Posts Tagged ‘History’

JAZZ AND THE NAZIS IN PARIS 1940-1944

Posted: November 9, 2012 in History, Music, Photography
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Getting the jazz. The “Degenerate Music” exhibition of the “Reich Music Festival”, Düsseldorf, 1938 © Ullstein Bild

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” (Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s ‘Bass Saxophone’)

The day the Nazis rolled tanks into Paris – the land of “Americano, nigger, kike, jungle music” (Goebbels, 1939) – the cave-clubs of Saint Germain dimmed. Montparnasse went quietly.  Pigalle’s cosmopolitan nightclubs folded and the Champs-Elysees muted the footlights. In fact, two million Parisians had already left town. Many jazz-junkies, gypsies, peddlars of swing, negres – all now in danger of being freighted to their death – considered catching the A-Train elsewhere.  Paris was preparing to go underground. But the Gestapo went straight to work. Loudspeakers declared a curfew of 8pm. Arrests began.

“It is better to be frightened in your country than another one” said Django Reinhardt – the most famous jazzman ever to live in the alphabet city. He had good reason to be nervous. A member of the Manouche ‘gypsy’ family – part of the French speaking Romany tribe – over one million of his kin would be gone by 1944. Reinhardt would try to escape Paris twice, but be turned back. Instead of escape, his gypsy legend grew and in the heart of Nazi Occupied Paris the enduring spirit of  jazz took another turn.

Django Reinhardt spent his time during the Nazi Occupation oscillating between a suite on the Champs Elysee and gypsy encampments. In hotel room circa 1945 with gypsy singer Sonia Dimitrivich. Getty Images.

“You who have been to Paris, just imagine this picture” wrote LIFE Magazine in 1940. “At the Palace de la Concorde no such merry-go-round of honking autos, screaming news vendors, gesticulating cops, gaily chatting pedestrians. Instead depressing silence, broken only now and then by the purr of some German officers motor as it made its way to the Hotel Crillon, headquarters of the hastily set up German commandery. On the flagstaff the swastika fluttered in the breeze, where once the Stars and Stripes had been in the days of 1919 when Wilson received the cheers of French crowds from the balcony”

Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had his own plans for the weekend. He’d drafted a scheme; a schedule to reopen Paris as a jaunty, gay, bustling showroom for New Europe. During the war it would be a recreational city, if only to draw a breath. Within weeks of bagging the Hotel Crillon, theatres and nightclubs would begin to reopen. The city’s cinemas and opera houses, draped in swastikas, would refill and brothels reopen. Soldiers, Officers, SS, wary Parisians; all mingled at tables. The caviar tones of Johnny Hess continued. Edith Piaf performed, Coco Chanel entertained Nazis.

It was a strange reconcile. Paris was a hot bed of bona-fide jazz-loving, leaf-smoking, jew-friending ‘degenerates’. And while Hitler’s army were arresting musicians, shutting down swing-joints,  storming cabarets that housed the “rhythms of belly-dancing negroes”, Django and the Hot Club of Paris were reinventing it as a gypsy-slang.

During the 30s the success of The Hot Club Quintet transformed jazz from a WW1 Americano import into the lingua franca of popular jazz. Their groundswell of popularity would lead to a residency in the celebrated clubs of Montparnasse, with a fanbase that included jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. The clip below shows the original line up bunkered in a bar setting, a vitalised core in situ, 1939.

They would all follow very different paths during the war.

Django himself might have been top of the Nazi hit-list. He had risen from the obscurity of a ‘gypsy’ camp. He liked billiards, he liked to gamble. He liked making friends, he liked music, his lifestyle was seen as vagabond. Hot Club collaborator and violinist Stephane Grappelli told The Guardian that when they got offered their first recording in 1934 by Charles Delauney (France’s supreme jazz expert), Django didn’t even appear – Grappelli found him in a billiard hall.

Hot Club clarinetist Hubert Rostaing said the best way to hear Django Reinhardt was to wait after the concert, and on the other side of the street. It was a minor miracle the Hot Club existed. But by the time war broke in 1939 Django’s new, taut ‘small string’ sound swept the city with colossal results. A powerfully quick improvisor, Django pioneered and defined new territory as a modern guitar soloist.

Michael Dregni best sketches the itinerant genuis: “His story was told like a fairy tale on the café terraces and in the fashionable salons. It was repeated in reverent tones among jazz acolytes. He was spoken of in awe as a child prodigy who never grew up, an idiot savant of jazz, a noble savage let loose in cultured Paris. His was the kind of modern fairy tale that Paris loved – even demanded – of its celebrities. “

But Paris was now dangerous turf.

An isolated city. André Zucca took these colour photos for Nazi magazine ‘Signal’, using rare Agfacolor film supplied by the Wehrmacht. Controversy over the depictions of ‘Parisian life as usual’ continues to this day.

 

 

Cinema Parisiana, colour photos of Paris under the Occupation by André Zucca.

Hats and coats, Paris occupied. June, 1940. Image by Roger Schall.

“Paris is dark at night now. Probably not until the war’s end will the great red lights of Moulin Rouge turn again. The small nightclubs that used to fill Montmatre and Montparnasse are also dead or dormant. Parisians have no theatre yet, no cinema, and one of the most frequent questions asked us is: when are we going to get American films? (LIFE Magazine correspondent Charles Wertenbaker, on the Nazi’s ultimate legacy in Paris, 1944)

German soldiers outside a Paris cafe on the Champs Elysees, Bastille Day 1940.

Entartete Musik – meaning ‘not of our kind or race’ – or more figuratively ‘abnormal, depraved’. The poster advertising the Degenerate exhibition of 1938.

The popular ‘Degenerate Music Exhibition’ of 1938 left little to the Nazi imagination. The Nazis had seized a huge assemblage of artworks; anything that might have been Jewish, Bolshevik or abstract – compiling them as an example of ‘degenerate art’. Graffiti trained above the exhibits, scrawling its way past the ‘negroid’, the Jew-infused classical or ‘popular’ music. Jazz was depraved jungle-junk. The New English Weekly more eloquently explained; the Nazi ‘felt the Hebrew uses jazz and like methods to iron out racial differences and produce a general neurasthenia in which Hebrew influence may ascend among peoples.’

Paris remained under blackout orders for a while after the Nazi arrival; streetlights painted blue. Many of the African American musicians who played the jazz clubs had sailed from Le Havre, expecting the worst. Not surprisingly, the original Hot Club Quintet were amongst those to disband. Django’s other half, Stephan Grappelli, sailed for England, guitarist Marcel Bianci was soon interred by the Germans, bassist Louis Vola bound a boat for Argentina. Other illuminaries also joined the exodus.

Guitar Oscar Aleman headed for Spain, hoping to catch a ship home to Buenos Aires. He was halted at the Spanish border, his tricone guitars confiscated, melted down for the war effort. German-born singer Eva Busch was arrested by the Gestapo the third day of her show at the Paris ABC Music Hall, and made a prisoner of Ravensbrück for three years. “The hatred kept me alive” she said.

Django would try to leave twice during the Occupation, only to be turned back. In the early days  he and other Romanies simply left the town, avoided the road, stayed in hiding. They retreated to the depths of la zone, bordered by forests and mountains.

Palaise de Reinhardt, with the family. Django and son Babik.

Django teaches his son Babik some guitar.

Jewish refugees from Germany holed up in the cellar of an abandoned factory, chez violin and guitar.

“After the German patrol passed by and we believed the coast was clear the tables were pushed back and the dancing began. As soon as the alarm was given the tables were set back in place and everything became orderly again” (Pierre Fouad on the Nouveau Hot Club’s early gigs under the Occupation)

As time went on there was little choice but to work. In need of a living, Django made his way back to Paris. On October 4th 1940 he was offered work playing guitar at the Cinema Normandie on the Champs Elysee, between Nazi approved films. He had to submit his song programs to the propagandastaffel before the guitar was propped.

Despite the challenges, it was here Django unveiled the Nouveau Hot Club Quintet de Paris. It comprised a sound that Michael Dregni describes as ‘light and airy and held to earth by Egyptian drummer Pierre Fouad’. Reinhardt had replaced Grapelli with Hubert Rostaing, who himself had been tuning his craft in the cabarets of Morroca and Tunisia. They soon picked up a new following.

