The House That Was Eureka (18 page)

The most sensational eviction battle Sydney has ever known was fought between 40 policemen and 18 Communists at 203 Liberty Street, Newtown, yesterday morning. All the defenders were injured, some seriously, and at least 15 of the police were treated by ambulance officials.

Only one man was hit by bullets fired at the walls of the house by the police, and it is not known how the injury was inflicted. Probably the wounded man was struck by a bullet which had been deflected in its path.

Entrenched behind barbed wire and sandbags, the defenders rained stones weighing several pounds from the top floor of the building on to the heads of the attacking police, who were attempting to execute an eviction order.

After a desperate battle, in which iron bars, piping, rude bludgeons, and chairs were used by the defenders, and batons by the police, the defenders were dragged, almost insensible, to the waiting patrol waggons.

Shortly before dawn, 50 police and detectives approached the building.

The two-storied house, a terrace, was fantastically barricaded on the outside by barbed wire. All doors and windows on the ground floor were reinforced with towering stacks of sandbags which reached to the ceilings. Every stack was about 6 feet thick at the floor and weighed probably half a ton.

When police reached the pavement outside the front fence, a terrible shower of stones rained down on to their heads.

After a short consultation, the police drew their revolvers. At a word of command they commenced firing steadily at the balcony railing behind which the men were crouched.

Leaving one group to continue the barrage, another group of police led by the Inspector in charge knocked upon the door of the adjoining terrace at 201 and were admitted by a woman, who is the owner of both properties.

Shortly afterwards, five police climbed from the balcony of 201 to the balcony of the besieged house, and succeeded in driving the defenders inside.

Were it not for the help of the landlady, the inspector in charge stated later, the police task would have been extraordinarily more difficult, so well barricaded was the house.

Meanwhile, a further body of police approached the house from a back lane and made a concerted rush on the back door.

By this time, summoned by the frantic calls for help from the guards on the ground floor, most of the men on the top floor rushed down the staircase to the small dining-room. It was here, in near-darkness, that the terrible hand-to-hand combat occurred.

Diving one by one through the narrow breach in the sandbags, the police steadily met the terrific onslaught of the besieged men.

Wielding bludgeons improvised from iron bars, palings, and wooden batons pulled from wrecked furniture, the guards made frantic efforts to repel the invading police.

The room was absolutely bathed in blood. Practically every man was bleeding from one or more wounds. Insensible men lay on the floor, while comrades and foes alike trampled on them. The walls were spattered and daubed with blood stained hands.

One by one the defenders fell. Those who were still on their feet were overpowered, and handcuffed.

From the moment of the police arrival, a crowd hostile to the police, numbering many thousands, began to gather in Liberty Street. They filled the street for a quarter of a mile on each side of the building until squads of police drove them back about 200 yards and police cordons were thrown across the roadway.

At times the huge crowd threatened to become out of hand. It was definitely antagonistic to the police. When constables emerged from the back of the building with their faces covered in blood, the crowd hooted and shouted insulting remarks. When the defenders were led out they were cheered. When one patrol waggon containing prisoners was being driven away, people standing well back in the crowd hurled stones at the police driver.

An examination of the house revealed a crude sign over the front door, re-naming the house ‘The Eureka Stockade’.

This was an example, the Inspector in charge stated, of how foreign Communists would even pervert glorious moments in Australia’s history for their own nefarious ends.

(In the Eureka Stockade of 1854, the foundation stones of Australian democracy were laid when miners gallantly fought against armed troopers).

Practically every combatant was treated by the Newtown Ambulance at Newtown Police Station, after which the majority of the defenders were taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

Twelve police suffered injuries to practically every part of their bodies and 2 were taken to hospital in police motor cars.

Of the 18 defenders, the most seriously injured were: Michael Cruise, 18, shot wound in left arm, cerebral concussion and lacerations to head; Padraic Cruise, 41, head injuries; Lester Dacey, 54, head injuries; Joseph Isaacs, 30, fractured hand; John Murchison, 31, fractured skull; Brendan Riley, 43, head injuries; John Kennet, 19, head injuries; Cecil Kennet 21, head injuries; Gino Bellotti, 35, head injuries; Jack Finley, 26, head injuries; Reg Bly, 29, fractured skull.

The 18 men arrested were charged that, being armed with sticks, staves and other weapons, they riotously assembled to disturb the peace, and continued to riot for half an hour.

This is the first time a charge of Common Law Riot has been brought in Australia.

It is believed that the tenant, Padraic Cruise, migrated to Australia in 1916 after being in trouble with the authorities in Ireland.

It is alleged that after the police commenced to fire upon the front of the house and shortly before they made their way onto the balcony, a gunman was seen on the balcony, pointing a gun down at the police.

Police state that the gunman appeared to be a young man of pale complexion, and is not one of the pickets arrested.

No gun has been found on the premises, despite careful police searches. The arrested men deny all knowledge of a nineteenth picket.

