Firebomb 02 | The Posters

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Just before we start, this episode contains some strong language and descriptions of violence.

It doesn't matter where you live in the world, I'm sure you've come across the odd racist poster or graffiti.

But back in Perth, in those years leading up to the fire at my family's restaurant, it was on a completely different level.

I mean, like imagine entire streets, suburbs covered in racist posters and they had these horrible messages like Asians out or racial war, white revolution the only solution.

And they didn't just target Asians.

There were also racist posters about other people of color and the Jewish community.

And it didn't matter whether you tore them down, they'd come back the next day.

They caused a lot of distress and we were bloody disgusted about it and we went all out to find out who these people were.

In the mid 80s, right back when the posters first started appearing, David Parkinson was a detective in what was essentially WA police's state protection and bodyguard service.

We were called the secret squirrels and the spies and whatever.

When he saw the posters, he figured whoever was behind them could be a threat to the kind of visiting VIPs it was his job to protect.

And so he started gathering intel.

Because the posters were politically motivated, it fell under our area.

David Parkinson noticed at the bottom of every poster something that was written on there.

It was the name of a group, the Australian Nationalist Movement, or the ANM for short.

And next to that, there was a postal address.

We took a warrant out on the post office to find out who the owner of the post office box was.

He was the guy, the man behind the throne.

That man's name was Jack.

I was given the task to go and speak to Jack, which I did.

I was probably the first police officer in WA to go and talk to him.

But before he spoke to Jack, he wanted to do a recce of the place where Jack lived in the Perth suburb of Gosnells.

So the night before, he drove over in an unmarked car.

Just like a normal mum and dad vehicle.

And he parked the car somewhere away from the house and he just went for a jog.

I was wearing jogging gear.

I had a jogging shoes, I had a pair of shorts, I had a singlet on, but I also had a bum bag with

a 10 caliber Smith ⁇ Wesson handgun in.

I wanted to find out what was there because we didn't know, quite simply.

As he jogged past the house, he noticed something pretty weird out the front.

There were sandbags on the front where the rear fence would be, which I thought was quite interesting.

It looked like some kind of battle fortification that would be more at home on the front lines of a war than in a suburban front yard.

And then I went in and retrieved the lost ball for my dog that didn't exist in his backyard.

He didn't see anything incriminating, but he had a bad feeling about the place.

So then he went back the next day, but this this time he noticed there were two men out on the front lawn and they were talking to Jack.

So he pulled over, got out of his car and walked straight up to them.

Hi, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I just went in, pulled my badge out, said I want to talk to Jack.

But it was the two other guys who made their presence felt first.

And then one of the person got very aggro and anti-tagonistic towards me.

He was all mouth.

What are you doing here?

What are you?

The spies are.

Which was like waving a red flag to a bull.

David's a pretty big guy, tall with broad shoulders, and he wasn't afraid of confrontation.

And I put him in his place very, very quickly because he was full of piss and wind.

That's all he was.

The other one, I was wary of him straight away, his body language and the way he was.

I had him in my sight the whole time, a very menacing character.

Out of the three guys on the lawn, Jack was the shortest.

He had this black hair with a side part, a well-groomed mustache, and he had this very strong sense of self-confidence.

And Jack, when I started talking to Jack, Jack tried to convert me.

He was

questioning why I was on the side of a corrupt government.

He did not recognise our law.

He did not recognise my authority.

So this conversation on the lawn at Jack's place happened in the mid-80s, which was a couple of years before the first restaurant fire bombings.

David Parkinson was only investigating some racist posters, but now he was getting pretty worried about what he was hearing.

He realized that Jack wasn't just a racist.

He was motivated by a much darker and more deeply held ideology.

He was a neo-Nazi.

And he was recruiting.

I had the hairs on the back of my head tingling because he was a very good orator and I can see how he changed simple-minded people.

When I got back to the office I said we've got a problem here.

I said these guys are mad because it wasn't in our thought process that in Western Australia you would have an Adolf Hitler clone.

If you're wondering at this point who this man is, Jack Van Tongeren is Dutch-born, an ex-soldier and an office clerk.

