Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  Fanny Hamilton was not the only woman who chose to end her life in the bay. In 1898, a wharf labourer saw a figure in her late twenties, wearing a black dress, white straw hat, black stockings and shoes, sitting on some timber near the jetty and staring blankly at the water. Then she suddenly vanished. Her body was later seen floating in the bay by a man out on a walk. In the late 1930s Freda Parkinson, a middle-aged meth drinker with many convictions, was released from jail after serving a sentence for vagrancy. That same day she got drunk in Kings Cross on methylated spirits and wandered down to the bay, where she leapt into the water. Her hat was found floating some distance from where her body was discovered.

  Unlike men intending to drown themselves, women were frequently saved. Typical is Tilly Franklin, a married woman who in 1905 jumped off the steps at the foot of Dowling Street and was rescued by two labourers. In another incident two men leapt into the water to save Mary Barran, who was said to be mentally disturbed. There were women who had attempted suicide several times. A young woman in the late 1890s failed to drown herself on many occasions. When rescued she would say she was ‘tired of life’. According to newspapers of the time, she had ‘a mania for jumping into the bay’. Several times she had been dragged out, ‘more dead than alive’. The trouble was that suicide was against the law and women who attempted it were jailed.

  There were always accidental drownings. Many in the 1850s and 1860s were caused by poor lighting, as in May 1863, when Henry Park, a shoemaker, left his home in Palmer Street one evening to go for a stroll down to the bay. It was thought that in the dark he had walked over the end of the pier and drowned. Three years later, also in May, two people were found drowned having, as one reporter put it, ‘missed their footing in the dark’.

  Some drowned because their boat overturned in the bay and, like many people of the time, they couldn’t swim, and so sank to the bottom. Children drowned falling from the wharf where they’d been playing. Sailors fell from their moored ships after drunken fights, or simply slipped on a gangway and tumbled into the water. Wharf workers drowned because they were unable to swim. Some drownings were so commonplace they barely rated a mention in the press. In 1925 a middle-aged man sitting on the pier overbalanced and fell in. The only witnesses were a group of Chinese men, who were unable to tell the labourers nearby what had happened because none of them could speak English.

  The worst accident occurred in 1906, when fifteen men drowned after a collision between a steamer and a cutter from HMS Encounter. The cutter was carrying seventy-two sailors. The steamer Dunmore ran into it, striking a hole in the cutter’s side that caused it to turn turtle. A handful of men made it clear and swam to shore, while others clung to the overturned boat, her side exposed and ‘broken like an eggshell’.

  John Riley, a ranger in the Domain, witnessed the accident, which had taken place only a short distance from the shore. He’d watched the steamer and realised it was on a collision course. ‘My blood ran cold when I saw the Dunmore strike the cutter with a noise that could be distinctly heard hundreds of yards away. Many of the occupants were struck by the bow of the Dunmore and sank immediately. The rest clung to the remains.’

  Nearby, Robert McNeill was on a morning walk with a friend when they also saw that a collision would be inevitable. ‘Our hair nearly stood on end as we watched the steady progress of the vessels until the crash which could be heard nearly half a mile away. The impact was like the report of a cannon and the wonder was that there were any survivors.’ Like Riley, McNeill and his friend ran to the water’s edge. The distance between the damaged cutter and the shore was only 200 feet (61 metres) and Riley and others who had joined him, called out to the sailors, ‘Come on, lads, you have not far to swim and we will help you ashore.’ But the young men seemed paralysed and clung to the boat screaming ‘Save us! Save us!’ Riley saw two of them throw up their arms and sink. As McNeill said later, ‘The cries of those in the water were heartbreaking and so little was being done to render assistance. It took nine to ten minutes for a boat to come from Garden Island for the rescue.’ All the victims were from England and aged between eighteen and twenty; only one was married. The sail room at Garden Island was turned into a temporary morgue; the drowned men were wrapped in shrouds and covered with the Union Jack.

