by Louis Nowra
The two important rules are to make others laugh and not to bore them. One man who flitted through our company for a year would begin a tedious and interminable anecdote with ‘Reminds me of a funny story …’ a preface that would make us inwardly groan.
In winter, especially on a Monday night when the theatre is closed and only the core Crew is in the pub, the roaring fire is the main attraction. While the bitter winds and rains rattle the front door, some of the Crew toast marshmallows and others stare at the flames as if mesmerised, especially Cockney Michael, the fire maker, who sits on his stool entranced by what he has created. With a warm Gluhwein in my hand, and a snoozing Coco on my lap, the cosy, silent room has an almost uterine intimacy.
Then there are times outside the pub in summer when the weather is perfect, the temperature is right, the sky is an intense unspoiled blue, the lorikeets are swirling joyously around the dozen gum trees opposite, the dogs are contentedly basking in the sun, a soft briny breeze is coming up Dowling Street from the bay and the wine somehow tastes better than usual, when there is a general air of inarticulate bliss and an exquisite sense of serenity at being alive on such a day.
BETWEEN WARS
ORRY-KELLY WAS AN AUSTRALIAN WHO WAS TO LIVE in Hollywood, win three Oscars for costume design and dress all the biggest stars from Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe. When he came to write his memoir Women I’ve Undressed, the most evocative sections were about his adventures in Woolloomooloo as a twenty-one-year-old country boy recently arrived in Sydney.
It was just after the First World War and he started a job in a bank, which bored him. One evening an actor friend, Ralph, suggested they visit the dives of Woolloomooloo. It was a notorious part of Sydney, regarded as Sydney’s ‘dirty drawers… the violent part of the town where people lived violently’. Ralph knew of a sly-grog place in Bourke Street called O’Grady’s run by Alice O’Grady, a tough, large woman who never wore make-up and whose ex-husband had been Sydney’s best pickpocket.
Its façade was like all the sallow-faced terraces, but inside, hidden behind the heavy burgundy drapes drawn over the windows, was another world filled with jockeys, bludgers, criminals, hard drinkers, wide-eyed first timers like Orry-Kelly, and Spanish Nell who, once she lost her looks, became an abortionist. When a telephone call would come for her she’d grab her banjo case filled with Epsom salts, permanganate of potash and other unknown substances and head off into the shadowy streets of the ’Loo. The constant loud music was played by Little Tich, named after a famous English music hall star, Little Tich, who had six fingers on each hand; this antipodean Little Tich had six toes on each foot.
The mood was raucous, the rooms filled with cigarette smoke, the booze plentiful and expensive. The pimps, waiting for their girls, shouted the house with beer or ‘gay and frisky’ (whisky). Then after midnight the ‘two-guinea girls’ arrived. These were high-class prostitutes who worked Macquarie Street (not like the cheap whores with their ‘Woolloomooloo Wiggle’ who plied their trade in Boomerang Street). Their prices started at two guineas, hence the nickname. Elegant, their white faces coated in Java Rice powder, their eyes drowned in belladonna drops to make their pupils enlarge and gleam unnaturally.
Once the theatres closed, the girls and their businessmen clients hurried to the Domain, near Government House, to have sex before the girls would make their way to Alice’s sly-grog house where they handed over their earnings to their pimps, whose faces were ‘like visors, with slits for eyes and cruel sagging mouths’. And as the 1902 poem said: ‘In each den and stew of dark Woolloomooloo/ the little harlots dance like mad.’
That first night in Bourke Street transformed Orry-Kelly. It was as if ‘I had suddenly broken off my leash’ and he returned time and time again to O’Grady’s and other dives. For a gay man fascinated by the theatre, these nights were shows unto themselves, and years later in Hollywood he still remembered the ‘mysterious flavour of sensuality surrounding Bourke and Palmer streets’. Especially Palmer Street, where it seemed every second house had a china or iron cat chained to the doorway, indicating it was a ‘cathouse’. Prostitutes stood in doorways with one foot on the threshold and the other on the pavement, calling out to the passing men, ‘Hello, ducks, ows about comin in for a go?’ or ‘Ello, dearie, ow’s about comin in fer a good time?’ The curious stance of the prostitutes was because the girls could not be prosecuted if they kept one foot on their own property.
