by Louis Nowra
What made the hurt worse was that at their trial in 2008, the four Tongans received light sentences. They pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and to supplying heroin. Leota received the top sentence of three and a half years, while his three companions were given even less, so no jail time went beyond 2010. When the family complained to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, someone from his office callously told them to ‘get over it’. But justice had one more tactless gesture to make — the first killer walked free on what would have been Shane’s fifty-third birthday. When she was interviewed in 2012 as the oldest barmaid in Sydney at the age of ninety-one, Shane’s mother, Lil Miles, said the grief was still very raw, ‘Every day, every time the door opens, I think it is him.’
But she still enjoyed working at the Bells, saying it was fun and hoping she was a help to the old blokes who drank there. ‘They are lonely, have no-one to talk to, and I am quite a good listener.’ A highlight during her time as barmaid was a Navy initiation ritual in the more unruly days of Woolloomooloo when the sailors would strip naked, wrap a newspaper up very tightly, ‘stick it in their arses and then light it. They’d run around the block and get blisters on their backsides and we thought it was so very funny.’
Some of the Old Fitzroy regulars come down to the Bells, especially on a Thursday evening when Juan plays. It’s a rare night that everyone doesn’t end up blotto. If I sit at the westernmost of the outside tables I can see the giant concrete wall that hides the expressway and attempts to muffle the sound of traffic. Beside it is a truncated street that used to be Lincoln Crescent. If you look up towards the northern section of the Eastern Distributor tunnel, you notice an elevated park, a grassed area near the Art Gallery and the Domain. The lawn is a roof that covers two huge structures built during the Second World War for oil storage that were never used. While the park above is rectangular, the reservoirs taper towards a point at their outer ends. The roof is supported by row upon row of narrow square pillars with box-shaped bases and inverted pyramid tops. The underground space has an eerie theatricality about it. The very few who haven’t forgotten its existence don’t know what to do with it, but nature is beginning to gnaw at it, the end wall is crumbling as roots penetrate the concrete from the trees in the park above.
As evening descends and you sit outside the Bells, the bay constantly transforms itself, whether it is an approaching storm changing the water from a sparkling bright green to a brooding inky blue, or the brilliant last rays of the setting sun gilding the surface and bathing the wharf in a warm golden glow.
At dusk the Finger Wharf begins to resemble a gathering of fireflies as the waiters light the table lamps and candles and prepare for the arrival of their diners. There will be few locals among them, the huge majority will be tourists and visitors. The Finger Wharf has become highly successful since its massive renovation, something that wasn’t on the agenda when the wharf became derelict in the 1980s.
The state government didn’t know what to do with the Finger Wharf. At 400 metres in length, it was one of the longest wharves in the world. There were developers who demanded it be demolished and it’s probably coincidence that over six months in 1991 there were three mysterious acts of arson on the wharf. Former prime minister Paul Keating, whose opinions carried a lot of weight with those who loathed anything that was a reminder of Sydney’s industrial past, said he hated it, calling it ‘an excrescence on the face of Sydney’.
Those protestors who wanted to keep the wharf won, and in 1999 there was a $300 million renovation, creating 345 apartments with exquisite and expensive views on the western side towards the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, a glamorous hotel, a marina and a series of swanky restaurants. The designers kept some of the conveyor belts and artefacts related to the wharf’s history when it played a crucial role in Australia’s economy as the place from which Australian wool was exported around the world. It’s the only surviving example of non-Naval maritime activity in Woolloomooloo Bay and, as such, is a vivid reminder of just how important it was to the character and residents of Woolloomooloo. The Finger Wharf was also where troops boarded transport ships during the First and Second world wars, and was one of the principal passenger wharves during the 1950s and 1960s for newly arriving migrants.
I’d often walked past the Finger Wharf or stared at it from outside the Bells as I sipped a gin and tonic, but had been there only once, when Mandy and I stayed at the hotel on our wedding night in 2003.
It was only recently that I ate there, one sunny December day during the centenary year of the wharf, which had opened in 1915. It was the perfect day to enjoy the ambiance with the marina within touching distance. The water lapping against the sides of the huge yachts and cruisers sounded like back slaps, as if the boats were congratulating each other. The restaurants line a boardwalk which many women use like a catwalk, parading to their destinations in micro minis, high heels, red carpet make-up and dyed blonde hair; their anonymous male partners dress in casual but costly bespoke suits. This was a place where diners lingered long over lunches, as if time and money were of no concern, and talked of publishing deals, share markets and shopping trips to Europe.
