c96 - I wrote the following piece for the Melbourne Age.... it records
an experience I had in 1987.
A young policeman ran at us, gun in hand, bent over low. "Get back into
your houses or I will shoot you myself!' he ordered frantically. Behind
him, in front of the lights of the Clifton Hill Swmming Pool, other police
crouched behind trees, or dashed from cover to cover through a park, across
Hoddle Street in Melbourne, Australia. All were armed.
We flattened ourselves behind a police car, wondering if the car body
coulld really shelter us from high-powered rifles. None of this seemed
real.
Just over the road, across a narrow strip of grass, I could see two people
lying on the central reservation of Hoddle Street. One , a woman in a light
skirt - her feet and face pointing up at the sky - was strangely still. A
man covered up by a dark jacket lay next to her.
A policeman ran over to him, briefly lifted the jacket and moved back to
rejoin four other policemen huddlled behind a cluster of cars.
It was 9.30 on a Saturday night in inner Melbourne.
Surely a film producer would appear soon and shout "Cut!"?
Just a few minutes earlier, a police helicopter had banked steeply above
us, searchlight trained on the nearby railway track where the killer or
killers were believed to be hiding. Shots had rung out. The helicopter
fled. Later, we found out it had been hit in a petrol tank.
Only half an hour before, wee had finished an early dinner in a Vietnamese
restaurant and started heading home up Hoddle Street, not knowing we were
heading straight into a killer's trap.
Sudden traffic congestion stopped us. We did not know that just ahead of us
the occupants of other cars were being gunned down. If we had arrived
seconds earlier, we could have witnessed the slaughter - and maybe fallen
victim ourselves.
Suddenly, two police cars raced up behind us. They swerved left to drive
through the trees of the nearby park, sirens blazing. We made a U-turn to
bypass the congestion. Police cars started coming from every direction,
haphazardly turning, reversing, moving in all directions.
By now the firing was nearly continuous. The sound of a pump-action shotgun
could be heard among shots fired from other guns.
We were surrounded by nervous, jumpy police. All running, with guns in
their hands. Most were in uniform, some in plainclothes. One wore a
dressing-gown with his police badge pinned to it.
A man aged between 30 and 40 lay on a stretcher, being treated by an
ambulance crew. His face was a lattice of bloodstains, his shirt and scalp
soaked with blood. He lived in a house right behind me. He had run out to
see what was happening and had been shot down minutes ago. An oxygen mask
covered his nose and mouth..
Another younger man in a white T-shirt was escorted by police to the
ambulance. He had a bloodstain on his lower chest and another on his arm.
He too lived in this street. Their friends clustered anxiously in gateways,
oblivious to police warnings.
The gunman was still just across the road on the far side of Hoddle Street.
A policeman said he had three rifles.
We looked past the ambulances - and it was then that we saw the woman and
the man lying dead on the reserve in the middle of Hoddle Street. A cluster
of cars stood nearby at crazy angles. Police huddled among them.
A policeman slipped into one of the cars and switched off its lights.
Another policeman smashed the headlights on another car. Everyone was
scared, everyone a potential target.
The dead lay unattended.
Still the police huddled behind the cars. It was now over half an hour
since the shooting started.
We then noticed that the shooting had stopped - and speculated that he had
run out of bullets. About ten minutes later (it seemed like an hour) , the
police radio told us that a "teenager" had been captured. Still the police
huddled behind cars while they searched for a possible accomplice. Rumours
flew.
And the dead lay in the open street, feet towards the swimming pool.
Sensibly the police decided that no lives would be risked by tending to
them.
About an hour later, I managed to get to my home about three blocks away.
At 4 am, as I finish writing this account, it is strangely quiet outside.
Only now is the reality of the night's happenings coming home to me. Six
people are in Melbourne morgues, 18 people are wounded, witnesses are being
questioned down at the Fitzroy Police Station - a Clifton Hill teenageer is
being questioned at St. Kilda police station.
It is only now that I think about the people who knew those killed in the
night's Hoddle Street massacre. Only now do the dead seem real to me.
End.
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