Leviathan (49 page)

Rates of assault, robbery without a weapon, robbery with a weapon other than a firearm, domestic burglary, motor vehicle theft and shop theft ‘were all substantially greater in inner Sydney than in Cabramatta'. What Cabramatta did have, however, was ‘a disproportionate share of offences related to the possession and sale of narcotics'. And, of course, the 5T gang.

The 5T are a long-time favourite of desperate news editors with space to fill and deadlines to meet. Their name, redolent of the 3 Lions and the 14K Triad, derives from the five Ts tattooed on the gang members' forearms. The Ts have been translated as meaning murder, money, sex, drugs, violence, prison, lack of respect, bad attitude and an unhealthy love of machetes, billiard cues and, naturally, ‘numb-chuckers'. But as both youth workers and streetkids told me some years ago when I was researching the first heady moments of the 5T's rise to fame for
Juice
magazine, the meaning was, originally at least, infinitely more saccharine.
Tuoi Tre Thieu Tinh Thuong
: Young people lack love and care. But such maudlin ooze has never sold newspapers, unless it is poured over cancer babies and beached whales. Nor is it much use for amplifying and channelling mass anxieties about spiralling crime rates, racial conflict and socioeconomic decay. To magnify and direct such fears creates a setting in which the beliefs and positions of millions are mobilisable and ‘the creation of political followings' becomes more feasible. The arousal of those feelings is often of more political consequence than the outcomes generated. Manoeuvre around such issues as ‘Asian youth gang violence' and the ensuing ebb and flow of mass support are the life force of politics and more important to the actors concerned than outcomes such as the Carr Government's ‘knife legislation'.

For the legions of the city's poor, unemployed and even middle-class people whose experience of the 1980s and 1990s was not of white shoes and Cointreau balls, intense economic change nurtured corrosive fear and a sense of powerlessness. There is no solace in blaming impersonal developments like ‘globalisation' in such circumstances. So the anxious parties look for explanations in myths of failed or guilty leaders, dangerous outsiders or simple conspiracy. A related consequence is the appeal of Edelman's ‘hero-leader', often riding in from outside the system to deal with the threat. It is no accident that someone like Pauline Hanson appeals powerfully to the victims and losers of fifteen years of economic and cultural revolution. In such situations neither the ‘enemy' – be they Asian youth gangs or the World Bank – nor the hero-leader – say, a maverick politician or talkback radio demagogue – can be viewed as a complex, ambivalent human being with a potential for empathy. ‘They are perceived as embodiments of a particular role,' writes Edelman. Their mythic role.

By the early 1990s the 5T were getting regular press as a large, organised, mafialike outfit, maybe 100 strong, with a formal structure of rank and rules and with links to other unspecified ‘Asian crime gangs'. New members were said to go through an initiation (involving some criminal or violent act), were sworn to secrecy and devoted Total Loyalty to the gang. They were ‘known' to sit at the hub of Cabramatta's huge open air heroin market, putting them in control of the city's drug trade, and have since been fingered for extortion rackets, home invasions and the murder of John Newman, the local member of parliament. About the only thing not known about the 5T gang is how a bunch of dozy, beer-loving tabloid journalists continually scored the hot gear on such a violent, secretive, fanatically devoted crime ring. But of course there is no fashionable cachet in telling the readers that you wheezed up to the clippings library with a sticky bun and a cup of coffee to crib your notes from whichever poor, po-faced hack got the job of breathing life into the Asian crime gang caper before you.

While facts (such as the calibre of the bullets which blew away John Newman) are as hard and tactile as a pebble in the mouth, their meaning is always negotiable. Before the MP's murder was exposed as a possible end game of a power struggle within the local branch of the Labor Party, it was widely
known
to be a payback killing for Newman's stand against the 5T. The murder was a perfect fit for the myth that the 5T were what was wrong with Sydney. Their insidious connections to ‘adult' Asian crime gangs were flooding the city with heroin and causing the social chaos which the anxious and the displaced seemed to perceive all around them. So resource deprivation and the massive collateral damage of economic restructuring were suddenly transformed into a story of race war, and the common interests of people from poorer suburbs in the city's south-west were fractured along ethnic lines. Rather than youth centres, education, job training and infrastructural investment, politicians mobilised support on the promise of more police and harsher laws, driving a wedge into communities already riven by multiple stress lines. Occasionally this lack of a sense of proportion and irony would backfire amusingly, as with the ALP's mooted ‘crackdown' on youths who wore their baseball caps backwards. A ghastly fashion mistake yes, but hardly a crime. At other times, however, the comic gave way to the tragic. In 1993 for instance, while the
Herald
cranked up early warnings of ‘child gangsters' and ‘Asian terror gangs' on page three, the
Sun Herald
buried a short report that in the previous twelve months, thirty thousand migrant children had missed out on places in English language courses. Despite the media's increasing interest in ethnic crime, nobody seems to have bothered to note a possible relationship between the emergence of the ‘child gangsters' and the federal government's decision to consider retrenching another forty per cent of staff from the English language program after an initial cut of twenty teaching positions.

