Here are some highlights from this 2007 book by Greg Callaghan:
* [T]his cliff-top walkway and park was a popular homosexual ‘beat’ for decades. At a time when gay bars or venues were few, or too risky to visit, and when most gay or bisexual men married out of social pressure, closeted gay men would come to beats such as this—and Marks Park was among Sydney’s most famous—to meet others, soak up the seaside view, and, if the conditions were right, engage in casual, anonymous sex out of view or go back to one of their homes if it were available… Some attracted to the social aspects of mixing with like minded souls; others to the sheer sexual danger. One theory has it that men prowl or ‘cruise’ beats because the heterosexual world has taught them to associate homosexuality with guilt, repression and disguise.
Here is an after-midnight world that offers them a clandestine sexual escape—albeit a highly risky one. The gay beat drew international headlines back in April 1998 when British singer George Michael was arrested at a toilet block in a Los Angeles park by an undercover cop, who charged him with performing a ‘lewd act’.
‘Poofter bashing’ at beats such as this—and they exist in public parks, public toilets and beaches—was epidemic throughout Australian cities in the 1960s and 70s. Only a small fraction of these bashings was ever reported, their victims gagged by a blistering sense of shame, and a suspicion that the police, if they weren’t openly hostile, wouldn’t do much about it.
But something different happened on the Bondi headland between 1989 and 1990. The popular trysting spot turned into a playground for killers. It was here that gay men were dragged kicking and screaming to the cliff edge, where they were hurled over in wide-eyed terror like helpless animals. The area became so notorious for screams ringing into the night and the snaking pathway so frequently bloodstained that some locals dubbed it the Bondi Badlands. From nearby apartment blocks, dim figures were often seen scurrying across Marks Park, vanishing as quickly as they came.
* The onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s—and the flush of social paranoia caused by the Grim Reaper television campaign—pushed some of this prejudice to the surface, with gays being branded AIDS carriers and spreaders. Homosexuality only became legal in NSW in 1984, and then by only a slender margin, and it took until 1997 for it to be decriminalised in Tasmania.
* Even today, some in our society think that beating up gays, if not justifiable under normal circumstances, is at least understandable when it happens at an unsavoury place such as a beat. The victims have no-one to blame but themselves for taking such stupid risks. Besides, what are they thinking, having sex in a public place anyway . . . isn’t it against the law? Yes, in most states it is illegal, and yes, in anyone’s language it’s sleazy and distasteful.
* Back in the late 1980s, most Bondi locals considered the cliff tops a no-go zone at night because of what went on there.
* Ross understood that in a town like Wollongong, if you were gay and wanted to get ahead, you had to keep the closet door firmly locked. He had no better example of this than the mayor himself, Frank Arkell, who maintained a charade of heterosexuality during his entire seventeen-year tenure, after being elected to office in 1975. ‘I’m married to Wollongong,’ Arkell evasively quipped whenever he was queried about his marital status.
* Two decades later, in June 1998, Arkell was gruesomely slain in his home in the beachside suburb of Albion Park by 21-year-old double murderer Mark Valera, who strangled his victim before stabbing him in the eye with his Rotary Club badge. The 67-year-old Arkell was later named in the Wood Royal Commission for making advances to teenage boys.)
Since he had started at WIN, Ross made a habit every second weekend or so of doing the 82 km drive north up to Sydney, where he could soak up the vibrant gay scene of Oxford Street, the ‘Golden Gay Mile’.
* It was here, above the cliff tops at Marks Park 14 months before, that Ross had met the 21-year-old Craig Ellis, who had not long arrived from Auckland. Four years earlier, in 1985, Ross had been arrested for lewd behaviour at a toilet block in Southport, Queensland, with another male in his twenties. Mercifully for Ross, who was just starting out in his career, the embarrassing incident was kept out of the newspapers, in large part
thanks to the efforts of his mother. But sexual hunger is a powerful thing, and although he avoided beats for a time, Ross was drawn back to them by the time he had moved to Wollongong.
