by Louis Nowra
Once you exit the church — avoiding the grubby ibises rummaging through nearby garbage bins — and turn right, McElhone Street leads down to the bay. On the eastern side is a short row of Victorian terraces, including number 60, which briefly achieved notoriety in February 1945 when Margaret Tibbetts was found lying in a pool of blood just outside the house. She was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital where she died a few hours later, persistently refusing to reveal the name of her killer, saying, ‘It’s my own business.’
There were several women at number 60 that night: Barbara Smith (aka Claire Laird), Vera Sariwee, Millicent Tangga, Margaret Holmes (aka Tibbetts) and Iris Furlong, who rented the house. These women, all in their late thirties, were a scary bunch of lowlifes: prostitutes, sly groggers and thieves who operated under many aliases. Apparently there was an argument over a debt between two of the women and Tibbetts and another woman chased a third out into McElhone Street where Tangga shot Tibbetts.
The police searched for the gun but couldn’t find it. What frustrated them even more was that the women refused to give them any information about the killing. Iris Furlong, a hard woman and cop hater, not only refused to reveal the name of the killer but in an earlier hearing about the case nonchalantly crossed the courtroom to speak to someone in the public gallery. When she was ordered to return to her seat, she turned on the policeman and loudly admonished him, ‘Don’t you speak to me like that. The cheek of you.’ Another woman, Barbara Smith, was imprisoned for refusing to give evidence at the coroner’s inquest.
Sariwee and Smith said they had heard the shot and when they ran outside they saw Tibbetts ‘staggering about’ and Tangga running down nearby Pring Street with a revolver. It was so confusing that the cops originally charged the recalcitrant Furlong with the shooting.
Eventually Tangga was charged with the murder. Her defence was that Tibbetts had chased after her and pointed a revolver at her chest. Tangga had made a grab for the gun, got a hand on it and with her free hand pushed Tibbetts away. She tried to wrestle the weapon free from Tibbetts and as she did so she stumbled and it went off. Tibbetts fell to the ground screaming out, ‘Oh, Millie, you have shot me!’ In a panic Tangga picked up the gun, hurried down to Rushcutters Bay and hurled it into the water. This defence was enough for the jury to acquit her.
A few doors down from the murder scene is the Mariner’s Court Hotel, in such an inconspicuous spot it’s amazing it’s so successful. Next to it is a twenty-four-unit public housing block. Woolley lives there and nicknamed it the Ponderosa. Sometimes when I pass I see old Don inside the garage, which opens out onto the street, patiently repairing something with his amazing range of tools. At times the Ponderosa has housed a heroin dealer, junkies, a double murderer who had seldom seen the outside of a jail and, lately, a couple of ice addicts. And that’s the thing about public housing in Woolloomooloo, the mixture of people can create a volatile ambiance that perhaps only the locals can deal with.
As the street dips down towards the bay McElhone Street becomes a dismal and barren conduit, lined with the anonymous high grey walls. It’s a bleak, gloomy route and I like to avoid it by turning right up Harnet Street into Brougham to get to the famous McElhone Stairs.
One-way Brougham Street may be the eastern border of Woolloomooloo but it has little charm. The footpaths, especially on the western side, are so torn up by the giant roots of the gum trees that it can be positively dangerous at night. It may contain some interesting examples of Victorian and federation terraces, but the most important house is Telford Place, a colonial-era villa built when the area was known as Woolloomooloo Hill. Designed in 1831 by Edward Hallen, one of the earliest practising architects in the colony, it honoured the great English architect-engineer Thomas Telford (Hallen would live in the villa from 1832 to 1837).
Other than that, Brougham Street is important for the three sets of stairs — Butler, Hordern and McElhone — which lead up to Victoria Street, a leafy, expensive part of Potts Point. Butler’s Stairs were iconic because of their importance in allowing foot traffic between the two disparate communities previously divided by a cliff face. A children’s chant from 1898 went:
Jack and Lou,
Butler’s Stairs through Woolloomooloo;
Woolloomooloo, and ’cross the Domain,
Round the block, and home again.
