Best of 1999 - The Nick Possum Home Page

Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
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POSSU
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From the World Wide Web and the pages
of the Sydney City Hub …
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The best of 1999
Whispers from the
mean streets
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
www.brushtail.com.au
1
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
Contents
Apres Bob le deluge .......................................... 3
4 February 99 In which Craig McGregor reveals that Bob Carr is
all that stands between us and dictatorship!
The wreck of the pleasure barge ...................... 4
11 February 99 Don Dunstan and Neville Bonner go to the great
nesthole in the sky and Nick comes down with Possum Creek Fever
and discovers that Boris Yeltsin will never die.
With Gough on our side .................................... 5
24 February 99 Former Olympics Minister Bruce Baird develops a
death wish, the Whitlams have a bad week and the NSW cops get
white line fever.
It’s no show without Paddy .............................. 6
3 March 99 In which Paddy McGuinness embraces Germain
Greer and Nick remembers a few of the ghastly words the old
groupie and publicity hound actually wrote in The Female Eunuch.
God is my getaway driver, I shall not want .................. 7
17 March 1999 Nick is woken with the news that the NSW
Liberals are running a notorious, twice-convicted, armed holdup
man for the Upper House and Paul Sheehan gets time off for good
behaviour.
With justice for all and malice towards none ............. 7
31 March 1999 Nick writes to John Howard about the preamble
and urges him to find a better class of friend.
Knee-deep in shit, but free to be proud ............ 8
14 April 1999 From the Balkans to Australia, high-flown hokum
abounds while Nick and Joadja dig up the drains.
The Bob Carr question: is stupidity genetic? ............. 9
21 April 1999 Nick finds himself on a blood-soaked battlefield
and Joadja gets angry about Bob Carr’s stance on the drugs crisis.
The fig of the forbidden tree ........................... 10
5 May 1999 The Bob Ellis paternity imbroglio brings a lot of
pleasure to a lot of simple people and Old Possum explains why the
monetary system is ultimately doomed.
An assignation in the Marlborough ................ 12
11 May 1999 In which Nick signs up for a hazardous mission to
help the East Timor independence fighters.
Night flight to Timor ...................................... 13
18 May 1999 Nick finds himself kicking Kalashnikovs and Paddy
McGuinness dolls out of a Cessna Cargomaster over East Timor.
Praise The Market and pass the snake oil ...... 17
7 July 1999 In which Nick takes issue with the current political
fashion for "civilizing" capitalism and other weepy bullshit ...
The Vichy Republic of Balmain Peninsula ..... 18
21 July 1999 In which Joadja discovers the hidden agenda for the
Great Balmain Rebellion on two Chardonnay-stained coasters from
the Riverview Hotel.
They call it merchant banking ....................... 18
18 August 1999 Nick picks up a cheque for his work on the
Simon Hannes insider trading case and wonders why Simon
bothered.
A stakeout in the night ................................... 19
2 September 1999 In which Nick gets a bit of contract work with
the cops and finds himself staking out a locked public toilet.
Making a wilderness and calling it Order ...... 20
16 September 1999 The TNI continue their rampage and Nick is
hired a security consultant for the big Save East Timor Rally.
The fart of darkness ....................................... 21
23 September 1999 Nick, Joadja, and Old Possum discuss the hurt
feelings of the the Javanese elite and a huge inflated effigy of Paddy
McGuinness appears in the sky above Balmain.
The New Order changeth ................................ 22
30 September 1999 A chilly wind blows through the corridors of
power in Canberra and Jakarta as the friends of Indonesia's
dictatorship find themselves redundant.
The truth is out there somewhere .................. 23
28 October 1999 In which Nick finally gets stuck into the
renovations and discovers that the people delivering the rubbish
skip are liars and fantasists.
Far better Ita Buttrose appointed than Dick
Smith elected ................................................. 24
4 November 1999 Nick wakes in pain and decides that if possums
had the vote he'd vote Yes to the republic and No to the preamble.
Itinerary of an overactivist – the Rodney
Johnstone files ............................................... 25
23 December 1999 PR man and Liberal fixer Ken Hooper is
accused of organising bogus community groups on behalf of the
Westfield shopping empire and Nick is reminded of bogus groups
run by a certain Rodney Johnstone.
Mainstream politics is a chronic relapse
condition ........................................................ 14
25 May 1999 The drug barons emerge from the drugs summit as
the big winners and Bob Carr still looks good, thanks to the Sydney
Morning Herald.
This country would be all right if Cheryl Kernot
were alive ....................................................... 15
2 June 1999 In which Meg Lees and Cheryl Kernot go missing
and Nick stakes out the Parramatta Mall, posing as a Mormon.
The Terror ...................................................... 16
1 July 1999 Nick confronts a lynch mob led by Daily Telegraph
journalists and finds Bob Carr and Kerry Chikarovski trailing in its
wake.
Nick Possum’s ‘Whispers from the mean streets’ were published
simultaneously on the Nick Possum Home Page and in the
Sydney City Hub a weekly café paper which circulated in inner
Sydney until its sad demise in a miasma of weirdness, treachery
and amphetamines in January 2001 (the Hub reappeared late in
2001).
© Nick Possum, Brushtail Graphics, 2001
First Adobe Acrobat® downloadable edition: 2001
The Nick Possum Home Page: www.brushtail.com.au
Email: nick.possum@brushtail.com.au
2
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
Making hagiography
Après Bob le déluge
4 February 1999
It was early on Saturday morning when I ran into a
dead-end in my search for further Sydney links in
the Romero bribery scandal. I rang Jõse, my contact
man at El Mundo, to tell him the bad news. The editor had gone home, he said.
“Keep hacking away, Nick”, he urged. “If, if, this
guy got away with it in Barcelona, how likely is it
that nothing happened in Sydney? Have you talked
to your Señor Baird? He’s obviously anxious to tell
what he knows. Perhaps nobody has asked him about
Señor Romero?”
“I’ll have to get somebody else to ask him. My
relations with Bruce haven’t been the best since my
investigations into the Sydney tollways”, I replied. I
promised to keep trying, and hung up.
It was sordidly humid, overcast, and threatening
to rain when I dropped into the Werrong Newsagent and bought a Sydney Morning Herald on my
way to the café for breakfast.
They were running the Romero allegations on page
one. In the end, I reflected, Malcolm Fraser had got his wish:
sport was back on the front pages – almost constantly – but
not, of course, in the way he wanted. Even in mid ’70s
Malcolm’s idea of sport as gentlemanly, honourable, healthy
apolitical fun was hopelessly nostalgic. Nowadays, to get to
first base, you needed endless corporate sponsorship, government subsidised “sports institutes”, relentless product sales, and
a major pharmaceutical industry.
I lugged the paper to the café and laid it carefully on my
favourite table by the window. You can’t toss the Saturday Herald around recklessly. It is one of the nation’s great environmental disasters. It’s three or four centimetres thick and sometimes weighs in at nearly half a kilo – equivalent to a full ream
of paper. Every Saturday 150,000 people throw away half of it
without a glance.
Even though the State elections are scheduled for 27 March
it was hard to find any actual politics in the paper, but there
was a very gentle interview with Bob Carr by Craig McGregor.
The kind where the interviewee gets to indulge in their fondest
view of themselves.
Craig is the master of this style of journalism. Most people
believed that Kim Beazley was another cynical numbercruncher from the ALP Right until Craig revealed that he was
just a gentle modest Christian.
Okay, there’s too much competition in sport these days
but it doesn’t have to be this easy. Craig bowled up a bunch of
slow simple ones and Bob hit them all over the paddock. He
was the intellectual statesman, striding the wilderness, pon-
dering the big issues. The man with the long vision. This was
his land; these were his people.
He had always felt that being a Labor MP was “the noblest
profession”; he was the “arbitrator” of a “robust quick-moving
democracy” – courageously eschewing populism and demagoguery but closely in touch with popular opinion; the sort of
Premier who chats with his hairdresser, the butcher and the
taxi driver about the heroin issue; an intellectual at home with
Bill Clinton, Gore Vidal, Paul Erlich, and especially Norman
Mailer (James Ellroy seems to have dropped off the list).
Craig’s central assertion is that Bob Carr isn’t a natural politician. Oh please. Consider the following exchange:
Do you feel you could have made more radical decisions in
your time as Premier? – When it comes to change we’ve pushed
the social reform agenda as much as any state government. I’m
satisfied with what we’ve done.
Too many compromises? – You have to have a measure of
compromise for things to work. The alternative to compromise is
either rule by a dictator, or civil war.
It’s no revelation that Bob has pushed what passes for a
‘social reform’ agenda as far as Liberal premiers like Jeff Kennett
or Richard Court, but I had never realised that Bob was the
only thing standing between us and dictatorship or civil war
for these last four years. Après Bob le déluge. What a ham.
3
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
The wreck of the pleasure barge
11 February 1999
It happened quite suddenly last Tuesday afternoon. I began to
feel like somebody had switched the aircon off; which was
strange, because I didn’t have aircon. I felt heavy and exhausted
with an awful headache, pains in my hind legs and aching paws.
Every joint in my tail throbbed.
I went downstairs to the Brushtail Café and sat outside in
the lane with a cold mineral water, but it did no good.
“Go back up to the ceiling, flop into bed, and I’ll call the
vet. You probably picked up something nasty in Indonesia”,
Joadja said.
Dr Gupta arrived an hour later and climbed into the ceiling.
She asked a lot of questions, told me to roll over, stuck two
fingers up my bum and fished around. Humiliating.
“Mr Possum, your prostate is nearly twice its proper size.”
“That’s normal for Trichosurous vulpecula”, I grunted into
the pillow. “Happens every year. It’ll be twice as big again by
April – which is the peak of the main breeding season”.
The trouble with most overseas-trained vets is that they
know all about the Virginia opossum but bugger all about
brushtails.
“Unless it’s some new nastie, the only thing I can think of
is Possum Creek Fever – it’s the marsupial equivalent of Ross
River Virus. Bed rest – you must have bed rest and lots of
fluids”.
She took a blood sample, gave me a pack of Panadol and
left, promising to phone me with the results.
So I spent the week in bed, crunching Panadol, glugging
down apple juice, soaking up the media and drifting off into
weird and dangerous dreams.
It was a week of brooding changes. The blue light of the
TV flickered over the lovingly horded junk that cluttered the
roof space – the old stuff I could never bring myself to throw
away.
Old politicians I’d forgotten about years ago died and came
back to life as scratchy black and white images with funny
voices. My God, was that Don Dunstan, who made the safari
suit trendy, and poor old Neville Bonner, who penetrated to
the Heart of The Beast — the first Aboriginal elected to Federal Parliament?
Neville was a dignified figure of a man, and a fine clear
speaker, but his tragedy was that he was elected to the Senate
about twenty years too late. The era when you got elected from
a Responsible Party to advance the interests and yes, the respectability, of Your People, was long dead when Neville went
to Canberra. The new generation of black activists were in no
mood for paddling slowly up the right channels to respectability and equality. They were bomb-throwers, who didn’t give a
damn about respectable politics and wanted their rights immediately. Neville battled on until ’83 when the Liberal Party
gave him the shove because a black senator had become, well,
a liability.
Before Don Dunstan became Premier, South Australia was
a sleepy backwater, if you had heard of it at all it was because
they tested atom bombs there and the police beat gay academics to death. Don tried to turn the place into a Scandinavian
social-democratic paradise, a floating pleasure-barge … but not
much survives of that now.
