by Louis Nowra
The dog never drank less than ten middies a day and one hot day he sank twenty-seven beers. With headlines like ‘Boozing dog will do anything for a drink’, the RSPCA was asked to investigate charges of animal cruelty. But after a couple of days it announced they wouldn’t do anything about ‘Woolloomooloo’s beer-drinking dog’. It was obvious that Boozer had a liking for beer and ‘In those circumstances it can hardly be said that giving him what he likes constitutes ill treatment.’
So, late in the evening, the patrons would step outside the hotel and watch Boozer and his owner walk unsteadily back home, the dog ‘giving a graphic interpretation of a drunken man, staggering and rolling all over the street’.
By the 1950s, as the area became more industrialised, and the Royal Navy established depots and administration offices throughout Woolloomooloo, the hotel sold more beer and the sales of spirits and wines also increased. The new addition to the pub was a ladies parlour out the back that seated a dozen women.
Women also became publicans during the 1960s and, as the records noted, there was now a kitchen and a laundry, but no saloon bar or lounge, or bottle shop or beer garden. It attracted a floating mob of artists, the Victoria Street Push, led by John Olsen, who liked to descend from Potts Point to go slumming in the ’Loo. Hanging near the fireplace now is a reproduction of a John Olsen print called The Old Fitzroy, 6 p.m.
His etching of the pub is in his usual abstract, playful style, with cheerful reds, dark ochres and browns, blues and yellows. Supposedly a depiction of the main bar, it is an queasy blend of wavy lines and splodges that from a distance seem to be masses of copulating worms. To some it looks like a nightmarish closeup of an alien’s blood cell; to others it is the equivalent of Bazza McKenzie’s ‘technicolour yawn’.
After Garry hung it up none of us knew if it was upside down or not. Old Don liked to stare at it when he was drunk, leaning on his cane with one hand and holding a beer in the other while he scrutinised it. One day he announced to us that he could see figures and ‘the fucking bar’ in the print and that they were the wrong way up. Once we inverted it, he rocked back and forth in pleasure. ‘See, you fucking clowns, it’s supposed to hang this way.’ Olsen said he drew the scene when he was ‘very intoxicated’ and for some regulars it has become a Rorschach test: if they can see the figures in the print then they are either drunk or stoned.
As the 1960s wore on the majority of the pub’s customers remained residents and workers, though the numbers of patrons were rapidly declining. A basic sort of refrigeration had been in place for a decade but it seldom functioned. Finally, in 1973, a new refrigeration system was installed and the interior was repaired and painted.
In 1977, in an attempt to attract customers back to the hotel during the redevelopment of Woolloomooloo, a new publican restored the original name, the Revolving Battery. The effect was calamitous. Beer sales fell by a third and sales of wine and spirits dropped away. The pub began to attract a dubious crowd: gangsters, thieves and thugs who gloated over successful robberies, planned new ones, and consorted with bent coppers. Both groups drank themselves silly and brawled. A present-day local, Jessie, told me that during this unruly time she was having a beer in the bar one night when someone fired a shot through the window. She was lucky, the bullet slammed into the wall above her, just missing her head.
It also gained a disturbing reputation during the late 1970s as a place where paedophiles liked to congregate. The memoir Sunshine and Shadow is about two brothers, James and Stephen Dack, and tells the moving story about their alcoholic and abusive father who deserted the family, and how they were brought up by their saintly mother in a shabby Dowling Street terrace not far from the hotel. As James relates, back when he was a teenager the pub was still known as the Revolving Battery, and:
… the publican had no qualms about giving booze to us fourteen-year-olds. He’d mix the dregs from various bottles of wine and spirits in flagons and sell the evil-tasting goop to us. This rancid rocket fuel became known as ‘concoction’ … After we had drunk [it], we’d walk around glassy-eyed and out of it, like zombies.
The underage boys attracted paedophiles who ‘tumbled to the fact that there were plenty of kids in Woolloomooloo poor enough, perhaps, to be persuaded to do their bidding for a few bucks. These rock spiders started turning up at the hotel … filling them up with Twisties and drinks.’
