Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  I was a climber since I could walk. I was strong, light on my feet, and could contort myself into impossible shapes to get me to that next hand-hold. On a rare outing to the zoo, Mum had to rescue me when I climbed up the bars of the bears’ cage. I was fearless. I just wanted to get that little bit closer.

  My most notorious climb was to the top of our block of flats. I climbed up the outside drainpipe, no matter that it was only precariously attached to the bricks of the building, and sat on the edge of the roof, ten storeys up. Heights didn’t bother me. For all I cared I could have been standing on the ground. (Years later as a teenager I illegally climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, suitably clad in a balaclava.) On the roof at Camperdown there was no guard rail, only a thin railing. I looked down and noticed a largish crowd of people pointing at me and yelling things, just what I don’t know because they were a long, long way below, and besides, there was a strong wind blowing. I decided I would entertain them by pretending to fall. I stumbled a bit and waved my arms, as though I was teetering and about to plummet to my death. Many of the onlookers laughed at my daring display.

  James wasn’t so easily amused. He saw me up on the roof and came storming up and dragged me home, by the hair.

  Oddly, when you think I later became a boxer, I got into very few fights when I was a boy, and this is all the more remarkable because we lived in a neighbourhood where it seemed that every sideways glance was answered by a smack in the mouth. Collecting bottles and breaking and entry were more my go.

  James has a photographic memory of life in Camper-down. My memories are a bit hazier. I can remember my old man erupting at Mum or James, but rarely at me. Perhaps he spared me because I was smaller, perhaps because he saw something of himself in me.

  There was an occasion that springs to mind: we were all having dinner, five of us squeezed around a small wooden Laminex-topped table. Mum or James said something that enraged my father and he brought both his fists crashing down on the table and food flew in all directions. Potatoes, peas, lamb chops hurtling all over the kitchen. Another time, he punched James because my brother was engrossed in a TV cartoon and James had the volume up too high. My old man had a short, short fuse.

  In my younger days, Dad was a big, strong man, tanned and with distinctive angular jaw and nose. He could be charming when he wanted to be. I only learned his story later, and more from Mum’s brothers and sisters than from her or James. Dad was an Englishman who, aged around twenty, abandoned his wife and children and left his homeland to sail to Australia on a merchant ship. I was told he jumped ship in Sydney, and that he never became an Australian citizen despite living here for the rest of his life. He didn’t have a good singing voice yet he sang a lot when he was sober, funny English songs, and growing up in a family where there was a piano and everybody sang, he knew all the words. One of my aunts told me that his father died young and his mother was cruel to him, though it’s all long ago and hearsay so no one can know for sure.

  At Christmas 1969, Dad, who had been drinking heavily, came back for a few days and was driving all of us west down Oxford Street. I was in the front passenger seat of his car and Mum, Alison and James were in the back. The old man thought he’d get to wherever we were going sooner if he drove in the buses-only lane. Naturally, we were cleaned up by a double-decker. The impact sent the car up onto the kerb by the Courthouse Hotel. Mum flew forward in those pre-seatbelt days and whacked her head on the back of the front seat. She was bleeding from the mouth. Despite our shock, James and I tried to staunch the blood. My father thought only of himself. He opened up his door and fled the scene, knowing he’d be busted for drink-driving.

  I was five when my father left us. It was 1970.

  Not long ago, my partner Hilary and I returned to Camperdown and went to the block of flats. We bumped into a woman I remembered as being one of our neighbours from back in the day. We talked of times passed, and specifically of the time from 1970 to 1973, when it was just Mum, James, Alison and me living in the flat. She had asked Mum where Jimmy was and Mum had not told her he’d deserted us. She would have been too ashamed to. Instead, she’d simply replied, ‘Oh, he’s gone away to work.’

  One Saturday morning when I was five, I was playing in a kids’ rugby league comp at Moore Park. I had my jersey, shorts, socks and boots on and was sitting on the grass on the sideline waiting for our game to start. I felt a pat on my back. I took no notice, thinking some boy had brushed against me by mistake. Then another pat. I ignored that too. Now a third, heavier pat. I turned around angrily to see who was prodding me and it was Dad. I was so surprised I forgot that I was supposed to dislike him; instead I felt pure delight. He’d come to watch me play. He loved me after all. I just wrapped myself around his inside leg and looked up at him, saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ As we got ready to run on I gave Dad a final squeeze and said, ‘Are you going to be here when the game’s over?’

