The Lost Tangerine Jacket MEDIA KIT

INTRODUCTION Much has been documented and archived and of course written about the abduction and murder of activist, journalist and myth Juanita Nielson and my aim has been to theatricalise theories past and invent passions new, since there never has been so passionate a tale as hers, which rocked Sydney a little more than forty years ago. What exactly happened and who precisely did what isn’t my scene, as Hippies with herpes thought they said in 1975 on American Independence Day when the poor thing vanished; last seen it seems by a guy called Eddie Trigg who murdered her – or did he? He was a bar room manager in a seedy grog den called the VIP Lounge, a decent vomit from reception at The Carousel Cabaret, and it seems he was both assassin and gifted memoirist, since his incredible prose style was discovered by the cops when he croaked it. (The characters in the unreal life of Juanita Nielsen are realer than the pulp fiction of the time; and you simply cannot overwrite them.) She was heroic of course to write so bravely against police on the take as well as police really getting off on assisting evictions in the Cross and Darlinghurst; morally of course the cops ought to have helped the poor but, I mean, when in history have they ever? In my long legged life around the Cross and all other places I have never witnessed one single incident of a copper helping anyone to anything but a hiding. And now in the night there is only yourself and myself left all alone to try and figure out who killed the thing they loved. Her mythology leaps and flowers in many roses; the crystal petals breaking into many tears from all who remember or misremember her. Her moral outrage is interesting because the 1970s were practically immoral, with pornography more popular than school study and schoolchildren encouraged to view video filth in twenty-cent booths rather than look at Leichardt in Theatre by Francis Webb. Coming from melancholic, perpetually morbid Melbourne one doesn’t have the foggiest clue about life until one hops on a rocking and rolling dangerously unseaworthy wooden ferry and quickly drowns en route to Manly, to the studied boredom of others on that leaky tub who read the Daily Telegraph through a wall of stinging brine. They only read of murder since that’s all there is in Sydney and then they get to Manly and swear because it’s too much like Melbourne anyway and there’s nothing to do except die. I lived in Sydney during the vigorous and Valium-imbibing 1970s, reduced by circumstances to hand delivering in-house mail for rock station 2JJ and the ABC in Upper Forbes Street in Darlinghurst. The atmospherics of the city had to do with tripping over preposterous Moreton Bay fig tree roots that grew out of burst asphalt footpaths while hundreds of murder victims tried to tell me who killed Juanita Nielsen in the brilliant sunshine of Sussex Street – or Pitt Street, rather. I adored Pitt Street for its crude name alone and always rather imagined I should enjoy being buried there at the age of one hundred. In mid-1975, as I dashed hither and thither at work, which was sorting and delivering mail and scurrying up horses of stairs at Broadcast House because the lifts were always out, the gnawing gossip was nothing but the latest assassination theories on who murdered who in William Street just the other day; or else who forgot to murder who as they had a party on or a house-warming or a grog-up in ibis-obsessed Hyde Park, which is where I read Francis Webb’s insanely good poetry, composed in a nut house. I got caught up (without ever resisting, by the way) in the street gossip and, that being my favourite kind of theatre anyway, I began to write into my memory the sorts of human English sentences ordinary drug addicts were saying about Juanita Nielson as they shot up their drugs or sipped a glass in some syphilitic bar in Taylor Square or wherever I happened to be. I wanted some day to compose a new stage play about her, written in some entirely new way, depicting the love and pathos I felt – luckily or unluckily – for her, shot dead in a seedy club only a joint away from her own tiny neat terrace home situated at 202 Victoria Street. I still expect her to turn up there aged eighty or more in her foot- high pumps and yard-long eyelashes, her enigma entirely intact. She never died. The books and the fictionalised films go one way but I go altogether another, which is into the natural light from the doorway of common knowledge or anti-history. The last time I was in Sydney writing my new play for Currency Press I was invited unluckily by a winner of the Archibald Prize (what could be worse?) to a mesmeric meeting of a Palaeolithic Sydney history club called the Fossils at the Old Glebe Point Road Public Library. They rabbited on about detente for six hours at least but no one talked to me. They were so desperately alienated from the rest of Sydney society they tried hard to flog their own out-of-print histories to one another, to no avail. My back ached just looking at them and there