Leviathan (8 page)

While that may have been the party line, the eight members of Team One, which included Brazel himself, thought differently. They were all permanently attached to SWOS, unlike some of the part-timers in the other squads. They spent all of their time either training for or actually carrying out extremely dangerous missions. Some ‘relaxed' off duty in the Army Reserve. The Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody described them as the crème de la crème of the Special Ops section. They were assigned to raid an old shop which had been converted into a house at 193 Sydenham Road in Marrickville. It was Brazel's personal understanding that Porter had been hidden by friends at this property after shooting McQueen and Donnelly.

Brazel had formed this opinion after talking to either Graham Watson or Terry Dawson, two other members of Team One. Watson, who would be first through the door later that morning, had joined the force in 1975 and SWOS ten years later. A qualified instructor in the use of weapons and building entry techniques, he had been involved in armed raids at least three times a month during his attachment to SWOS. He thought of Sydenham Road as ‘the priority address'. Dawson, a detective sergeant and the third man through the door, had joined the force in 1966. He had also qualified as a SWOS field commander, a marksman and a weapons instructor and he too thought it most likely the fugitive would be found at Sydenham Road.

The other members of Team One agreed. Senior Constable John Rhodes – an expert marksman and anti-hijacking specialist who had effected more than 600 entries over the years and who would go in second after Watson – thought it more likely his unit would encounter the cop killer than any of the others. Senior Constable Graham Bateman, a member and instructor of the Police Assault Group, who charged in behind Sergeant Brazel, did so expecting to confront Porter and possibly any number of armed associates. Behind Bateman came Constable Bruce Marshall, number six through the door and the least experienced police officer. He had joined the force only two years previously, but gave nothing away in ability, having racked up six years of active army service with the SAS and 1 Commando Company. Bringing up the rear were Constables Martin and Whittaker who would be responsible for handcuffing any offenders found inside.

When the Redfern briefing had wrapped up, each team received their tactical kit. Everybody in Team One was fitted out with a bullet-resistant vest, and all, except for the sweepers Martin and Whittaker, also picked up a Remington pump action shotgun with a torch attached to the barrel. Everybody carried handguns, either .357 magnums or 9 mm pistols. Eye goggles, digital radios, a sledgehammer, crowbar, cans of mace and flexicuffs were issued. With twenty minutes to kill before kick-off, Team One drove to the nearby Newtown Police Station. They transferred to a van and moved to the form-up point, a street corner about 200 metres from the house. Just after five a.m. the Central District Ambulance Service was placed on alert. An ambulance officer who asked what sort of injuries they might have to deal with was told ‘gunshot wounds'.

Two hundred years had taught the white authorities not to telegraph their punches. Tench's black quarry had probably known his men were on their way days before they arrived. John Porter too would have known he'd gone to the top of the SWOS hit list the second he pulled a pistol on Alan McQueen. He had been at Sydenham Road a number of times in the previous weeks. But he was not there when Detective Sergeant Brazel's men came calling. The only people resident were an Aboriginal family – David Gundy and his son Bradley Eatts – and two friends, Richard McDonald and Marc Valentine. They slept as Team One left the form-up point and moved down Sydenham Road, an empty school playground sliding past the van on the right, a row of small workers' cottages renovated in postwar migrant kitsch on the left. As highly trained, as well equipped, as finely honed a strike force as Team One were, especially compared with Watkin Tench's sorry crew, the outcome of their mission was to be just as disastrous. With one major difference. Whereas Tench's assignment had taken nearly two weeks to break down, the SWOS raid on 193 Sydenham Road unravelled in less than two minutes. The end result was the same however. One dead Aboriginal man and a further poisoning of the already treacherous relationship between black and white.