A small man, Jack Van Tongeren led a small group of men comprising the core of the Australian nationalist movement.

Van Tongeren preached a callous and confused doctrine of Aryan supremacy.

Well before the mysterious firebombing started, Jack Van Tongeren and his gang of supporters were stoking racist sentiment in Perth.

It's from here in the rather wet Perth suburb of Gosnells that the ANM spreads its message of racial purity and white supremacy.

His militaristic followers have been waging a graffiti war in Perth.

While the victims of racism continue to suffer in silence, it seems the perpetrators of racial conflict could be stepping up their campaign.

Now it was up to the police to work out: was this gang just spreading hate, or were they also burning down restaurants?

This is Fireball, the latest season of the ABC's Unravel podcast.

Episode 2, The Posters.

Growing up around my family's Chinese restaurant, I got to know the staff really well because I spent a lot of time there when I wasn't at school, when I wasn't being babysat.

So I got to know the kitchen hands, the cooks, the waitresses.

Speaking of which, here we go.

Oh no, you got photos.

Oh,

oh my God.

Mitzi Chen and her family, I've known them all my life.

It was funny hearing you said you were quite quiet because if I remember you were quite raucous back then with all the girls that were working at the restaurant because you had, there was this crazy bunch of girls working on the floor with mum

who seemed to party a lot.

Afterwards because you were about 18, 19, I think at that point.

They dragged me out, Christine.

Christopher.

They made me go out with her.

Right, right.

We spent many family gatherings together.

The children's table.

I dreaded a Chinese children's table.

And she used to babysit my brother and I when we were kids.

So I think we've known each other a very long time.

When the Mandelin was firebombed in September 1988, I mean, I was...

I was only eight years old.

So my memories of that time,

they're all quite vague.

Mitzi, however, she was older than me.

She was about to finish high school back then.

So I want to know what she remembers.

I heard about the fire attack at the Man Lin from your mum because I think she called my parents to let them know what had happened.

I remember we drove by and was just like, wow, that's not a little fire like they really...

try to take out that restaurant.

I was just like, shit, the middle part of the restaurant was just this black hole of nothingness.

It was quite confronting to see.

For Mitzi, she was able to join the dots

and

to her it seemed clearly that it was part of a trend to what was happening in the streets.

She had seen the AM's racist posters all around the city and she'd also seen the group's leader Jack Van Tongren on the news.

Now this sort of thing, if carried to to extreme degrees, will in fact ruin the whole homogenous nature of Australia as a white European agent.

I think their media coverage made this situation worse.

Do you put these posters up?

I don't put them up.

You're telling me you don't put them up because you could be prosecuted.

That's right, isn't it?

No, I'm telling you I don't put them up because I don't put them up.

And the journalists, maybe they thought they were trying to help by denouncing this group, but once the media start covering it, it's just suddenly this big massive thing.

All of a sudden there's a face to where all this hatred's coming from that's the person you've got to fear and that you're worried about so you don't want to forget what they look like by the end of 1988 three restaurants had already been firebombed mitzi felt like the whole asian community was being targeted When the numbers started escalating, it was kind of like, okay, this is not a one-off firebomb that they're just trying to make a show of.

It's like they're seriously targeting Chinese restaurants.

I definitely felt like it was a message to to us.

It's kind of like, well, if you're not going to leave, then this is the stuff we're going to do to you.

Mitzi wasn't sure whether it was Jack Van Tongeren or his group or if it was someone else inspired by them who was behind the attacks on the restaurants.

But either way, it felt deeply personal for her.

She worked at the Man Lin, but her dad was also working at another Chinese restaurant.

a different one in another part of the city and she was worried he could get hurt.

I remember my mum voicing her worries to my dad.

Dad's like, I can't do anything about it.

It's like I can't not work because how are we going to feed the family type of thing?

It's frightening because I thought, you know, I don't really want to lose my dad to racism or some sort of needless violence.

You're just not sure what's going to happen.

There were people who had not just fired bombs, but bricks thrown through their windows constantly.

They'd repair them.

The next day, the window was smashed.