The name change only lasted a few years, but during that time the pub established a reputation as a grotty place filled with criminals, perverts, drug dealers and crooked cops. Something had to be done and in the early 1980s the name was changed to the Old Fitzroy; former customers had never taken to the Revolving Battery name and always referred to it as ‘the Old Fitzroy’.
Theatre at the pub stuttered into life. Way back in 1983, when the Revolving Battery was trying to change its image, there was a one-off show, Lip Service by Barry Lowe, but it was not until 1996 that there was a concentrated attempt to foster theatre, due to the new publicans Paul Sennitt and his wife Corinne, a former actress.
In 1996 Corinne was asked by theatre group the Revolver Collective if they could do a show one night in the downstairs area, which was used as a storage space. The piece was a sciencefiction cabaret about a hermaphrodite who was the embodiment of the meaning of life. The space had no fire escapes and most of the cast were too young to drink at the hotel. But as one of the original actors, Lou Murphy, says now, ‘Corinne was instrumental in turning the hotel into a theatre, as well as an artistic and cultural melting pot.’ By the following year the downstairs space was home to one of Sydney’s first independent theatre companies, and by 2012 it had staged 133 shows, more than fifty of them new Australian works.
Many actors and writers started out there and went on to bigger things, including Jeremy Sims, Toby Schmitz, Ewen Leslie, Tim Minchin, Brendan Cowell and Kate Mulvany. It’s a sign of the affection the theatre inspires that they return to see shows, take part in a revival, or perform at fundraisers to keep it going. Many of the casts change costumes in the cellar, but it’s said to be haunted and actors have reported seeing or sensing a presence in the room; even now there are those who don’t like to be alone in the room with the lights out. For the superstitious, both the cellar and the top floor have their resident ghosts and are to be avoided.
After Garry bought the hotel at the beginning of the new millennium, Corinne and her husband left for the Fox and Lion at Fox Studios and the Tamarama Players ran the theatre until, frustrated with what they thought was the poor condition of the space, they departed for Bondi. Other groups came and went. One artistic director, who seemed to despair of attracting large audiences, stormed into the bar one night where a sprinkle of people were waiting in line to get into the show, and shouted out to the Motley Crew, ‘Okay, who called me a cunt?’ Given we had no idea what he was talking about, it was a sign his theatre company would soon exit, as it did. Then a trio, Red Line Productions, took over in January 2015 and their energy and shrewd programming, especially around the time of the Mardi Gras with plays like Cock (a title that was catnip to gay men and curious women), attracted a huge gay following and general audiences became younger and more enthusiastic. The small theatre has a warm intimacy, as the players are within touching distance of the audience, and it’s no wonder it’s developed a reputation as an actors’ theatre.
Researching the history of the hotel it became apparent to me that the most successful eras, from the time of the gregarious Charles Halstenberg and his successor Martin Neary, have always depended on the personality of the publican as the perfect host. Garry is in that tradition. It’s as if he’s brought a country sensibility to the urban wilds of Woolloomooloo and created a true community pub, which is almost like a protected species compared to so many other Sydney hotels. His manner, sometimes firm, sometimes momentarily exasperated (with the council, customers, staff and me), often avuncular and laidback, is never confrontational and has helped fashion an ambiance that makes the Old Fitzroy
feel safe and egalitarian, no matter how dysfunctional its customers may be.
Upstairs there have been ukulele groups attended by pale middle-aged women and gormless men, choral societies and playreading groups. Probably the most predictable in their obnoxious behaviour are the sailors. They drink to excess and go through the same ritual of starting out telling stories and laughing, then graduating to hugging and kissing each other, until finally testosterone wins out and they start fighting the very people they were embracing only an hour before.
