Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  I sipped my wine and pondered what to do. I felt no fear, only bewilderment that a man I didn’t know wanted to kill me. I had been threatened with death several times before. Once when I was young, my father, demented from a toxic cocktail of drink, speed and being cooped up in the cabin of a truck for days, took out his .303 rifle, loaded it, woke up us kids and pointed it at us, announcing, ‘Start running. I’ll give you ten seconds.’ We jumped out of the bedroom window and hightailed it down the street. When I was a teenager my mother cornered me with a carving knife, shouting, ‘Are you scared?’ Given she had shot and killed her father, I had every right to be. Then there was the old woman on the bus heading up William Street to Kings Cross who threatened me with a breadknife. When I was living in South Melbourne a few doors from a women’s refuge, two women asked for my help to protect a mother and child from a crazed drunken husband who wanted to kill his wife. I stepped in between them, his wife cowering behind my back while he made stabbing motions at me, yelling he was going to kill me first and then cut open his wife. Only the belated arrival of the cops stopped him.

  But who was this anonymous man who wanted to kill me? Tickles woke from his alcoholic reverie and said he knew the guy and lived near him. Five years ago the man had been sane and charming, but he had descended into madness. He was being cared for by his divorced mother, who was at her wit’s end trying to deal with him. ‘A sad, sad story,’ said a wistful Tickles, gazing into his whisky. Ayesha, sitting at a far table with Yoohoo dozing on her lap, shouted gleefully, ‘You’re done for, Louis! He’s a karate expert, darl. He won’t need an axe to kill you, he’ll only need his bare hands.’

  Garry had called the police earlier and when they arrived they made it obvious that they thought I was lying when I said I didn’t know the man. When I repeated my denial, one incredulous cop asked, ‘Then why would he ask for you specifically?’ I had no answer to this and the cops left, forgetting to take the CCTV footage with them.

  It was only after they had gone that I realised I had met the man before. The previous summer I’d been sitting outside with Mandy when a man sat down uninvited at our table. He wore trousers and thongs and nothing else. His bare torso was covered with dog bites and razor cuts. Flies and insects fed on the bleeding wounds. In his crazed self-absorption, he was oblivious to his physical condition or our appalled reaction to it. Eventually he wandered off, muttering to himself.

  When the cops left, the Crew offered to escort me home, but I shrugged off their concern.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Woolley, coming inside, wearing his usual winter attire of Hawaiian shirt and thongs. ‘I told him you were off to Cairns.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But I am going to Cairns. Tomorrow. For a fortnight.’

  ‘Oops, I remember you saying something about that, Lou. But look on the bright side,’ he said, beaming, ‘it’ll take him fourteen days to walk to Cairns, then he has to find you before killing you.’

  Just what this troubled man wanted to see me about, I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with what he was holding. Some people thought it was a Bible, others a book. One thought it was a Filofax and another reckoned it was a cigar box. Maybe it was simply a book of poems or writings he wanted to talk to me about.

  It can be a dangerous area. One night Brad was walking home to his terrace in Bland Street when he encountered four men from the western suburbs prowling the Woolloomooloo streets looking for someone to bash. The men jumped out of their car and began to beat him. Brad managed to escape and ran to the hotel for help, only to find it had closed earlier than usual. These marauding hoons from the outer suburbs are not uncommon; they think coming into Woolloomooloo and bashing the locals is a fun Saturday night out.

  Residents who don’t take their medication can be a problem. The prime example is Ritchie. He’s bald and as huge as a Sumo wrestler and when he walks his body shakes like jelly. It was said that he had once been a promising footballer and, after a disheartening period as a bouncer at a grim Redfern pub, had suffered a mental breakdown. When he doesn’t take his meds he can become irrational and violent. One day I saw him threatening people in William Street, shouting incoherently and raising his fists as if to hit them. The following afternoon I was sitting in the sun outside the Old Fitzroy with Coco on my lap when he crossed the street and, possessed by a quiet fury, suddenly towered over me, his man boobs wobbling under his white singlet. He raised his hand as if to thump me and then spotted Coco and his whole face softened.