  ‘Of course, Sunshine. Now just go and play.’

  I ran proudly onto the field, determined to play the game of my life for my father. I assumed he’d watch the game and then we’d go home together. I played my heart out and scored a try and I looked across to see if he’d seen my mighty run to the line. He was gone. That broke my heart. He made me feel like I was nothing.

  All week long I hoped and prayed that Dad would show up for my next game. On the morning of the match I got it into my head that he’d be walking to Moore Park where we were to play, and I walked there the whole way from Camperdown, down Missenden Road, into Carillon Avenue, left into City Road and right into Cleveland Street which runs all the way for some kilometres to Moore Park. I didn’t see him because he wasn’t coming.

  My first fight was with my best friend of the time. I was seven, he was eight. His family was offered a Housing Commission terrace home in Woolloomooloo but turned it down because they thought it was too decrepit. Our family ended up taking it instead. My friend lived on the seventh floor of our block of flats in Camperdown. We were having a silly game in the lifts, pushing the doors open and closed. Somehow our game blew up. He punched me. Now I knew I was a better rugby league player than he was but I had always considered him a better fighter. Nevertheless, I hit him back. We got stuck into it, whacking each other there in the lift for all we were worth. I was surprised to find myself not only holding my own against him, but giving him a belting. And another thing, I’d always thought I’d be all emotional and upset if I got in a fight, but I was as cool as a spud. It was a moment of clarity I had: I enjoy hitting and being hit. There was nothing to be afraid of in a fight. His punches were heavy; they didn’t hurt me. I was coldly fixated on landing telling blows on his most vulnerable spots, and as he got scared and tired, he could not defend himself against me. Eventually James and my friend’s brothers separated us. One of them said, ‘Do you blokes want to punch on?’

  I said, without hesitation, ‘ Yes!’

  My friend said, ‘No way!’

  I walked off with James and he put his arm around me.

  [JAMES]

  mean street serenade

  There’s no place like Woolloomooloo. A rambunctious working-class enclave smack dab in the middle of one of the most breathtaking settings on earth.

  You want extremes? Go to the ’Loo. You’ll find extreme beauty, for it is located on one of the most stunningly picturesque bays of Sydney Harbour, it’s a quick stroll to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair with its views of the Bridge and the Opera House, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Domain, the Finger Wharf (built between 1911 and 1914 as a wool shipping wharf and used as a departure point for diggers sailing away to fight overseas in World War I), and above it all, to the south-west, is the towering cityscape of Sydney whose big bright lights at night seem so high you can’t tell them from the stars. Yet in its narrow streets, lanes, parks, pubs, cafés and convenience stores, terrace- and townhouses, you’ll also find extreme poverty, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness.

  Once,
close to 200 years ago, Woolloomooloo was one of the most desirable addresses in all Sydney. The wealthy and powerful lived there in sprawling sandstone mansions set in sumptuous gardens. It was safe and law-abiding, a world away from the larrikins, vice dens and rampant boozing that had turned Paddington and The Rocks into no-go zones for respectable citizens. Residents of Woolloomooloo shopped for fresh produce in bountiful market gardens and you could stroll down to the bay and take your pick of fish that had been caught just an hour or so ago. Yes, as in all the inner suburbs of Sydney, there were tanneries, brickworks and factories belching smoke, and coal-fuelled steamers loading and unloading in Woolloomooloo Bay made the air and water filthy, but the delights of the suburb were compensation. And anyway, the brisk salty winds whipping in off the Harbour usually whisked the pollution away.

  The ’Loo began to change around 1850–60 when inner-Sydney dwellers took advantage of better roads, public transport, gas and water supplies and improved communications to move away from the bustling, noisome and increasingly populated city to the new garden suburbs of Ashfield, Strathfield, Rockdale, Chatswood and Manly. When they departed, their mansions and their gardens were demolished and new factories or cheap workers’ terraces were erected in their place and filled with the people who toiled in the factories and their families. Suddenly, and increasingly so in the early twentieth century, Woolloomooloo was overcrowded with poor people who were rich in spirit; people whose numbers were added to by maritime workers and by the many thousands who were flocking to the city from the bush to find employment. In time, the factories closed down and industry was relocated in Sydney’s west and south, and the flimsy, shoddily-constructed buildings were converted into boarding houses.

