Underbelly, True Crime and the Cultural Economy of Infamy

Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy

Melissa Gregg and Jason Wilson

Introduction – Barbarians at the Gate

Sitting down to the April 23rd 2008 screening of the true crime drama Underbelly,

Brisbane viewers may have been perplexed by the first commercial break, featuring an advertisement for Victorian Tourism. The genteel strains of indie folk starlet Joanna

Newsom singing “The Sprout and The Bean” as a young girl followed an oversized ball of string around the city were an unusual foil following the opening scene of “Barbarians at the Gate”, in which the fictionalized Carl Williams calls Derryn Hinch’s radio program to deny involvement in a string of unsolved murders. This scene occurred well into the narrative arc of the first season of the Nine Network’s Underbelly, which involved a string of up to 30 killings in Melbourne’s criminal underworld during the years 1993-

2004, alongside the often-hapless efforts of police to restore order. Why anyone would be contemplating Melbourne as a holiday destination in light of the show’s sordid account of this history of bloodshed and violence is just one question this paper is inspired to answer.

From a certain point of view, advertising for Melbourne’s tourist economy and

Underbelly’s preoccupation with crime, sex and murder are hardly so contradictory. The wildly successful series can be seen in retrospect to have deepened and enriched the city’s brand appeal to a range of demographics. Evidence includes new, dedicated

“Melbourne Crime Tours” operating through traditional small business and popular media avenues alike. These enterprises only coincide with the city’s makeover as a hub for creative industries, cultural tourism and the so-called “night-time economy”, exemplified in the ACMI development at Federation Square, the “small bar” culture envied by other national capitals, and various underground scenes celebrated in an annual

Laneway Festival and documentary series like Not Quite Art.

Underbelly’s place in the creative economy of Melbourne, and the significance of its subsequent departure to Sydney and a NSW Government-sponsored production base, are part of a wider set of issues about the legitimate and underground economies in effect in

Underbelly’s narrative material, and in its screening and reception. We can see no better demonstration of this than a scene from later on in “Barbarians At the Gate”, where the death of Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin in suspicious circumstances in the backroom of a

Lygon Street restaurant is memorably depicted. The pivotal moment of Veniamin’s death at the hands of Mick Gatto is intercut with a series of shots illustrating the brewing and filtering of a classically prepared Italian barista coffee. Melbourne’s much-vaunted café culture is here linked with a city-wide network of organized crime and the entrenched business hierarchies presumed of a particular segment of the city’s significant Italian population. Underbelly couches murder – in this episode and others – in terms of changing leisure and consumption practices. If in this episode it is tied to the image of café culture that has spread throughout the country, other plots in the series figure murder as an externality of the night economy that has rejuvenated Australia’s inner cities. In Underbelly, even an espresso isn’t innocent; like the Charcoal Chicken restaurant Carl favours as the place to order a hit, it is a vernacular point of entry to a range of social, economic, ethnic and gender tensions that define the anxieties of recent decades.

Marketing campaigns for season one placed images in a range of urban topographies that could be associated with scenes of criminality and intrigue, under railway lines [Figure 1] and close to late-night strips [Figure 2].

Figure 1. Tunnel advertising for Season One near Marrickville Station, Sydney Figure 2. Footpath campaign for steel case box-set, Erskineville Road, Sydney

In addition the franchise pursued a recognisable format heading in to season two, A Tale of Two Cities, with in-store product placement echoing the street-level symbolism of police tape and chalk-outlined bodies [Figure 3]. Figure 3. Underbelly stand, Terminal 3 Bookshop, Sydney Domestic Airport

At a time when global media theories speak of “trans-media convergence” (Jenkins 2006)

Underbelly reveals the steadfastly local dimensions affecting television production, consumption and circulation. This paper describes three aspects of this trend:

 First, its extension and renovation of an established public appetite for true crime

narratives. The show repeatedly associates criminal violence with suburban

material aspiration, presenting such events as alternatively continuous with and

dangerous to Australian suburban life. By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in

the mouths of criminals, and by situating these stories in the suburbs, Underbelly

suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the

Australian Dream. Our analysis will show how casting choices trigger complex mediatised memories that further compromise the viewer’s reading of criminal

characters.

 Second, in its revelation of the brutal economies of drug production and

distribution which underwrote ecstasy consumption in the golden age of

Australian club culture. Exposing a generation’s denial of the criminal elements

behind ecstasy’s fetishised status, Underbelly problematises celebratory accounts

of club culture, shedding light on the infrastructure behind the economies of our

inner cities.