To avoid Nazi suppression the French had dropped the term ‘swing’. Jazz standards were re-titled in French. ‘St Louis Blues’ became ‘Tristesses De St Louis’. ‘I Got Rhythm’ became ‘Agate Rhythm’. Tunes were often given titles that would not betray their origins, such as ‘Blues in C Sharp’. They began playing, with composers’ names changed to French ones.

In his book ‘Bass Saxophone‘ Josef Skvorecky also recalls the rules that were set out to purify the music if it had to be performed.

Parisian Jazz – “La Revue Negre au Music-hall des Champs-elysees” with Josephine Baker.

Nazi nightlife in Paris. Image from Patrick Buisson’s book ’1940-1945, Années érotiques’.

Nightlife in Paris during the Occupation. Image from Patrick Buisson’s book ’1940-1945, Années érotiques’.

Paris under the Occupation. Image by Roger Schall.
The Nazi version of Eddie Cantor's 'Makin' Whoopee'. This rare Nazi jazz recording was made exclusively for shortwave broadcasting to Great Britain, USA and other enemy countries.

Ludwig “Lutz” Templin, bandleader of the jazz ensemble who also recorded as “Charlie and His Orchestra”, rearranging  American jazz hits with revised Nazi-approved lyrics.

Despite musical cleansing, Goebbels couldn’t compete with demand. German soldiers overtook the clubs, where the lights were warm. For their own pleasure German Officers cordoned off the Russian Casonova and Sheherazade cabarets, where the Ferret brothers played (another band of accomplished gypsy jazzmen – and Django’s biggest rivals). Amid war and food shortages Pigalle and Montmartre came to life once again.

In early 1943 the famous Abbaye club also reopened as Le Chapiteau. The previous owner’s burlesque styled parodies of Hitler meant he was now enjoying an extended holiday in Monaco to avoid the Club’s new Nazi patrons. Le Chapiteau had become a favourite hole-in-the-wall for many Gestapo and pro-Nazi French.

Goebbels, meanwhile, pegged jazz as an opiate. He put commissioned Charlie and His Orchestra (or “Bruno and His Swinging Tigers“) to swiftly begin recording and performing Nazi versions of popular jazz hits, a sanctioned Reichsministerium. Charlie were broadcast in medium-wave and short-wave bands across the Channel and Atlantic – the sonic equivalent of letter drops in jazz.

Despite the lyrics written by the Propagandaministerium, the group was Germany’s leading swing outfit and a competent group. They made over ninety recordings between 1941 and 1943. Their band leader was permitted by Nazi command to travel to neutral and occupied countries in order to collect jazz and dance music. He also knocked around in the rarefied dens of Paris, mixing with the bands of the day.

Meanwhile, the Hot Club had also been busy. Its three-story headquarters had become a meeting place for the French resistance.

La Place Blanche café (in 1940) opposite the Moulin Rouge cabaret. Reserved for the exclusive use of German soldiers during the occupation of Paris.

“Anything that starts with Ellington ends with an assassination attempt on the Fuhrer!” (Gestapo SS-Sturmbahnfuhrer Hans ‘The Fox’ Reinhardt, interrogating teenage swing fans 1944)

Luftwaffe Officer Dietrich Schulz-​Köhn (aka “Doktor Jazz”) had been a long-time follower of the Hot Club’s music.  It was known that other Germans would spend hours in his room listening to this variety of “Americano nigger kike jungle music”. Dur­ing the German occupation he provided a temporary shelter of sorts – simply by frequenting the Hot Club as a patron.

For the years of occupation many people had relied upon the power of protection. But things were becoming increasingly uncertain. A person could easily be shot at whim. They could easily be included in a deportation order. Those offering protection could easily lose their power or be deported. Survival couldn’t be guaranteed, and the gap was closing.

Luftwaffe Officer Dietrich Schulz-​Köhn (aka “Doktor Jazz”), Django Reinhardt, four Africans and a Jewish musician – outside La Cigale, a jazz club in Paris.

“The Officers of the Club liked me coming there” said Schulz-Köhn in later years. “Especially in uniform as they were sometimes raided by the Gestapo. (The Gestapo) would find the place full of letters, magazines, records with labels – all in English and this was no laughing matter at the time. So they could use me as a signboard to prove their innocence and reliability”.

But in in October 1943 the Gestapo made a definitive raid on the Hot Club headquarters. They took into custody Charles Delaunay, his secretary and the Hot Club President of Marseilles. “They wanted to know where to find our resistance leader” said Delaunay. “I was fortunate enough to know enough of the German that was spoken preparatory to each question. Never have I talked so much or so well.” Delaunay was eventually released a month later – with a shadow of Gestapo not far behind. His secretary and the Hot Club President were not as lucky.

They were sent to the camps. Both perished in the gas chambers.

Nouveau Hot Club Quintette de Paris. Date unknown.

In the isolated city, jazz broke further from its American roots. While continuing to tread carefully for their own survival, players such as Reinhardt had charged the music with new potency and, despite the best efforts of Goebbels the his Charlie cohorts, jazz remained an undefined danger zone.

The Zazou fad was the first youth ‘movement’ to openly claim a patch and square itself against the hooks of German occupation. Its battle issue was non-conformity. In 1942 the Nazi-run mag L’Illustration attacked the Zazou style; men wore a ‘lumber jacket, which they show an unwillingness to take off, even when it’s soaking wet. The women wear cheap furs, turtle-necked sweaters and very short pleated skirts. They are armed with vast umbrellas that remain obstinately folded whatever the weather’. By 1944 seventy-eight anti-Zazou articles were published in the pro-Nazi Vichy Govt press. Zazous were lazy, vain, ‘Judeo-Gaullist shirkers’.

Their beating came highly recommended.

Round-ups began in bars. Zazous were roughed up on the streets. The Fascist youth organisation Jeunesse Populaire Française adopted the slogan “Scalp the Zazous!” – perhaps this sounded better in French. Zouzous were set upon with hair-clippers by squads of young fascists. They were beaten, arrested, sent to the country to work the land. Before long many Zazous went underground, ducking for cover in basement clubs and jazz halls.

By 1944 seventy-eight anti-Zazou articles had been published in the pro-Nazi Vichy Govt press targeting the louche phenomenon of work-shy Zouzous.

‘Work for Germany? I’d rather die!’ ‘Bravo! Young man, don’t you like Germany?’

And as the Allies began bombing closer to the city, the Nazi round-ups increased. In 1943 the German Kommandantur of Paris requested that Reinhardt and the Nouveau Quintet of Paris be summoned to Berlin to play for the Nazi High Command. Django made excuses. The Kommandantur insisted. Django decided to hit the road.

Filling his Buick from a wad of gas coupons, Django skipped town with his wife. They headed to the German-Franco border, with the plan to escape to Switzerland. When the car ran out of gas, they sold it and brought themselves tickets for a clandestine truck to take them across. That night, passing through the border, the truck was subjected to a search. They were found and turned back with a warning.

While he planned his next step, he moved his family to Thonon, where they lived near the Savoy Bar. This place was the genuine melting pot – full of jazz-loving Nazis, gypsies and Zazous who had left Paris. Django began playing here, as well as various parties around the area. He became a regular at functions thrown in Chateau La Folie owned by the Schwartz family and set on a leafy acreage. But the Occupation continued to tighten its grip. The Schwartz family were denounced by the gardener’s son as Jews – they were deported and perished in the camps.

The Gestapo took over the estate.

Django decided to try and get to Geneva via the West. Again, the venture failed. He was also told not to try and escape France from the North because of German U-Boats. Instead, he and his pregnant wife decided to hike the Alps to freedom. They met their guide at a cafe. They were overheard by a German officer. They were all arrested.

Under interrogation, his British Performing Rights Society card was confiscated and he was declared a spy. Finally the officers brought in the local kommandant to continue the questioning. The kommandant was a jazz fan; Django and his wife were released.

They returned again to Paris.

Paris, 1944. Sniper fire shortly after the liberation. LIFE/Time Images.

On June 6th 1944 The Allies invaded France at Normandy. The German occupation of Paris ended on August 25th, 1944, when General Jacques Phillippe Leclerc’s Second Free French Armoured Division, supported by the US Fourth Infantry Division, entered the city. Only days before the liberation the Nazis murdered several thousand Roma and Sinti ‘gypsies’ at the Zigeunerlager in the Auschwtiz-Birkenau concentration camp.

