Warehouse squatter war story

From My Cummerbund Fell In The Toilet:

I lived in a warehouse squat in the 80s. It was called the G-----y, in Woolloomooloo. When I moved in, after a 3 month stint drying out in Queensland, there were about 8 people in a huge three level space. We each had a wing of the place to ourselves. After some weeks more and more people started to move in, given ppl in small groups controlled entire sets of spaces themselves and let their friends and associates move in with them. What ended up happening was a full out territory war, with people annexing new spaces at two o'clock in the morning, internecine warfare, bitchiness, and backstabbing to the point of occasional physical violence. But in this toxic environment, something beautiful did grow from the compost heap.

Still, many, many, memorable gigs were staged in the couple of performance areas of the warehouse we had set aside. It was an important cradle for developing bands and artists at the time because we operated a space that was free of commercial concerns. We had a couple of great week long art festivals, and dozens of excellent music gigs, theatre, a video art festival, excellent parties, a colony of visual artists, and several small recording studios came and went within the bounds of the space.

Living in this osrt of environment really takes it toll though. Once in the middle of winter we went about two months with no hot water and having to take your cold shower in a big impersonal shower block in the middle of winter is no fun let me tell you. We also had the electricity connected illegally (a big warehouse like that has no meters, just a three phase connection straight to the grid). One morning the electricity inspector turned at 7 am. As I was defacto in charge of electricity, I had to bolt, in the nude, into the switch room and rip off, by hand, the illegal jumpering we had connecting the main three phase with the supply coming in from the street. I had to jump up in the air and try to pull off the jumper cable in one movement, to avoid being electrocuted.

One guy who lived for a while opposite the space where I lived was a hard-core crim. He was pimping his junkie girlfriend. He had a Ph/D., earned, I suspected, while inside for something or other he'd done. He was friendly enough to us, actually, but did get ugly to some others of thesquatters. Always in the wee hours of the morning, he'd pull up with a car and his mates and they'd unload stuff. The stuff would all be gone by about 11am the next day.Once, he gave an old rifle, a 30-30 to my girlfriend. My advice was to immediately take it across the road the dump in the harbour. I refused to touch it. Who knows what the cops would think if they ever got to do ballistics on it and your prints where on it.

After putting up with the characters there for a while we got jack shit of the eternal space wars in the warehouse and found a better set of squats round the corner.It was a small block of houses owned by the DMR (Dept. Of Main Roads), the eastern distributor tunnel entrance now goes right through where the houses where. Some may remember speeding past the brightly coloured houses with the spastic paint job to the left at the bottom of the old freeway off-ramp as it sped up Palmer Street in the 'Loo.

When, after some weeks the DMR turned up and insisted they were going to knock the place down any time soon for the freeway, we chimed up with, "Why don't you give us a lease?". Primarily they were worried about the legal ramifications of people living in their property. We got a lease, alright. We had to do the maintenence ourselves. We paid $25 a week for the whole house. For the next seven years.

The place next door was initially squatted by some fairly decent anarchist-punks. However this house slowly degenerated into junkie squatsville after a couple of years. Some of these junkies where just hopeless couldnt even change a tap in the kitchen, instead preferring to just turn the water on and off at the common water main the two houses shared. I went off my nut one morning, I mean if you are going to squat a place youve got to accept the maintenance burden its part of the deal. Id rewired warehouses, replaced hot water systems, helped unblock blocked sewage, torn down and rebuilt entire spaces, walls, floors all sorts of things. Taps were a trivial affair and Im not walking out into the back lane wearingnothing but a towel to turn the water main on just so I can have a shower.

We kept our place pretty clean and tightknit with three of us forming the house's stable nucleus for many years. The two places behind us though were another story. The small terrace house directly behind us that my girlfriend shared with a paranoid woman who thought we were channelling nazi war criminals at night time. She stole stuff off my girlfriend, which caused my girlfriend to kick her out. The resulting insulting graffitti is probably still hidden behind the freeway wall. My girlfriend ran away with some stupid junkie scum bag, I guess they deserved each other, we were having huge screaming fights pretty much all through our completely disfunctional relationship. Eventually the small terrace was demolished, and turned into a carpark for the BMW dealership across the road, during the day. We reached an agreement with them to use it as a garden when they weren't parking cars in it and on weekends we'd set up a garden furniture set in it and have a barbie.