* Shortly afterwards—in February 1989—Ross drove Greg to a quiet spot and told him it was over, only minutes after they had had sex.
* Ross, who had come of age during the first major wave of the AIDS crisis and the fear-invoking Grim Reaper television campaign, kept condoms in his glove box and was always scrupulous about safe sex. At beats, his sexual repertoire rarely included penetration; tonight he left the condom packet unopened.
* He’d fallen in love with Australia, he gushed to his mother and sister in frequent letters back home. What he didn’t tell them was that as a gay man, he found the lifestyle refreshingly open; this was a place where he could breathe more easily, at last be himself. Where he came from, it was better to keep such matters hidden.
* Where to go? There were no gay bars or venues in Bondi, so he strolled off to the Bondi cliff tops, having heard that gay men hung out there, especially on a weekend night. As he crossed into the darkness of the pathway, his pulse began to quicken; sexually charged situations like these made him feel apprehensive and nervous. So he was partly relieved, partly disappointed, to discover that no-one was about.
* ‘Bondi is where all the faggots hang out. Me and me mates have been showing the gays who’s boss.’
* Steve Page was hitting the phones. He knew there are only three ways you can crack a murder case: by physical evidence, eyewitnesses or a direct confession. In most cases, the first two lead to the third.
* Thompson began reciting a long list of brutal crimes against gay men and lesbians—stories of murder, of lives ruined, of victims being left with lifelong injuries. ‘Heterosexual men are usually attacked by one offender; gay men by three to five,’ she said bluntly. ‘And those three to five attackers are usually teenagers or men
in their twenties.’
* more than one in five gay homicides happen at beats…
* [Why the poofter bashing?] ‘To prove their masculinity to their mates—the old alpha male syndrome. To show they are not gay, to steal, or simply because they enjoy bashing people up.’
‘Beats are usually about quick anonymous sex, but they can vary—some are more about socialising, others have their own rituals, such as at truck stops,’ she explained. ‘Marks Park at Bondi was a particular kind of beat because it operated only at night. The area is dotted by areas of scrub and caves in the rock face that men would go in after they had picked someone up on the pathway. A gay male would “cruise” another one by looking him straight in the eye and holding his gaze for a second too long, or nodding. Sometimes they might rattle keys to let someone know they are there and interested.’
‘I’ve heard numerous reports about gay men being led off the pathway on the Bondi headland by a decoy, only to be set upon by a gang.’
* Sydney’s gay heartland is in the grip of an unprecedented wave of violent murders and bashings. Teenage gangs, straight from the nightmare world of A Clockwork Orange, are terrorising the yuppie eastern and inner-city suburbs.
* ‘How come the media were on to it, but the police weren’t?’
* ‘Poofter bashing or first degree murder?’ ran a headline in the Star on 17 November 1989—only six days before John Russell’s body was found at the bottom of the Bondi cliffs. ‘In Australia, poofter bashing has long been regarded as an amusing, essentially innocent sport,’ opined journalist Paul Paech. ‘But now, after AIDS, it has turned into something more sinister, something that leaves people with more than a few bruises and broken bones. Today, poofter bashing amounts to first degree wilful murder.’
In the first six months of 1990, according to another story, more than 90 gay bashings were reported in Sydney, and there had been three gruesome, wellpublicised gay murders (Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn, Richard Johnson and school teacher Wayne Tonks). One young man quoted in another article admitted to being involved in more than 50 gang assaults and robberies of gay men.
* Some blamed the violence on the increased profile of the gay community in Sydney—as if, by being more open about their sexuality, gay men had no-one to blame but themselves for unleashing the furies of violence.
* Steve Page smiled to himself. He knew from long experience that there are few real murder mysteries: only guilty people with dark secrets, witnesses who won’t come forward out of fear or misguided loyalty to the killer, or maybe a case that remains unsolved because of a mis-step or two by the investigators, who misread
a critical piece of evidence. The unvarnished truth is always out there.