As the Council of Europe described it: “Germans who took part in the slaughter later described it as the most difficult moment in the war for them, as Romani women struggled to hang on to their children. The crematorium burned all night”. Around 600,000 to 1.5  million Roma were exterminated during the Holocaust. One of Django’s cousins had faked his identity as Django in an attempt to save his own life – without success.

Paris itself only barely escaped destruction. Hitler had ordered German commander, General Dietrich von Cholitz, to leave the city in ruins. Cholitz turned fate and disobeyed – he left it intact.

As the world struggled to recover Django reunited with Grappelli. Together they toured the US with Duke Ellington. In 1949 he eventually sold his Paris apartment, bought a Lincoln, attached a trailer and hit the rural back-roads of France. He later hooked up a larger caravan for his mother, who had been living in an old converted Citroën. Reinhardt would occasionally visited Paris for a show – getting by on the wad of banknotes he kept under the pillow.

The basement of the Caveau de la Huchette, one of the first clubs to open after the war. It filled instantly with soldiers – mostly Afro-American.

Despite Goebbels best efforts the music could never be contained, quarantined or owned. The music leaves a legacy – as well as a brilliant but haunting accompaniment to the uncertainty, terror and mass obliteration that tore through those years.

Check out the fascinating but graphic clip of Europe on its knees by 1944, to the gilded music of Lili Marleen -  a wartime favourite on both sides of the front. Django’s melancholy war-inspired Nuages, below (here recorded on electric) was another track that walked the lines, elevating him beyond the divisions – and onto stardom – during his years in Occupied Paris.

“He did more for the guitar than any other man in jazz”  Stephane Grappelli told Melody Maker following Reinhardt’s death in 1953. “His way of playing was unlike anyone else’s, and jazz is different because of him. There can be many other fine guitarists, but never can there be another Reinhardt. I am sure of that.”

I highly recommend LeoTaurus1975 on youtube for a comprehensive look at the music of the times, along with some great clips of the time.  Michael Dregni’s book on Django is also worth a delve, as well as a great gypsy-jazz homage site at http://www.paulvernonchester.com.

Geoff Stanton

THE STRANGE STORY OF ‘MIRACLE MIKE’ THE HEADLESS CHICKEN 1945

Posted: August 25, 2012 in History, Photography
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‘Miracle Mike’ with stand-in rooster head, 1945. Mike toured sideshows for 18 months after surviving a decapitation. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

I’ve been getting a bit high-brow at The Barrelhouse lately, so here’s a story about a chicken with no head. As LIFE Magazine explained it, in 1945 Mrs. L.A. Olson, wife of a Colorado farmer, “decided to have chicken for dinner. Mrs. Olson took Mike to the chopping block and axed off his head”. The axe failed to cleanly clip the brain, instead creating a super-bird that refused to die.

Miracle Mike’s plight lead him out of the barnyard and into the limelight; for the next year and a half he starred in sideshows, acquired a promoter, appeared in LIFE Magazine, accrued a closet of stand-in rooster heads and was waited on feather and claw with suitcase and drop-feeder. True to rock star status he finally died in a motel somewhere in the Arizona desert.

Not for the fainthearted.

Mike the headless chicken on top of the world, and also a lawn mower. Fruita, Colorado, 1945. Image by Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

“Mike the headless chicken in his Colorado barnyard, with fellow chickens” LIFE Magazine 1945. To dispel theories that Mike was a hoax he was taken by his owner to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to establish his authenticity. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

The suitcase used to nurture Mike. Includes an eye dropper for delivering sustenance through the hole where his head used to be. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
 

Mike resting at home, 1945. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Promoter Hope Wade with money-making Mike. Fruita, Colorado, 1945. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Mike’s genuine head was reportedly eaten by the cat. He gathered stand-ins on the road. Image by Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

October 22, 1945 Issue of LIFE Magazine.

For the dirt on Mike’s legacy – including an annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Colorado and Fan Club – take a look at his dedicated website.

ROGUES’ GALLERY REVISITED | SYDNEY POLICE ARCHIVES 1912-1948

Posted: August 2, 2012 in Books, History, Photography, Uncategorized
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“Some of the photographed documents are like open wounds. A hastily pencilled suicide note reads: ‘Goodbye earth, all is lost’. Another, apparently written in blood, says ‘Be prepared, you die soon’. There are obscene drawings and messages left at crime scenes by safe crackers and burglars. One, signed ‘Apache’, compliments the victim on the robustness of their safe; another thanks the home owner for the whiskey” (John Doyle, City of Shadows)

It’s a book that gives you ideas. If you’ve got a chain-smoking drifter lurking in the back of your head, or a killer stealing your thoughts, you might finally catch them here. The photos have been exhibited in Sydney a couple of times – but their story is still worth repeating.

When a flood deluged an old Sydney warehouse back in the 1980s, The Historic Houses Trust shifted around four tonnes of boxes, cartons and crates of old Kodak neg. What they cracked open was a lost covenant of crime photos, dated from 1912 to 1960. Con-men, prostitutes, itinerants, gangsters, the aftermath of murder; all caught in the flash-lamp of bygone police investigations, details of which had been long since lost. Lives and motives cut largely adrift – not for the first time.

What remains is raw – sometimes graphic – testament to their characters. Several years ago the writer John Doyle was brought on board to salvage these moments from the glass plates and acetate. Groaning ledgers of long-since forgotten mug-shot, murder scene, mishap and tragedy could now easily satisfy any director’s casting book or story-board. Doyle has done an extraordinary job, compiling a strangely intimate tour through the under-tow of a city’s dead in his book City of Shadows.

Mr Skukerman, or Mr Kukarman, or Mr Cecil Landan, glowers from across the years. The NSW Police Gazette Sydney notes he ‘obtains goods from warehousemen by falsely representing that he is in business’.

Harry Williams, sentenced to 12 months hard labour on March 1929 for breaking, entering, stealing. The Police Gazette  reported that Williams consorted with prostitutes and ‘frequents hotels and wine bars in the vicinity of the Haymarket’.

Walter Smith after a battering, somewhere in Sydney, Australia, 1924. Smith was listed in the NSW Police Gazette, 24 December 1924, as ‘breaking and entering’. He was sentenced to 6 months hard labour.

‘Harry Leon Crawford’, charged with wife murder. Crawford was soon revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had passed as a man since 1899. In 1914 Falleni  married Annie Birkett, who later told a relative she had discovered ‘something amazing about Harry’. Birkett disappeared. Falleni went on to appear in numerous mug shots through the years, becoming the notorious ‘woman-man’ killer in the press.

Mug shot of Thomas Sutherland Jones and William Smith, 15 July 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney.

The handwritten inscription reads ‘Frederick Edward Davies stealing in picture shows and theatres, Central 14-7-21′. Police held petty theft in particularly low regard – this may be why Davies is photographed front of the toilet stalls.

Thomas Bede, Central cells, 22 November 1928. The man who refuses to open his eyes for a photo. Police had to scratch this script back-the-front on the plate – so this would have been doubly annoying.

“To meditate on the uncensored history presented in these photos is to be made aware of two things; the power, strangeness and vulnerability of all human life and the need to document, resolve and rationally explain its infinite capacity for aberration” (Peter Doyle, City of Shadows)
It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that a standard procedure was enforced for mug shots. Before then, there was an enormous degree of creative license for everyone involved. The images often capture the subject in a full-blooded moment, with no consistent mode of framing or standard composition to constrain.

“Despite the elegant formal arrangements…we are left with the impression of a black and white world that is fraught with pain and misadventure. A place that the era’s magazines, travel brochures and up-beat newsreels ritually ignored.” observes Doyle.  “Men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension”

Vera Crichton, 23 (left) conspired with two other women to ‘procure a miscarriage on a third woman’. She was ‘bound over to appear for sentence if called upon within three years’. E. Walker was believed to be a vagrant. Her head was probably shaved in the cells due to lice.

Convicted of using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. Janet Wright was a former nurse who performed illegal abortions at her house in Kippax Street, Surry Hills. One of her teenage patients almost died after a procedure – Wright was sentenced to 12 months hard labour. Aged 68.

‘Tilly’ Devine sentenced to two years gaol for slashing a man’s face in a barber shop with a razor. She would become Sydney’s best-known brothel madam, her public fued with sly-grog queen Kate Leigh (below) provided endless media fodder at the time. The war between the two has since been elevated to city folklore. Aged 25

A young Kate Leigh, 1915.

