by Larry Writer
For all the years I attended St Mary’s, all the ’Loo kids would meet each morning at around eight on the corner near our place and we’d walk as slowly as possible through the suburb and along Cathedral Street together to school. We’d be distracted by a game of touch, a can to kick, a rumble, a drunk under the bridge to heckle. Not once do I remember arriving at school much before one minute to nine. Once the headmaster expressed his exasperation that it took the kids who lived closest to the school the longest time to get there. ‘It’s not as if you have to come by helicopter!’ he said.
The Squadrito brothers, Dominic, Frank, Jimmy and their cousin Joe, in many ways epitomised the kids of Woolloomooloo. They’re still my friends to this day and I’ve never stopped admiring those blokes. Dom and Frank were masters of any ball game they chose to play, be it rugby league, cricket, basketball or tennis, and Dom, especially, had incredible skills and hand–eye co-ordination. Frank, one of those natural leaders in life, was almost two years older than me and we were great mates. He convinced me to play rugby league for Chelsea with him in the South Sydney juniors competition and when he switched to play with Bondi United he took me with him and we were the premiers. Jimmy never had the skills of Dom and Frank but he was a boy who was always in for a dig, giving everything 120 per cent effort. He was the organiser, corralling us, forming us into teams, marking out our field with witches’ hats and afterwards telling us what we’d done wrong in the game. Jimmy was the catalyst for our touch footy competitions. From our early teens until we were in our twenties and moved on to other pursuits, Jimmy organised us into teams and devised the various competitions. There were enough of us to make up four or five teams as well as a girls’ side and mostly we won the comp against other localities.
Joe Squadrito became a first grade rugby league player for the South Sydney Rabbitohs. He was an elegant, gazelle-like runner, a boy with perfect composure and balance with a ball in his hands. He was a neighbourhood star and he always looked the part, wearing the latest Souths and Balmain jerseys emblazoned with sponsors’ logos. I have an abiding memory of Joe. We were all playing touch footy together, not in the Domain, but on the concrete basketball court in the Woolloomooloo playground. Five minutes into the game we all had concrete scrapes and grazes on our elbows and knees. Joe made a break and ran to score but we were closing in on him and the only way he could score that try was to dive and plant the ball on the concrete in the corner an inch from the sideline. He flew through the air gracefully as if in slow motion, plonked the ball down and somehow, defying gravity, he slid on his stomach and used his hands to push himself back up into the standing position, all without receiving a scratch from the unforgiving concrete. That was the coolest thing I ever saw.
Jimmy Squadrito was a keen cricketer and he had this trick where he could make it appear that he’d dropped the ball when he was fielding, but he really had it firmly in hand and when the batsman chanced an extra run, Jimmy would hurl the ball at the stumps. He rarely hit them.
There were the Dymock brothers: Jim (who went on to play rugby league for Australia), ‘Paul’, Angelo and Milton. Each was a gifted athlete, yet of them all, Milton was the most naturally gifted, all silky touches with the footy and he seemed to have loads of time to get things done on the field. He didn’t go as far in sport as Jim because he lacked his brother’s application and killer instinct. Milton coasted, Jimmy busted his gut.
Laurel Turkelson’s door was always open to us kids. She lived on the corner opposite us and never failed to have a cup of tea for me. A lot of the adults copped it from the youngsters, but never Laurel. At night when we’d be making a racket in the street she would come out and ask us to quieten down, and we did without a peep of complaint. Mary Raffa was another neighbour, a lovely woman. She broke her hip and Laurel, in the spirit of the ’Loo, let her stay at her house until she regained her health. Laurel, her husband Keith and daughters Michelle, Jan and Melissa looked after Mary so well, when her hip mended she didn’t want to leave.
