Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  On Fridays he distributes bags of groceries and meals given to OzHarvest by restaurants to feed the housebound. He has no official position, but is a liaison to charities like Hope Street and others. Because he’s trusted by the locals he acts as a go-between in fractious disputes and has a unique ability to calm the agitated and angry.

  He has known the area since he was nine years old and arrived here at the turn of the century to live permanently. He has grown to love Woolloomooloo and the locals. He knows all their stories and when I’m with him, he’ll whisper some of them into my ear as we pass by: ‘She’s just out of jail; don’t mess with her, she nearly beheaded her husband,’ or ‘Don’t like him, he beats his wife.’

  Parts of Woolley’s life story I’ve learned over the years, but there are other aspects of his past I’m not interested in exploring, because I like it that there are still mysteries about him. He was born into a family that once lived in the salubrious Bronte House and he joined the army, studying at Portsea became an officer in the engineers. After leaving the military he cooked, worked in pathology, and lived around Taylor Square back when it was party central. For a time he had a photo lab (perfect for developing Mardi Gras pictures) and was an excellent picture framer, at one point making the frames for a ‘Kangaroo’ Thornton exhibition, one of Sydney’s most eccentric and original painters, who pop artist Martin Sharp described as ‘the first of the hippies … and the last of the punks’. Woolley once showed me his framing technique using a photograph of Ayesha on the wall of the hotel as an example. I’d had a few drinks so the explanation didn’t stick in my brain, but at the time it seemed rather clever.

  Some of his stories tell of many women and much booze, and when he recalls that period, his eyes sparkle with happiness. Somehow he ended up in Woolloomooloo in a public housing block so intractable that heroin dealers ruled over the twenty-four apartments. The Department of Housing wouldn’t do anything about the drug dealers so Woolley and a couple of friends smashed up the main dealer’s flat and evicted him. There are still the occasional smackheads, ice addicts and jail birds living in the block, but as long as they behave, Woolley and his mates leave them alone.

  He will tell me stories about people he thinks will interest me, but there are limits to what he will reveal. As he’s said to me many times as we sit outside the pub, his voice grave with smoke, alcohol and warning, ‘You should be careful, Lou, because there are some very rough characters in Woolloomooloo and what they do, well, they like to keep their secrets secret.’ One day as we walked from the Frisco Hotel up to the Old Fitzroy after a long lunch, he picked up a piece of crumpled paper.

  ‘See,’ he said, recognising the handwriting, ‘this woman’s son operated a meth lab and she’s trying to get her life together.’

  I studied the note the woman had written to herself: Get teeth. Get job. Get son back.

  Concerned that I hadn’t met enough of the locals who had been living in Woolloomooloo before the great redevelopment of the late 1970s, he organised interviews for me, and through him, I’ve met older residents. He would always preface these meetings with some caveat or advice, such as, ‘This should be good, she’s put her teeth in for you’, ‘Her parents and grandparents were born here too’, ‘He’s looking after his son who’s on worker’s compo after ruining his back’, and ‘She used to be the best madam in the ’Loo.’

  Through him I met a woman born in Woolloomooloo during the Second World War whose uncle ran the oyster shop next to the Hills Stairs, men who had worked down at the wharves, a woman whose father was an SP bookie at the Old Fitzroy and a mate of another SP bookie who worked just around the corner in Judge Street, and those who were nostalgic about the days they used to race greyhounds or play in the Old Fitzroy football team.

  There was one woman who had an extensive record collection and, as Woolley said, ‘used to hold a lot of wild parties’. After Woolley left us to talk (his usual MO), she told me she had known Graeme since he first shifted into the area when he had a wife.

  ‘I met her,’ she said, ‘and immediately told him to drop her, she was much too young for him.’

  I never knew he had been married and when I questioned him back at the pub he didn’t reply, but concentrated on rolling a cigarette.

  ‘She was a Brit,’ he said finally. ‘She had to return to England because of visa problems.’ When I asked about her visa issues, he shrugged and mumbled something about Hong Kong. I left it at that.