Then I was on a big rubber lifeboat … floating wreckage
and burning patches of oil on the water … The lifeboat was
packed and there were many in the water hanging onto the
gunwale ropes …
Dying hands let go of the boat and sunk into the blue
depths, and the boat drifted away on a light breeze … the sun
flickered through a weird black mist … we could see the hedge
funds, circling, circling, sensing the blood and urine and fear
in the water …
I saw Jim McClelland a long way from the boat … Jordan’s
King Hussein let go and slipped away, then the Brazilian
economy, and Gough Whitlam’s reputation, and Richard Butler’s fucking career … Saddam Hussein just grinned … old
King Fahd, was dying too, he said … there was no sense having him weigh down the raft … might as well prise his fingers
loose …
Boris Yeltsin was lying at my feet in a sloshing pool of salt
water and blood … he was on a vodka epidural, drifting in
and out of consciousness … screeching that we were all traitors … gibbering into his mobile phone, sacking everybody
…
He showed no sign of dying, at least not in the normal
sense. All his organs will rot but he will hold onto power to the
end, then he’ll project his soul into the future, like Stalin and
Ivan the Terrible. It is a Russian tradition.
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
With Gough
on our side
24 February 1999
“duchess ... 4. colloq. to treat in an obsequious fashion in order to
improve one’s social or political standing.” (The Macquarie
Dictionary).
When the phone rang late last Friday afternoon it was Bruce
Baird’s senior flack.
“Oh, hi Nick”, he said, “I’m trying to get hold of Bruce
Possum, but I couldn’t find Magnum Corporate Security’s
number in the phone book. Has he changed the name of the
business?”
“You’re way too late I’m afraid. Bruce Possum pulled the
plug on Magnum in ’88, just before Laurie Connell’s bank
went down, and then he disappeared. It was all handed over to
the Homicide Squad ten years ago”, I replied.*
“Gee, that leaves me in a tight spot. You don’t do bodyguard work do you? I desperately need somebody for the weekend.”
“Sorry Mate”, I sighed, “I just never do that stuff. What’s
got into Bruce anyway? Has he developed a death wish? Why
is he saying these things about Kerry Packer and the others?
Has he forgotten the rules?”
I felt bad about the situation. Bruce Baird isn’t my favourite person, but nobody should live in fear just because they
misunderstood things that were said to them by John Alexander, Ken Cowley and Kerry Packer.
“Why don’t you call Patrick Stevedores, they know lots of
the big boys in that line of work”, I suggested.
He thanked me profusely and hung up. Bruce Baird had
really got himself in an ugly situation this time. The former
NSW Roads minister, Olympic minister under the Fahey Government, and now Federal MP for Cook is famously a bornagain Christian and if God exists, Bruce may need all the help
he can get from Him. God may have the final say, but Big
Kerry’s reach is more immediate and can do terminal damage
to your political career.
Bruce stood up in Federal Parliament last week to announce
he and Nicholas Whitlam had strolled down to see Alexander
at Fairfax and Cowley at News Limited and Big Kerry to tell
them there’d be a “high level of duchessing” of IOC members
during the bidding process. They’d secured an agreement that
the media would turn blind eye to this, he said, and his story
seemed to me to have the ring of truth to it. Bruce is, after all,
a muscular born-again Christian. Why would he lie?
On the other hand, John, Ken and Kerry are honourable
men. They all denied Bruce’s story outright and pointed out
that the Sydney media had not been entirely uncritical of Bruce’s
conduct even before Juan Antonio Samaranch said “Sydernee!
Sydernee!”. By Friday night Bruce was backing down. Nothing had been heard from Nick Whitlam, who had troubles of
his own with the long-running NRMA privatisation saga and
was probably lying low somewhere.
Friday was not a good day for the Whitlams. Bruce had
also blown the whistle on the Olympic bid company’s African
operation. Gough Whitlam had toured the Darkest Continent
with Ken Coates, handing out cheap blankets, brightly coloured glass beads and $2.7 million worth of what were termed
“sports scholarships”. It was a last-minute bid to claw the crucial African vote off the Chinese … and, as usual, Bruce Baird
had been told nothing until after it was all over.
It is all a seedy debacle, in the finest tradition of the “Olympic spirit”, and we have not heard the last of it.
The sun was setting on a balmy Sydney evening when I
went down to the café for dinner. Howard, the solicitor with
the Police Integrity Commission (why didn’t they call it the
Police Integrity Group? -– some people have no imagination)
was sitting at the table in the lane tucking into a fragrant bowl
of pasta with basil pesto.
“Geez, Mate”, I said, “Is your mob issuing pseudonyms
now? What’s this crap about this bloke you’re alleging supplied
cocaine to the cops being called ‘Lenin Marx Lambert’?”
“Strange but true”, he replied. “And if Bob Carr did cocaine, his dealer would be called Lincoln Washington Reagan”.
I fetched a cider from the bar and sat down with him.
“You know”, he said, “Maybe it would have been better in
the long run if the AOC had’ve subcontracted the whole Olympic bid to the cops. Those boys are real straight shooters.
They’d have worked long demented nights at top speed, they’d
have had no trouble bringing across the American and African
votes, and there would have been no problems with the sports
medicine supplies.”
“True but strange”, I replied, “Have you ever considered
that New South Wales has never really changed since the days
when it was run by the Rum Corps?”
• For the Bruce Possum story download Rumours of Bruce.
5
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
It’s no show without Paddy
2 March 1999
Saturday afternoon was quiet at the Brushtail Café. The Mardi
Gras folk had left for the parade assembly points, leaving a
scatter of sequins glittering in the lane. It was threatening to
rain, so I hunkered down over the Saturday Herald, nursing a
cider and chuckling over Paddy McGuinness’s latest column.
Here was the Great Fulminator at his finest: in a sweaty embrace of his old colleague Germain Greer that was almost beyond satire.
“Yeah, it might be funny to you”, Joadja snorted, “But,
lots of younger people wouldn’t understand the Germaine joke
because they weren’t there. And anyway, most people get so
confused after a couple of paddygraphs that they just give up
and flip over to Alan Ramsay or Kaz Cooke, or even Richard
Glover”.
She was right or course. We learn so much history by rumour that sometimes it’s a shock to actually read the black
letters on the white paper and think about the implications.
Lots of people live with the vague impression that Germaine
Greer was a pioneer feminist, so Paddy’s endorsement probably seemed weird, but The Great Fulminator and the author
of The Female Eunuch go back a long, long, way – to the early
60s in fact. They go back to the Sydney Push, a bohemian
heterosexual drinking and rooting club run for the benefit of a
handful of pretentious “libertarian” men who made a living
gambling, or were awaiting the moment when their field of
professional endeavour would offer them fame, respectability
and huge salaries.
For women, the price of entry to the Push was widepread
sexual availability, and the Push had a fatuous justification for
this: sexual freedom was the root of all other freedoms. There
was even a bizarre party line on orgasm – the vaginal orgasm
was superior to the clitoral.
Paddy’s love letter to the Untamed Shrew started with a
long gushing buildup in which he favourably compared Germs
with most other feminists through the old Paddy technique of
the straw woman.
He laid the groundwork with a portrait of the feminist as
selfish, rich and middle class – a woman stacking up problems
for society by treating her children like “pets or furniture” while
pursuing a career as a man-hating academic; sleeping her way
to the top while whining at her long-suffering husband about
housework and the “non-existent” glass ceiling.
How many professional feminist academics are there in all
of Australia? Maybe 50 or 60. How many fit Paddy’s caricature? Maybe one.
Having knocked the stuffing out of the straw feminist,
Paddy came back to Germs, but a cuddle can be a dangerous
thing – you can suddenly take a thumping at close range from
someone who knows your history well. When the stick came
down it was well aimed:
“Germain Greer has gone through a long intellectual evolution and rethought many things. After a bohemian youth in
which she did not make a career of flashing her knickers (there
is a famous underground film by Albi Thom [sic] in which she
appears nude, and she went even further in a photo for the
dreadful rag Suck), she gradually realised that there is more to
a woman’s life than sleeping around and she came to admire
the traditional family loyalities of marriage and children.”
Maybe Germaine didn’t make a career of flashing her knickers but she certainly wrote a lot about taking them off. How
about this, from Oz magazine during her late 60s counterculture
group sex period:
“I guess I’m a starfucker really. You know it’s the name I
dig, because all the men who get inside me are stars. Even if
they’re plumbers they’re star plumbers. Another thing I dig is
balling the greats before the rest of the world knows about
them, before they get the big hype.”
In fact Germs was writing some of her dumbest pornographic rubbish for Suck while she was penning The Female
Eunuch – in which she attacked every possible variety of feminist for being fat, belligerent, sexually unliberated and probably lesbian.
Germs’ view of the ideal marriage? In The Female Eunuch
she returned to her old obsession with the Petruchio-Kate relationship in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Kate has the
“uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man enough
to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit
and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He
tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and
she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty …
The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting
…”
And while we’re at it, here’s Germs on domestic violence:
“It is true that men use the threat of physical force, usually
histrionically, to silence nagging wives: but it is almost always
a sham. It is actually a game of nerves, and can be turned aside
fairly easily”.
Ah, the Paddy and Germs show. It’ll keep the kiddies giggling for decades to come about how it was in the old days.
Required reading:
Greer, untamed shrew, By Christine Wallace, Picador, Sydney 1997
Sex and anarchy: the life and death of the Sydney Push, By Anne Coombs,
Penguin, Australia 1996.
6
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
God is my getaway driver, I shall not want
17 March 99
Saturday morning dawned mean, humid and streaky-grey. A
weak shaft of light struggled in through the big skylight I’d
installed years ago – part of the renovations I never finished.
Joadja went down to pick up the papers, but I rolled over and
went back to sleep. When I opened my eyes about an hour
later, Jo was propped up reading the Herald.
“Terrible business this, on Ambon. Christians and Moslems hacking each other to death with machetes in the name
of God. Only the army and the ruling families can feel happy
about this.” she muttered.
“That’s the funny thing about God”, I said, “For someone
that’s supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing, he regularly fails to clear up misunderstandings arising in his name.”
I drifted off again and beheld a pale horse. And his name
that sat on him was religious and ethnic hatred. They ruled
over about a quarter of the world at last count and Hell followed and only the Dow Jones index laughed. There was also
the Wormwood problem. About a third part of the waters had
been polluted with the stuff and many died of the waters, because they were made bitter …
“Hey, wake up. You’re gibbering stuff from The Book of
Revelations again. Speaking of God, guess who’s running on
the Liberal ticket for the Upper House?” Jo said excitedly.
“I Dunno. Saint Augustine? L. Ron Hubbard? The Reverend Samuel Marsden?”
“They’re dead.”
“Wouldn’t make a difference, so are half the people in the
Upper House.”
“Do you remember young Tony Dennison?”
No, that couldn’t be right. She must be kidding.
“You’re kidding? You don’t mean the Koori armed holdup
man. Did time twice. Five years of a 13 year sentence the first
time, five years of a 12 year sentence the next?”
I sat bolt upright and focussed on the photo she thrust
under my whiskers. There was Tony on the happy side of the
chain link fence at Long Bay, looking fat and prosperous and
holding a big black Bible or maybe his Filofax.
“Yeah, he’s found God”, Joadja said. “Says he literally saw
the light. He was lying injured in the bullrushes as the cops
closed in. Now he’s a Pentecostal Christian and he owns a
security company in Moree. Tough on Aboriginal crime. Says
here he reckons Labor has fostered an Aboriginal welfare industry riddled with corruption, cronyism, nepotism and incompetence. That sounds like the way the major parties pick
their candidates.”
“And it’s the line on Aboriginal organisations that John
Howard’s white trash intelligentsia have been running for years
… not to mention One Nation. The irony is, if the Liberals’
current law and order policy had applied back then, Tony
Dennison would still be pumping iron in the exercise yard
and he wouldn’t be running for the Liberals or badmouthing a
bunch of other Koories who spent their time more productively”, I replied, sliding down and pulling the blanket over
my head.
“And you know the whole setup is pretty racist anyway”,
Jo said. “The Coalition can say they’ve got a black on their
team, but he’s 12th on a 15-member ticket, so there’s almost
no chance he could get a guernsey. Just the ticket: a black, godbothering, reformed criminal who won’t embarrass you by actually getting in.”
“Great story. Who wrote it anyway?” I muttered.
“Paul Sheehan.”
I sat bolt upright. Jo was giggling.
“You bastard … you are joking this time, aren’t you?”
