by Louis Nowra
Brothels big and small proliferated. In tiny, dark Corfu Street, Mrs Norma Woods, twenty-nine, had a two-storey house with the ground floor windows boarded up. Parties with sly grog and prostitutes were held often and, as the neighbours said, ‘servicemen were frequent visitors’ — even to their horror, black Americans. One night the neighbours heard several shots and Woods was shot in the stomach as she answered her front door. As she was dying in hospital she told police that after a knock on her door, she opened it and a shot was fired. She refused to tell the police who had done it, saying, ‘If I am shot, what does it matter? You only have to die once, so why worry?’
These men and women seemed only out for themselves and had no sense of patriotism. Newspapers labelled them an ‘army of parasites’. Every night in the area there were ‘plonk’ parties attended by women from ages nineteen to forty and men of all ages. Most of the women had convictions and many aliases. These parties were held in houses of ‘indescribable filth’ or condemned terraces. If that wasn’t enough, drinking parties were held in air-raid shelters. Woolloomooloo’s reputation was such that only a mug would venture down there. In early 1945 during a court case where a Chinese seaman had been robbed of £100 by a kitchenhand, the exasperated crown prosecutor described what he thought was the bleeding obvious. The place:
… had many types of bad men … in addition to the violent, reckless and low sneaking jackals and rats who lived there … There were, as everyone knew, places of ill-repute, haunts of prostitutes and places where liquor was illegally sold. To such places fools would go, particularly at night, and it often happened that the fools had their money taken by violence.
There were few people who would speak up for the area. One who did was AM Dawson, who wrote a piece defending it in the Sydney Morning Herald in March 1945. He was well acquainted with its notoriety. When he’d tell people he came from Woolloomooloo ‘the reaction was instantaneous, and seldom varied. I could almost hear the gasp … I felt the company set me apart as something of a curiosity rather than a person.’ He knew that anyone from the suburbs ‘must shudder when he beholds the terraces of dying houses, leaning together for support’, but for Dawson, Woolloomooloo had an ‘intangible spirit of something [the locals] really don’t understand themselves’. Perhaps this was a spirit of defiance. He used as an example his time at the reviled Plunkett Street School, where the pupils developed a loyalty to the area because of how people from the outside mocked the so-called ‘slum school’.
He saw a Woolloomooloo childhood as something special. After all, the city was their playground, as was the Botanic Garden, the bay was perfect for fishing, catching crabs and paddling, and there were the Fig Tree Baths for swimming. Unlike suburban schools, Plunkett Street School was a veritable United Nations with Chinese, Aboriginal, Maltese, Greek, Italian, Estonian, Polish, English, Scottish and Irish children, and all as good as each other.
Dawson acknowledged that local kids saw things ‘we shouldn’t have seen, but it gave us a keen sense of values’. What other Australians didn’t know was that in this tight community everyone knew each other and acts of kindness and charity towards the less fortunate were common. But there was no mistaking that it could be a harsh world, where many had to work hard simply for a basic wage, whether as a wharf labourer, a street worker or office cleaner. Nevertheless, the place had a Chaucerian richness, a pulsating diversity of human life — sly-grog sellers, whores, gangsters, bashers, beggars, blind men, good people, bad people, cruel and kind people, drunkards and the devoutly religious.
Dawson’s was almost a lone voice compared to Woolloomooloo’s many critics, who wanted these people and their houses erased. Just after the war architects presented a plan to the government that proposed an opera house in the Domain behind the Art Gallery and a big block of flats in the southern, more elevated, part of Woolloomooloo. The land near the wharves (‘mostly slums’) would be bulldozed for a sports stadium. There was a more considered plan a few years later, in 1953, when the population was about 5500. An elevated eastern suburbs railway line would be built, with an arterial road running right through the centre of Woolloomooloo. About 1400 residents would be rehoused under a slum clearance scheme, while the rest would simply disperse or be dispersed. The basic idea was to retain the area solely for light industry.
The plans were not followed through. Woolloomooloo and its residents were easy to forget and life continued as it had before. Wharf workers drank at the waterfront hotels, Italian fishermen dried and repaired their nets in the streets and in May every year from 1952 onwards, the blessing of their fishing fleets took place, organised by the Franciscan Capuchin Fathers, with a prize given to the best decorated ‘smack’ (boat).