  Perhaps the person who had the most unenviable job down at the bay was Senior Constable Griffith, who worked the Woolloomooloo beat. In December 1888 he was fishing with three other policemen when there was a sudden squall and their boat capsized. All four men were thrown into the water. Two of them drowned but Griffith and the other survivor were found clinging to the upturned vessel.

  For the next decade Griffith was frequently called upon to search for those who had gone missing in the waters of the bay. It was he who found the naked body of typhoid sufferer Charles Donohoe. Whether it was day or night, he had to search for the drowned, and then patiently examine their belongings to find clues to determine whether the death was accidental or deliberate. It’s not hard to imagine his nightmares.

  AN OLD FITZROY FIXTURE

  I REALISED I HAD BECOME A FIXTURE AT THE OLD FITZROY when a Sydney bar guide said that if you came to the pub you’d be certain to see Louis Nowra and his Chihuahuas. I didn’t know whether to be pleased to have become a tourist attraction or embarrassed. Perhaps a bit of both.

  ‘Never try to talk to Louis until he’s had his first drink,’ Woolley has often told the regulars. It takes me that long to unwind from a day of being alone in my study, living in my imagination, frantically racing against deadlines, as anyone who works as a freelance writer can understand.

  From the first sip of my first white wine I can feel myself growing more content and relaxed. I need my solitude during this initial period. I love the sensuous feel of a long-stemmed glass in my hand, the luscious grassy bouquet of a sav blanc, and by the time I have drained the glass, there’s the glowing sensation of my spirits lifting as I’m buoyed up by the intoxicating, transforming nature of alcohol.

  Once the second glass of wine has kicked in, my work and my deadlines have been forgotten and I begin to tune into those around me. Conversations can cover the usual topics, the weather, cars, motorbikes, music, television (mostly documentaries, or obscure comedies from childhood), history, politics (only Tommy was a right-winger, and because of his stroke we hardly understood a thing he said) and football (the Pommies talk about the English soccer league results, Brad and I obsess over Aussie Rules and attend the Swans’ games together).

  Sometimes the conversations can venture into the philosophical. (‘So I started to read this Kierkegaard guy,’ said Graham, ‘and he’s full of bullshit. The nearest I can figure out is that he was apologising for Christianity and the rest, well … it was bullshit.’) Or it can be plain esoteric, as with Tickles’s analysis of the architecture of Karl Schinkel or Byzantine art. There are the daily news stories to discuss (Muslim terrorism a recent speciality). If Jason is at the pub and is asked about his job as a lawyer representing those who were sexually abused in institutions, he will discuss it, but don’t get him started on the perfidy of the Catholic Church, where morality is sacrificed to money.

  You must be able to take teasing because that means you are not up yourself. This could mean remarks about your baldness, clothes, age or, in Juan’s case, my mockery of his hero James Taylor. Anecdotes about personal childhoods (most of us were brought up in public housing, including me) are generally horrifying in their bleakness and the dysfunction of family life, but are always, always, undercut by being told as black comedies. These stories only shock one person and that’s Ayesha. Even though she was an orphan, she always speaks of her childhood as idyllic. The personal histories do explain why the majority of us have never had children. Such childhoods may also account for the common attitude that God does not exist and human stupidity, knavery, cruelty and superstition are permanent and ubiquitous. There is nothing wrong about drinking, drugging or smoking yourself to extinction because d
eath is merely a pratfall into oblivion.

  And since I’ve been going to the Old Fitzroy there’s been a rollcall of those slipping off into that undiscovered country. Stevie ‘Sticks’ was so called because of his ornate walking stick. His left leg was shorter than the right due to a motorbike accident when he was in his early twenties. His specially made left boot resembled something for a club foot, and he didn’t so much walk into the bar as lurch as if already drunk. His body had been racked with pain for years and only OxyContin gave him temporary relief. He had widely spaced eyes and grey bouffant hair topped with a black beret, a vulpine sly smile when around women, and was so sure of his genius that he’d interrupt any conversation with a loud stream-of-consciousness monologue that had no relationship to the topic at hand. He was an artist, and for the umpteenth time we had to hear how Salvador Dali’s agent wanted to take him on, only for Steve to find out that the agent had wanted him to fake Dali’s work after the famous artist had died.