There were always dogs following us around. Woolloomooloo was a suburb of mutts. Michael Borlotti had a dog called Butch and Dave Harrison had Caesar, a Casanova dog of indeterminate pedigree. Caesar jumped our fence and knocked up my poodle, Fifi. On 11 November 1975, the day that Gough Whitlam and his Labor Government were sacked by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, Fifi gave birth to a litter of four pups. I recall that the day after their birth I laid them out on newspapers all proclaiming the historic event of the previous day, and they looked very cute. All my friends wanted a pup. I gave Max Ruello a black and white one that he imaginatively christened Black & White. George Lucarelli, Eric Parisi and Michael Borlotti each got one of the remaining three. Eric’s new dog stacked on weight and within twelve months it was the size of a coffee table. Turns out Eric’s food-loving family fed the dog what they fed themselves: pasta and meatballs and beautifully roasted chicken.
Characters abounded in this vibrant and colourful place. The man who owned the corner store near us was Joe Napoli. He was obsessed with his compatriot, the Italian professional wrestler Mario Milano. Joe had posters of Mario on his walls and every time we went there to buy our milk and bread he’d regale us with details of Mario’s latest victory over Killer Kowalski or Skull Murphy at Sydney Stadium or on Sunday’s World Championship Wrestling on Channel 9. Joe’s hero Mario was a good-guy wrestler, clean-shaven scourge of the nasty guys who broke the rules, so imagine the crisis of confidence Joe suffered when Milano grew sideburns and a sinister moustache and became a baddie for a time. The swerve didn’t last long. It turned out he’d been hypnotised into evil-doing by Tiger Singh.
We rode our bikes in the streets, but had to be careful not to get run over by the cars that the local hoons would occasionally race up and down Dowling Street, deafening the residents and making the air thick with fuel fumes.
It seemed there were as many abandoned cars as there were people in our suburb, and it was not unknown for them to be set on fire. Even to leave a car in a Woolloomooloo street while you visited a friend or had a meal was to risk returning and finding it a smoking ruin. The locals didn’t worry about their cars being burned, because hardly anyone who had to live in Woolloomooloo could afford one.
Cars were especially at risk on cracker nights, when everyone went feral and reached for their matches. There was a big bonfire in Dowling Street every year. Kids would drag debris from all over the area and pile it up and light it and the flames would soar high and lick the overhead power lines. One such night things got out of hand. Locals were actually dismantling cars parked on the street, and dumping everything they could carry – tyres, seats, radios, the belongings of the owner – onto the bonfire. Then they ripped the boards off the abandoned houses and threw them into the flames. It was the biggest bonfire any of us had ever seen. To stand within 10 metres was to lose your eyebrows and the hairs from your arms. One cracker night, the immense heat from the bonfire melted a streetlight and an electrical cable snapped off and swung, sparking and crackling, above our heads, like a huge glittering snake gone berserk. Given my history with electricity, no one vacated the scene faster than me. When the police and the fire brigade converged on Dowling Street to try to extinguish the fire storm, we all booed.
And we’d tease everyone who couldn’t run fast enough to catch us, more often the homeless men and alcoholics who frequented the Matthew Talbot Hostel and slept rough huddled around bonfires on the footpath. Mick Fowler, the gruff old wharfie and union activist who would wage an heroic battle to save the workers’ cottages of Woolloomooloo from developers in the 1980s, was even a target. We once burned down Mick’s front door.
We had the Finger Wharf to fish from and mooch around, and the docks where the big merchant ships lay at anchor. There would be containers full of cars stacked on the wharves and big cranes from which we would leap 15 metres into the water. From such a height, the impact was so hard when we hit the water we had to wear sandshoes to protect our feet.
When we were not rampaging along it, we’d swim under the Finger Wharf. Who cared if we were slashed by the barnacles on the big wooden pylons? Because there were more fish in the Harbour then, there were more sharks, too, and we always kept a wary lookout for fins. Not that, as I recall, I ever saw a shark in the bay. You never knew what you’d swim into under there – rats, dead dogs and cats, all kinds of debris – but one thing we could be sure of, a swim in filthy Woolloomooloo Bay would leave you with an ear infection.
One of my favourite pastimes, then as now, was to go down to the wharf and dangle my bare feet in the water, close my eyes and turn my face to the sun. The warmth would course through my body. At those times, I felt like I was the Mayor of Woolloomooloo. This was my heartland, my town, and today, nearly forty years later, it still is.
