No fair dinkum

TENSION GRIPPED the Australian community in Angeles City this past week with the third in a series of crime incidents with Aussies at the receiving end.
The decomposing body of one Tylar Hammond, 64, was found hogtied and stabbed inside his residence in Balibago, July 2. A week back, tourist Keith Joseph Cook, 68 was killed in the city’s entertainment district. And before that, one Raymund Arthur Kelly, 56, was seriously injured after being shot at point blank range by motorcycle-riding robbers.
The incidents have so uneased the Australians that they fear they have become specific targets of criminal gangs here. So well articulated in a front page headline of Punto! last Friday, "Aussies are crime targets."
I don’t know why that headline took me down memory lane – must be the age showing again – to a not-so-distant past in Angeles when the city was still Basetown, USA.
The last days of October 1987. It was soon after the simultaneous killings of three US servicemen and a Filipino of American descent by the urban partisan unit of the New People’s Army in the city.
To distinguish themselves from the Americans who were dubbed as “targets of opportunity” by the partisans, Australians took to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “I AM AN AUSTRALIAN. I AM NOT A TARGET” whenever they went out of their residences.
The Australians though were the target of another kind, before, during and after the American killings. They were the favorite whipping boys in the local press. Culled from the deep recesses of an ageing memory now:
A whopping 70 percent of the entertainment industry in Angeles City was controlled by Australians. This was a mantra at each meeting of the Angeles Entertainment Inc. by its president, Frank Abrillo, owner of Stag club. Filipina girlfriends and mistresses serving more as dummies than partners allowed actual ownership of businesses by the Aussies, Abrillo was all-too-quick to add.
Aussies have found a most desirable place in Angeles, a fair dinkum to use their phrase. With their stranglehold of the entertainment industry the Aussies naturally lorded it over all the denizens of Fields Avenue and its satellite streets of flesh.
A query to an Australian tourist on what was there in Angeles that made his compatriots to troop to the city gave this wisecrack: “You don’t have the beaches, mate. But you sure do have the bitches.”
“The devils from down under “ damned an editorial of The Voice of the “reglamentary” abuse by Australians of bargirls and other workers in the entertainment industry; of the low, low regard of Filipina women by Australian tour operators who had the gall to publish in one Outback shit of a sheet the lurid enticement: “Come to Angeles City, the girls are cheap, P100 only.”
Pampanga’s media organizations coming out with a joint resolution denouncing an Australian writer whose special report on the Angeles-Olongapo entertainment circuit in an Australian newspaper that read in part: “Filipino men are willing to sell their daughters, their wives, even their mothers for a few pesos.”
A very personal matter with these Aussies. I was on a date with a lady friend at the nipa hut restaurant of Swagman Hotel – the flagship of Australian dominance of entertainment in Angeles then.
The lady was on her way to the powder room when a group of drunken Aussies groped at her. She came back to our table crying. Gallantry obliged me to seek redress. I got more. It so happened that city cop chief Col. Ahmed Nakpil was near our table with his men.
The cops lined up those rowdy Aussies against the wall at gunpoint and I had a kick out of striking each one on the head. Penyagap ku la.
Aside from the flesh market, the Aussies also indulged in illegal gambling. No, not jueteng, dummy. That was the monopoly of RR in the city then. The Aussies established off-track betting stations in their enclaves. No, not for the races at the Manila Jockey Club nor the Sta. Ana Race Track but for those in far-off Sydney, Australia. The results were dispatched to Angeles through short-wave radio. Remember, there was no fax yet that time, no IDD, and the internet was still eons away.
For all these abuses, even malfeasances and petty crimes of Australians, I cannot recall covering any Australian killing. And to think that the insurgency was at its peak in the city then.
Fast forward to these times when Koreans have far overtaken the Australians and just about every national here – Filipinos included, it is often jested – in ownership of businesses from the field of entertainment to real estate. Aussies being target of crime syndicates now just don’t fit the bill. No fair dinkum there, mate.