Introduction
As we noted in our first post, Welcome to Crimes of Class, we started this project to share stories from back in the day about regional and rural working-class lives in the informal, criminal, and black economies, and to ask what we can learn about class struggle and class composition from these stories. We decided to begin by interviewing each other about our own experiences living in these types of conditions. We will serialise the interviews on this site. Once we have posted the interviews in full, we will share a co-authored essay reflecting on the issues raised in the interviews.
We are posting the interview with Mark first. The interview will be posted in 5 sections, themed broadly as follows:
1 Learning to Live with Crime, Cops, and Prisons
2 Living Against the Police, Solidarity for Survival
3 Class Composition, Resource Scarcity, and Time Abundance
4 Lumpen Politics, Whiteness, Race, and Policing
5 The Morality of Crime, Rebellion, and Exclusion
This post introduces the housing commission neighbourhood in Bomaderry that shaped most of the stories to come in this interview. It tells stories about growing up among the criminalised economy, unemployment, heroin, police raids and prison, and politicisation via experiences of poverty and policing.
PART ONE
Learning to Live with Crime, Cops, and Prisons
Nick: Where did you grow up? What was it like?
Mark: I grew up in Bomaderry in the Shoalhaven, a rural town on NSW South Coast. I moved there when I was 5 or 6 in the mid-1980s. I was actually born in Sydney and lived there for five years. And then moved to Bomaderry and lived in two houses. The first one was on Cambewarra Rd and then I moved to Leonard St, which is where I spent the majority of my time as a child and a youth. It was a smallish neighbourhood. Leonard St was the street I lived on and then there was Sampson Crescent that was attached to it and there's a few little streets and those series of blocks were all Housing Commission and Aboriginal housing. Basically, all run-down little weatherboard housing, yards attached to houses, a park. So, it was a small neighbourhood but there was a lot of people within it. In a lot of ways there were great things about it and there was a lot of difficult things about it as well. Some of the good things were there's a lot of people, a lot of kids. Growing up among that was good 'cause there was always people around and other people your own age, it was easy to find people to hang out with and muck around with. It's like bush around there and so there's all that sort of stuff, that was good. But I guess the other side to it, like any other sort of Housing Commission or poor area is, there was a lot of everyday struggles getting by, in terms of material wealth, or lack of it. As well, just the negotiations and navigating the law and the police, that sort of stuff was how the neighbourhood was characterised.
I grew up in this house on Leonard St, there was myself, my Mum, and my stepdad Tony, and I was the eldest and I had two brothers two sisters, so there's the five of us kids in the house and Mum and Tony, so seven of us in the house. Every time I start to talk about this I don't really know where to begin, like in a lot of ways it was lovely and awesome and there was a lot of love and support within the household. The house was like a social hub for lots of people like mum and Tony’s friends, mine, and my siblings’ friends. It was very open, often lots of people hanging out and so on. There was a lot of good times, and I felt like I was given a lot of freedom to do what I liked, which I guess you can unpack that a bit maybe in some ways, but I felt supported to do whatever I wanted to do, which was a good thing. It was a generous space, and they were generous people in all sorts of ways, and mum was especially generous with her love.
But the other side to it was we didn't have much money, ever really. Mum would sometimes work as an aged care nurse in a nursing home, but that was pretty rare. She was mainly on the pension and Tony sometimes worked as a cleaner, sometimes worked as a concreter/labourer, but mainly didn't work. I only remember them working a tiny bit. I guess the main difficulties of the household stemmed from their own drug addictions, primarily to heroin, and how that brought us into relationship with the law and the cops on the one hand and then also other elements of criminal life and illegal activity.
I refer to Bomaderry as where I grew up and most of my experiences stem from there, but we actually moved there, at least this is how I remember it, because Mum and Tony were trying to get out of the heroin world they were in up in Sydney, trying to get a bit straighter, something they tried many times and didn't quite succeed at any time. So, it is hard to put into words, because mum and Tony were really good parents in many ways, very loving and supportive of us in lots of ways, that never felt in question. It was really stressful and very lovely at the same time, both of those things we're in constant tension with each other.