  He was so annoying that the only one who would listen to his cocksure theories about art, politics and the great subject of himself was Nathan the barman, who became the only person Stevie said he liked in the whole hotel. His desire for women never abated. He’d approach female patrons and offer to draw their faces without looking at his pad as he sketched. When he finished they were always stunned by how the drawing didn’t look remotely like them but more like a nervous spasm of zigzag lines. Desperate for a woman, he entered a speed-dating event at another Woolloomooloo hotel, but it went spectacularly wrong when he was accused of stalking a girl he had fallen for. It was rumoured but never confirmed that a painting of his hung in the White House.

  No-one suspected that beneath that bravado was a man who realised, as he aged into his sixties, that despite the promise it had begun with, his career had amounted to little. One day Tony, who had a key to Stevie’s tiny house, went to investigate why the artist hadn’t been seen for several days. He discovered Stevie’s body upstairs, lying fully clothed on the bedroom floor, dried blood on his face and a suicide note nearby.

  ‘When I felt for his pulse I knew he was dead immediately,’ said Tony, still shocked days afterwards, ‘because he was so cold.’ The extremely narrow staircase, common to Woolloomooloo terraces, meant the paramedics had to break Stevie’s limbs which had become stiff with rigor mortis, in order to get the body downstairs.

  Gradually each member of the Crew has revealed their past, whether it be jail, rehab or exotic travels. Shelley, along with Mandy and Kate, was a regular. Other women come once or twice, but, as one said to her husband after her only visit, ‘I prefer a wine bar or upmarket pub.’

  Shelley and her partner, Alex, live down the lower end of Dowling Street in the former house of the late Gypsy prince, Costa Sterio. They have been together since the 1970s, and, except for a separation of several years, remained a couple. Alex drank at the hotel and Shelley would stop by to have a few drinks after her day as a nurse at the injection centre or answering a hotline for mothers who were at breaking point because of their husbands’ or children’s behaviour. She’s generally emotionally exhausted when she arrives, and her enjoyment of her first beer is something to behold. When asked about her day, she’ll smile and casually mention saving the lives of addicts who overdosed in the centre: ‘A couple of blue ones today, but we got them in time.’

  I knew she had graduated as a nurse in the early 1970s but, unless she got to know you, she kept the details of her life to herself and even then, she’d be genuinely apologetic because she thought she was ‘ordinary’ and we would be bored. Far from it. She told Mandy and me many stories about being a young nurse, whether it was having to deal with horrifically deformed babies or how, during her final year of nursing, an older, more experienced nurse took her into a private room where there was a male patient.

  ‘You’ll have to look after him,’ said the sister, as she closed the Venetian blinds. Shelley noticed that the man was proudly displaying an erection. ‘It’s best to get it over and done with and he’ll sleep better then,’ said the older woman matter-of-factly. A shocked Shelley said she couldn’t do it. ‘Stupid bitch,’ sighed the sister and masturbated the patient.

  After graduation she wanted to help the disadvantaged, so she volunteered to work in Alice Springs. On her first day there was an emergency call and she and the ambulance driver had to travel for five hours to an outback pub to pick up a teenage Aboriginal girl who had been set on fire because she wouldn’t fuck her brother-in-law.

  ‘We had to bandage her whole body before we could drive back,’ she said. Then with her broad smile hiding her anger and pain, she added, ‘And that was only the beginning. Gee, did those men treat their women rough.’

  During her separation from Alex, she lived in India for a few years, and for a time her home was a houseboat. She travelled through India, Pakistan and Afghanistan alone. She was blonde, white and attractive. I asked her how she dealt with the problem of lecherous men, and she shrugged and gave a wry grin, ‘Oh, buses were the worst. I had this heavy stick and when they used to try and feel me up, I’d whack them with it.’