There were signs put up out the front of their house.

Gordon Hill was a Labour MP and a minister in the WA government at the time, and he was disturbed at the stories that were coming out.

People in the Asian community in particular came to see me concerned about the chanting that would happen where they'd walk down the street and people would be chanting at them and yelling at abuse, repeating the sort of lines that the Australian Nationalist Movement were presenting on their posters.

Just intimidating stuff.

And really

that was frightening a lot of people.

Gordon was in a kind of unique position in the WA government at this time.

He was the Minister for Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs, but he'd also previously been the Minister for the Police and Emergency Services.

So in theory, he was able to hear the community's concerns, but he also knew how to do something about them.

At the time I was not satisfied with the police response to the way and how the police handled this whole issue.

As far as Gordon could tell, Jack Van Tongren and the A ⁇ M, it was like there had been no real consequences for their racist poster campaign.

I mean to him it was pretty obvious that it was either the A ⁇ M behind the firebombings or it was someone else inspired by them.

But he also felt that the police weren't doing enough to put pressure on the group.

And what surprised me is why he felt like that.

I've always held the view and I've good reason because I've heard it from police officers that there is a fair amount of racism in the police force as there is in a lot of society and sadly but it came to the fore to me at that time.

Just comments that were police officers made to me that were racist comments that were the sort of thing that you might hear from Jack Van Tongren.

Gordon took his concerns straight to the police commissioner.

I said, What can we do about this?

What is the police actually doing about these issues?

It was always a matter of leave it to us, we're handling it.

We've got people dealing with these issues, and we'll take appropriate action when the need arises.

For Gordon, that didn't seem good enough.

He told the commissioner that, look, you've got the A ⁇ M's name on all of the posters, you've got Jack Van Tongren on TV, popping up all the time on all the channels, espousing his views.

How hard is it to pinpoint this group and to disrupt their activities?

But unfortunately, the comment to me made by the police was we actually have to catch them in the process of putting up these posters.

There's nothing much we can do about it until we actually catch them breaking the law.

Well it begges belief doesn't it that police patrols

so many around the city hadn't actually witnessed at some point these signs going up because they were going up everywhere.

I can't talk to the police commission about all of this because he's passed away.

But it's important to say here that I don't think Gordon Hill is accusing the commissioner or any particular police officer of being racist.

Overall, though, I think Gordon felt like the force was doing a half-hearted job.

He was getting increasingly frustrated.

With so many posters going up, why hadn't anyone caught the racists in the act?

So one night, he got so fed up, he took matters into his own hands.

It was a rather dark night.

I recall that really vividly.

I was driving home down Kent Street in Victoria Park,

and I noticed three people standing by

a main road department sign with a bucket, painting equipment, etc.

I knew straight away who it was.

I knew straight away that was the ANM.

I shone my headlights on the posters.

It was an anti-Semitic poster.

I think it was something about a Holocaust was a lie or something to that effect.

I followed them, found them in the next street.

I drove around the corner and stopped my car and put the window down and yelled out to them to come over to my vehicle.

They walked, three of them walked over behind a tree that was in a shadow of a street light and they put their equipment down and then walked across the road.

Jack Van Tonkren Tongren stood at the front of my car.

A big bloke stood right next to my car door and there was a third person who stood at the back of my car.

Most people at this point would have just tried to get out of there.

But Gordon Hill was losing his patience.

I was furious.

I was so angry.

I pointed to Van Tongren.

I recognised him because he'd been getting so much damn publicity.

And I said, I know who you are.

I got out of the car and the three of them followed followed me across the road.

I crouched down in the dark.

It was pretty stupid, I know, but I reached into their bag and I took out a poster, an anti-Asian poster, and I said, this is the evidence I need.

And I walked off back to my car and one of them yelled out, we're doing this for Australia, mate.

The next day, Gordon Hill took the evidence to the police.

They went to his house the following day to interview Van Tongren because I'd given the evidence he was the man.

At one point Van Tongren left the room and the police noticed on his desk was a book, Mein Kampf,

and other right-wing paraphernalia.

I think about a couple of months later, the matter went to the magistrate's court.

