Leviathan (59 page)

Hey there. How you doing? You'll probably be doing a lot better if you choose to skip this little section. Believe me, you've got better things to do. You could have a cup of tea and a nice sit-down, play a video game, toss the old tennis ball around for Rover perhaps. All much better than plowing through an essay on my major sources.

I don't have much of a choice, however, because I chose not to make you fight your way through a barbed wire tangle of citations and footnotes in the main text. I did that because nobody but pointy-heads (and of course the good folk being cited) ever read the footnotes and because, frankly, I think they look kind of ugly.

Before plunging into a discussion of everyone else's work I should write a quick note on self-plagiarism.
Leviathan
took over four years to write, during which time I tried to keep my journalistic commitments to a minimum. Occasionally, however, an editor would offer me a commission which related to research I was already doing, and in such circumstances I'd take the job and write the story because it helped the cause. Hence there are a few minor sections of
Leviathan
which have been published in embryonic form elsewhere. In the very first edition of the
Australian
's
Review of Books
I held forth on the nature of violence, a discussion which I refined in chapter three of this book. Later, in reviewing Stephen Knight's
Continent of Mystery
for the same publication, I drew on some work I had already done on the working conditions of early Sydney. When Peter Craven asked me to contribute to
Best Australian Essays 1998
I did so because it allowed me to work out some ideas I'd been having about the appeal of Pauline Hanson, which also appear in here. The linked discussion of Sydney's neo-Nazis was first published in
Rolling Stone
under the title ‘Hearts of Darkness', while some of chapter four's examination of the 5T first appeared in
Juice
magazine as ‘Exit Wounds'. Ten years ago I embarked on what I hoped would be a ground-breaking piece of writing for
Rolling Stone
, living on the streets for a month to document the life of some street kids. The story was a failure largely because I was too immature to make it work. It's been bugging me ever since and I rescued a few snatches of that feature to use here in the hope that I might redeem the time I otherwise wasted. The abusive episode which opens ‘Pig City' is taken from that piece.

Wherever I have drawn directly on somebody else's work, I have either said so or tried to make it obvious. But sometimes the same ground might have been covered by four or five different writers, each with a subtly different spin and, once again, I wasn't about to make you wade through half a dozen names every couple of lines just for the sake of good form. Which brings us here, at the end of my own personal Vietnam, to this awkward, disjointed sort of essay where I'm going to try to put myself right with all of those guys in whose books, articles, essays and theses I've been buried for the past four years or so. The following isn't really exhaustive in the same way as the formal bibliography, but I hope this does cover everyone whose diligence and hard work I profited from. If, God forbid, you've been reading
Leviathan
and have suddenly leapt from your dusty old armchair in the commonroom, spittle flying and temperature rising because you think I've swiped your life's work without sufficient acknowledgment, well, uh, sorry. Give me a bell or drop me an email and I'll see you're cited properly in any later editions.

1. The Long Goodbye

Additional details of the last days of Saigon were drawn from
The Fall of Saigon
by David Butler,
Vietnam at War
by Davidson, Tim Bowden's
One Crowded Hour
, Neil Sheehan's
A Bright Shining Lie
, and
Time
magazine's special issue commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the war's end, ‘Saigon: the final 10 days'. I found Dinh Tran after reading his story in the
Herald
.

When researching conditions in Georgian London, besides those works cited in the text, such as those by Engels and Mayhew, I also referred to
Selections from Cobbet's Political Works
, AGL Shaw's
Convicts and the Colonies
(specifically chapters seven and eight) and MD George's
London Life in the Eighteenth Century
, from which came some of the great detail about the effects of the gin trade. Manning Clark's 1956 articles in
Historical Studies
were a good source of data and tips for further reading in this section. Shaw also did sterling service in the re-creation of the First Fleet voyage, along with Bateson's
The Convict Ships
, John Cobley's ‘The Crimes of the First Fleet Convicts', Hazel King's ‘Villains All?', Anne Conlon's ‘Convict Narratives' and of course Robert Hughes's
The Fatal Shore
(which I still think is really cool, even if lots of pointy-heads don't). The best source of information about the First Fleet however, remains the foundation journals. If the government is looking to throw some money at digital ventures, perhaps it could think about putting these babies on a single CD-rom.