As all six teams formed up around the city, in Marrickville, at Bondi and Petersham, in Summer Hill and Newtown, they radioed in to the command post at the Sydney Police Centre that they were ready. Warrants for the raids had been issued with an entry time of six a.m. However, by ten to six all the teams were in place and three minutes later the CP advised them to move at their own discretion. Team One's van moved off from the street corner by Marrickville High School. It travelled 200 metres, pulled up in front of the old converted shop and disgorged eight armed men into the quiet dawn. Whittaker stood by the door with his sledgehammer at the ready. The other men, guns cocked, safeties released, formed up around him. Brazel signalled Whittaker who smashed the door open with one blow and Team One poured through the breach yelling, ‘Police! Police!' After that there was no set plan. The men's training came to the fore as they adjusted to the layout of the building and the discovery of its various inhabitants. It was dark. The team moved quickly, illumination provided by the crisscrossing shafts of light coming from the torches attached to their shotguns. In the front room, which ran the length of the building, they found McDonald lying on three armchairs which had been pushed together. Watson, first through the door, covered the dazed man with his shotgun, shouting, ‘Police! Stay down! Get your hands up!'

Rhodes passed him, charging across the lounge room to a set of two improvised steps in the far corner. He entered a corridor which ran down the left-hand side of the house, and spun into a bedroom where he found another man, Valentine, lying in bed and a small boy, Bradley Eatts, standing alone. Terry Dawson passed him on his way up the hall. Behind him, Brazel made for the kitchen at the rear of the building. The rest of Team One were in the lounge room by now, already handing over their captives to the sweepers. Watson, who had covered McDonald, left him to Martin. He then made for the rear of the house where Terry Dawson had just kicked open David Gundy's door and moved into the gloomy bedroom.

Gundy had been taken from his family in the early 1960s, shuffling between various institutions and foster parents. He was, unsurprisingly, a troubled child, although his clashes with the law did not extend beyond a few stealing charges. He found work in 1975 and a devoted girlfriend, Dolly Eatts, a year later. Gundy had worked hard. He studied to advance himself and he took care of his young family. For the past eight years of his life he had had no trouble with the police. When he next encountered them, however, he had only a few moments to live.

There was a bed behind the door which Dawson had kicked in, some other pieces of furniture scattered around, and a man clad only in underpants, yelling, ‘You cunts! You cunts!', coming at Dawson through the gloom. David Gundy grabbed at the barrel of the shotgun, either to push it away or perhaps to try to wrestle it free. Dawson, who had been trained to retain control of his weapon above all else, was yelling, ‘Police! Don't!' It mingled with Gundy's shouts and with the other incoherent yelling and screaming throughout the house. Then the shotgun discharged.

The Remington 870 is a big, heavy-hitting piece of artillery. Adapted for the US Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War it was just about perfect for the requirements of the Special Ops section. When fired it unleashes a super-hot wad of eighteen lead pellets at a muzzle velocity of over 1200 feet per second. These pellets spread out from the mouth of the gun at a rate of about one inch for every yard travelled. It is an excellent firearm for clearing constricted spaces in close urban combat. Its utility for subduing confused angry young men in their underpants is more problematic. Gundy was immediately subdued, but only because the fiery blast atomised a twenty-three centimetre long chunk of his wrist and left arm. It also disintegrated his watch band, embedding small pieces in the wall behind him. But the fatal wounds were elsewhere. Two of the pellets which emerged last from the barrel had bumped into the spray of bone, tissue and metal and deflected into Gundy's abdomen where they passed through his lungs, pulmonary artery and heart. He staggered backwards, one arm hanging uselessly by his side, the other still raised as he shook his fist at the intruders. Bateman had entered the room behind Dawson by now. He placed his shotgun on the ground and moved around behind the wounded man to grab him. They fell to the bed in a tangle. Whittaker entered and ‘cleared' the room, assuring himself there were no other occupants. He flicked on the overhead light and moved to the bed to give first aid while Watson called for the ambulance. From street corner to deathbed had taken 110 seconds.

