Leviathan (60 page)

I took most of the gaudy detail of the plague which struck Sydney in 1900 from Dr J Ashburton Thompson's excellent reports. Simply and lucidly written, they even achieve the occasional flight of poetry. His recommendations for keeping man and rat separate appear in the appendix to his 1907 report. Max Kelly's much quoted slum article also reared its head in this section.

Peter Spearritt's
Sydney Since the Twenties
neatly summarised the growth of the city after the Great War and I owe the description of changes to suburbia from that period to his work. He also did the research on the 1920s land boomers which I profited from in the same section, supplemented by the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
's entry for Sir Arthur Rickard. Whitham's quote about Lane Cove was snipped from Spearritt too. Jahn's mini-essays on the Astor and the Macleay Regis, and Richard Cardew's chapter in Roe's
Twentieth Century Sydney
did good-cop-bad-cop duty for me while I was looking at the apartment boom of the 1920s and 1930s. The biographical details for Portia Geach came from the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
and an unpublished manuscript in the Mitchell Library (ref A 920.7 G). The description of de Groot's attack on the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of the Harbour Bridge is taken from contemporary reports in the
Herald
and the
Daily Telegraph
.

Jahn was the starting point for the brief section on high-rise Sydney with small diversions in Birch and Macmillan's
Sydney Scene
, Ruth Park's
Companion Guide to Sydney
and
Haskell's Sydney
by John Haskell. My description of the Australia Hotel is derived from the hotel's own guide for guests, held in the Mitchell Library. When writing this book I often wished I could transport myself back into Sydney's sepia-toned days. Had that wish been granted, I think the Australia would have been one of my first ports of call. It's one of the many great tragedies of this city that we let it slip away. Harold Cazneaux's photographic tributes to this lost city are a powerful reminder of what was lost, and for anyone interested I recommend Philip Geeves and Gail Newton's collection and study of 1980 or Phillip Adams and Helen Ennis's more recent
The Quiet Observer
. It was in the former I found Cazneaux's beautiful photograph of the old Royal Exchange. Geeves's simple prose, which I drew on, was an appropriate counterpoint to the photographer's elegant style. From him comes the droll information about the need for early car owners to always carry a potato and a description of Rowe Street before the MLC Centre buried it. Jahn provided the info for the brief treatment of high-rise Sydney.

3. Only the Strong

All that juicy bayonet stuff comes from the BBC documentary series ‘Decisive Weapons'. Details of Bligh's last hours in government came from the transcript of George Johnston's court martial with a bit of cribbing from Fitzgerald and Hearn's
The Rum Rebellion
when I just couldn't see through the bullshit and spin-doctoring any more. The wry detail of Bligh's daughter attacking the main guard with her parasol is mentioned by GC Mundy decades later in
Our Antipodes
. He probably got the story first-hand from her as she was back in Sydney in the late 1840s, having long before married the colony's then military commander Sir Maurice O'Connell.

As you might guess I tend to favour Bligh's version of events, a bias which will no doubt earn me a good head-kicking from some Macarthur loyalists when the reviews come out.

SJ Butlin's
Foundations of the Australian Monetary System
turned out to be much more interesting than you'd ever imagine and it forms much of the basis for my discussion of the city's infant economy. The journey down the long and winding road through the colony's power structure before the rebellion was made much simpler by constant reference to Fitzgerald and Hearn (again), to Kercher's
Debt, Seduction and Other Disasters
, and to David Neal's
The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony
. It's a helluva job writing an interesting treatise on the relationship between money, power and the legal system, but these boys all stepped up for a shot at the brass ring, Fitzgerald and Hearn in particular.

The re-creation of the riots of 1843 was brought to you by the good journalists at the
Sydney Morning Herald
, the
Chronicle
and the
Colonial Observer
, with a little help from Mr Brewer's extract in
Sydney Scene
. The journal of William Wills, secretary to the first mayor of Sydney, provided some fascinating colour. I don't recall seeing it referred to anywhere in the literature, which isn't surprising seeing as how I stumbled across it while searching for weather reports amongst the log books of those ships moored in Sydney during election week. Anyone who's interested in delving more deeply can find the manuscript in the Mitchell Library at ref M934. See entry 165 Part 8, AJCP handbook. The gritty detail of the depression that year comes from press reports and a series of Legislative Council enquiries which can be found in the British Parliamentary Papers, session 1842–4.

Details of Wentworth's life are largely drawn from the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
, with a pinch of Manning Clark's iconoclasm thrown in for balance. Wentworth's early attacks on the landed and wealthy are from his own book,
A Statistical Account of the British Settlements in Australia
. The small diversion into the early industry of Sydney, contained within the discussion of JW McCarty's ideas, was made possible by the work of Brian Fletcher in
Sydney: A Southern Emporium
. The ensuing discussion of the rich draws on a wide range of sources, threading data and argument from numerous writers in and around each other. Briefly, the main players are Michael Roe's
Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia
, Rubinstein's two papers on the wealthy of New South Wales, GC Bolton's ‘The Idea of a Colonial Gentry', Sandra Blair's ‘The Felonry and the Free', Barrie Dyster's ‘The Fate of Colonial Conservatism on the Eve of the Gold Rush', and Shirley Storrier's
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
article ‘Colonial Society' from which I snipped the James Henty extract. Roe's book was particularly useful and I drew repeatedly on it, first in the discussion of James and Edward Macarthur's ideas and then in the general discussion of gentry characteristics which followed.