was no coffee. Just eye-watering pamphlets and terrible tits. The evening proved interminable but it did me some good in one respect and that was to renew my hatred of verifiable, factual history. History must be interesting or it ought to be forgotten. If something is true then it happened, but when you live in a bleak and crummy rooming house and are a year behind in rental, who really needs to remember anything other than their own father’s name or mother’s reputation or what a rotten pineapple tastes like? I became besotted by the story about the vanished heiress with the extreme makeover and matching wig and wondered in 1975 when I lived in the Cross just what it would have been like to be her. Who was she exactly? Did Eddie Trigg murder her on the say-so of Abe Saffron as folks said on stormy ferries or aboard crumpled drunken taxis to North Shore parties? In my room I liked reading the Kings Cross Whisper (what a great name!) and I wish it still existed as there is nothing like it in the year 2016. I recall a grim letter to the editor once that I shall roughly paraphrase as an indication of the house style. ‘Dear Whisper Letters Editor, I live in Bayswater Road with my so-called boyfriend named Ken and do you think he will pick up after him? HE WILL NOT! NO MATTER WHAT I DO HE BLOOMING-WELL LEAVES HIS BRA AND PANTS ALL OVER THE SHOP! WHAT AM I TO DO WITH THIS PIG OF A MAN? Distressed, Bayswater Road’. It is not the forensic truth I am interested in but the vox pop of Kings Cross, voices that say all they please about the abduction and murder of one of their own upon the fourth of July, forty-one years ago this year. It is not the worthy letter I have drawn from, nor well- made newspaper article, complete with gory illustration of a slain girl, claiming she was brave to stand up against Abe Saffron and his cobber Frank Theeman the developer who destroyed the Cross with the help of criminal admirers. It is the ordinary shop keepers and round-the-clock taxi drivers that I am paraphrasing in my play called Juanita, written for Currency Press as their writer in residence. It is not so much what really happened as the hipster language of 1975 that intrigues me enough to write a new play looking into steamy evenings in the tacky strip joints of the Cross where once I was moron enough to pay an old moll forty bucks for diseased intercourse because I got wiped at a Channel 9 Christmas party. She took an hour to get her kit off and demanded payment by credit but was too doped-up to do the card. She demanded cash next and said, as I remember, ‘The more you pay the better it is!’ I disputed that and left. And yet I never stopped loving Sydney and always remember the smell of Circular Quay and the stormy ferry crossings past the heads on my way to Manly; is it still there? Hardly anything spiritual or geographical remains of the oId Sydney my grandmother took me to when I was just eleven and it blew my mind. Her name was Gert, for Gertrude, and the way she waved her arm at the Harbour Bridge was the kind of gesture one makes when one owns something splendid; and I therefore have inherited from her that same holy possessiveness that no one can thieve from you. It’s a sense of place that feeds the grass of love. It is a very great thing that young Juanita posed for the lurid cover of a Carter Brown paperback only to be murdered in the same genre. It was as if she were gifted with foreknowledge, prescient enough to see her brilliant career would end with a thud. Why has neither the culprit nor her poor body ever been found in all these yearning years? Listening to her cultivated and rather beautiful voice on YouTube, it is memorable not just because it is mellifluous but because it is full of hope mixed with an exaltation of Darlinghurst, where she knew just about everyone on a first-name basis. And listening, it can’t help but occur to you that she is worth remembering and you should, if you can do it, turn her into a play, although that play would have to be as unreal as the year 1975: the sacking of Gough and the war in Vietnam over and the abduction and murder of Juanita Nielsen all somehow blended into one event. Bizarre. We should all be remembered. Currency Press has published both my plays on Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in our country. When the Playbox Theatre Company commissioned the second of those plays about that awful execution, I at once called it Remember Ronald Ryan; because he above all others really should be remembered for the barbarity that was done so obscenely in the name of justice. Juanita must also be remembered and it always seems to me that the art of live theatre is the only way to truly remember anything – or anyone, more to the point. I have scoured all the available literature on her story and her tragedy but the best information has come straight out of the gutter. I dare not name my sources except to admit that they come, reliably informed, from bus stops and milk bars and funerals and ferries all pitching about in a tempest on the rocky swell to Manly.