She shook her head and pushed the paper towards me again.
It was Paul Sheehan. Paul Among the Barbarians Sheehan – the
doyen of the anti-political correctness mafia.
“Did he get time off for good behaviour too?” I asked.
With justice for all
and malice towards
none
The Prime Minister
The Hon. John Howard, MP
Parliament House
Canberra 2600
28 March 99
Dear John,
Just thought I’d take time off from watching the Balkan
war on TV to drop you a line about the draft preamble to the
constitution. Les Murray is saying that it’s all your fault – the
embarrassing guff about mateship and that patronising evasion about the Aborigines and their culture.
Well, maybe, but I don’t believe a word of it, John. I know
Murray’s mob and they will always get you into trouble. Look
at poor old Manning Clarke. After he was dead, Murray reckoned Clarke used to turn up at dinner parties wearing the Order
of Lenin. The story was bullshit of course – it was just a cheap
muck-metal gong the Russkis handed out to everybody who
7
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
attended some international conference of historians years ago
– but that’s what you get from going to the same parties as the
redneck intelligentsia.
The draft preamble sounds like a rotten compromise
stitched together by Paddy McGuinness after a particularly trying meeting of the Quadrant editorial Board when the monarchists had fallen out with the Bog Irish republicans and the
redneck poets and the old-style screaming queens.
What’s this weird hokum about “achievement”. It says that
the democratic and federal system of government will exist
under law to “protect all Australians in an equal dignity which
may never be infringed by prejudice or fashion or ideology nor
invoked against achievement”. It reads like some petulant poet
defending his Australia Council grant in the Riverview Hotel
after a long afternoon on the red. Ah yes, I understand what’s
going on now. The elitist politically-correct black lesbian-marxistdeconstructionist mafia are trying to roll me on the committee.
Fuck them. Cheers and laughter from the mob at the bar. Stagger
out onto Birchgrove Road. Fall over.
And I’m sure that bit isn’t your bit, John, ‘cos I remember
it in Murray’s early hand-written draft commissioned by the
Sydney Morning Herald. And anyway, the idea of “equal dignity” is a nonsense. You can’t guarantee Australians equal dignity – just for a start, some of them are politicians.
The ideology of this mob is a raging mass of inchoate fears,
sentimental bullshit, dumb mythology and old grudges. There
are many dank shadows and stagnant pools and they like it
that way. Most of them defended that trashy anti-semitic novel
by Helen Demidenko/Darville and even honoured it with various awards. And when anybody with decent instincts weighed
in against One Nation they defended Pauline Hanson in their
sly way, and said that criticising her vigorously was something
like censorship.
That is what they mean by “Free to be proud of their country and heritage”, John.
The Old Australia, the Australia of respectable little black
brick houses on Homer Street, Earlwood, with squalidly neat
buffalo grass lawns and one hydrangea in the corner and a
narrow concrete path down to the Hills Hoist in the back yard
is as dead as Bob Menzies, John. It was always a rosy myth and
it died years ago with a lot of other myths like Terra Nullius
and Hard Workin’ White Men. That Australia was both good
and bad and it was also narrow and backward and boring – a
cheap bit of nation-building that most Anglos don’t mourn
much. Why hang about with the few who do?
It’s an aside, but let me tell you about my experience on
the polling booths today. I was handing out for the Greens
(who else would a marsupial hand out for) and there was a
funny little red-headed taxi driver with verbal diarrhoea handing out for One Nation. He spent an hour explaining the international Jewish-Marxist-Bankers’ conspiracy to the jerk from
the Non-Custodial Parents’ Party, who was a pretty receptive
audience. There’s a whole subculture of these nutters out there.
They mutter about discrimination in favour of women and
the superiority of Christianity and White Anglo-Saxon Culture and the right to carry automatic weapons and drive their
4WDs everywhere and whenever they’re given a verbal flogging they whinge about freedom of speech and the conspiracy
of the elites.
It’s a right wing victim culture and its intellectual champions defend it in a coded language and hope they can lean on it
and harness it and control its worst excesses.
Why hang out with a bunch of wilful losers, John? Why
not be seen with a mainstream Churchillian conservative like
that nice Gerard Henderson? I know he comes across as a
pseudo left-liberal cultural Catholic these days but he is measured and it would reflect well on you. The other mob are a
desperate choice for desperate times.
Yours in Struggle,
Nick. B Possum
Knee-deep in shit, but free to be proud
13 April 1999
It was another grim week. In the Balkans the bombing and
ethnic cleansing rolled on in a wave of mutual rhetoric while
refugee Kosovars piled up on the borders. Integrationist thugs
hacked people to death in an East Timor church. And then the
toilets backed up.
“If it’s what I think ...”, said Boris the plumber, “The big sbend, it’s collapse, just near where it join the main sewer. He
cost you four thousand, or maybe just a coupla thou, if you
dig it up for me yoursel”.
So Joadja and I got to work. It rained from time to time
but by Sunday midday we had dug down through nearly two
metres of muddy soil, prising out lumps of sandstone and old
bricks.
Jo went over to the cafe and came back with some lunch.
She brought the Saturday Herald.
“Did you see that Les Murray’s rewritten his draft preamble? Says there hasn’t been a split with John Howard, but he
reckons their first effort was ‘rather baggy’”, she remarked.
“Yeah, just the other day I wrote one of my rare letters to
John, warning him about Les”, I replied.
“I’d been trying to figure out what that weird bit actually
meant – you know, about ‘equal dignity’ never being invoked
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Private Eye
against ‘achievement’ – but now he’s changed ‘achievement’ to
‘merit’. Anyway, I got the Macquarie Dictionary out and substituted the definitions of the key words in Murray’s new draft
and this is what I came up with …”
She flourished a closely-written sheet of paper, cleared her
throat, took a deep breath, and continued: “Australia’s democratic federal system of government exists under law to preserve each person in an equal nobility of manner or style, stateliness, gravity, nobleness or elevation of mind, worthiness, honourable place or elevated rank, degree of excellence, (either in
estimation or in the order of nature), or relative standing or
rank, which may never be violated or transgressed, encroached
or trespassed upon by an unfavourable opinion or feeling
formed beforehand, or without knowledge, thought or reason,
or disadvantaged as a result of some judgement or action of
another, or by conventional usage in dress, manners, etc., especially of polite society or conformity to it, or by a body of
doctrine or myth, or the symbols of any social movement, institution, class or large group, nor called for with earnest desire, made supplication for, or prayed for, or appealed to, called
for, or conjured against, any claim to commendation, excellence, or worth, or anything which entitles to reward or commendation or that which is deserved, whether good or bad.”
“Holy Mother of Darwin, that’s a lawyers’ picnic”, I said.
“If this gets through there’ll be years of endless fun when the
lawyers start interpreting the intention of the Re-founding
Fathers by weighing the implications of that gibberish”.
I scanned through the words. “Just for a start it means you
can’t trespass upon somebody’s “honourable place or elevated
rank” with an “unfavourable opinion” or even a “feeling”. The
pollies and business tycoons will love it”, I said.
“And he’s left in the stuff about how Australians will be
“free to be proud of their country and heritage”, but there’s
nothing about whether somebody will be free to be ashamed,
if that’s how they feel. I think it’s dangerous, because the right
to dissent is the only real test of freedom”, Jo observed.
There was something ominous about digging a trench in
the rain, listening to high-flown hokum like “hope in God”
and “proud of their country and heritage”, as well as the latest news from the Balkans on the radio – something unsettling about the cycles of history. The Serbs had closed ranks
around Milosevic, muttering about “honour”, the “heavenly
kingdom of death” and the “Field of Blackbirds”, which was
an obscure battle they lost in 1389. The Russians had retargeted all their nuclear missiles towards Nato countries in
what was flippantly dismissed by Western commentators as a
meaningless gesture.
I scraped away the last of the soggy earth around the sbend. Sure enough, the old clay fitting had shattered into pieces
and collapsed under the weight of the soil above it, blocking
the sewage pipe. It had clearly been like that for a long time.
There was a sordid odour of urine and watery sewage seeped
out of the crumbled mess. I prised out the biggest chunk. Suddenly, months of accumulated shit surged out of the pipe and
filled the trench around my legs.
There was some sort of moral there, if only I could see it.
The Bob Carr question: is stupidity genetic?
21 April 1999
I was on a vast and smoking field at the end of a great battle …
bright sunlight … bodies scattered everywhere … a riderless
horse galloping in terror through the smoke … ragged ranks
of white-trousered soldiers in black shakoes … waving their
muskets in the air … cheering wildly … “Vive l’ Empereur!
Vive l’ Empereur!”
I turned in the direction they were looking and the Emperor came cantering towards me in slow motion on a white
horse … thin face with a high forehead and gimletty eyes ...
A gravely wounded soldier beside me staggered to his feet,
waving his shakoe aloft … “Now we have won this great victory, you will see, l’ Empereur he will give us the fruits of our
sacrifice” … blood seeped through his coat and he fell to the
ground again.
The Emperor was beside me now … little darting eyes but
somehow vacant, fish-like. And the mouth! He looked coldly
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Private Eye
over the scene and the mouth moved just a little … “I accept
the victory you have given me with great humility”, he said …
the soldiers cheered wildly … The Emperor turned to me with
a sneering air … “I will tolerate no more this rabble of nations
and babble of factions … And now the soldiers must march
on Moscow”. He wheeled his horse and cantered away … the
ground trembled violently …
And then I woke up. Joadja was shaking me gently by the
shoulder.
“You’ve been having one of those Bob Carr dreams again”.
They had been ruining my sleep for days. Dr Gupta the
vet had warned me about this. It is a symptom of Possum Creek
Fever. Even after you recover from the first episode you can be
visited indefinitely by terrible nightmares.
“What is it about Bob Carr?” Joadja asked in exasperation
the next day.
The café was closed but we were having a cider with Old
Possum after Jo had finished doing the books. “Is it possible he
really believes his own rhetoric? All these paens of praise to the
franchised McDonalds economy and the shopping mall culture – a shining vision of a temporary, part-time, low-wage,
open-seven-days, contracted-out workforce? The American
culture of relentless hard work with high risks? The myth of
the heroic little entrepreneur? Only a simpleton or a man who
had never run or worked in a small business could really believe that humbug. Most small businesses fail in the first year.
In reality we’re talking about people so exhausted they seldom
have time to devote to the service of their community or see
past immediate self-interest.”
“Yep. In reality we’re talking about a politician’s paradise”,
I said.
Old Possum shook his head with the sad resignation of a
marsupial who had seen it all before. “You can forget the idea
that there’s a left-wing Bob in there somewhere, previously ter-
rorised by a wafter-thin parliamentary majority; a social reformer cautiously waiting for the moment to emerge. Bob’s
just told us that it’s going to be three more years of the same:
more privatisation, more prisons, more prisoners, more cops,
more grovelling to the big end of town. And it’ll be more of
the same on the drugs front too.”
And if there was anything that got Jo riled it was this.
“Everybody knows that Bob’s brother died of a drug
overdose”, she said, “Perhaps it’s time to get personal on
this. Normally we don’t put the spotlight on our politicians’
private lives, and that’s as it should be, but when a man
choses to say that the tragedies suffered by thousands of
families are basically the result of the stupidity of individuals he ought to have the courage to apply that explanation
to his own family.
“Bob reckons he’s a journalist. We should ask him to write
a full account of the tragedy from his point of view. How did
it start? what personal or family circumstances might have
contributed to it? did his family – or even Bob himself – go
wrong in trying to deal with it? was his brother just a stupid
person who wanted to inject a poisonous addictive substance
into his veins or were there other powerful factors? why was
he so stupid? was it genetic? Because if the primary problem
is the stupidity of individuals there’s nothing much to learn
and nothing that can be done about it really. We might as
well let them go if they’re that dumb. A neat social darwinian
solution”.
“And if that’s what he believes he ought to stand up and
say straight out ‘Look, I know what I’m talking about. My
brother died of a drug overdose, and what could we do? he was
just stupid. You can’t protect people from themselves’”.