 Third, in its capacity to offer a retrospective genealogy for the spectacular, drug-

inflected, criminal hypermasculinity which is now – in the bodies and behaviours

of professional sports stars in particular – a visible part of the Australian

mainstream. Connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality, the

series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these

unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia's

present, one that countervails the official pieties of the ordinary that characterised

the Howard years, and troubles the political priorities of today’s law and order

state.

Underbelly as true crime TV. At one level, Underbelly enacts a bankable genre in publishing, cinema and television: true crime. Along with other examples like horror (Carroll 1990), true crime is a cross- media genre with a long history, yet it has avoided the same degree of critical attention as a platform encompassing print, television, cinema, photography and even electronic entertainment.1 True crime stories offer heightened, narrativised versions of historical criminal events. As moral campaigners justly argue, they turn criminals and their activities into a species of entertainment. For this reason, true crime as a popular literary form has often been seen as disreputable, and open to the charge of being exploitative, as crimes up to and including mass murder are turned into money-making forms of consumption. But it is also a way of addressing anxieties – whether they relate specifically to crime and disorder, or have a broader reference (Murley 2008; Seltzer

2006).

True crime is related but distinct from two neighbouring genres. Crime reporting as a form of journalism clearly shares the preoccupations of true crime (and sometimes personnel – the authors of the Underbelly books are themselves crime reporters) but crime reporting is produced under different circumstances, on a different timescale, for a different, less specialised audience. True crime writing has tended to appear in books or in specific magazines, and while crime reporting always has journalism’s alibi of keeping citizens informed, true crime writing struggles to place itself as history or criminology. It always faces the charge that its appeal is to prurience, morbid curiosity, or even to dark sexual urges. True crime also needs to be distinguished from crime fiction, although that distinction is less secure than at first it might appear (Seltzer 2006). While clearly true

1 For a critical account of recent manifestations of the genre see Seltzer (2006). crime deals with actual events and crime fiction is essentially imaginative, more successful true crime writers purposefully focus on recounting events with a strong focus on characterisation and narrative shape, and tend to mix up their accounts with moralising asides or black humour.

While it draws ultimately on real events, Underbelly is an adaptation of Leadbelly (2004), from the Underbelly true crime series by Melbourne writers John Silvester and Andrew

Rule. These authors started as well-connected crime writers for Fairfax’s The Age newspaper in Melbourne (Silvester’s father was deputy Victorian Police Commissioner, and later head of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence). They moved beyond this into publishing as editors and quasi-ghost writers for the initial volumes in

Melbourne criminal Mark “Chopper” Read’s Chopper series.2 Starting as true crime, these books generally defied categorisation, bringing together idiosyncratic stories of criminal autobiography, self-aggrandising tall tales, poetry, black humour, and, eventually, crime fiction. They aided in the development of Chopper Read’s peculiar celebrity in Australia, making him a regular in tabloid newspapers and TV current affairs, as well as a marketable touring speaker, at least until his recent illness. The books also inspired the Australian film, Chopper (Dominik 2000), itself now a true crime classic, and the launching pad for actor Eric Bana’s Hollywood career.

Following the successes of the early Chopper books in the 1990s, from 1997 Rule and

Silvester turned to writing the Underbelly series. The Underbelly books were

2 The specifics of this history can be heard in the public conversation Melissa had with Andrew Rule, ‘Exposing the Underbelly’, hosted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, in October, 2009. Available at acmi.net.au comparatively loosely organized, providing chapter-by-chapter collections of shorter true crime tales. Understandably, they were Melbourne-focused, given that this was the beat and milieu for the co-authors, and the location for which they had the biggest archive of journalism. The books also contained stories from around Australia. Their local origins made them stand out in the larger true crime market, but so too did a distinctive writing style. Despite the writers’ background at The Age, we would argue that the books employed a refined tabloid register: jokey and clipped, but sometimes also caustically judgemental about the moral and intellectual failings of the criminals whose world they detailed.