  ‘I like Coco,’ he cooed. I knew it would be all too easy for me to say the wrong thing and provoke him into violence so I stayed silent. He held out his hand and asked for a dollar. After I gave it to him he started to walk off, but turned around and came back. My heart sank. This time, I thought, he will hit me, but he walked past me and into the hotel, where Frosty was alone behind the bar.

  Frosty was massive himself. A redhead, he was like a huge cuddly bear whose favourite act was to give an unsolicited cuddle or massage, which some of the bar staff and Crew found disconcerting and in other professions would have landed him with a sexual harassment charge. His bulk meant that Ritchie respected him. I heard Ritchie loudly ask for some cardboard, paint and a rope. Frosty gave him a piece of cardboard and a rope. A grimfaced Ritchie then marched back to his unit. It turned out that he needed the cardboard to write his suicide note on and the rope was for a noose. The next day I saw Ritchie walking through Woolloomooloo in a state of euphoria yelling out ‘Merry Christmas everybody’, even though December was months away.

  These periods of craziness grew worse when he stopped taking his medication. The unnerving aspect was that his attacks were random, whether the target was Alex, Vince or a total stranger. One afternoon he was passing by the Frisco when he grabbed a local and squeezed him in a headlock. Another day he stormed up to Woolley outside the Old Fitzroy and punched him to the ground. Woolley began to suffer from headaches and dizziness and for two weeks had jaw and neck pain. The police refused to investigate, which was their typical reaction to these assaults. Carl, Woolley’s friend, wrote to the cops and city councillors asking that they do something about Ritchie. Their replies were bureaucratic bullshit. Two days after the assault I was in Darlinghurst Road when I heard my name. I turned and saw the giant Ritchie heading towards me. There was nowhere to hide. He was grinning wildly, which was not a good sign.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘for whacking you at the pub but I went crazy for three days.’ He had confused me with Woolley.

  Some locals, like Ritchie, may stop taking their medication, others turn to drugs like ice. One woman in her forties started taking crystal meth and she became continually angry and confronting. One spring day when the plane trees were in leaf again, and we were sitting outside the hotel warmed by the glorious dappled light, this woman stopped on her way past to abuse Mandy for the hat she was wearing, called her a lousy author and threatened to burn down the pub.

  Another time Mandy and I were sitting outside when a man in his thirties, wearing pigtails and a stiff brimmed hat, walked down Reid Street. He was about to turn into Cathedral Street when he saw me. He clenched his fists and strode over. He was furious and he demanded to know why I had mentioned incense. When I said I hadn’t, he replied that he had overheard me. ‘You are ridiculing my people,’ he shouted. Judging by his outfit and curious hair I wondered if he meant Aborigines or Native Americans. Before I knew what was happening he had picked up my folded umbrella and was brandishing it over my head, threatening to hit me, demanding to know why I had used the word incense. Then I cottoned on. He meant incest. His eyes were spinning, giddy with ice. I said I hadn’t mentioned anything about incest. Abruptly forgetting me, he turned on another patron and threatened to kick him to death. Then without another word, he vanished around the corner. The bar staff called the police but, of course, they didn’t come.

  As for the man who wanted to murder me, he never returned to the Old Fitzroy, but a few weeks later, Jay, a tiny, att
ractive woman and former barmaid at the Old Fitzroy, told me a story about my potential killer. She had gone to work at the East Sydney, the hotel on the corner of Cathedral and Forbes streets. One day a man came to drink there and immediately fell in love with her. To show how much he adored her he gave her a present of an expensive Japanese skinning knife. Then he began to stalk her. She took out an AVO on him so he couldn’t come anywhere near the hotel. Distraught, he attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat. When that failed, his mother threw him out of their apartment. It seems that he had been refusing to take his medication for months. He lived on the streets of Woolloomooloo where his behaviour was too feral even for the homeless and he was eventually sectioned.

