Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  Prince Giustiniani allowed himself to be condescended to, but as a man with exquisite manners and unnatural forbearance, he survived his TV host’s ridicule. Normality eventually returned to his life, but now the celebrities and notables stayed away. Anyway, he had more serious things to worry about. The love of his life, Robert, died of AIDS in 1995. A few years later he wrote a memoir, My Life and Other Misdemeanours. I immediately optioned the rights for a stage play and had lunches with Lorenzo to find out more details about the wedding and the parts of his life that weren’t mentioned in the book.

  My screenplay based on his memoir came close to production, but eventually it was taken over by another team. Later I wrote a fictionalised version of the wedding, which was broadcast on BBC radio. But it’s always special to talk with Lorenzo because in my mind he seems to be a fusion of the man in front of me and the character I created. The farce of the aborted wedding took its toll, as did the death of Robert. The impish glow has faded from his cheeks and, despite his enthusiasm, even perkiness, there is a deep hurt in his eyes. Once part of Sydney society (if that isn’t an oxymoron), he now devotes his time to the Friends of Alexandria Library, a cause dear to him not only for its cultural value but because the Egyptian city was where he had spent his childhood with his adored mother.

  I continue to run into him and, even though Pitty Pat’s actual father thought Robert and Lorenzo were scammers and Lorenzo’s titles fraudulent, I remain on his side. I liked him and still do. (After all, who can dislike anyone whose favourite author is Marcel Proust?) After Robert’s death he shifted from the depths of Woolloomooloo to an elegant apartment overlooking the railway viaduct near the heights of William Street, where he resides when he isn’t in his beloved Alexandria, a place he dreams of living in permanently.

  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  WOOLLOOMOOLOO MAY NOT HAVE HAD DANCE HALLS, theatres, sports fields or playgrounds, but it could always provide spectacles for the locals. On the night of 29 June 1865, they witnessed the largest fire that had ever taken place in Sydney when the glorious Gothic-style St Mary’s Cathedral, at the western end of Woolloomooloo Street, was totally destroyed.

  Myriads of sparks ascended high into the air, and fell in showers in the direction of Woolloomooloo Bay … From the top of the Cathedral clouds of yellow flame and smoke issued, which shed a lurid lustre on all around; and at times, so bright was the glare, the minutest objects in the remotest parts of Hyde Park, could be seen as distinctly as by daylight.

  It was said that the glare was visible twenty miles out to sea.

  Three years later, the locals were again outside watching as the temporary wooden cathedral burnt down. However, this fire was not as impressive as that which destroyed the three-storey moulding workshop and timber yard at the corner of Duke Street and Cowper Wharf Road. The building and the timber yard had been features of the foreshore, as was the constant sound of saws and machinery. On an October night in 1874 the building and a huge stockpile of timber went up in flames. The yard had a fire hydrant but there was insufficient water in the mains and so the fire raged and threatened the nearby Frisco Hotel. The streets were so narrow that the fire quickly spread to the roofs of five houses in Duke Street, but the houses themselves were saved by locals using buckets and bowls of water to dowse the flames, though the woodwork of the balconies was charred and windows exploded in the heat.

  The bay was always an attraction and by the late 1820s women-only public baths had been set up by a Mrs Biggs. Bathing for both sexes followed with the baths themselves formed by a small sunken ship, the Ben Bolt. After Biggs came a husband-and-wife pair, the Robinsons, who naturally enough called it Robinson’s Baths. They were succeeded by Mr Wilson, Mr Robinson’s son-in-law. The baths were enlarged by a trading ship called the Cornwallis. Dressing cubicles were erected on the ship, but while the floating baths were screened from the public gaze so that passers-by couldn’t see any nudity, it was not enclosed underneath. In 1849 a shark attacked a swimmer, causing panic, and the waters were ‘crimsoned with blood’. In 1859 municipal baths were built near the present-day Boy Charlton Pool and provided with safety nets to keep out the sharks.

  For sixty years children referred to the baths as the Fig Tree Baths because of the large ficus drooping over the water that kids used to jump from. One morning the tree blew over, which, as one man remembered years later, was ‘regretted very much by the nippers. It was a favourite place for boys who wagged it from school, going in and out of the water all day long.’

