Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  Palmer and Bourke were once the epicentre of brothels, gambling dives, sly-grog shops and criminal haunts, but the Roads and Traffic Authority achieved what preachers, missionaries and moralistic reporters couldn’t do. Now the eastern side of Palmer Street is a dumping ground ineptly hidden behind flimsy cyclone fences and the western side is a blur of bland apartment buildings only visible from the inside of a car.

  But if you drive down Palmer Street and stop at the Cathedral Street traffic lights, there’s a tiny space that was illegally created by guerrilla gardeners and artists that has become permanent. It has four pseudo traffic signs with black images on yellow backgrounds, each containing part of the word Woolloomooloo. The first has the image of a sheep, then there’s a toilet seat, followed by a cow and then a second toilet seat. Behind the signs are a couple of cows skilfully constructed out of tin sheets and pots. Perhaps only Woolloomooloo can celebrate its name with such vulgarity.

  Before the expressway was constructed, much of the traffic to and from the bay went up Bourke Street on a road so badly constructed and poorly patched over the years that the very road itself and the houses along it would shake into the early hours of the morning. Now most of Bourke Street is a quiet residential street with a few automobile repair shops dedicated to expensive cars like Mercedes Benz and BMW, reminders of how, for forty years from the 1930s, Woolloomooloo’s streets had been a giant pagan shrine to that great transformer of urban landscapes, the automobile.

  The cars almost ate the whole of Woolloomooloo. Machine shops, car repair workshops, car parks (inevitably once a house or a row of terraces was demolished it became a car park) and dumped cars dominated the area and became more ubiquitous than its residents.

  After the redevelopment of Woolloomooloo, the southwest area was designated a commercial district and the rest was returned to the residents. Bourke could have turned out like Palmer and it seems as if it has when you stand at the corner of William Street and see the cars pouring into it, but they’re quickly siphoned off into the Eastern Distributor, vanishing underground and leaving the rest of the street to local traffic.

  Not far down on the western side of the street is a long row of two- and three-storey Victorian terraces, including one rented by the writer Bill Harding, who I’ve known for decades. His neighbours include a raucous Aboriginal family who fight, argue and party all the time, playing songs like ‘Islands in the Stream’ and ‘Beds are Burning’ up to forty times in an evening. One member of the family asked Bill if the music was too loud.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind it,’ said Bill, ‘besides, your people have been here longer than people like me so it’s the least I can do.’

  He’s amused that the vocabulary of their arguments consists mainly of the words ‘cunt’, ‘fuck’ and ‘poofter’, but now they’ve added ‘pedo’ to the limited mix. The casual swearing and violent verbal abuse in most of the terraces filters down to the children, and on one occasion Bill saw a three-year-old girl standing on the footpath defiantly yelling, ‘I am not a cunt!’

  There have been two recent deaths in Bill’s row of houses; a disturbed man in his thirties with a liking for ice and leather wear hanged himself, and Nadine (a ‘trannie’ in the old-fashioned argot of Woolloomooloo) was found in her terrace, naked, with her face in a bucket. Why she was in that position no-one knew. Nadine was a familiar figure in the streets. Slim, with badly dyed lank ginger hair down to her shoulders, she could be argumentative and I often saw her abusing people, some she knew, others were strangers to whom she had taken an instant dislike. Yet when she was trying to cajole or impress someone, she would adopt a posh private-school accent. If she cornered you, she would deliver an unstoppable monologue, which consisted mainly of fantasies so obviously untrue that it’s a wonder that even she believed them. One I was familiar with was about her fabulously rich parents and her education at the most elite school in Sydney; then there were the extraordinary stories about her travels around the globe, always first class, invariably with celebrity companions. The last time I was on the receiving end of one of her monologues she told me that she travelled with Qantas when she flew the domestic routes because the stewards always gave her — and no-one else — a complimentary cocktail.