But there wasn't much the courts could do about it.

The magistrate imposed a fine of, I think it was $150 plus costs.

At this stage, there were no laws against racist intent in a poster.

In fact, there were no laws against hate speech anywhere in Australia.

It was a penalty for defacing government property or something to that effect.

So it was a slap on the wrist.

So basically, the gang got away with their postering, thanks to to weak laws and in the eyes of Gordon Hill, weak policing.

So did racism in the police force help them get away with it?

Well one police officer we've been speaking to, Maury Tong, reacts strongly to that idea.

I never ever once saw any incidents of not stepping in and a proper police investigation being done.

So the comment by the then minister, whoever he was, is just spurious.

That's just political motivation, nothing more, nothing less.

In any case, it wasn't Morris' job to stop people putting up posters.

I mean, he was the head of the Arson squad.

But once the firebomb attack started in late 1988, it did become his job to catch the Arsonists.

We discussed it as a team.

We were a real team in Arsenal Squad.

It wasn't just me sitting there.

I had three other sergeants and good, experienced detectives.

And we sat down and said, look, this has got to be linked to the ANM or something similar because these are racially motivated.

But not much useful evidence had come out of the fire scenes and the arson squad was still struggling to make progress.

Every restaurant fire,

all we were doing was getting evidence of arson.

We weren't getting any evidence of identification.

It was infuriating for Maury and the pressure was mounting.

The modus operandi is so similar, we know that one group or one person is responsible for it.

There is suspicion and way off in the far distance is proof.

When the new year rolled around whoever was targeting Chinese restaurants dramatically stepped up their attacks and in a space of just two weeks in January 1989 here's what happened.

First

Three restaurants were vandalized.

Then, someone attempted to burn down another restaurant restaurant called the Ko Sing.

Thankfully, it didn't catch fire.

But then the firebombers struck again.

Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Lingnan restaurant, causing nearly $40,000 damage.

In total, that's five restaurants firebombed, and more have been vandalized.

The attacks on the Chinese community were coming non-stop, and it seemed pretty clear now that the motivations were racist.

Perth was facing a wave of racist terror.

Now, you'd think that'd be a pretty big story in the national news, but no, it wasn't.

In fact, it wasn't even a big story in Perth.

So what are the...

and those dates?

Are these the dates we're looking at?

Yes, that's right.

So.

Kosing on the 16th of January.

And also the Lingnan restaurant in Mirabuka.

I spent hours at the library with ABC reporter Alex Mann trying to find coverage about what happened that January 1989.

Okay, what have you got there?

One paragraph in a paragraph of three, one about the Lingnan restaurant, and then it goes back to a spillage of some chemicals by a truck.

And that was the only mention of the Lingnan.

Wow.

Nelson page.

After the World News.

It's like completely ignored.

Like the title, the significance of it is not at all conveyed through the coverage of the newspaper.

I wanted to tell our community side of the story.

My parents were starting to understand that, and they even agreed to help me track down the owners of these other restaurants.

Dad even suggested trying to contact these other owners through his old fish supplier.

Because my Cantonese sucks, mum helped me talk with some owners who weren't able to speak English well.

Hello,

Some of the owners didn't want to talk.

And others we found just dodged our calls entirely.

Hello.

Hello.

She just hung up on you just then, she just declined the call.

That's That's disappointing, but

not surprising either.

Really, just sounds like

a lot of the people from

the 80s, from that particular generation,

aren't really interested in talking about this at all.

What you're supposed to do?

It's fucking frustrating.

Why do you think they

don't want to talk about it?

Because it brings up bad memories.

Because maybe they're scared still.

Because they

don't think it's their job.

And they don't think they can do anything to change things.

And sometimes they're just tired.

And they just want to rest.

Enjoy the rest of their lives here and not try and stir shit up.

Is that what we're doing?

Yeah,

I guess we are.

We don't want to bug the Chinese restaurant owners anymore.

I mean, it's frustrating because I really think their stories should be told.

But if they don't want to talk about what happened or bring up those memories, I get it.

