by Louis Nowra
ONE CHILLY WINTER’S EVENING AS I STROLLED DOWN Forbes Street on my way to Bells Hotel to listen to Juan play his weekly gig I heard a dreary version of ‘Amazing Grace’ on tinny speakers. Before me were a couple of dozen apathetic homeless people sitting or lying on their mattresses under the viaduct. A handful hovered around a picnic table where coffee was being dispensed by charity workers.
As I crossed Cathedral Street, I heard my name being called. I recognised the distinctive light baritone and there, in the shadows of the viaduct, away from the streetlights, was Ayesha. As usual she greeted me with a raucous laugh and cheery wave. When she calls out to me up in the Cross, visitors to the area stop and stare because the voice belongs to a glamorous woman invariably wearing a slinky dress and an extravagant hat more suited to the Melbourne Cup than Darlinghurst Road. Close by her high heels is Yoohoo, her small dog.
She was in a merry mood and held a Styrofoam cup. I asked her why she was out so late. ‘Free coffee,’ she said, as if she had won a prize, then grabbing me by the arm and told me she was taking me back to her place to see her photograph album.
Ayesha lives a minute’s walk from the pub, and I see her nearly every afternoon at the Old Fitzroy. Although she doesn’t drink alcohol, the staff always give her a free raspberry cordial. Now that the new smoking laws are in force, there’s a chair especially for her, four metres from the front door, where she can smoke to her heart’s content.
A few years ago I thought I’d write her biography. It’s a fascinating story. Keith was born to an unknown Asian mother and then adopted. He was a talented pianist who went to Sydney Boys High School and later to teachers’ college. Attracted to the camp scene, he was soon performing as Ayesha at Les Girls nightclub in the Cross.
Ayesha is the name of the immortal goddess in H Rider Haggard’s novel She. Because she is Eurasian, Ayesha was the one exotic face among the performers. As she once said to me with a laugh, ‘If political correctness had been around in the late 1960s, I would have made a fortune from all the racist remarks.’ Photographs from that time show an incredibly beautiful woman. She would later work in Hong Kong and tour outback Australia many years before the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert popularised the idea.
The problem for me was that I didn’t know enough about the drag scene and I was at a loss to know how to write the book. After a few interviews, the project petered away.
Every day she wakes up early and tours the Cross, frequently gossiping with her old friend Vittorio, who for fifty years has run the tiny Piccolo Bar, before heading to the Wayside Chapel where she buys her outfits. As many people have noted, few women can pull off such clothes with so much panache. She can carry off blonde dreadlocks with a black slinky sequined frock, and wear a full Native American headdress of real feathers without being comical. She seldom wears the same clothes twice. Among her notable outfits there was her leopard print dress worn with an ornate wide-brimmed hat, black wig and sunglasses, and one time she turned up at the pub wearing a tight purple sequined cocktail dress, purple high heels and a hat with half-metre long pheasant feathers. Unfortunately she had come on the wrong day for a cocktail party upstairs.
She adores being recognised. A young director working with the homeless and disabled approached Ayesha and asked if she would be in his short film. He wanted her to play a highwayman’s girlfriend. He added that the film was to promote the disabled. ‘Oh, I love the disabled,’ said a sprightly Ayesha. ‘I’ll do it!’
She has the imperiousness of a diva. On her seventieth birthday she told me she loathed birthdays, ‘But then again, people want to celebrate me.’ The hotel’s clientele accept her for what she is. A blow-in insulted her once, saying ‘You’re not a woman, you’re a man!’ Her fury was frightening to behold. One evening two drunks from out of town were leaving the hotel and one, a heavily built Ocker type, lurched towards her. I thought he was going to make some hurtful crack but I was stunned to see him collapse into her arms and weep unashamedly. Ayesha calmed and stroked him. It turned out that his twin had died of AIDS and this was the first time he could show his true pain to anyone.
Ayesha herself has HIV, which means she takes a lot of medication. Perhaps that explains her mercurial moods. Sometimes she’s so happy that she sashays through the bar as if on a Parisian catwalk or dances in the street as if caught up in a dream. A few times she has lifted up her blouse and shown us the breasts she acquired in Hong Kong and we all agree they are most impressive. If in an impish mood she will be deliberately politically incorrect (‘Oh, I hate poofters, Asians and niggers’) or tell someone like me or Woolley, ‘You know what we have in common? We both have cocks!’ At other times she will turn on people, snapping angrily, ‘What would you know about the feelings of a trannie?’ There are days when she turns up in drab clothes and without make-up, as if her body is sagging with an incredible weariness.