There was nothing posh about these interiors. Unlike Alice O’Grady’s, these were bare, functional front rooms containing a bed with soiled sheets, a chair and a washbasin, and hallways lined with torn and faded wallpaper; walls and ceilings were whitewashed with kalsomine. If you were lucky, a girl might play the pianola and sing a local favourite:
She’s me Lou, Lou from Woolloomooloo
She’s just the little tabby I adore
I takes her for a walk and show her around the shops.
And if she gives me any cheek, I slap her on the chops,
Because she’s mine, mine all the time
She is, so help me Bob, and strike me blue
Though she’s not exactly what you call a lady
She’s me Lou, Lou, Lou from Woolloomooloo.
Sly grog fuelled these haunts and, in the 1920s, so did cocaine. Called snow parties, these gatherings in brothels or the back rooms of terraces consisted mainly of women, who ‘began talking all at once on all sorts of different subjects. Nobody listened to anyone else.’ The effect on the men was different; they became taciturn and morose.
Palmer Street was notorious for these ‘dope parties’, and they not only attracted prostitutes but also, middle-class women. In one raid police came upon six attractive, well-dressed women with ‘good’ jobs, ‘in a rather excited and flushed condition called, “dope happy”’. In their search of the terrace, the police found small packets of cocaine, known in the trade as ‘sniffs’. The women tried to brazen it out but after questioning, they began to cry and pleaded for leniency. No charges were laid against them and they hurried back home to the safety of the suburbs.
The reason for the prevalence of cocaine and opium in Woolloomooloo was simple: it arrived in ships that docked just down the road at Cowper Wharf. Customs officers had their work cut out for them searching ships for drugs, especially those that had recently visited Asian ports. In 1925 they discovered 1500 tins of opium, at that time the biggest haul in the world. The ship had come via Hong Kong with a Chinese crew.
The hiding places were ingenious. A year later, 197 tins of high-grade opium were found secreted in the carcasses of two sheep in the freezing chamber; another time drugs were hidden in bananas. Volumes of Dickens were found to contain opium, while small tins of the drug had been placed in larger water-tight tins hidden in a service tank.
The amount of drugs coming into Sydney via Cowper Wharf soared and by 1927 the police admitted that the drug traffic had ‘assumed enormous proportions’. Although cocaine and opium were consumed in Woolloomooloo, most of the cocaine was for the whores, addicts and gangsters of East Sydney. Brothel owners bought it for their girls, getting them hooked so that the madam paid them in drugs rather than money. Kate Leigh, one of the hard-boiled women of East Sydney, had her lackeys buy the drugs from foreign sailors at hotels around Woolloomooloo Bay and sold it on to the prostitutes she controlled.
Orry-Kelly was right, Woolloomooloo was violent and its very name could strike terror far from Sydney. In 1937 one hoodlum was visiting Melbourne and found himself in a flat in working-class Fitzroy. He asked his host to give him a beer; when it was refused, he slashed him across the face and arm with a razor, saying, ‘This is what we do in Woolloomooloo.’
In the 1930s the safety razor was the vicious favourite weapon of Woolloomooloo criminals. One evening a labourer was found staggering along the footpath in Cathedral Street with blood streaming from a severe gash in his throat. When asked by police who had stabbed him, the victim said, ‘I wasn’t stabbed. I was climbin
g a fence when I fell.’ The thug’s code of honour made it difficult for police to find the culprits. One tough was found outside his house in Dowling Street, his face ripped apart with razor slashes. He refused to say who had done it to him, telling the police he would deal with the matter himself. These hoodlums had their own sense of justice. In late July 1932 a man was found unconscious and bleeding in Palmer Street and was carted off to hospital where he had twenty-seven stitches inserted in deep razor wounds in his head, face and hands. His gang came to the hospital as an act of solidarity. They knew who had done it, a fact not known to the assailant, who also turned up at the hospital. There was a wild tussle in the emergency room, a flurry of razors and shouting, with the result that the original assailant himself was slashed and had to be stitched up.
