The steam had gone out of Mardi Gras by the time the parade reached the El Alamein fountain in Kings Cross. For an hour or so a couple of thousand gays and lesbians, their friends and civil libertarians, had marched through Sydney on a midwinter night calling for freedom. Now it was time for a drink.

But the police had other ideas. As the marchers began to disperse, they found their way blocked by a fleet of paddy wagons. Bashings and arrests began.



A riot outside New York’s Stonewall Bar a few years earlier had kicked fresh life into gay law reform in America. On this night in June 1978, Stonewall was happening all over again in Sydney’s Darlinghurst Road.

On Thursday an apology is to be debated in the New South Wales parliament this week for the violence of the police that night. About time. But we should thank the cops, too, because their zeal and brutality were so out of kilter with the city’s take on gay life they made reform in New South Wales inescapable.

I wasn’t on the march – I’m not one of the honoured “78-ers” – but I was at the court that Monday to find the witnesses I needed to do what we did on The National Times in those days: write a big narrative of what happened in the hours after a happy crowd chanting “Out of the bars and into the streets” set off down Oxford Street behind a truck at 10.30 pm.



I’ve been back to my notes. They are better than the story I wrote nearly 40 years ago. Names swim out of the past. Aids has claimed some of these warriors. A few of the lawyers on the streets that night are coming to the end of their time as judges in NSW and federal courts. Some of the braver souls on the march have escaped respectability. We’re all getting old.

Revellers poured out of the bars. The police hurried them all down the road. Within 20 minutes they had reached Hyde Park where the police permit issued for the march decreed the demonstration had to end. It was too soon.



The park filled with people expecting speeches but wishing for a concert. The police were having neither. They ordered the truck and its loudspeakers to drive away. The driver refused, was dragged out and fled into the crowd. The police ripped out the speaker leads.



As the first arrests were made the crowd began chanting, “Stop police attacks on gays, women and blacks.” It was an old favourite. Once the loudspeakers were disabled, the crowd was left to make up its own mind – by chanting. A chorus began: “March to the Cross. March to the Cross.”



This was an action with only one purpose: to make arrests

On William Street happy bravado was restored. The ruckus round the truck was forgotten. It was party time again. People left the footpaths to join the happy procession. “Ho-ho-homosexual,” chanted the marchers. Also a new favourite: “Dare to struggle, dare to fight, smash the Festival of Light.”



Word somehow swept through the crowd that their destination was now the El Alamein fountain. It made sense. The fountain is the bullseye of the Cross. But even before they arrived, there was a sense that the night was over. Old timers sang mournfully, “We Shall Not be Moved”. People broke off to buy ice creams.

But about midnight the paddy wagons moved into place, their sirens blaring. The marchers were packed tight in a stretch of Darlinghurst Road with no way of dispersing. This was an action with only one purpose: to make arrests. Police removed their badges and began grabbing people.



In the melee of the next half an hour the demonstrators were joined by locals, drunks and a couple of bikies. The queers fought back. “Police were using fists and boots,” one of the marchers, Jeff McCarthy, told me. “Beer cans were being thrown, full ones from the back of the footpath, bottles of Spumante, shoes, at least one garbage can from each side of the road.”



There was screaming and crying. McCarthy saw a policeman kicked in the balls. “Someone was thrown half into a van, landed on his stomach on the edge of the door, then police slamming the door on his legs.”

Several witnesses confirmed that incident and widely shared was McCarthy’s impression that the police were particularly targeting women. “They seemed to make their attacks especially sexual,” McCarthy said. “Women were dragged along by the hair … One woman was grabbed by the tits. She called, ‘Let go of my tits’ and was charged with offensive language.”



Paddy wagons ferried the arrested to the nearby Darlinghurst police station followed by several hundred marchers who took up a vigil in the street. This was the headquarters of the notorious No 3 Division that policed gay Sydney. There was antagonism of long standing between this station and that community. Darlinghurst police frankly regarded homosexuals as criminals.



More demonstrators were arrested. Heads connected with paddy wagon mirrors. Three big constables dragged a woman into the station by the hair.



Inside, police refused for hours to bail any of the 50 prisoners. Peter Murphy was the first to emerge at about 4am. He had been bashed in the cells. Dr Jim Walker told me: “Murphy had bruises of the head, ribs, stomach arms and legs. His lower leg was particularly swollen to twice its normal size. I suspected a broken fibula.”



Murphy was taken to St Vincent’s hospital.



Some of the 1978-ers marching in the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2008. Photograph: Jane Dempster/AAP

Helping bail the men was Barbara Ramjan. It was nearly a year since the dramatic night of her election as the president of the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council, the night the man she beat, Tony Abbott, punched the wall beside her head.



Now she was dealing with bewildered students, obstructive police and tearful gay solicitors. The last of the men bailed about 8.30am on Sunday morning complained of a busted eardrum after being bashed in the police garage.



For no particular reason except to prolong their ordeal, the women prisoners had been removed to central police station. There they were very, very slowly fingerprinted. The last of them was not released until 9.30am.



That night on television, the then NSW premier Neville Wran claimed the demonstrators had had “a pretty good go … and I don’t suppose that it’s unexpected that the police have taken exception to a busy thoroughfare in Kings Cross being completely blocked off at midnight.”



All those charges were eventually dropped. Police commanders were shown to have lied in court

That was a signal to police. Next morning in a cold drizzle up to 150 officers blockaded the steps of the Liverpool Street courts. There followed a battle that lasted most of the day between police and the magistrates to allow access to the courts. Despite order after order from the magistrates, the police declared: “The courts are closed.”



The crowd grew restive. Eggs were thrown. Three women who tried to climb over a high balustrade were tossed back into the crowd. There were more arrests. A police photographer shot rolls of film. Solicitors were threatened.



A magistrate ordered Ramjan to be allowed into the building to bail the new prisoners. I watched police push her down the stairs instead. She somehow kept her footing. After all these years she puts that down to “Girl Guide training”. She made it into the building at last.



Soon after lunch, the police gave way. They’d made their point. The public entered to watch the magistrates grind through formalities: one charge of malicious injury to a police uniform, three charges of assault, four of offensive behaviour, five of failure to observe a direction, nine of resisting arrest, 10 of unseemly words, 18 of hindering police and 19 of unlawful procession.



All those charges were eventually dropped. Police commanders were shown to have lied in court. Protests continued all through that winter. It was at this time that a cohort of young solicitors came out. The law was at last seen for what it has always been: one of the great gay professions.



Mardi Gras became a great Sydney event, at first commemorating that 1978 shemozzle. But in an absolutely Sydney development, it shifted from winter to summer to celebrate itself – and to keep calling for law reform. It was 1984 before Wran stared down the churches and the Catholic flank of the Labor party to decriminalise gay sex in NSW.



The police changed. This year the NSW police gay and lesbian liaison officers will march in Mardi Gras as they have done for the past 20 or so years. Bill Shorten will be among the squad of politicians turning out for the celebrations.



And as a curtain-raiser this week the NSW parliament will debate an apology for 1978 and what Liberal MP Bruce Notley-Smith calls “the struggles and harm caused to the many who took part in the demonstration and march both on that night and in the weeks, months and years to follow”.



Ken Davis, one of the organisers of the first march is weighing up whether to attend the ceremony. He welcomes the apology after all these years but wonders where we are on the bigger question of freedom in a city of lockout laws and harsh bans on processions.



“We got law reform,” says Davis, “but police control of public life is much more extensive now than it was in 1978.”

