Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  Brian’s rheumy eyes lit up at the thought of Eric’s punishment. ‘The prices are standard, of course. There’s the touch up, a black eye and some bruising. Then there’s a beating. Of course, broken arms, broken legs cost more. The ultimate whack, well …’ he paused, allowing me to absorb what he was suggesting.

  ‘What’s the ultimate whack, Brian?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think we can afford that one, Louis. But I tell you what, I leave this with you. Have a think, a deep think about the solution to our Eric problem.’ He downed his beer and headed off into the night.

  WHEN WOOLLOOMOOLOO WAS A FILM SET

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Woolloomooloo remained, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, a place exhibiting ‘the very worst conditions which are usually only associated with medieval cities’. But it was precisely this quality that attracted filmmakers and resulted in four of the best silent movies made in Australia.

  Just after the First World War the director Raymond Longford decided to adapt CJ Dennis’s 1915 verse narrative The Sentimental Bloke for the screen. It’s a romantic comedy about how Bill, the larrikin ‘Bloke’, after a spell in jail for assaulting cops, falls in love with Doreen. Their relationship is undermined by Bill’s jealousy of a sophisticated rival, but after a reunion Doreen agrees to marry him. The marriage transforms the larrikin and he forsakes his drinking mates to become a faithful husband.

  The story had been set in the working-class streets of Melbourne, but none of them had the picturesque slums Longford needed, so Bill became a larrikin from Woolloomooloo. One of the major reasons for this decision was that the area was one of the last unapologetically working-class enclaves. He and the actors steeped themselves in the subject. As one actor said, ‘We talked Woolloomoolooese by day and slept at night with a book of the verses under our pillows.’ So concerned were the authorities about Longford portraying the slums of Woolloomooloo, which were a vile stain on Sydney’s reputation, that the director had to film some scenes secretly. Released in 1919, there was no doubt that part of the film’s success was due to the authenticity of the locations that rooted the simple story in reality.

  The 1922 film Sunshine Sally, although missing the last few minutes in the surviving prints, is a wonderful concoction of comedy and melodrama that reads like a girls’ version of The Sentimental Bloke. The title character is a working-class girl who lives in a crumbling terrace. Sally and her pal Tottie are friends with two hawkers, Skinny, a rabbit-o, and Spud, the bottle-o.

  Woolloomooloo terraces may have seemed something out of Dickens but the importance of hawkers was not a fiction. Although you couldn’t hear it in the silent movie, hawkers created the noisy ambiance of the streets, banging on front doors, yelling at the back gate, crying out with merciless persistence until ‘The very earth seems shaking/ with their cries to “Come and Buy!”’ Or as one poem described ‘The Hawkers of Woolloomooloo’:

  Here we awake each morning

  Roused from dreams by raucous voices

  A babel of hawkers

  As around the streets they come.

  The milkman at the dawning

  And the ‘Fish, oh!’ bloke rejoices

  To break the early silence

  With their pandemonium

  Tripe, oh, fruit, blokes who hawk the greens, the Bottle oh! Rabbit,

  oh!

  The realism of Sunshine Sally is evident in the very beginning when the hawkers travel in their carts through the Woolloomooloo streets that are not so much evocative of the Roaring Twenties but of Victorian East End London. The first time we see Sally, she is working in a commercial laundry so steamy and primitive that it seems like hell on earth.

  Skinny and Spud are both in love with Sally and fight each other for her before the main bout in a farcical boxing match down at Rushcutters Bay stadium. The only way the women can watch the contest is to dress up as men, a ploy not as far-fetched as it sounds — Jack London’s wife dressed in a man’s suit so she could sneak into the all-male crowd for the 1908 world championship fight between Tommy Burns and the African–American Jack Johnson at the same stadium.

  A few days later Sally is rescued from drowning in the Coogee surf by Basil, a wealthy toff. He takes her home to his mother’s mansion in Potts Point, where she is given a governess to teach her social etiquette and educate her about the world. Sally becomes engaged to Basil, Skinny marries Tottie, while the drink-sodden Spud marries a Salvation Army woman who reforms him. Unlike The Sentimental Bloke, which accepts its proletarian characters, Sunshine Sally’s view of Woolloomooloo is judgmental. Its inhabitants are flawed but the rich on the hill are perfect.