The books foregrounded the peripheral world of criminal and drug cultures, violence and murder – the sociopathic social networks rarely mapped in Australia in other media or genres. The Underbelly series of true crime compendia ran to 11 volumes. The series had a number of break-out titles: Tough (2002), an omnibus of selections from the series;

Rats (2006), about unsolved crimes; Gotcha (2005), which dealt with hits and arrests; and the stand-out hit, Leadbelly. The latter focused on Melbourne’s so-called “gangland war”, a linked series of murders that became entwined with a conflict over control of the increasingly lucrative market for “party drugs”. These books pitched themselves well, and they have been very successful. Priced between $20 and $25 in paperback, and engagingly-written, they are prominent in airport bookshops, department store book sections, large chains like Angus and Robertson, as well as specialist bookstores (see

Figure 3). Television’s Underbelly and Rule and Silvester’s Leadbelly dealt with the same series of events, although the television version projected a different tone and foregrounded different preoccupations, as we will see. Both trace a war that is sparked by Alphonse

Gangitano’s execution of Greg Workman (Gangitano is played by Vince Colosimo, the promotional face of the show) and starts in earnest with the non-fatal shooting of Carl

Williams (Gyton Grantley) by Jason and Mark Moran (Les Hill and Callan Mulvey). The tit-for-tat murders that follow are between Carl’s allies on one side, and the Moran family and the so-called “Carlton Crew” of inner-city gangsters on the other. On television, the story was complicated by a range of subplots that developed particularly in relation to the sexual appetites of the main protagonists and the compelling portrayal of Carl Williams’ wife Roberta (Kat Stewart), Underbelly’s answer to Lady Macbeth. Along with sex, the television programme offered greater character development to exploit the formidable ensemble cast. It also made the perspectives of police (and presumably, the wider community) more central, with a voice-over narration by female Detective Jacqui James

(Caroline Craig). This commentary had a markedly different tone to the authorial voice of the Underbelly books, and as such it was a crucial feminizing gesture to ensure the show’s prospects for mainstream success.

As is often the case with true crime, Underbelly’s first season hit snags because of its interactions with the real-life events it drew on. In February 2008, Justice Betty King banned the screening of Underbelly in Victoria, much to the Nine Network’s chagrin, ruling that it might prejudice then-current trials (AAPa 2008; Bartlett 2008; Bradley

2008; Butcher 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d; Ziffer 2008). Later, Roberta Williams parlayed the show into an extension of her own celebrity through a number of money- making opportunities (AAPb 2008; Battersby 2008a; Royall 2008). Merchandise and support groups were set up through online social media outlets – consolidating the status of the Williams brand [Figure 4]. Community groups vocally objected to this use of the series to capitalize on an earlier life of crime (Houlihan 2008; Benns 2008), particularly since a range of media outlets aside from Nine assisted the efforts of Williams and others in the wake of Underbelly’s popularity. In a touch of irony, with screening issues preventing legitimate access to the programme in Victoria, this major initiative in true crime television came to circulate via criminal networks selling knock-off copies as well as illegal internet download sites (Jackson 2008; Holroyd 2008;Weekes 2008).

Figure 4. Unofficial Underbelly fan merchandise for sale on E-Bay in 2008 This bleed between reality and fiction, criminality, consumption and celebrity was exacerbated on a number of levels. The real-life personae of Underbelly characters became regular features of mainstream media interviews, especially through the infotainment platforms of current affairs. Today Tonight and A Current Affair maintained regular updates of Roberta Williams and Judy Moran, while The Australian Magazine did the same for suspected killer Mick Gatto (Stewart 2008). Roberta Williams attracted still more fame by ghosting her former husband’s Facebook account (Bradford 2008;

Battersby 2008b) and launching a “tell-all” autobiography (Williams 2009).

The casting choices of season one and two assisted in the confusion of ordinary celebrity and infamy. Most of the key roles were played by well known actors from previous TV appearances. For instance, Lewis Moran was played by Kevin Harrington, who built his reputation playing both David Bishop (son to Harold Bishop) on Neighbours and the archetypal “Howard Battler”/ “ordinary Australian” Kevin on Seachange.3 Harrington’s other major roles include local films The Dish (Sitch, 2000), Australian Rules (Goldman,

2002) and The Honourable Wally Norman (Emery, 2003). This is just one illustration of the major conflict between the “characters” played by actors and the history of associations accumulated in the CVs they brought to the project. Underbelly’s large ensemble cast includes long-serving veterans of iconic “family” programmes such as

Home and Away, Neighbours, Blue Heelers and The Secret Life of Us.4 In this way,

Underbelly offers a flipside to the televisual mainstream of the period it claims to

3 The politics of “ordinariness” reached a crescendo during the Howard Prime Ministership and is discussed in Brett (2005), Brett and Moran (2006) and Gregg (2007). 4 Blue Heelers alumni alone included Carolyn Craig, Martin Sacks and Damian Walshe- Howling in S1, with John Wood joining the cast in S2. represent: the televisual memory of the peak shows of the 1990s and early years of the decade, whether mainstream family fare or next generation youth programming. This accumulated viewing knowledge heightened sensitivity to questions of corruption at the heart of the show, given the public’s parochial susceptibility to bestow innocence and venerability to these faces.