The only real blood spilt while I’ve been drinking at the pub was in December 2009 and the incident was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph with the headline: ‘Drinker hacked in Woolloomooloo pub meat cleaver brawl’. There was a photograph of a man wearing a makeshift white bandage around his head, his shirt open to reveal a flabby body with splashes of blood on it, and a report that a fifty-eight-year-old man had chopped a forty-three-year-old male patron across his head, causing ‘a large wound to his forehead and fracturing his skull’. Apparently there had been an argument between the men and the older one had run a short distance to his house in Dowling Street and returned with a meat cleaver. The wounded man retaliated by striking ‘his assailant to the head with a schooner glass before both men engaged in a brawl on the floor of the hotel’.
It was easy to recognise the victim. It was Jamie, a barrister who was frequenting the pub a lot that year. There were photographs of the crowd milling outside the hotel and I recognised several, including Brad. He and a friend had separated the two men as they wrestled on the floor.
The major disturbances have come from a neighbour. A drawback of the area is that people shift into houses or units next to restaurants or hotels and then complain about the noise. In researching my book on Kings Cross I came across several people who had complained to the police up to four or five hundred times about noise and behaviour they didn’t like. This has become a growing trend in the past fifteen years as more people have bought into the locality. One woman who shifted in to a rental unit over a restaurant that I frequented had hearing so sensitive that she whinged about the rattle of cutlery. Down in Woolloomooloo it was no different. A man bought an apartment next to the Frisco Hotel and constantly complained about loud voices, laughter and the number of tables and chairs outside. A woman who moved in next to the East Sydney Hotel in Cathedral Street has never stopped complaining about the pub, which has stood there since 1853.
Then a man from a terrace house a few doors up from the Old Fitzroy began to complain about the number of drinkers on the footpath, who he had to weave through when he retrieved his empty garbage bins from around the corner. Live music and theatre crowds waiting to get in were other annoyances to him. He’d stand outside the pub counting the number of customers and photographing them. His appearance unnerved me: he was thin as a bean pole with an expression like a spooked emu.
One evening I could take it no more. I was tired of the harassment and bounded up the cul-de-sac and told him to stop harassing us and to get a life. He yelled out that I had hit him. The cops were called and they arrived immediately, unlike their usual tardy response to anything that happened at the pub. Witnesses said I hadn’t touched him.
The harassment didn’t stop there. It seemed that the serial complainer had the police and the city rangers on speed dial. I was questioned three times by police over imaginary threats.
When Mandy and I headed home of an evening, our two dogs liked to run up the cul-de-sac and bark at the feral cats which infested a slice of unruly bush next to the railway line and race back to us before the felines had a chance to attack them. They did not harm the cats and, of course, Chihuahuas presented no threat to those mean, lean, hungry cats. But the ghastly man seemed to have placed the dog-pound on special speed dial too, and rang them so many times that for a month the dog catchers would park in the cul-de-sac, hoping for any opportunity to impound Coco and Basil. These city rangers, who must have been on overtime, even stalked Mandy and me as we walked home one night, driving slowly up McElhone Street a metre or so behind us, making their presence obvious until I stopped and confronted them and asked them how two Chihuahuas could be considered trouble. They had no answer and I could tell that the two men now realised the ridiculousness of the situation. They were spending hours waiting for an opportunity to snatch two tiny dogs.
The next day I caught up with the neighbour and asked him how my small dogs could hurt feral cats. He gave the sly smile of someone who held a great secret, and replied, ‘Do you know how cats feel?’ It was then that I realised he was a troubled soul. But this did not make me any more sympathetic to him and I took to abusing him (coming from someone in their sixties, very childish).
What truly riled me was that the authorities were kowtowing to this one serial complainer. They constantly visited the pub, limiting the people and furniture outside the hotel, until there was literally none and we had to sit on the ground.
What I didn’t know was that Garry was exasperated by the mutual animosity between this bloke and the Crew and he was at his wit’s end to know how to deal with the authorities. A meeting was organised and Garry came to an agreement with the galoot.
Later that day he sat me down. ‘You and the others have got to ignore that guy.’ I said I would find it very difficult. ‘Louis,’ he sighed, ‘you’ve got to help me out.’
‘What do you mean, Garry?’