  By the 1920s, Woolloomooloo was a seething slumland of ramshackle, falling-down terraces and rooms-for-rent, bloodhouse pubs, cafés, corner shops and brothels. Unemployment was higher than elsewhere in Sydney. The crime rate too. Lawbreaking is often a symptom of poverty, and, a far cry from its halcyon days of a hundred years before, the ’Loo became one of Sydney’s more dangerous addresses, home to razor gangsters, drug dealers, sly grog shops, standover men and prostitutes. It was a hangout for the likes of Tilly and Jim Devine, Kate Leigh, Guido Calletti, and Frankie ‘ The Little Gunman’ Green, who lived for a while in Cathedral Street.

  About the time that we moved to Woolloomooloo, in 1973, it retained the colourful squalor of past eras, although parts of it were being bulldozed for low-cost and Housing Commission accommodation. When we rolled up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and desperately glad to escape from Camperdown, and moved into a small, neglected terrace in Dowling Street, the Finger Wharf was a working wharf, still twenty or so years from being transformed into a luxury site of multimillion-dollar homes and apartments, restaurants where the cost of a single meal could feed a Woolloomooloo family for weeks, and a berth for huge power boats. Occasionally today I’ll treat myself to lunch at the Finger Wharf’s pre-eminent restaurant, Otto, and sit there among the merchant bankers, radio shock jocks, sports champions and stars of TV and the screen, and gaze around the bay, remembering the old days when I would sit just there on the dock dangling my bare feet in the water and Woolloomooloo was my playground, battlefield and schoolyard.

  Our house was a rundown 100-year-old terrace at 148 Dowling Street. When we moved in they had begun moving the families out of the houses across the street from us and knocking the terraces down and putting up town houses of brick with modern kitchens and bathrooms. We called these little clumps of new blocks the Posh Area. It seemed to us that the tenants who were placed in them considered themselves a cut above us, saw themselves, tongue in cheek, as the silvertails of the ’Loo.

  To make our terrace habitable, Mum and I, and her brother Don Messiter, a gruff, no-nonsense bloke, pitched in and cleaned out about thirty years’ worth of garbage – it was stacked up 2 metres high in the house and out in the yard – tacked some lino on the kitchen floor, painted the walls and ceilings, and got the fireplace working. Unfortunately, the rats were harder to get rid of than the rubbish. We could hear them scampering day and night in the wall cavities, and it was not unusual for a big brown monster to brazenly scurry across the kitchen or lounge room floor. Yet, for all its faults, I thought our little home was pretty wonderful, and we lived there for six years before we moved to another Housing Commission home nearby at 114 Forbes Street.

  After our previous locale, Woolloomooloo was paradise. It was poor and decrepit and if you didn’t keep your eyes and ears open you could get into trouble, but to us it was the Promised Land. It was full of kids – most of them, like me, doing it tough, living in government-subsidised accommodation and with limited chances of ever making a career, but all out for a good time, whatever it took.

  There was the bay to swim and fish in, and beyond it the sparkling Harbour where kids ventured in rowboats.

  Some 30 per cent of the dwellings in Woolloomooloo then were condemned terraces, languishing like prisoners on death row in a weed-engulfed block of land abandoned except by rats, cockroaches and the homeless, waiting resignedly for the wrecker’s hammer. We kids invaded the rotting hulks and made them magical cubby houses. There were vacant lots to play Cowboys and Indians in and a particularly brutal game of hide and seek called Hares and Hounds where half the kids, the hares, had to run off through the suburb and hide from the other half, the hounds. A hare was on a hiding to nothing because when he was finally caught, he had to stand still while the hound belted him. Now, the game couldn’t finish until every last hare had been unearthed and dealt with. One day it was late and one kid, Shane Ross, had succeeded in eluding his pursuers. We hares, who included Shane’s brother Mark, were standing around in a disused factory wondering where the hell Shane was when suddenly we heard a loud crack and looked up to see him fall right through the dilapidated Gyprock roof above us and land at our feet. Despite the wounds that Shane suffered in his fall, we hounds proceeded to deliver the punishment he so richly deserved.

