I Was Beaten Up One Night In Sydney
A writer reflects on the current media hype surrounding alcohol and unprovoked attacks in the inner-city.
I once had my very own experience of violence on the streets of Sydney. It was a scary and surreal experience all round, the kind of thing you hear about and see on TV without thinking it will ever happen to you. I was 20, and on my first trip to the city without parental supervision of any sort. It was late on a weeknight, and I was walking a friend home to his place in the inner suburbs.
We were making our way down the side of a busy main road, making idle conversation, when I saw them approaching: a group of dark figures silhouetted in the headlights of the approaching cars. I felt my guard go up and my stomach drop but I told myself I was being stupid and over-cautious, as a stranger in a new city. As my friend and I approached the group of four or five, they parted around us as we walked through.
‘You see, that was fine,’ I thought to myself as we passed. A few seconds later, they jumped us.
I remember bits and pieces of what happened next, but the whole thing is a bit of a blur, like someone bumped the remote and made my memory play back at twice the right speed. The first thing I clearly recall is that one of the guys grabbed me from behind and smashed a bottle over my head. I didn’t feel it at all, but I knew it had happened because of the broken glass I saw falling to the footpath. It looked weirdly pretty.
The next thing I knew, he had a tight grip on me, holding my arms behind my back — but with a combination of shoulders and elbows, I managed to struggle free from his grasp. When I turned to face him, I saw a wiry-looking guy about my age. He took a lunge at me and I raised my fists and snarled. I probably looked about as threatening as a Labrador puppy, but he seemed surprised that I was putting up any sort of a fight, and backed away.
My friend got the worst of it. He was on the ground, with two or three of the guys hitting and kicking him. I couldn’t make out much other than random words like “faggot”, along with the scuffing sound of shoes on the pavement and the dull thud of their kicks connecting with his body. I don’t know why they chose him and not me — I was a faggot too, after all — but the next second they were running away down the street.
The rest of the night consisted of rides in police cars, looking at photos under harsh fluorescent lights, repeating the story of what happened to different people at the police station in Surry Hills. One of the officers took me, slightly bruised and a bit dazed, back to the scene – which feels like a weird thing to say because the words have such a Law & Order-ish ring to them.
I found my glasses lying by the side of the busy road, completely intact. I was so amazed that they hadn’t been squashed to smithereens by a passing car that I let out a laugh when I picked them up. It was a strange night.
This Alcohol-Fuelled Violence Trend Is A Media Beat-Up…
I thought back on that night when I heard about Thomas Kelly, who was killed in July 2011 by an unprovoked punch on his first night out in Kings Cross. I thought back on it again when I heard about Daniel Christie, whose life support was switched off 11 days after a similar one-punch assault in Kings Cross, on New Year’s Eve. I looked at their photos and felt weirdly guilty, because I’d gotten off so much more easily than they did.
After a flurry of editorials about the wave of alcohol-fuelled violence sweeping the city, NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell gave in to the pressure and announced a tough set of reforms for the Sydney CBD. By this point, however, the media pendulum had swung the other way. O’Farrell’s lockout was condemned as unworkable and unfair, and statistics came out showing that alcohol-fuelled violence has in fact diminished considerably in the last five years.
Contrary to the articles we’ve seen splashed across the front pages of the SMH and the Sun Herald in recent months, it seems that Sydney is not a city of punchy profligates who can’t hold their liquor. As argued by Tad Tietze on Junkee yesterday, alcohol-fuelled violence is a trend invented by the media, with only the shakiest of connections to what’s really happening on our streets. We can probably even be trusted to go out drinking again without hitting and killing each other.
As I write, bloggers and newspaper columnists are wrapping the issue up and declaring it done, but one question still remains. If Kieran Loveridge and Shaun McNeil, the men whose punches killed Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie, weren’t acting as part of a broad, media-mandated social trend, what the actual ever-loving fuck were they doing?
A friend of mine, who can always be relied upon for a pithy quote, gave his take on the proposed CBD lockout yesterday. “I agree that alcohol doesn’t help and can impair judgement,” he said, “but dickheads are dickheads whether they are sober or drunk. We need to look at the dickhead problem in this country.” I think my friend really truly hit the nail on the head.
In a piece published on this website earlier today, Andrew Levins made it clear that he was only joking when he suggested a ‘Don’t Be A Fuckwit’ campaign — but I like his way of thinking all the same.
…And The Recent Attacks Are A Symptom Of Something Else
In the midst of the blanket coverage surrounding the drinking culture and O’Farrell’s reforms, I found myself drawn to a January 20 article by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Mark Dapin. Dapin wrote about his own experience of unprovoked violence, an attack while leaving a pub that was so bad it put him in the hospital with a suspected fractured skull.
Dapin’s take on his attack pre-empted much of the media hype of the past few days. Figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show that reports of non-domestic assaults in the Sydney Local Government Area have fallen over the last ten years, from a high of 4377 in 2007-2008 to 3589 in 2012-2013. If you want to have a play with their search tool yourself, you can do it here.
In his piece, Dapin said that his attackers weren’t acting as part of an alcohol-fuelled crime wave. There was no broad social trend to blame, no hashtag or headline to sum up what happened. They punched and kicked him into unconsciousness simply because they enjoyed it and they could. Reading between the lines of his piece, he argued that it was just human nature that made them do it.
That’s a pretty pessimistic take on things, but I understand where he’s coming from. The urge to beat the shit out of things is more deeply-ingrained than a drinking culture. It’s more deeply ingrained than violent video games or contact sports. The urge to beat the shit out of things, Dapin argues, comes from the need to feel powerful.
Across the literature on violent crime – in articles about rape, domestic abuse, gang violence – the phrase ‘the need to feel powerful’ comes up again and again. It’s a need to compensate for feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, a need to feel strong, even a sense of satisfaction that comes from inflicting violence on those less powerful.It might be that Kieran Loveridge and Shaun McNeil threw those punches for a thrill, or because they wanted to look tough in front of their mates. It might have been the caveman impulse to eliminate competing males for the sake of female attention. They might, at least in Kieran Loveridge’s case, have been too drunk to consider the consequences of their actions.
I feel lucky in some ways because at least I can explain what happened to me and my friend that night: we were attacked by a bunch of guys who just straight-up didn’t like gay people. It’s a bullshit, cowardly motive, but it’s a motive all the same. There’s no such explanation for what happened to Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie.
Will the promise of 3am lockouts, tougher jail terms for drug and alcohol-fuelled offenders and increased police powers help the voters of NSW sleep a little more soundly? Maybe. Will the Kieran Loveridges and Shaun McNeils of the world be deterred in any way? I wouldn’t hold your breath.
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Alasdair Duncan is an author, freelance writer and video game-lover who has had work published in Crikey, The Drum, The Brag, Beat, Rip It Up, The Music Network, Rave Magazine, AXN Cult and Star Observer.