The big garage/workshop at the very back, was occupied by some people I knew from the old Glebe squat days from before the Gunnery. However they couldn't control the space effectively, so it was areal mess, with a bunch of transients coming and going and generally ruining the space with deadshittery. I dubbed it, 'Lost in Space' and painted as such on the garage door. We did manage to put one excellent gig on one Good Friday called 'The Modern Cruxifixion' at which my favourite bands of the time, Smash Mac Mac, Distant Locust, and some other people myself included played. Smash Mac Mac was the first band Paul Mac and Andy Rantzen (later itchee and scratchee) had formed. Some transvestites who still lived in the Gunnery dressed up as easter bunnies and skipped around and handed out lollies and drugs. We were running an illegal bar, as was the norm at those sorts of gigs in those days, but ran out of alcohol by 11pm because we forgot that on Good Friday the pubs were shut and no-one would therefore bring any BYO. If we had planned properly, we would have really cleaned up, instead of just doing moderately well.

One of my housemates had a whole family of loopies. She was a bit loopie herself but still personable and more or less functional however her sister A----- really took the cake. A----- set up camp in the top front room. She was insane, really insane, I mean actually so to the point of paranoid schizophrenia, rather than in any colloquial sense. She accused my other flatmate of raping her, at the time he was away travelling in South America. She hung a handwrittensign out the front window, Travellers beware, they have broken my legs and bound my armsand holding me prisoner. K----- asked her sister to move out. She gave her two weeks. Two weeks came and went. A----- claimed she was travelling overseas to Germany and that K----- had stolen her passport, thus preventing her from leaving. One afternoon, I came home to find a very shaken K----- in the loungeroom nursing a nasty wound on her arm. It turned out that K----- had tried to personally evict her sister and A----- bit her on the arm. I mean bit, like an animal would bite -- into the flesh. Blood. Wounds. During the course of this fight, A----- had apparently called the cops to report the theft of her passport!!! Shaken, the three of use, K-----, S----- and myself tried to argue with A----- to get her to see sense and leave. But it was like trying to argue Kantian Metaphysics with a fence post. Eventually the cops came. We explained what happened. Knowing my rights as a leaseholder, I demanded the cops remove A----- from our house or I would resort to reasonable force to make her leave. They got a social worker down who got A---- to move out.

The loopie family story doesn't end here. One of her other sisters, L--- came to stay. Problem was, L--- was a catatonic schizophrenic. She spent days and days just standing in the kitchen. Eventually she perked up a bit and we took her out with us party crawling one night. On the way back home, right in front of the old JJJ building, she walked right out into William Street against the lights and boom! Hit by a car. Cartwheeled right over it, 15 feet in the air. I saw the whole thing from the other side of the road. My only thought was -- dead -- as she flipped into the air and fell back onto the road. But she was only badly, really badly, injured.

Her long hospital stint caused the entire family -- mother and remaining two daughters -- to come over from R------ in South Australia and stay in our front room the one A--- had vacated not long before. This lasted about three months until L--- was well enough to go home with them to R------. Dad didn't come on account of the fact that many years before he had died lying in bed where he stayed for two days before anyone noticed he was dead.

Eventually I moved out to move in with my new girlfriend. A few years later they flattened the houses to make the new tunnel complex for the Eastern Distributor. The punk disco-suckscrusties who originally squatted next door turned up a few years later as the Jellyheads, and afterward formed the core of the legendary rave party outfit the Vibe Tribe. Oh ironies of ironies. K----- went to NYC where she became a celebrated door bitch at a Manhattan s&m nightclub. S----- went to Russia for a while, and was there when there was the popular revolt against Yeltsin's rule. He said the Army had to be bribed to support Yelstin and shoot at the protesters. This was the time when the Army was shelling the parliament building. He nearly got hit with a rocket grenade at the tvstation when the army opened up without warning or provocation on the protesters, who had siezed control of the tv station, and he spent three hours hiding in a stormwater drain. A----- I never saw again. I got the shock my my life some years later when one of my friends started dating one, then the other, of the younger sisters. When I first met them they were like 12 and 14.

A couple of the people who hung around the G-----y became big rock stars, art stars or leading designers and the like. Some became tragic wastes of space, a couple are normal people, a few are dead, some just disappeared off the planet, but most of the others are still around today, although I only really ever see a tiny handful of them even occasionally nowadays.