Last Drinks Page 7

  Brisbane. The Fallen City.

  Or indeed, Queensland itself. In many ways the city and the state were one and the same. And I’d deserted them both, long ago.

  But then it was said that an alcoholic never really left the bottle and, in a similar way, maybe no one ever really left Queensland. Even in the act of desertion I’d never quite made it over the border to New South Wales. I had certainly intended to that final night in December 1989, when I reeled drunkenly to my car and steered it south through the city, the streets ablaze, on and on until the crowds and people and celebrations were gone. Highwood had not been my destination then. I’d had no destination, other than crossing the border into New South Wales, and Highwood was nothing more to me than a name on a road sign. I still had no idea why I took that road, or stopped where I did. When I woke next morning, I was only a few miles from the border and there was nothing stopping me, nothing to hold me back. Only Highwood itself.

  But there I stayed.

  It was not a thing I could ever fathom. Perhaps it was that while Highwood was geographically in Queensland, its soul was not of Queensland. A fine distinction, perhaps, but any distinction was a saviour then. Highwood was a mountain town, high and cold, while Queensland, everyone knew, was hot and tropical, its face turned towards the beaches. Queensland houses were supposed to be things of wood and corrugated iron, wrapped in wide verandahs against the heat. Highwood was a town of small brick cottages, closed in on themselves, chimneys prodding up. Unheard of anywhere else in the state, Highwood even sometimes received a light dusting of snow. By rights it shouldn’t have been in Queensland at all. It was an accident of map making. The mountains were a different world, a fragment of the New South Wales tablelands that jutted north over the border.

  But all the same, I remained a Queenslander.

  And finally, perhaps, there was something in my heart that needed that assurance—just as a reformed alcoholic might need to know that somewhere in the house there was that one bottle, both a temptation to be resisted and a last resort if it came to the worst. Queensland was an addiction. Maligned and scorned by the rest of the country—an intellectual backwater, a redneck breeding ground for ignorance and bigotry and corruption, and it had earned the titles—but still, it infected the soul somehow. Demanded love of those it bore and bred, no matter how weary and sickened they might become of the place. Demanded loyalty, no matter how bizarre its government and its laws, no matter what political oddities were thrown up over the years.

  And oddities there were. In my day, some people didn’t even call it a democracy. There was a parliament, yes, but alone of the Australian states, Queensland had no upper house. Under generous inducements, it had voted itself out of existence years before. It meant that any majority party in the one remaining chamber could run the state completely free of scrutiny, and free of balances. That is, a certain core of the majority party could run the state. Long tradition had made Queensland a system operated almost wholly by the executive. The premier and the cabinet ruled Queensland. A scant few men, with unopposed legislative authority. Those same few men appointed their favourites as police ministers and police commissioners, and so controlled the law enforcement arm. They also appointed their favourites to the bench, and so controlled the judicial arm. There was no separation of powers. No supervising committees. No safeguards. Strong leadership, that’s what Queensland was about in my day. Absolute leadership.

  And there were elections, yes. But in the thirty-two years leading up to 1989 there was only ever the one winner. Poll after poll, Queenslanders kept voting the same government back in. It was monolithic and unassailable. Opponents of the regime, disillusioned by defeat after defeat, could offer many explanations for this. For one, the electoral boundaries were notoriously distorted in favour of the ruling party, who of course controlled the electoral commission. For another, the media had become increasingly cowed and uncritical over the years, and were far too friendly with too many ministers, and far too reliant on government patronage to dare make trouble. And the opposition themselves, long starved of seats in parliament, had become so withered and bitter and internally divided that they barely offered a serious alternative anyway. There was really only the one political force in Queensland, so how on earth, save by some great upheaval, could a new regime ever achieve government?

  But all the justifications in the world could only excuse so much. The baffling thing was that, deep down, Queenslanders liked their rulers and wanted them to stay. Not once in those thirty-two years did the overall vote for the opposition ever top fifty per cent. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if it had. Such was the bias in the voting system that even with fifty-five or sixty per cent, they could still be denied a majority of seats. But they never got close to those figures. Regardless of how blatantly the electoral boundaries were rigged, or how utterly unrepresentative the final allocation of seats in parliament might be, the fact remained—the majority of Queensland’s population preferred the government they had.

  So we went openly and willingly to our own disaster.

  And the smaller lapses in the democratic system didn’t seem to matter. The bans on public gatherings or street marches. The strict censorship of books and films. The constant war against unions of any kind. The freakish treatment of minorities like homosexuals or Aborigines. The Special Branch of the police force which spied on and persecuted the government’s enemies with complete impunity. The increasingly frequent declarations of States of Emergency, with all their force of martial law. The use of rank and file police as political shock troops. The judges who quietly smothered investigations. The steady whisper of outrageous scandals concerning the use of public money and contracts.

