Trying to find the sunny side of life
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Burchell
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David Burchell's biography and other articles by this writer
When the historical datelines are being drawn up, the year 2005 may be marked down as the Indian summer of Australia's decade-long economic boom. Truly it seemed as if the sun might never set. Household disposable incomes, measured in dollars, were half as high again as they had been a decade earlier – a deluge of personal wealth we'd not seen since the halcyon postwar years. The dollar values of Australians' homes had more than doubled, while the interest rates they were paying on their mortgages were almost a third lower. Unemployment had fallen from almost 9 per cent in 1995 to little more than 5 per cent in 2005, and the average duration of that enforced leisure had roughly halved (from about six months to three). Housing extensions and renovations were making millionaires of builders across the major cities, while big-screen televisions and "home cinema" equipment were walking off the display floors faster than they could be ordered. "The economy" – that menacing couplet which had quickened the heartbeat of thousands of newspaper readers for decades – seemed to have become what the Romans would have called a cornucopia: a horn of plenty.
And yet the monsoon clouds were already gathering on the horizon. In Sydney – an increasingly fractious town wracked by drought, heatwaves and traffic snarls – the apparently weightless property market had begun to reacquaint itself with the force of gravity, and people were watching their real estate magic puddings unaccountably beginning to shrink. Housing affordability had already a hit a historic low, while over the decade from 1995 housing debt rose from about 40 per cent to about 70 per cent of households' disposable incomes. Almost two-thirds of private renters had fallen into a state the statisticians define as "housing stress". As if affected by the endless dry heat, a tone of rancour had crept over the city's baking streets. "Symbolic analysts" and "knowledge workers", those grand but dissatisfied beneficiaries of the boom, argued vociferously over their dinner tables about the nation's moral failings and our shrunken hearts. In the newspapers, there was increasing disputation about the city's status as the main repository for the nation's refugee and family reunion immigration programs. "Ethnic tension", that rough beast we'd associated with South Central Los Angeles or the tenements of Western Europe, seemed to be stirring. The airwaves hissed with anxieties around "home-grown" terror and Islamic extremism, while the dress habits of Arab-Australian women became matters of public notice. And, three times within the space of a year or so, young men – men with different causes, and from different backgrounds, it's true – took to the streets to throw things and words about, attack property and police alike, and generally raise the social temperature. For the first time since the days of the Rum Corps, Sydney had become a riotous place to live.
LATE ONE FRIDAY NIGHT, IN THE DYING DAYS OF the long hot summer, three young men from one of the most stressed neighbourhoods of that stressed city acquired a late-model white Holden Commodore with a view to taking a joyride. Some minutes later, with an unmarked police car in hot pursuit, the car lost traction at a gentle bend on Eucalyptus Drive, Macquarie Fields, rolled several times and ploughed into a gum tree. Both passengers in the car, Matt Robertson and Dylan Raywood, died instantly. Robertson had been in jail so often his friends couldn't remember his age, but in two weeks he was due to start his first legitimate job, stall-holding at the Royal Easter Show. A year before, Raywood had been selected in the under-seventeen development squad for the Wests Tigers Rugby League Club, part of a program designed specifically to get troubled young players back on track. (The club's football manager admitted: "To be truthful, Dylan wouldn't have made the squad if it was chosen on merit. But the whole purpose of it is to keep kids off the street.") The driver, Jesse Kelly – himself a troubled young man with a precocious criminal record – survived, but he disappeared into the night. His aunt, Deborah Kelly, a formidable woman with a criminal record of her own, took charge of the situation.
According to a later police statement opposing her bail application, Deborah circulated a rival version of events according to which the police had rammed the car into the tree on purpose and then fled the scene. The Glenquarie Estate, a Housing Commission enterprise from the 1970s to accommodate troubled families and their children, is one of the toughest, most crime-wracked localities in Sydney, and relations with the police are generally fraught. Deborah Kelly's account of events sped up and down the laneways of the neighbourhood, and by the Sunday night hundreds of young people had gathered on the street, where they began launching missiles, fireworks and Molotov cocktails at police. The police responded with baton charges. For the next three nights, there were pitched battles along the broad bitumen curves of Eucalyptus Drive. The police donned helmets and shields, and deployed in lines reminiscent of the tactical doctrines of the Duke of Wellington. The local boys fought, posed for the cameras and took souvenirs of the battle. The television film-crews dodged and weaved as they strove to catch the best shots. Outsiders brought in deckchairs to watch the show. And the airwaves of Sydney radio ran fever-hot.
The so-called "law and order debate" nowadays has such a familiar, choreographed quality that it resembles those Balinese shadow-plays which are appreciated in stoic silence by Australian holiday-makers. In the aftermath of the Macquarie Fields riots, the little stick-figures had a busy time of it. The state opposition and the most popular radio personalities united in questioning how the police had allowed the riots to develop in the first place, and in calling for that hardiest of law and order slogans, "zero tolerance". (Exactly how zero tolerance was to be practised on a neighbourhood in which almost everybody seems to fall foul of the law before they reach majority was not explained.) The city's conservative-leaning tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, declared "Enough is enough". In sharp contrast, the city's liberal-minded broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, offered the familiar "cry of pain" diagnosis: there were "deeper", "underlying reasons" for the riots than mere lawlessness, socio-economic disadvantage was the key.