  For residents in the late nineteenth century, the bay became a touchstone of happiness and entertainment. One of the most amusing spectacles occurred in the early 1880s when one and a half thousand people arrived to witness Frank Warden baptise several members of his flock. Admission was by a ticket, and as the enclosure could only hold five hundred people, the other thousand had to either watch from outside or scale the fence and sneak in.

  Warden was appalled by the chaos and the disrespectful attitude of the locals. He began by warning that this was no pantomime but a solemn ceremony, and if the disturbances continued they would find him a ‘hot member’ to deal with. Even his appearance amused the crowd. He was wearing a long black oilskin gown, tied firmly around the waist and flowing loosely downwards. When the spectators heckled him about his clothes he yelled back at them that he was prepared to be looked upon as a fool, for he was nothing but an outcast in the sight of God and as such, he was a little baby, a weak little baby. He announced that total immersion was the proper way to conduct the ceremony and only men and women should undergo it; the sprinkling of water on the heads of infants was not a true baptism.

  He asked the audience to join him in the hymn ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’, after which he told the spectators that his converts would be asked to take up the cross of Jesus Christ and bear the scorn and ridicule of the world. It was high time, he preached, that something was done about the infidelity epidemic that was raging in Sydney, and there was immorality being propagated in the theatres, which had been infiltrated by dangerous free thinkers.

  He said a prayer and three young women wearing their street clothes and six men dressed in white duck trousers and white shirts stepped forward. Warden waded out into the water, not realising it was low tide and sewage washed around him. He found himself in about three feet of water, sank several inches more into the mud, but gamely continued. The women were led one by one into the bay. The first one was taken hold of by Warden and tipped backwards into the water. This caused much laughter from the crowd and it grew louder when the second woman resisted being dunked. Warden tried several times as the spectators yelled out, ‘Give it to her again!’, ‘Let her have it again’ and ‘That’s not fair!’ The men were baptised, but one was so short he nearly drowned.

  Exiting from the water, covered with mud, Warden was greeted by more mockery and the police had to disperse the crowd. Many followed Warden and his flock along the streets of Woolloomooloo, laughing and making remarks ‘more pagan than parliamentary’.

  There was another spectacle to witness the following year when the intrepid aeronaut Henri L’Estrange attempted to ascend in a balloon from the Domain in front of several thousand people. A previous attempt had been made in 1856, also at the Domain, when a French aeronaut, Pierre Maigre, set out to make the first flight in Australia in a balloon named Sydney. Unfortunately, as the aeronaut waited for the wind to abate, the impatient crowd of 12,000 rioted and set fire to everything that would burn, including the Sydney. The vice-regal party fled to escape the melee and the crowd was last seen chasing Maigre through the Domain, crying out, ‘Hang him!’

  Australian-born L’Estrange decided on a night flight, but the wind was so calm the balloon failed to rise as high as he would have liked. It floated over the trees and roofs of Woolloomooloo until it arrived at the corner of Palmer and William streets, where it plummeted. L’Estrange escaped by the guy rope just as the balloon touched the ground and before it hit a
gas streetlight. The balloon exploded and an enormous sheet of flame engulfed the nearby houses. The terrified spectators panicked and people were knocked down and trampled as they tried to escape. L’Estrange determined not to tempt fate any longer and immediately retired to enjoy ‘the tranquillity of private life’.

  If that was not entertaining enough, a local supplied her own sideshow. A Woolloomooloo woman gave birth to a boy who had no arms; on the right foot there were only three toes and only four toes on the left. On one of the stumps at the shoulder, where the arm should have been, were a few knots of flesh thought to be the imperfectly formed fingers and thumb. The child was said to be handsome and in good health. The parents proudly showed him off and hundreds of people, mainly women, paid a small fee to troop through their house, ‘availing themselves of the permission afforded them of witnessing the extraordinary phenomenon’.