  Other times when I am with him he will stop a local and tell them about me and, because it’s Woolley who has introduced us, with the hint that I can be trusted, they will tell me about their lives and exploits which, if true, would have landed many of them in jail. There are also people who stop Woolley and launch into a feverish monologue about some obsession that I know will be tedious and repetitive because Woolley will put on his sunglasses so he can shut his eyes and drift off into his own thoughts. He has been in Woolloomooloo longer than I have and knows who to avoid.

  These monologists talk non-stop about their problems with the Department of Housing, or drug dealers (some having been dealers themselves or still are), or vicious neighbours or court cases where they are going to represent themselves and win a substantial amount from the government or the police. I try not to be rude and listen to more of these monologues than is mentally wise. There is no attempt at dialogue so I spend my time trying to judge what is true and what is fantasy. Is the diatribe against a neighbour who secretly gave her lithium to drink, true or a delusion? Does the tax department really owe him millions? Did a woman from the Department of Housing really try to seduce him as she was examining his malfunctioning stove and then complain that he had been sexually harassing her? (‘Why would I fucking do that when I had a hot pussy awaiting for me in the bed next to the kitchen?’)

  One of Woolley’s important activities is running what he calls ‘Walking Tours’. Sometimes they are organised in collaboration with social workers or the Baptist church. Once he helped lead a group of the homeless from Tom Uren Square to the Taronga Zoo, and made sure that some of them had their first shower in months. (‘A bus can pong up pretty quickly,’ said Woolley with the voice of considerable experience.) He also accompanies residents to film and theatre nights. One evening a dozen or so locals, some of whom had never been to the theatre before, gathered outside the Old Fitzroy to wait for a minibus to take them to see Henry V. Knocking back a double whisky he addressed them.

  ‘Okay, the show’s long. If you’re going to smoke some dope, do it before you get on the bus. The drinks there will be expensive, so you might want to charge up before we go.’

  Another time he, Ayesha, Tickles and a couple of others went to see the Aztec exhibition at the nearby Museum in College Street. ‘It was bedlam,’ said a reflective Woolley afterwards. Ayesha tested all the touch screens and if they didn’t work, imperiously yelled at the staff to get them fixed. Tickles, fuelled up with hard liquor before the morning excursion, was thrilled with all the gore in the Aztec world and loudly praised the realistic blood on some of the statues, causing school teachers to hurry their charges away into another room, and when Woolley himself started to take photographs, guards told him it was forbidden. ‘Nonsense,’ said Ayesha, with theatrical aplomb, ‘he’s photographing me.’ Impressed by the trannie diva in their midst, the guards also took photographs of her while she posed next to the most gruesome sculptures she could find.

  Sometimes it’s only Woolley and me who are available to go on a walking tour, but invariably we have lunch at the Frisco and, too relaxed to set out on the tour, we stay on to drink and contemplate what we might have done. Woolley’s definition of ‘walking tour’ can be elastic and one night at the Old Fitzroy he asked if I’d like some free shares in a mining company. I thought he was joking and signed the form he put in front of me. ‘That means you’ll have to turn up to the shareholders meeting next week,’ he said, as if barking an order to a private.

  It turned out
that an irregular drinker at the pub was director of a mining company and he was afraid that he and his fellow board members might be voted off, so he had Woolley sign up some pub regulars and their friends to stack the meeting. Which is why I ended up at the Frisco at 10 o’clock one morning with a group of sudden shareholders Woolley had organised. Melancholic Peter, who was now unemployed, defied his progressive downward spiral and donned one of the impressive suits he used to wear at his high-powered job (he even looked kind of happy), octogenarian Don was there, as was Jeanne, a Frenchwoman, a young Turkish woman, sister of one of our barmaids, Vince (cheerful, with sunglasses hiding his eyes ‘Just in case I have to lie’) and Carl, the physicist.

  We had all dressed to suit our personal image of what a shareholder would look like and walked from the hotel into the city. Don, thumping his walking stick on the footpaths as if angry with the concrete, led the way across the overhead walkway from Woolloomooloo into the Domain, through Hyde Park and down Market Street.