Shirley Fitzgerald's history of the city council and Paul Ashton's
Accidental City
were both, as cited, principal sources for the discussion of conflict between the colonial and municipal levels of government.

Wendy Lowenstein's fantastic
Weevils in the Flour
was a great souce of first-hand acounts of the Depression, supplemented by newspaper accounts, David Hickie's bio/interview with Chow Hayes, Lydia Gill's memoir and Trevor Sykes's chapter on the collapse of the Government Savings Bank in
Two Centuries of Panic
. I found Sykes a great help in coming to grips with the premiership of Jack Lang, but also drew on Lang's entry in the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
and sections of Gavin Souter's
Company of Heralds
and Paul Barry's
Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer
, both of which contain interesting discussions of the role played by the city's leading media dynasties at that time. The re-creation of the antieviction crusade draws heavily on Nadia Wheatley's pioneering work in
Twentieth Century Sydney
, contemporary press reports for what they are worth, and Lowenstein. Wendy's young lad Richard made a short film based on that section of her book and I watched it in the State Reference Library one afternoon to get a feel for the grit of the period. A footnote in Wheatley's essay led me to the Australian National University in Canberra where the Noel Butlin Archive Centre holds the legal files of Christian Jolly Smith, a female solicitor, a rare breed in the 1930s, who took on a lot of cases for the International Class War Prisoner's Aid group. She must have been quite a take-charge babe, but somehow I doubt she got to spend a lot of time down at the Australian Club with the other lawyers knocking back the brandies and bullshitting about the glory days of the Sydney bar. Smith's witness statements are all on file and we can only thank the person who saw the historical significance of her work and donated it to the ANU. The great quote about the explosion and fireworks of the Russian Revolution was cribbed from
Cities in Civilization
by Sir Peter Hall.

Until I read MT Daly's
Sydney Boom Sydney Bust
I knew nothing about the building and finance boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I still don't know very much, but by judiciously drawing on Daly's work and closely studying Trevor Sykes's essays on the period in
Two Centuries of Panic
, I was hopefully able to conceal the bottomless well of my ignorance. The green bans of the early 1970s have been extensively documented but I found Meredith and Verity Burgmann's history of the BLF the most informative, whilst Anne Coombs's dissection of the Sydney Push in
Sex and Anarchy
has a top section on the battle for Victoria Street. An AFC doco called ‘Woolloomooloo' and readily accessible at the State Reference Library in Macquarie Street has some really nice interviews with street-level participants, including Mick Fowler whose passing, like that of my friend Pat Bell, left the city all the poorer. All of Mick's quotes and the grabs from Val Hodgson and Frank Theeman are taken from this documentary. Theeman's paraphrasing of Norm Gallagher is from the same source.

4. Pig City

The quote from Manning is taken from
Running the Risks
by Lisa Maher et al, a truly amazing piece of investigation. The structure of the Kings Cross heroin trade in the late 1980s came from Dobinson and Poletti's report,
Buying and Selling Heroin
.

The statistics on arrests for drunkenness in New South Wales in 1948 are from Peter Grabosky's
Sydney in Ferment
, as are references to the Summary Offences Act of 1970 and various information on social crime in Sydney and the breadth of New South Wales criminal law. He also contributed information about the pack rape scares of the late sixties and the so-called ‘Age of Lawlessness'. The quotes from Dr Alfred McCoy are taken from Evan Whitton's work on New South Wales crime,
Can of Worms
. As I hope is obvious from the text, a great deal of the information on postwar crime in Sydney is taken directly from David Hickie's exhaustive survey of the period
The Prince and the Premier
; some of the information on black-market rackets also comes from his work
Chow Hayes
. No doubt a lot of real historians come over all sniffy at Hickie's work, but having waded through millions of words on Sydney I'm willing to lay hard money that next century his bio of Hayes becomes one of the most important sources on the criminal history of the city. A debt is owed to Richard Hall for the valuable insights into the political dimensions of gambling and vice in Sydney in his book
Disorganised Crime
. The information on Phillip Arantz, his dismissal and the ‘paddy book' system of crime statistics is taken from his self-published work,
A Collusion of Powers
. Information on royal commissions leading up to the Wood Royal Commission is taken from Athol Moffit's book,
A Quarter to Midnight
.

Any information about the Wood Commission not drawn directly from the official reports, such as details of the related suicides, was provided by the
Herald
's eight page special report of 1 May 1997.

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