Because early 1989, it was an intense time for them and for the rest of the Asian community in Perth.

But what they didn't know was that things were about to get even worse because it was around this time that, just by chance, one cop got a scary insight into the world of Perth's racists.

Luck is a wonderful thing.

David Parkinson was that cop from the Intelligence and Protection Branch, the one who'd gone to visit Jack Van Tongren years earlier.

It was one of my closest, closest friends that I grew up with on the sheep station that I worked on.

That friend was calling from his dad's farm up in Bindun, which was about an hour north of Perth.

He rang me and he said, do you know a person called John Van Blitiswick and I said, yes, I do.

John Van Blitiswick was Jack's right-hand man, and he seemed to be a senior member of the A ⁇ M.

He was that menacing-looking guy that David had met on the front lawn at Jack's.

well before all the firebombing started.

Van Blitiswick worried me right from the very first day.

He was under my skin.

There was something about him that I did not like.

So as David listened on the phone, his old friend gave him a vital tip off.

He said he's in the gingham pub with his couple of skinheads in his mouth and off how they're going to start a war with the Asians and the Jews and how they're going to wipe him out and etc etc etc.

And I said really and he said yeah they've got the property next to us.

Well bingo it was like winning lotto.

It really was.

From his old mate's property he'd get a perfect view of the place.

Now David Parkinson wasn't involved in the investigation into the restaurant fires but it was his job to be across any threats to VIPs or suggestions of political violence.

So he was curious.

Basically I wanted to get a good liar of the land because we had no information or anything that anything was happening there.

So I went to my mate's place,

grabbed an old motorbike, went across to his boundary fence and there was a pine plantation separating my friend's property and John Van Berliswick's property.

So I had all the gear to, you know, if something happened, if I was compromised.

I had a backpack, I had jungle greens, I was suitably armed obviously, I had a camera.

and I went in and amongst the pine plantation was a couple of big grass trees.

So I secreted myself under one of them.

And it it's probably apart from gaining the lie of the land, so to speak, it was boring as hell.

Nothing occurred, I got bitten by flies.

David packed up his stuff and left his hiding spot.

And as he was driving home, he noticed a car parked on the side of the road just opposite John Van Blidiswick's property.

There was a farm vehicle there.

And

when I'd finished doing what I was doing I spoke to a fairly elderly bloke and gave him my phone number and he rang me one night and I remember it was a long weekend, it was bucketing down rain here in Perth and he said it sounds like there is a war going on in Van Blizwick's properties.

He said the firearms, the gunfire is unbelievable.

And I said I'll be talking high caliber low.

He said everything.

He said it's just been going for hours and hours.

To David Parkinson, this was a significant escalation.

On one of the A ⁇ M's posters were the words, Asians out or racial war.

But now it seemed like maybe they meant it.

So

I rang my boss.

I said, I better go up there.

And he said, I can't spare you.

Local coppers can go.

Well, as it turned out, they couldn't.

So whatever the A ⁇ M was doing out there on that private property in Bindun, for now it would remain a mystery.

While in public, on the streets of Perth, it seemed like Jack Van Tongren and his neo-Nazi followers were getting bolder.

And there was this hate in the community.

from this very small, you know,

diseased little faction.

We didn't really think at that point that anything would happen to us.

In 1989 Helen Carroll was a humanities student at Kern University in Perth.

I was a member of the student guild.

I was motivated by political and social concerns.

And she lived in this share house with a couple of mates and her boyfriend.

So my household and I were kind of active in student protest movements.

They weren't Asian themselves, but the house was in a pretty multicultural suburb.

Now, I didn't know this before I talked to Helen, but it turned out one of her favourite places to eat was actually my family's Chinese restaurant, the Man Lin.

The Man Lin was

where we had many a takeaway

and sat in.

So, yeah.

Yeah, so.

I mean, you would have probably met my mother then, I guess.

She was usually the one I was manning it.

Do you remember some of the food that you had there?

What were some of your favourite dishes?

We loved the chow mein and of course, sweet and sour, honey, kind of pork, which was just fabulous.

So when the restaurant was firebombed, Helen knew about it straight away.

