Leviathan (41 page)

The first of that winter's anti-eviction battles took place on 30 May 1931, a Saturday, and was an easy victory for the police, their last. The house in Douglas Street, Redfern, had been home to the McNamara family since 1920. They had been good tenants for a decade, never missing a rent payment until a year after McNamara lost his job. The Redfern branch of the UWM had placed a picket on the house at the start of the month when the landlord had taken out an ejectment order. But having been assured by the Colonial Secretary that no police would be used to enforce the order, only a handful of activists were in place on Saturday when half a dozen cops sledgehammered the front door and sailed into them with their batons. The surprise and the violence had the intended effect. The skeleton crew were hustled out of the house and quickly scattered.

Just over an hour or so later they returned in a red truck with about thirty reinforcements. A couple of labourers who were still moving out the family's possessions were overwhelmed while their two police guards were set upon by club-wielding activists. A large crowd of locals who gathered to support the evicted family were ‘completely and actively hostile' to the police, who drew revolvers to hold them back while their own reinforcements rushed from Redfern station. The extra officers quickly cleared the street, arresting a couple of people for bad language and riotous behaviour. The UWM had flown a red flag from the balcony beside a placard which demanded an end to evictions. The flag was torn down and the placard broken into pieces. The Communist Party's
Worker's Weekly
newspaper almost cheered, for now the unemployed would truly know on whose side Jack Lang stood. For too long, it crowed, the unemployed had been conned into the belief that Lang was with them.

A week later in Starling Street, Leichhardt, that bill was presented to about twenty police who confronted a much larger, angrier crowd who refused to disperse. This time the UWM had prepared their weapons, with a number of improvised batons later discovered inside the house they were guarding. One was made from a solid plug of lead, reported the
Herald
, which was soldered to a flexible wire ending in a number of coils to form a grip. The pickets and police laid into each other with abandon this time and both sides suffered casualties. Outside a crowd, 200 strong, howled abuse at the officers and had to be driven back down the street by a baton charge. The threat detectors of the establishment press were quick to pick up on this worrying escalation. The
Sun
claimed Moscow was behind the whole business.

It is a common assumption among those who are content with existing status and power relationships, says Edelman, that when those with less status finally get their shit together they represent a threat to the established order, and that so long as they are not organised they are either impotent or loyal. We can see in the first weeks of June 1931 the flux and flow of these relationships, the way that Edelman's ‘mass publics' were becoming aroused and mobile, growing, dividing and fusing like so many amoebae suddenly excited from quiescence into action. Such movement, promising disruption and even radical change, is always an anxious affair. For the truly ascendant – like the Fairfaxes – for those middle-class types who dream of ascendancy and for those who are simply aligned with them – like police officers, for instance – a whole world of ordered privilege and rewards is at risk. Meanwhile, those fighting for change must deal with the consequences of their actions, withstanding attacks both physical and semantic, calculated and ad hoc. Whether a communist with a fundamentally radical agenda or an unemployed man with a simple but urgent need for a minor redistribution of wealth, the advocate of change stands before an onslaught of the powerful. Both sides will inevitably frame their stories, their myths, in an exculpatory, heroic fashion; the UWM resisting fascist enslavement; the brave, outnumbered police constable confronting hateful and fanatic Marxists. These myths give meaning to otherwise confused and furious encounters. They justify violence, encourage endurance, stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Escalation is almost unavoidable. It came a week and a half after the clash at Leichhardt, heralded by the crackle of gunfire on the outer fringes of the city at Brancourt Avenue, Bankstown.