  When she rejoined Alex, they lived in a series of London squats, where she gave birth to her beloved son, Louis. Once they returned to Australia, they were broke and moved onto the family farm where Shelley had grown up. This is where her entrepreneurial spirit emerged. The property had several tin sheds that were hidden from the roadside by feral choko vines. In these she cultivated marijuana crops, telling young Louis to keep an eye out for police helicopters. The sale of the dope helped them buy a house in the Blue Mountains.

  Like many of the Motley Crew, including me, she smoked dope. It calmed her after a day of trying to save the lives of overdosing junkies or listening to weeping women. In a way she preferred the company of men because her experiences dealing with women had soured her. A strong woman herself, she despaired at how many women took refuge in helplessness rather than assuming responsibility for themselves. Yet she never condescended to her clients. She was fully aware of her flaws and those of every human being.

  One time a missing-persons expert asked Mandy to find a young woman whose sick mother was desperate to find out if her daughter was alive. I showed the woman’s photograph to Shelley. ‘Oh, I know her,’ she said immediately. The woman had had a baby when she was sixteen and, after having it adopted out, vanished into the badlands of the Cross, where she was now a hooker based in Kellett Street, earning money to pay for her ice addiction. As usual Shelley had only good things to say about people whose lives had unravelled. ‘She’s a noble soul. She’ll come through.’ And the young woman did. She rang her mother and visited her in Brisbane, staying on to endure rehab again.

  Although she didn’t talk much about literature, Shelley read widely, fiction and poetry, and even listened to radio plays. These interests and others seeped out in her conversations, so one never knew what else lay hidden within her. Mandy and I spent a weekend in the Blue Mountains with her and we were surprised that as she drove us around the countryside she played the German heavy metal band Rammstein at top volume. The garden was beautiful, with flowers, fruit trees and a copperhead snake in the woodpile. Inside the house there were boxes of clothes, books and knick-knacks everywhere. She promised Alex that once she had sorted through them all she would clean the house and they’d sell it to help pay off their Victorian terrace in Dowling Street, but that was never going to happen. The country house was a refuge, where she would spend days and nights by herself, especially in freezing winter, which she preferred to summer, slowly sorting through her collection of boxes, smoking dope and daydreaming.

  One late afternoon she told me, with a nurse’s detachment, that she had had breast cancer, but after a recent mastectomy and chemo she was now in remission. Few people at the pub knew about this, and although she still seemed her normal self, drinking, smoking and laughing, the cancer had given her a taste of mortality and sometimes, between sips of beer and puffs of a fag,
she’d grin and say, ‘I’ve had a good life. I can say that truthfully.’

  If she was tipsy she’d reminisce about travelling through Afghanistan in the 1970s, when it wasn’t racked by war and dope was incredibly cheap. In fact Afghanistan has been a destination for several of the regulars. One woman who drank in the pub for a couple of months went to Afghanistan to work for the Red Cross making and fitting artificial limbs for those who had been injured by mines. Dan, a tall barman who seemed to walk on tiptoes, as if not wanting to disturb the ground, had been a soldier in Afghanistan, as had German Dave, who remembered returning home to his village after his first tour to be met by a total lack of curiosity from family and friends. ‘It was as if I had merely been on a holiday,’ he said to me, still irritated by the indifference. Both Dan and Dave were invaluable sources for my novel Prince of Afghanistan. India was a favourite destination for Tickles, though one year he went to Estonia to track down his relatives with a vague idea of recovering the lands his ancestors had once owned, but the magnificent inheritance failed to materialise.

  Antidepressants are discussed openly because many of the Crew take them. One local doctor, who prescribed medication in copious quantities to three of the pub regulars, committed suicide, and a psychiatrist who treated another two of us was disbarred because of a morphine habit. There’s much talk about drugs, some of it nostalgic (‘God, in New York you used to be able to get the best Charlie for practically nothing’) as well as the current price and availability of pills or dope, especially the latter, as many of us like the weed. The destructive effect of ice has become a common topic, given that it makes the local addicts dangerously aggressive, though some of the tradies still use it to complete a job on time.