Crime hadn’t disappeared. SP bookies ran their operations out of private houses and hotels like the Old Fitzroy. Brothels, sly-grog shops and gambling houses dominated Palmer and Bourke streets and the lanes that siphoned off them. It was a place that provided good copy for the tabloids. In April 1952 the Vice Squad trailed three Chinese seamen into a terrace in Dowling Street. A woman opened the door and the Chinese men trooped in. As the police ran towards the door before it closed, the woman called out to others in the house, ‘Look out! Here’s the police!’ and attempted to slam the door in their faces.
The police pushed past her and when they burst into the hall they saw a nude redhead, carrying a frock, hurtle down the stairs from an upper floor. She raced by the astonished cops and into the backyard and locked herself in a toilet. When she had dressed, twenty-year-old Phyllis Donald emerged and was arrested for vagrancy. Upstairs, in the room she had fled, the squad found a young Chinese lad lying naked on the bed. He said he had met Phyllis for the first time that night and had paid her £2. After searching the terrace the police found another dozen Chinese men. The woman who had tried to prevent the police from entering the house was Daphne Norma Conquest, who said, ‘We don’t do any harm. You can see for yourself that the place is clean and well kept.’
The first time the author George Farwell heard of marijuana was when he was living in Dowling Street. It was with some sense of pride that he wrote, ‘The ’Loo was always ahead of other places. Whatever was going in Sydney, you would find it down there.’ Cocaine was too expensive compared to heroin, which was becoming increasingly popular, especially when the American servicemen came to Sydney from Vietnam on R&R. By 1965 Customs authorities were worried. In one instance they had found a huge stash of heroin in the false bottom of a case of whisky on a liner. It confirmed their suspicions that increasing amounts of heroin were being transferred from ships on Asian routes to American vessels which docked at the Finger Wharf.
One of the first underground LSD laboratories in Sydney was set up in Woolloomooloo. In 1967 a university research scien-tist was among three men and a woman who were arrested for organising the manufacture and distribution of LSD. They had been under surveillance for three months. When police raided the lab they found 500 micrograms of the drug impregnated into blotting paper. The twenty-one-year-old woman distributed the drug by hiding packets of it in a pram next to her three-month-old baby. The head of the investigation told the court that, ‘I feel that in this group we have wiped out an organised ring in the manufacture of the hallucinatory drug.’ Farwell was right, Woolloomooloo was always in the vanguard of illegal trends, as the frustrated magistrate conceded. All he could do was fine each defendant £100 each, the maximum under the law. He told the four they were fortunate that a new law governing the drug hadn’t come into effect yet. ‘If I were dealing with you under the Police Offences Act, I would sentence you to eighteen months hard labour.’
Crime percolated its way to the top. Albert Sloss, a member of the Labor Party, represented the area in the NSW Legislative Assembly from 1956 to 1973. He had been brought up in the ’Loo attended to Plunkett Street School, and was so popular that his electorate was known as ‘Slossville’. A short, earnest man with watchful eyes, he was born in 1911 and was a labourer for fourte
en years before becoming an alderman and licensee of two inner-city hotels. He married an attractive fifteen-year-old girl in 1930 and they lived in public housing in Dowling Street, paying a suspiciously lower rent than anyone else.
During the war Sloss signed up as a gunner and served in Darwin for two years before managing to convince the authorities he was ‘unfit for service in hot, humid climates and was unfit for marching’. He was given the job of cutting sandwiches and wiping down mess hall tables. In early 1945 he went AWOL in Sydney in order to campaign for a seat on Sydney City Council. The public was intrigued and newspapers tried to track him down, as did the provosts. His house was cordoned off by the Military Police as they waited for him to turn up, but even his wife didn’t know where he was.
‘I haven’t seen him’ she told reporters. ‘Our daughters are anxious to see him, but I know he will not show up until the campaign is over.’