  It was mainly an area of Anglo and Italian families, and the Italians outnumbered the Anglos. After some early head-butting I got on well with the Italian kids even though, in a delicious twist, they called me ‘Wog’. There was Max Ruello and his cousins Sam, Leo and Johnny, Eric Parisi the paddle tennis king, the three Squadrito brothers and their cousin Joe Squadrito, Michael Borlotti, Mickey Grech, Vince Losurdo, the Ianni kids ... These boys lived their own spaghetti western. Thinking of them today I can picture myself walking down past their houses in the ’Loo and smelling the mouth-watering aromas of garlic, parmesan cheese and meatballs cooking and hearing the noisy and theatrical Mediterranean clamour inside those little homes.

  We played touch footy in the Domain, which was right by my school, St Mary’s Cathedral Christian Brothers High. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, a burgeoning mob of local kids would surge through the streets, calling up to their mates’ windows to join them for a game. It reminded me of that old TV show The Texas Rangers, where it started with one lawman walking down the street and he’d be joined by another ranger, then another until there was a whole posse parading through town. Sammy Ianni’s family moved from the ’Loo to Five Dock in Sydney’s inner west, yet he kept returning to play touch footy. He used to complain, ‘Gees, guys, I come all the way from Five Dock and none of you bastards will even pass me the ball.’

  More than any other memory, I retain abiding impressions of the warmth and friendliness of my neighbours. They were cash-poor but spirit-rich.

  Every time I return to Woolloomooloo it’s like I’ve been overseas and I’m arriving home again. I get a warm and tingly feeling that comes from remembering all the wonderful experiences I’ve had in that little suburb, a compassionate, supportive community of good friends who would give you the shirt from their back if you asked them for it. Growing up in the ’Loo, you could always find a friend to hang out with. I was talking to an old mate from Woolloomooloo, Eric Parisi, recently and he told me, ‘Mate, I’ve never f
elt so good as I did when we all lived down the ’Loo. They were the best times of my life.’ Hear, hear!

  They were halcyon days when the sun was always shining on the back of your neck and no matter how dreadful things were at home, on the streets, for a little while at least, we were kings. Ten of us would go to the movies together and all sit in a bunch. Many of the friendships I made there have turned out to be life- time ones.

  We all had nicknames. I was known as Stork because I was tall. My brother Stephen was the Shadow or Sunshine. Dave Harrison had long, stiff limbs so I nicknamed him Tin-Legs. There was a kid we dubbed the Guru because he could grow a beard and sat cross-legged like the Maharishi. Another boy was Bear’s Fur for no other reason than he had a lot of straight, thick brown hair on his head. A fellow with round, protruding eyes was known as Marbles, and as far as I know he still is. The Clock had one arm shorter than the other. One wharfie from Woolloomooloo dock answered to the name of the Judge because, said his mates, he was always sitting on a case. And another wharf worker was the Fog because he’d never lift.

  Another local, Norma Kelly, is my friend to this day. She is a generous, hard-working and brave woman who has had a challenging life but always made her home warm and welcoming. I’ve been lucky enough to be in a position to help her sons Luke and Jaidyn. She has done her absolute best for them and your best is always good enough, even if you sometimes fail.

  There’s always been an unfair stigma about Woolloomooloo. While it may not be the wealthiest joint in Sydney with the most palatial houses, it is a place of heart and character. People do it tough there yet so many of us have made a success of life. And because of where we come from, we’ve had to be twice as smart and twice as tough to succeed. I remember once when I swore, a teacher chided me and said, ‘You sound like you come from the back blocks of Woolloomooloo.’ I had great satisfaction in saying to him, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do.’ I know some of my neighbours have claimed to hail not from Woolloomooloo but Potts Point, because they didn’t want others to think less of them. I can understand them doing that, but I’m glad to say I never have resorted to lying about my home suburb. I have always liked the idea of being a Woolloomooloo boy.