  Something similar happens in The Dinkum Bloke (1923), also directed by Longford. Set in Woolloomooloo, it’s the story of Bill, a wharfie, who promises his dying wife that he will bring up their young daughter, Peggy, as a lady. He works hard, including taking a second job as a street singer. By the time his daughter is a young woman she falls for a wealthy young man from Potts Point. Bill is invited to meet Peggy’s fiancé and his parents, only to prove to be so socially inept that the marriage is in jeopardy. In a desperate ploy he manages to convince the family that Peggy is not his progeny but the adopted daughter of a rich English family. The lie works and Peggy, now accepted as a lady, leaves Woolloomooloo for the heights of Potts Point while her father stays behind in the slums.

  One of the funniest silent movies is Kid Stakes (1927). Directed by Tal Ordell, it has none of the cuteness and sentimentality of the usual children’s film. Its comedy has a bracing reality about it, no doubt helped by the Woolloomooloo locations. The title has multiple references, not only to children and goats but the term kid stakes was slang for nonsense. It was based on Syd Nicholls’s popular comic strip Fatty Finn and opens in an inspired postmodernist touch with Nicholls himself drawing a sketch of Fatty which magically comes to life. Fatty, played by Ordell’s six-year-old son, looks at the drawing and asks ‘What sort of job have I got to do this week, Mr Nicholls?’ From here we are transported into Fatty’s world, where his latest adventure unfolds.

  Fatty Finn is the leader of a scruffy, irrepressible gang of Woolloomooloo kids. They enter Fatty’s pet goat, Hector, in a derby but a rival gang, led by Bruiser Murphy, sets Hector loose on the morning of the race. Fatty finds the runaway goat and persuades an aviator to fly him to the race track in time for the main event, which culminates in a thrilling climax, not unlike a children’s version of Ben Hur.

  The goat race itself was filmed in Rockhampton as the RSPCA objected to such races. Goats were common in Woolloomooloo during the late nineteenth century. As one old timer recalled in 1913, ‘There were parts of Woolloomooloo which looked like a farm … when you’d look out of the window of a morning you’d see girls milking goats in the backyards. In the daytime the goats would roam about the streets picking up scraps and bits of papers and rags.’ During the bubonic plague of 1900 health authorities rounded up the goats and got rid of them.

  The subplot of Kid Stakes is based on the class differences between the working class of Woolloomooloo and the posh upper classes of Potts Point. This social chasm is reinforced by the topographical reality of the abrupt cliff face that separates the working class of the valley from the wealthy living on the high ridge. Probably nowhere else in Australia was the class divide so physically obvious. The only way for these two different worlds to communicate was via the steep Butler Stairs.

  One day the spoilt son of an upper-class family ventures down into the bowels of the ’Loo. Bespectacled and dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, he is taunted as a ‘sissyboy’ and set upon by the local boys, but he proves his mettle in a nasty fight. After he’s accepted by the gang, he leads them up the steep stairs to find Hector. It’s a hair-raising adventure because a plump policeman guards the top of the stairs to keep the riff-raff from entering. But the cop is asleep on the job and the children sneak past him into the forbidden and intimidating Potts Point, where they
find their starving goat feasting upon a mansion’s opulent garden. The symbolism of the huge gulf between the classes couldn’t be plainer.

  What is fascinating for the modern viewer is that the film is an extraordinary and affectionate portrait of working-class life; corner shops, treeless narrow streets, dingy terraces, labourers, stables, the Cowper Wharf docks, brewery horses, fishing fleets and nets. It’s very much like the Woolloomooloo the author Frank Clune describes just before the First World War, when there were only fuel stoves in kitchens, and poverty-stricken families ‘had kids galore’. Every youngster had a billy cart and families were so poor that they depended on their children finding wood chips to feed the stove. ‘Merrily we prowled and played in the bluemetalled streets of Woolloomooloo and chased the goats, and chiacked the crews of the tall-masted ships anchored in the bay.’