In season two, Italian-Australian criminal Robert Trimbole, played by Roy Billing, was an oddly sympathetic character, who was humanised by a devoted love interest and a particularly inconvenient case of prostate cancer. Trimbole faced regular racism from business partners in pivotal moments of the story, which drew attention to the triumphant

Italian business empire at the beginning of Underbelly 1.5 Trimbole’s “gift of the gab” assures his success as an entrepreneur and his deft subversion of bureaucratic process, while also allowing his escape from Australia – and this life – without punishment for a series of arranged murders. Trimbole’s manipulation of official systems mark him as a characteristically Australian battler against authority, in a tradition of larrikin criminals stretching as far back as Ned Kelly. In many ways, this is only fitting for an actor known for playing the unremarkable everyman.

Of course, such casting can always be attributed to Australia’s relatively limited pool of bankable television actors. But in 2008 Nine’s capacity to attract such talent to a major project was significant. First, it functioned as a reassurance that Nine still had the power to amass an all star cast: Underbelly was proof that Nine could deliver quality as well as

5 It also highlighted the strategic use of ethnicity in marketing the sexier image of the first season. Billing’s Trimbole, short and overweight, is the avuncular rogue to Gangitano’s (Vince Colosimo’s) smoldering intensity. quantity. In addition, the judicious distribution of roles can be read as Underbelly’s strategically unapologetic backlash to the comforting content other networks had come to rely on. Director Peter Andrikidis’ comments at the 2008 AFI Awards are instructive:

“Underbelly has changed things. It broke all the rules – sex, violence, language… and two million people came (to watch)” (The Australian, 7/12/08). Underbelly’s peerless visual style, energetic editing, witty dialogue and high-level violence, all punctuated by an irrepressible soundtrack of local and international artists, could be read as a corrective to the stagey innocence of the preceding decade in Australian television drama. It was

Australian television’s return of the repressed: a direct challenge to tired-out models for industry success.6

The following section shows how Nine found itself in an almost paradoxical position.

Having always built its brand on celebrity, Underbelly became something of a morale boost internally, while externally it deployed celebrity in new ways. In sum, the significant impact the series had was to make the word “Underbelly” a master signifier in

6 In its notorious use of both male and female nudity, Underbelly was a major indictment of politically correct programming of recent decades, if not feminism per se. Graeme Blundell, one time star of Alvin Purple (1973), welcomed the return to 1970s full-frontal style in his review for The Australian. A feminist reading of season one certainly seemed possible, as the competing egos of the male protagonists led to similarly pointless ends for the bulk of the script. One episode, “Wise Monkeys” was entirely dedicated to the perspective of female characters, which could be read as tokenistic if it did not translate so literally to multiple awards for actress Kat Stewart (Roberta Williams) and supporting actress Madeleine West (Danielle McGuire). In the final episodes, it is the female detective Jacqui James who finally elicits the pivotal confession. Season two was far less optimistic, with the initial attention given to Asher Keddie’s glamorous detective Liz Cruickshank eventually abandoned in the anti-climactic final episodes. It might be possible, then, to read Tale of Two Cities as a prequel in the strictest sense to the feminist triumph of the first season. a resurgence of true crime reporting and programming.7 The breadth of stakeholders making entrepreneurial use of the series – to the moralizing disapproval of vocal sectors of the community – distracted attention from the Nine Network’s preparedness to do exactly the same thing.

Underbelly as post-broadcast TV.

After years of local television production enamoured with Reality TV formats,

Underbelly’s success marked an unexpected resurgence of local drama. It arrived in tandem with SBS’s gripping multicultural cop show East West 101, Channel 10’s Rush, and Seven’s cross-generational prime-time family drama, Packed to the Rafters. Several factors combined to induce Nine to commission its ambitious programme. The first was the loss of its own preeminent status within the domestic industry. In 2007, after decades of dominance, Nine lost the ratings battle to the Seven Network. A range of publications outlined in detail how Nine’s hitherto failsafe model – blockbuster US imports supported by home-grown content driven by well-paid and heavily promoted in-house celebrities – had faltered.8 Management troubles and ownership transitions exacerbated the central problem, notably in the wake of Kerry Packer’s death and son James’ liquidation of media assets. Heavy-hitting US shows on Seven – among them Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy – joined local lifestyle staples such as Better Homes and Gardens to

