The odious Norm Gallagher rode in over the wishes of the local membership and purged the branch of its progressive leadership. On the day he lifted the green ban on Victoria Street, Gallagher motored past the scene of January's battle in Frank Theeman's car. According to Theeman, Gallagher just looked at the empty desolated structures and said he should have torn the fucking lot down. If true, it's a moment worthy of a Hubert Selby Jnr story; a fitting denouement to a darkly compelling fable, elegantly sculpted, rich with metaphor and finely calibrated to emotional nuance, character and the victors' amoral detachment from their sins and ethical conceits. A powerful stream of contempt runs through the story, contempt for the past, and contempt for any measure of value which cannot be gauged with a pocket calculator or an eye to the main chance. Pressing the question of where power lies in such a city as this, you eventually penetrate a place with a cold vacuum for a moral core.

In October 1998, in a week-long series attempting to answer the very same question, Rupert Murdoch's flagship broadsheet, the
Australian
, limped to the conclusion that in Sydney, a ‘city of a thousand networks', power was protean and constantly shifting between separate cells of influence in finance, government, construction, law, the media and primary industry. After two decades of retreat from civic society in favour of rule by market forces, the commercial city was ascendant again. The planning powers assumed by government in reaction to the chaos of the green bans had been eroded, or quietly abandoned, so that when the redevelopment of East Circular Quay provoked similar outrage to SCRA's original proposals for the Rocks, or Theeman's for Potts Point, the responsible authorities simply turned up their open, honest palms and declined to accept any responsibility at all. Decisions affecting the lives of the city's four million people are now as likely to be taken at a meeting of fund managers for AMP or Bankers Trust as on the floor of Parliament, although the cynical might say, so what? The new decision makers are no more remote than the old.

Perhaps the difference is a matter of form. Public power must at least maintain the facade of responsibility, while private power is beholden only to itself. The point at which they intersect, however, is contested and the outcome is politics, that process by which ‘wealth, status and autonomy' are lost or gained. In politics we can see the sparks thrown off as the powerful contend for turf and leverage, even if the battle itself is too complex to comprehend. More revealing than anything the
Australian
's contributors wrote was what they did not write. Their own employer, the eerily powerful Rupert was missing in action. The
Australian
's in-house media analyst, the endearingly feral Errol Simper, scratched out a few notes explaining how the
Telegraph
had usurped the
Herald
's influence over the city's daily political agenda, but of Rupert's influence over the highest offices of the land, there was no mention, nor of Kerry Packer, playing Gog to his Magog. Perhaps a series on the power structure of Sydney may have benefited from an investigation of the deals cut to alienate public space within the Sydney Show Ground for the private benefit of Murdoch's Fox Studios; a deal sold as providing Sydney with the facilities to cash in on the digital entertainment revolution, facilities which quietly mutated into a hokey old theme park. Or perhaps not.