  On the way I asked Woolley what was in it for us. ‘Well, we’ve all got shares and they’re worth five cents and those board members we vote for are going to buy us lunch.’ That seemed fair enough to me but when we lined up to sign ourselves in on a plush upper floor, I realised that we Motley Crew did seem odd compared to the men in bespoke business suits and the women in severe power dresses.

  Before we went into the meeting, Woolley gathered us around. ‘All right, this is it. It won’t take long and then we’ll have a real big lunch.’ A grinning Vince was excited by the prospect, but the Turkish woman frowned.

  ‘How do we know which way to vote?’

  Woolley paused and sighed as if addressing Dad’s Army. ‘It’s easy, guys, you vote the way the blind guy does.’ We looked at each other, none of us had seen a blind man. ‘He’s the one with the eye patch,’ he said, exasperated. ‘He’ll hold up a green card for yes, a red one for no.’ Someone wanted to ask a question. Woolley held up his hand. ‘No questions. A good meeting is a quick one. I’m hungry.’

  We all took seats in the back of the conference room, except for Carl and Vince who sat in the front row. Carl was ready to ask questions about a company we knew nothing about. It turned out the firm had mines in Chile and in Turkey near the Syrian border. When it came to re-electing the board we watched the blind man in front of us. He put up the red card so we didn’t vote.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Woolley urgently whispered to us. ‘He’s fucking colour blind. A raised hand means yes.’ So we obediently followed and it wasn’t long before the board had been voted back in.

  Lunch was at the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel. Three of the board members watched our group devour huge lunches. Because it was free, we ordered the most expensive wines, double helpings of food that few of the Motley Crew could ever afford, and rare liqueurs. A grumpy Don sat by himself eating oysters and demanding everyone give him their oyster shells for his shell garden. When the bill came the board members were astonished at the cost of the lunch and needed three credit cards to pay for it. It almost didn’t justify our votes, and the next year there was no lunch because the mining company was in financial strife with share prices plummeting and board members resigning. Negative articles began appearing in the newspapers; the Chilean mine was closed and there was no way there was going to be mining at the Syrian border, given the war there.

  By 2016 the company was suspended from trading and placed in the hands of administrators with $22 million of investors’ money inexplicably gone and shares now worth 0.9 cents. The founder of the company, who had convinced us to vote for him to remain a director, had been sentenced to three and a half years jail. But as far as we were concerned the mining company had provided the Motley Crew with one of the great free lunches and is still fondly remembered, all thanks to Woolley.

  He’s the go-to networker in the area. When Josh was afraid of going back to his flat alone after a neighbour had attacked him, Woolley escorted him home. Then there was the desperate, very pregnant sixteen year old who needed his help and knew she’d find him at the Old Fitzroy. Her boyfriend was on the run from the police, she hadn’t told her parents about her situation, or seen a doctor. She was totally delusional, in denial that she was eight months’ pregnant. Woolley organised for her to visit a doctor and booked a hospital. After Peter had attempted suicide several times (including flooding his apartment after taking enough medication to kill any other human), Woolley helped arrange rehab for him. While Peter was being treated, Woolley and his friends cleaned up the trashed apartment.

  ‘Lou,’ said Woolley, ‘you should see the pills in his medicine cabinet — and as for his drinks cabinet, well, we’re gonna have a ball.’

  People outside Woolloomooloo soon find out that if they want to know what’s happening in the area then they should contact Woolley. One day we were to catch up with a journalist who wanted to talk about Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s promise to install a men’s shed. This trendy initiative was up and running in other suburbs but not in the ’Loo. Sydney City Council had already spent $380,000 on feasibility studies with no result. We met at the Frisco: me; Woolley; a haggard Don; Carl, who was artificially cheerful but vague because he had had to take OxyContin for his back pain after his operation was delayed yet again; and deathly pale Paul, dressed in black and still jumpy because he had been attacked for the fourth time by his loopy, violent neighbour. But the journalist didn’t turn up, though it didn’t matter because I knew Woolley’s opinion about having a men’s shed in Woolloomooloo: ‘That’s just asking for fucking trouble. Imagine a chisel in the hands of some ice-addled local.’