  One of the strongest connections between these films is that three of them used the same director of photography, Arthur Higgins. He was a newsreel cameraman who seemed to realise that he was not only making a movie, but documenting social history and an anachronistic urban landscape. And he succeeded. These films are an astonishing and eerie visual record of how Woolloomooloo used to look. Its Victorian-era slums and social milieu seem to belong to a world unimaginable now.

  In Kid Stakes, unlike The Dinkum Bloke and Sunshine Sally, the children accept their domain and don’t hanker for the posh world above the cliff face. In Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Film 1900–1977 it’s called ‘one of the major films of Australia’s silent period’. It was also the last feature film to be set in Woolloomooloo.

  There are probably many reasons for this, but really Woolloomooloo represented a wretched world many people thought belonged to the unenviable past. Like Sally and Peggy, the audiences and filmmakers were heading up the stairs to another world, leaving Woolloomooloo far behind.

  DAY IN THE LIFE

  IN SPRING AND SUMMER THE AMERICANS COME twice a week. It’s easy to recognise them as they disembark from the tour bus. White, and of retirement age, both men and women wear sexless pastel clothes and new white sneakers. Many are overweight and waddle from the bus. As they approach the entrance of the Old Fitzroy they pause, puzzled, and stare at the exterior as if the tour leader has taken them to the wrong destination. Once inside, they marvel at what they see and words like ‘quirky’ and ‘quaint’ are bandied about.

  They are in the pub for exactly twenty minutes to sip samples of Australian beer. While the bar staff hand out servings in quantities so small that you’d think they were rare wines, Garry, the host and publican, talks knowledgeably about ales and lagers. The hotel prides itself on its range of craft beers. Not many of the Americans actually taste the samples, except for some of the more adventurous men. Others, especially the women, take photographs of an eccentric pub that seems as cute as anything in Disneyland.

  One time I was having lunch with Nathan, who had returned from New Zealand after publishing his novel Vagrer, set in the Old Fitzroy. Parts of it were barely fictional, while the last chapters were obviously products of his imagination (the characters’ names scarcely hid the real identities of the regulars: I’m called Hughie, Mandy is Sandy, and Ayesha is China). Over lunch, he told me about his latest girlfriend and how he’d met her when he’d been working in the pub — he’d had to serve alcohol upstairs for the wake of a young man who had hanged himself. He struck up a conversation with the dead man’s girlfriend and they soon became an item but, as Nathan said, ‘She has her issues.’

  Because the Americans had arrived and taken most of the tables, Ayesha came inside and sat with us. Garry was mid-spiel when he pointed us out and told the visitors that we were locals. All the Americans turned towards us, cameras at the ready. Ayesha was dressed flamboyantly in a leopard-print outfit and pillbox hat (‘Exactly like Jackie Kennedy’s,’ she whispered), I was wearing a black suit and white shirt, and sitting between us was Nathan, with his curly hair and skinny frame draped in opportunity shop cast-offs. I could see the visitors were trying to fathom our relationship. So we posed for photographs as a family, with Ayesha and I the proud parents of a son who was dressed like a beggar. It was our hope that back home in the States the visitors would show the photographs to their friends, astonishing them with pictures of this typical Australian family.

  But what began to intrigue me about Garry’s spiel to the Americans was that he didn’t know much about the history of his own hotel. I had researched its beginning in the 1860s as the Revolving Battery Hotel, but what happened after that?

  Garry, unlike previous publicans, didn’t live at the hotel and had installed a general manager to run the pub when he wasn’t there. Martin Neary was older and more experienced than any of the bar staff and operated with calmness and professionalism. He fitted in from the beginning as if he belonged there. It didn’t take me long to find out that Martin had a historical connection to the Old Fitzroy.

  Between 1874 and 1888 a Martin Neary had run the hotel. I asked Martin if he was related to that particular Neary, and he said he didn’t know. However, as coincidence would have it, a few weeks later a distant relative contacted him for a family reunion, not realising where Martin was working, and told him that he was directly related to a Martin Neary who used to own the Revolving Battery Hotel. For some of us, this coincidence had the spookiness of the hotel in The Shining.

