Leviathan (58 page)

‘This bloke just didn't like uniformed police to start with,' explained Gordon. ‘He just hated uniformed police … no-one knows why … just an absolute bastard that's all. His mentor was Attila the Hun … he took his leave once and wrote this little book. He was going to boost morale at the station. He took all these sayings from Attila the Hun.'

When word came through from Queensland that Wendy's brother had cancer, they decided to leave Sydney to look after him. ‘And John, I was happy for him to leave,' said Wendy, ‘because those eighteen months he was under that man … Gordon's always been an even-tempered … He's not an easily provoked person … And he's not a malicious person … And that last eighteen months under that man … Gordon would return to the house
ropeable
and
ashen grey
. I said it's just no good for you, leave the stinking job, because I could see by that time it was really having a toll on him. Little did we know that he had a malignant melanoma on him. We'd sold the house. We're in between the move. And in June Gordon gets diagnosed with a malignant melanoma. It was just one hell of a time. I saw Gordon's health go down. And I think it was the stress. Because Gordon's a straight person. And I don't think this bloke could handle that attitude. The sergeants weren't there to lick his boots. They were there to do a job. I mean, if the guy has a persecution number that's his problem. You tell John what your opinion was, Gordon. What you joined the police force for.'

Gordon, who was shaking quite a lot now, drew in a long shuddering breath. ‘Just to go to work and do your job,' he breathed. ‘And to be left alone, and not be hampered by stupid bloody bosses about bloody stupid things when they knew that all this shit was going on.'

His voice began to speed up and become more emphatic. What he meant by all this shit was the corruption exposed by the Wood Commission. ‘That's what got him at the end,' Wendy nodded emphatically. ‘It was blatant to a lot of them what was going on.'

Unprompted, Gordon suddenly launched into a bitter speech, fired by an intense energy which had been missing up to that point. ‘You used to tell them things what were going on in the bloody cells and shit,' he spat. ‘Why people were hanging themselves, you know, and some bloody things that might have helped. And they'd do bloody nothing about it! All they did was get up after some bastard was dead … You could bail bloody most of them … Get rid of them. Was only stupid little things they were kept in there for. They could have been bailed out and gone. That was just their procedure then, filling up the bloody cells with bloody people.'

‘The politics is there,' said Wendy. ‘The black knights and the white knights, whatever you call them. The politics are there well and truly, John.'

‘Well and bloody truly,' nodded her husband.

‘And if you're not in, you're gone.'

‘They've all come through the system,' Gordon said. ‘They're all ex-detectives. They've all been involved in the quid coppin' and everything else. They're all bosses. And if they didn't know, they should have bloody known. That was their bloody job, to know, to dig it out …' This seemed to disgust Gordon more than anything. He bore the scars of doing his job for more than twenty years but the bosses had not done theirs. ‘The people who bloody complained …' he continued. ‘Soon as you mentioned anything … Christ they came down on you like a bloody ton of bricks. Telling people to come forward … yeah come bloody forward all right.'

‘It's like politics,' said Wendy. ‘You pick on the easy one, don't you? It's the same system. Pick on the guys that can't really defend themselves while the heavies, they keep going.'

‘It's better off handing out a hundred bloody parking tickets than grabbing some bloody crook,' muttered Gordon.

Wendy leaned forward with an imploring look on her face. ‘You guys would know this, you're round it all the time, aren't you?' she said, meaning journalists. ‘You're seeing it. You must see it better than dumbos like us. God only knows what goes on in some places. You would have seen it up in Queensland. What can you do about it? Will anything ever be done?'

‘Some blokes, they try to do their bloody job …' Gordon whispered to himself.

‘And they're worse off for doing it, aren't they?' said Wendy. ‘To be fair and have a good police service you've got to have it from the top down, don't you? Maybe I'm very naive in my talkings … But I think it's the only way that people are going to gain confidence … Why are they frying the little guy, and the big guy who is responsible keeps getting off the hook all the time? Nobody is going to address that in my opinion, John. That's the game, isn't it … it's so political. And that's why the police force will never be what the public would like it to be … because it's so political … I presume from the detectives up is where it kicks in. You look at the royal commission, that seems to be where it's coming from. Not that Gordon or myself would ever know about those levels.'

‘Ryan, the [Police] Commissioner, he's an educated man,' said Gordon, more softly now. ‘He knows what's going on … Christ, he should be doing something! But he's not doing anything about it. He's just talking about it. He's gunna do this, gunna do that … gunna gunna gunna.'

‘How does it make you feel?' I asked, hating myself just a little bit for such a braindead question but wanting to know anyway.

‘Absolutely sick to the stomach,' said Gordon Gallagher, the dying policeman. ‘Sick to the stomach that you were ever involved in it.'