7 Not to mention a new line in low-brow porn: actresses hired for pole-dancing roles in season one followed Roberta Williams’ lead appearing in men’s magazines in 2008-9. 8 In titles such as Gerald Stone’s Who Killed Channel Nine (2007; updated 2008), plus Paul Barry’s update of The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer (2007). Boned by anonymous offered a more humorous take on the inside workings of the station’s current affairs. capture a larger audience share and younger, more lucrative viewers. In this context, the

2008 season launch at Nine’s Richmond studios had CEO David Gyngell promising to

‘make right what we have done wrong’ (The Age, 6/12/07).

When Underbelly was commissioned, Nine was also considering the likely impact of the looming US writers’ strike, which would deprive it of important US primetime dramas and sitcoms. Of course, the writers’ strike would effect the other commercial networks too, but second-placed Nine could ill-afford the further erosion of audiences and advertising revenue. The new drama was seen as a gamble before its launch, and was even criticised in the media after initial screenings (Ziffer 2008b). With the ban in

Victoria finally evident, Nine had little choice but to launch its major investment, one of up to 40 new shows for 2008 (Idato 2007).

Screentime made the programme with assistance from Film Victoria and the Australian

Film Finance Corporation, which folded into Screen Australia in 2008. Significantly, then, these stories of criminal excess – whose outcomes were not clear as production commenced – were seen as worthy financial ventures by key institutions brokering state subsidies for the creative economy. While Screentime had little organisational experience with drama production, as opposed to boutique vehicles such as Stuart MacGill

Uncorked, key personnel commanded long histories of involvement. In particular, Greg

Haddrick, one of Underbelly’s main writers, co-producers and Head of Drama at

Screentime, had been writer or script editor on iconic programmes including Sons and

Daughters, Home and Away, and big-ticket mini-series The Potato Factory (2000), The Society Murders (2006) and The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (2005). (The latter was directed by one of Underbelly’s directors, Peter Andrikidis.) Haddrick also created

“quality drama” MDA for the ABC.

Although created for a free-to-air, broadcast television network, the wider environment for Underbelly’s screening was one in which the broadcast business model was eroding, with digital storage and transmission through peer-to-peer file-sharing allowing consumers greater control over viewing (Turner and Tay 2009; Meikle and Young 2008;

Spigel and Olsson 2004). With bans in place in Victoria, copies of Underbelly – including episodes yet to be screened – found their way across borders principally through illegally copied DVDs and file-sharing networks (Miller 2008; Ziffer 2008c).

This large-scale embrace of pirated material meant that a series tracking the history of organised crime enjoyed its own criminal networks of production and distribution.

Indeed, the amount of media attention devoted to covering this black-market activity amounted to a public education program regarding the use and convenience of Bit-

Torrent clients. The mainstream desire for Underbelly awakened an accompanying mainstream awareness of the illicit practice of file-sharing, a further instance of the show’s blurring of legal and illegal cultural economies. Labourers selling knock-off copies of Underbelly on building sites were an interesting juxtaposition to the fan- initiated consumption practices documented in recent media studies. Celebratory accounts of the interplay between television users and producers rarely mention distribution via such deviant networks, let alone potential impacts on the administration of justice. True crime television’s illicit circulation in Victoria almost mocked the imperial, US-derived articulations of “convergence culture” and its privileged networks of educated broadband users.

Although Nine lost advertising revenue in Victoria (an estimated $3.9 million on the back of approximately $15 million in production costs)9 these losses seemed justified when the

Underbelly 1 DVD release became the highest-selling in Australian history. With the second season debut also breaking ratings records (2.5 million viewers in its first week),

Nine ultimately received accolades for “saving” Australian drama (Elder and Riley

2008). Yet even “post-broadcast” television is vulnerable to public opinion and legislation governing programming standards. Throughout 2008, Underbelly was regularly held up along Nine’s other major success – the expletive-spouting TV chef

Gordon Ramsay – as demonstrating unwarranted levels of sex, violence and profanity on broadcast television (Akerman and Roberts 2008; McWhirter 2009a). 2009 continued the trend, as a viral video of crude sex scenes appeared online prior to the season debut, inciting outrage from Christian groups. The Australian Family Association condemned

Underbelly 2 for its “excessive pornography” in early episodes (McWhirter 2009b) and non-specialised television journalists in the blogosphere lamented the depiction of heroin importer Allison Dine (Anna Hutchison) in this “Tale of Two Titties”.