  Nadine was one of many trannies who have lived in Woolloomooloo. Some have not completed their physical transformations because of a lack of money or reluctance to make the final body sacrifice (removal of the penis). A few are obviously mentally ill, though it is hard to tell whether they were like that before their sex change or if it’s the result of the life they’ve led afterwards. Some like Nadine have had to earn money by prostitution. Many live in a distressing world of poverty and face violent assault by men who are even more disturbed than they are. Nadine was unusual in that it seemed she wanted to provoke angry responses, so her death wasn’t a total shock to me, but I was surprised by the death of timid Tammy, who died in a Cathedral Street gutter after being ‘bricked’ by an ice fiend.

  Such public acts of violence run through the history of Woolloomooloo. In 1894, not far down from Nadine’s terrace, just after 7 o’clock one morning a passer-by saw a woman lying in Bourke Street while a man repeatedly stabbed her with a knife. The weapon was found, covered in blood, near the crime scene and the attacker, John Hannon, was soon arrested for maliciously wounding his de facto, Julia Hannon. They lived at number 1 Burrapore Street, just off Bourke. The Hannons were poor and the day before the attempted killing, all their furniture had been sold off and a neighbour had taken Julia in for the night. Early the next morning the Good Samaritan neighbour sent Julia to a butcher’s in Cathedral Street to buy some meat for breakfast. Hannon had been drinking and was waiting for his partner to appear. Once he saw her, he ran straight at her, pushed her over, fell to his knees and started stabbing her with a penknife.

  Julia spent three days in hospital and at the trial refused to swear on the Bible, telling the court that Hannon was ‘mad with drink’ when he attacked her. She was not his wife but had been living with him for many years, during which time he had never mistreated her. The judge concluded there was sufficient evidence to convict her spouse but he’d alter the charge from malicious wounding to common assault. A relieved Hannon immediately pleaded guilty but Julia begged the judge to deal with him leniently. When the judge sentenced Hannon to two months’ hard labour, Julia again protested, asking that Hannon only be fined. The exasperated judge had had enough and refused to change the sentence.

  Burrapore Street is now Talbot Place, and it and Burrapore Lane are the front and rear boundaries of the Matthew Talbot Hostel, but in the 1870s the area enclosed by these two streets was an enormous timber yard. Both thoroughfares ran parallel to Bourke, with Corfu Street leading directly onto it. Corfu is now a dark narrow thoroughfare featuring several quaint renovated Victorian cottages bunched up together and painted in whites, greens, ochres and reds as if they’re trying to brighten the shady street. Like many of the more interesting nooks of Woolloomooloo, these tiny, squat houses are seldom noticed, except perhaps by the alcoholics who slump in the shadows of narrow Talbot Place and Burrapore Lane or seek out the sun’s rays to warm themselves as they wait to sober up before they’re allowed into the hostel.

  On the left-hand side of Bourke, at the corner of Cathedral as you walk towards the bay, is the studio of Craig Handley, who drinks at the Old Fitzroy and lives in Nicholson Street with his wife, Christina (one of four women with the same first name who have occasional drinks at the Old Fitzroy). I first got to know him when I learnt he was an animator and had worked on one of my favourite cartoon series, Ren and Stimpy. He’s now a painter, and for Mandy’s birthday one year I commissioned him to paint her when she was nine and attending Plunkett Street School. It’s a moving portrait of a young girl who, though she doesn’t know it, will eventually write a memoir with a memorable chapter about the school.

  Adjoining Craig’s building on Cathedral Street is the successful chic café John Montagu. The owners
and staff are resigned to the behaviour of obstreperous locals, accepting it as part of the theatre of Woolloomooloo, whether it be the woman who whips away newspapers when customers are reading them and takes them to her own table, or the brain-addled woman on ice standing in the café demanding the staff to call the police while she screams abuse at her equally angry spouse.

  The café is a sign that this part of Woolloomooloo, especially along Cathedral and Crown, has changed dramatically these past few years. The new places are attracting people from outside Woolloomooloo (John Montagu has long queues wanting to get in of a weekend). Cafés and art galleries are cropping up, although there are no restaurants. During the day the office workers come for lunch and coffee, but at night the streets return to the locals.