But for one anonymous poet in 1915, the stairs led down into an immoral cauldron:
From where I stand the stairs go down,
A long stone flight, to the streets below;
There all that lives the shadows drown —
I see dark ghosts drift to and fro.
Dwell there below, in the mire and murk,
Descend I dare not, lest I should rue,
For many grisly secrets lurk
Under roofs of Woolloomooloo —
The fetid, fuming
Soul-entombing
Roofs of Woolloomooloo.
On the short walk down to the bay it’s hard to avoid the architectural monstrosities on top of the cliffs on the eastern side of Brougham Street, a reminder of rapacious developers of the 1970s and their indifference to beauty and the landscape. Tower blocks of apartments rise above the sandstone ridge, stacked like Lego bricks on top of one another, an uncanny echo of those ugly apartment blocks built during the Communist era in Eastern Europe.
At the end of the street, on the right, I reach the magnificent McElhone Stairs, 103 steps leading up to Potts Point. They are graced by huge trees on both sides now, whose branches meet to form an emerald green arbour. The only human blot on the beauty of the stairs are the joggers who run up and down them, sweating, grunting and oblivious to anyone who gets in their way.
It’s such a contrast to how the stairs looked in 1944 when Sali Herman first saw them. In his painting there are no trees and the stairs seem to go on to infinity. They rise between huge terrace houses on the right, a long red fence and a vertiginous drop on the left. A handful of people trudge and stagger up the stairs, as if it is a mighty effort. There’s a father, his daughter and their dog; a solitary child so dwarfed by the immensity of the stairs that she almost vanishes; a couple resting halfway up as if gathering their breath. Moving upwards from the bottom is a girl dressed in white escorted by two sailors, reminding us that the war is still on, and a weary woman nears the top, just able to make the final couple of steps by clinging to the handrail in the middle of the stairs. The steps are a dirty gold colour, as if they are a yellow brick road leading us from the grimy slums of the Woolloomooloo valley up to the clear, clean blue sky of the Potts Point ridge.
THE REVOLVING BATTERY HOTEL
ACROSS THE ROAD FROM THE OLD FITZROY is a piece of vacant land on two levels, one three metres higher than the other. This is the site of the old steam laundry bounded by McElhone, Reid and Dowling streets. On the wall of the apartment block adjoining it is a huge mural of a misty Chinese landscape painted in dreamy greys, blues and soft yellows. The dozen gum trees, some twenty metres high, attract birds such as lorikeets, cockatoos, galahs, magpies and, on occasions, kookaburras. For a few years locals have fought an ongoing battle with the City of Sydney Council to make the site a communal garden. In the beginning a handful of people toiled hard, led at times by Brendon, who had a strange stage-Irish accent that baffled Irish visitors. He wore drab clothes that seemed to be modelled on the tramps in the plays of Samuel Beckett, his favourite author. He liked to plant seeds and was bewildered when the turnips he was expecting turned out to be strange crimson-coloured root vegetables. When told these were radishes, he had no idea what to do with them.
There were some successes (peas, beans, potatoes), but one of his most painful discoveries was when someone ripped out his passionfruit vine. He came down to the hotel, holding the plant, now withered with the heat.
‘Do you know who would have done that?’ he asked Woolley, who was knocking back a double whisky to dull the pain of having another two teeth removed.
‘Yes
,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s Ned. He’s a junkie and a brilliant weeder. The trouble is that he goes over the top when he’s weeding on smack.’
