Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  ‘He shouldn’t have sat in Tommy’s chair,’ she said with certainty, and set off down the road.

  WHAT WOOLLOOMOOLOO WANTS

  IN 1858 A PATHOLOGICALLY SHY, EARNEST young man walked the streets of Woolloomooloo making observations and taking notes. In his early twenties, William Stanley Jevons had come to Australia in 1854 at the height of the gold rush to work as an assayer at the newly opened Sydney Mint, assessing the quality and purity of the gold taken from the diggings.

  He was born in Liverpool, England, the ninth of eleven children. From a young age he was thought to be headed for greatness. Intelligent and curious, he studied science at university but had to leave when his father was bankrupted. He was thrilled by Australia, viewing the colony as a tabula rasa for his ideas and experiments. He took up wet-plate photography, then in its infancy, photographing people, Sydney landscapes and interiors. An indefatigable walker across New South Wales, he’d also stroll daily from Petersham to the Mint in the city, making notes about the local plants, geology and habits of the people. Even our climate intrigued him and he became a pioneer of scientific meteorology in Australia.

  When he was a boy in England he had been fascinated by the poorer sections of Liverpool, and in Australia he was drawn towards new working-class suburbs like Glebe and Woolloomooloo, attempting to describe them as scientifically as possible. He had no intention of publishing his findings, even though the survey, ‘Remarks upon the Social Map of Sydney, 1858’, had taken immense time and effort. It seems Jevons’ social investigation was a trial run to develop his skills in this area, which he would take back to the Mother Country the following year. However, once back in England he turned his attention to logic and political economics instead, which made him famous. He was to drown at Hastings while swimming at the age of forty-seven.

  The report was found by his daughter years later and it was published in 1929 in the Sydney Morning Herald. His precise survey is confirmation of just how rapidly Woolloomooloo had developed in such a short time. It had only taken a decade for it to be packed with rows of terraces and cottages.

  He devised categories for houses and people that ranged from first to third class. The inhabitants of this mainly residential area were primarily tradespeople and others of similar occupations of the second class, ‘almost entirely respectable’. Near William Street, Dowling, Forbes and Bourke streets were many first-class houses, ‘neatly built in rows’, but the more crowded streets of Riley and Crown were filled chiefly with the second and third class.

  North of Woolloomooloo Street, heading down to the bay, the houses were ‘pretty uniform of the second class. The last portion is a perfectly level alluvial flat only a few feet above high water.’ Along the shore was a small maritime trade, chiefly in firewood, lime and timber. Besides a sawmill, there were also cows and a flourishing dairy.

  Towards the east and the cliff face, Dowling was the last main street. Judge, Duke and Brougham, running parallel to each other, were so narrow as to be almost considered lanes and were occupied by small second-class houses.

  The once crystal-clear creek was now fouled with shit and rubbish and the land around it was ‘uninhabitable’. The survey also speculated that the flat parts of Woolloomooloo ‘must certainly be unhealthy from the damp miasmatic air which must lie on it at night’, but this ‘bad area’, as he called it, terminated at Woolloomooloo Street, when the land began to slope upwards towards William Street.

  What he also noticed was an ominous trend in the back streets, unchecked by authorities. These lanes and walkways, originally intended to afford a rear entrance to the principal houses, were now being built up with smaller and cheaper houses, financed by unscrupulous developers who cared nothing for the quality of the houses but were eager for quick profits. This development would become a distinctive characteristic of Woolloomooloo, with its bewildering number of side streets and lanes.

  Newspaper advertisements of the time provide examples of the housing available. St Kilda House, built in 1844, rented out accommodation, generally a bedroom with a sitting room. You could rent a cheap furnished bedroom sharing a house with a family, or lease a two-roomed cottage with a kitchen in Bourke Street. In another part of Bourke Street a family could lease a house with eight rooms and a kitchen, or in Brougham Street you could pay less rent for a cottage with three rooms. If you wanted a home in Forbes Street, there were some with six rooms, a kitchen, a hall and a balcony plus ‘a good yard and water laid on’.