We were so poor. It was a struggle every day for Mum to put something on the table. Typical fare for the Dack kids, and for her, would be dripping on toast (for those of you who don’t know, dripping is the fat from roasted meat. Mum would catch it in a tin as it dripped from the cooking meat, and when it cooled and congealed, it was a cheap and tasty spread.) Another snack was salt and pepper on a piece of toast. And how can I forget that other staple of our childhood, tinned beetroot on stale Sao biscuits? It’s funny; when you’re poor and hungry, everything remotely edible tastes pretty good.
Of course, being on a meagre single parent’s pension and being paid little for her cleaning jobs, Mum couldn’t afford to give us pocket money, so we resorted to other means of scraping up a little cash. We vied for paper routes and scrounged for bottles. No one was as good as Stephen at finding soft drink bottles in the neighbourhood and cashing them in. He always seemed to know where to look and he’d collect them in the basket of his bike and cash them in for five cents each. Following his lead, all the kids got involved in bottle collecting and Woolloomooloo being a thrown-away bottle kind of place, mostly we were able to gather enough to buy a sixty-cent bag of lollies and an ice cream by dusk.
There was a pub on just about every corner in the ’Loo, and getting drunk, like lighting fires, was a popular pastime. Every night I’d be kept awake by shouting and the sound of people being hit and things beings smashed. For a few months, these sounds intimidated me, and I would lie in bed feeling frightened and threatened, until I got used to it, and the cacophonous serenade of the Woolloomooloo streets became as normal to me as the cries of the kids playing long after dark and the blasts of the boats’ horns on the Harbour on a foggy morning.
The nightclubs were rough, full of working men in shorts and T-shirts who’d get pissed and fight, and spivs with sideboards and Merv Hughes moustaches, wearing flares, brown and grey shoes and purple or yellow shirts with long pointed collars trawling for the local talent. On one night that lives on in Woolloomooloo folklore, the daughter of a club proprietor was slapped by a patron and a huge brawl erupted, flowing out onto the street; cops came from everywhere. The police from Darlinghurst and Kings Cross knew their way to Woolloomooloo.
When we arrived in Woolloomooloo, the Eastern Suburbs Railway was still being built. Naturally, after dark and on weekends when the workmen went away, my mates and I ventured into the caverns where trains roar to and fro today. Carrying our torches, we’d walk as far as you could go. It was an overpowering environment. Scary, dark as the grave, the pungent smells of wet earth and rock and gunpowder making our heads swim.
Often at night, we’d climb up onto the top of the overhead tunnel structure, which bisected Woolloomooloo, and look down over our suburb. There was a brothel directly below our vantage point, one of the busiest in the ’Loo, and after dark there was a steady stream of men going in and out. Though the streets and alleys were dimly lit, it was surprising what you could see. The street lights reflected directly onto the faces of the prostitutes and their clients. We could see them, but they couldn’t see us. One of us had a camera with a flash unit attached but no film inside and when a punter emerged, we’d fire off the flash at him and yell, ‘Smile … you’re on Candid Camera … We’re sending the photos to your wife!’
Another trick was to climb down from our perch and steal the chairs that the prostitutes sat on in the street when they vacated them to go inside the brothel to entertain a client. Often we’d return the chairs in pieces. Our fun and games ended when the sex workers set their protectors, detectives from Darlinghurst, onto us. They chased us away and threatened us with arrest or a good belting if we returned. The girls paid the cops for protection so the officers didn’t take kindly to our disrupting their little earner at the brothel. Through the week the policemen would come and bang on the door, the signal that the prostitutes should front with their money and pay them a percentage for ‘protection’. The girls who had made no money that night leapt from windows or ran out the back door because they knew they risked being jailed as an incentive to make more cash in future.
In time, a mate and I befriended the prostitutes. We would sit and chat to them out the front of the brothel and they’d pay us ten dollars, sometimes more, for our time. Sometimes if a weirdo came and menaced the girls, we’d scare him off. I was surprised by the number of well-dressed businessmen who frequented the place, often leaving an expensive car in the street – they were lucky their cars weren’t torched – while they were inside. One fellow, well groomed and always wearing a beautifully tailored suit, became obsessed with one of the women, and visited three or four times a night. I’ll never forget one girl who worked there. Her name was Christy. She was a prostitute by night with a pricey cocaine and heroin habit, and a high-flying hostie with Ansett during the day.