N: Was unemployment and poverty the common conditions of those living in that part of Bomaderry?
M: Yeah, definitely for the majority of people - like the people I was hanging out with and the people who were around, so all the different friends I had at different points, their families, most people hung out in the neighbourhood most of the time. So, I remember when Tony, my stepdad, was doing concreting for example, he was a labourer, he was doing it for this guy Kip who lived across the road and had his own small concreting trade. There was a brief period where Tony would work for him now and then. Kip was one of the exceptions and worked full-time. My friend Jeff’s dad worked now-and-then, working also in a cement shop. And my best friend Quenton (Crow), his mum worked in the nursing home, and she worked reasonably consistently. But aside from exceptions, in terms of my own immediate points of reference, most people either didn't work or worked a little bit. Most people were unemployed or doing things otherwise, with some people working.
N: One of the things you suggested we talk about was politicisation via poverty. Why did you choose that theme and how does it relate to the commonality of unemployment and poverty?
M: What I meant by that is two things, my own politicisation by experiencing them is one thing related to that. But also, everyday forms of living when you don't have much stuff and when the police are regularly in your life, about how people come to form social relationships, friendships, or bonds, which aren't capital P political in a sort of activist-y sense, but are kind of political in another way, or just a part of the everyday politics and what it's like to live in a deeply classed society. For example, politicisation via poverty, for me anyway, was like living in a context that was very hard to make sense of why it was the way it was, just in reference to what was immediately on hand. So, like why there were so many difficulties and so many people going into prison, or going into juvenile detention, or people dying, and the police being around so often. And me being aware of all of those sorts of things, being aware of that, even the fact my own folks were going to gaol, how that sort of set me apart from, not necessarily the people who were around me in the neighbourhood, but people at school and so that being such a jarring and difficult thing for me to understand at the time.
And it was something I wanted to understand but also, I was afraid of admitting openly to all of my friends who weren't from that neighbourhood what was really going on in my own household, or where I lived. Other of my friends were not like that at all and my siblings weren’t all like that either (afraid to be open about it all), but for me, I found it very difficult to sort of say that stuff out loud. That created this massive gap in terms of how I understood myself, what my everyday life was like and then what a normal life is meant to be. So, it took me a long time of thinking about and reflecting on all of those things to get to the point where I was able to see it in a way that was not just connected to where we were, but other broader questions about class and prisons, mainly.
For example, my parents going to prison, coming back saying they're not going to get back into the same shit that put them there, but then getting back into the same shit, in a cycle. At a certain point you have to find a way to explain that, which isn't just personal failing, 'cause it didn't seem like it was just personal failing, and also I loved them, so I didn't really want to think they were just useless people. So, for me, I didn't really get politicised in a sort of activist-y way, through an issue, or through a cause, but mainly just through all of that sort of stuff and wanting to understand it and in some ways escape it, which sounds kind of silly in some ways. Like to be in such a classed environment and then to try to understand it and reflect on it, build a politics around it, but in doing so sort of step out of it into somewhere else. In hindsight that seems like a really strange thing to have done, but also was probably necessary at the time.
Then the other side to politicisation and poverty, the amount of sharing that people did, like we didn't have a car a lot of the time, sometimes our neighbours had a car, and so that was a shared sort of thing, and that was with some other people as well. Even just like milk and sugar and sharing these things when you don’t have them or money for them, all these sorts of little things. Or when the cops were coming and often our house is getting raided, because of the deeply problematic role my parents were playing in the neighbourhood, and you'd get tip offs from other houses. I mean there's this little arrangement between I think it was Debbie and she lives in a different neighbourhood, but she had one of those cop wireless things, like a radio scanner and so there was a few times where she would give Mum and Tony a heads-up that the cops are coming for one reason or another. I guess that's another element, a less biographical one, how there’s this whole aspect to everyday life which is in constant antagonism with the way things are and it's just surviving within that context, it's not really challenging it, just sort of living there, but expresses some kind of politics.