‘He’ll only stop the harassment of the pub if you stop abusing him.’
I was inwardly debating my reply when Garry looked directly at me, almost imploring me. ‘You’ve got to take one for the team.’
Some tables have returned to the outside, but there is a strict regulation on the number of chairs. What the experience taught me was that the ecology of an urban community means it will always have whingers and whiners, and if one dies or shifts away, a new one will appear. In the inner city, it seems to be the natural order of things.
Then there are the one-off visitors who are remembered for their momentary outbursts. I was having a drink in the bar one afternoon when I heard a woman screaming in the toilets. Suddenly an Aboriginal guy rushed outside, thrusting a bicycle pump into his bag. The bar manager ran into the toilets and discovered that the man had been thrashing his girlfriend with the pump. She refused any help and ran after her boyfriend and, still bruised and battered, headed up the street with him arm-in-arm as if nothing had happened. On another occasion I heard an agonised screaming in the toilets and Nathan went to investigate. He returned to tell me that a drugged guy was standing at the urinal staring at his penis and screaming. The druggie, finally mute, came out into the bar, poured himself a glass of water and froze in mid-sip, staying in that pose for over a minute before stumbling outside, his mind befogged with drugs.
The pub itself is attractive to filmmakers and has been a set for movies like The Daughter, The Dressmaker, and the TV series Love Child, set in the Cross in the 1960s. There have been many people like me who have wanted to write a TV series set there.
One afternoon Garry told me that a mate of his was writing a comedy series about the Old Fitzroy with the storyline of husband and wife publicans who are divorcing but have to stay together at the hotel.
‘There’s a brilliant scene where the husband has to listen to the wife in the next room fucking a customer. It’s hilarious,’ said Garry, laughing so much he had tears in his eyes. It sounded like a Carry On movie to me. ‘You know who’s helping him write it? Matthew Johns.’
I asked if that was the rugby league guy.
‘Yeah,’ said Garry, ‘he’s great at comedy. Do you want to have a talk to them?’
‘I’m afraid my sense of comedy is different,’ I said. He looked surprised and then smiled sympathetically at me, as if I were a right blockhead for turning down the chance to be part of a hit series.
I once asked Garry if he ever considered selling up and leaving the hotel, as it was rumoured he intended to do. He fell silent for a time and then
shook his head, saying he wouldn’t know what to do if he sold the pub.
‘I love to entertain and people entertain me. That’s the thing about a hotel — people come to have fun, that’s a wonderful thing.’
ENTROPY
FOR THE HUSTLERS, BROTHEL OWNERS, CON-MEN, criminals and sly-grog shop owners of Woolloomooloo, the Second World War was the perfect time to make money. Up on the heights in Potts Point and Kings Cross were neon lights, posh restaurants, a beautiful theatre and glamorous nightclubs for Australian, American and other Allied officers.
Down below in the shadows of the cliff face was a different world. It was here that the ordinary soldier or sailor came to have sex, drink and gamble. As long as you could pay for what you wanted it didn’t matter who you were. Unlike Kings Cross, black American servicemen were welcome. After all, they had more money than Australian soldiers. And as for those flashy Australians who modelled themselves on US servicemen on leave, the ultimate put-down was to call them ‘Woolloomooloo Yanks’.
Woolloomooloo, with its labyrinth of streets and lanes, was also a perfect place to hide if you wanted to avoid Manpower callups. There were hundreds of men and women who avoided work. As far as the government was concerned, the Gypsies were the worst. When their men were called up for work, they produced medical certificates to secure exemptions. Gypsy women, like Costa Sterio’s relatives Sophie and Helen, who were arrested and banished from New South Wales, preyed on gullible American servicemen who came down into the valley to have their fortunes told. The women made so much money that the Commonwealth Treasury Department raided the Gypsies’ homes in Dowling and Palmer streets and found gold coins worth nearly £2000. One old Gypsy had a necklace made from gold coins from every part of the world worth over £1000. Another had £600 in notes concealed in the tucks, folds and knots of her loosely fitting dress of vivid colours.