  Jevons ignored the pubs but these were also proof of the phenomenal growth of the area. By 1854 there were hotels in Bourke, Forbes, Duke, Junction and Palmer streets. In just Woolloomooloo Street alone there was the Shamrock, the Cottage of Content, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hargraves Hotel. It was thought that there were more hotels in Woolloomooloo than any similar-sized place in the world, including San Francisco during the gold rush.

  Pubs were more than places that sold alcohol. They offered an attractive alternative to the cramped terraces and, as there were no community halls or entertainment venues, they provided a place for locals to meet. You could rent a room, play billiards, sing along to the hotel piano or plan the popular regatta races on the harbour. The pub was the hub of social life. At the 1857 Easter Monday sports day at the Palmer Street Hotel in Woolloomooloo Bay, the events included greasy pole climbing, running, jumping and foot racing, sack races, bobbing for treacle, throwing the weight, shooting the wild cat, duck hunting in deep water and the celebrated kangaroo dance. At least the local pubs didn’t go in for rat killing, a speciality of Gus Parker’s Hotel on York Street in the city (it advertised ‘a good pit’ with plenty of strong rats provided for ‘your terrier to kill’).

  Hotels also served important official functions, including holding election meetings and coroners’ inquests. The government paid a pittance to the hotel that held an inquest, but for a publican the real money was made when the inquest was over and the jurymen stayed on to drink.

  These inquests provide an intriguing record of the community that’s found nowhere else. One such inquest was held in 1857 at the Wharf Hotel (now the Frisco) in Dowling Street. John Hearne was a musician who lived in Duke Street with his wife and children. After a brief illness he died on a Monday and on the Wednesday there was an inquest. It was a curious death and it seemed that it may have been caused by an incident that occurred several months before. At the time a witness had seen Hearne wandering the streets covered in blood with a large bruise ‘about the size of his palm on his left temple’. He said his wife had attacked him with a candlestick. At the inquest his eleven-year-old son contradicted this, saying that his father ‘drank very hard’ and that the wound had been inflicted by a man who had come to ask Hearne to teach him music. A drunken Hearne had ordered the man out of the house. Not taking kindly to this, the man had struck Hearne, knocked him against a chest of drawers and run off.

  On the Friday before he died Hearne went to bed, seeming to be in good health, but was found on Saturday morning on the sofa having a fit, with foam percolating from his mouth. After his death on Monday night his innards were examined and found to be diseased because of his excessive consumption of spirits. The doctor’s opinion was that the head wound had nothing to do with his death. The jury accordingly returned a verdict of death from diseases brought on by intemperance. No-one seemed to have appreciated the irony that an inquest for a man who died of drink was held at a hotel — or, more probably, there were so many inquests held in pubs concerning deaths by intemperance, or the results of drunken fights, that Hearne’s death was unremarkable.

  The Aborigines also succumbed to liquor, which they drank near the foul creek at the foot of Woolloomooloo Street. According to one puzzled newcomer, they:

  … are there day and night in a state of beastly intoxication. I would like to enquire whether there is any ‘protection’ here? Whether the publicans who supply these poor wretches with drink are not punishable? And why do police not interfere and stop the disgustin
g scenes enacted there daily?

  The answer was that ‘any publican supplying an aboriginal native with spirituous liquors is liable to a penalty’. But there were publicans who disobeyed the law and of course there were whites who bought alcohol and sold it on to the Aborigines at a profit.

  By 1854 the area was becoming a byword for crime. The Illustrated Sydney News fulminated that ‘large portions of Sydney have been abandoned to utter lawlessness. We need only particularise the suburb of Woolloomooloo.’ Part of this reputation was based on the number of brothels in the area. Jevons had heard that they existed but he didn’t know their extent.

  In reality there were about forty brothels, with the majority of prostitutes under the age of eighteen. About half the houses of disrepute were run by John Rushton, described by one journalist as ‘a very ill-looking, diminutive old man’, a hypocrite who managed to avoid being prosecuted and revelled in his public persona as a preacher ‘on race courses of a Sabbath afternoon’.