Barry Leonard Dickins Melbourne 2016 Print Article: Trigg takes truth behind murder to grave http://www.smh.com.au/action/printArticle?id=4075904

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Neil Mercer Published: March 3, 2013 - 3:00AM

Eddie Trigg died eight days ago. He was alone in his small, clean and tidy room at the Abbotts Hotel in Waterloo.

According to police, there are no suspicious circumstances.

His death, at 72, would be unremarkable but for the fact he was the last person to see the heiress and anti-development campaigner, Juanita Nielsen, alive.

That was at the Carousel nightclub in Kings Cross on July 4, 1975. Indeed, Trigg may well be the person who killed her, acting on the wishes of his nightclub boss and a wealthy developer.

With his lonely, alcoholic death, those secrets have been taken to the grave and the chances of the case being resolved, or of Nielsen's remains being found, are now negligible.

Fairfax Media has been told the homicide squad's cold case team was notified of Trigg's death in case he left any clues - such as a manuscript for a book he was rumoured to be writing.

If it ever existed, it hasn't yet been found. Nor has Nielsen's body. No one has ever been charged with her murder.

The disappearance of Nielsen, who vigorously opposed high-rise development in Victoria Street, Potts Point, raised issues of corruption and cronyism in Sydney long before the Wood Royal Commission into the NSW police, and long before anyone had heard of Eddie Obeid.

Born in 1937, Juanita Nielsen was a member of a wealthy family that ran the retailer Mark Foy's. She was independent, privileged and precocious.

In his book, Killing Juanita, author Peter Rees describes a meeting between her and one of her cousins at a family wedding in Bellevue Hill.

"During the evening," the cousin recalled, "this gorgeous creature who looked like a French model and sounded like Tallulah Bankhead came up to me and said 'Darling, could you get me a whiskey please?

"The head waiter told me she couldn't have one. I asked why. He said 'she's only 12'."

In the 1970s, living in a terrace at 202 Victoria Street, she started a local newspaper called Now, which was mostly advertorial.

But she took a strong stance against the high-rise development proposed by the businessman Frank Theeman, which would have seen the demolition of many of the stately terraces in Victoria Street.

As the 1983 inquest into her death heard, it was a tumultuous time. Residents opposing the massive development clashed with police and ''heavies'' hired by Theeman. Many were fearful and with good reason. One protester, Arthur King, was thrown in the boot of a car and kidnapped. Fortunately, he survived.

A barrister, John Basten, told the inquest: "There was an air of violence and confrontation in the street."

The Builders Labourers Federation supported the residents, imposing green bans that delayed Mr Theeman's controversial proposal.

Counsel for the Nielsen estate, Neil Newton, said Theeman had the motive to get rid of Nielsen because she was holding up his project and costing him money.

"Hers was the voice that would not be stilled and hers were the hands that would not cease to write in opposition," he said.

The court heard that Theeman was on friendly terms with Jim Anderson, the manager of the Carousel and other Kings Cross

1 of 2 28/04/2016 10:22 AM Print Article: Trigg takes truth behind murder to grave http://www.smh.com.au/action/printArticle?id=4075904

clubs. Anderson had a fearsome reputation in the red-light area, partly because he had shot and killed standover man Donny ''The Glove'' Smith and partly because Anderson worked for the notorious Abe Saffron.