  ST COMICALS TO THE McELHONE STAIRS

  ONCE YOU EMERGE FROM THE SECRET GARDEN you’re confronted by the southern side of St Columbkille’s church — or, as it is known locally, St Comicals. Not many people know of its existence, it’s easy to overlook. A modest brick building just 24 metres by 11 metres, its entrance is in the continuation of McElhone Street and its rear backs on to Brougham Street. Once there were gardens and trees all around it, but the public housing architects built the apartment blocks so close to either side of it that it seems as if their secular walls are pushing against the church and squeezing it upwards.

  It was consecrated in May 1885 by Archbishop Moran. He and a thousand Catholics marched down from St Mary’s and were joined by thousands of locals to witness the ceremony. Its unusual name was that of a famous Irish saint and missionary, which was appropriate given that the ‘pretty little church-school’ for one hundred worshippers was specifically built for the Irish Catholics of Woolloomooloo.

  Over time the ethnic mix of the area changed and when Father Ed Campion became its priest in 1971 his congregation was mainly Italian and Maltese. Woolloomooloo was becoming a ghost suburb by then and only about a thousand locals remained (a dramatic fall from nearly 12,000 in 1900); Campion’s Sunday congregation had dwindled to about fifty. It was in this church in 1973 that Cardinal Freeman and Campion oversaw my wife Mandy’s confirmation.

  Campion, or Ed as I know him, was to play a pivotal role in the saving of Woolloomooloo in the early 1970s. He may have been worldly-wise but he was a determined supporter of Catholic morality; he would not marry Mandy and me because we had both been divorced.

  I knew him from when we were on the Literature Board of the Australia Council together. Well read, and an author himself, he had clear skin, with cheeks that clouded pink when he laughed or drank red wine. It was a surprise to see him when I went to a morning Mass at St Columbkille at Christmas, 2015. Inside, the church has a high wooden vaulted ceiling painted white, three insipid stained-glass windows behind the altar, reproductions of paintings of Christ carrying his Cross to Calvary darkened by time, a gruesome, almost life-size statue of Christ on the Cross with painted blood caught mid ooze, and many petite statues of the Virgin Mary around the walls. At the rear is a clock frozen at a quarter to six. There’s nothing flash about the church, and its humble interior is a contrast to the theatrical opulenc
e of St Mary’s at the top of Cathedral Street.

  When I went the congregation was tiny, about twenty-five casually dressed worshippers, a third of them Filipinos, another example of the changing demographics in the area. After I arrived a man three pews in front turned around and greeted me. It was Ed, looking the same as ever, beaming and ruddy cheeked, dressed casually in a blue and white checked shirt. He was merely a worshipper that morning. In front of me a ten-year-old boy squirmed with boredom between his testy father and resigned mother.

  The priest was Irish, pronouncing ‘thing’ as ‘ting’. For some reason his Christmas sermon mentioned Thomas Mann and Star Wars on the way to focusing, naturally enough, on the Holy Spirit impregnating Mary. Almost as an aside the priest remarked that Joseph was more than happy about this because of the joy he had as Jesus’s legal father (perhaps only a celibate man could be so cavalier about a husband being a cuckold). As he talked about the Three Wise Men, I saw three male figures silhouetted behind the stained-glass windows as they walked up the steep slope of Brougham Street, as if spectral figures heading towards heaven.

  A collection was taken up twice and while we were standing, most of us mouthing a hymn, the priest was at the side of the altar counting the money from the first collection. Ed has a strong baritone voice and he was one of the few who sang, his gusto outdoing everyone else. A very old bloke, bowlegged and using a cane to walk, operated the antiquated audio-visual system that projected the lyrics onto a white screen and played CD recordings of hymns that were so slow I thought the electricity was running down. The restless boy in the pew in front of me reluctantly made his way to the pulpit and began to read a lesson, but stumbled over long words (oblation, holocausts, abolishing), breaking up the rhythms of the sentences so that they made no sense. Everyone except me took Holy Communion; those who were gluten intolerant were offered a special wafer. I may have been a Catholic once but the ceremonies and rituals meant nothing to me beyond the showmanship, which verged on camp.