Given the terrain we have outlined, sensationalism and raw incivility can be understood as bankable strategies to generate interest in a multi-channel, fracturing media landscape.

9 Calculated on the initial rate of $40 000 per 30 second advertisement for Underbelly 1, and Victoria’s 25% market share of the national total (Casey 2008). By season 2, advertising rates were attracting up to $60 000 for 30 seconds, causing concern for businesses seeking to profit from the show’s success without bombarding viewers, see McIntyre (2008). With Underbelly, Ramsay, and its sports roster (including the NRL) as bright spots of success, Nine could be seen to be offering an increasingly hypermasculine programming flow, which itself echoed the macho, even misogynist corporate culture at Nine.10 In- programme advertising during free-to-air screenings in 2008 in fact featured Ramsay and

The Footy Show celebrities in a mock line-up with Underbelly characters to emphasise this “bad boy” image.

Underbelly critically juxtaposes some key categories that have underpinned mainstream cultural and political discourse in other ways. Carl and Roberta Williams’ normative suburban heterosexuality is counterposed to the inner-urban, homosocial affections and affiliations of the Carlton Crew. Doing criminal business in the banal surrounds of

Charcoal Chicken and neighbourhood barbecue areas, Carl combines the trappings of ordinariness with murderous ambition. Season one’s narrative as a whole replays the

Howard-era caricature that opposed a valourised, ordinary suburbia with inner-city “latte sippers”. The series followed this logic remorselessly, as the “aspirational” suburbanite

Carl orchestrated the destruction of the “cosmopolitan” Carlton Crew to take over the ecstasy market.

10 Underbelly was screened soon after a notorious incident involving Nine Network Head, Eddie McGuire, who became famous as host of The Footy Show light entertainment program devoted to discussion of the Melbourne based Australian Football League. McGuire was widely reported as having implied that a leading female news anchor would be “boned” – an alleged colloquialism for “fired” – for her lack of conventional beauty. The close association between “boned” (fired) and the more familiar synonym for “boned” (fucked) is symptomatic of Nine’s reputation for deliberately intimidating female employees – although it should be acknowledged that such conditions are hardly restricted to the one network. Indeed the moment of outrage and danger reflected in the show is one of interruption to established ways of doing business between men: the point at which an unknown outsider’s cocky ambition invades the territory and the established hierarchy of a comfortable circuit of profitability. The real life knowledge of the events that followed

Carl Williams’ entry to the Melbourne drug market were probably enough for many people to find this unappealing television. But the prospect of following the web of rivalry and power plays that drove the spiral of violence took on a certain curiosity factor for these wider cultural associations – it was an Australian story that bore elements of

Shakespearean tragedy, and more immediately shared an affinity with American cinematic crime epics like The Godfather trilogy or Scarface.

Underbelly and the night-time economy.

In the final section of this paper we want to expand on the sense that Underbelly offers a retrospective on the period when a legitimate or overground leisure economy expanded in tandem with an underground, linked economy based on the production and marketing of illegal drugs. In doing so, we want to be explicit from the outset in saying that the escalating violence depicted in Underbelly 1 and 2 is of course driven by a lamentable mix of hotheaded paranoia, machismo and material aspiration on top of a significant degree of mental instability fuelled by social alienation of various kinds. We do not write to excuse the violence in the show, or trivialize the impact of its many depictions of murder. However, we do seek to highlight the massive expansion, even mainstreaming of the use of “party drugs” throughout the last two decades and point to the ways this significant historical shift continues to resonate in the show’s framing and reception. We do this for the purpose of revealing a new take on the ideas of ordinariness that have been taken as read in Australian cultural criticism for many years.

The original conflict between the Morans and Williams is over market-share in this booming drug trade, just as A Tale of Two Cities depicts the conflicts surrounding the establishment of a new heroin syndicate in Sydney. In early episodes of season one, Carl makes use of his new insider status for personal profit. He surreptitiously uses the

Morans’ pill press to make high-quality MDMA to sell at lower prices than the established drug cartel. Anyone who saw it will remember the pivotal and formative scene in which Roberta and Carl consummate their desire for each other – and a better life – laid out on the couch, as pills roll endlessly out of the machine in the next room.