  He operated out of a ramshackle shed on the corner of Woolloomooloo and Palmer streets. It was a shabby emporium stocked with old furniture, cracked mirrors, broken chairs, dilapidated couches and other cheap and second-hand household items. From here he would furnish the twenty or so houses he leased as brothels and charge the girls four times the normal rent. In this way he flouted the law that only applied to the ‘keeper of brothels’. There was no law against merely letting houses. He was too clever to lease a large house and fill it with dozens of prostitutes, instead he scattered his houses throughout the area, with only two or three whores in each and, ‘like a general controlling an army, superintended the whole from his lumber-warehouse in Woolloomooloo Street’.

  His empire would collapse because of a goose. In early 1859 four young prostitutes sharing one of Rushton’s houses stole a goose from Brougham Street. The bird had been especially imported from England and was more valuable than the local variety. The girls took it back to their tiny two-room cottage, which Rushton had furnished with a bedstead, a sofa, three chairs and an old table, ‘all of the most wretched description for which he charged them an outrageous rent’. They intended to cook the goose and have it as a Sunday dinner for themselves and their friends. Before they could they were caught and charged.

  Two of the girls were fifteen years old, the others sixteen and seventeen, but it was thought that they were younger and one looked ‘a mere child’. One of the fifteen year olds said her father was somewhere in the bush, her mother was dead and she had run away from home. During the trial two of the girls held their faces in their hands and wept bitterly. On being sentenced to six months’ hard labour, ‘the unfortunate young creatures cried and sobbed piteously’.

  There was a public outcry at the harsh sentences and confusion as to why Rushton himself hadn’t been charged. Inspector Black, a popular policeman and well known in Woolloomooloo, took it upon himself to put Rushton behind bars.

  He focused his attention on one brothel in particular at 123 Duke Street, inhabited by three girls aged between sixteen and seventeen. The next-door neighbour was asked to spy on the girls and the men who paid for them. Another policeman disguised himself as a potential client. The girls were often seen in bed with different men. ‘Old Jonathon’ would turn up almost daily demanding rent, which the girls could seldom pay. He’d threaten to evict them and feared they were secretly saving the money ‘to bolt’. He also suspected that there was a spy in the next house and told the girls not to tell the neighbour who the furniture in the house belonged to.

  When the house was raided the cops saw men in the bed with the girls, who were so drunk they were barely able to walk and were ‘using very obscene and disgusting language’. Rushton was charged with running ‘a disorderly house’ and the proof was that in leasing it to the girls he was the actual owner of it.

  One reporter covering the trial, filled with moral indignation, compared Rushton to ‘a loathsome spider, watching from his lurking place the flies that approached his disgusting web’. Despite this, he only received a sentence of one year. The public was appalled. Not long before, ‘a man of colour’ had been found guilty of keeping a brothel and was sentenced to three years. What also disgusted the public was that the girls who had stolen the goose had received the harsh sentence of six months’ jail. It all seemed unfair, but the jailing of the previously untouchable Rushton spooked brothel owners, many of whom fled to other suburbs or, in the case of one Palmer Street operator, as far away as Melbourne. Locals were so grateful to Inspector Black for his success in closing the brothels that they presented him with a gift of an expensive riding whip and ‘a purse of sovereigns’.

  The people of Woolloomooloo had other concerns, especially about the physical condition of the area. Duke and Dowling streets, like some of the other streets, were in a dreadful state, filled with ‘hills and hollows’. One resident in Duke Street complained about a pool of water some 80 feet (24.4 metres) in length and averaging 4 feet (1.2 metres) deep. There was no outlet for the water so the pool remained, growing more fetid and stinking every day for weeks. There were many petitions to improve and repair the streets but, despite the fact that they already paid taxes, the council wanted residents to contribute half the money.