The alleged escape of the man despite the fact that the front entrance, the back yard and the back lane of the premises were completely surrounded by police is described by police as a ‘mystery’.

In the search for the gunman police discovered a young girl cowering in a cupboard, but careful questioning revealed that she’d seen nothing of the battle.

The police are still conducting their enquiries.

Noel and Evie sat on the bed, reading together. Every so often, Noel would look quickly at Evie, or Evie would glance fast at Noel. ‘
Help from landlady
,’ Noel read out loud, and they knew they were thinking the same thing. Then right at the end Noel began to hiccough badly.
Search for gunman
. He felt Evie tense, next to him.

‘
Police discovered a young girl cowering in a cupboard
,’ Evie read out loud and shuddered.

Neither of them spoke to Sharnda of the gun they’d found. Neither spoke of dreams, or the despot.

‘Did they find him,’ Noel spluttered through his hiccoughs, ‘that gunman?’

‘No,’ said Sharnda. ‘If he existed.’

‘What do you mean?’ Evie demanded.

Sharnda told them then that she’d scoured the papers for any account of police finding a gunman, but there was nothing. Over the next four days the Search for the Mystery Gunman had got three more mentions in the
Sydney Morning News –
all along the ‘police-are-conducting-their-inquiries’ line – a passionate but uninformational account in
Black
’
s Weekly
, and an even more colourful editorial in the worst of the afternoon rags…

The search for the mysterious Communist Gunman, the nineteenth picket who according to police disappeared from the embattled house in Liberty Street Newtown last Thursday, is mystifying Sydney’s police.

Meanwhile, residents of Newtown and neighbouring suburbs are unable to sleep at night for fear lest the gunman pay them a mysterious visit.

Sydney police report increased Communistic activity in Newtown lately, as these red rats of revolution capitalise upon the sad plight of our nation and attempt to stir up the Australian working man with their imported foreign lies.

Proof of their trouble-making is shown by the fact that in the recent eviction riot over a Newtown house police drew their revolvers to quell an unruly mob.

Sydneysiders might well ask themselves if they haven’t a democratic right to sleep peacefully in their beds without attacks to property and possibly life and limb being perpetrated around them by mysterious gunmen and the rest of this red rubbish from the European sewers.

Despite sickness and hiccoughs, Noel laughed. Felt proud, too. That was him, the Mystery Gunman that made people write about him so funnily. That was Noel. He did’nt know how it was him, but he knew it’d been him with the gun.

‘And after that,’ Sharnda said, ‘there wasn’t any more. No further mentions of a search, and no statement that the search had stopped either. The only thing that seems to me to make any sense of the whole thing is the denial that there’d ever been a gunman, that the Communist Party’s
Workers’ Voice
put out.’

Since Thursday’s violence by the armed forces of the state these same forces have not been content to leave well enough alone but have been harrassing the arrested men and also members of the UWM and the tenant’s family in their so-called search for a so-called mystery gunman.

UWM leaders wish to make it clear that the mystery gunman is a mystery indeed, except in the minds of our so-called public protectors.

The UWM opposes the use of guns and the only guns present at Liberty Street were those in the hands of our so-called public protectors.

This search is a deliberate piece of intimidation, enabling police to obtain warrants to search the homes of UWM activists. It is also a deliberate attempt by police to put the blame for Thursday’s violence upon UWM pickets, by suggesting to the public that police violence was necessary to quell the disturbance.

Yet even if the nineteenth picket did exist, which he didn’t, it is shown in the police’s own account, published in the
Sydney Morning News
, that the alleged gunman only
pointed
a gun, and that he allegedly did this only
after
police fired their revolvers.

The fact that there was no gunman is proved by police failure to produce either gun or gunman despite the fact that they had the house in Liberty Street surrounded.

UWM leaders predict that police will allow the matter to drop because of the embarrassment that will be caused by their failure to find a man who does not exist.

In the meantime however the police interrogation has caused two female members of the tenant’s family to require medical attention.

Noel held his nose, held his breath, did a headstand on the bed to stop his hiccoughs. He started to chant upside-down; ‘The other day upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there…They’re telling lies,’ he added.

‘Who?’ Sharnda demanded.

‘The UWM people, or whatever they’re called.’

‘I don’t think so!’ Sharnda was belligerent: defending her heroes. ‘Why d’you reckon that?’

‘Because…’ Evie began, but Noel toppled down on her, and Evie shut up. They were tangled up there for a second, then both leapt to opposite ends of the bed.

‘The back door,’ Sharnda said, changing the subject because they looked embarrassed. ‘Can I go out and look at it?’ She stepped out of the scullery bedroom and stood in the breezeway, investigating the door for any marks around the architrave to show where the police had smashed.

‘But they didn’t smash it down,’ Evie said in a dull voice, almost as if she was explaining something to a young child; as if Sharnda was Sammy and ignorant. ‘They came over this roof, and got in through Sammy’s room upstairs – they’d got onto this roof through the window next door. And then they came down and opened the door from inside.’