  The curious thing was that none of these people drank at the pub. But whenever any of us saw Ritchie we crossed the street to avoid him in case he was in one of his belligerent moods. One recent wintry night I was walking home from the Frisco Hotel after a few drinks with Woolley and as I walked up Dowling Street I heard my name being called in a soft, gentle voice. I glanced around but could see no-one, then I looked up and saw a huge man, a silhouette of menace, his features hidden in the darkness, leaning over a balcony and peering down at me.

  ‘Hello, Ritchie,’ I said. He beamed, his white teeth standing out in the gloom.

  ‘You know, Lou, you look fit and healthy for your age. Look at me and I’m only forty-one.’ I asked him how old he thought I was. ‘About fifty-two,’ he said. I was pleased to be thought much younger than I was.

  ‘Are you feeling violent?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m taking my medication,’ he said sweetly.

  I bade him goodnight and headed off into the cold mist. So much trouble happens in the ’Loo if the locals don’t take their medication.

  THE REVOLVING BATTERY HOTEL OPENS

  WHEN THE REVOLVING BATTERY HOTEL OPENED in early 1860 it had two floors, eight rooms and a kitchen. Its address was 97 Dowling Street (in later years the numbers in the street were altered, so it’s now 129) and the first publican, John Lanergan, had once run the Ship Inn, a hotel in Kent Street in the city. This new public house was not alone. There were six hotels around the corner in Woolloomooloo Street and four in Dowling Street itself. Throughout the rest of the area there were so many taverns that one amazed visitor commented that ‘you could not go ten steps through the narrow streets without encountering a small drinking booth’.

  The hotels were a visible sign of Woolloomooloo’s extraordinarily swift growth. In the space of only ten years the orchards, green meadows and paddocks of ti-tree scrub had been transformed into densely packed houses and long dusty streets. There was no central planning authority or building regulations, so many developers erected cheap and shoddy terraces and the main thoroughfares sprouted a chaotic series of narrow side streets. As one reporter wrote in 1860, these were:

  … streets of such strange formation as might puzzle the strongest traveller to traverse. Lanes with every diversity of turnings, but leading, when you come to the end of them, nowhere. You must retrace your steps, and with much difficulty you have to find your way back into the main street.

  The range of occupations in Dowling and Woolloomooloo streets alone was amazingly diverse: surveyors, auctioneers, bookbinders, shoemakers, butchers, carpenters, coach builders, coal merchants, shopkeepers, fishmongers, medical galvanists, jewellers, licensed victuallers, midwives, governesses, school teachers, tailors and, indicating the semi-rural nature of the land fronting the bay, dairymen.

  But a hotel like the Revolving Battery was banking on not only these workers, but the promise of sailors and wharf labourers becoming customers. Since 1851 there had been plans to reclaim the flat land below the high water mark, which occasionally came as far south as present day Cathedral Street, and construct a semicircular quay or wharf. The wharf would be important for the suburb because of the high cost of transporting goods from Darling Harbour. During the next decade the government would occasionally announce its intention of constructing a wharf, but did nothing. There were constant complaints from residents about the area’s poor drainage and the condition of the streets, many of which became impassable when it rained.

  Finally in 1861 work started on the new wharf, which swept around the head of the bay for about 1100 feet (335 metres). Its three rows of piles were made of ironbark sheathed in metal. It would allow large vessels to berth and deliver cargoes of vegetables, meat, wood and coal for the area. The government promised that once finished, the wharf would ‘do away with the present and unhealthy swamp’.

  That didn’t happen of course. The wharf was finished in 1863 but the twenty-seven acres of reclaimed land lay unused and rubbish and shit collected at low tide. For years the land around the foreshore became a huge lake during winter. The water level could rise so high that boats could sail up as far as the present Harmer Street (then called Bay Street, an indication of just how far south the high tide travelled) and residents would fish from their windows. In summer the suburb reeked, ‘a wilderness of filth’. Moralists were concerned that the stench and pools of sewage created more than the potential for pestilence and also gave rise to ‘all the evils which are concomitants of intemperance — to improvident habits, to self-neglect, to disease, social depravity and death’.