One time she was in such a foul snide mood that I lost my temper with her and she, in turn, with me. She later apologised for her mood swings. All was forgiven and I was invited to hear her performing at BarMe (the old jazz haunt El Rocco) in Brougham Street, so my friend Adam Knott and I went to watch her play piano, an instrument she had once taught. We were the only people there besides Ayesha and Carmen, a well-known drag queen in her day. Carmen was in her late seventies, bulky, with grisly thick make-up and a black tower of hair that gave her the appearance of a gigantic kewpie doll. She was wearing a red frock that had a touch of the burlesque about it, in contrast to a more sober Ayesha who wore a black dress with silver sequins and a black hat. She was eating her free meal (Irish stew) when we got there. The idea was that if this one-off gig attracted an audience, then Ayesha would become a regular.
Carmen took quite an interest in the fact that Adam was a professional photographer, so it wasn’t a surprise to me when I returned from the toilet and found her sitting behind the piano, demanding that Adam take a picture of her. When Ayesha played she took off her glasses and closed her deep sunken eyes as if in a reverie. She played the standard romantic repertoire, but as she hadn’t had a piano to practise on she was rusty, but the bum notes didn’t seem to matter. The owner did a midnight flit the following week, owing money everywhere, so Ayesha never played there again.
She is close to Tickles, who is just a few years younger than her. They have their arguments. One time it was over the merits of the English Renaissance composer Henry Purcell. When Tickles said he adored the composer, Ayesha closed the conversation with an imperious, ‘The bugger couldn’t write a melody!’
Her diva attitude is the weapon of someone who has had to be brave. Unlike gay men who remained in the closet, drag queens like Ayesha were performing as women in an era of ridicule, even physical violence. Her imperiousness, sarcasm and wit are the armour that has protected her from insults and harm, and have become an intrinsic part of her.
Her whole life is crowded into her small unit. And on that winter’s evening it was so cluttered with clothes, hats, plastic bags, furniture, knick-knacks and kitsch objects that I had nowhere to sit. She wanted to show me photographs from Hong Kong, during the time after she had left Les Girls and first had hormone treatment and developed breasts. Many of the pictures were of her performing in clubs, but there were several of her semi-naked and lying provocatively like a Playboy model on a chaise longue.
‘You look very sexy there,’ I said, meaning it.
‘I know,’ she said casually, as if it was completely obvious.
I left to continue on my way to the Bells. On the patio I congratulated her on her recent seventy-first birthday.
‘You know, Louis,’ she said with a fierce conviction, ‘I’m going to outlive you and write the book. I’m going to call it For the Term of Her Unnatural Life.’ As I walked away I could hear her raucous laugh following me.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
VISITORS TO WOOLLOOMOOLOO IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY thought it as savage and wild as Africa, and there were suggestions that just
as missionaries were sent to the Dark Continent to save the souls of the natives, so the locals of Woolloomooloo had to be saved — or, as one appalled visitor wrote, ‘All the streets need missionaries more than China or India. More are malignantly criminal than anyone can find in the teeming slums of Calcutta or Bombay.’ In 1884 St Peter’s Anglican Church in East Sydney organised an eight-day mission with the view to ‘rescuing those who have abandoned themselves to profligate lives’. They intended to raise enough money to build a mission hall in lower Woolloomooloo. The exercise was a failure. The residents were beyond redemption.
Yet the area had a heart. There was a refuge in the 1870s on Francis Street that provided shelter of a night and breakfast for homeless men, and later a larger shelter for the homeless opened near Cowper Wharf. From the late 1860s the Vernon became a familiar sight in Woolloomooloo Bay. This was a training ship and industrial school for 250 boys, the majority of them without parents or guardians; one eight-year-old boy had been rescued from living in a brothel. Some had been criminals and 90 per cent of them were unable to read or write when admitted. On board were fifteen staff, including the captain, a cook, and sailors who taught the boys seamanship and skills such as shoemaking, carpentry, sail-making and tailoring. It was a tough school based on naval discipline and up to 10 per cent of the boys would abscond, but others went on to become seamen or found skilled jobs on land.