The discussion ambled on until the small hours but we
finally agreed it would be intrusive and unfair to go public and
ask Bob to answer difficult and personal questions.
The fig of the forbidden tree
6 May 1999
“Working on any interesting cases?” Old Possum asked.
“Well, yes, without going into details – which would be
unprofessional – I’ve been retained by a fourth party to do
some snooping around on the Bob Ellis paternity allegations.
It’s likely to be a nice little earner”, I replied.
“What simple pleasure is brought to our lives by these little imbroglios of the great and famous”, he chuckled. “Alan
Jones being arrested in the London public toilet, Malcolm Fraser
losing his pants in a Memphis Hotel, Rupert Murdoch’s new
woman, Gina versus Rose Handcock, Billy Snedden dying ‘on
the job’ …”
“Well, and then there was Alan Jones getting the shove
from the Sun Herald. You remember, some anonymous person
sent him the text of a ‘secret KGB document’ from a Frederick
Forsyth potboiler and he thought it was genuine and ran it in
his column.”
“With any luck these things end up in the courts where
the lawyers manage to siphon off bucketloads of money and
redistribute it downwards.”
We were strolling down to the park with a magnificent
Sydney Sunday spread out before us. Brilliant sunlight fell all
around. A tall blue sky, washed clean by days of rain, arched
overhead. Majestic rain clouds boiling up, luminous cream and
white on top, deep greys underneath, falling to a far horizon.
And it was all free.
We sat on the seat under the old Moreton Bay fig – a huge,
spreading tree with deep buttress roots and massive branches.
It must have been planted well over a hundred years ago.
I’m sure the city fathers who planted them valued them
just for their grandness. They couldn’t have known how important they would become for the wild things that share the
city with people. That was just an accident of aesthetics, a crumb
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Private Eye
from the human banquet table.
They support little colonies of fig birds and at night
grey-headed flying foxes swarm through them, feasting on
ripe figs and gibbering at each other in their weird electronic voices.
If you carefully break open a fig you will see that it is not
really a fruit: it’s an invaginated inflorescence – a flower head
with hundreds of little flowers. It’s rather like a daisy turned in
on itself and almost tied off at the top. If you look hard you’ll
often see the tiny, tiny, wasps that pollinate the flowers crawling around inside the fig. The seeds themselves are like little
flecks of sawdust and the survival of each species of fig depends on just one species of little pollinating wasp ensuring
that the seeds are viable.
“A wonderful metaphor, really” Old Possum remarked,
“Such a big impressive thing depending on such a small, seemingly insignificant one. It makes me think of the whole monetary system”.
“That’s a pretty big call”, I said. “You’d better explain it
slowly”.
“Well if the wasps died out, figs wouldn’t disappear immediately. They’d die off one by one and it would be only decades
later, maybe, that somebody would notice that no new figs
were germinating.
“Think of the seeds as currency – little round bits of intrinsically valuable metal – gold or silver. Our whole monetary
system began like that. Everybody wanted those metals and
everybody would accept them in exchange for something.
Monarchs issued them in fixed weights with their likeness and
some impressive words stamped on the face.
“But it was dangerous to carry such valuable stuff around
with you, so merchants started to keep it safe in their vaults
and they issued notes to each other to keep a track on who
owed what to whom.
“It was a short step from that to paper currency, which was
just a promise by a bank, on a fancy piece of paper, to pay the
bearer so much in gold or silver, if they presented it to the
bank. Since it was clear that not everybody would want to
exchange their bank notes for gold at the same time, you could
issue a greater value in paper than you held as gold in the bank.
On that basis the money supply expanded rapidly and economies got bigger and bigger.
“Then, in August 1971, Richard Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, and other countries rapidly followed.
Nothing much happened because times were good and everybody continued to have faith in the value of the paper …”
“Which is, intrinsically, worth not a fig”, I said.
“Exactly, but released from the material reality of gold, there
is only the fantasy value of paper and electronic signals representing paper that doesn’t even exist, and there’s faith in the
fantasy.
“The tree lives on and even gets bigger, and it still bears
figs, and the figs have seeds, but nobody seems to notice that
none of them are viable … and sooner or later the tree
will die.”
“Great Mother of Darwin, you’re right”, I said, “It’s the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I won’t tell them if
you don’t”.
11
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
An assignation in the
Marlborough
11 May 1999
I was sitting in the sun outside Customs House at Circular
Quay on Friday morning when three FA 18s screamed overhead in formation, wingtip to wingtip, banking sharply towards the east. What the hell were they celebrating, I wondered. And then I remembered that Hitler had suicided on 30
April 1945. The Third Reich must have capitulated only a few
days later, so this must be VE
Day. The war in Europe had
ended 54 years ago.
I have to play these mental
games to keep myself from going crazy during long stakeouts.
Get too engrossed in reading
the paper, for example, and
you’re liable to miss the moment, blow the job … blow the
job … blow job. I thought
about Alexandra Long and Bob
Ellis again and started to get the
giggles. A bunch of young
koories, who were shooting a
grab for TV nearby, looked
around. I pretended to be
laughing at something in the
paper.
More time passed. I doublechecked the Nikon and scanned the square for any sign of my
targets. The Ellis-Long-Cooper paternity business was turning out to be a nice little earner.
And it wasn’t just the Bob Ellis affair. Fat times come along
only once in a blue moon for a cheap detective like me. The
Phil Coles imbroglio had paid off handsomely when I trundled up a sackful of documents to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Talking on the mobile phone is another thing you can do
to kill time and cover yourself while you linger in a public
place. You can keep watch and kill the conversation quickly if
the target turns up. The trouble is, it’s expensive, so I normally
just pretend to talk to people. I find the more animated you
get, the less people look at you. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a merchant banker gabbling on a mobile phone.
But I didn’t have to abase myself with these devices because at 11.05 the mobile rang of its own accord. It was Tommy
the ecologist, calling from somewhere in Indonesia.
“Good morning, Tuan Nick”, he said, “We have some arrangements now for the shipment. Can you meet our sales
manager to talk with her of delivery?”
“How about Sunday night, at Newtown, in a hotel called
the Marlborough?” I gave him the details.
“She will not have trouble recognising you?”
“I’ll probably be the only old grey possum wearing a
trenchcoat”, I said.
He laughed and hung up.
I gave up at on the stakeout at 11.45. It was obvious that
neither Carl Scully nor Alexandra Long were going to turn up.
It just was another lucrative
false lead. Fuck these people.
Dealing with them is like living in some dated play by
David Williamson while ugly
deals are going down in Timor
and people are being done to
death with machetes in roadside ditches and buried in
shallow graves.
Even a quiet Sunday night in
the front bar at the
Marlborough Hotel is noisy
enough to cover a conversation from all but the most sophisticated electronic snooping. The Nightwalkers were
playing to a subdued audience
as I sipped a cider, waiting for
the “sales manager”. When she arrived I was mildly surprised.
She was a worn-looking dark-skinned Timorese woman of
maybe 40, dressed in rumpled off-black, so as to blend in with
the locals.
We exchanged codes disguised as pleasantries, and I bought
her a beer. “We have two hundred units and spare parts which
must definitely be delivered next weekend to this address. They
are very urgently needed to cover orders. To catch the client at
home it will have to be in the evening, rather late, I’m afraid”,
she said.
She handed me a business card which described her as
‘Maria’, the sales manager of an import-export agent specialising in Indonesian teak furniture. On the back a grid reference
was carefully printed in biro, disguised as a phone number.
“If nobody’s home, we’ll just drop them on the porch. Do
you have a contact number?”
She scribbled a radio frequency under the grid reference.
“I’m sure you have a good memory for figures”, she said.
I went to the toilet, memorised the numbers, burned her
card and flushed the ashes down the toilet bowl. When I went
back she was gone. Why did I let myself in for this, I thought.
I’m much too old for this desperate stuff.
12
Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
Night flight to Timor
19 May 1999
“By virtue of what emotion do we risk our lives, sometimes so
casually, to move the mail?”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It was Wednesday morning at 07:05 when the Cessna Super
Cargomaster took off from Bankstown and headed north, following the coast.
There were just the three of us: me, my old friend Richard
the bush pilot, and the mysterious Timorese, Maria. Behind
us there was the consignment.
It was concealed under a dummy cargo of cardboard boxes
in the cargo space. There were ninety-five Chinese-made
Kalashnikov rifles each with three magazines but sans bayonet
(to save weight), carefully padded in four plywood crates. No
ammunition. Then there were 100 semi-automatic pistols
packed in three big blue plastic drums. Each was swaddled in
bubble-wrap with a home-made nylon holster, three fullyloaded magazines, 50 spare rounds, a cleaning kit, and a little
instruction booklet. Each load was strapped under a Butler
cargo parachute.
A few minutes after take-off we flew over Paul Keating’s
new renaissance revival palace. It was nestled next to John Laws’
place in a beautiful secluded valley west of Wyong, and I wondered if Paul had slipped up to Jakarta recently to console his
embattled old friend Soeharto.
We stopped off at Rockhampton to refuel and then flew
over the Shoalwater Bay Training Area where, for years, our
army had trained the Indonesians in ‘counter-insurgency warfare’.
“What’s the dummy cargo?” I asked.
“Oh, I borrowed my wife’s stuff”, Richard said, “She bought
a whole warehouse full of fat little Santa
Claus dolls – just a few cents each from an
Indonesian chinaman who went bust last
year. She snipped off the red caps and
dipped everything except the head in a vat
of black dye and sort of turned the mouth
down at the corners with a couple of strokes
with a black Texta. She sells them at the
Balmain markets as Paddy McGuinness
dolls for ten bucks. She’s cleaning up. Soft
toys. They weigh bugger-all but they take
up lots of space”.
There had to be a message there, if only
I could see it.
We turned inland and headed for
Timber Creek where we landed for
the night. It was 35 degrees but the
air was blessedly dry. We slept on the
ground next to the plane.
We flew out on Thursday
evening so as to arrive over the
drop zone at 21:00 hours, passing west of Timor at 15,000 feet
as if we were heading for Sulawesi. It was moonless and pitch
black. Then we doubled back to pass east of Dili – hurtling
towards our rendevouz with the independence fighters.
At 20:35 Maria and I went aft. We clipped on our safety
harnesses and shovelled the dummy cargo away from the rear
door. One of the cheap cardboard boxes split open, spilling a
couple of hundred Paddy dolls onto the floor. It was too late to
secure them, so we worked with them underfoot.
We clipped the drums and crates of weapons to the static
line and marshalled them towards the door. Sweet Mother of
Charles Darwin, what if it was a trap. What if ABRI were waiting with a few well-placed machine guns or even real antiaircraft stuff. My mouth went dry and my tail went stiff. I
check everything again and thought of Joadja. I was definitely
getting too old for this sort of thing. Maria sang softly to herself.
Richard’s voice came quietly through the headset: “Okay,
Three minutes”.
He pulled her back to 130 km/h, just safely above stalling
speed. I eased the cargo door open. There was a screech of air
as it folded out above the fuselage – they were never designed
for this sort of work. Paddy dolls tumbled towards the door
and sucked out into the darkness as I threw out the static line.
I peeped cautiously around the edge of the door. Wind cut
under my glasses and my eyes ran, but I saw a couple of torch
beams stabbing towards us and an open field below.
“Get ready … ready. Now! Go! Go! Go!”, Richard’s
voice screeched.
The drums of pistols went in a few seconds.
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
“Stop! Stop! We’ve overshot the drop zone. I’ll come around
for another pass.”
Maria was heaving the crates of rifles down towards the
door as we banked sharply, circled, and came in again. “Go!
Go!” Richard ordered, and as she slid them up, one by one, I
leaned against the fuselage and shoved them out with my foot.
Then they were gone. I kicked a couple of dozen Paddy
dolls clear of the door, watched them fall into the darkness,
and pulled it closed.
“Jesus, imagine if we had one of those Air Force C130s”,
Maria said, “We could have dropped enough stuff tonight to
do over the fucking integrationist thugs in a few days. Howard
and Downer are such grovelling creeps.”