Anderson in turn had employed Trigg at the Carousel Cabaret. Trigg had a troubled childhood and was placed in an institution. He went on to become a small-time criminal. In July, 1975, he was managing the Carousel's VIP bar.

And that is where Nielsen went on July 4, the last day of her life, ostensibly to discuss the Carousel placing advertising in her paper.

Police eventually charged Trigg and two others with conspiracy to abduct Nielsen but they didn't have enough evidence to go one step further and say who had actually committed the murder.

In 1983, Trigg surprised everyone by pleading guilty to the conspiracy charge. He was sentenced to three years' jail with non-parole of 15 months. He later insisted he was innocent.

Rees said on Friday Trigg "was a heartbeat from Juanita's final moments.'' He said he believed it was Trigg who killed Nielsen and disposed of her body at the behest of Anderson who in turn was doing the bidding of Theeman.

Theeman and Anderson always denied any involvement in the killing. Both are now dead.

Police said Trigg was found in his room at the Abbotts Hotel about 11.45pm on Saturday, February 23.

"He basically drank there every day. I got the impression he smoked and drank himself to death," a police source said.

"It's a bit of a sad day really, Eddie taking it to the grave. It doesn't leave many options."

Down, but maybe not totally out. Officially, the Strike Force Euclid will remain ''active''. Anyone with information is urged to contact the police.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/trigg-takes-truth-behind-murder-to-grave-20130302-2fczk.html

2 of 2 28/04/2016 10:22 AM NIELSEN, JUANITA JOAN (1937–1975) BY RICHARD MORRIS This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 15, (MUP), 2000

Juanita Joan Nielsen (1937-1975), publisher and urban conservationist, was born on 22 April 1937 at New Lambton, Newcastle, New South Wales, daughter of Neil Donovan Smith, English-born heir to the fortune of Kathleen Sophia Foy, and his wife Vilma Grace, née Meares, who was born in Sydney. Juanita was a great-granddaughter of Mark Foy; her father was a major shareholder in Mark Foy’s Ltd. Her parents separated soon after her birth and she was raised by her mother at Killara, Sydney. Educated at various schools, including Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Pymble, she obtained her Intermediate certificate in 1952 and worked at Mark Foy’s as a glove model before leaving Australia in 1959. While abroad, she married Jorgen Fritz Nielsen, a Danish merchant seaman. They solemnized their union in 1962 in a Shinto ceremony at Kobe City, Japan, but were to be divorced in 1967. After living in Morocco and Denmark, Juanita returned alone to Sydney in 1965 and opened the ‘Gear Box’ fashion boutique in Mark Foy’s city store. She was briefly estranged from her father for leading an unsuccessful shareholders’ revolt against a takeover offer ($4 million) by McDowell’s Ltd for Mark Foy’s in 1968. Following their reconciliation, her father bought her a terrace house in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, and a local newspaper, Now, which she published from her home. Wearing distinctive clothes and a ‘beehive’ wig, Nielsen modelled fashions and hair styles for her newspaper’s feature pages. She also conducted a vigorous editorial campaign in support of the ‘green ban’ movement against the redevelopment of Victoria Street by F. W. Theeman’s real-estate company, Victoria Point Pty Ltd. With her neighbour and trade- union activist Jack (‘Mick’) Fowler, she played a prominent role in mobilizing local residents against the demolition of Victoria Street’s historic terraces and the eviction of their tenants. Juanita Nielsen vanished on 4 July 1975 after visiting the Carousel (previously Les Girls)—a transvestite nightclub and underworld haunt at Kings Cross—on advertising business for Now. Attempts to find her or her corpse proved fruitless. Despite public outcry, the mystery remained a major case in the annals of unsolved Australian crimes. Over the years some information about the circumstances of her presumed abduction and murder came to light. Two persons connected with the Carousel nightclub were convicted (one in 1981, the other in 1983) on charges of conspiracy to abduct Juanita Nielsen on an earlier occasion. The trials did not directly involve events on the day she vanished. In July 1983 the Sydney City Council opened a recreation centre in the Juanita Nielsen Building, near her former residence at Woolloomooloo. It was not until 10 November 1983 that a coroner and jury of six declared that Nielsen had died ‘on or shortly after 4 July 1975’. They were unable to name ‘the place of death or the manner and cause of death’, but found ‘evidence to show that the police inquiries were inhibited by an atmosphere of corruption, real or imagined, that existed at the time’. In 1994 the Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority further castigated investigative ineptitude in the case and emphasized links between her presumed murder, property developers and the criminal milieu at Kings Cross. THEEMAN , FRANK WILLIAM (1913–1989) BY G. N. HAWKER This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 18, (MUP), 2012