  To continue down Bourke Street from Craig’s studio, alongside the seldom used bicycle track, is to arrive at one of many streets that have been truncated or obliterated. Called Junction Street, it exists now only as a passageway to get to Kidman’s Terrace, a private road which is not so much a road but a sliver of a lane formed by the backyards of a dozen Victorian terraces; within it residents have created a secret garden that resembles a miniature rainforest.

  This is another ignored cranny. I only learnt of it through Terry and Mark, a gay couple who have lived in the area for twenty-five years. They often tell stories in the Old Fitzroy of how, in the first few years after they had moved in, they learnt to keep their car unlocked so that junkies wouldn’t break the windows trying to find something of value inside the vehicle, and how, when drunk, they depended on the kindness of the crossies and trannies working in the shadows just off William Street to guide them home to Kidman Terrace through the then-perilous streets.

  A few steps from Junction Street is an open lawn under the viaduct where there was once a row of terraces. Some of the homeless sleep or drink there, wanting to avoid the arguments and violence that break out among the homeless and druggies in Tom Uren Place. Behind the toilets is a sturdy steel fence with a pretty community garden that is locked to everyone except the gardeners. It’s laid out in a neat grid of garden plots, unlike the small messy community garden in Dowling Street. The range of plants is enormous: herbs (rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage and parsley), fruit trees (lemons, limes) and vegetable patches of beans, tomatoes, lettuce, rocket and even trendy kale. There is a plan to double the size of the garden, house chooks and install a native beehive. Again, what is striking is how Woolloomooloo is able to sustain close social juxtapositions that would be unheard of elsewhere — here, the druggies, alcoholics and the mentally disturbed exist side by side with residents whose leisure time is spent gardening.

  Across the road there’s an enchanting spot, so totally unexpected that it took me several times to find it again after first accidentally coming upon it. You turn a corner in Charles Street, once straight and true, now truncated into a T, and suddenly find yourself in a common hemmed in on the northern side by Harmer Street. This small square of lawn and its two enormous trees is bordered by public housing. The houses seem to have turned their backs on this beautiful space, and hide behind their rear fences of roughly hewn sandstone. It’s a quiet sanctuary from ugliness and noise. On the occasions I’ve been there, sitting in dappled sunlight under the rich canopy of leaves, I have never seen anyone else. It’s so isolated that perhaps the homeless are afraid to go there and would sooner rest across in the Bourke Street Park, where they can be seen by others and so feel safer.

  Back out on Bourke Street there is a notable difference between the houses on each side of the street. On the western side, the redevelopers saved many of the terraces, but demolished all the homes across the road and in Harmer Street. What fascinates and appals is that the renovated Victorian terraces exude a nobility, a delicate charm, unlike the houses built in the 1970s and 1980s. These are sullen, chalet-like two-storey homes, with sloping roofs covered in black slates. Those facing the western sun on Bourke are hidden behind high brick fences that are dirty with rainwater and moss, while the others, especially in Harmer Street, cower in the shade and shadows. They look ugly and damp and forlorn. All the good intentions of the planners have failed here and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see these houses demolished long before the Victorian terraces across the road.

  Harmer Street was once called Bay Street, and when it flooded in 1984 it was easy to see how it had gained its original name; for years the high tides would cover the flat land right up to this point. The street seems benign, even bland, but a couple of years back one of the houses blew up; it had been used as a meth lab, and since then the house has remained a burnt-out and blackened shell behind a cyclone wire fence.

  Back in the early 1950s a gang of blonde women ruled this area around Bourke and Harmer. Headlines warned of ‘The battling blonde ladies of the ’Loo’. These hard-drinking blondes, many with criminal records, were violent and intimidating. Wild sex orgies and hard drinking sessions were rumoured to be held in the back lanes around Harmer Street. One resident complained that ‘Their orgies keep this part of Woolloomooloo awake at night. The language and obscenity have given one man a nervous breakdown.’ Some parents resorted to sending their children away because of the women’s bad influence. The blondes were so vicious that locals were too scared to go to the police. A shopkeeper remarked that the women ‘rule the neighbourhood by terror’, and one garage mechanic observed that ‘Sometimes — usually on a Saturday afternoon — they have brawls among themselves and they fight like cats.’