Females had a fondness for the razor, too. A local woman had an argument with a taxi driver over the fare. It escalated to the point where she suddenly took a razor from her stocking and ‘frightfully gashed the driver about the face’. In 1931 there was a brawl in a Woolloomooloo hotel between several people, both men and women. One woman threw a bottle at the men. A middle-aged woman, defending the men, ripped open the face of the bottle thrower so terribly that the staff of Sydney Hospital considered it one of the worst cases of razor slashing they had seen.
If the police had had a hard time of it before the First World War, their struggle grew between the wars. It was a thankless job. At times it seemed they were permanently under siege. Respect for authority may have existed elsewhere but not down in the ’Loo. Even just charging someone for indecent language was a hazardous task. One summer night’s in 1925 a constable tried to arrest a man for swearing in Cathedral Street. The offender resisted long enough for a crowd to gather. Some of them attacked the cop by kicking and beating him until he was knocked down and almost bashed unconscious. Another time two policemen had two women they had arrested in the back of their car when they saw another woman in Palmer Street they wanted to question. One of the policemen got out of the car to speak to her when suddenly a crowd poured out of the brothels and started to attack him. His partner jumped out of the car to help him, but he too was brutally assaulted.
Attending street fights was fraught with danger. Three policemen tried to stop one scuffle in Forbes Street only for the men to turn on them, bashing them so severely a policeman’s head was split open. On another occasion Forbes Street was again the site of an attack when police went to close down a sly-grog shop. The drunken, cursing crowd surrounded the cops and knocked them to the ground.
If the police had their hands full with lawless locals attacking them, they also had to attend the usual crime scenes, whether it was squalid domestic disputes or drunken murders. In August 1925 the murder of Mrs Mary Lawrence by her husband seemed, on the surface, somewhat typical. Mrs Lawrence had separated from her husband and was living not far from him in Palmer Street. Despite the couple being on friendly terms, he had threatened to kill her.
Her husband, Harold Collins, nearing thirty, had fought in the First World War and returned haunted by his experiences and with severe facial scarring. Given his looks, he felt blessed that Mary wanted to marry him. He knew she had previously been married to an Albert Lawrence in London during the war, before they had migrated to Australia. But she had a habit of disappearing for weeks on end, until one day she didn’t return. Without divorcing Lawrence, she had married Harold. Albert heard about it and she was convicted of bigamy. Now they weren’t legally married, she separated from Harold and led a single’s life.
Still in love with her, and jealous of any man who went near her, Harold invited her to come back and live with him. She agreed to return and, as Harold waited for her in his house, he cradled a revolver. He had serrated the heads of the bullets, as he had been taught to do during the war. Called dum-dum bullets, they caused wounds that were ugly and ragged and didn’t make the clean punctures of ordinary bullets.
When she came through the door he shot her. The first bullet hit her jaw, shattering it. Terrified, she turned to run when a second bullet hit her below the left shoulder and another went clean through her arm. She managed to walk outside and, bleeding profusely from the head, staggered into the fruit shop door next door, where she collapsed in front of the astonished shopkeeper. Harold followed her into the shop, stood over the dying woman and hit her twice in the head with his gun.
Then he knelt down, picked her up and tenderly carried her outside, hailed a passing car and accompanied her to Sydney Hospital. When the police arrived they saw Harold sitting in a chair, his overcoat covered in blood. A constable took the revolver from a pocket of the overcoat. A calm Harold said quietly, ‘I was going to give it to you. I shot her. She has been knocking about with other men.’ He was found guilty of manslaughter. The jury recommended mercy for him, saying that jealousy and love were the reasons he had killed Mary Lawrence.
Sometimes the police would come upon a crime scene that was unusual, even for Woolloomooloo. On a hot February night in 1933 police hurried to Charles Lane, not far from Cathedral Street. On getting out of their car they saw a dwarf, his head on a pillow, lying near the gutter. On closer inspection they saw he was dead and blood was seeping from wounds in his skull and neck.