We slipped back into our seats. Any moment I expected to
see an Indonesian fighter slip alongside and order us to follow
him … but it never happened.
By Saturday I was back in the office. The whole thing had
an air of unreality.
I was reading the papers on Sunday morning when the
mobile rang. It was Tommy. He was calling, he said, from Jakarta.
“The consignment arrived in good order. It is much appreciated. The Phillip Adams dolls were a nice touch, as you
say. He is much admired here on the Radio Australia and
internet, but why do his dolls look so grumpy?”
“Ah, it’s a sort of local joke, Comrade; a cult thing. Very
arcane. I’ll explain it over a Bintang next time we meet”, I
muttered.
Mainstream politics is a chronic
relapse condition
26 May 1999
There are days when it’s hard to know whether Bob Carr just
does what David Humphries writes in the Herald or if David
Humphries writes what Bob Carr thinks. This thought struck
me as I scanned through reports on the outcome of the muchvaunted Drug Summit.
Joadja and I were dawdling over dinner in the Bar Muda
in Australia Street, celebrating my big cheque from the Bob
Ellis paternity investigation and watching the Saturday night
traffic drift past across Newtown Bridge. We had simple enjoyment, but out there in dark corners of Sydney, a handful of
winners were cleaning up and others were despairing, succumbing, retching, sweating and dying.
It had been a week of winners and losers in politics too.
John Howard was a big loser. His mean little vision of the
GST as a millionaires’ relief tax had been dying wretchedly
like some junkie in a back lane in Fairfield – until Meg Lees
gave it a big shot in the heart.
Bob Carr was a big winner. He had lived dangerously again
and survived. At the end of the day the drugs status quo prevailed, in a practical sense, and he got good notices and nice
pix in the Herald. It must have been a huge rush.
But the biggest winners were the drug barons. If they bothered to read about the summit at all, they would have felt they
could sustain an almost endless war of attrition with the police
– assuming Peter Ryan had the stomach for the casualties. On
the wild frontiers of globalisation there were plenty of keen
and dumb recruits.
“Decriminalisation of marijuana for personal use! That’s
the defacto position now”, Joadja snorted. “When was the last
time you heard of the police aggressively raiding a party and
dragging people off for smoking dope? The only time they
bust somebody is if they want them for something else. It’s an
opportunist tool for muscling working class youths – and even
with this, Carr says he’s not personally in favour. There are
plenty of opportunities for the idea to be swallowed up by the
quicksands of politics.
“And then there’s ‘safe injecting rooms’. I’ll be surprised if
many of those get set up. Carr’s way out will be to roll over to
local government objections – all very democratic. The ‘shooting galleries’ might not have been hygienic but they were defacto
legal too, until the tabloids and the talk-back nazis waged a
campaign against them a few months ago.
“Ah, but Carr’s spun his way through it and thanks to the
Herald he’s looking good again. He’s a minor genius in the
petty craft of politics. It’ll be a few weeks before the Tony
Triminghams and Bev Bakers and Ian Websters realise they’ve
been done. These people are babes in the woods of politics.
The generalissimos of the Salvation Army know they’ve held
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
the line against the reformers but they’ll cover their profound
relief by ranting about how Bob has surrendered to the forces
of the devil and that’s how politics is conducted”. She lapsed
into silence and pushed a chickpea around the huge white plate.
“But I detected a more sinister thing in the outcome”, I
said. “See how far we’ve come from the early ideals of the labour movement, the ideals of equality and a full life for all.
Listen to what Bob Carr says here: ‘life is an inherently disappointing experience for most human beings, some people can’t
cope with that. My view is that this comprises the problem: a
propensity of human beings to compensate for the mediocrity
of their existence and that it [he means illicit drugs] is there, it
is available’”.
I made a mental note to check what ‘propensity’ meant in
the dictionary.
“It’s a question of where you stand,” I went on, “of how
you make your living, of how secure you are. A businessman,
judge, politician, currency dealer – or for that matter a middle-level drug dealer – on $150,000-plus a year tends to see
things differently from you and I.
“As Carr sees it, most people’s lives are pretty mediocre
compared to his. They’re basically a bunch of losers. In his
brave new world a millennium of plenty and prosperity arrives
through dog-eat-dog competition, privatisation, temporary
employment, downsizing. There has to be insecurity to drive
the lazy masses forward and overcome their dissatisfaction at
the mediocrity of their existence. If we don’t get the business,
then the Koreans will, or the Indonesians, or the Chinese, or
even Jeff Kennett.
“If some fall by the wayside, well, as Mr Justice Wood so
charmingly puts it here (I riffled through the Herald till I found
the place): ‘There is no means of inoculating people against
the life circumstances and social events that lead to their cycle
of substance abuse and criminality and we should not pretend
there is’”.
“The fact is”, Joadja said, “people know more nowadays,
they have higher expectations, but the Laborites have all but
given up on the hope and belief that society can be organised
so that inequality is minimised. What we’re left with is a grim
caricature of 19th century Social Darwinism”.
I had to make an early start in the morning on a missing
person investigation – the curious case of Cheryl Kernot. We
paid our bill and strolled to the station through the Saturday
night bustle.
• Justice Wood’s quote from SMH Friday 21 May 99, Bob Carr’s quote from
SMH Saturday 22 May 99.
This country would be all right if Cheryl
Kernot were alive
2 June 1999
It was my long-lost business partner, Bruce Possum, who tought
me how to do surveillance in a public place. Bruce specialised
in the Half-Mad Scientologist With Clipboard, and the SpacedOut Sanyassin With Collection Tin … but that was in
another age.
The Scientologists have better things to do these days. They
are said to be running California, or at least Hollywood, and
they maintain only a token presence of clipboard-wielding initiates at the corner of Castlereagh and Park.
The Orange People struck me as being a sort of recognition code for lonely singles from the Eastern Suburbs. A very
Seventies thing. If you wanted a fuck, you bought the guru’s
portrait on a medallion that dangled from a necklace of cheap
wooden beads; you wore orange clothes, and said “hi!” to the
next person you saw who was dressed like that. But the
Sanyassins have long since acrimoniously split and faded into
obscurity. These things happen, as they say in California.
On one occasion, Bruce wanted to stake out one of Chris
Skase’s media events dressed as The Wilderness Society koala,
but I drew the line at that – there are some things a possum
has to respect.
Nowadays I always carry a big black name-tag with white
lettering that says “ELDER POSSUM” and in really small letters underneath: “CHURCH OF CHARLES DARWIN OF
THE LATTER-DAY BELIEVERS”.
Whenever I have to stake out some public place thronging
with people, I pin it on, clutch my big black Filofax to my
breast and stride towards passers-by at random, grinning
broadly.
You can get away with this for hours. People avoid eye
contact, break into a trot, and change direction. You fade into
a fog of avoidance you create around yourself, until all that’s
left is a fleeting impression of a salesman’s grin, floating
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Private Eye
in the memory.
The only drawback is that every once in a while some Baptist halfwit or dopey New Age deist wants to dispute theology.
I usually just tell them that if they don’t fuck off and stop
bothering me I’ll rip their balls off with my teeth and stuff
them down their throat. It’s a solution of which I’m not proud,
but it works, and I know the Mormon Church has spin-doctors who are slick enough to handle the fallout.
But nothing like this was necessary on Saturday morning
as I bothered the good folk strolling through Parramatta’s
Church Street Mall. They are used to running through a picket
line of Mormons, and one hapless Elder was no trouble for
them.
Despite what had seemed like an inside tip-off, there was
no sign of Democrats’ leader Meg Lees in the Mall. She had
disappeared on Friday, after the switchboard and the fax were
jammed by incensed party members and even a group calling
itself “The GST Rejection Front”, according to the worried
staffers at her office.
There was a rumour she had gone to ground at a ‘safe house’
in Harris Park – a nondescript flat near the station, equipped
with a bank of phones, faxes and fast computers – to call in all
favours and fight for her political life. There was talk of a secret
rendezvous at the Cosmo Café with a high-profile industrialist
and of “saving her from herself ” and “getting to her before
Stott Despodja does”.
I gave up on stake-out at 1.30 and caught the train home.
Privately, I didn’t give a damn anyway, but the job paid well
and Meg looked like a mean mother who could look after
herself.
She turned up on Monday morning, as I had told her staffers she would, and I went back to work on the Cheryl Kernot
missing person case. What an appalling irony, I thought. Cheryl
jumped ship and joined the ALP because, she said, she wanted
to be part of stopping Howard’s GST bandwaggon. It was a
bad call. She survived the jump and squeaked through at the
polls but then she disappeared into the black void the ALP
reserves for those who are not really of “The Tribe”. If she had
still been leader of the Democrats she would have made her
appointment with history.
The Terror
30 June 1999
I was sitting at my favourite table outside the Brushtail Café,
contemplating the fate of the Balkans and the state of civilisation the end of the 20th century, when the lynch mob came
down the lane on their way to Waterloo.
There was a flaming cross at their head and they were led
by some of the boys and girls from News Limited. TV cameramen were running in front, egging the mob on, and a couple
of wild-eyed women held aloft a thick rope with a noose. Many
people were waving copies of the Daily Telegraph and even the
Sydney Morning Herald.
“Kill the pedophile! Kill the pedophile!” they chanted.
I stood up and shuffled towards the safety of the café door.
A fat leering journalist lurched past. Was that a pistol in his
pocket or was he just having a good time?
“What’s going on?” I asked a weedy man in a cheap tracksuit.
“We’re going to burn out the pedophile. Are you with us?”
he muttered.
“No thanks, I’ve helped put away a few criminals, but when
they’ve done their time, they’ve done their time.”
He had eyes like a dead shark, but suddenly there was a
flicker in them. He backed away and turned to the mob.
“Here’s one of Lewthwaite’s poofter mates!” he screamed,
“Skin the possum! Skin the possum!”
Just then, Joadja stepped out of the café with the baseball
bat she keeps behind the bar. The crowd turned away and the
weedy man decided he had better move on or he might miss the
fun. We were watching them stream around the corner into
Sydney Street when Kerry Chikarovski and Bob Carr came past.
“Hey, be careful, that’s a pretty ugly mob” I said.
“We must follow them, we’re their leaders”, Bob muttered,
and they hurried on.
“Was that the bloke from Media Watch bringing up the
rear? You know, the bland one who took over from Stuart
Littlemore. Was that him?” Joadja asked.
I couldn’t be sure, It had all happened too fast. We went
inside and I knocked down a cider and asked for another. It’s
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Private Eye
no longer politically correct to shoot the Jews and lynch the
blacks, so the trash have to keep their hand in by stoning
pedophiles, or former pedophiles.
“What is it about that mob from the Telegraph?” I asked,
thinking aloud.
“Well, if you work on the Terror you have to find – or
invent, if necessary – somebody who’s lower than yourself to
flog. If there’s one thing those boys and girls like doing it’s
administering a good beating to somebody who’s on the ground.
It helps them purge the terrible guilt and tension that comes
with the job. I reckon it’s a bit like when pederasts go to gaol
and the axe murderers beat them and rape them”, Jo said.
It started to rain outside so I settled in at the bar and read
the papers. The rich were getting richer and more arrogant
and the poor were getting poorer and going crazy and the punishment freaks were getting their way everywhere. Bob Carr
was building three new prisons and hiring 700 more cops and
there were 900 people on death row in the Philippines – which
has just reinstated capital punishment – and thousands in the
USA. I was on my way to getting pissed and moody but Joadja
dragged me down to the Palace Academy to see Robert Altman’s
latest flick, Cookie’s Fortune, which cheered me up no end.
Praise The Market and pass
the snake oil
7 July 1999
Ex-prime ministers were in the news last week. Bob Hawke
(remember him) rushed to kiss Sir Peter Abeles shortly before
the old transport magnate died, and more claims emerged about
the big piggery deal that made Paul Keating even richer than
he would have been if he’d had to rely on his parliamentary
pension. In the prevailing climate, who can blame him? We all
have standards. Perhaps he felt he had to keep up with the
Soehartos.
