Q News
Andrew M Potts
Steve Johnson sat down with QNews to tell us about his book A Thousand Miles From Care and his role as the victims’ families representative on the newly formed LGBTQIA+ Consultative Committee.
Steve Johnson is in town for the launch of his book A Thousand Miles From Care at Qtopia Sydney’s The Substation in Taylor Square.
The book is a triumph, serving as both a memoir of Steve’s three-and-a-half decade fight for justice and a biography of his brother Scott’s life and achievements before his untimely death at Manly aged just 27.
A feature film adaptation with a working title of The Surface of Venus is already in the works.
That title is a reference to Scott Johnson’s early work at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was instrumental in revealing the face of Venus for the first time by mathematically inferring the surface of the planet from reflections and scatterings of radar waves.
A Thousand Miles From Care tells the story of a family’s love and loss that ultimately ends in victory and the conviction of a man that Steve had brought to the attention of the police as early as 2007.
“I wrote the book for several reasons,” Steve tells me.
“I wanted the world to know my brother better. But I also wanted people to see that standing up to intransigent institutions like the NSW Police can sometimes end up succeeding.
“I am hopeful that the NSW Police will change and by writing this book I hope to send a message that the government needs to take the recommendations of the Special Commission seriously. To get to work trying to solve some of the other deaths that occurred around the time Scott died. To move the NSW Police into the 21st Century and heal the wounds caused by their mistakes of the past and reform the institution so that it takes seriously their sacred duty to protect and serve all people equally.
“Then I would have succeeded in accomplishing something for my brother and for the other victims that are still awaiting justice.”
In the book Johnson reveals that he’s still not sure that Scott White, who later took his wife’s name of Newman, has been entirely truthful about the circumstances that brought him into contact with his brother Scott.
“I’m grateful that Scott White pleaded guilty and spared us a trial,” Johnson tells me.
“I’m also grateful that he confessed to having killed my brother. But I’ve always wished he would tell us more. I hope for a time where I can hear straight from Mr White why he was there with my brother and why he did what he did.”
It also paints a picture of the level of closeness between some police with known gay bashers that were operating around Manly in the years close to Scott Johnson’s death.
“I discovered through the proceedings of the Police Integrity Commission in 2000 called Operation Florida that the Manly Local Area Command often had close relationships with the drug crime and the drug criminals in the Northern Beaches,” Steve reveals.
“When we discovered during the third inquest that the police in charge of one of the most prominent arrests of a gay bashing gang in the year before my brother died had attended the wedding of the leader of that gang it made me question whether there was more to the reason the Manly Police were reticent to investigate Scott’s case than met the eye.”
“In 1988 the police did considerably less than not investigate Scott’s case. They went so far as to convince me that my brother’s death was a suicide and withheld information about the violence against gay men in their own streets during that time and in particular areas like where Scott died which were places that gay men would go to meet each other and teen gangs would go to attack them.
“Their failure to share even the most basic information about the circumstances of Scott’s death led to a decades long mystery about why he died and permitted the person who we later learned killed Scott three decades of freedom in which he could continue carrying on violence.”
Steve’s role on the LGBTQIA+ Consultative Committee
Steve’s fight for justice ultimately led to the establishment of the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes, a process that he’s still intimately involved in as the victims’ families representative on the LGBTQIA+ Consultative Committee that is working with NSW Police and the NSW Government on implementing its recommendations.
He says it has been slow going so far, though that should start to change when the NSW Government releases its formal response to the Commission of Inquiry, something that Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council, Penny Sharpe, said at the book launch will be happening in the very near future.
“The committee has had two meetings but as yet has not had a substantive conversation about the recommendations,” Steve tells me.
“There’s some preliminary work that we’ve been apprised of and our next meeting is in October.
“We have been told very little about what the government intends to do or what the police intend to do except that the government’s response is imminent.
“During the first meeting we discussed the membership of the committee and I suggested that the committee be entirely open to the public. That way anyone who wished to listen and submit questions could do so, so that the process could be seen as very engaged and open, whereby everyone could see the earnestness of the government and the police to work out the reforms that were recommended by the Sackar Commission.
“I said that the NSW Police took quite a hit during the year-and-a-half that the Special Commission was underway in terms of the public trust because it fought so assertively against what the Sackar Commission was attempting to do.
“Namely, to get to the bottom of how best to serve the men who had lost their lives and who had not yet received justice and how best to avoid the failures of the past to serve the LGBTQI community well.
“I said the NSW Police could best regain some of that trust by immediately opening the committee proceedings up to the public so the public could see a good faith effort to follow the recommendations of the Special Commission.
“That was taken under advisement.”
US election hopes and fears
When Steve boarded his flight to Sydney to attend his book launch Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee for the US Presidential Election.
But by the time he arrived in Sydney, Biden had stepped aside. Johnson is proud of Biden’s record but feels that it’s for the best.
“I think President Biden was one of the best presidents we’ve had in my lifetime and I’m glad he’s stepped aside and made room for candidate Kamala Harris and I hope she becomes the Democratic nominee,” Johnson tells QNews.
“My wife and I are one hundred percent behind her.
“I’m very much worried that things will go backwards for gay and transgender Americans under a second Trump Administration. I’m worried about all kinds of things going backwards if Donald Trump becomes president again.”
-Steve Johnson’s A Thousand Miles From Care is available now from all good booksellers.
*This writer has previously been employed by the Johnson family.
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