He won the election but it was soon obvious he was corrupt. In 1953 it was alleged that he accepted ‘tributes’ from council employees he had helped, and he faced allegations of bribery over the allocation of fruit-barrow licences. These charges were mysteriously dropped when the principal witness went missing. His other grift was to use the threat of resumption against property owners. They were told that their property was needed for a library, park or rest centre and were advised that the resumption could be avoided at a price.
These allegations didn’t stop him from being elected to the NSW Parliament as a staunch Labor man. What the locals liked about him was that he was an outspoken and parochial representative for ‘Slossville’. His questions and speeches in Parliament seldom strayed beyond local concerns — traffic conditions on William Street and at Sydney Hospital (of which he was a director), parking restrictions and the need for a traffic tunnel under Kings Cross. He was a disruptive and noisy presence in Parliament and was frequently suspended from sittings.
There was an even darker side to him. He may have been active in his local RSL branch, but he stole funds from it. One of his favourite haunts was the Macquarie Hotel (now the Woolloomooloo Bay), where he would wheel and deal with gangsters. He was a silent partner with criminals such as Phil ‘The Jew’ Jeffs, who ran the notorious 50/50 Club on William Street. Jeffs was ruthless, a rapist and blackmailer and wealthy beyond belief from sly grog and cocaine. In 1967 when Richard Reilly, a vicious gangster, was murdered, Sloss’s name was found in his ‘black book’. He mixed with criminals, including those who controlled the slygrog trade, prostitution, illegal gambling and SP bookmaking. On occasion he met with criminals to decide how to carve up in the spoils of these illegal activities. His mendacity and greed were boundless, but he was never convicted of a crime and only left Parliament when his seat was abolished. Even though Woolloomooloo locals knew he was crooked, he was affectionately known as ‘The Squire of Slossville’ and ‘Mr Slosh’.
As residents left the decaying area, some artists took advantage of the low rents. The Ukrainian painter Michael Kmit set up a studio in Cathedral Street. Described as ‘one of the most sumptuous colourists of our time’, he immigrated here in 1949 at the age of thirty-nine and immediately established himself as a unique artist, notable for introducing to Australia a neo-Byzantine style of painting executed in a cubist fashion learned from his teacher in Paris, Fernand Léger. One of his best works is an exquisite depiction of a Woolloomooloo Italian fisherman and his boat. Despite Kmit and a handful of other painters living in the area, most only stayed for a short time and no creative community developed.
For a couple of years the Macquarie Hotel was the centre of the ’Loo’s ‘jazz age’. With the end of six o’clock closing in 1954, hotels needed to keep their patrons entertained and the publicans featured live music. The waterfront hotels, once the domain of wharfies and seamen, started to attract a new clientele: longhairs, hippies, silvertails and outer-suburban couples. But old habits died hard and late at night the Macquarie Hotel would raffle prostitutes for two shillings and sixpence a ticket. The joke was that the women were so ugly that the winner would always choose the second prize of a carton of beer.
But there was an exception to the exodus of residents and the visual blight of crumbling slums. In August 1963 the new Astor Motor Hotel opened on the site of the old fish market bounded by Plunkett, Bourke, Forbes and Wilson streets. It had cost the extraordinary sum of half a million pounds to build and was advertised as Australia’s largest and most lavish motor hotel. It was only the second hotel to be built in the city area since the end of the war.
The Astor was the epitome of modern technology and design. Three storeys high, with a drive-in reception area and two floors of indoor parking for guests’ vehicles, it had an electronic booking system at the reception desk which recorded the occupancy of each suite and the progress of the servicing and cleaning of each room. The main entry to the accommodation section was equipped with automatic-opening sliding doors, activated by pressure on rubber mats on either side. An automatic elevator ran from both reception and the basement car park.
There was a novel selection of single, double, twin, family, executive or penthouse suites. The luxurious twin bed suites opened onto an enclosed Japanese garden. The other ninety-six suites were of various types and sizes but all were equipped with a radio, background music channels, a television, a telephone, a fully tiled shower recess, toilet and vanity basin, air conditioning and heating, a refrigerator, wall-to-wall carpet, a writing desk and large picture windows overlooking the pool and garden. It was fully licensed with a dining room for both guests and the public.