 

Gordon sued the police service in March 1998, alleging disability discrimination. He had tried to take up his old job in 1994 but had been rejected because his previous sick leave had been ‘excessive'. In fact, his sick leave throughout his many years of physically gruelling and dangerous work had been well within his entitlements, but the service refused to explain the basis for its decision. Legal aid flogged them in the Equal Opportunity Tribunal with his former tormentor, Attila the Hun Jr, having to squirm his way through nearly an hour's excrutiating testimony as he tried to justify his part in the exclusion. When Gordon won, the tribunal ordered the service to pay damages and publish a full apology in the
Police Service News
‘forthwith'.

I attended his funeral and burial service at Sutherland on a bitterly cold day in mid-winter. It was wet and bleak and steam plumed from the mouths of dozens of police officers who had come to pay their respects. Most of them arrived in cheap, rusting cars. They were just workers. As Gordon had been. They sang their hymns, said their prayers and committed their friend to the earth. Months had passed since the tribunal's decision, but the service had never found time to publish that apology.

It was a weird feeling. Really weird. Ten past four on a Saturday afternoon, one week before my birthday, I shut down my Powerbook and stretched back from the desk I'd made my own over the previous four years. The Mitchell Library was quiet, sleepy and warm. Nothing unusual there. It was about this time most afternoons I could be caught flaked out for a little covert nap action. On the next table a couple of high-school kids were already snoozing atop their stack of HSC papers. Half a dozen or so of the Mitchell's resident freaks and trainspotters were scattered through the huge reading room. I stood and stretched and tried to shake off that weird feeling like a big old dog emerging from a pond. But there was nothing for it. It was too weird.

I had just written the last line of my last chapter and although another few weeks of editing, revising, defamation checking, foot stamping and tantrum throwing stretched in front of me, the long, long run was over and the fat times were coming. For two months I'd been forcing myself through the barbed wire entanglements of my deadline with promises of unimaginably indulgent bludging afterwards. During breaks I'd sit on the steps of the Mitchell washing down mouthfuls of M&Ms with paper cups of instant coffee dreaming of my personal big rock candy mountain. When this baby was delivered to the printers I planned to play quite a few video games, catch more than my fair share of waves and smoke way too many cones. Basically, dear reader, my plan was to boogie oogie oogie until I just couldn't boogie no more.

It had been such a long journey that now the end was near I wasn't quite sure of what to do next – after surfing, thrashing my Playstation to death and pulling heaps of cones, that is. And it was only in the last few months, looking up from the line or paragraph immediately in front of me and scoping out the book as a whole for the first time that I realised just how far I'd strayed from my intended destination since 13 April 1995, the day I'd signed on for this King Hell road trip. At eleven a.m. that day I'd pitched Random a history of Sydney in the style of Michael Pye's
Maximum City
. The difference between these sorts of books, I explained, and your more conventional histories is partly based on content and partly on technique. Essentially the author brings the methods of American magazine journalism, once known as the New Journalism, to a much longer format.

In Pye's case this involved writing what he termed a ‘biography' rather than a standard history of New York. Pye's story of New York advances through themes as much as through time. It follows a rough line from the founding days of the colonies through to the end of the twentieth century. However, by organising his material in thematic chapters rather than in a more rigid chronological order, he shows how present-day New York is a child of its past. Within each chapter he deploys standard historical techniques of archival research, alongside the journalistic methods of interview, narrative, biography, personal observation and shifting points of reference. In this way his history becomes richer than a standard textbook and accessible to a much wider audience.

I had planned to write a celebration of my city. Some obvious themes in her story suggested themselves; migration; environment; money; power; leisure and culture. I planned to open with an essay called ‘Creation Myths', covering prehistory to convict transportation and including Aboriginal history. I also intended writing a whole chapter on women and actually mapped out a long section on the city's gay history. But none of these things happened.

Four years later I sat hunched over my laptop, tapping out the ghoulish details of corpse ratting at the Glebe morgue. At one point I stopped typing, sat back and smiled my most lopsided, fatalistic smile. Well here we are, I said to myself, the emotional low point of the book. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have bottomed out.

How the hell did we end up there?

Not only had the chapter on Sydney's women disappeared, the women themselves, apart from a few cameos, had gone MIA. And the gays? The burbs? The celebration? The good vibes of living in the greatest city in the world? Forget it. Sometime back in 1995 I wandered off the bright, teeming thoroughfares and down into a very dark alley. I never came back.

I think Arago's journals might have drawn me down there, all that grim business about the opulent merchants of olde Sydney towne tossing some blackfellas a bottle of rum and some mouldy bread to beat each to death for whitey's entertainment. I'd always known we'd done those blackfellas wrong but it had never really come home to me before. When I started researching the Gundy shooting and the subsequent Redfern raids I began to understand how little the mindset of white authority had changed, and when I read the story of Gundy to an audience at the Brisbane Writers' Festival I realised I wasn't the only one who'd been wearing a white blindfold.