Some hard drinkin’ years later. Kate Leigh as Sydney’s now notorious sly-grog baroness and underworld figure, 1930.

Inscribed Hayes, date unknown – probably early 1920s.

Alfred Ladewig, alias ‘Tiny’. Police Gazette Sept 1920 reads that Ladewig was charged with ‘stealing by trick’ the sum of two hundred and four pounds.

It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that standard procedure was enforced for mug shots – until then dance routines were obviously acceptable. Friends of the missing Rene Flowers – clearly a vaudeville performer – flaunt it.

Teenager Annie Gunderson was charged with stealing a fur coat from a Sydney department store called Winn’s Limited, in 1922. Police records do not indicate whether the fur she is wearing is the stolen item. Aged 19.

Wharf labourer William Stanley Moore ‘operates with large quantities of faked opium and cocaine’ and ‘associates with waterfront thieves and illicit drug traders’.

W. Cahill, the tough guy’s Russell Crowe, hits 1923 to do some crimes. Details unknown.

Bad boy Sidney Kelly, June 25, 1924. Offences included shooting, and assault. In the 1940s was a pioneer of illegal baccarat gaming in Sydney. This NSW Police Gazette: “Illicit drug trader. Drives his own motor car, and dresses well. Associates with criminals and prostitutes.”

Kong Lee makes numerous appearances in the NSW Police Gazette. A ‘safe blower’ and ‘thief’, and is noted in 1929 as having recently been seen riding trains ‘in the company of card sharpers and spielers’.

‘Ah Num’ and ‘Ah Tom’ some time in 1930. The ‘D’ prefix on the photo indicates it was taken by the Drug Bureau. Num and Tom don’t appear in any records – their names may have been conjured for the paperwork.

The lads busted. Not for long perhaps? Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien – July 20, 1921

All together now. ‘Group of criminals, Central 1921′ (unnamed). The woman on the left is believed to be Eileen Leigh or Barry (daughter of Kate Leigh). The man third from the left in that row may be the pickpocket and three-card trickster known as Frederick Mewson, and the man far left in the front row is likely the pickpocket known as Norman Smith.

“Child unknown found wandering at large”. Mid 1920s, details unknown.

Hazel McGuiness, 26th July 1929, Central cells. Details unknown.

May Russell, 31st January 1922, Central cells. Details unknown.

Ah Chong, 11 July 1928, Central cells. No listing for Ah Chong found when this photo was taken, but an Ah Chong was convicted on two charges of receiving in 1922. He also received twelve months hard labour.

Mrs Dorothy Mort was having an affair with a strapping young doctor and Test Cricketer, Dr Claude Tozer. On 21 December 1920 Tozer visited her home to break off the relationship. Mort shot him dead. She was found covered in blood with a gunshot wound to her breast, and under the influence of a narcotic. Tozer was found in her drawing room, shot in the back of the head, the temple and the chest. Dorothy Mort has rebuttoned his vest over the chest wound.  The case stirred a media sensation.

Dr Tozer visits the home of girlfriend Dorothy Mort on 21 December 1920. It didn’t go well.

Exterior, scene of car crash, from bridge onto storm water canal cover, early 1940s. Details unknown.

 

Underneath a bridge, inner city Sydney, a bottle Waterbury’s Compound – a popular tonic and cough remedy – by the dead man’s side.  It is unclear whether he fell – photographs suggest the possibility.

Probably mid 1940s, details unknown.

Published in Sydney newspapers in 1933, as a practical demonstration to a sceptical press and public that police could operate undercover. The men seen here are a mix of detectives and civilians. The figure third from the right is believed to be Sergeant Frank Fahy, aka “The Shadow” – the force’s most effective undercover operative at the time.

The International Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’, carried out ‘direct action’ – sabotage – in Sydney in 1916, agitating for the release of their leader, Tom Barker. Barker had been jailed for sedition after making an anti-war speech in the Sydney Domain. It was seen as the modern equivalent of terrorism. Cotton waste, turpentine, phosphorous and kerosene, were allegedly found during police raids in Sydney and the ‘IWW Twelve’ were convicted of conspiracy and sedition. All received long jail sentences.

The most popular camera with crime and press photographers was the large format 4×5 Speed Graphic- made famous by Weegee. It had a large flash unit attached that could light up an entire room. It was difficult and hard to focus in low light, with ground glass and rangefinder focusing.

Probably late 1930s, early 1940s. Details unknown.

The scene where criminal heavy John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes shot boxer William ‘Bobby’ John Lee, at the busy Ziegfeld Club, 22 May. Hayes shot Lee in front of friends and other underworld figures, in a revenge attack. He was reportedly provoked by the line ‘you wouldn’t do it here, with all the lights shining and all the people around’. ‘Chow’ shot Lee five times. Lee refused to identify Hayes on the way to hospital – where he died that night. Hayes was not convicted.

According to the Police Report: “Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor. Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot. A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door. The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.

Bedroom, with bloodstained bed reflected in dressing table mirror. Details unknown, late 1930s.

Safe break attempt at the Camellia Grove Hotel, now the Sports Bar, Henderson Road, Alexandria.

Three men demonstrating self-defence techniques. Details unknown, late 1930s.

Of the assorted types, Doyle says: “The subjects of the Special Photographs seem to have been allowed – perhaps invited – to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked. Their photographic identity thus seems constructed out of a potent alchemy of inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics.”

So, given the passage of time, this collection reminds me a bit of the epilogue line at the end of Barry Lyndon: “It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”.

The latest exhibition from the ongoing discoveries in the archive was Collision: Misadventure by Motorcar – featuring car crashes and traffic accidents in Sydney between 1920 and 1960.

All images (c) NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & Police Museum, Historic Houses Trust of NSW. http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/insites/city_of_shadows

A TAXI RIDE THROUGH KINGS CROSS SYDNEY | THE DIRTY HALF MILE 1970

Posted: February 29, 2012 in History, Photography
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Cab Driver Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.

“It was raining hard in Sydney. I needed one more fare to make my night. A lady up ahead flagged to wave me down. She got in at the light” (almost the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s Taxi)

I was recently digging around some photos of Sydney’s Kings Cross and uncovered a series of photos by Rennie Ellis. They were shot over a six month period during 1970 and early 1971, when American servicemen from Vietnam jostled money through the bars and strip joints alongside bikies, hippies, oddballs and junkies. Everyone was, as Barry McKenzie might have said, “as busy as a one-armed taxi driver with crabs”.

Rennie Ellis’s 1971 work captures the Cross at its eccentric and seedy best. A mesmerising gateway into what he called “the surface glitter and underground guts of the Cross”

"The underground guts of the Cross". Bouncer, Kings Cross Strip Club, 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.

“Sydney was, in effect, a tabula rasa. Unlike the cities of the Old World, no slow sedimentation of history lay beneath its streets. Old World centres founded in Roman or medieval times grew organically… Cities of the New World sprang into being, often at a single, identifiable moment in time” (John Birmingham, ‘Leviathan – The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney‘)

The Sydney of 1970 had not shifted far from its origins – except perhaps for a quick roll in the glitter. Back in 1788 the first freight-loads of male and female convicts were dumped together two miles west at Sydney Cove just as a terrible storm hit. It took several barrels of stupefying rum – thrown in courtesy of some relieved and exhausted Officers – to turn the scene into a full-blown squall of lightening, liquor, filth and fornication.

But the seed scattered in virile soil.

US Servicemen at the Golden Orchid, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Midnight Show, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Between strips, Kings Cross 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Officers on the beat 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.


US Serviceman with Kings Cross girls 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.

“The scene which presented itself beggars every description: some swearing, others quarreling, others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest” (Arthur Bowes Smyth on Sydney’s first landing, 1788)

By the early 20th century the Kings Cross district had become Sydney’s bohemian heartland. It also provided ground for a notorious turf-war in the illegal alcohol trading – known as sly grog – between Sydney’s celebrated crime matriarchs Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.

In 1970 the neon protegee – set behind the spooling enclave of exclusive 19th century terraces -  had refined history into a red lather of lights, action, sordid glam, the eccentric and the criminal.

Snake Woman, Kings Cross 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.


MC, Paradise Club, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.

Carlotta & Electra, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Carlotta, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.