The field of battle was far removed from the usual rats' nest of constricted and gloomy inner-city streets. Brancourt Avenue at that time was described as a wide, open thoroughfare bordered by grassy verges. It lay at the edge of development, where ‘paddocks and scrub stood between the scattered fibro and weatherboard cottages'. One of these squat, grey little boxes was home to John Parsons, a thirty-nine-year-old returned serviceman. He had fallen behind in his rent and prevailed upon the local UWM branch when the landlord came calling. They had been in attendance for three weeks and having learned some of the lessons of Redfern and Leichhardt had prepared quite elaborate defences. More than half the picketers were former soldiers and had drawn on their military experience to run up barbed wire and build sandbag revetments. To the same improvised batons they had used at Starling Street, they added a grab bag of axe and pick handles, iron bars, garden forks, stones and bricks. The police were just as ready for action. They commenced their attack twenty minutes before they were legally permitted, turning off power to the area after hearing the protestors may have electrified the barbed wire. Most importantly they came in overwhelming numbers. At least forty police stormed the house itself, with another hundred or so held in reserve nearby. It is uncertain who threw the first stone, and largely irrelevant. The air was soon thick with them, the sound of the fight carrying across the quiet suburb. The police, who had to cut their way through the wire entanglements under a constant barrage of stones, replied with gunfire and volleys of rocks. An inspector leading a squad around the side of the cottage in a flanking movement was struck on the temple and dropped like a sack of shit, the base of his skull shattered by the blow. A Constable Dennis, forcing his way through a window, was hit by a brick and then an iron bar. He fired into the house, shooting the leg out from under Richard Entock. It took half an hour for the police to subdue the sixteen defenders after a savage round of hand-to-hand combat. A convoy of ambulances ferried the wounded to hospital where doctors were faced with an amazing array of bullet wounds, gaping cuts, broken skulls and sprained, fractured and bruised limbs. The house was virtually demolished. Not a window was left intact, reported the
Herald
.

The
Worker's Weekly
ran an article by one of the picketers who laid the blame for most of the property destruction at the feet of the police. After bashing their defenceless prisoners

Here was fascist barbarism indeed. Destroying food, clothing and culture (in the form of the violin). Was nothing beneath these brutes? The
Weekly
's correspondent also denied claims in the mainstream press that the tenant was not even at the house. Parsons, he wrote, was in the thick of the fight, and ‘only saved from being killed by the actions of another worker' who threw himself on top of the old soldier as a gang of cops laid into him with their batons. According to the
Herald
, it was ‘one of the most serious disturbances ever dealt with by the police in New South Wales'. But it paled beside Black Friday, in Newtown, two days later.

 

Like the Rum Rebellion, the anti-eviction riot in Union Street, Newtown, on 19 June was a highly plastic event which morphed from a shocking example of state-sponsored brutality into a stirring triumph of the city's finest over the spectre of violent anarchy – depending on who was perjuring themselves at the time. Union Street was then, and still is, a narrow, claustrophobic passageway into a dense maze of roads, alleys and lanes in the wedge between King Street and Erskineville Road. Led by fearless lesbians, the renovating class has been gentrifying the area for years now, but in 1931 the new elites were a long way from this grim patch of turf. The only ferals were cats and dogs, turned loose by families unable to feed themselves, let alone any pets. You could still live and die in a place like Newtown without setting foot outside its boundaries; and although the war and the Great Depression had plucked and torn at the suburb's intricately woven fabric, the ties of neighbourhood were still much stronger than they are today. This would help explain the large crowds, hundreds strong, which constantly milled about in front of 143 Union Street during that bitterly cold wet week in June when the UWM moved into the little two-up two-down terrace in response to yet another eviction order. It would also explain the way the crowd swelled to many thousands when the police arrived, and the vehemence with which they screamed and hurled defiance at the government's hired muscle when they attacked the picketers.

