Adelaide elected Don Dunstan, for God’s sake.
What a man! Others have spoken lovingly of his iconic pink shorts. His tendency to wear a Greek tunic while playing the piano. His easy familiarity with people who were not white and protestant, partly because of his birth in Fiji. His comfort with his own sexuality. His defeat and his death were tragic and heroic. Not to mention a few minor law reforms, like the appointment of Australians as governor, first Mark Oliphant and then Doug Nicholls, who was also the first indigenous governor; the first woman appointed to the supreme court, Roma Mitchell; the declaration of native title; the extension of shopping hours; and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Not to mention the creation of Rundle Mall, his encouragement of good food, arts, music and festivals and Don Dunstan’s Cookbook, which contains an excellent chicken curry. My partner David is related to Adelaidian Dunstans, and desperately hopes that he might be close kin to the fabled and fabulous Don.
Picture the scene. I am sitting on a purple towel on Glenelg Beach with my transvestite friend Vic, who is being a lady today, hence the purple towel and the fetching lilac dress with frills. I am wearing jeans and a T-shirt as usual. We have a bottle of red wine, of which Vic is drinking the most because, as she said, ‘If the prophet who declared that Adelaide is about to be wiped out by a tsunami this afternoon spoke the truth, I want to get in a few last drinks before someone calls “Time”.’ The prophet had told us that God would wipe out Adelaide because it was a wicked city, similar to Sodom or possibly Gomorrah, and it would all be our fault for our sinful ways.
Although I never met anyone who actually said they believed him, people were nervous. Some of the Hindley Street shops had clearance sales in the middle of summer and some people were said to have sold their goods and fled to the hills to watch the sea take the city from a safe vantage point. In Adelaide it is always difficult to sort out the irony from the anxiety. But still.
So, on 20 January 1976, Vic and I were getting progressively oiled and not a little sunburnt as we waited for the end. There were lots of people there with us. They too were having picnics (though because Vic was on one of her all-alcohol diets, we had forgotten about food) and time ticked on. I was explaining to Vic that apocalypse was a Greek word that just meant revelation, not disaster, when the time for the tidal wave arrived.
There was a stir at the back of the crowd. Pacing down through the groups of people came (I swear) Don Dunstan in a safari suit, riding on a camel – a good choice because it sneered all opposition out of its way, as camels do. You always know that they are calculating exactly where a half-kilo of semi-digested grass will do the most harm. The Premier had come to join his people at this moment of danger. If Adelaide was going to be hit by a great wave, it would have to get past Dunstan first.
It was the only time I ever saw him. He was slight but had such a commanding presence. He got down off his camel and stood with his arms outstretched, facing the sea. Surely he must have been just a little apprehensive? I was. The crowd was silent. We watched him. He watched the ocean. Even the camel stopped bitching, caught by the moment. I remembered Cuchulainn the Irish hero, cursed and fighting the sea.
Then the moment passed and Dunstan shook hands all round, got back on his camel and rode away. I grabbed the bottle from Vic and drained it in a toast.
What a wonderful man.
Speaking of the day when Dunstan defied the ocean and God’s vengeance on unrighteous wretches (that is, us), Adelaide has the highest number of atheists in Australia. It had no convicts and fewer Irish (and therefore fewer Catholics) than the rest of Australia’s state capitals, which meant that its servant class was free and probably quite stroppy. It was a capitalist venture that went broke and had to be bailed out by Her Majesty’s Government in the 1840s. It has only one tram route. It is a green and watered park in the middle of some very desolate deserts. There is no good reason for it to be where it is.
And it has the oddest crimes. No one from Adelaide can understand our fascination with Adelaide crime. They point out, rather stiffly, that their crime rate is lower than other cities, which is true. I am not saying that there is more crime in Adelaide. Just that it is odder.
It has been suggested that Adelaide works on a massive form of the Old Boys’ network. If you are alone in Adelaide, it feels uncaring and you will be isolated and lost. But if you know one person, they will introduce you into a network of other people and life will suddenly become vibrant and exciting and full of friends. It’s a series of cliques but they are big cliques, containing between two thousand and ten thousand people. You can know everyone in your chosen clique. This is the source of the ‘Adelaide Effect’ which means that any two Adelaide people encountering each other in, as it might be, Ulan Bator will find at least one acquaintance in common. Apparently it’s a hard and fast rule.
And so it is in regard to crime. Everyone has serial killers but only Adelaide had Snowtown, where the killers (plural, which is very unusual) stored the bodies in barrels in a disused bank. Everyone has homophobic attacks on passing homosexuals but only in Adelaide are the attackers the police and the assaulted (and, in fact, drowned) a university lecturer, Dr George Duncan. Everyone has cults but only Adelaide had The Family.
The Family murders were, as the Americans would put it, particularly heinous. A series of young men and boys – Alan Barnes, Neil Munro, Mark Langley, Peter Stogneff, Richard Kelvin – were raped and mutilated and murdered and thrown away like rubbish. They had all been dosed with knock-out drops, including mandrax, a restricted substance, which led the police to one Bevan Spencer Von Einem, who lived with his mother in a nice middle-class house in a nice middle-class suburb. Called Paradise.
Von Einem’s method was simple. The boys were enticed to begin with, plied with alcohol and promises of parties and girls. They were doped with a mixture of alcohol and rohypnol (now called ‘the date rape drug’), mandrax, valium and chloral hydrate marketed as Noctec, the original ‘Micky Finn’, and then ravished away to be held captive for the monsters’ amusement. I say ‘monsters’ in the plural because more than one person was definitely involved in their torture. Not all of the boys picked up by Von Einem were murdered. He never explained why some were released and some were killed. He showed no remorse. He admitted no guilt. And he never revealed who else was involved, so the stories about a high-level homosexual rape club were given free rein.
It might have been true. This was Adelaide, after all, home of the seriously weird crime. Think of Derrence Stevenson, who was murdered by his young male lover and stuffed into a freezer. The murderer superglued the lid and took off for Coober Pedy, presumably for the opal mining. You have to admit that that was unusual.
Everyone has road murderers, riders on the storm, but only Adelaide had Christopher Worrell, who took his homosexual mate Miller along with him when he killed hitchhiking girls on the road to Truro. He then had the bad taste to die before he could be tried. Miller wrote a nauseating little self-justification, Don’t Call Me Killer, explaining that he loved Chris dearly, was only along for the ride and never murdered anyone. Meanwhile, the most heart-wrenching book about any murder, It’s a Long Way to Truro, was written by Anne-Marie Mykyta, whose daughter Julie was one of Worrell’s victims.