“Some call it Australia’s Barbary Coast – and there are a few pirates there for sure. Others call it Sin City – and here’s some of that around too. One Sydney Alderman wants it cleaned up. Another says it is worth a million a year the way it is. If you can believe what you read about it the inhabitants make their living out of baccarat, dope, witchcraft, prostitution, stripping – and selling each other salami.” (ABC TV, 1969)

By 1970 Abe Saffron – known as Mr Sin – ruled the roost. It was during his reign Jim Anderson shot dead Donny ‘the Glove’ Smith dead outside the Venus Room – now a less salubrious Backpackers Hostel. Australia’s celebrated witch Rosaleen Norton held court. Free love was for sale at the artists open residence The Yellow House. The area was a certified home to artists, writers, poets journalists and actors – including Australia’s Peter Finch and Chips Rafferty.

Property of Hells Angels, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.

Auntie Mame, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.


The Witch of Kings Cross, Rosaleen Norton 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Tattoo Girl, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Working Girls, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.

Peace sign, The Yellow House, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.

Yellow House Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.


Top of the hill and left at the Coke sign, Gov. Rainy evening Kings Cross 1966 Fairfax Images.


Kings Cross 1970, Image by J Fitzpatrick.

Rennie Ellis went on to photograph bar rooms, strip joints, celebrities – with a seemingly boundless backstage pass – around the world. He also caught some great AC/DC dressing room moments with Bon Scott in 1977.

His photo gallery captures the great Australian cosmopolitan throughout the decades, from the beehives and rockers of the sixites to the hyper-colour of the eighties and ninties – with sex throughout. Ellis passed away in 2003. Kings Cross has since been tidied up some – instead it is now littered with plaques commemorating the characters who once coloured the area.

THE GUNS OF BRIXTON | LONDON RIOT SOUNDTRACKS REVISITED 2011

Posted: August 13, 2011 in Music
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by Geoff Stanton

It used to be you could tell a good riot from the soundtrack. Just look at the peasant revolt of 1381 – five hundred and ninety years before Johnny Rotten, its rabble-rousers still being covered by Chumbawamba. The banditry of Robin Hood was later formalised; British communists had a Little Red Songbook “to fan the flames of discontent” while smashing Fascists in the street. The fifties and sixites gave us Folk Music, Frontmen, Highways, Hells Angels – and magazines have long since fossilized the punk and reggae rush through the spot-fires.

Yep, every decent riot needs a good soundtrack.

So what was the soundtrack for looting a Footlocker or nicking a plasma? While the 2011 London riots look familiar against a century of images – hi-res fireballs and swarms of hoodie aside – overt political causes are muted by sheer adrenalin and rage.

But the genuine voices are out there. “We just have to hunt them down,” veteran musician Bruce Cockburn told The Star in 2010, on talking about how music has been forced underground again. “We just don’t hear them. We don’t hear anything worthwhile these days unless we go looking for it.”

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Reg Weston recalled the rioteers ‘Little Red Songbook’ (published between 1905 and 1973, it was originally called Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops—Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent), used during Weston’s involvement in the London riot of 1936. “The fascists were assembling by the Royal Mint” he said. “And police started to make baton charges, both foot and mounted, to try to clear a way for them to escort a march. They did not succeed.”

Oswald Mosley does the two step past adoring fascists at a rally in east London, 1936. Photograph by Imagno/Getty Image

“We sang the traditional working class marching songs and anthems.  The Internationale (“Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers”); the Italian revolutionary Bandiera Rossa (“Avanti popoli, alla riscossa”, “Forward ye workers, into the struggle”, “Fling to the breezes the scarlet banner”); the Berlin workers’ song Rote Wedding (“Left, left .. the workers are marching again”); the Polish Varshavianka, and the old Wobbly song “Solidarity Forever”, with the appropriate words: “We’ll hang Oswald Mosley on a sour apple tree … when the red revolution comes”.

“A barricade started to go up. A lorry was overturned, furniture was piled up, paving stones and a builders yard helped to complete the barrier. The police managed to clear the first, but found a second behind it and then a third. Marbles were thrown under the hooves of the police horses; volleys of bricks met every baton charge.”

London bobbies dismantle a communist built barricade near Mark Lane to clear the street for Mosley's fascist march, 1936. Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

“Back in Stepney and the East End there was almost unbelievable delight. We had won. The fascists had been defeated and humiliated. The police too and the authorities had been proved unable to protect them.”

“Hastily a victory march had been organised to follow the route from Cable Street to Victoria Park where Mosley had planned to address his army. Hundreds joined in. Thousands stood on the pavements and in the roads, clapping and cheering as we marched on. In those days we marched, often in ranks of fours, under the leadership of the ex-servicemen of the not so far away World War I. We marched and we sang.”

A bobbie standing by a burning car, set alight during a communist march in the East End of London, 1936. Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

Baton charge on demonstrating strikers at Walworth, South London. Image taken during the General Strike, 6th May 1926. Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images.


Woody Guthrie lights up, providing inspiration to the folk singers of Britain. The 'Dust Bowl Troubadour's' music remains a vivid voice and rich oral history.

Bob Dylan in London, 1962. Ewan MacColl, father of the late Kirsty MacColl and legendary British folk singer, sits to the far right. A leading writer of English protest songs in the 1950s, he also wrote the very awesome ‘Dirty Old Town’ – immortalised by The Pogues.

By the 1950s the sounds of US folk singers such as Woody Guthrie had seeped into the working quarters of Britain, much the same way that Dylan would shift its youth culture a decade later. Guthrie had traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California, learning traditional folk and blues songs. His songs recorded experiences in the ‘Dust Bowl’ era of the Great Depression. Known as the “Dust Bowl Troubadour” Guthrie was associated with Communist Party groups throughout his life – but never a member.

“Working people have always known that songs are a good way to say what you got to say about work, wages, school, cats, love, marriage, keeping house or doctors bills. If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher.” (Woody Guthrie)

Folk was seized by a politically charged element and used as a standard. Ewan MacColl, father of the late Kirsty MacColl, was a leading writer of English protest songs in the 1950s, with pro-communist songs such as “The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh”, “The Ballad of Stalin”, and songs about the nuclear threat such as “Against the Atom Bomb”. He also wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’,  later immortalised by The Pogues.

A young Ewan MacColl.

Notting Hill, 1958 – the riot blueprint for generations. Simmering racial tension and poverty (check out the 1955 Pathe newsreel Our Jamaican Problem) led to the riots of Notting Hill – also eventually resulting in the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of diversity and music. Organised by Claudia Jones (black nationalist, journalist, activist and local) as a response to the race tensions of ’58, the festival  was a huge success, despite being held indoors. The hippie London Free School reinvented the festival as an outside event in August 1966.

Notting Hill, 1958.

Keep Britain White, Notting Hill 1958.

Meanwhile ... just a little bit of history repeating. A fight between anti-Fascists and supporters of Oswald Mosley's Union Movement at Charing Cross Station in London, 12th May 1963. The UM members planned to proceed to their headquarters in Vauxhall Bridge Road on their May Day march. The march was cancelled due to the escalating tension. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“The words ‘protest songs’ give me the willies,” Cockburn told The Star. “They conjure up the worst music of the 1960s – songs like ‘Eve of Destruction,’ which I hated when I first heard it. It’s pretentious posturing, manufactured nonsense, bad songwriting and just plain ignorant, compared to Dylan’s work in the same period. ‘A Hard Rain’ and ‘Masters of War’ are beautifully constructed and artfully created. They hit the right emotional buttons and they nail their targets.”

Iconic protester of the 1960s, Bob Dylan, and natural-born-protester (in the making), John Lennon.

The Rolling Stones scatter the seeds of unrest down the charts, 1964.

The kids are alright...just. Moments before they trash a music hall. The Rolling Stones riot, Zurich 1964, when the rioters soundtrack hit middle class mainstream. Keith Richards said that at this particular riot, girls' underwear was hanging from the chandeliers.

The Rolling Stones riot - images from the Flash Project's Street Fighting Man Exhibition: 50 years of youth protest.

The anti-Vietnam protest in London’s Grosvenor Square, now known as The Battle of Grosvenor Square, was a watershed moment in the rise of Britain’s so-called counter-culture. The target of the march was the United States Embassy, and the resulting riot was the inspiration for The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man after Mick Jagger attended the rally and got swept up in some of the heat. An enormous crowd began to squeeze into the confined square, with reports that as many as 6,000 to 10,000 people made there way to the protest. The police reportedly handled the protest with kid gloves. Until the protesters tried to storm the US embassy.