  For kids, the lack of playground space meant they had to invent their own amusements. One that horrified journalists and their readers was what the Plunkett Street School students got up to after school. They would head down to the bay with string and pieces of meat and bone, with which they would tempt the rats that lived around the wharf with the food. There were thousands of rats so they were easy to catch but horrible to look at because they had little or no fur. The kids would swing them around their heads and throw them at their mates, striking them with a dirty squealing rat, much to everyone’s glee.

  Another form of entertainment was to head down to the new lock-up at the end of Woolloomooloo Street to hear the screams of men being flogged. The lock-up was generally filled with prostitutes arrested overnight, some of them so drunk they were delivered in wheelbarrows. Flogging was commonly a punishment for men convicted of indecent behaviour. Robert Dodds, a slightly built man, was tied up to the triangle in the small courtyard of the lock-up, and took the first three cuts without flinching, but from the fourth to the thirteenth he moaned continuously. When the straps were removed from his limbs he was trembling violently and his hands were so firmly clasped round the bars of the triangle that some force had to be used to loosen his hold. He was supported to his cell and muttered as he went, ‘I’ll go to the gallows before I come here again.’

  A large crowd also gathered outside the lock-up to hear the sound of the whip when another man, also convicted of indecent assault, received twenty-five lashes. When he was asked by the doctor if he’d like a little brandy beforehand he was incredulous, ‘Brandy, the cursed brandy brought me to this.’ At the first blow he screamed in pain and groaned. By the seventh, blood flowed freely from his back. After the final blow he said to his punisher: ‘Is that all? I’d take it on my head. Call that a flogging!’

  One morning in mid-January 1884 excited men, women and children began filtering down Woolloomooloo Street to the gates of the lock-up. By midday four to five hundred had gathered. They had come to hear the flogging of three larrikins who had attacked a Chinese man, Wong Ken, without provocation in a Woolloomooloo street. They had savagely beaten and kicked him, pulled him up by the pigtail, knocked him down again and kicked him without mercy for half an hour as locals watched on, many of whom were now waiting outside the lock-up.

  Locals were in an angry mood and protested the punishment. Police guarded the entrance to the station and the doctors and reporters had to fight their way through the crush to get inside. A man called Magner was the first to be punished. He and the second prisoner, Mulholland, were silent throughout their floggings. The third man, O’Brien, cried out at the second stroke and howled during the rest. Those outside were pleased with the stoicism of two of the three offenders.

  But what the crowds really liked was to hear the crack of the whip on a bare back and the scream of the victim. They got their wish with James Deane, who was to receive fifteen lashes for abominably gross outrage of decency and indecent assault. During his flogging he writhed and howled. His groans and cries were heard by the thrilled audience outside, ‘many of whom were standing with their ears almost glued to the walls’.

  DEATH RAYS

  IN LATE 2014 A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY WAS STAYING with his grandmother in a flat near the Frisco Hotel. His 34-year-old uncle, a convicted drug dealer, cajoled his nephew into collecting the money for heroin transactions. The boy would take money from addicts through the grille of a street-level balcony window, generally $100 to $200 a time, and pass it on to his uncle, who would later hand a small balloon of heroin to his customers either in a nearby street or in the Frisco Hotel. What he didn’t know was that his nephew had unwittingly collected money from undercover cops, and the uncle was later arrested at the hotel.

  In the late nineteenth century the Frisco was perhaps one of the most beautiful pubs in Woolloomooloo. Designed in the rare American art deco style, it had sandstone walls and large windows and doors opening onto a first-floor verandah with an iron lace balcony. The building’s entrance on the corner of Nesbitt and Dowling streets was delicately curved with a gas lamp over the doorway. All this was gone by 1912 when the new owner, Mick Hogan, demolished the upper verandah and balcony, added an extra storey and had a basic verandah constructed at street level. The main doorway was straightened into a nondescript entrance. Gone was the architectural panache that had made it one of the most beautiful buildings in Woolloomooloo and in its place was an example of commercial pragmatism.