  Once the first Neary sold the pub it continued under the same name until the early twentieth century when it became the Fitzroy, a name it resurrected from a defunct hotel that used to be on the East Sydney side of William and Palmer streets. There was also an obvious reference to Fitzroy Street, the original name of Reid Street that runs directly down to the pub.

  At the time its front door was on the corner of Cathedral Lane and Dowling Street, with a large gas lamp above it. In 1908 the Council widened the gloomy lane, that began at the crossroads of Forbes Street, to create Cathedral Street. To make this possible the Dowling Street terraces, numbers 123, 125 and 127 across the lane, were demolished to create a street out of the narrow passageway. The entrance of the Fitzroy was shifted to Dowling Street and in 1910 Tooth’s brewery bought the hotel and the following year rebuilt it, adding an extra storey.

  Any hotel owned by Tooth’s had to keep annual records of alcohol sales, renovations, the number of rooms, the length of the bar counters and other relevant details. After downloading the records from the net, I went through them. By 1930 the Fitzroy was said to be in an industrial area with ‘poor class residents’. A Duncan Pardy, in his middle fifties, leased it from 1928 and had his name proudly displayed as publican on the wrap-around verandah. He must have been popular because the sales of bottled beer escalated. The year after he had taken on the five-year lease, the pub sold twenty times as much beer as it had a decade earlier, though spirits sales halved and hardly anyone drank ‘plonk’.

  Pardy’s success must have been hard earned given that, as an annual report stated, there were twelve hotels within a quarter of a mile (400-metre) radius. The Fitzroy had fifteen rooms, some of them were for the publican, his wife and staff, with a bar 10.6 metres long (extended from 7.6 metres), though its furniture was ‘very fair’ (and this description would not change for over fifty years). Like most publicans, Pardy had his squabbles with the liquor authorities, and had been fined for selling alcohol on a Sunday, though in his second year he pleaded guilty to the same charge, but produced an old lady as a witness to say he had sold whisky to her because she was suffering from influenza and the remedy had been recommended by her doctor. The excuse didn’t help him escape a fine.

  One Sunday night in March 1931 a man rang the police and said that a woman had been shot at the hotel. When they arrived they found Mrs Pardy in her upstairs bedroom with a bullet wound in her chest. In her statement at the hospital, where she was admitted in a serious condition, she said that her husband ‘went mad and shot her’.

  Pardy was charged with having shot his wife, Elizabeth, with
intent to do grievous bodily harm. In his defence, the publican told the police that he had returned from Manly at about 8 p.m. that evening and found his wife drunk. She was wearing an overcoat and taunted him, saying she had a revolver in her pocket. He didn’t believe her and rushed upstairs to the dining room, where he kept his pistol, and found that it was missing. He returned to his wife who boasted she was ‘going to do him in’. Pardy jumped on his wife and pulled her right hand out of the coat pocket. She was clutching the gun and, as he was attempting to wrestle it from her, it went off, the bullet penetrating his wife’s left breast and passing completely through her body.

  Pardy could have gone to jail for years but a few days later his wife told the magistrate at the committal hearing that the shooting was an accident and she didn’t wish to proceed against her husband. A week later the Pardys vacated the hotel.

  During the Depression publicans came and went, and indicative of the change in demographics, a Greek publican ran the hotel for a time, but beer sales halved, spirits were drunk less frequently and the annual sales of wine were only 30 litres.

  The hotel went unnoticed by anyone outside Woolloomooloo until 1945, when a dog made it momentarily famous. Boozer was a six-year-old retriever owned by a regular, James McFadden, who arrived at the hotel in the early afternoon most days with a pannikin and Boozer. The dog would bark until someone gave him a beer, which McFadden would pour into the pannikin. If barking didn’t work, McFadden would tell his dog to sneeze, and Boozer would produce ‘a paroxysm of a hay fever’. The act seldom failed. Boozer was particular, he liked his ‘nut brown’ straight and wouldn’t touch shandies, let alone ‘plonk’.