At 2.08am on 8 March 1973, two drums of petrol were lit in the foyer beneath the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub. Fifteen people died upstairs of carbon monoxide poisoning, in a first-floor room with one obstructed exit. Every one of them was dead before the fire brigade arrived. And months earlier, a career criminal named John Andrew Stuart had told a journalist — who printed it, and who personally warned the Police Commissioner and the Police Minister — that an empty club would be firebombed first, and then the Whiskey Au Go Go would be burned while it was full of people. On 25 February an empty club burned. Eleven days later, so did the Whiskey.
A NOTE ON SOURCING
James Finch and John Stuart were convicted in October 1973 of one murder — that of Jennifer Denise Davie, 17. The other fourteen charges were never proceeded with. Stuart died in Boggo Road Gaol in January 1979. Finch was released in 1988 and deported to England, where he confessed to a British newspaper and retracted within a day. He died of Covid in London, and the reopened inquest was told of his death on the opening day of its second tranche.
Police fabricated the evidence used to arrest Stuart. That is not in dispute. Finch was convicted largely on a typewritten record of a police interview that he never signed, in Queensland, in the years before the Fitzgerald Inquiry examined that police force.
A coronial inquest was reopened in 2017 and sat from June 2021 into 2022 — 30 days, more than 65 witnesses, over 2,000 exhibits — hearing credible evidence that Finch and Stuart did not act alone. As at the time of recording, the coroner's findings had not been delivered.
At a 2017 Supreme Court sentencing for the murders of Barbara McCulkin and her daughters, Vincent O'Dempsey told the court he had nothing to do with the Whiskey firebombing, and Justice Peter Applegarth said there was available evidence to the contrary. That is reported here as what was said in open court. It is not a finding about the fire. Mr O'Dempsey has never been charged over the Whiskey Au Go Go and denies any involvement in it. No other person is named in this episode in connection with the fire.
Two motives have been argued for fifty years — an extortion campaign, which is what the 1973 jury accepted, and an insurance fraud that went wrong. Neither has been established.
SOURCES
Geoff Plunkett, The Whiskey Au Go Go Massacre: Murder, Arson and the Crime of the Century (Big Sky Publishing, 2018) — written with access to the original police files
Matt Condon, 'What really happened at the Whiskey Au Go Go?', Courier-Mail, 4 March 2023
'Secrets of Whiskey may never come out', Courier-Mail, 8 March 2023
Both archived at whiskeyfire.info
Contemporaneous reporting: The Age, 9 and 13 March 1973; 7 January 1974; 2 January 1979; 6 June and 7 July 1984. The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1966; 9 May 1974; 10 February 1984; 24 November 1988.
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, Whiskey Au Go-Go nightclub bombing 1973
Monument Australia — Whiskey Au Go Go Fire Victims
SUPPORT
This episode deals with mass killing, self-harm and death in custody.
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