  It has been a venue for sailors and naval personnel, but that’s changing. The walls used to be covered with naval memorabilia, photographs of ships and their crews, maritime awards and trophies, but a recent renovation by the new owner has meant that many of these objects have been put into storage to make way for a larger pokie den. Upstairs is a restaurant and dining room, but you can eat outside, which Woolley and I have done on many occasions before setting out to explore the nooks and crannies of Woolloomooloo — or intending to do so, only to find the alcohol and brilliant sun too delicious to give up.

  Dowling Street ends not far from the pub at Cowper Wharf Road. Across the road the Navy moors its ships. These imposing grey vessels, bristling with guns and satellite dishes, seem within touching distance when you stand next to Harry’s Cafe de Wheels. New residents in neighbouring Potts Point constantly complain about the ships blocking their views of the bay and the Harbour Bridge, and keeping them awake with their noisy generators.

  It never occurs to these whingers that the docks and the Navy have been there for decades, but the vessels puzzle and disturb these new arrivals. Back in the 1990s it was thought that the war ships secretly contained ‘death rays’.

  Residents reported strange beams of light late at night, budgerigars going crazy, telephones ringing for no reason, electrical appliances ‘acting strangely’, tingling spines, nausea, headaches, shivering and nosebleeds. One man lined his flat with aluminium foil as a radar barrier ‘to stop it, just like a microwave emission’. Soccer star Craig Johnston said that the radars affected his hi-fi equipment and set off car alarms. The hysteria continued for months with people complaining that computer data was being erased and the memories of their VCRs and answering machines were being wiped. It was also said that rashes spotted the skin of some residents and cataracts formed over the eyes. Others complained they were constantly waking up in a state of panic or feeling ‘electrified’.

  Lord Mayor Clover Moore (also the local MP at the time) was not one to let a media opportunity pass and wrote to the Defence Minister stating that, ‘The Navy freely emits millions of megawatts of focused pulse-powered radio energy which slams straight through the brickwork of residential buildings and human tissue.’ She also noted, without supporting evidence, that ‘I am informed that there is an unusually high incidence of cancer in the area, especially brain tumours.’

  All this, of course, was nonsense. The Navy conceded that the testing of radars sometimes interfered with some electrical and electronic appliances, but research revealed that they caused no health problems. It was explained to the panic-stricken residents that radars were just
another form of electro-magnetic energy, like the common lightbulb or microwave.

  The juxtaposition of the battleships next to the luxurious apartments of the Finger Wharf and the more modest homes just across the road remind me just how important the bay and its shipping — whether cargo, passenger or naval — has been to the locals. It has shaped the destiny of Woolloomooloo and its people.

  UPPER FORBES STREET

  FOR A HUNDRED AND TWENTY YEARS FORBES STREET was a wide thoroughfare that sloped down the hill, with a slight bounce as it crossed Cathedral Street, before descending to the bay. Now, looking north from the top of William Street, Forbes Street seems to vanish into the viaduct and merge with the surrounding trees. For the first seventy years of the twentieth century it was used by horse and then car traffic as a direct route to Cowper Wharf. Now the turn-off from William Street has been narrowed so only a single car can exit the street. At Cathedral Street all traffic must either turn right or left. But the car, which dominated Woolloomooloo for decades, is still a feature of the blocked-off street. At the block at the top of William Street is a huge bitumen car park for Bayswater rental cars.

  Behind the car park, Judge Lane runs off Forbes Street and leads into a remnant of Judge Street. It’s a desolate space. Once lined with terraces and teeming with people, the lane and the street are now empty, lined with the drab rear entrances of tall warehouses and office buildings. They are bleak spaces, and, as you walk down Judge Street towards the brutal concrete slash of the viaduct, there’s a sense that even if the sun did manage to filter down, it would be swallowed up by the permanent oppressive darkness. I’ve never seen anyone there, and it’s a reminder of how urban planners neutered many streets and lanes in Woolloomooloo, creating vacant areas serving no purpose except for an exit door from the back of a building. Officially there are sixty-three streets in Woolloomooloo, but there are many like these two that are not real, but only phantoms. At night they can be menacing terrain, but during the day they exist as places of sunless sterility, mocked by the street signs proclaiming their original names.