  None of it mattered. We kept voting for them time and time again, for three decades straight. We loved ministers like Marvin. Flamboyant. Entertaining. Certainly not tied down by anything as grim as due process or bureaucracy. And for the rest, it was just the way things went in Queensland. It was different, and meanwhile the climate was warm, the beaches were golden, the reef was a Wonder of the World, and taxes were low. Out west were some of the biggest cattle stations and coal mines in the world. It was a boom state. Tourists and investors came from everywhere.

  So why complain? So what if the rest of the country loathed the politics of the place, laughed at it, dismissed it? As various government ministers liked to remind the voters, Queensland was a law unto itself. And if Queensland wasn’t left to go its own way, free from southern harassment, well then, it could always secede from the federation. What matter civil war?

  You had to love Queensland.

  Thousands didn’t, of course, and they headed south across the border in legions as soon as they were old enough to drive. But millions stayed and convinced themselves that nothing was seriously wrong. It was a betrayal, somehow, to believe that anything could be wrong. As if admitting that even one small fault existed would lead to an entire flood of admissions, and we’d all drown in it. It was a state of mass denial. Pilots joked about it to their passengers as they flew in from Sydney. Turn your watches back one hour, ladies and gentlemen, and your mind back fifty years. The worst thing was, Queenslanders laughed at it most of all. Defensively. Defiantly. Proud of themselves.

  I would never quite understand it, but it was inside me all the same. So even when the Inquiry came, when everything imploded and I ran, the saving of my own skin the only thing on my mind, even then I couldn’t bring myself to abandon Queensland. Instead I went as far south as my heart would allow, set myself up in the high hills, a noble exile, and tried to forget everything that festered and bubbled down below. The view was splendid from up there. I could see everything with clarity. With hindsight, the view just about stretched on forever. And for ten years, I had declined to descend.

  Now, in rain and blindness, understanding nothing, I was creeping my way back down. And while an alcoholic might never leave the bottle, would he deliberately go back to his favourite bars to pass the ti
me with his old drinking partners? Would he test his will to such limits?

  My car groaned down the slope. Soon I was under the mist and cloud, and the rain was easing to a drizzle. It was already warmer. In summer, driving down the range could feel like descending into a steam bath, the change was that dramatic. The mountains themselves were to blame. They trapped whole air masses and kept them sweltering over the coastal plain, sometimes for weeks on end. Brisbane, caught between the mangrove waters on one side and the hills behind, steamed in its sink. In winter it wasn’t so bad. Brisbane in winter was balmy and fine, and really it was no winter at all. But in summer . . . it might still be early spring and cold in the mountains, but Brisbane was a world away, and in that world summer could come early, and full blown.

  I remembered the heat like a dream, a blur of drunkenness and hangovers and sweat-tangled sheets. Lethargic, for at times it seemed that the heat took on a moral quality as well, it sank into your limbs and your heart, made everything slow and confused. It was another explanation, perhaps, for the way things went in Queensland. It took effort to protest, to question, when you were stupefied by a long afternoon of sun and humidity. It was easier not to bother, to shrug and accept things as they were, to chant the refrain—that’s Queensland for you.

  Besides, I was as rotten as the rest of it. Me and my friends. We were part of the problem.

  I drove. I was down in the foothills now, winding away from the range towards the little town of Boonah. Already the omens weren’t promising. In Highwood the damp air had been bracing; down here it felt clammy and close. Away to the east, shafts of sunlight broke through the clouds. I switched off the wipers and rolled the window all the way down. In time I was opening the glove box and pulling out my sunglasses.

  Brisbane, said a road sign, and I was only an hour away.

  We were part of the problem, me and my friends, but by no means all of it. There were bigger syndicates than ours, people who ran more clubs than Charlie, government ministers far more famous and corrupt than Marvin. At times it seemed everyone in Queensland was involved. It was as if the law didn’t matter because the police broke it more than anyone. It was as if democracy didn’t matter because the government hadn’t lost an election in decades and never would, the electorate was dazed, fast asleep, the media had given up even trying. Everyone knew it, everyone accepted it, anyone who hadn’t had long since left town. It was Queensland, that was all. No one cared. All of us too drunk and fat and glutted to know what was really happening any more. Trusting simply that things would never change.

  All ancient history now.

  I passed another Brisbane road sign, then I was off the back roads and onto the highway. It rolled east over the hills. I opened up the throttle, speeding when the last thing I wanted was to hurry. The sun came out and moisture steamed off the bitumen. In my rear view mirror I could see the mountains, a grey line on the horizon, still swathed in clouds, but ahead of me the sky was glaring with light and haze and heat.

  Brisbane.

  By the time I hit the outskirts, sweat was itching on my scalp.

  ELEVEN

  The syndicate proper was born in early 1979.

  By then I was working at the Daily Times. As a tabloid paper it was a slightly more relaxed concern than our broadsheet competitor, and we were suited to each other—my style as a journalist was relaxed as well. I’d drifted into lightweight features and the more social side of the news, and even though I was still very young, the editor liked me and the way I wrote, and was already talking about more money and a column of my own. Our offices, meanwhile, were in Fortitude Valley, and surrounded by pubs. I liked that as well. I’d moved into a flat just a short walk away in New Farm.