Its main newspaper and magazine advertisement showed a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a gorgeous frock leaving their car and heading towards the bright lights of the sophisticated bar. Famous Australian and American comedy and musical acts played in the Harbour Room. A local, George Farwell, arrived one time wearing a sports jacket and a cravat but was turned away because he wasn’t wearing a tie. He could hardly believe it — one now had to wear a tie in Woolloomooloo.
The Astor was a modern anomaly among the slums, warehouses, empty houses filled with squatters and ad hoc car parks. One demolition locals remembered for a long time happened in 1957 when, without warning, St Kilda, the second-oldest home in Woolloomooloo, was razed to the ground. Its history went back to the Riley Estate when Charles Scott bought four and three-quarter perches (just over 120 square metres) of land in 1844 and built a mansion he dubbed St Kilda. It remained in the Scott family for over a hundred years. It had broad upstairs verandahs, many rooms and a gigantic Norfolk pine growing out the front in Cathedral Street. For a few years from 1879 it was a Jesuit school (its most famous scholar was the poet Christopher Brennan), and after that a private hospital. In its declining years it was a boarding house.
The way the tenants were forced out of the mansion became a template for later developers. The new owners, Auto Auctions, destroyed the internal floors to such an extent that those tenants still remaining found ceilings crashing in on them. The gas and water pipes were ‘accidentally’ severed. As one resident remembered, her mother ‘polished up her old primus and lent it to a lady friend so she could cook some porridge and stew. Others of us cried “Halt” as best we could to no avail. St Kilda came down for an asphalt car park.’
The houses around Pring, Dowling and McElhone streets were demolished and a huge Navy storehouse built. Other warehouses and light industry quickly followed. The Commonwealth government itself was the landlord of what was considered the shabbiest slum real estate in Sydney, owning 125 cottages and ‘hovels’ in Woolloomooloo. The residents could not remember the government ever having spent a penny on paint and repairs. As one report stated, ‘Some of the houses were almost derelict, presenting a picture of rotting woodwork and broken windows.’
One person who did care was the painter Sali Herman. Born in Zurich, he came to Australia in 1937 at the age of thirty-nine. For twenty years he lived in Wylde Street in Potts Point, on a clifftop at the rear of an apartme
nt block. His own surroundings held little interest for him; he was drawn to the working-class area of Woolloomooloo and over the years became its visual chronicler. A realist, he used heavy impasto and scraped at his work with a palette knife to give his pictures a raw, tactile quality. His colour spectrum was like Woolloomooloo itself: browns, greys, dirty yellow, burnt orange and black. His paintings of the slums and their occupants, the ‘dissatisfied proletariat’, were considered tasteless compared to the quaint, romantic slums filled with contented people depicted in the work of Julian Ashton or Lionel Lindsay. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that Herman’s depictions were a shocking repudiation of the great Australian Dream.
One of the criticisms of Herman was that he was a socialist, but as he often said, the scenes he painted were his emotional states rather than ‘the sadness of the slum’ itself. His slums are dotted with people, seemingly as self-absorbed and lonely as any in Edward Hopper’s work. His eye was unflinching. From an early work, Sydney, 1942, he was intrigued by the heterogeneous dilapidated terraces with their few occupants either sitting on a rickety balcony or on a street bench. In another one, Demolition 1954 he depicts only the outlines of the destroyed houses on the walls of those that remain. He often returned to the subject matter of the partly demolished rows of terraces, revealing the evidence of former houses in the shapes of faded wallpaper and patches of colour on the walls of old rooms and stairways. To Herman this archaeology of the ghostly human presence expressed the transience and loneliness of life.
Other paintings showed bored kids sitting on footpaths or in the gutters, plump housewives standing in doorways with young children, solitary figures lost in thought on the balconies, a woman knitting in a chair outside her bleakly plain house, and always in the background are the smoking chimneys, distant cranes and partial glimpses of ships moored at Cowper Wharf. No-one seems to connect with anyone else; these are people who are stuck in the dreary daily grind of existence. The atmosphere is torpid and soaked with ennui, the residents appear devoid of hope, as if reality has sucked out their sap. The rows of terraces they live in should have crumbled and collapsed from neglect but are glued together by a weary resignation. Herman’s Woolloomooloo is a disturbing visualisation of urban entropy.