Vanessa Redgrave and political activist Tariq Ali speak out against the Vietnam War at a rally in Trafalgar Square. It would shortly move on to Grosvenor Square, London, 1968.

Police confront thousands. Grosvenor Square, March 18, 1968.

“I remember being terrified at being chased down by what seemed like scores of mounted police with truncheons flailing about while the square was blocked off so that none who found themselves on the inside could get out” recalled Robert Newsom, from the University of California. “But the police seemed as frightened as the protesters. I remember also seeing Mick Jagger standing coolly on the steps of a house in the square surveying the chaos”

UK Police History London 1968

If you are the guy getting his hair pulled, please contact The Barrelhouse. Grosvenor Square 1968.

For the conservative observer of the 21st century, 1968 still delivers apoplexy. “The remarkable thing is that the half-baked and narcissistic ideologies of that dismal 12 months are still with us” moans columnist Rod Liddle in The Daily Mail. “In our schools, in our law courts, in our social services. They have permeated every facet of our lives. A disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, multiculturalism, “yoof culcha” and an emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities. A permissiveness and indulgence shown towards every anti-social phenomenon from the use of illegal narcotics to single mothers and suicide bombers (‘We really need to understand them better’)”.

Strangely enough, Liddle didn’t seem to mind punk when it came around. Perhaps he liked Sid’s shock-value swastika.

London councillor Bernard Brook Partridge didn’t. “Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death” he stoically observed on London’s emerging punk phenomenon. “The worst of the punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols. They are unbelievably nauseating. They are the antithesis of humankind. I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large, exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it.”

Dig your own hole. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten.

Punk’s place in the riot littered seventies is well documented. And Anarchy in the UK still ticks every box.  Rotten’s ‘just another council tenancy’ bark sounds almost mournful enough to be timeless. And it might be more in step with the personal politics of our day, more so than the socially driven Clash or protest folk and rock of the 1960s.

“It’s a loser’s emblem (swastika), because the Nazis lost the war. It’s ridiculous to suggest we are involved with fascists. All my best friends are black, gay, Irish or criminals.” (Johnny Rotten)

The Clash’s ‘White Riot‘ was written during the fermentation of London’s civil unrest. Joe Strummer, sartorial social barometer that he was, recalled getting caught up in the Notting Hill riots of 1978 under the Westway, along Malton Mews by Ladbroke Grove; starting with a group of “blue helmets sticking up like a conga line”, going through the crowd. It started with one can being lobbed through the air, one man hit – followed by a pelting hail of cans in every direction.

“The crowd drew back suddenly and the Notting Hill riot of 1976 was sparked. We were thrown back, women and children too, against a fence which sagged back dangerously over a drop. I can clearly see Bernie Rhodes, even now, frozen at the centre of a massive painting by Rabelais or Michelangelo… as around him a full riot breaks out and 200 screaming people running in every direction. The screaming started it all. Those fat black ladies started screaming the minute it broke out, soon there was fighting 10 blocks in every direction.”

Joe Strummer developed his love of rock music listening to The Beach Boys - as well as American folk-singer Woody Guthrie. He even went by the nickname "Woody"in his earlier band years. In 1970 his brother David had joined the National Front. His suicide in July profoundly affected Strummer.

Another notorious incident in the build-up of tension was the Southall riot. In the great tradition of Mosley, the National Front met the local candidate for upcoming parliamentary elections, who was pledging to “bulldoze Southall to the ground and replace it with an English hamlet“.

Among the inevitable clashes a young teacher named Blair Peach was knocked unconscious (reportedly by a rubberised police radio) and died the next day. Another victim was Clarence Baker, the manager of the British reggae band Misty In Roots. Baker was left with a fractured skull and a blood clot in his brain. He took a year to recover. Peach later became a national protest icon, memorialized by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in his song ‘Reggae Fi Peach‘. Baker’s assault meanwhile inspired The Ruts classic ‘Jah War‘.

The Southall riot that lead to the death of Blair Peach, 1978.

Sloganeering - The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Specials have all peddled their way once again through the standard of riot tunes, with The Kaiser Chiefs ‘I predict a riot’ being the most recent addition to the list.

Between July 3rd and July 11 of 1981 more riots fueled by racial and social discord in Birmingham, London, Liverpool, and Manchester. There were also smaller episodes of unrest in Leeds, Leicester, Southampton, Halifax, Bedford, Gloucester, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Bristol, and Edinburgh.

The Brixton riots were the first real explosion of fury to hit the London Metropolitan Police since it had formed in 1829. The metropolitan police website still calls it ‘the first serious British riot of the 20th century’ to wreak substantial destruction on property.

Amongst the recent media white noise, a spotlight has this time swiveled onto Grime – a sub-sound of UK Garage, breakbeat and hip hop.

“As the glaziers and magistrates go to work after four nights of riots across London and the UK,” wrote the Guardian after the August 2011 riots “the search for understanding and the finger of blame are simultaneously pointing towards the MCs and rappers who Bizzle told me in January were ‘the real prime ministers of this country’”.

“For Professor Green, a top 10 artist, like Chipmunk and Wretch, and one of the MCs who has been most eager to illuminate the causes of the riots, it’s a story of a country that has elected to forget about many of its young people. ‘What needs to be understood here is there is a lot of anger in the underclass’ responded Green. “And a lot of the youth aren’t quite sure where to aim their anger. There are also a lot of underprivileged children who’ve grown up without boundaries”

The Guardian goes on to describe Grime’s place in the recent unrest:”Grime describes the world politicians of all parties have ignored – its misery (eg Dizzee Rascal’s Sitting Here), its volatile energy (Lethal Bizzle’s Pow), its gleeful rowdiness (Mr Wong’s Orchestra Boroughs), its self-knowledge (Wiley’s Oxford Street), its local pride (Southside Allstars’ Southside Run Tings), down even to minor specifics. When some Londoners expressed their surprise and admiration at the quasi-vigilantism of “Turksec” in Dalston and Hackney, the north London Turkish community who fought off looters with a mixture of togetherness and baseball bats, most grime fans’ first thought was Wiley’s offhand lyric: “I had this Turkish bredrin from school, all his family were gangsters.”

“People concerned about the issues that have always troubled us are more likely to turn to Facebook to find a like-minded community than to sing songs in the streets, the way we did in the 1960s,” Cockburn told The Star. “There are plenty of protest songs out there, but they just aren’t part of the cultural mainstream any more. Radio doesn’t play them, and people don’t seem to do things together, as a community. We’re all connected individually to some kind of device, working alone, amusing ourselves alone, enlightening ourselves alone.”

Yet the roots of rhythm remain. Even if thirty million CDs did go up in flames at the Sony warehouse.

THE DEAD HEART | A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF AUSTRALIAN HORROR

Posted: March 6, 2011 in Film
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When ‘Wolf Creek’ was brought for over $4 million in 2005 by a US distributor, horror was quickly seen as the new vanguard of Australian cinema. But from what dark kernels does this inheritance stem? The history of the local horror film is cross-pollinated by various demands, from overseas audiences to distributing requirements to shoestring budgets. But the arcane total creates an interesting prism through which to gaze not just across a passage of Australian cinema, but into the heart of our somewhat darker preoccupations.

They lie somewhere between the murderous Datsuns of Peter Weir’s Cars that Ate Paris and the carnage of Terry Bourke’s 1971 slasher Night of Fear. This is a land dominated not by a vengeful God, but by ocker madmen and dark mystic edges. Its players drift lonely across the megafauna. The vast hollow of the outback provides a captivating stage for what horror author Robert Hood has called the “alien meaning that heralds a predetermined, apocalyptic end”.

Greg McLean acknowledged as much when he stepped onto the barren crater of the Wolf Creek location: “The implication is that there is some force in this place and it potentially manifests itself through dark, lonely characters who are thinking about things they shouldn’t be thinking about”.

For McLean Wolf Creek was a return to the ground zero of horror – tracing the legacy of films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. “Whether you look at Wolf Creek as a crappy horror movie or as a thriller, it does focus you on an extremely uncomfortable moment and allows you to dwell on the darkest kind of human transaction you can imagine.” says McLean. ““Heads exploding is uninteresting by itself. There are so many crappy crime shows with killers and serial killers and they gloss over the unbelievable horror of the transaction at the moment of someone being killed.”