N: Then what you termed ‘solidarity for survival’ as the more common or more communal social form of that, rather than your own individual form of survival, how widespread was that ‘solidarity for survival’ in your neighbourhood?
M: It was widespread, not necessarily everybody was sharing things with everybody else, but there were groups of houses that for whatever reason were better friends or closer with each other and so that would be its own sort of little hub of resource sharing, care sharing, and these sorts of things. Then other groups would have a similar sort of thing. I think this was a necessary thing, which doesn't mean that there wasn't conflict either, obviously there was a lot of conflict as well. But there was also conflict within that context. Like, even if you didn't really like other people, you still were there all the time with each other. So, even bad relationships in that context were somehow related to each other, to a form of cooperation. Obviously, there's all sorts of horror stories as well, but in terms of that solidarity for survival I think it was really widespread and it took different shapes, whether it's like I mentioned before, sharing a car or food or money, that sort of stuff. But also looking out for each other and caring for each other was another element to that.
In my own experiences there were times when the cops raided the house in the morning before school, which was when it usually happened, and we'd be at school still and Mum and Tony wouldn't have come home yet, but we didn't know this. So, Chris, which was Jeff’s mum, or maybe Quenton's mum, would come and get us, or take us to their house, and look after us for a few hours, until Mum and Tony had come back from the cop shop. Quenton’s household was a bit of a shit show at various times and so there were times when Quenton would come and live at my house. The same with Jeff and Daniel, my other friend. So, that sort of thing is another example of solidarity for survival. There's a lot of good things about it, but it did feel a little bit like you are on the edge of things and you're helping each other not go off the edge. So, there's a little element of desperation too.
Then in funny ways, like my Mum became really good friends with Lorraine, another woman who lived a couple of streets down from where we were. At first Lorraine hated my mum, not without reason, mainly because a lot of heroin users would come to our house and there was a big park just down the street and there was a time when needles were being left in the park and kids would go there. Lorraine was like ‘this is connected to your household’ and so that's how their relationship started. But eventually they became really good friends somehow through negotiating that. Probably mum would have said something to people who came to our house not to keep doing that. In any case, their relationship became one of friendship and they were still friends up until when Mum passed away.
And as I just mentioned, housing was something that was important. Our house, just as one example, really had a lot of people moving through it, and while a lot of that was problematic and really drug focused, there was also a lot of sharing of shelter in times of need. I had a few friends other than Crow who essentially moved in for a time, my sister did too. And mum and Tony had friends who would stay at different times for various periods of time as well. And I think this demonstrated a type of social living and sharing that was really important in people’s lives.
N: The question I’m bringing in now is about your own proximity to and participation in crime and the impact of crime on your childhood, even though you've talked about it in relation to the other questions. What more can you say about that, because obviously with yourself, with your family, and with what's going on around you, there's things you probably haven't talked about yet? So, what more can you tell us?
M: The degree, the amount of proximity, the depth of it, and the impact of it, I still don't think I have fully got a handle on to be honest. You know your life’s not normal, and normal doesn't really exist anyway so we can kind of take that for granted, but there's still this idea of what something normal is, and the degree to which you’re removed from that is varied. But just how not normal my experience was, I still don't think I’ve quiet got that through, in terms of my own understanding.
Just as a way to talk about proximity, so when my sister Adelaide was born, I'm two years older than she is, so this is Mum and Tony's first kid, my mum and my dad split up when I was just about one… So anyway, Mum was pregnant with Adelaide, went into labour, went into hospital, and Tony wasn't there. Then Tony didn't turn up at all, and Mum was like ‘OK what's going on’. Mum had Adelaide and was still waiting for Tony. Then, the next day, she saw the local newspaper while in hospital and there’s a story about Tony being arrested the day before. So, he'd done this terribly planned extortion job on someone who owned the property where he was working (he was working in construction at the time).