  The rampaging blondes disappeared into history but they would have been familiar with a shop on the western corner of Bourke and Harmer streets. Now a dirty white terrace with a rusting cast-iron balcony, it has faded anti–Clover Moore posters in the windows, rotting filigree curtains and an atmosphere of abjection and defeat. For years this was a boarding house, and it was where Nathan Roche lived while working at the Old Fitzroy. Now derelict, or maybe not, this was home to crazies, alcoholics, ice addicts, bitter lonely men and those who lived permanently in the dark night of the soul.

  Nearing the bay there’s a cluster of six inconspicuous houses between Nicholson and Bland streets, but they are significant examples of many early Sydney terraces that emerged from the Georgian and Victorian styles. They were part of a building boom from the 1860s to the 1880s when extensive stands of terrace housing were built to accommodate a rapidly growing population. By the 1890s many terraces had become slums and during the 1920s terrace housing was banned in almost all parts of Australia.

  A short walk on the same side of Bourke Street ends at the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel. It’s a huge structure with many outdoor seats and drinking and eating areas upstairs and downstairs. It’s popular with tourists and office workers, with simple pub food, many pokies and a huge TV screen showing sports. Once called the Nell Gwynne, it has had several name changes since, including the Macquarie Hotel. During the Second World War and the 1950s the Macquarie was one of the few pubs in Sydney where black sailors and soldiers could drink unmolested (there are photographs of them drinking with both white and Aboriginal women). It became a jazz haunt during the 1960s and early 1970s, when Mandy’s father worked in bands as a drummer there. The pub was notorious for its raffling of prostitutes, and as seaman Mick Fowler, also a musician and a legendary opponent of greedy developers during the Victoria Street Green Bans, said, ‘It was really rough. The roughest pub I have ever worked in.’

  On the other side of Bourke Street is the Bells Hotel, which has been run by the Miles family since 1973 and attracts a loyal clan of local customers. The original pub was demolished in the 1920s and a new one built set further back from the bay so the council could widen the road. Like the Macquarie, the Bells was close to the wharves and for years its customers were mainly waterside workers. In 1954 it was bought by Jimmy Carruthers, Australia’s first world boxing champion. Carruthers was a local, born and bred. He had trained as a youngster at the Police Boys’ Club not far from the pub and had worked as a wharfie before ta
king up professional boxing. What bemused customers was that he was also a teetotaller. When he became publican of the Bells he announced, ‘I do not intend to learn drinking now. Drinking and running a hotel do not mix.’

  What he didn’t count on was that boxer Ray Coleman, whom he had once defeated on points when he was on his way to winning the world title, continued to hold a grudge against him, believing the judges had made the wrong decision. An angry, sore loser, Coleman would come into the pub, stand at the door and yell abuse at his former opponent, ‘You dog, Carruthers!’ and taunt him to come outside and fight. Carruthers paid no attention until one day Coleman abused his wife. That was the breaking point for Carruthers and he told Coleman to meet him in the Domain.

  Locals and waterside workers heard about the fight and soon a large crowd gathered on the lawn next to the Art Gallery. The fight was quickly over when Carruthers knocked out Coleman. The braggart never turned up at the Bells again.

  But pubs can be dangerous for both customers and staff. One night in December 2004 a drunk Tongan, Joseph Leota, was becoming increasingly aggressive towards one of the pool players in the Bells. After he was told to leave by the barman, Shane Miles, Leota phoned up his Tongan mates, who drove all the way from Villawood to Woolloomooloo. The four of them entered the pub and one immediately threw a chair at the pool player, striking him in the face. Once he was on the floor, the Tongan kicked him in the head. Not content with that, Leota threw a bar stool at another drinker, but it missed and struck Shane’s skull, fracturing it. He never recovered and just after Christmas his life support system was turned off.

  His whole family was devastated, including his brothers Rory, Danny and Patrick and his sister Erin. I knew Rory slightly because he used to be a tennis coach and when I played down at Rushcutters Bay courts, he’d be on the neighbouring court patiently and gently encouraging players from young kids to arthritic pensioners.