Instantaneous rage convulsed the city's black population, mirrored in the wider community by a deep sense of disquiet. It didn't help the police that none of the places they raided that morning were occupied by cop killers. The team which hit a boarding house in Darley Street at Newtown charged down a seventy-four-year-old pensioner, Bob Salisbury, who thought hooligans were trying to break in when his door crashed open. Salisbury told reporters he might have had a go at protecting himself if he'd been a bit younger. Luckily for him his fighting days were over and all he could manage was to stumble blearily to his door, which flew open, smacking him in the face and knocking his glass eyeball clear out of his head. He scrambled around on the floor looking for it while black-clad SWOS men danced around him yelling, ‘Stand back! Stand back!' Three doors down, Beryl Walsh, a tea lady at Grace Brothers Broadway department store, was having a quiet cuppa before heading off to work when her door exploded inwards and over half a dozen heavily armed men burst into her hallway. Beryl, who was recovering from a heart attack she'd suffered three weeks earlier, went into shock. Detectives attached to the SWOS team made her a cup of coffee and told her to fix up her front door and send them the bill. Amidst this lowbrow farce Gundy's wife Dolly Eatts returned from a trip to Queensland, took one look at their gore-soaked mattress and demanded to know why there was blood all over their bed. The police had said David stood up and struggled. But all she knew was that there was blood on the bed, not the walls.

She did not trust the police to investigate themselves and she was not alone. As inaccurate and premature details of the shooting appeared in the press, the force began to face insinuations of a payback execution. Gundy's relatives made a late submission to the Black Deaths Royal Commission which all but accused the force of a premeditated killing. The two fatal shotgun pellets, they argued, had not been deflected on their path. Their track through David Gundy's body had been ‘true trajectories'. The victim had not been standing and struggling when shot, but sitting on the bed,

It was a desperate thesis, demonstrably wrong, which grew out of 200 years of bitter, impacted frustration. But that did not matter. What mattered was that Gundy's people knew in their
hearts
that the white invaders had once again despatched their warriors to exact vengeance for the loss of one of their own. Phillip had sent Tench out with his muskets, machetes and sacks to bring back six of Botany Bay's natives ‘or, if that should be found impracticable, to put that number to death'. For Sydney's surviving Aborigines, the capture and punishment of a real renegade having proved impractical for whitey, another black man had simply died in his place. Again.

It was expected that the inquest into Gundy's death would open these raw psychic wounds to painful scrutiny. Nobody could have expected, however, that on the first day of the inquiry – scheduled, coincidentally, for National Aboriginal Day – that the police would further inflame matters by conducting another armed raid, this time on an Aboriginal children's sports carnival in Alexandria Park, Redfern. A report prepared by the Aboriginal Legal Service stated that somewhere between five hundred and one thousand Aborigines, at least sixty percent of them children, were at the carnival when six white men in civilian clothes entered the park with guns drawn but without immediately identifying themselves as police. While searching for an Aboriginal man on a couple of outstanding warrants, two of the men suddenly discharged their weapons. A bystander wrestled one of the officers to the ground; but the others, seeing the man they were after making a getaway in a truck, fired, despite there being a number of children on the back of the vehicle.

It would be a remarkable event in any other setting, say at a sports carnival organised by a private boys school on the North Shore, but in the context of Redfern's indigenous history it is an old story. In the months following Gundy's death large groups of armed police swept through the district, culminating in a maxiraid in Eveleigh Street in February 1990. One hundred and thirty-five police, many of them Tactical Response Group officers kitted out for a riot in helmets and flak jackets, kicked down the doors of ten houses in the black ghetto at four in the morning. Out of this massive show of force came three arrests for property offences and one for possession of a bong. Two people were detained in connection with unpaid warrants and another two in relation to warrants for breach of bail and for ‘being under the influence of intoxicating liquor on the railways'. Leaning precariously over a sizable credibility gap, Superintendent Alf Peate and Inspector Alan Peek said the action had been taken in response to ‘a despairing cry' from the local Aboriginal community for a strong response to increasing rates of drug-related crime. The Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research subsequently analysed crime figures from the month of the operation and for seven following months. It concluded there was no evidence of a decrease in crime in the area. Obviously that bong seized by the TRG wasn't missed. Chief Inspector Peek provided a more revealing justification of the raid to the State Ombudsman when he argued that it had made the local community realise that unless there was a decline in trouble from their more rambunctious members, operations like this would recur. Like the punitive expedition ordered by Governor Phillip, it may not have been totally successful in terms of its immediate goals but atleast they had ‘struck a decisive blow', convinced the blacks of the white authorities' superiority, and perhaps even infused a ‘universal terror, which might operate to prevent further mischief'.