  Charlie, meanwhile, had built his parents’ little bistro into a serious restaurant. It was getting favourable reviews in the major papers now, not just the community weeklies, and not just in Brisbane. His photo had appeared from time to time, and he was marked as a restaurateur to watch. He was ready to open a second establishment, and it was agreed that I would go partner with him in raising the money. The only serious question, for both of us, was obtaining a licence to sell alcohol. And by now we both knew what a sham the licensing laws were.

  For all its puritan facade, Brisbane in 1979 was a town awash with alcohol. The licensing laws might have fooled the teenagers we’d once been, or the out-of-state visitors who found Brisbane so lifeless, but for those who knew where to look, or who to ask, and who to pay, anything was possible, anywhere and any time. Behind closed doors, special clubs and bars were permitted to operate at all hours. And that was the least of it. Gambling was illegal in Queensland, yet casinos were permitted to flourish everywhere. Prostitution was illegal, yet brothels were permitted to flourish everywhere. True, none of it was casually visible, none of it open. Brisbane still looked like the moral town its government so proudly declared it to be, but underneath there was a different Brisbane. And it was my own New Farm, and next to it the Valley, that formed the nexus of it all.

  Not that Charlie or I were yet very familiar with that world. We knew about it, we’d heard about it, we’d caught glimpses of it, but we weren’t on the inside. The one trick eluding us was how to make the right connections, to meet the people in charge of it all. We would have found them ourselves eventually, no doubt. The whole point was that these people could be found by anyone who really wanted them. But as it turned out, the right person came directly to us. In the form of Marvin McNulty.

  He was only a backbencher then, on the government side, but not in any position of power. Young and green and vaguely ludicrous, with an unimpressive background in private business, his arrival in parliament had been greeted with derision by the more sober political observers. No one was even sure exactly how he’d got there. Yet there was something fascinating about him, and somehow he never settled into obscurity the way everyone had expected. He kept on appearing in controversial places, and doing unexpected things, and everyone knew who he was. And while in 1979 no one would have predicted he’d rise to the ministry, in fact that feat was less than three years away.

  For the moment, though, Charlie and I knew him mostly because his electoral office was close to Charlie’s restaurant. Marvin was a big eater, and he liked Charlie’s food. He would bring his staff along to the restaurant, after work, and hold brainstorming sessions around the table. They would drag on till late in the evening. Marvin would always be the last to leave, and often Charlie and I would be the only ones left there with him. So we talked. Drinking, once again, was the key. Marvin was a drinker, a serious one, and would join us in sessions long into the night. But like every other customer, Marvin was forced by the laws to bring his own alcohol. That was what grated, with him, and with Charlie and me. It wasn’t convenient, and it wasn’t civilised. So eventually Charlie explained about his difficulties with the Licensing Commission. And Marvin went to work.

  In later years, when he was in the cabinet and considered something of a prodigy in government circles, he could have fixed a licence as quick as uncorking a wine bottle. In those days, however, member of parliament though he was, he still had to go through channels.

  When he was ready, he called a meeting at Charlie’s place. After hours.

  Ironically enough, we met by candlelight.

  Not by choice, but because the electricity was out. It was another of the accepted truths about Queensland—it was poorly served by its power system. Accidental breakdowns haunted the state, then as later, no matter whether you lived in the city, or away off in the hills, in a place like Highwood.

  But just like the one caused by Charlie’s death years afterwards, this power failure was no accident.

  The basis of it all was an industrial dispute. At the time, the generation and supply of Queensland’s electricity was a state-run monopoly, and all its employees were union members. The Electrical Workers Union—a notoriously strong and aggressive association, not afraid of occasionally holding the government to
ransom. The government in its turn—never one to tolerate another power base within its realm—had a keen interest in breaking the stranglehold. As Marvin and Charlie and I met that night, an opening skirmish was being fought between the government and the EWU, over the issue of contracted workers being brought in to take the jobs of union members. The union had called a retaliatory strike, no maintenance was being performed, and so load sharing and short blackouts were rolling back and forth across Queensland as the arguments wore on.

  Marvin didn’t even seem concerned that he, a member of the government, was being forced to hold his own meetings in the dark.

  ‘We’re backing down anyway,’ he said. ‘Things will be back to normal by morning.’

  We were seating ourselves at a table, a bottle of wine between us. It was late and the restaurant was empty. Charlie was only running a reduced menu in any case, because of the power stoppages.

  ‘The union has won then?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ Marvin replied, even though he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on a picket line. He was a sad physical specimen. Short and dumpy, with a big head perched on a narrow neck, topped by slicked-down thinning black hair. To complete it all he was almost blind and wore oversized, thick-rimmed glasses. ‘But don’t worry. This is just the start. We’ll be ready in a year or two.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was your department.’

  ‘It isn’t. But you know, I’ve been hanging around the halls. Friends of mine are in there. Believe me, this was just testing the waters.’

  I was hardly listening. I was a reporter, of course, but not that sort of reporter. I couldn’t care less about power strikes.

  We got down to business.