Frank William Theeman (1913-1989), businessman and land developer, was born on 28 May 1913 in Vienna, son of Jewish parents Arthur Thiemann (d.1936), bank officer, and his wife Frieda, née Donreich, and was named Franz Wilhelm. Franz worked in the family’s textile- manufacturing business until 1938, when the Nazis seized it. On 31 July that year at the Döbling Synagogue, Vienna, he married Gisela Spiegel, a milliner’s assistant. In November he and his mother were interned. Released after ten days on condition that he leave Austria, he travelled with his wife to Shanghai, China, and awaited permission to enter Australia. In April 1939 they arrived in Sydney and were naturalised in 1944, after which they changed the spelling of their surname to Theeman. His mother died in 1945 in Mauthausen camp. On the voyage, by his own account, Theeman had met an Australian businessman and racehorse owner, Timothy O’Sullivan, who lent him £1000 with which he established a hosiery business, Osti Pty Ltd, in Sydney; the name is formed from the phonetic beginning of O’Sullivan’s and Theeman’s surnames. Starting with six sewing machines sent from Vienna, Theeman built the business into one of the three largest of its kind in Australia. It was the first Australian manufacturer to produce and treat nylon fabric and turn it into clothing. He donated an award for ‘Bri-nylon’ lingerie, comprising a gold medal in the shape of a star set with a single diamond. In 1970 he sold his family’s interests in Osti Holdings Ltd to Dunlop Australia Ltd, for $3.5 million but remained as chairman and managing director. Theeman had developed close political connections with the Liberal Party of Australia and saw opportunities in the Liberal ascension to power in New South Wales in 1965, when planning restrictions were eased to open residential areas to commercial development. He formed a family-controlled company, Victoria Point Pty Ltd, to focus on property development. Between March 1970 and June 1971 Theeman spent $7 million ($1.6 million of his own money) buying properties in Victoria and Brougham streets, Kings Cross, emphasising his vision of Victoria Street as a ‘beautiful tree lined street close to the city which needed rehabilitation’. Three 45-storey towers and a 15-storey office block were originally planned, requiring the demolition of all existing buildings in the area. Opposition from residents, who formed an action group, was strong. The State branch of the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation imposed green bans. Some tenants were evicted amid allegations of force and intimidation while others refused to leave; squatters entered the vacant buildings. The delays cost Theeman dearly: by 1975 he was paying $16,800 a week in interest charges on borrowed money. The green bans were largely lifted in April-May 1975 and the city, State and Federal governments agreed to the development of the Woolloomooloo basin in June. Juanita Nielsen, owner of the local newspaper Now and a leading opponent of the development, continued to protest. She was last seen on 4 July 1975 and was presumed dead. Her body was not found. In 1994 the Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority, which investigated the affairs of James McCartney Anderson—a notorious Sydney figure—noted that Theeman had paid a substantial sum to Anderson, shortly before Nielsen’s disappearance. Theeman had said that the money was to set up one of his sons in business. In the New South Wales Legislative Assembly the Independent member John Hatton hinted at an answer believed by many when he said that ‘Mrs Nielsen was last seen alive in a club owned by Abe Saffron and run by Jim Anderson, a friend of the developer of Victoria Street, Mr Frank Theeman’. A contrary view was expressed by Padraic P. McGuinness, a journalist and sometime resident of Victoria Street, who argued that there was no reason, other than the payment to Anderson, ‘to suspect Theeman of culpability, except in encouraging Anderson and his friends in their threats and violence against the protesters’. Theeman had protested his innocence over Nielsen’s disappearance. The first stage of the Victoria Street complex was completed in 1978. He claimed in 1983 at the inquest into Nielsen’s death that the project had realised a healthy profit. Short, early balding and a toupee wearer, Theeman was invariably expensively dressed; a vain man, he had a reputation for vigorous sexuality. He was a keen bridge player, who spent heavily in recruiting the best professionals to his tournament teams. In 1983 he was a member of the Australian bridge team. Survived by his wife and their three daughters and two sons, he died on 24 January 1989 at Darlinghurst and was buried in the Jewish section of Northern Suburbs cemetery. Print Article: Juanita Neilsen: The Kings Cross crusader who disappear... http://www.smh.com.au/action/printArticle?id=997755978