I re-created the Gundy shooting and its aftermath from the investigation by the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody and the New South Wales Ombudsman's report into ‘Operation Sue'.

The section on Australia becoming an El Dorado for the English poor drew on dozens of different authors' work and they are so closely woven it is difficult to tease out the most important; but if I had to point the finger at the culprits responsible, you'd be looking at Townsend's ‘The Molesworth Enquiry: Does the Report Fit the Evidence?' in the
Journal of Australian Studies
and ‘Document: Sir Richard Bourke's Afterthoughts, 1838' in
Push From the Bush
and ‘The British Parliament and Transportation in the Eighteen-Fifties' in
Historical Studies
. Ritchie's ‘Towards Ending An Unclean Thing: The Molesworth Committee and the Abolition of Transportation to NSW, 1837–40' got a good workout, as did Conlon's ‘Mine is a Sad Yet True Story'. Margaret Kiddle's research on Chisholm forms the basis of my version of that great story. Hayden's ‘The NSW Immigration Question and Responsible Government, 1856–1861' provided a useful starting point in understanding early anti-migrant feeling, while Pyke's ‘Some Leading Aspects of Foreign Immigration to the Goldfields' provides the description of the Chinese arrival on the goldfields. As I mentioned in the text, Curthoy's chapter in
Who Are Our Enemies?
was my template for laying out the ensuing anti-Chinese movement, with lots of material provided by contemporary press reports, the Final Report of the Committee to Enquire into Crowded Dwellings, which you will find attached to the Eleventh Progress Report of the Sydney City and Suburban Sewage and Health Board, Appointed 12 April 1875, and the Report of the Select Committee on Common Lodging Houses, V&PNSWLA, 1875–6, Volume 2.

Rennie's 1982 article in the
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
, ‘The Factor of National Identity: An Explanation of the Differing Reactions of Australia and the United States to Mass Immigration', was where I first encountered the argument that postwar migration in Australia contributed to a sense of national identity and security.

A few minor details about National Action, such as the sharehouse meeting in Glebe, were drawn from Greason's
I was a Teenage Fascist
. Most of that section, however, is based on my own article for
Rolling Stone
called ‘Hearts of Darkness'. Former National Action leader James Saleam obviously has a different view of the events in the 1980s. Those interested in this unique take on far-right politics could visit National Action's website, as I did to check details of the Funde incident. You'll find it at
www.adelaide.net.au/©national
/

2. The Virgin's Lie

Most of the cool tsunami stuff came from Bryant and Young. The
Australian Dictionary of Biography
supplied the bio of Carl Sussmilch. Wherever I seem to display a formidable knowledge about the obscure achievements of long-dead Australians such as Sussmilch or Dr J Ashburton Thompson, you can be pretty sure it was the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
I cribbed the good gear from. An insanely great resource, it's a damn shame those guys have to struggle so hard to turn a buck.

The geological history of the Sydney basin, although quite a short section, was one of the hardest parts of this book to write because, let's face it, I didn't have a clue what I was talking about. Chris Herbert, who is The Man where the basin is concerned, really helped out with his 1:100 000 Sheet and Guide to the Sydney Basin. Stanbury's
10 000 Years of Sydney Life
was a huge help with the bio side, and I leaned heavily on Proudfoot's
Seaport Sydney
because it was written in English rather than propellor-head. Robinson's
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
article ‘Geographical Aspects of Land Settlement in the Sydney District, 1788–1821' was very useful but even with all these champion references I couldn't have put a sentence down were it not for Penguin's
Dictionary of Geography
and the
Britannica
on CD-rom. Kids, did I mention how cool that thing is? I kept those suckers open and at hand during the whole three weeks it took me to write my three or four paragraphs. Without them, well, this book would be three or four paragraphs shorter. Of course, having lost fistfuls of hair teaching myself all about geology, I put the last full stop in place only to find that bloody Tim Flannery in the
Herald
a week later had written the whole story, probably off the top of his gigantic throbbing head. Doh! If only I'd procrastinated a little while longer. Mr Flannery's
The Future Eaters
, by the way, contributed a bit to my understanding of the evolutionary effects of geological change.