 

It was a strange gig on which to lay such a heavy reading. A comedy night in fact. Dirk Flinthart and I had just released
How To Be A Man
and the festival organisers rang to see if we'd like to do a little dog and trumpet routine for the new book. Flinthart was up for it but I wasn't. They sort of pecked at me a bit, teased out that I was working on
Leviathan
and asked whether I'd like to read from that instead. I would, I said, but not at a comedy night. Oh, it's not all comedy, they assured me. We have some really heavy-going performance poetry too. That should bring down a suitably gloomy atmosphere. Oh well, I said, in that case …

I hired a young Aboriginal actor to read out the longer quotes, practised an appropriately grave persona for reading such depressing material and arrived to discover I'd been billed as something like ‘Crazy John Birmingham, Queensland's favourite funny man'.

Hmmm, good deal.

Anyway, the actor and I took the stage, or rather the couch, from which we would be reading. I gazed across the dreadlocked, nose-ringed, pin-eyed audience and understood with a sick sinking feeling that they were there to hear some hilarious anecdotes about bucket bongs and mad flatmates. I started to read.

Well, you could actually see the pain in their eyes when they realised this was not about the funny things which happened to Crazy John the last time he pulled too many cones. But that was nothing compared to the discomfort and the urge to flee which ran through the room when it dawned on them that the topic for the night was, oh no – oh God no please don't – Aborigines.

It's a hell of thing to perform in front of a room full of people who suddenly don't want to be there. But I had faith in this story, and I had faith in my reluctant listeners too, so I ploughed on and after a few minutes a really cool thing started to happen. In spite of themselves they were drawn in. Not in a good way of course. They stopped and attended the same way you can't help but look at a bad road accident as you drive by. But the boredom, the agitation and even the hostility which had been there evaporated. At first curiosity took over, then active interest and finally horror. I could see it in the way their faces went sort of slack, their eyes widened and a few folks lost control of their mouths, letting them fall open.

It was the shotgun that did it. I had slowed the reading right down and reached the line, ‘The Remington 870 is a big heavy-hitting piece of artillery.' My own voice hitched at that point, which was a surprise, I can tell you. I looked up to catch my breath and composure and saw that for the first time every pair of eyes was boring in on me. As I worked through what happened next some people began to shake their heads slowly, some gave out little groans and one or two began to dab discreetly at their eyes. I think at last the story had come home for them as well.

After that, I don't know, it was all just a bit difficult to embrace the Good Living Sydney of laughter and forgetting. I was deep inside the alleyway now, perhaps Durands Alley or Abercrombie Lane, and although I knew there was a world of light somewhere above, I only wanted to push further into the gloom. So let me apologise if you think I've been too dark, or biased, or unfair; if you think I've dwelt too much on violence and alienation and not enough on the triumphs and virtues of this great city. Perhaps I have written a black armband biography and have been unjustly selective in my choice of material. I am guessing, for instance, that Prime Minister John Howard would not approve. But then, John Howard can go fuck himself. And the horse he rode in on.

History is never bloodless. Someone always gets hurt. And I guess, in the end, I couldn't draw my eyes away from that. Perhaps then, I should it make clear that I love Sydney. She took me in and made me her own when I was just a starving baby writer, living on friends' brown couches and bludging meals off the Hare Krishnas to get by. I love it that she didn't care, dirty trollop that she is. She just threw her arms around me and cried, ‘Here I am baby, come an' get it!' I love her beaches, her sunshine, her food and her art. I love her arrogance, her greed and promiscuity. I love her parties and the hangovers that inevitably follow. I love it that she loves a good fight. That she knows she is better than anyone else. That you can do things her way or you can shove it.

If I could take the ghost of Arthur Phillip on a tour of the city he founded, I'd want him to be proud. I'd take him to the highest towers and shout him the most expensive lunch. I'd tell him that all things considered, he'd done well. I'd say a free people now live where he pitched his camp so long ago. The city he helped raise is one of the finest in the world. Its treasures would make the London of his day seem like a mean and muddy little village. I'd want him to know that it was all worth it.

The only dark spot I could imagine might come if Phillip asked what had become of his old friend Bennelong's people. I could take him down to Circular Quay, warp his mind with the Opera House and tell him we now celebrate the memory of his friend in the name Bennelong Point. But of his people? The Iora and all the other tribes? Well, surrounded by the city's staggering wealth and progress, I suppose that question might prove a little embarrassing.

I could imagine so many things I'd want to say to Phillip if his ghost did turn up. But if he brought his friend Bennelong with him, what would I say then?

Perhaps sorry might be a good place to start.