None of this is to deny that the 5T exist. They do and this is the saddest element of all, for their creation was avoidable. When the first stories of the 5T were being laid out at the
Telegraph
and the
Herald
, the gangs were little more than groups of unemployed Vietnamese teens who had slipped through the net of the secondary school system and often had no close family to rely on. Coming from refugee camps in Hong Kong where 2000 children were kept under armed guard for months without seeing daylight, they may never have been in school. Some had seen their families killed. They arrived in Sydney, were given a few months English training if they were very lucky, then set loose to fend for themselves. April Pham, a youth worker in Cabramatta, told me that they didn't think of themselves as having ‘low self-esteem'. They just thought of their lives as shit. They could not even cope with welfare. In March 1991, during a deep recession, the Bankstown, Cabramatta, Fairfield, Marrickville and Campsie social security offices combined had only two Indochinese aged between sixteen and eighteen receiving job search allowance. ‘Half the kids don't have any income,' said April. ‘The dole is a huge hassle. We virtually have to drag them in there. They live off and with their friends, a dozen in a one-bedroom flat. They share expenses. If one has fifty dollars, everyone gets it.'

This was the 5T in its earliest days. But even bullshit has a critical mass and past that point it becomes self-generating. Cut off from any other source of identity, the loudest message those young Vietnamese had beamed at them was ‘street gangs'. If they ever sat on the floor of their dismal unfurnished flats and wondered what this strange new country expected of them, they need only attend to their media image. Unfortunately that particular fantasy was powered by an alternating current. Just as the symbol of a powerful underground teen-mafia explained the suburban catastrophe of drug-fuelled crime – and offered salvation through the symbol of an unshackled police force waging their War on Drugs with a nuclear armoury of supercharged drug laws – so too did it provide a reassuring myth for their notional enemy. Cast adrift in an alien world which obviously distrusted and feared them, the rootless beta-version outlaws were presented with an expertly crafted narrative of their own power and significance. They weren't sloughed off failures. They weren't pathetic. They were not doomed.
They were the 5T
. And though they might walk in the valley of the shadow of death they would fear no evil because they were the
baddest motherfuckers
in the valley. I mean, really, what did everyone expect them to do? Get a haircut and a job flipping patties at McDonalds?

Barbara Tuchman once described the behaviour of governments which pursue policies plainly contrary to their own self-interest as the march of folly. Wilful blindness, self-deception or, as Tuchman calls it, woodenheadedness, has played an important role in governance since the Trojans decided to place within their possession that big, suspicious-looking horse their implacable enemies the Greeks had mysteriously left outside the gates of Troy. It was epitomised, she writes, by Phillip II of Spain, ‘the surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns', of whom it was once said, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence'. The policy-makers who responded to the 5T as a cause of urban decay rather than a symptom had only to contemplate the city's criminal history of a century before to understand the end point of their woodenheaded policies – just as the politicians of the nineteenth century had been informed, at length, time and again, of the grim consequences of allowing slums to arise in their midst.

In the 1880s and 1890s the city's gangs were composed of poor Australian, Irish and English slum dwellers. Known as larrikins, they were the offspring of those benighted creatures described by WS Jevons and a series of Royal Commissions and reports into the conditions of the city's working classes. Like New York hoodlums or the
gamin
of Paris, they were as much a product of the slums as the plague rats of 1900. And just as the slums are still with us today in different form, so are the larrikins, except now they are called the 5T, the 108 Gang, Sing Ma or the Bankstown Boys. If that seems to over-sentimentalise the modern city's social bandits, it shouldn't. We see the larrikin through the soft focus lens of time's passage. When he actually roamed the street he was perhaps even more of a terror to the respectable and the well fed than your average Asian youth gang today. In January 1884
Sydney Quarterly Magazine
said the city at night was haunted by what they called a ‘formidable evil'. Of the Victorian youth gangs, it was no exaggeration

And just as Bankstown Mall was supposedly turned into a free-fire zone by gang warfare, so were the parks and alleys of Sydney rendered impassable by turf wars between the likes of the Blues Point Mob, the Livers and the Rocks Push as bands of larrikins ‘swollen with insolence and wine' formed opposing parties to contend ‘with infinite spirit by means of stones and fists'. The larrikins, like the 5T, followed a classic evolutionary path from low-level street offences to organised criminal enterprise. By the 1880s they had gathered into ‘pushes' which more or less controlled areas like the Rocks, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills or Glebe. Said the
Quarterly
,

In 1897 the State's enlightened and forward-thinking comptroller-general of prisons, Frederick Neitenstein, reported to Parliament on ‘the causes and prevention of larrikinism', remarking on the way ‘certain phases of crime' seemed to periodically bloom, mature and eventually pass away. He commented favourably upon British programs to alleviate the shocking conditions of the slums, which Neitenstein was convinced were the cause of this ‘undisciplined animalism'. He also tagged another culprit, blaming sensational media coverage for inflaming the situation and giving a lead to the easily led.

James Murray, who in 1973 analysed the phenomenon of the larrikin pushes, was struck by the parallels with his own era and wrote, ‘it may be that the last thirty years of the twentieth century in Australia will see migrant pushes as troubled and dangerous as the pushes of the nineteenth'. He was mistakenly prescient. Murray predicted the possibility of gangs arising in Sydney and Melbourne's Italian and Greek communities. However, political consensus on migration and a relatively strong economy had seen those arrivals integrated quite comfortably. During the 1980s and 1990s, economic restructuring and the erosion of that consensus by a cultural dread of non-European migration denied many migrants from the Middle East and Indochina the same advantages. The picture was not unrelentingly dark of course. Tens of thousands of overachieving Asian-Australian university students suggested another story beyond the Battle of Bankstown. But they stood in apparent contradicton to evidence of ‘gang violence, drugs and related crime among young Indochinese' noted by even the most sympathic observers, such as Nancy Viviani in 1996.