The short section on the Aboriginal use of fire was drawn largely from Rosen's
Losing Ground
of 1995 and Flannery's
Future Eaters
, with a tip o' the beanie from Tim to Professor Rhys Jones's seminal 1969 article on the uses of fire amongst Australian Aborigines. Flannery provided the reference to Sir Thomas Mitchell's comments on the change in Sydney's vegetation brought about by the altered fire regime. The State Coroner's NSW Bushfire Inquiry Findings Volume 3 laid out the facts of the Como-Jannali disaster which I fleshed out with interviews with survivors. Bob Beale, writing a feature in the
Herald
on 8 January 1994 (coincidentally the day of the disaster), provided the neat explanation of what gum trees do in a bushfire.

I learned most of what there is to know about ancient and mediaeval conceptions of Terra Australis in Wood's entertaining
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
article about, uhm, ancient and mediaeval conceptions of Terra Australis, supplemented by the Bicentennial History. John Cobley's
Sydney Cove
series proved a very useful starting point for tracking down primary sources, especially within the First Fleet diaries, and the State Library's Cobley collection got a real workout while I was researching early English perceptions of Australia. Graeme Aplin's contribution to
A Difficult Infant
also played a big part in anything smart I might have said about the environment of Sydney as experienced about 200 years back, as did Peter Bridges's
Foundations of Identity
and the rambunctious
Botany Bay Mirages
by Alan Frost. All that flap-doodle and balderdash about the Romantic and Picturesque movements would have been nonexistent without Proudfoot's ‘Botany Bay, Kew, and the Picturesque' and, again, the
Britannica
on CD.

I'm not sure now why I got so carried away with trying to explain El Niño. Possibly because I could after reading all about it at the web page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. The Environmental News Network Special Report of 22 September 1997 and the US News and World Report's online El Niño reports are also largely to blame.

The material on Sydney during and after Macquarie was drawn from Bridges's
Foundations of Identity
, Jahn's
Sydney Achitecture
; Norman Edwards's chapter in Kelly's
Nineteenth Century Sydney
, ‘The Genesis of the Sydney Central Business District 1788–1856'; James Broadbent's chapter in Kelly's
City of Suburbs
, ‘The Push East: Woolloomooloo Hill, the First Suburb'; and Paul Ashton's
Accidental City
.

Details of James Barnet's career came from the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
, Jahn, and the bio article in the
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
by McDonald. Jahn's beautifully realised book was a godsend for a bloke with a whole chapter to write about Sydney's built environment and nary a clue as to how to go about it. Written clearly, without the impenetrable bombast which renders a lot of architectural literature completely unreadable, it gets my Big Tick as one of the coolest funny-shaped books to be published in the last couple of years.

Birch and Macmillan's
Sydney Scene
provided neat summaries as well as great first-hand accounts of the city's physical growth. I drew heavily upon them, along with Shirley Fitzgerald's
Rising Damp
and Maisy Stapleton's chapter in Jahn, to describe the city's expansion in the later half of the 19th century. Stapleton's article in particular was useful for getting my head around the Rubik's cube of suburban growth and terrace housing, and my explanation of how the city fanned back along transport routes is really down to her. Good old Freddy Engels supplied the info on the disgusting eating habits of the English poor. He might have been partly responsible for the emergence of a couple of vicious, totalitarian dictatorships, but jeez he could write. Mayne's ‘City Back-slums in the Land of Promise', an article from
Labour History
, provided the damning quote about the city's lack of poverty from the
Herald
on Australia Day 1876, along with the government statistician's comment on infant mortality in the 1870s. Kelly is cited in the text but I feel I should mention his ‘Picturesque and Pestilential: The Sydney Slum Observed' chapter in
Nineteenth Century Sydney
again.