Yet none of these responses ever seemed really to cut to the heart of the matter. Since, on the one hand, communities whose members routinely plunder and deface public property are rarely healthy places in which to grow up, the first set of responses (zero tolerance, tough love, where are the parents?) always seems inadequate and even perverse. Yet the reflexive incantation of the theme of socio-economic disadvantage – like some journalistic equivalent of a lecture out of Sociology 101 – often seems hardly more helpful. Solve disadvantage and you'll solve lawlessness and dysfunction, the slogan seems to say. And then – the tabloid-reading critic might well respond – why not go on to create world peace?
THE EVENTS OF MACQUARIE FIELDS, LIKE THOSE IN REDFERN before and Cronulla after, aroused such controversy in large part because rioting in suburbia seemed – at least prior to the overheated social temperature in Sydney of the last few years – to be strangely out of kilter with Australian mores. In Western Europe, public housing is almost synonymous with public disturbance. The classic tower blocks of inner south and east London, or on the outskirts of Paris – originally built as part of hopeful campaigns of slum-clearance – have defied attempts to foster civic pride. Instead, they have often become graffiti-encrusted, vandalised wind-tunnels, and have provided the cannon-fodder for tribes of neo-Nazi bovver-boys and jihadiwannabees. In Australia, by contrast, the ambitions of postwar planners turned instead towards fostering private home ownership across the vast green-brown suburban expanses, and (despite the grand dreams of social radicals) inner-city public housing was aimed chiefly at the very poor and the elderly – who generally appreciated what was seen to be their privilege. For every wind-tunnel, there are probably two or three gatherings of neat inner-city window-boxes.
Yet, seen from the historian's point of view, the story of Macquarie Fields has the kind of irresistible logic to it which is often attributed to ancient Greek tragedies. It begins with the changing public housing philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s. As the waiting lists for inner-city public residences grew (and their tenants grew older), planners sketched out miniature suburbs of public housing across the outskirts of all the major cities. Often these neighbourhoods were given pastoral-sounding names like Green Valley or Ambarvale, and it was imagined that they could be designed and laid out like little country villages. At the same time, priority was increasingly directed to providing housing for those defined by new measures of disadvantage as being in crisis – meaning, in many cases, women with kids fleeing violent partners, parents with drug and alcohol problems, or those receiving counselling for behavioural problems – or all of the above. And so, without any explicit policy directive connecting these two movements, the new semi-rural estates became the chief repositories for families in crisis. In the early 1980s, my wife (who was then working in a women's refuge) dropped off an Aboriginal woman and her kids fleeing domestic violence to the then-new Glenquarie Estate, at a house which she recalls only as seeming to be in the middle of nowhere. It felt like dropping a pebble into the ocean.
Up until the mid-1970s, Macquarie Fields was little more than a collection of hamlets loosely following the curve of the Georges River, a half dozen or so kilometres south of Liverpool on the city's south-western verge. If you strayed more than three or four blocks east of Glenfield railway station (as a friend who grew up there recalls it), you'd find yourself wandering through the virgin scrub. Out of this frontier wilderness, the Department of Housing planners carved neat rows of brick-veneer bungalows and angular semidetached "villas" for a brand-new suburb. But Macquarie Fields was to be more than an ordinary township. It was to be a public housing estate within a suburb: a little island of social experiment locked within the grand suburban sea. And when they came to draft the public housing estate on the suburb's eastern fringe, the planners called upon the ghost of William Morris. Rather than have the kids play on the streets, the architects shaped arcing drives with pastoral names like Eucalyptus, Rosewood and Cottonwood, and sculpted gum-strewn parks with wandering tracks and laneways, like the country lanes of an imagined bygone era. They called it the Glenquarie Estate.
In large measure, the experiment was still-born. Parents in crisis not infrequently reared children in crisis, and some of the children are now, a generation on, becoming crisis-ridden parents themselves. The jobless rate in the suburb is about twice the national average: on the estate it's higher again. Single-parent families are in the majority. Habits of domestic violence and substance abuse are commonly transmitted inter-generationally. It is possible to grow up on the estate nowadays and not know a single adult male who's unquestionably on the straight and narrow. For many, being burgled is a routine occurrence. In the 2564 postcode area in 2005, 114 cars were reported stolen, there were 227 reported burglaries, 457 cases of property damage, and 279 assaults. Given the prevailing relationship with police in the area, the reported figures are probably extremely conservative. Within a couple of decades of the first concrete-pours, the quaint laneways have become unsafe to walk at night, the paired semi-circular drives have turned neatly into amateur racing-tracks, and the paths through the parks make handy escape routes from the police. The neighbourhood has become a kind of monument to good planning intentions gone wrong. Building Jerusalem can hardly have begun more brightly, nor ended with so faint a whimper.