More than 50 years after a fatal firebombing, the site of the Whiskey Au Go Go is still scarred

It had always been something of a tomb, a place you looked at solemnly from the outside, a place so tragic it required no words.

The Whiskey Au Go Go. Picture: Supplied

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It had always been something of a tomb, a place you looked at solemnly from the outside, a place so tragic it required no words.

In a rapidly modernising Brisbane, it was the sort of plain, low-rise building at the corner of St Paul’s Terrace and Amelia Street, Fortitude Valley, that would ordinarily have commanded little or no attention.

That is, if it hadn’t once been the site of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub, which was firebombed in the early hours of March 8, 1973, killing 15 innocent people.

At the time, it was the biggest mass murder in Australian criminal history.

The aftermath of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub firebombing. Picture: Supplied

The building never lost its mournful aura once you knew its antecedents. And against all odds, it survived intact over the decades, dwarfed by high-rise office buildings and apartments and a 21st-century Brisbane that swirled and eddied around it.

Which is why it was such a shock when in 2021, during research for The Australian’s true crime podcast, The Gangster’s Ghost, about Sydney mobster Stewart John Regan, I stood once again outside the old Whiskey with Regan’s second cousin, Kelly Slater Regan, jiggled the door and found it open.

For the first time in more than a decade of researching the firebombing, I was able to step inside this sacred and horrific space.

We entered in awe, past the alcove beneath the right-hand stairwell where convicted Whiskey killer James Finch had supposedly rolled two drums of fuel and set them alight as part of some crazed extortion plan by Sydney criminals, including Regan, to take over the Brisbane vice scene back in the 1970s.

At the top of the stairs, I paused. On the night of the fire, waitress Donna Phillips had been manning the front desk here before she was called away minutes before the stairwell exploded.

Survivor Donna Phillips attends the Whiskey Au Go Go 50-year anniversary service in Fortitude Valley. Picture: Liam Kidston

She told me: “Then the lights were starting to appear as though they were going out … it was dark, it was dark … and (the smoke) was curling up over the ceiling and running forwards that way … two men passed in front of me, went to the sliding door, opened it. One of them turned back and said something like, ‘Well, are you coming now?’ And, you know, it’s kind of, well OK, I better go now.”

The day we visited, the space was packed up and in transition. An office environment being replaced by another. Beyond the empty desks and packing boxes, it was still possible to look down the length of the building and see in your mind’s eye the bar on the left, the kitchen on the right, the tables and chairs where clubgoers socialised and at the far end, the dance floor.

Kelly Slater Regan visited the site of the Whiskey Au Go Go. Picture: Matthew Condon

When the club went up after 2.08am, 50 patrons – staff and the public – ran for exits and windows. The 15 who didn’t make it out died within minutes of smoke inhalation.

It was humbling to be there. It was moving. And it was infuriating – to know that while two men had been convicted of the crime (James Finch and John Andrew Stuart), many others who planned and participated in the attack were never held to account and literally got away with multiple murders.

An external shot of the Whiskey Au Go Go before the fire. Picture: The Courier Mail

Physical progress did finally catch up with the Whiskey in recent years. While the building has remained intact, the internals have been completely overhauled for a medical centre.

Kelly and I would have been one of the last to have stood in that tragic room as it was half a century ago.

Interior pictures of the Whiskey Au Go Go. Picture: Supplied

I attended the 50th anniversary memorial for the Whiskey on the footpath outside the club in 2023. Some survivors and relatives of many victims paid their respects around a brass plaque bearing the names of the lost.

A memorial outside the former Whiskey Au Go Go building. Picture: Liam Kidston

It’s impossible to fathom that the true story behind the Whiskey has remained elusive after so many decades.

Truth, though, is enormously resilient.

As workmen stripped the internals of the old building at the time of the 50th memorial, they found a reminder of the past underneath the first floor supports. Scorch marks. An internal tattoo that said “Never forget”.

Subscribers get Episode 9 exclusively at gangstersghost.com.au. Or hear Episode 7 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now.