* [Former teacher William Allen] stood, unsteadily, only three or four metres from the toilet block in Alexandria Park where he had been brutally bashed… Did Allen meet his killers at Alexandria Park, while cruising the beat late at night? He was, after all, a regular at the park, more often than not taking his dogs for a walk there. Or was he lured to his death, as he had unwisely left his phone number on a cubicle wall in the toilet block?
* Page came across other far less saintly stories, however. There was Allen’s predilection for teenage boys, his habit of haunting beats, and a neighbour’s report of occasional visitors late at night. Allen was also being investigated for having sex with an under-age boy.
* In the park opposite, during the winter months, they played footy with many of their mates and knew all about the toilet block situated on the northern side. After nightfall it became a poofters’ hang-out. A gay beat. After the game they ambled across the road to the park, and headed straight for the toilet block. One selected a telephone number scribbled on the cubicle door and proceeded to call it from a public phone box nearby, while his mates listened in, sniggering. The number belonged to Richard Johnson, a slim, darkly handsome 33-year-old New Zealander who lived in Coogee; the boy invited him to come to the park for sex, enticing him with statements such as ‘I like to give head jobs’.
Johnson took the bait, arriving at the agreed time— 10 p.m.—after parking nearby, and walking across the same thatch of grass where William Allen was felled only a year before. Perhaps sensing danger, Johnson had no sooner stepped into the toilet block than he attempted to leave. Alas, it was already too late.
* Some of his attackers mocked him with ‘why be a fucking poofter?’ and ‘there’s no point being a poof’, laughing as their helpless victim desperately pleaded with them to ‘leave me alone, I’m sorry I’m gay’.
* Wayne Tonks, 32, school teacher. “Tonks didn’t go to the bars of Oxford Street, largely for fear of being spotted on the strip by colleagues or students. Paradoxically, though, he frequented beats, and had got into the reckless habit of leaving his phone number on toilet walls and doors. To reduce the obvious dangers of running into any of his students, he only did this in areas well away from where he worked, avoiding the high-risk inner city and Eastern Suburbs.”
[16yo Andrew claimed Tonks plied him with alcohol, played pornographic videos, offered him a massage—and then sexually assaulted him.
* Friends testified that Tonks had a predilection for young men—early twenties down to late teens—but there was no suggestion he ever had sex with anyone under sixteen.
* Tall and leanly muscular, Raymond Keam had the kind of body most men envy. Around his neck he wore a silver medallion, declaring him to be a member of the Zen Chi Ryu group, an elite band of black-belt karate experts specialising in full-contact, no-holds-barred sparring, arguably the most street-savvy martial art of all.
On a clear night in January 1987, outside a toilet block in Alison Park, Randwick, Keam was savagely beaten and left to die. Nearby residents, long accustomed to seeing and hearing assaults in the park—there had been at least eight attacks there in the previous twelve months—heard a commotion at about 2 a.m., but failed to call police because it had happened so many times before.
A Department of Main Roads technician, Keam was intending to drive down to Canberra a few days later to join his de facto wife and two-year-old son… Sometime after midnight he drove his Holden Jackaroo to Alison Park and parked it near the toilet block. Although Keam had been known to frequent gay beats, he didn’t identify as homosexual or lead a gay lifestyle.
* No-one will probably ever know what Maurice McCarty was discussing with his rough-looking young guest only minutes before he was murdered in his backyard. McCarty, a solid, unfit man with a thatch of wild grey hair, may have been shooting the breeze about the rugby…
* McKinnon claimed in court that McCarty had lured him to his Newtown home with the promise of selling him some cheap marijuana. Instead, he poured him a glass of wine and made a pass. The sexual overture was too much for McKinnon, who simply ‘snapped’.
* While it may not be a legally recognised term, the ‘homosexual panic defence’—the argument that men can be excused of carrying out even horrific violence if it’s in response to another man trying to fondle or kiss them— has a long and ignoble tradition in the Australian courts…
* The criminal class—both inside and outside prison—is ruled by a brutal code of silence. Even the toughest thugs are often afraid of what will happen to them if they inform on mates or enemies.