There is little point trying to reconcile the alternate versions of what happened on Black Friday. It is as though the day itself split into competing time lines, humming through the same space, involving the same men, but somehow existing in completely different worlds. Inspector Jim Farley, who commanded the force of forty to sixty police officers, described a routine operation gone wrong when his cool-handed squad arrived with a warrant and were instantly bombarded with stones, bricks and foul-mouthed communist abuse. Several police, including Farley, were struck and one constable was knocked down. Farley braved the rain of missiles to wave his piece of paper and shout, to no effect, ‘Be sensible men. Stop throwing. I have a warrant to enter here'. The crazed UWM men continued to rain half bricks and pieces of concrete into the street, one of them shouting, ‘Come on, boys, into the fucking bastards.' Even civilians were taking hits from the poorly directed fusillade. Finally, after much forbearance, some police drew their revolvers and fired on the house, driving the men on the balcony inside. Farley, who by his own evidence did not seem to have maintained much tactical command, noticed a number of police disappearing down the narrow passageway at the side of the property. As a handful of his men scaled the balcony he made his own way down the side. After a brief moment he entered the rear of the house.

‘The whole place was in a state of confusion,' he later stated at the UWM men's trial. ‘A large number of bags of soil were lying about both rooms on the ground floor. I then directed the police to take the defendants out into the back, which was done. They remained there for a few minutes. I kept them under observation. The police patrol arrived and the defendants were brought to Newtown Police Station.' A challenging task, expertly handled, by hard-nosed professionals. Inside, Farley counted sixty-eight bags of soil and took note of ‘a number of stones, pieces of bricks, concrete and a banner', along with other crude improvised weapons such as iron bars, knives, sticks and home-made clubs. He had been on the job thirty-one years when he led his men into action against the UWM and it was his considered opinion that they were facing ‘very grave danger'. All of the defendants were armed and none stopped fighting until the last man went down, at least thirty or forty minutes after the first rock bounced off the scone of one of his officers.

The evidence of Farley's officers was a little more dramatic, a little more confused, and a little more disconnected from reality. Constable Ray Kelly, who led the assault on the rear door of the house, described the harrowing experience of trying to force his way through an entrance which had been blocked with a sheet of iron and a massive pile of sandbags. Rocks and bricks pounded into his chest and head as he tried to squeeze through, while ranks of heavily armed communists waited eagerly on the other side with sticks and iron bars. One of these men, Joseph Garbett, had even fashioned a spear out of a length of gas pipe. He thrust it at Kelly, piercing his tunic and puncturing his left arm. Garbett then ran into the front room while Kelly fought with a young picketer named Reg Hawkins, who smashed him in the head with a steel bar. Sergeant George Phillips, who followed Kelly inside, said he was hit on the arm by a brick, thrown as he scrambled over the collapsed mound of sandbags. Someone swung a chair leg at him, injuring his thumb as he tried to fend off the blow. He never drew his revolver, not once, he said. He couldn't name
one
officer who did. In fact, although he heard something that may have sounded like a gunshot in the wild melee, he couldn't swear that's what it was. Constable William Resolute Gibbons, from Hurstville station, the third man through the door, was struck in the right eye and collapsed to the ground as soon as he made it inside. He clambered to his feet, only to be hit with a chair on the back of the head by a man called John Murphy, a thirty-nine-year-old hellcat swinging this chair with one hand and an iron bar with other, laying into policemen all round him. ‘I arrested Murphy,' said Resolute Gibbons somewhat matter-of-factly, ‘and later he was removed to the back yard'.

The
Herald
, which characterised the ‘desperate fighting' as a battle between the police force and communists, reported that the police fired steadily at the walls behind which the reds cowered. The paper ran Inspector Farley's line that this was justified by ‘the terrible shower of stones' which rained down on the officers; however, it contradicted his testimony that the shooting just sort of broke out, instead depicting it as a deliberate act. ‘At an order from the officers in charge', wrote the
Herald
's man, ‘the police retired, many of them bleeding profusely from jagged wounds … After a short consultation, the police drew their revolvers. At a word of command they commenced firing …' Only one protester was hit, according to the report, and it was not known how. Perchance, the journalist offered helpfully, ‘the wounded man was struck by a bullet deflected from its path'.