The mainstream media sold the Abeles story as a penniless-migrant-makes-good yarn. A modern Australian nationalist, humanitarian, business visionary and friend of the working man. He was troubled by the very success of the “free market” and yearned for some force to civilize it, they said.
This has become a cheap snake oil salve for troubled hearts
and minds, and more and more people are rubbing themselves
down with the stuff. The multi-billionaire hedge fund operator and currency raider George Soros and Lindsay Tanner and
Kim Beazley and Paul Sheehan and the Democrats and the
Russian Mafia and British Prime Minister Tony “Rupert” Blair
and Canadian philosopher Raulston Saul are all lathering it on
thickly. Old Bob Santamaria used it since the days of his youth
when he was an admirer of Benito Mussolini.
But The Market is a cruel and relentless bitch goddess. She
will never be civilised – let alone by these puny wankers – and
most of them know it. They believe in the “civilize capitalism”
line to the same extent, and in the same sense, that most English Tories believed in God and the Church of England: a worthy intention and a charming myth. Indispensable for gulling
the unwashed masses, but not actually to be believed in for
practical purposes.
In the end it was really just a story about the Labor Party as
a way up the social ladder.
Not everybody in official politics is driven by a massive
ego, but most are, and they are holding us back. These people
are true professionals and that is the problem. They are there
because they actually like politics. They like the lifestyle, the
process of politics itself. All they want you to do is vote, and,
of course consume. They’re not
even happy about
you joining their
party, because you
might ask questions
or even raise issues.
The old British Tory
ruling class did warn us
about this. If we give you
all the vote, they said, you
will just get a bunch of social
climbers from the lower orders representing you.
The old Tories were so seriously rich that they could take
part in politics as a duty. Their objectivity wasn’t tainted by the
search for personal power and wealth so they could be trusted
to do the right thing by The Nation – by which they meant, of
course, themselves and their kind.
The root of the problem is that most people are cut out of
the loop of politics. Between the jobs and the kids and the new
technology and the perpetual reorganisation there just isn’t time.
The greatest real leap in democracy came when the trade
unions won the five day week. There was time then, not just
for recreation, and participation, but for reading and thinking
and the new experiences which broaden the mind. But the
world has moved on since then and become more complex,
and every problem we face needs more management, more
participation. Now, even in a wealthy country like Australia,
most people just don’t have the time to actually participate,
and this is in spite of the huge increase in productivity per
person in the last 50 years and the fact that nowadays there are
usually two people working in each family.
Democracy is being rorted and stolen from us and the best
way we can make a start on the problem is the four day week.
Not the 35 hour week, or even the 32 hour week, but the four
day week. Nothing less will do.
17
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Private Eye
The Vichy Republic of Balmain Peninsula
21 July 1999
When I went down to the Brushtail Café, Joadja was behind
the bar regaling an audience of the afternoon regulars.
“ … suit like a tent, and then this huge scowling bulk
lurched towards the door … “
“Don’t tell me you slipped out to see Orson Welles in Touch
of Evil again”, I said. She must have gone back to the Chauvel
to see the director’s cut three times since we saw it the night
Ross Gittins jumped the queue.
“No, no. Paddy McGuinness was in the newsagent, doing
some copying and look what he left on the photocopier.”
She handed me a couple of beer coasters from the Riverview
Hotel and went on with the story of her close encounter. On
the backs of the coasters was what appeared to be a to-do list
for next Monday’s Balmain residents’ meeting.
The rich burghers of Balmain were rising up angry. They
were pouring too many of their hard-earned dollars into council rates, only to see them subsidise the scum in poorer sections
of Leichhardt municipality – and even Balmain itself. It was a
harsh and unconscionable imposition on stockbrokers, columnists, TV execs, merchant bankers, retailers, corporate lawyers,
ministerial staffers, radio ‘personalities’ and other pillars of the
elite, they said.
I laid the Chardonnay-stained coasters side-by-side on the
counter and deciphered the scrawled list.
“Jobs for Committee:
“1. Contact Les Murray re preamble for Balmain constitution.
“2. Ring Helen Darville. Can she be Ethnic Affairs Officer? If not: Paul Sheehan? Bill Hayden?
“3. Marlboro ads on Town Hall and council cars.
“4. Council-subsidised Quadrant subscription for every
household. Arrange to close library.
“5. Offer flag of convenience registrations for Japanese
whaling fleet (spin: oppose Western cultural imperialism).
“6. Recognise Indonesian sovereignty in East Timor (too
small to be viable entity). Offer asylum to General Pinochet.
Ring Bill Skate for his Taiwan contact’s name ($50m enuf?).
“7. Privatise municipality (talk to David Humphries re this).
Promise cashback bonus for all residents municipal stockholders.
“8. Arrange security wall on Rozelle side, customs post on
Darling Street.
“9. Workshop formal title for the new entity”.
Ah, yes, I thought, a formal title. How about The Vichy
Republic of Balmain Peninsula? Another gated community for
the seriously well-off; another fantasy-land response to the pressures of the age. A polite Hansonism for the well-heeled. “The
civil society” for the very civil. Funny how it’s the globalisation
freaks who are doing this. Like the foreign quarter of Shanghai
in the old days, when the imperialists ran China. “No dogs or
Chinese”, the signs used to say.
Perhaps, on the other hand, why not, if that’s the way they
want it? Why not concentrate the whole ghastly problem in
the one place and quarantine it? We could arrange to have
them all go into exile in Balmain: General Soeharto and the
merchant banker Milosevic, Boris Yeltsin, John Howard, Paul
Keating and John Laws, when the time comes.
They call it merchant banking
18 August 1999
“You’re a slack fucking possum”, Joadja said, prodding me at
seven on Saturday morning. She was surveying the junk stacked
round the dusty ceiling. “Why don’t you ring up The Bower
and get them to take away all those old chairs and the clothes
horse and that ghastly bric-a-brac. Somebody will love it, but
you need to make a fresh start. You mightn’t mind climbing up
the old ladder to go to bed – it’s a cultural thing I suppose –
but I’m sick of it. Why don’t you buy one of these prefab spiral
staircases.”
I sat up in bed and peered into the dark recesses. There
were three bright patches in the gloom: the big skylight I’d
installed years ago in a fit of enthusiasm, the hatch leading
down to my office below, and the ancient standard lamp on
Jo’s side of the mattress, whose light fell ominously on a pile of
home restoration magazines littering the bed. I was trapped.
Jo was right, of course. You can let things slide for years,
but in the end you just have to do them. Besides, I enjoy carpentry when I get started.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission had
sent me a fat cheque for some contract surveillance work I’d
done for the Simon Hannes insider-trading case, so I decided
to go shopping for staircases at a showroom in Willoughby.
Saturday morning was clear and bright, but by one o’clock,
when I came back across the Harbour Bridge on the train, a
cold wind was blowing in from the Snowy and the sky was a
place of drama.
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
Charcoal clouds reared like spectral mountains in a blue
sky, underlined with a luminous black that faded to green at
the horizon. Long skeins of pale grey rain drifted down thousands of feet towards Drummoyne and Hunters Hill. A white
747 glinted against the grey backdrop as it headed in to Mascot. Sydney was dappled in patches of bright sunshine and
deep shadow and there were pearly-pink clouds to the east,
over the ocean.
As I walked back to Werrong Lane through the park a flurry
of cold sleety rain caught me from behind, and I turned up my
trench coat collar. Simon Hannes was a yachtsman, so he would
have paid attention to the sky. He’ll have a lot of time to study
it in the next few years. The Macquarie Bank director will meet
some interesting and violent characters from less privileged
backgrounds while he’s inside, but they will probably be in
awe of him. He’s sure to be given a cushy accounting job, his
family will visit regularly and what is jocularly called “the banking community” will close quietly around him when he gets
out.
On Saturday evening a couple of the investigators from
ASIC dropped into the café for a celebration. They got stuck
into the piss and fought the case over again. Thrice they tracked
down Hannes, and thrice they slapped the cuffs on him. They
slapped me on the back and stepped on my tail and preening
themselves mightily. They had fought the good fight and upheld the standards of capitalism.
Hannes did a very silly thing. If you’re going to pull off a
market scam, make sure it’s an enormous one, not some pissy
little bit of insider trading. Go for something really big, say,
half-a-billion dollars big. Handle a privatisation, an infrastructure deal or a big internet float for example. Make sure you get
seen with John Howard, or Jeff Kennett or Bob Carr, and cultivate a journalist or two from the business pages and the re-
write bimbos from “Money”. And if the deal turns sour, and
the cashflow looks crook, and the creditors get restive, talk it
up and raise some more equity. What the hell. There’s safety in
numbers and the bubble will just keep getting bigger and there’ll
never be another crash like 1929.
Make it really big and it has to be legal. They call it merchant banking.
A stakeout in the night
2 September 1999
The moon shone weakly through a rainy mist and water started
to trickle across the concrete slab under the milk crate. My tail
was wet and my bum hurt and the dim glow of a distant street
lamp was only just enough to read by.
It was Monday night and I was hunkered down in the doorway of a locked public toilet on the edge of the park. I had a
pile of newspapers and a bottle of cider in a brown paper bag
and I was packing death. In both senses. Some bastard was
going around bashing homeless old people to death in their
sleep and the cops had hired me to help with the case. Something between an undercover job and decoy work.
“What with the budget cuts, we can’t put one of the boys
on overtime, but we can afford to hire you as a ‘visioning consultant’ – you know how it is with the Carr Government”,
Detective Superintendent “Shag” Pile said.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Well, you’re a night animal. Great night vision they say.
And if the bastard does you in, the paper work will be easy.
We’ll just hand it over to the Wildlife Service at Hurstville.
Brian Gilligan will write you off as a roadkill”. He laughed so
much his toupee nearly fell off.
“Very funny, arsehole. What exactly do you want me to
do?”
“Okay, so, we reckon this jerk probably scouts out his turf,
studies his victims before he strikes, so you’re watching for some
sort of loner, a midnight jogger maybe. They lock the toilet
here at dusk, so you can camp in the doorway”, he stabbed his
finger at the big wall map.
“Take your shooter and keep in radio contact. There’ll be a
patrol car within a couple of minutes drive ‘till 4 am. If we
don’t hear from you every five minutes we’ll come around”.
At first I entertained myself listening to Brian Wilshire on
my little derro’s radio. His show goes well with long-shot
stakeouts. It opens the mind to every shadow, every move-
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
ment, every possible coincidence, but too much
of Brian through one earplug and the police twoway through the other can be dangerous. By
11.30 paranoia was creeping up on me and I
switched to the Saturday Herald.
The nearest street light fizzed out at 2.38, so
I turned the radio back on to listen to the amiable Peter Hand.
Just then I saw a figure in a dark tracksuit on
the other side of the park. He was carrying what
appeared to be a white stick in his hand and he
moved furtively from power pole to power pole.
After a minute or two he moved out of my
field of vision, behind the toilet block. I called
the patrol car and told them to move in discreetly.
Three long minutes went by. Was that the cops I
could see a couple of hundred yards away? Then
I heard footsteps over the sound of my heart
banging. My mouth went dry and I clutched the
Browning in my right paw, eased it out of my
trenchcoat pocket, and slid it under the newspaper on my lap.
Suddenly the man walked back into my field
of vision. He was only ten metres away. Dark
hair, dark complexion. He looked fit and dangerous. He stopped in the shadows and looked
at me, then he slipped out of sight behind a big
fig tree. I uncovered the Browning, ready to wave
it at him.
Headlights came slowly down the street. A
couple of patrol cars stopped and the coppers got out. The
man didn’t run away. The cops walked over and stood in the
shadows talking to him, then they bundled him into the patrol
car and drove away.
“So who did you pick up? Anybody interesting?” I asked
Pile on Tuesday morning.