In Boomerang Street, on Woolloomooloo’s western boundary, an industrial blind institute was set up in 1880, and a decade later thirty-five men were employed there. They lived locally in their own homes or in boarding houses. Each man brought his own lunch to the institute, had his own bench and worked fixed hours. They made mats, baskets, halters, wickerwork and cane chairs. Their work was considered to be of the highest quality and was sold in their showroom. Music was an essential component of the enterprise, and became a money-making venture when their band played to large crowds in the Domain of a weekend.
Dowling Street was the site for a children’s nursery, the first of its kind in Sydney. One major sponsor, a Mrs Fairfax, said she had wanted to contribute after hearing ‘so many sad tales. How children were locked in a room all day, and how a child of three in charge of a baby was supposed to give it a bottle and was found drinking the milk herself. One child, a little boy, was kept in a butter box because his father, an epileptic, was afraid of handling him.’
The nursery opened in 1905, just before Christmas, and within a couple of years had ninety children below the age of seven. It was an obvious addition to the area given that there were so many working mothers. A bonus was that the children were given free medical attention. The centre had the appearance of a dingy storehouse but inside there were miniature tables and chairs, pictures on the walls, a dainty ‘Lilliputian’ bedroom, a piano and a playground. There was a canary in a cage and soft green light came in from the dingy street, filtered through the geraniums and herringbone ferns in the window boxes. It seemed to a reporter that the luxuriant window boxes bloomed ‘in one of Sydney’s dreariest parts … a living emblem of what the children’s garden means in that crowded, sordid district’.
But as far as the general public was concerned — and for that matter, the press — Woolloomooloo remained a profane and dissolute place, filled with brutal and brutalised people, crime and misery. Life there was rawer and shriller. It was a hub for sly grog, illicit stills and prostitutes, coyly referred to in newspapers as ‘nymphs of the pavement’. The brothels were notorious and there were frequent stories about underage girls being rescued by police. In many cases the girls had fled their homes and didn’t want to return. The only solution was to send them to the dreaded industrial school at Parramatta.
For the police the problem with prostitutes was that many of them drank to excess and it was common to arrest them for ‘riotous behaviour’, ‘indecent language’, and ‘behaving in an indecorous manner’ as they partied in the laneways or drunkenly wandered the streets insulting or propositioning passers-by. In Woolloomooloo it seemed that the women were just as feral as the men. There were clashes between men and women in the streets and in the brothels. Women were arrested for kicking, beating and throwing stones at the police who were trying to break up these public brawls. What made it worse was that these altercations were watched by crowds of spectators who did nothing but urge the fighters on.
The women were ferocious in protecting their men. In July 1886, a Constable Hickey went to a house in Brougham Street to arrest Henry Horsey on charges of false pretences. When given the warrant Horsey tore it up and threw himself at the policeman. The two men scuffled and fell to the floor. Horsey’s wife, Sarah, picked up a knife from the table and rushed at the cop, who attempted to avoid the blow but her husband held him by the beard so he was unable to move and the blade plunged deep into his right cheek.
Drink was the cause of vicious punch-ups and deaths in the public houses. In one incident a local, worse for wear, asked two Frenchmen to have a drink with him and when they said no, he grew angry and demanded they go outside with him where they began brawling. At the same time a cab drove up with two more Frenchmen, one of whom shot the local three times. A few streets across at the Cowper Wharf Hotel (now the Tilbury), Thomas Tyrrell, aged thirty-five, had a drunken argument with another customer, James Danby. They went outside to fight and Danby punched Tyrrell, who fell backwards onto the footpath and his head struck the kerb ‘with a violent thud’. One of the spectators said to Danby, ‘I’m afraid you have done for that poor man.’ Danby nodded and replied, ‘Well, he deserved it.’ Without being asked, three men in the crowd picked up the dead man and dumped him on the wharf.
Some aggressive drunks pushed publicans too far and there were occasions when the publicans brawled with their customers. On one occasion the publican of the Commercial Hotel in Dowling Street killed a patron in a fight.