* he was not dealing with a single serial monster but a multi-headed hydra, a diffuse group of men (and maybe women) who had made it their hobby to kill gays… Killers don’t tend to come out of nowhere. In most cases, they have a history—and in this case it would have been bashing gays. Perhaps, having got away with thrashing gay men again and again, they became so emboldened they thought nothing of throwing someone off a cliff. In short, serial bashers who had morphed into serial killers.
* some members of the Alexandria Eight were bashing gay men in other parts of Sydney, including Bondi. French admitted in subsequent police statements to bashing hundreds of gay men, including at Bondi…
* ‘I know that poofter, man. I’ve seen him before, I’ve belted him before.’ They’d belted him at Moore Park, when they was up the Cross before and took his wig.
* She recalled a troubling conversation with her flatmate’s friend, a woman called Merlyn McGrath, in August 1989, who claimed she went ‘poofter bashing’ with male friends. Constable O’Brien asked her why she did this and McGrath replied, ‘to teach them a lesson not to be f*** poofters.’
* “Occasionally I would hang around in the hope that I might meet someone for casual sex. So in ’89 I met up with this chap who I called Red because of his henna-red hair. He was someone, a gay man, who went to the rocks area pretty regularly. So I’d just pass the time of day with him and ask him, what’s been happening, just to get a bit of an idea if there’d been any trouble. I’d been assaulted myself in 1986…‘Red’ showed me knife scars on his upper body from when he’d been assaulted but managed to fight them off… I suggested a Sunday night because that’s usually the busiest night at the rocks.”
* Rick knew what went on there—he’d been to the cliff tops several times before—and had even hooked up with a couple of young men who he’d invited back to his tiny one-bedroom flat. One had even become a friend. Truth be told, he found a run or stroll around these cliff tops so much easier than fronting up to one of Oxford Street’s gay bars. That first step into the darkness of a bar or club was always so intimidating. The hungry eyes checking you out. The attitude—real or imagined—from the goodlooking ones. The preening gym bunnies. The leather queens. He always had to gird himself for those first five or ten minutes. Only after the warm glow of those first couple of beers sank in could he start to relax and enjoy…
* Rick looked up beseechingly at the twentysomething man now standing on his balcony. He yelled out that he’d been bashed.
‘I’m not going to help you,’ the man shouted back. ‘I don’t help poofters.’
* ‘But a lot of people thought the beat at Marks Park was the small toilet block on the Tamarama side; this wasn’t really the case. The toilets are too open and people can always walk in on you.’ Rather, it was the rocky area on the perimeter of Marks Park and the bushes on top of the flat area of the park that were the favoured cruising spots because they were so private, Jones added. ‘When I lived in Bondi I came here nearly every night, but not necessarily for sex. Sometimes just for company.’
* He now had a clear sense of the principal gangs in the late 1980s targeting gay men. They were the Alexandria Eight (who killed Richard Johnson, and possibly William Allen); the Tamarama Three (who murdered Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn); and the Bondi Boys (who allegedly attempted to kill Rick, among a host of other crimes at the cliff tops). Under the Bondi Boys, Page had a list of ten names, corroborated by witness statements and police reports of the time. All these gangs were prolific in gay bashings, the murders representing the mere peak of their hardknuckled attacks.
* Matthew Davis, one of Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn’s killers, was among the first persons of interest to take the box. As a teenager, he told the packed courtroom, he was ‘filthy on the world’. He described how he was sexually abused as a child by a friend of the family, a paedophile. ‘Because I was raped and bashed by this
man for years, I thought, okay this bloke was a man, he had sex with another male, so me not having the social skills or the education back then, or the mentality or whatever to differentiate, I couldn’t differentiate between paedophilia and homosexuality.’
The net result, he explained, was that he ‘hated [homosexuals] with a passion’.
* One witness, a gay man, declared to the court: “the days of going and doing beats, searching for partners, is dangerous, risky business… I believe that we need to look at these things and say okay these are the problems, right, we shouldn’t be going down to these parks because they are too dangerous.”