That restaurant, when it was set on fire and firebombed, it didn't look like a fire had been through the building.

It was destroyed.

It was...

It was like a bomb had gone off.

We saw the complete devastation.

It was shocking to all of us that lived in the neighbourhood.

But it was what that restaurant symbolised to us that was so important.

And that was this was

people's livelihood.

For months leading up to the fire, someone had been plastering the whole area with racist A ⁇ M posters.

She couldn't shake the feeling that the two things were connected.

I remember thinking at the time,

you know, was this a deliberate move to harm people, individuals, the people that owned the restaurant?

Or is this more of a twisted political statement?

With the unexplained fires and the spread of neo-Nazi propaganda, Helen and her housemates felt like the racists were winning.

And I think as a kind of a group decision in the household, we came to the view that we were not going to be letting that happen under our watch in our own backyard.

It was offensive to us.

So we decided that whenever we saw a poster go up, that we would either mark it out with pen or paint or we'd do our very best to tear them down and destroy them.

And they weren't going to do it quietly.

As soon as we saw one, we would

take it down without...

any qualms at all about who might be watching us as we were doing that.

In fact, you know, it was great if people saw us do it.

That was a good thing in the way I thought about it because we wanted to publicly stand out against it.

But Helen and her flatmates didn't quite realize what they were up against because it seems like someone had seen what they've been doing to the posters.

And one day in January 1989,

they came for payback.

It was a very hot,

typical Perth summer, early afternoon, beautiful weather.

Helen and her boyfriend, they had been celebrating her birthday, so they spent the day chilling out next to a fancy pool at the casino, but now they were coming home.

We were on our way back in his car.

We came round the corner into Nottingham Street where our house was, very close to the corner, and immediately knew there was something wrong.

It was

just

the way the garden looked different.

All of the front lawn

was kind of crisped and some bushes were burnt and just thought that's really strange what's gone on here.

Then Helen saw her car.

I was looking at my car front on and that whole side facing the street was caved in and blackened.

I went, really, what the hell's happened here?

Suddenly the front door of the house burst open.

And I remember two of my housemates sort of falling out through the front door, down the front stairs and going, oh my God, we got firebombed.

And

just not actually comprehending what they were saying.

Because really, why would you comprehend it what does firebombing even mean I didn't even realize what they meant by that

everyone was really

heightened it was a tense and a real sense of we couldn't believe what had happened

Slowly, the shock and confusion gave way to fear.

She and her housemates, they had tried to push back the A ⁇ M by tearing down their posters.

But now it looked like the A ⁇ M had retaliated with fire.

What if they come back again to try and finish off what they'd started?

Because clearly they were aiming for the house and they wanted to do major damage.

That scared us because what we realised was that people were watching us and they knew where we lived.

and that

made

a shift in our thinking.

Helen and her housemates called a house conference.

I think we sort of thought through what we should do, what we could do.

Helen decided it was time to back down.

We really needed to treat this quite carefully and perhaps go quiet for a while, not take down more posters because we were very concerned that they were still watching us.

They knew where we lived.

lived.

It was a warning that they were sending to us.

We

were absolutely dead sure of that and it scared us.

In January of 1989, it seemed like Jack Van Tongeren and his group were kind of unstoppable.

But there were still a few people left in the city who were crazy or brave enough to run straight towards a danger instead of away from it.

There was a part of me that just thought, I don't care if I die, I'm going to go out swinging.

Today, Perth's president of the World Ninja Society spoke out about the fears in his community and the role of the lethal ninja fighters can play.

They drag me around the corner, and that's when I heard the voice, we can't kill him here, we've got to get him out of here.

And whoever was firebombing the restaurants, they weren't done yet.

The latest attack happened just after three o'clock this morning and police say it's the sixth explosion at a Perth Asian restaurant in less than 12 months.

The evidence that was obtained demonstrated a complete change in Modus Operandi.

It now became protection of life.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Chrispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Garaguland and Wutjutnga land.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact-checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolta.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Frennan, and our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

To make sure you're the first to get the next episodes, follow the Unravel podcast.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.