Drink and anger even caused fratricide. Adolphus Dixon and his brother James lived near each other in Riley Street. Both were married but Adolphus had no children and his older brother had an adopted daughter. They were close and saw each other daily, but enjoyed fighting, in what James’s wife called semi-friendly bouts, which she thought acted as a ‘safety valve for their more or less evil passions’. It was not uncommon to see them stripped to the waist and having it out in the backyard. But James had had sunstroke three times due to his outdoor job, and on the third occasion it was so serious that it was thought he would die. Drink, said his wife, made him a maniac.
On a Good Friday, Adolphus’s wife found her husband in the local sly-grog shop, very drunk and dragged him home with her. While he was waiting for his meal, James, also drunk, passed the front window, greeting him with, ‘You silly old bastard.’ Adolphus was unable to see the funny side of this and in a rage invited his brother into the backyard for a fight. Both wives were in the kitchen and tried to stop James, but he pushed them aside and ran out into the backyard where Adolphus picked up a tomahawk and rushed at his brother. James avoided several blows before spotting a rusty bayonet lying on the ground. He grabbed it, and after dodging another near blow, threw the bayonet at Adolphus, catching him on the cheek, just under his left eye.
Adolphus was dead before he hit the ground. James fell to his knees, screaming at ‘Dolph’ to speak to him and looking up at the heavens, imploring God to resurrect his brother. When taken into custody the remorseful James pleaded self-defence, which is how the jury saw it, and he was sentenced to six months’ jail. Their old next-door neighbour commented drily that, ‘The men were all right. They were good men enough. Drink is good too, in its way, and a little fighting does no harm, but drink and fighting don’t go well together.’
Woolloomooloo’s reputation for violence grew as the area became associated with the worst of the larrikin gangs. The Plunkett Street Push was a fearsome group in the 1890s with a penchant for dressing up like the Apache dancers of Paris in striped jerseys and cloth hats, high-heeled boots and black coats. They roamed the streets
of the ’Loo with their ‘donahs’ (girlfriends) molesting and insulting passers-by, robbing them, intimidating shopkeepers and roughing up people. Not content with robbing them, they kicked and beat their victims. They feuded with other larrikin gangs and, in one battle, defeated the dreaded Rocks Push, a brutal encounter with both sides using coshes and throwing rocks. No local was safe if the mood took them. One mob of larrikins looking for trouble threw rocks and stones through the windows of Bottomley’s Hotel in Forbes Street. John Bottomley was sitting near the doorway with a baby in his arms when the gang swore at him and one of them threw a ginger beer bottle, knocking the child out of his arms. John’s father, William, was leaning against the bar inside the hotel, when a rock hit his hand, cutting it open. The mob ran from the scene and continued to throw rocks at windows and people along their way.
The press nicknamed larrikins the Human Wolves. What bothered residents was that the police seemed scared of them. In one incident they fought for three-quarters of an hour in Dowling Street and, as newspapers reported, no police turned up. On another occasion two gangs fought with stones, ‘shrieking and howling like so many fiends’, but as one reporter noted, ‘The police were anxiously inquired for, but they did not put in an appearance.’
It was a difficult and unruly place for the police to patrol. The larrikins had no compunction about assaulting cops and there were times when none of the residents seemed to respect them either. This was especially true on New Year’s Eve, when locals played a cat and mouse game with the law. It was forbidden to light bonfires but residents paid no attention. When the cops arrived to put the bonfires out, adults and children would pelt them with stones and bits of metal, frequently causing injuries that required the victims to be taken to hospital.
On New Year’s Eve 1907 events got completely out of control. An excited crowd of about three hundred people congregated in Duke Street for what was promised to be the biggest and best bonfire for years. And so it turned out to be. As the bonfire took hold, locals ripped palings off fences and grabbed anything else that would burn. Some young men stole a 22-foot long (6.7 metre) boat and were attempting to throw it on the fire when the police arrived. There was a ‘battle royal for possession’ with sailors and locals gripping one end and the cops tugging valiantly but vainly at the other, until the boat was dragged onto the fire. A drunken sailor jumped into the boat, danced wildly for a moment, and then fell into the flames. A gang, not to be denied their fun, gathered on the heights of Victoria Street and threw all sorts of missiles, including stones, at those dancing and singing around the spectacular bonfire below. A bag of flour struck a policeman, momentarily blinding him and, much to the glee of the crowd, he staggered around looking like a drunken ghost.