While Australia’s horror films may have been occasionally laconic (Incident at Ravens Gate), sometimes chilling (The Last Wave), frequently bizarre (Howling 3: The Marsupials) – they are all rooted in the sturdy disquiet and abhorrence that have stalked the land since colonial times and, more often than not, kept the Censorship Office open for business.

SOLDIERS OF THE CROSS (1900)


It may come as a surprise then that Australia’s first quasi-horror fest was pioneered by the Salvation Army. Limelight Productions was, in fact, one of the world’s very first production houses. Designed specifically as a recruiting tool, this department ultimately gained notoriety for a different reason. Soldiers of the Cross, a 1900 Limelight Production, was a skilful weaving of 200 beautiful limelight slides with 3000 feet of freshly pressed kinematographic film. It was also a brutal cavort through the fundaments of Sainthood. For two hours audiences watched Christian soldiers being shredded by lions in the wastes of the Coliseum; being beaten, crucified, mauled and beheaded before being turned into smouldering strips of human torchlight for the Emperor Nero. “The martyrdom of the saints is fascinating in its reality” commented one dazed parishner.

The show was a triumph

Soldiers of the Cross was just north of horror, but it cast its shadow. Within church ranks there was unease about this restless medium stirring on the horizon. The Church no doubt realised it had raised a golem. When the Salvation Army was taken over in 1910 by more puritanical commandants the film department was quickly dismantled. Full kudos must be given to the Army’s new insurgents: they clearly understood the genre’s potential.

THE BLOODY BUSHRANGER

Meanwhile, in lieu of burning saints, a mad parade of bushrangers, scoundrels and assorted villainy flocked to fill the breach. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), apocryphally noted as the world’s first full-length motion picture, retrieved the blood scent. A 1907 edition of the Bulletin says: “By the time the railway scene comes on the public have had their taste for blood so freely whetted they have no enthusiasm for the schoolmaster who spoils the Kelly arrangement”.

While the Bushranger does not strictly haunt Australia’s horror canon, he was critical to the development of its code. In the compendium of early bushranger films ferments the root note of the classic killer. While the mystic native has long belonged to the land (The Last Wave, Walkabout, The Dreaming), the madman has traditionally been the flip-sider who haunts the Big Australian Empty (along with powerhouse crocs and bristling hell-hogs).

It is no coincidence that this aspect of our heritage lent itself so supremely to the horror film and its (occasional) box office returns. By 1907 the bloody bushranger film was so popular one nettled preacher warned: “These films do for children all that strong drink does for the drunkard!” So when this high-calibre screen violence was banned from NSW cinemas in 1911 there was, naturally, an outcry. But this time it was the Government, not the Church, who pulled the curtain.

The famous postmortem of Joe Governor; minor celebrity and celebrated bushranger, a criminal whose violent exploits inspired a flourish of Australian "pictoral horror" - and hastened its censorship.

The banning of “pictorial horror” severely hampered the local industry, which had already found its niche in “representations of gore and galloping cut throats”, as one impassioned fan letter to the Bulletin put it. This protester suggested the reasons for the prohibition were disingenuous: “It is easier and cheaper to import the American gorescape than to make a local one. The puritan denounces the bushranger and hasn’t got a word to say against the Indian horror with the turkey’s tail around his savage cranium. Which showman is game enough to adopt the motto: ‘Only Australian Blood Spilt Here!’”

But it was to be more than seventy years before the bushranger was resurrected in such incarnate splendour as Phillipe Mora’s magnificently violent Mad Dog Morgan (also notable for the Dennis Hopper’s method-channelling of dead Irish bushrangers via a breakfast of rum and cocaine).  They also, in part, inspired the contemporary macabre of John Hillcoat’s excellent prison-based Ghosts of the Civil Dead, described by the UK Time Out Magazine as “presenting some of the most horrifying images ever shown on screen. A masterpiece in the order of Goya.”

Violence in Cinema: Part 1

The screen, like nature – and prohibition – abhors a vacuum. But for many years the Australian Film Industry languished in one. Over the next forty years Australia saw other moments of early on-screen horror, but they are sparse and few between.

By 1960 the Australian film industry had veered dangerously close to extinction. Between 1959 and 1966 not one Australian feature film, horror or otherwise, was produced. Amongst some more interesting documentaries, cinema reels were largely motion sound grabs lauding the British Empire, lyricising a golden age of prosperity. A generation of directors, writers and technicians practiced their art through the production of these newsreels. But the tightly sutured reality of post-war Australia was about to undergo a well-documented haemorrhage.

If there was a clearer reaction to this industrial film-mill than George Miller’s 1971 Violence in Cinema: Part 1, it is hard to find.  The film begins with a Professor (Arthur Dignam) seated at his desk, talking to camera about violence on screen. It comes as a shock then when a gunshot splits his head apart like pink fruit. Splattered in gore, Dignam rattles on, gabbling like a human metronome, while further desecrations commence to shear him down to bloodied pulp. The abhorrent sense of relief felt through this overt violence is palpable. The film was a short explosion; it tore a cavity open and exposed a heartbeat. The critics didn’t know what to do with it. At the 1972 Sydney Film Festival it was placed it in the documentary category.

THE HORROR PUSH

By the 1970s television had begun opening the eyes to the abominable. With political assassination buried in the collective conscience, Vietnam unfurling in the living room, and idealistic abandon exploding like a land mine at every step, what television couldn’t handle cinema dined on. In the US cinema screens were now luminous with gore. ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ was famously churning out its low-grade product. So when the new Whitlam Govt offered a subsidy to the Film Industry in 1970 we fixed our hands on grimier reels. By the mid seventies what Robert Hood calls the ‘Australian Horror Push’ was in full bludgeon.

Terry Bourke

“Horror films have suddenly become the best money making vehicle” Producer Rod Hay told the Daily Telegraph in 1973; “They also provided an excellent opportunity for technical excellence by photographers, make up artists and effects experts.”

Inspired by the gorier flicks now coming out of the US, Australia had its share of purveyors ready to dip their hand. The inimitable Terry Bourke was one. Bourke’s first feature had been a ‘soft-core sex romp’ set in Singapore, but after judiciously eyeing the US market he set to task creating a more salacious brand of outrage. Bourke teamed up with producer Rod Hay to form the Company Terryrod Productions, and together they conceived their first project.

Night of Fear was a homespun shocker – in the every sense of the word.  An inchoate story about a stranded woman stalked by a bush dwelling maniac, this low rent slasher was filmed in scrubland on the outskirts of Sydney, and drew heavily from elements of Herschell Lewis US-styled gore. It was rolling red with screams, rats and deliriously wide-eyed close ups.

Bourke’s Night of Fear had originally been intended as the pilot episode in a series called Fright, and for a while the concept had the press crowing: “Australia’s 4 Television Networks are scrambling to buy a locally made horror series featuring some of the most terrifying scenes ever filmed for television” bayed the Herald. But in 1973 the project was banned by censors on grounds of “extreme obscenity”.  Producer Rod Hay indignantly claimed it was yet another example of “victimisation of local product”. Although he did concede to the Mirror that the film was “horrific and bizarre and that children should not be allowed to see it.”

Having tossed Night of Fear among the pigeons, Bourke and Hay bravely followed up with their 1890’s fable Inn of the Damned; a gregarious mix of sex, carnage and a bit of Cobb & Co. history. The Grand Guignol gothic is set loose around the traps of an colonial Inn, but not helped by dialogue evidently dictated upon the slips of delirium. Yet the film’s indulgences are a frothy addition to that 1970s cocktail of terror – by today’s standards its conceits seem almost luxurious. Outlandish sex, violence and thuggery; all phrased in a sort of mismanaged opulence – the kind that beguiles but never quite bores. It is an intriguing work, shackled somewhere in the pantry of the greater gore masters. Bourke passed away in 2002 and while his work has also sunk into relative obscurity Night of Fear and Inn of the Damned can be found on DVD.

Peter Weir

It wasn't all about rats, rape and cannabalism. Or was it?

Others were meanwhile crafting different curios. The esoteric Picnic at Hanging Rock has virtually been touted as Australia’s answer to the Sistine Chapel.  But Weir’s lesser-celebrated visions lend some seriously black gravity to Australia’s horror heritage. The Last Wave, in which a lawyer involved in an Aboriginal murder case inadvertently discovers Sydney is to be obliterated by the ocean, is sheer apocalypse. It perfectly translates the eerie spiritualism of the outback to the blank canvas of the city. David Gulpilil is mesmerising as the aboriginal man haunting Richard Chamberlain’s head and slowly undoing his life. The film exudes disaster.