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Barry Dickins Published: July 5, 2015 - 12:15AM

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the death by murder of vanished heiress Juanita Nielsen, who fought courageously against developers of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross during the early 1970s when police corruption was almost breath taking. But nobody knows who took her breath away; or if there are people who do know, they're silent upon the matter.

She wrote editorials against those in charge of the destruction of Victoria Street from her modest cottage in it, so it wasn't far to go to work, her work being a crusade. It is hard to kill an enigma though, and her abduction around midday all those years ago has only intensified people's grief for her martyrdom and the timeless pain of remembrances engraved into footpaths and back alleys.

She loved most of the ordinary tenants of The Cross to a point of devotion that's possibly biblical. She loved the children of those ramshackle streets so overcrowded that they played literally with no room to kick a broken tennis ball or wrestle one another. She adored the higgledy-piggledy ad-libbed slums as they contained really cherubic characters who laughed as much as she did herself.

Unluckily, some of the just-as-real characters around in 1975 were thugs and gangsters in the pay of her nemesis Abe Saffron, who owned just about everything in town, including allegiances of police fond of a quick buck followed by a quick schooner. It is nigh on impossible to believe but not one single copper displayed the slightest concern over Juanita's unparalleled disappearance.

Juanita kept the appointment with Eddie Trigg, night manager of The Carousel Club to chat about advertising in her paper Now And Then!, which circulated around The Cross and was outspoken in criticism of rapid developers such as Frank Theeman, the brother-in-horror of Abe Saffron. Friends of Juanita were amazed she kept the appointment in the heart of her enemies' camp.

After 11 that July 4 morning 40 years ago , she was never seen again and there are now endless rationales as to what happened, who did what. The effect is rather like the intoxication of some untested opiate. Eddie Trigg was the last person to see her alive, it is said; he shot her too, it is said; but it could have been anyone around town keen on a bloodied envelope stuffed with money.

Eddie gave her a cup of tea as he and Juanita discussed a half-page of advertising the club wanted to take out. It could have been spiked because not long later a friend of hers, a hairdresser over the road from The Carousel Club said she'd seen Juanita but her famed bouffant was flat so whoever it was could've been an impersonator.

This story is beginning to sound like a Carter Brown murder-mystery and it really should as Juanita once posed for one of its gaudy covers, not for payment but because she felt like it.

Not long after her abduction, her favourite leather jacket was found all scratched on a freeway not far away in company with her makeup and her notebook; as though she had cast this stuff out the window to alert passers-by to her plight.