“Nah, it was only Frank Sartor, pasting up election posters”, he replied. “We let him go with a warning. First offence,
good character, no publicity. You wouldn’t want Katherine
Greiner as Mayor would you?”
It was a fine distinction and an ugly choice, but I had to
agree with him.
Making a wilderness and calling it Order
16 September 1999
It was nine on Saturday morning when Liam, from the East
Timor solidarity group rang me. I had agreed to do some ‘security consultancy’ for them at the big Timor rally and march.
“We’ve read Paddy McGuinness’s column in this morning’s Herald and some people here are worried he might launch
a crazy single-handed assault on the rally”, he said. I could
hear the Solidarity Choir rehearsing in the background.
“Yeah, I read it myself, but I don’t think there’s too much
danger of that. Paddy has smaller fish to fry today. He’ll probably be doing the rounds of his workers on the Balmain polling booths – shaking hands, bringing them their lunch hampers, that sort of thing. The worst that might happen is that
he’ll stand at the edge of the rally with a placard.”
“Yeah, I can see it now: ‘MEDIA PROVOCATEURS
CAUSED THE SLAUGHTER!!! CATHOLIC CHURCH
HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS!!!’”
“Something like that. All the same, you might keep the
nuns in a group on the inside of the march and make sure the
ABC journalists stick together.”
“Or anybody who looks like they’re from the Left, or the
‘chattering classes’”.
“Or the ‘political elites’”
“Yeah, right, or those warmongering hysterics from among
the ‘civilised, educated and enlightened’ … and John Howard
will save us from our hysterical selves”.
I laughed and hung up, but it was no laughing matter.
Tens of thousands of East Timorese were being shipped out to
holding camps in West Timor and Bali and parts unknown,
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
where the Alitas-Wiranto government were holding them as
hostages and the psychological-warfare types from TNI were
culling their ranks of anybody who looked like they might be
trouble. Dili had been comprehensively looted and burned by
Indonesian soldiers and police. Bodies were being dumped at
sea by Indonesian ships. The lucky had made it into the hills,
where they faced starvation and murder, unless Australia start
parachuting arms and supplies to them.
The march started as five or seven thousand but it swelled
to twenty thousand as it passed through the city, sucking shoppers from the pavements and workers from building sites. Drivers waved and beeped their horns in salute.
You have to marvel at the political sophistication of the
Javanese elites. Their cynicism and political subtlety is way
beyond anything our politicians can muster, and they’re
streets ahead of the UN. First their army, thinly disguised as ‘militias’, terrorises Dili, killing anybody they can get their hands on and Howard
protests that they must ‘restore order’. So
Wiranto sends more troops and they kill and
loot and burn some more and Howard gives
them a stern deadline to ‘restore order’. So Alitas
declares martial law and sends more troops and
they empty Dili (and everywhere else) of any
Timorese that are left and complete the looting
and burning and John Howard urges them to ‘restore order’ some more.
Finally, they’ve created a wilderness and called it Order,
and there’s nothing left to save, at least in Dili, and we haven’t
even sent their officers, who are still training here, home, or
withdrawn our recognition of their sovereignty over East Timor,
even though eighty per cent of the population voted for independence.
Late on Sunday night, Habibe, Indonesia’s lame duck President, announced that international peacekeepers would be
admitted to East Timor. No doubt he insisted that a few days
were needed to restore order before their arrival. The Indonesians were still successfully playing for time and their Australian-trained Kopassus troops were attacking refugees and Fantilil
camps in the mountains.
Ethnic cleansing was still in full swing and Howard and
Clinton were still terrified to act decisively in case the Indonesian stock market collapsed.
The fart of darkness
23 September 1999
“You know it really enrages me, listening to those murdering
bastards from the Javanese ruling elite. To hear them tell it,
their fucking ‘sensitivities’ have been upset over East Timor.
And then they go on with this thin bullshit about a ‘complex
situation’, where they were just doing their best to handle backward and unruly people who were fighting among themselves”,
said Joadja.
“Every bunch of exploiters in history have hidden behind
gibberish like that, and in the last resort, behind cheap hired
killers. They always say that if they were left alone they’d solve
the problem in their own way, in their own time. They always
claim that outsiders are interfering and making things inconvenient”, Old Possum replied.
We were in a taxi, heading back to the city along Victoria
Road in the chilly evening gloom.
“It’s pretty rich, isn’t it, coming from a bunch of rulers
whose repression of trade unionists, students and intellectuals
is legendary. These people sell their country to the global market on the basis of a subservient workforce, ultra-low wages
and ‘strong government’. Stick up your head to complain about
your lot in Habibe’s Indonesia and you’re likely to end up in a
windowless cell with a bowl of rice-water soup, a shit-stained
blanket and a plastic bucket – if the cops don’t put a bullet in
your brain and chuck your body in the river before you arrive”, I said.
“So why did Howard do it?” Jo asked, “What’s that bastard got to gain out of standing up to the Indonesian generals?
– after all, he was quite happy with the relationship until a
month ago.”
“Nothing at all”, Old Possum replied, “Except political
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
survival. It’s all lousy choices for his mob. The participants
have their best intentions, but there’s also a lot of chance in
history ... lots of bad luck ... things just spin out of control.
Howard’s first bit of rotten luck was Habibe shooting his mouth
off, saying that maybe the best thing for Indonesia would be if
East Timor got its independence.”
“Right. So after 25 years of loyally endorsing Indonesia’s
right to rule East Timor, Australia could hardly be seen to support less than that, and the agreement to hold a ballot followed”, I said.
The taxi driver put the pedal to the metal and managed to
get through the Balmain Road lights before they went green.
I clutched the seatbelt in terror, but Joadja just picked up
where I’d left off: “And then, naturally, since they were our
quote unquote friends, and we helped train them, Howard
ignored the warnings and hoped the TNI would behave with
honour and keep order while the ballot was held. Big mistake.
The bastards had a well organised plan – the militia thing –
and they ran amok. But then things went wrong for the military – after 25 years of bastardry the Timorese hated their guts
so much they wouldn’t be intimidated and they stood up to be
counted.”
“Which is where the massive power of instantaneous electronic communications came in”, I said. “Neither the Indonesian generals, nor what you could call the Keatingite Appeasement Party in Australia – and that includes Howard – were
prepared for the shock waves of evidence that followed, and
they swept over ordinary decent Australians like a tsunami.
There was no denying the horror, the horror. The Javanese elite
were seen to be just brutal colonialists like the Dutch they’d
displaced. To have failed to do something in the face of that
evidence would have branded a man, and a party – forever – as
utterly dishonourable. It would have been political suicide”.
Old Possum sighed. “You’re right. History might have
played out differently if the ABC had covered, live-to-air, the
Nazis when they marched the German leftists and trade unionists off to the first concentration camp in 1933, or the Japanese army when they murdered and looted their way through
Nanking in 1937, or Stalin’s Moscow trials; people would have
woken up earlier.”
We rocketed on towards the Glebe Island Bridge, passing
the Paddy balloon – a monstrous gas-filled advertising gimmick that loomed, tethered by near-invisible wires, above a
tawdry drive-in pawnshop. It struck me as a black-clad version
of the Michellin Man. A garish banner, strung across the facade of the shop, proclaimed: “FAT DEALS!”
The New Order changeth
30 September 1999
“But I am just an ordinary man. An ordinary man like you,
and an ordinary man like me.” B. J. Habibe.
There are warm spring breezes in Werrong Lane now, but chilly
winds are blowing down the corridors of the weird bunkerlike thing that is Parliament House in Canberra and among
the armed forces buildings on Russell Hill, and also through
the halls of power in Jakarta.
On Saturday night I went down to the Brushtail Café and
watched the news on the TV behind the bar. Thousands of
Indonesian soldiers were streaming out of Dili, jeered by the
locals, who had strung East Timorese flags over the road. In
Jakarta, after a violent riot by tens of thousands of enraged
students, President Habibe had suspended a draconian emergency powers law just passed by the outgoing Soeharto-era
parliament. The TNI and the Javanese elite were in deep trouble, and the much-hyped anti-Australian backlash amounted
to a tiny TNI-sponsored rally by what looked like the Islamic
Trailbike Riders’ Association or a mob of embittered St George
supporters.
The old order is dying. It was known, globally, as The New
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
World Order and officially in Indonesia
– where it dawned early, in 1965 – as
the New Order of General Soeharto. Not
many international powerbrokers drop
in on the general these days and oncefaithful allies like Time magazine accuse
him of looting something like $40 billion from the Indonesian people.
The Javanese elites seem genuinely
bewildered by the events of the last
months. They thought they could rely
on their friends in Canberra and on the
Australian media, but they were suddenly
stampeded by a bit of bad press, a couple of street demonstrations and some
TV about people being chopped up with
machetes. In the salons of Jakarta they’re asking: don’t these
piss-weak Australian bastards know how you dealt with this ‘public opinion’ nonsense?
In Canberra too, there is a sense of things suddenly flying
out of their natural place in the firmament. The political ‘realities’ on which political and bureaucratic careers have been
built, ever since the sixties, are suddenly wasting into living
skeletons, dying, and crumbing into dust.
Dozens of senior figures in the diplomatic service, the “intelligence community” and Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade – people who operated an obsequious collaboration with
the Jakarta regime – are suddenly finding their phone calls
aren’t being returned. Nobody laughs at
their jokes in committee meetings and
their subordinates are becoming insubordinate. Politicians who used to ring for
advice are calling some left-wing academic
once regarded as a nutty loser, or Jose
Ramos Horta, or even Xanana Gusmao
whose mobile rings almost constantly.
The next step is the purge. In other
places (like Jakarta), and in nastier times,
yesterday’s bureaucrats would have been
quietly shot and the files culled to remove
their names, but this is Australia, so it is
done differently. Many will retire early, to
Batemans Bay, citing “medical” or “family” reasons, and others will shuffle off to
write self-published memoirs, breed dobermans, or make meticulous little plastic dioramas of German Panzertruppen storming through the ruins of Stalingrad.
And it isn’t just bureaucrats. A whole generation of senior
Australian journalists – the chorus boys of the pro-Soeharto
choir – are trampling each other down in the rush to adjusting
their positions, cover their tracks, or even totally re-invent themselves. Others, like Mike Carlton (who thinks he’s one of us)
are covering their arse, just in case things go wrong, and making fatuous comparisons with Vietnam.
The big wheels of history are turning and many who are
big men today will be very ordinary little people tomorrow.
The truth is out there
somewhere
28 October 1999
I have always enjoyed carpentry (and plastering, plumbing,
and painting for that matter) and last week was a good time to
be renovating. I left a message on the answering machine that
said: “Sorry, Nick Possum is on assignment for the next couple
of weeks. Please leave a message after the beep”, and started
building the staircase.
By Tuesday morning I’d accumulated a small mountain of
debris. I needed a rubbish skip so I riffled through the Yellow
Pages and rang AAA Clean n’ Gone (motto: ‘We’re Cleaning
Up’).
Not a problem, a bloke called Mick told me. A four cubic
metre skip for $235. “Mid-morning tomorrow”.
Wednesday morning came and went and there was no sign
of Clean ‘n Gone. I rang Mick.
“He’ll be there in half an hour”, he said.
Nothing happened for a couple of hours, so I rang back.
“He says he definitely delivered it.”
“Well I reckon your skip must be blocking a Wollongong
Lane somewhere, ‘cos it isn’t in Werrong Lane” I replied.
“It’s young Dave. I’ll call him again. Ring you right back.”
He didn’t. An hour later I rang him.
“Yep. He got the street wrong like I thought. Dropped it
in Wollongong Lane. He’ll be there in half an hour”, he laughed
and hung up.
Right. Not the best possible plan, but a good plan carried
out quickly, as we used to say in the army. Two hours later I
heard the beep, beep, beep, of a truck backing into the lane, so
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
I went down with the chequebook.
“Sorry I’m late, mate” the young bloke said. “Locked myself in the bathroom by accident, had to call the locksmith to
get me out. Lucky I had the mobile on me.”