The high-end lifestyles, the long list of contract assassinations, the employment of bodyguards, and the endless legal battles that follow are all financed with drug money gleaned from supplying the clubs of Melbourne with the industrial quantities of ecstasy pills which are integral to the culture of post-MDMA clubbing.

The divide between the metropolitan consumption culture and the suburban origin of the drug suppliers (a distinction that would also feature in the Mary Louise Parker vehicle,

Weeds) is observed in the text in several ways. Unlike the middle-class club-hoppers that consume the product, the suppliers and dealers only ever snort lines. The criminals don’t take pills. Instead, in season one, their drugs are cut up in the open in the club which is only populated by other underworld figures and dancers who, as is also the case in Two

Cities, seem to be forever dancing just for them. This individualised and exclusive experience, underscored in Two Cities’ spiraling decline of the corrupt lawyer Brian

Alexander (Damian De Montemas) to alcohol, is a complete contrast to ecstasy’s all- welcoming embrace. Like the fate bestowed on any of Terry Clark’s associates who fall victim to heroin addiction in Two Cities, the show makes a point of completely distancing its dealers from the drugs at the heart of the story. In season one, this seems a particularly pointed critique of the commodity fetishism that characterizes expanding middle-class ecstasy consumption.

The experience privileged in each text is that of the drug pushers, the key silence of the text is the point of consumption. The dealers themselves aren’t shown to be MDMA users, evidently preferring speed or cocaine to assist both their crimes and celebrations.

Nor are they ever shown in mainstream clubs. On rare occasions they are filmed entering and leaving, with a particular focus on bouncers letting them in ahead of the queue (the role of security staff in enabling the illicit night-time economy is a well known additional dimension to each city’s “underbelly”). Warring suppliers remain on the outside, in alleys and carparks – the liminal spaces that are also amenable for the violence that inevitably ensues (see Figure 1 and 2 for how advertising ghosts these zones of propinquity for criminality and violence). When the protagonists do engage in drugs they are always in cocooned or protected venues – the strip club, the hotel room, individual homes. They are never part of the same public, social, communal setting that is the defining aspect of ecstasy’s mass appeal. These zones instead provide shelter for the externalities of the night-time economy – the spaces that the middle-class consumer would prefer no to see.

Here the echoes with The Sopranos line of business, waste management, echo the toxic, shameful and frightening elements behind legitimate business transactions.

Underbelly shows us the structural links between violence, drug production and distribution and the now-mainstream practices of hedonistic weekend drug consumption.

Screening in 2008-9, at a time when a spate of misbehaving football stars only made these connections more prominent, the show provided a framework by which these developments might be traced. These externalities that complicate both celebratory accounts of drug and club culture, and progressivist accounts of the renewal of inner- urban precincts by means of the “night-time economy”11 are part of the industrialization of global club culture over the last decade or more. Vastly expanded precincts and venues dedicated to after-hours leisure, many of which have been driven by deliberate policy change, mean that “Super-club” equipped areas appear prominently in Sydney’s Darling

Harbour, Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley and Melbourne’s CBD. These designated entertainment precincts not only attract forms of cultural tourism from beyond the city, but they do so from within the city as well, bringing revelers in from the suburbs to inner- urban areas. (Flew) One component of clubbing in the contemporary night-time economy is drug use, and those drugs which are characteristically linked with post-rave club culture – ecstasy, amphetamines and cocaine, can’t be made, sold, obtained or consumed

11 Flew defines this as “a term that is used to describe the diverse range of service-related and creative industries associated with leisure, entertainment, hospitality and tourism, which cater to the ‘liminal zone’ between work and home for the local population, and activities related to travel and tourism for those visiting a city.” legally. A major compenent of the night-time economy otherwise celebrated in local council planning documents consists of substances that remain criminalized.