If that wasn’t enough, the council arrived just before the first harvest was to be picked, pulled up all the plants and vegetables and destroyed the garden, saying that flats were going to be built on the site, but they never were. The council padlocked the gate in the cyclone wire fence, citing safety concerns. The only cultivated plants that survived were two determined banana trees, which produced tiny green bananas that stoners ate and soon vomited up. Between the two levels was a crude brick wall, perhaps three metres high. It began to disappear as the grass, shrubs and weeds, growing at an abnormal pace, commandeered the garden. It soon became a seemingly impenetrable jungle. Only one man ventured into it, sneaking in through a gap in the fence. He’d scurry into the unruly garden at odd hours, until it became obvious he was living there. This was Lawrence. Gaunt, with a trim grey beard, he always wore a black coat. Words and phrases were painted on the coat in thick white paint that had cracked and faded with age, proclaiming his love of God and his conviction that Armageddon was coming. He was a walking signboard for the Apocalypse. He had made himself a cave within the brick ruins that was impossible to see from the street.
Sometimes he’d arrive at the overgrown site with plastic bags filled with things he had scavenged from the streets. On one occasion he dragged a huge wooden kennel up Dowling Street and into his cave, which he was hoping to sell to a dog owner. He caused no harm to anyone and always greeted me with the cheery smile of someone who knew the Apocalypse was nigh and was looking forward to it with enthusiasm.
One morning before the hotel opened, social workers and the police took him away, having found him some improved accommodation. The council pulled up all the weeds and shrubs to reveal what Lawrence had done during his time in the cave. He had painted the brick wall greyish pink and covered it with words written in capital letters. Taking up the centre of the triptych of proclamations and warnings was a poem painted in various shades of orange:
Hi, welcome to Woolloomooloo
Its manifold and motley crew
Some old faces, some are new
Some have their own places
Boxes will get them through.
Some are wayfarers with a shady past too.
But most of all just want to be true blue.
The right panel had a message in white paint: One word stopped the wanton junkie crusaders. A few other words like OxyContin and medicating had been written hastily, while the third panel contained indecipherable messages with the words damage, hurt and feelings jumping out from the messy scrawl.
Once the area was denuded of shrubs and weeds it was easier to see the shape of the vacant lot and the foundations of the old steam laundry, whose looming black chimney had been a fixture in the area for some thirty-odd years before it was demolished to make way for the widening of the streets.
But what was there before that? There was a general consensus among long-term patrons of the hotel and some old locals that the site had once held a revolving artillery battery to protect Sydney from invasion. This seemed to be confirmed by the fact that in the 1980s the Old Fitzroy had been called the Revolving Battery Hotel — obviously a tribute to the gun emplacement that had once been just across the road. But why would a revolving battery, something that was supposed to defend Sydney from a naval invasion, be positioned so far from the bay itself?
This proved to be an example of how oral history is at best an approximation of the facts — but some parts of the story are true. In 1908 the Revolving Battery became the Fitzroy Hotel and in 1980 changed its name back to the Revolving Battery. (Several years later still, it became the Old Fitzroy.) What no-one knew, including Garry the publican, was that when the hotel first opened it was called the Revolving Battery, due both to the threat of Russian invasion at the time and a talented but eccentric Woolloomooloo inventor.
When Sir William Denison disembarked in Sydney in early 1855 as governor-general, the Crimean War was still in progress. Russia was fighting against the alliance of France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire. In Sydney news of the Crimean War panicked the government and, in the year of his arrival, Denison authorised the completion of a fort on Pinchgut Island in the harbour. It was finished in 1857 (to be renamed Fort Denison), by which time the Crimean War was over. Despite this, the fear of invading Russians lingered.
The problem was that Pinchgut was useless as a battery site. Because of the porous nature of the sandstone on which it was built, it was not possible even to fire a gun as a time signal without ‘shaking the island to its foundations’. Denison strengthened the batteries at Dawes Point and installed other harbour batteries. There was even a competition to invent the most technologically advanced battery. One man who thought long and hard about this was William James, who lived at 118 Dowling Street, not far from the present hotel.
His abilities were many: he was well known as an accomplished artist in both oil and watercolours, a sculptor, watchmaker, experimental chemist, musician, gunsmith (breech-loading rifles were his speciality) and devisor of an electro-galvanic bath that extracted metallic poisons ‘which have hitherto baffled the science of the physicians’. After many attempts he finally created what he called ‘The Revolving Battery’ and made a wooden model of it.