“Isn’t it a bugger. Happens to me all the time”, I muttered.
I wrote out a cheque and signed the delivery docket. The
delivery address read “WERRONG INVESTIGATIONS,
WERRONG LANE. OFF SYDNEY ST” in a bold and clear
hand.
To my amazement I filled the skip in a couple of hours and
there was still a big pile of rubble left.
When Dave came back for the skip on Wednesday morning I said I’d better get another. He rang Mick on his mobile.
Mid-morning Thursday, he said. No worries.
At 2:00 pm on Thursday it hadn’t arrived, so I called Clean
‘n Gone.
“Ah yeah, it’s young Jason. Ah, he’s just had to deliver one
to a Meriton job in Sutherland. He’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to let Mr Triguboff down, would
we”, I said. At nightfall it hadn’t arrived.
At 10:00 am on Friday it still hadn’t arrived so I called
back. This time I got an answering service. The lady said he’d
ring me right back. Mick rang at 1.30.
“Jason’s been having a lot of personal problems lately. His
mum’s on chemotherapy and his personal trauma counselor’s
partner just died of AIDS, so his appointment was delayed.
Fucking poofs, you know what they’re like. He’ll be there in
half an hour”
“As always”, I said.
Jason arrived at 4:30 with his bull terrier riding beside him.
He was a couple of metres high, wearing a blue singlet and
grubby stubbies. He had “LOVE” tattooed on the knuckes of
his left hand and “HATE” on his right.
Lashed to the back of the truck were a couple of big framed
posters he’d rescued from somebody’s skip: naked blond women
with big tits posed on motorcycles.
“Sorry I’m late, mate”, he said, “They put me dog in detention at obedience school. Had to drive out to Pendle Hill to
pick him up and then I blew a tyre on the M4.” He glanced up
at my shingle, hanging above the lane. “How’s the PI game
going anyway?” he asked.
“Just great”, I muttered as I scrawled out a cheque. “Koffi
Annan just hired me for six figures to look into the John
Howard-and-Paul Keating-are-gay-lovers allegations.”
Far better Ita Buttrose appointed
than Dick Smith elected
4 November 1999
When I woke on Saturday morning I felt like a real tradesman.
My arms ached and my paws throbbed. There was pain in all
my joints. It struck me then that a fortnight of serious home
renovating is pretty much like a long bushwalk or the second
week on the fireline at a serious bushfire emergency. At the
end of the day there’s the massive exhaustion, the meal under
makeshift conditions, the early bedtime and the sleep of the
dead. In the morning there’s the pain.
The staircase from my office to the ceiling was slowly taking shape, problem by problem, amid dust and chaos. It’s always the same with old houses. Everything is connected to
everything else, and you struggle with history, trying to preserve the best and work around the problems.
I had cut myself off from the world, reading only the headlines in the Herald and listening to the radio news, so the referendum snuck up on me. Even so, it seemed that, in reality
nobody cared too much.
The Yes mob were running on the idea that nothing much
will change, other than that the ‘Head of State’ will be an Australian citizen. It was just a necessary piece of housekeeping, a
bit of sentimental nationalism really. The No People were running on the preposterous idea that without a hereditary head
of state the country would descend rapidly into anarchy. The
chooks would stop laying, statues of Queen Victoria would be
pulled down, the servants would go bolshie and the country
would end up being governed by politicians.
And some republicans were asking: “Would Bob Menzies
have been a republican?” And answering “yes”. Were they kidding? This was the Liberal prime minister who wanted to name
our unit of currency the ‘Royal’ when we went decimal in 1966
– an idea laughed out of court by the whole populace, even in
those conservative times!
What will really change if we become a republic? If you ask
that question the answers are all in the realms of psychology.
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
An act of maturity. A national coming-of-age. Cutting loose
from mother’s influence. But the rich will still get richer and
the poor relatively poorer, the Aboriginal people will still be
battling uphill for every bit of social improvement, farmers
will still do dumb things to the environment, the regions will
still get dudded by the capital cities and the class struggle will
go on just as it did before.
The whole republican thing looks like, well let me put it
this way: some merchant bankers salve their consciences by
getting involved in worthy projects to do with The Arts and
others become republican luminaries.
“So how are you going to vote?” Joadja asked, when she
brought lunch up from the café. It was almost the first time
we’d discussed the subject.
“You keep forgetting that wildlife don’t have the vote”, I
said, “But if I did get to vote I’d vote Yes to the republic and
No to the preamble – ghastly second-rate mission statement
that it is”.
“And the direct election thing?”
“Oh bugger that! The direct electionists – what do they
want? If they only want a ceremonial president, why the big
fuss over directly electing one? Direct election would just become another very expensive political circus. Or do the direct
electionists really harbour a weird political fantasy about a charismatic national figure as a powerful president with wide reaching powers, a person ‘above politics’, an anti-politician? No,
far, far better to have an Ita Buttrose appointed than a Dick
Smith elected”, I replied.
“Well I’ll be voting Yes because a victory for the Yes vote
would be a blow to the hereditary principle”, Joadja said. “Why
don’t you take a break on Friday night and we’ll go down to
the Three Weeds at Rozelle and take in the National Junk Band’s
Pre-Referendum Extravaganza?”
“Why not?” I replied. “You know what I believe in: happy
music in the pub and long walks in the rain”.
Itinerary of an overactivist
The Rodney Johnstone files
23 December 1999
It was the season of goodwill and cheer and also of loneliness
and quiet desperation. I would normally feel sad about these
things but when it is Ken Hooper feeling lonely I chuckle.
Ken Hooper is a political fixer straight from central casting – a PR type who was once a tabloid journalist and a management boy for News Limited. Nowadays he works for John
Laws, writing Lawsies’ radio program and also working on his
pay TV show. During the years when Nick Greiner was Premier, Ken was his press secretary. More recently he was one of
the masterminds behind Kerry Chickarovski’s state election
campaign.
So I chuckled with delight when I opened the Saturday
Herald to find that Ken stands accused of organising bogus
community groups to campaign on behalf of the giant Westfield
shopping centre empire against rival projects.
The matter was in the Federal Court, where a couple of
developers who had bought the old Arnott’s factory site at
Homebush had taken action against Hooper under the Trade
Practices Act. In court last week Westfield Ltd owned up to
having paid Hooper. He had organised a nifty letterboxing
campaign against the Arnotts’ site proposal by a faceless group
called the North Strathfield Resident Action Group. The Herald said it was “an admission likely to send shockwaves through
the corporate sector and the State Government and possibly
spark a new round of huge damages cases”.
Now there is no suggestion that Ken Hooper or Westfield
are linked in any way to the cases that suddenly flooded into
my memory but the Herald story sent a shiver of recognition
down my tail and I went to the cabinet where I archive old and
unsolved cases and hunted out my files on the Burwood Council
affair and various related matters.
Bogus community groups are nothing new. They have been
a seedy part of politics for years and they do a lot of damage to
the good name and reputation of genuine community activists. I have come across a few such groups and most of them
were run by a character, very active in Sydney during the years
of the Fahey Liberal Government, who called himself Rodney
Johnstone.
Rodney first came to my notice during the 1994 public
inquiry into Burwood Council. Then, he was styling himself
‘President’ of the Burwood Action Group. It eventually emerged
that he was the secretary, the treasurer, the committee, and all
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Nick B. Possum
Private Eye
the members as well. In the inquiry, Johnstone alleged he had
witnessed the Deputy Mayor, ALP councillor John Fisk, receiving money in a paper bag from developers. He also alleged
that Fisk had assaulted him, and that two goons had attacked
him in his home.
It was all lies, and Johnstone got caught out. When the
cops came for him he ‘fessed up and in July ’94 he got a month
in the slammer.
On the surface he was just a sad little man who got caught
up in a spur-of-the-moment deception that got out of control.
That was how the magistrate dealt with it, but the more questions I asked, the wierder the case became.
Before the Burwood Council affair, Rodney Johnstone was
often seen in the gallery of the Legislative Council and seemed
to be on easy terms with a number of Coalition identities.
In 1994, Councillor Fisk was the Labor Party’s preselected
candidate for the vital State seat of Burwood. His past had
never been a public issue, but the Liberals were keen to make it
so. He had been in their sights as early as 1986 when Nick
Greiner, then Opposition Leader, asked a question without
notice in Parliament about what he said were Fisk’s criminal
convictions for stealing, conspiracy to defraud the Commonwealth and malicious injury, and his involvement with Neighbourhood Watch. That question was unanswered in September the following year and John Hannaford, a Greiner insider,
raised the matter again in the Legislative Council.
As it turned out, the unmasking of Johnstone was a bit of
bad luck for the Liberals. Had his false allegations against Fisk
stuck, there is no doubt the media would also have run stories
on Fisk’s past and these would have brought no joy to Bob
Carr who was then making his run for power. After the
Burwood inquiry, Fisk decided not to stand for Parliament
because of the stress.
And when I dug further I found that Rodney Johnstone
was not all he seemed. His real name was Rodney
VanWeigner and he had played an interesting role in Victorian politics in the years when Jeff Kennett was newly elected
and on the rampage. In 1993, when the Victorian police
were under severe public criticism he ran a little campaign
called “Cops are Tops”. He is said to have stood outside
police headquarters with a sandwitch board saying “Honk
if you support the Police”.
In the same year Johnstone joined a genuine community
group called the Geelong Action Committee. They called a
meeting to fight Kennett’s plan for council amalgamations and
raised $1000, which was given to Johnstone to finance a Supreme Court challenge. Johnstone assured the group that a
writ had been issued, but it never was. Johnstone disappeared
to NSW and the money was never seen again. The Victorian
Police declined to take action, because, they said, the sum was
too small.
Somehow, whatever this activist did, the Liberals seemed
to benefit.
Rodney was a very busy ‘activist’ in 1994 and Burwood
Council was not alone in receiving his attentions.
Some said he was active in Manly politics. I was never able
to confirm that, but early in ’94 he popped up at a meeting of
LinkUp, an umbrella group covering pro-public transport organisations. He was then calling himself director of Concerned
Citizens Association of Australia and his entre was a nicelypresented report (of which he claimed to be the author) titled
A Community Audit of User-friendly Principles for Sydney’s Public Transport. The CCAA operated out of offices above a physiotherapy studio in Burwood, and it even boasted a “public
transport issues coordinator”.
Something made the LinkUp mob suspicious and Rodney
wasn’t invited back. It was not long afterwards that he turned
up in the Burwood Council affair.
The prison experience didn’t deter Rodney’s ‘activism’. By
September 1994 he was trying hard to establish himself inside
the burgeoning anti-motorway movement. He was calling himself the Canterbury North Residents Action Committee. He
even turned up unexpectedly at a meeting of the direct action
group called Freeway Busters, who were then blockading the
M2, but he was recognised and frozen out.
The media, however, has a short memory, and in October
’94, Rodney got his CCAA some free publicity in the Sydney
Morning Herald, when he announced the bogus group’s support for the anti-float directors of the NRMA. He claimed the
CCAA was a watchdog group with 2,000 members across Australia. It was 2,000 efforts of his fertile imagination.
A few days later he announced he was standing as an independent in the March ’95 state elections for the seat of Canterbury, against Labor incumbent Kevin Moss. Johnstone’s platform was a weird mix of left- and right-wing policies. It looked
like it was hand-crafted to steal votes off Moss and deliver them
to the Liberals, but by then he was pushing his luck too far.
His antics were exposed in the Sun Herald and he dropped out
of sight.
The last time I heard of Rodney Johnstone he had set up
shop in Perth as an “anti-corruption campaigner”. The West
Australians are more trusting than Sydney folk. Rodney had a
campaign going against a shop selling novelty condoms and
another for human rights for security guards. He was still running the CCAA and also the Thornlie and District Residents
Association, the Youth and Childrens’ Progress Association,
the Southern River Health and Human Services Consumers’
Association and also the International Citizens’ Action Council, which was campaigning against judicial executions in the
USA. He was on first-name terms with half the politicians in
town.
It makes you wonder.
26