Nevertheless, the combination of clubs, dance music and drugs is now a mainstream element of youth culture, no longer a marginal or especially resistant practice. As such, there is regularized contact between “ordinary Australians” and the criminal individuals and organizations who supply drugs to clubland: precisely the characters depicted in shows like Underbelly. Increasingly, this interface between criminality and the mainstream is in plain view. In many cases during and since the screening of the show, drug consumption, violence and the interface of celebrity with infamy have become a form of almost predictable spectacle. The 2008 episode “Earning A Crust” screened the same week that Wayne Carey appeared on Andrew Denton’s chat show, Enough Rope, trying to deny his association with Jason Moran (Carey had been a character reference for the Moran trial). It was also the time that swimming star Nick D’Arcy, who was then competing in Olympic trials, was charged with battery after a night of drinking. The NRL football season would be marked on several occasions by examples of players engaging in precisely the activities depicted in Underbelly during off-field “celebrations”. This was the season that followed Rugby League star Andrew Johns’ confession to the use of ecstasy throughout his career – a time that coincided with the period Underbelly documents. It was also the year that began with another League star Jarryd Hayne reportedly shot at in a Kings Cross street. (ABC Online, 3/3/2008) Further off-field incidents throughout 2009 only reinscribed the links between hypermasculine celebrity and infamy, and a sorry history of footballers crossing shady lines of criminal activity and association (see Rule). In this context, Underbelly offers a retrospective insight into the moment when club and drug culture took hold as the background for these wider events. Its depictions offer a historicising function, pinpointing the conditions giving rise to these larger cultural phenomena. The corrupt policing practices of the 1970s were just the beginning of a broader culture of silence, for ultimately it was in the period of Melbourne’s gang wars and the tenure of the conservative Howard Government that Australians became the highest per capita consumers of ecstasy in the world. The 2004 National Drugs Strategy Household Drugs

Survey found that 21 per cent of Australians aged 20 to 24 had used ecstasy, and that 13 per cent had used it recently. For all Australians aged over 14, in 2004 the number who had tried ecstasy was equal with the number who had tried cannabis, at 11.4%.

(Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) (For comparison, it’s instructive to note that according to the ABS around 15% of Australians attended an AFL match in 2005, and only 9% attended a Rugby League match.) Underbelly revealed, once and for all, the true picture of a nation’s pastimes.

Ordinary Australians? While it’s true the pudgy white boy from Broadmeadow was a heavyweight on

the bathroom scales, he was no athlete. He was an ex-supermarket shelf stacker

with a pill press and a taste for fast food, fast women and fast bucks.

The Age, 10/2/08

Underbelly’s distinct televisual properties contribute to making idyllic portrayals of

Australian suburbia somewhat anachronistic. Carl Williams’ ultimate arrest takes place at a neighbourhood park, in the middle of a barbecue (as John Howard was fond of saying, it’s a real “barbecue stopper”). Set to the tones of Nick Cave singing “The Carnival is

Over”, the scene is an overriding symbol of how the show places ordinary Australian leisure practices alongside criminal indulgence and murderous rivalry. Underbelly makes the familiar settings of everyday life ripe for narrative charge and – as the retrospective aesthetics of previous decades take precedence in later series – shows an alternative cultural economy for mass entertainment and consumption. It did this drawing on a range of social and economic oppositions within a changing multicultural society.

Years of watching Blue Heelers had taught Australians to expect that the cops always win in the end, that the complications of any episode could be resolved with a drink down at the local pub. Underbelly reversed this idyllic narrative. With each week, the police appeared increasingly helpless to affect a cycle of senseless carnage, and repeatedly their efforts were met with failure. This breach of the traditional generic expectation of the cop show was also an indication of Australia’s wavering belief that answers will be found and offenders charged and prosecuted in an age of international terrorism. Underbelly’s narrative structure operated on the assumption that the audience already knew that an ever more outrageous slaughter was always on the horizon.

Watching from Queensland, and later in Sydney (there in an apartment building on the very street that Underbelly 3 will be set) we recognize that the issues being raised by this remarkable series aren’t isolated to particular cities, neighbourhoods or time-periods. In closing, and to contemplate our own investment in this show, it’s worth reflecting on the intimate bond that linked the fate of fictionalised Detective Steve Owen (Rodger Corser) of the Purana Task Force and the upstart Carl Williams. The ambition shared by the two men – one who makes a point of his clean, white collar image, the other who wears shorts and thongs to most of his business meetings – asks us to question how very different they are. Williams oversees an appalling amount of bloodshed to maintain his achieved status, just as Owen acknowledges that attending the funerals of gang members is an important networking event and career stepping stone. A lingering lesson from Underbelly is that the white collar professional and the suburban entrepreneur have more than a little in common, particularly in the desire for self-motivated class mobility that many would claim as the commendable aspirational spirit of the decade. To understand the winners in the cultural economy of infamy this paper has outlined, we might further speculate on the fate of the two actors who filled these roles since filming ceased. Gyton Grantley, QUT

Creative Industries graduate and now multiple award winner for depicting the criminal

Carl Williams, will star in the next season of East West 101 – marking the tradition from commercial to high-brow drama. Rodger Corser was last seen in a Hyundai commercial. References

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