I have never touched drugs, and I know what scared me off. There was a woman at the brothel, not a bad sort at all. Even though I was just a young teenager, one night, off her face on heroin, she came up close to me, fondling her crotch seductively and moaning, ‘You want a bit of this, don’t you, sonny?’ I was terrified, tongue-tied. She stood there for a bit, then went back inside for a moment and returned with a bucket. She put the bucket on the ground in front of where I was standing, took off her knickers and urinated noisily into it. She watched me the whole time, her eyes rolling around in her head. I was horrified. I thought, If drugs can bring you so low, count me out.
We were hanging around the brothel one night when we heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Five blasts, from a nearby house, then silence. Someone must have called the police because within minutes the street was crawling with them. They grabbed everyone in sight and started grilling us. A detective pulled me roughly to one side and wanted to know everything I’d seen and heard. I did my best James Cagney impersonation and bristled at the heavy-handed treatment, telling him, ‘Fuck off!’ He was tempted to haul me in, but really I was no more stroppy than the other bystanders who were being questioned and he let me go. It turned out that the shots were fired by some jilted lover. Apart from some holes in a wall, no damage was done.
My cosy arrangement with the hookers ended when my mate proved himself to be a bit too greedy. One night when the girls were particularly stoned (there was a huge bag of pot on the premises, the biggest bag of pot I’ve ever seen), slurring and weaving and way out of it, this bloke crept inside the brothel and stole twenty dollars from a prostitute’s handbag. At sixty dollars a trick, in cash, and it being an even busier than normal night
, he knew there’d be a stash of money around. Drugged-up as they were, these girls were sharp as tacks when it came to the money they’d earned. Soon one girl charged outside and right up to us. ‘There’s twenty bucks missing. You fucking little bastards! We pay you to be our friends and you throw our trust in our faces and rip us off.’ The thief sheepishly produced the twenty-dollar note and handed it back but it did no good. ‘Fuck off, we never want to see either of you again,’ was the girl’s parting shot.
I had mates who ended up in jail or dead. For some reason, perhaps because I would never bring shame to Mum, I shied away from serious trouble when it would have been easy for me to get embroiled in the shenanigans of the kids I knocked around with. I was never tempted. There was no choice to make. Stephen would have a tougher time resisting the temptations of the wild side.
There’s no formula. Some kids grow up part of a loving and supportive family in a secure environment and yet go off the rails. Others come from a background of violence, deprivation and abuse and lead decent and productive lives. I admire these people so very much. Maybe we’re born a good person or a stuff-up, and our true self inevitably emerges in spite of conditioning, good fortune or bad.
My experiences with police had not, by and large, been pleasant ones. I’d been kicked in the arse by the best of them and of course I was bashed by that psychopath at Camp MacKay. So I surprised myself when I started having so much fun at the City of Sydney Police Boys Club (as the old former police station in Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo, was called at the time. In 1985, Police Boys Clubs became known as Police Citizens Youth Clubs, or PCYCs, to give their due to the girls who were joining; and in 1995 the name was changed again to Police and Community Youth Clubs which allowed the retention of the PCYC acronym). Back then the club was basic. A nondescript old three-storey former cop shop and inside a workout area, a boxing room, trampoline, and mats, gloves, skipping ropes, medicine balls, hand weights. The other vital component was a group of police officers and trainers who were as caring as they were tough. Men of the streets such as boxing trainer Bruce Farthing. To all intents and purposes, Stephen, who joined the club at the same time as me, and I had no father, and the men of the Police Boys Club filled the gap. They disciplined us, guided us, developed our character, got us very, very fit, and gave us a sense of responsibility and a home away from home. Being a member of the club made me feel wanted, as if I belonged. I was never going to be a champion boxer, footballer, a champion anything. That didn’t matter. It was enough that I sweated hard. The men who ran that club as much as said to me: ‘I recognise your talent, I respect you for it, I will help you.’