On a revolving platform were twelve guns, protected at the front by metal screens that could be lowered when a gun was ready to be discharged. The whole of it was to be covered by a dome of heavy wrought iron. The guns were to be placed on carriages which ran backwards and forwards on rails and could be discharged every two seconds by a single gunner. The whole operation would require only seven men when at the time it took seven men to work only one gun. Constructed under the revolving battery would be temporary accommodation for a hundred armed men. Because all the guns had to revolve, the first gun would have time to cool before being loaded and fired again. In other words it was like an armed merry-go-round. If similar batteries based on his prototype were placed at South Head, Middle Harbour and half a dozen other strategic points, James reckoned it would be impossible for any enemy vessel to enter the harbour.
In December 1859 Denison examined the wooden model. The Governor-General had been a brilliant engineer in the Army with an interest in constructing docks, harbours and bridges, so he knew what he was talking about, and although impressed by James’s ‘genius’, pointed out an obvious flaw: there was no provision for the recoil of the guns.
The determined James was not in the least daunted and set out to make a new model without this major defect. He had already achieved local fame and his revised battery was eagerly awaited. Unfortunately he broke his leg in an accident and his recuperation delayed matters. Nevertheless, after three months the new model was completed and he managed to convince Thomas Glaister, a celebrated professional photographer, to let him exhibit it at a meeting of the Philosophical Society. Glaister and James both had a knowledge of guns, but the Woolloomooloo inventor had nothing like the skill of the photographer, who was such an excellent shot that he had competed against the best rifleman in the New South Wales Army and won.
On 7 March 1860 James showed off the revised model of the revolving battery to impressed reporters, who wrote long flattering pieces about it. The next day the public flocked to see it. Despite the popular enthusiasm for it, James’s revolving battery was never adopted by the military due to its impracticalities, and his fifteen minutes of fame were over.
During his months of celebrity James’s invention had gripped the imagination of George Smith, the owner of a new hotel being built on the corner of Woolloomooloo and Dowling streets. Deciding to trade on the fame of the weapon, he called his pub the Revolving Battery Hotel. James vanished into obscurity and all the work he put into his invention only survived as the onetime name of a hotel in the street where he once lived.
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO KILL ME
ONE DAY I ARRIVED LATER T
HAN USUAL at the Old Fitzroy and the barmaid, Zara, paled when she saw me. ‘You just missed the guy who wants to kill you,’ she said. I laughed, thinking she was joking. ‘No, no,’ she said, trembling. ‘That was the maddest person I’ve ever seen.’ Given that I was used to the hotel’s crazies, alcoholics and odd bods, this sounded serious. I asked Zara why he wanted to kill me. She was so upset, all she could do was shake her head.
Garry came in with a worried look on his face. ‘I managed to get rid of him just a few minutes ago. It’s a miracle he didn’t run into you.’ I had no idea what they were talking about and asked Garry to describe him. Instead, he took me down into the basement to view the CCTV monitors. I looked at the six screens and Garry motioned to one which had a camera pointed to the tables outside near the front door. He played back the tape. An unshaven thirty-something man stood menacingly still and stared intently into the hotel. He hugged a book or a small cigar box to his chest. I did not recognise him at all.
Back in the main bar a couple of witnesses said that the man had arrived in an agitated state demanding to know where I was because I was late for a meeting with him. When I didn’t show up he became increasingly aggressive and, after he had threatened to kill me, Zara told him to leave the bar.
Outside he stopped at the open steel grille on the footpath that was used for delivering kegs into the basement and saw Garry chopping wood for the fireplace. ‘I would like that axe,’ he said. Garry looked up and saw an angry man staring down at him. When Garry went upstairs Zara told him what had happened to her, so he went back outside and told the man to go away. The man wandered off up Reid Street and turned left, just missing running into me. If he had turned right, then Zara thought I might well be dead.