  Others believed that there was an inseparable connection between the filthy, uncomfortable houses and the poor physical and mental condition of the locals that resulted in ‘hydra-headed forms of vice’. The comparison was constantly made with Potts Point, perched on the rocky heights where there were no jerrybuilt terraces but well-ventilated mansions. Up there the atmosphere was pure, the population aristocratic, and there were few, if any, back streets. It was a place of temperance compared to the depths below where the temptations were many, especially of alcohol.

  Yet the pubs were woven into the social fabric of Woolloomooloo, an essential part of community life as well as fulfilling important legal functions. One of the first inquests to be held at the Revolving Battery concerned the death of an illegitimate three-year-old boy who had died of a combination of influenza and measles. The mother hadn’t consulted a doctor because she was too poor, and his father had rejected her request for money to pay for one. This so appalled the jury that their verdict included the rebuke: ‘We regret that the father of the deceased did not supply the mother with the means to call in a medical man … when he was informed of the deceased’s illness.’

  Another inquest heard about a twenty-month-old child, ‘the daughter of respectable parents’ of Dowling Street, who died from phosphorus poisoning after sucking the heads off matches. Some accidental deaths were strange. A young woman who lived in Brougham Street rushed up the stairs carrying pins and needles in her mouth. She accidentally swallowed them and for the next three weeks the pins and needles began to emerge from her throat. The pain was so great that she drank ‘some black stuff’ believing it to be liquorice, but it was a poison and killed her. There were many inquests into suicides and men and women dying of ‘intemperance’ and ‘drunkard’s brain’.

  In the disturbing case of five-week-old Sarah Ogle, who perished upstairs at Bottomley’s pub in Forbes Street, the inquest was held not far away at the President Lincoln Hotel on the corner of Woolloomooloo and Forbes streets.

  Sarah Ogle had died of extreme emaciation, influenza and malnutrition. What puzzled the coroner was how the mother, Alice Ogle, had allowed this to happen. At first he wondered if it was deliberate, but on questioning her it became obvious that she had ‘very weak intellectual powers’. She did not know her own age and could not read or write. A doctor bluntly told the jury that ‘the mother is stupid and not fit to nurse a child’.

  Gradually a darker story emerged. Alice Ogle’s father was a publican in Maitland but Alice had come to Sydney and had lived at Bottomley’s Hotel for eight years. William Bottomley, sixty-four, was Alice’s uncle. Alice was single and had previously been pregnant, but Mrs Bottomley had beaten her un
til she agreed to an abortion. The reason for Mrs Bottomley’s action was that she knew her husband had fathered the child. He was also the father of Sarah. Alice had refused to abort the pregnancy, so Mrs Bottomley did nothing to help the baby and, knowing that the retarded woman was unable to care properly for the girl, waited for her to die. She had confronted her husband about both pregnancies but he denied they were his. He never held the child and, like his wife of eighteen years, was content to allow the baby to starve and wither away for five weeks in an upstairs room of his hotel.

  The deaths of babies and young children were common, most of them from measles and bronchitis. There were also many still-born children. In the same month that Charles Halstenberg took over the Revolving Battery in 1865, his wife gave birth to a dead boy. He was the publican for eight years and ran the hotel well, making extra money (and lots of it) running a bar at the Randwick Racing Course during the autumn carnival. Like many publicans he employed barmaids. It was hard work but paid better than many other jobs. As one anonymous barmaid wrote in The Life, Adventures and Confessions of a Sydney Barmaid, most barmaids were single because ‘Men as a rule have an objection to their “nectar” being served up to them by mothers of families.’

  She had many admirers and marriage proposals, and would witness the debilitating effects of alcohol, such as the ‘gentleman who came regularly every morning for his whisky and whose hand shook like an aspen leaf’. She saw men make awful exhibitions of themselves, ‘love making, singing, crying, quarrelling, spouting and even praying’. There were the unwanted attentions of drunken men, ‘smashers’ who tried to pass bad money, and the danger of bursting soda water bottles, which caused a fellow barmaid to lose the sight in one eye. As far as she was concerned beer was not as injurious to the system as spirits, whose drinkers, as the poem went, ‘Go mad and beat their wives/ Plunge, after shocking lives,/ Razors and carving knives/ Into their gizzards.’