Someone who knew that business was just business, no matter what the collateral damage. Someone who didn’t think twice about setting alight a club full of people, knowing many would die. Logic tells us, it had to be someone who enjoyed the rush of fire, explosives and weapons. How could a mass murder occur in sleepy old Brisbane?Īnd most importantly, who was behind this infamous crime? So what was true? What was fact and what was myth? Notorious NSW detective Roger Rogerson, who flew up from Sydney to help investigate the Whiskey in 1973, told a journalist decades later that a man named “Vince” threw a molotov cocktail into the club that night. One criminal told police that witnesses saw Vince “skulking” outside the club before the fire. He claimed he was in Sydney at the time of the fire, but there is evidence that shows he was in fact Brisbane. Hunter had friends perish and only made it out alive by seconds.ĭonna saw a workmate with his shirt on fire, but she escaped, and has been haunted by that moment all her life.īefore Port Arthur, the Whiskey Au Go Go stood as Australia’s worst mass murder.īut what does all this have to do with Vince? Kath believes she saw the killers lighting the fire at the front entrance. Yet it still attracted popular musical acts. As the old saying goes - you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It strove for class, but was a hood’s idea of posh. It didn’t have the fancy atmosphere of Chequers, for example, at the top end of town in Elizabeth Street. Rumours lingered that prostitutes worked out of the Whiskey, and that hoods and crims held up the bar there. The club itself had a reputation as a “last chance saloon”. Of the 50 revellers, three girls were out on a hen’s night, and amongst the drinkers and dancers was a truck driver, the manager of a local suburban public pool, a pub owner from country Queensland, telephonists, a woman who worked in the canteen at the nearby Roma Street railway station, two members of the Military Police and two Queensland police constables. Most bodies were found in an alcove next to that door. A fire-resistant exit door had closed and was unable to be opened from the inside. An inquest would find that the winding mechanisms on all those windows had previously been removed, and the windows riveted shut. In the club there were windows along the wall facing St Paul’s Terrace, but all were covered in decorative curtains. MATTHEW CONDON: Was it was a vicious fire.ĭONNA PHILLIPS: I don’t, I’m pausing. MATTHEW CONDON: You remember seeing it on fire? MATTHEW CONDON: You were facing the club at that point? MATTHEW CONDON: Once you got over the fence, you went across Amelia street and you sat on the footpath?ĭONNA PHILLIPS: On the footpath with my feet in the gutter MATTHEW CONDON: You heard someone screaming inside? I’ve come forward to the fence and hopped off. I’d forgotten previously, but it was another thing that I’d remembered was standing near that back door and looking back thinking, well, how can we help these people? Then with the shower, the sound of shattering glass, it was oh, maybe it’s too dangerous. Audio Clip DONNA PHILLIPS: We heard a woman scream and we heard glass shattering.
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