<nettime> Pyschopath City

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

zczc
*aus*edued*
catchline:Wark-column

Pyschopath City
McKenzie Wark
Monday, 29 November 1999


Big Itchy was the bouncer who kept the peace at Thommo's, the famous
floating two-up school that boated around Sydney harbour, where Nixy the
Flea kept the ring. It all sounds so colourful, Sydney's seedy criminal
side. There's even a chain of hotels in Sydney that name their gaming
rooms after Thommo's.

The charm of lawlessness exercises a certain fascination, whether it's
bushrangers or razor gangs. But Thommo's was a place connected with
corruption, extortion and murder. Yet all this gets overlooked in that
distinctively Australian cultural trait of celebrating the criminal
character. 

In John Birmingham's book Leviathan (Random House), which he calls a
"biography" of Sydney, it is the city itself that appears as a colourful
and criminal character. What's refreshing about Leviathan is its radical
pessimism. There's no grand narrative of the march of progress at work
here. There's just venality, violence and greed on an ever expanding
scale.

Rather than a chronological narrative, Leviathan is series of fabled
incidents that show what kind of milieu Sydney has grown to become.  Dinh
Tran is a school teacher who manages to get his family out of Vietnam. The
entrepreneurs who sold Dinh Tran the package holiday cruise from hell are
juxtaposed with the contractors who outfitted the Second Fleet. Camden,
Calvert and King were better known as slave traders, and the Second Fleet
was little better equipped than a slaver.

First Fleeter Watkin Tench and a platoon of troops bumble around in the
bush looking for a black fella to punish in retribution for a white death.
Birmingham then shows us the death of another Aboriginal man, David Gundy,
killed by twentieth century police who are also looking for another
perpetrator. "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." 

"The women of the First Fleet, and those who followed them, were sent out
not simply because they had sinned but because they could do so again,
this time in the service of the Empire." Cut to the industrialised
prostitution of the war years, where women impoverished by the depression
serve a rising class of underworld gangsters and corrupt cops, as well as
a small army of American servicemen.

Where Melbourne has the geometric form of a nineteenth century city,
Sydney is a pure product of the "creaky wooden engines of state" of the
eighteenth. Governor Philip divided the infant colony between east and
west, officers and convicts. His successors issued heroic plans and
orders. But the officers were a law unto themselves. "They often arrived
in Sydney deeply in debt and on the lookout for a piece of the action." 

Birmingham offers a moral fable or two on the dangers of the privatisation
of state functions, particularly the sale of commissions to the colonial
Officer Corp. The Corp stands at the beginning of a long line of corrupt
state sponsored businesses that not only oppose the fair competition of
the open market but do their best to restrain it.

The dysfunctional chaos of Sydney, "this zircon in the crown of Empire",
emerges in Birmingham's hands from the tendency to see governance as
something to rort for particular advantage, rather than as a neutral
arbiter of what is best for economic development as a whole. 

Birmingham goes looking for the human cost, from the murderous pack of
dogs that could pull an unwary colonist off a horse, to the slums that
bred the plague of 1900. He finds in the archive no shortage of reports on
the poor conditions that "simply shuddered to a stop as the degradation
overwhelmed their ability to describe it." This is a city that simply
doesn't ever want to raise the blindfold of progress.

Birmingham offers a passing glimpse at the shonks and crooks responsible
for actually building Sydney -- some of whom make the Corps look almost
like gentlemen. As the Corp mutated into a pastoralist class, their main
interest became the suppression of any drain on the public purse that
might fetter their own interests. Those familiar Sydney features -- weak
regulation, competing or overlapping public bodies and minimal
accountability, appear as a "great" Sydney tradition, serving the
interests of pastoralists and property developers alike. 

"Private interests had so effectively usurped control of the city that the
twentieth century dawned on a bustling port which seemed to be an
experiment in the civic utility of true anarchy." And by the end of the
second world war, "it had become a leviathan, evolved from a few
cells...". Sydney, Birmingham seems to be telling us, was spawn of a bad
seed.

After pastoral wealth comes industrial, and now digital, and with each
comes a rash of new building, which snap-freezes into permanent form the
gaudy tastes of the dog pack of the day. Permanent at least until the next
boom-bust cycle demolishes the city's past and starts over again. "The
city is eating itself".

The city ingests the talents of its migrant peoples and the resources of
the land to produce its energetic and erratic growth, it also excretes
what it can't use. "The poor, like the Eora, have been dispersed. No
longer concentrated in the inner city, they are encamped on the western
and south-western fringes of the metropolis, up to half a million of them,
uneducated, unemployable and with little future beyond daytime TV, junk
food, bad drugs and madness."

The growth of this Leviathan is "protean" rather than orderly. This
history is a history of contingency. Birmingham is drawn to the kind of
stories that reveal "the underlying structure not to be concrete and steel
but rather lust, greed, hubris and a ceaselessly shifting but morally
inert and insatiable will to power." 

Birmingham's Sydney is "a commercial city, a pure product of capitalism's
global expansion in the nineteenth century." It's great monument should be
it's wharves, "the point at which the city's inhabitants touched the vast,
roaring river of world trade and were either dragged under and drowned or
came away clutching ingots of silver snatched from the current." 

In good times, the ingots were plentiful and "the streets roared with life
and madness and greed and the gritty red dust thrown up by the carts and
horses racing to the waterfront to deliver teetering mountains of wool and
wheat and load up with even larger piles of furniture and fine goods for
the interior." In bad times, it call came crashing down in a heap of bad
debt.

And when it all crashed, the productive destruction of economic violence
gave way to the unproductive destruction of political violence.
Birmingham's Sydney of the great depression is one in which the police,
and the proto-fascist New Guard biff it out with the Labor Army and the
Communist inspired Unemployed Workers Movement.

The resistance the latter put up to evictions in Union Street, Newtown is
recorded as "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." This city of greed and violence is also a city of
lies, or of lying institutionalised, by press and state alike. 

In the 80s, the newspapers discovered the Asian drug gang story. "As they
charged after it, into the suburban badlands, most reporters cut their
ties to the world of real things and passed like tongueless blind men
through the night, decoding only dimly perceived movements." Meanwhile the
really powerful criminals went unmolested by either the media or the
police.

Two hundred years ago Jeremy Benthan described the governance of NSW as
"so much lawless violence". Birmingham thinks that judgement still
applies. The rationing of the war years led to a merger of the interests
of law, politics and crime that remained until the Wood Royal Commission,
and probably beyond. If the state's drug laws "send a message" it is one
of tolerance -- of the corrupting influence of prohibition on law
enforcement officers. 

Birmingham is attracted to stories of violence and greed, for "here
perhaps we can find the genesis of the city's fall: that ceaseless,
shifting dissonance within Sydney's history, that will to power in a place
without history, long-lived institutions or a moral centre." This is a
biography of the city's character -- Sydney as psychopath. "Sydney has a
soul and that is a very dark place indeed." 

Most left-liberal histories lean towards inclusion of questions of race,
gender and sexuality. Birmingham replaces these with a more distinctively
Sydney trifecta of money, thuggery and real estate. The achievement of
Leviathan is in popularising a radical account of Sydney rooted in a
pessimistic view of human folly, rather than the warm inner glow of
bleeding heart liberal humanism. 

McKenzie Wark is a senior lecturer in media studies at Macquarie
University, mckenzie.wark@mq.edu.au

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