Her bones have never been found and her name rebounds around Sydney like a murmur; if by a common miracle she wandered up William Street to see what the fuss was about she'd be 78 years of mystery and history and horror.

I worked in The Cross in the same year, 1975, when Juanita disappeared and I've always wanted to write a stage play to fetch her back to life through literature, the only way a resurrection is possible outside heaven or hell I suppose, and she lived in both of them, that much is certain.

I am the playwright-in-residence at Currency Press in Redfern this year and am listening to her friends with my ears cleaned out good and proper. Hers is a life surely to be remembered and that is the provenance of the theatre in my opinion at least. She is well worth our tears.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/juanita-neilsen-the-kings-cross-crusader-who-disappeared-40-years- ago-20150702-gi1dfu.html

1 of 1 28/04/2016 10:19 AM IN MEMORY OF VICTORIA STREET IAN MILLISS AND TERESA BRENNAN http://www.ianmilliss.com

When the National Trust originally classified Victoria Street, Kings Cross they described it as the ‘Montmartre of Sydney’. The epithet is appropriate for those who see the street as Victorian architecture with a residential Who’s Who that has included most of Australia’s leading writers and artists. The residents have seen it differently. To them the atmosphere of the street is more important than its fabric. While the ‘community’ concept is gaining currency with the resident action movement, an actual community has existed in Victoria Street for over fifty years. One resident who lived there for ten years described the Victoria Street of the late fifties as full of pensioners, single parent families, Kings Cross identities and young people in transit. While the rest of the Cross fell victim to R and R and toy koala bears, Victoria Street remained unchanged. ‘It was the same until ten months ago. I started off as an illegal tenant in No. 67 and stayed. I learned who the permanent tenants were. We knew when a tenant moved in and wondered who it was. We saw kids doing midnight flits with a suitcase in one hand and a cat in the other.’ Unlike most other inner city suburbs Victoria Street was neither ‘restored’ nor demolished. It remained as a low-rent residential area. By the end of 1972, Frank Theeman, a would-be developer, had bought all the houses in the northern end of the street. This was the section where even the bathroom windows gave a picture post-card view of the city and harbour. In April 1973 all but twelve of the four hundred tenants were evicted in one week. Some of them had lived there for over forty years, but most were unfamiliar with their legal rights. When Theeman’s agents told them the buildings were condemned and shortly to be demolished, they moved, either to the outer western suburbs or to smaller and dearer rooms in the inner city. The NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation imposed a Green Ran, preventing either demolition or construction. In the following weeks, however, vandalism and a series of fires made many of the houses uninhabitable. In June the National Trust approved a revised plan presented by Theeman which incorporated the facades of the more ‘historic’ buildings in a ‘low high-rise’ development. Since the Victoria Street Action Group was also concerned with preserving low- rent housing, the Trust’s decision was unacceptable. However, this decision meant the loss of ‘respectable’ support for the group and confusion to the BLF whose own respectability was largely dependent on their assertion that bans ‘gave teeth’ to the National Trust. The Action Group decided squatting would draw public attention to the need for low-income housing in the inner city, and also prevent further damage to the buildings. The squatting commenced on June 10, 1973. By the end of 1973, after six months of squatting, there were a hundred residents in the street, including some former tenants. In July, Theeman took legal action against one squatter, John Cox; charging him with trespass. He was convicted and appealed. As long as the Cox case was sub judice the squatters enjoyed some security. As Cox said: ‘A summons is as good as a 5A lease.’ In December, with unprecedented speed, Cox’s final appeal was quashed. The squatters prepared for police action. With the first rumours of eviction, barricading began, using materials which sympathetic rank and file builders’ labourers had scrounged from city building sites. Depression resulting from uncertainty set in. The barricading continued for three weeks, and as time discredited particular rumours, many became convinced that nothing would happen. Still, some people moved out. Most squatters shifted those possessions they wanted to keep. Squatters organised a phone tree designed to get as many people as possible onto the street as soon as there was any action. Flags were made in green (for bans), red and black. A siren was installed, and residents patrolled the street to activate both siren and phone tree when necessary. One of Theeman’s associates, Joe Meisner, self-styled world karate champion, was recruiting men to evict the squatters. On Sunday, December 29, one of those approached informed a member of the action group that Meisner had organised several men for the job, and that the police would close off the street while they broke into the houses. The barricading continued with more urgency. On Wednesday, January 2, a policeman informed his brother, a BL, that hundreds of police were being sent to Victoria Street the following morning. That night another thirty people stayed with the fifty remaining squatters. At 6.20 am on Thursday morning, a nearby resident informed them that there were over two hundred police and several paddy wagons massing outside Darlmghurst police station. The last of the scaffolding was put into place, and the core numbers on the phone tree were alerted. Police arrived at both ends of the street with Meisner’s recruits, described in Theeman’s press handout as ‘controllers’. The ‘controllers’ appearance was large and very beery. They sported sledge hammers, axes, and crow-bars. They shook hands with the police and both groups moved towards the houses. At No. 57 they took five minutes to open an unlocked gate with a crow-bar. As they broke into the house one resident climbed through the roof into the more securely barricaded No. 59. The controllers took thirty minutes to axe their way into this house. The eleven residents had retired to a back room where they drank beer and discarded all defence plans. Once inside the building, the controllers ignored the squatters and commenced tearing open doors off their hinges, smashing fittings, plumbing and wiring. When theresidents refused to leave they were arrested by police. Squatters were barricaded in thirteen buildings, but the controllers broke into six additional buildings which Theeman had barricaded six months earlier to keep out squatters. In No. 115 the squatters headed for the roof of the three-storey building, and two climbed to the top of the chimneys. The controllers broke into another house through the roof, and there cut a hole through to the flat below. The couple living there turned a hose on them, and the controllers retaliated with caustic soda. By 8.30 am, forty squatters were in jail and hundreds of people were demonstrating in the street. Two squatters, Keith Mullins and Con Papadatos, were still on the chimneys of No. 115. The controllers attempted to demolish the chimneys from underneath Keith and had to be stopped by police. The police rescue squad attempted to remove the two but they were still there when the squatters were released from jail at 4.30 pm. An elderly man not previously involved approached some of the squatters and gave them five dollars to ‘buy everyone a drink when its over.’ By 5.30 pm the crowd of sympathizers concentrated on the footpath opposite No. 115. Facing them on the other footpath were over 100 police and thirty controllers. At nightfall the police trained a spotlight on the demonstrators. This effectively prevented them from watching Keith and Con, but it provided the two men with an excellent view of their supporters, who then staged an impromptu concert. The crowd sang appropriate numbers such as “Chim Chiminee” and improvised new verses for old songs. Some people played guitars while others banged saucepans collected from the belongings piled in the street. When people were too hoarse to sing they went on to the road and danced. Shortly after, BLF secretary, Joe Owens, was arrested for obstruction, bringing the total arrests outside the houses to fourteen. At 1.00 pm, after seventeen hours on the chimneys, Keith and Con announced that they were coming down. A meeting of builders’ labourers and squatters had earlier planned a mass rally at Kings Cross on Monday January 7, to discuss the rights of low-income earners to live in the inner city. After Keith and Con were arrested, the action group decided to picket the street, at least until the time of the rally, as two members of the group, both legal tenants, remained in the houses.

At dawn on Friday, January 4, Elvis Kipman, a former squatter, climbed onto a chimney on No. 113. The controllers attempted to shift him by lighting a fire below. Elvis shoved his pillows and blankets down the chimney and smoked the men out of the building. The police climbed onto the roof, handcuffed him and proceeded to demolish the chimney around him. Later that day a fifty-year old woman in a neatly lettered smock joined the picketers. It read: ‘Sydney law/ One for the Rich. One for the Poor.’