By contrast Weir’s surreal 1974 film The Cars that Ate Paris – about a car-obsessed town where locals slaughter passing motorists – is an absurd gem. It is set in a small NSW country town where doctors perform brain surgery on crash victims, turning them into ‘veggies’, while the rest of the community scavenge their car wrecks and cobble together the hybrid hot-rods that ultimately run riot in the blood fuelled finale. This was the first film to ever be funded by the Australian Film Development Corporation, and it made a good start of things by receiving acclaim at The Cannes Film Festival. Channel 4 Films recently claimed Weir’s vision of Australian isolationism “paved the way for Mad Max and countless other pictures.”

Everett DeRoche

Patrick: The man that inspired the spitting scene in Kill Bill.

“It wasn’t until Carrie and The Exorcist came along that the horror really began to take off in Australia,” says scriptwriter Everett DeRoche. “That was what got the investors interested. It wasn’t until those films came out that things began to heat up commercially for horror movies.”

If there is anyone well placed to talk about the emergence of Australian horror during this period, it is DeRoche. Together with Producer Anthony Ginnane he helmed what must be regarded as Australia’s most prolific periods of cinema by any standard. DeRoche’s list of work includes Patrick, Long Weekend, Harlequin, Snapshot, Razorback, Roadgames and Link amongst others.

“Horror always came naturally to me” says DeRoche. “I’ve always been fascinated by the dark side. And all my kids are the same way. They put it down the fact that I’m actually from Maine. There’s something innately creepy about Maine. Stephen King has captured it quite well in his work.” Having grown up in the US Everett believes he may have had a certain advantage at the time through noticing the fears and obsessions taken for granted in the Australian lifestyle. “I tended to think the best Australian films were made by outsiders. Things like Walkabout and Wake in Fright. Maybe immigrants tend to notice things that locals miss or something.”

Patrick (1976), directed by Richard Franklin, remains one of DeRoche’s most memorable excursions. “One hundred and sixty pounds of limp meat hanging from a brain!” lectures the doctor, plying his scalpel through the skull of a squirming frog to illustrate the point. “Can you imagine anything less aware than that?” This is, of course, the story of a sexually repressed psychotic wreaking havoc from the grips of a coma. But while the film (hopefully) embraces a more universal theme, DeRoche says that living in Australia did ultimately inform the way he approached his work. “I probably ended up having more knowledge of Australia than I did of the United States. Growing up in Southern California, if we went anywhere we’d go to Southern Mexico to go surfing. Consequently my geographic knowledge of the States was very limited, whereas I’d seen quite a bit of Australia. And I think that’s changed the way I’ve approached some of my stories. I’ve always been impressed by the fact that you can jump in your car and drive for half an hour and get seriously lost. I guess this happens in other places too, but it somehow seems more apparent in Australia.”

None more so than in Roadgames. Penned by DeRoche shortly after Patrick, this film is considered by many to be director Richard Franklin’s Hitchockian masterpiece. Essentially Rear Window recalibrated to the windscreen of a truck crossing the Nullarbor, the film is a triumph of suspense and menace wrapped in the brooding mettle of the outback.  It is a testament to the sadly unsung talents of late Franklin, who eventually based himself in the States to direct the genre films for which he demonstrated such flair (among them Psycho II). “All of these films did better overseas” says DeRoche. “They weren’t well received in Australia at the time. I don’t know how long they lasted at the Box Office. But it wasn’t long.”

Which brings us to Razorback. Jaws-meets-Priscilla when a rabid boar tears the bejesus out of a threadbare desert community. The schizophrenic play between Hollywood and Australian sensibilities was never more evident than when the beer-swilling locals prove scarier than the beast. But DeRoche has grown fond of Razorback over the years. “At the time I wasn’t that thrilled with the script” he reflects. “I actually wasn’t all that excited about doing a movie about a giant critter. But Russell Mulcahy came along and gave it a kind of style that wasn’t there in the script. So it’s kind of gratifying when I’ve written a less than brilliant script and it’s able to be made into something more than it was.” Razorback has gone on to become a cult classic.

THE 1980s AND BEYOND:  HELL AND HIGH WATER

By the mid 80s director Brian Trenchard-Smith had also became a notorious name, creating such splatter pieces as Turkey Shoot in which prisoners from a futuristic prison were turned loose in the scrubland for a frenzied manhunt. “A sadistic, ultra-violent catalogue of sickening horrors” dourly noted David Stratton. Tarantino agreed – he is a huge fan. Dead End Drive In, in which marauding cavalcades of youth are barricaded in an old drive-in cinema by the government, remains his favourite Trenchard-Smith outing.

Other notable horror films from this time include Rolf De Heer’s Incident at Raven’s Gate where aliens invade a farm (perhaps our answer to Repo Man) – the engaging script and performances, particularly from young Steve Vidler, make this an overlooked entry. As is Alex Proyas’ Spirits of the Air, Gremlins in the Clouds, where a brother and sister wandering a bat infested, post apocalyptic desert while being dogged by a ‘stranger’. Cassandra, a film about a psychic girl whose subconscious memories raise hell in Melbourne, is also memorable.

Melt.

Outback Vampires (vampires set up terrifying shop – in the outback!) and the slasher-derivative Nightmares signalled the more sardonic arrival of the 80s and 90s.  Thickly glossed in schlock, often pushing social parody to the point of comedy, a host of splatter films stick to this era like mud; Body Melt (a flesh eating virus sets a community into literal melt down), Bloodlust (three vampires sluice their bloody way through Melbourne’s criminal underbelly), Bloodmoon (schoolgirls carved up), Cut (actresses carved up) and, lastly, the disastrous bluster of Houseboat Horror (everyone, including rock band, carved up).

Wolf Creek perhaps marked a grittier convergence of this disparate lineage. While the story could have come from the frontal lobe of Terry Bourke, it is the dark weaving of the land as a character that makes the film so chillingly effective. Says McLean: “Horror has to keep being reinvented. It keeps needing to be transformed. You wait for horror movies that test how scared you can possibly be and that use cinema to show you something terrifying that you’ve never seen before, and suddenly the bar is set at that level.”

That new level has resulted in an overwhelming resurgence of passion from a new generation of writers and directors. And that apocalyptic stage has now gone global. Shortly after Wolf Creek was brought by the Weinsteins, Saw found its offshore funding and on to make more than $55 million in the US alone. More recently, after a successful debut at Cannes, Andrew Trauki’s Black Water  (an intense, lean tale involving three people and a salt-water croc) has sold to 76 countries. “The horror market provides the perfect resources for the new film maker to plunder” says Trauki. “You don’t need big stars, and a lot of the time you don’t need a huge budget. For new talent it’s an accessible entry genre.” Released around the same time as Greg McLean’s similarly themed Rogue, Black Water unfortunately received minor local release.

Other screwturners from the new guard include the colonial cannibalism of Michael Brougham’s Dying Breed and Jamie Clink’s Storm Warning, a DeRoche story about a couple tortured by out-of-towners. Clink has also just finished shooting a remake of his 1976 horror classic Lost Weekend, with Claudia Karvan and Jim Caviezel playing the holidaying couple terrorised by wild bushland. In a testament to the original, Clink asked DeRoche not to alter the script. “Although I had to find the original script first” adds DeRoche. “There was only one dog-eared copy – this is long before computers – with pencil notes all through it. But the acting is probably the most dramatic thing to have changed. The standard has been raised quite a bit since the 70s. Having Claudia Karvan has been a real bonus. Also, the location is a lot better. One thing I didn’t quite like about the original is that it looked too pretty. This time around we used Wilson’s Promontory. The weather is a lot darker and more changeable.”

This renewal of interest may indicate that our horror cinema is finally getting the reappraisal generally reserved for Italian, European and American varietals. “I’d like to know were all these people were thirty years ago!” laughs De Roche. One senses that it has indeed been a long road. And amongst the pitfalls, screams and general plundering of obsession, from the sublime to the perverse and derelict, the plight of the Australian Horror Movie has itself endured tremendous adversity. Is this the real overarching ‘tradition’ spanning the lengths of our horror screen heritage then? Perhaps. Regardless, until the retrospective festivals finally catch up, many of our national horror obscurities are definitely worth digging from the vaults. Or at least the dustier shelves of the video shop.

By Geoff Stanton