They followed a trail of blood from the lane to a house at number 10, two metres away. One of the policemen knew the house very well, as he had been there on several occasions because of drunken brawls, though he had never seen the dwarf before. The door was open and they followed the blood trail into the front room, which was the bedroom, and then into the kitchen where a pool of blood covered the floor. Someone had tried to wipe the blood up with a newspaper but all they had done was smear it across the linoleum. A drunken ‘coloured’ woman began yelling abuse at the police, and she was arrested and taken outside. A man, Alf Ranger, sat calmly in a chair next to the small kitchen table containing two half-empty flagons of cheap plonk.
‘There’s been a bit of a brawl,’ said Alf.
When asked what had happened, Alf said it was impossible for him to remember as he had been on a bender for weeks. All he could recall was his wife shaking him and saying, ‘Alf, Alf, Bobby’s lying outside the door bleeding.’ It turned out that Bobby was Robert Widgery, who worked for Wirth’s Circus as a clown and acrobat. Alf described him as ‘a very irritable little gentleman who wanted to live in a world of his own’.
Margaret Armstrong, a boarder and a widow, was a better witness, even though she too had drunk much cheap wine with the others. She had gone to sleep earlier but had been woken up by an argument. She went downstairs and saw Bobby, the dwarf, lying on the floor; a man by the name of Jack Kirkaldy, forty-two, a coal lumper, picked up the dwarf by the back of the neck and seat of the trousers and threw him out the front door onto the roadway before fleeing into the night. Armstrong looked out the door and could see Bobby bleeding from the nose, mouth and back of the head. Alf appeared with a pillow and placed it under the dwarf’s head, then went back inside to finish his drink.
Police tracked down Kirkaldy, who denied he had anything to do with Widgery’s death. He had known the dead man for five years and they had even lived in the same room when Widgery separated from his wife of ten years. Kirkaldy admitted that the dwarf’s quarrelsome nature got on his nerves, but he said it was Widgery who pulled a knife on him and that when he left the house, the dwarf was still alive.
The truth was more prosaic. An argument had broken out in the kitchen over what, no-one could really remember, and Kirkaldy had picked up a tin opener and stabbed the dwarf in the neck and head and, after throwing him into the street, left him for dead.
It was a sign of the changing demographics of Woolloomooloo that one of the drunks in the Widgery case was ‘a coloured woman’. As one writer observed:
The sons of Erin have been replaced by swarthy-skinned communities from abroad. Rooms that once resounded with the euphonious brogue emit a gibberish of undersized Maltese. Italian fishermen mend their nets in t
he thoroughfares that were once the happy hunting grounds of good Australians.
Woolloomooloo was a frightening example of how the rest of Australia could be ‘racially contaminated’. By 1920 places like Charles Street and Charles Lane were enclaves of miscegenation where ‘here in White Australia [are] white women living more or less promiscuously with yellow men … and men of varying shades through brown to black’. Their children may have a Syrian profile but with alarming Chinese eyes and ‘negroid types sallow almost to whiteness’. The Sydney Sun compared Woolloomooloo to sleazy Cairo, where ‘you meet cosmopolitans of all descriptions and the smell of the place is quite Eastern’.
Foreigners began to appear before the courts, whether it was Maltese gamblers, Italians charged with wounding, murder or even attempting to kill policemen, or a Greek man slashing a barmaid and drowning himself. Then there were the violent arguments between foreigners, like the time Charlie Chiroop, who lived with several other Maltese men in Charles Street, was stabbed close to his mouth and nine times in the left shoulder in an argument over who had stolen a pumpkin. It seemed that the ‘dagoes’ couldn’t control their emotions. At a late night supper in Jules de Flyn’s house in Cathedral Street, an Italian made himself objectionable by attempting to kiss Mrs de Flyn. When she repulsed him, he punched her several times. Her husband tried to stop him, and the Italian pulled out a razor and slashed him across the face and hands. As the Sydney Arrow editorialised, ‘Time after time we find instances of crimes of violence and, in some cases, absolute brutality that can be definitely attributed to the Latin races and emigrants from all those countries that are bordered by the Mediterranean Sea.’