Mum told me this story not long before she passed away, but Tony had started making threats of various kinds to get cash out of this guy, the guy was reluctant and not going along with it, but then Tony had got him to go somewhere and dump a bag of money, and Tony was going to go there and get it and he was going to take the bag and then he would have been rich, not rich, but have some cash. But obviously it didn't work out, the guy had got the cops involved, and so Tony was arrested the day Adelaide’s born and he spent time in gaol for the first year or so of Adelaide being around (I think, I can’t really remember how long). That's just a way into saying everything was basically shaped by crime and I don't really remember any period where the cops weren’t around in some ways.
Mum and Tony not only used heroin, but they also did sell it at times as well. That's where the most problematic aspects of what they did come from. In the everyday, what that meant was that lots of people would come to our house, people would be using heroin, sometimes in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and so you're little and you're aware of what these things are. I remember being very small, like 4-5, but knowing that drugs was a thing and syringes were a thing with drugs. It was present in all sorts of ways, like partly just the people coming round, and Tony had lots of anger stuff for many years, but generally they were nice and loving. But they would be locked in their room or ‘on the nod’, or all these sorts of things, so there's that kind of everyday relationship stuff and just sort of knowing what that is, and I guess kind of always wishing it away, but always knowing it was there.
And then, some of the other issues were going to school, in year 5 or 6 when I was 10 or 11, I would go to school one morning then came home and Tony was home, but Mum had been sentenced to a little while in prison. Mum and Tony hadn’t told any of us that mum was going to prison, and coming home to that news as a child was a pretty big deal. So, that was the first biggest shock 'cause there's like everyday tension and then there's events that mark the time and that was the first one where I was pretty young and not really knowing that although funny things would happen in your house, ever considering that people would just be there one morning and not there that afternoon. So, that was a really big deal and was a really difficult thing.
She wasn’t in gaol for long, I think only 3 months or something like that, and then came out and went to rehab for a bit, another 2 months I think. Then Tony went to gaol about a year or two later for about a year. That was, I think, connected to ‘welfare fraud’ and probably other things as well, but that was the main thing I remember something to do with social security scam. Tony had a longer history of imprisonment than mum, having been to prison once or twice before he and mum got together. I was talking to my dad about this the other day, and he said that the cops were really just being arseholes to tony at this point, and getting him for anything they could. Then another year or so later mum went to prison again for a couple of years.
So, the prison time was a big thing and going to visit your folks in prison and Christmas in prison, these sorts of things, were weird. Even travelling to prison is a weird thing, and we’d often get the train ‘cause no car, and getting fined for no train tickets on the way home ‘cause no money for tickets. And prisons really leave an impression on you. Like how they look, getting searched going in, and also just the reputation of them – like visiting Silverwater, Goulburn, even Emu Plains. It’s hard to express, but just the feeling of those words and places leave a trace. Prison calls, letters, all that stuff. The look of the buildings. And it’s funny because on the one hand it all feels wrong, but it’s also the only thing you know… Funnily enough I often saw my friends, a couple of friends from the neighbourhood, there in the prison and they were visiting one of their parents. Again, speaking to the level of shame, or inability to speak to it that I had, I was like ‘oh let's pretend this didn't happen’ when we’re at school.
Then even just the police raids, that was hectic. The time Tony was in prison, I was probably 13 or 14, and so it was just Mum and us kids at home and I don't know, again obviously it would be related to heroin, but they (the cops) come and knock on the doors before sunrise, and we are all asleep in the back. There was knocking and we didn't hear it. Then all of a sudden there was this banging, banging, banging, and the back door of our house was this old solid wood door, and they were bashing through the back door with a sledgehammer. That was really difficult, in the sense that I wasn't able to sleep through the morning for a long time after that, just constantly waking at dawn, and every time I heard a car I’d wake up and be like ‘is it the cops?’ So the impact of that was really significant for me, just really stressed out a lot and not being able to sleep properly. You are always wondering when the next time is coming. And it’s weird how you come to embody these experiences.
The next post will pick up from here, and continue answering this question about proximity to and participation in crime