  Then there was the land that followed the creek, ‘a receptacle of all filth and noxious stench on hot sultry days’. All sewage flowed down into the harbour, much of it festering in large pools of shit on the mud flats. It was thought that its ‘exhalations … have caused the death of many young children, whose parents reside near the shores of the bay’.

  Locals were beginning to realise they were being ignored and a list of the ‘Wants of Woolloomooloo’ was published in a newspaper. It’s illustrative of the condition of the district as the fifties ended. The wishes included a circulating library and reading room, a market, more places of worship, a respectable family hotel, a branch of a savings bank, a cab and coach stand, large shops, drapers, grocers and large public rooms for balls, lectures and public meetings. Their needs were a long time coming and most would never be fulfilled.

  VIRGILIN WOOLLOOMOOLOO :

  PART 1

  WE WERE BOTH PLEASANTLY STONED as we paused on the rise near the Domain, and I looked back over Woolloomooloo Bay and the streets lined with terrace houses that stretched up the slope to William Street.

  ‘Come on, Lou, got to keep moving,’ said Woolley, and we walked through the Botanic Garden, the palms and rainforest trees dripping with moisture after a downpour. We were making our way to the Woolloomooloo festival of short films.

  I had come to think of Woolley as my Virgil, guiding me to places and people I would otherwise never have seen or met. We stopped on a pathway and he told me about when he and Tony were having a picnic in the gardens and some American tourists, excited to see and talk to their first Aborigine, asked Tony where they could find a coolabah tree. He pointed to a scrawny pine tree. The Americans were very grateful and photographed a beaming Tony in front of it.

  The Dendy cinema near the Opera House was only a third full, despite a table glittering with trophies. There were fifteen films by Woolloomooloo locals, and the mini festival went for an hour. There were those that were intensely serious and others that were funny and some that were up to Tropfest standard. The theme was balloons, and some directors kept to it while others merely filmed what interested them: two young girls in a playground; a man playing guitar and singing a parody version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ over images of the homeless (‘My dream may be heard when you pass Tom Uren Square … who will come a heart art dreaming with me?’); furry toys such as Sylvester the cat and a rat visiting various locations surrounded by the homeless, ending in a Woolloomooloo cul-de-sac with the toy rat next to a real dead rat; social workers and welfare bureaucrats playing with balloons while working.

  The organisers, who had given the cameras to locals, presented the prizes, though probably half the winners didn’t turn up, no doubt prevented by the weather. When we left
it was pouring with rain and there were no taxis, so a group of us got on a bus and Woolley gave us a disabled pensioner ticket each.

  ‘What’s my disability, Woolley?’ I asked him as the bus driver viewed me suspiciously in his rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Mental illness — that should be easy for you, Lou.’

  In the novel Vagrer about the Old Fitzroy, Nathan’s character Wardo is a thinly disguised Woolley. In one chapter Woolley arrives when the pub opens:

  The only customer who was there was none other than Wardo, the saint of Woolloomooloo. He was given this title as to his generosity with his bar tab among the locals, his caring of the elderly (despite not being shall we say, no spring chicken himself) and gardening around the streets and bars. A true authentic icon living amongst us.

  No matter where I go through the streets and lanes and pubs of Woolloomooloo, it seems that everyone knows Woolley, and most call him by his actual name, Graeme. I’ve used Woolley to distinguish him from the other Grahams at the Old Fitzroy, and, of course, I like that the name Woolley is a shortened version of Woolloomooloo.

  When he hasn’t shaved or had his hair cut, his burly frame resembles that of a lumberjack, except he likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and has a superb collection of them, both retro and new. When he shaves, he takes years off his real age (late fifties), and his smile, no longer hidden, is charming and puckish, which no doubt was once extremely attractive to the ladies. His teeth are new after he went through an agonising period of extractions. We would always know how many teeth had been taken out each time because he would come straight to the pub from the dental hospital, and his whisky order correlated to the number of teeth: a double whisky meant two had been extracted; one afternoon he ordered a triple, we all knew what that meant.