On the other side of the marina, past the boardwalk dotted with modern wooden and steel sculptures, are the squat apartments belonging to a block painted a gruesome muddy yellow; the shrubs and rushes on its roof resemble a buzz saw haircut. Gazing back at the foreshore I thought of the thousands of women and children saying goodbye to their husbands, sons and fathers as they sailed off to the Boer War, the Great War and the Second World War to a soundtrack of military bands, thousands of cheering people and boat horns escorting the troop ships out of the Heads. Later women would place wreaths and bouquets of flowers on the wooden wharf gates in memory of those who did not return.
In Europe the name Woolloomooloo became synonymous with Australia in the First World War, as demonstrated in the popular ballad ‘The Sergeant from the ’Loo’:
The Aussies were checked in their onrush in France
The Huns in a strong point held up their advance
But a sergeant who came from the home of the free
At Woolloomooloo thought he’d just go and see;
Four diggers he took, and a big bomb he threw —
And thirty surrendered to Woolloomooloo!
All that happy cacophony of troop departures for overseas changed into the sad, muted sounds of families greeting the ships containing the disabled, the wounded and shell-shocked men returning home. The rest of Australia could avoid this reality, but not the locals of Woolloomooloo, who had waved these men goodbye and were the first to greet them on their return. Not far from where I was lunching at China Doll had once been a beautiful memorial gate inaugurated in the early 1920s (now located further east along Cowper Wharf Road) that acknowledged the women who saw off their men and waited with trepidation for their safe return.
After lunch there was the long walk down the wharf and it was only when I returned to solid ground that I felt I was back in the real Woolloomooloo. The Finger Wharf is a glamorous, enchanting place, but it really isn’t part of the ’Loo. It’s as if the wharf stretches out into the bay like a quarantine station for the wealthy, preventing them being contaminated by what lies on the shore.
THE MOTHER OF THE PLACE
NATHAN WAS IN PARIS WHEN I EMAILED HIM and told him Shelley had died. He replied immediately:
That is the most devastating news I’ve heard all year. I love Shelley, she was the mother of the place. I can’t believe it. Literally can’t. Unbelievable. I’m shocked. I never expected this. There is no justice. There is no God.
His shock was compounded because my email was in response to one I received from him just an hour earlier asking, ‘What is the local neighbourhood gossip? Who has died now? Hopefully no-one.’ As far as the Motley Crew was concerned, the news was devastating, more so since there had been no warning. One day Shelley was her vibrant, funny self, the next she wa
s in a coma.
She had had a heart attack in her kitchen and never regained consciousness. A few days later Mandy and I visited her in St Vincent’s before Alex had to make the horrendous decision to turn off her life support system. She was in bed with a tube running from her mouth and about a dozen monitors blinking around her head like a kabbalistic halo. Nurses had put some make-up on her face and a slight touch of eyeshadow, so she had some reassuring resemblance to her normal self.
The Old Fitzroy regulars were just as stunned as Nathan. We were unprepared for this. The last time I had seen her she looked healthy and much younger than her sixty-one years, her youthfulness no doubt a product of her energy, compassion and sense of life being a great adventure, one she was proud to have thrown herself into — at times with wilful abandon.
Of all the deaths of the regulars this one affected us the most. It seemed unnatural not to see her sitting outside in her chair at the top table, her face glowing in the sun, bags of groceries at her feet, a beer before her and a cigarette between her fingers as she laughed at her silliness and ours. Her funeral service was attended by more mourners than any of the other Old Fitzroy deaths. There were so many people that they spilt out of the church and had to listen to the service on the speakers outside.
The mourners were Woolloomooloo locals, Old Fitzroy regulars, bar staff, those she worked with at the injection centre and Lifeline and, Alex, who had recovered from his own illness. Their son, Louis, had flown out from London. As Woolley said to me, ‘It’s been a long time since all the regulars were together.’ Maybe Nathan was right — the pub had lost its mother. It was as if some sort of indefinable but optimistic spirit in the pub had permanently vanished.
Alex asked me to read a poem at the service and I chose ‘The Cloud’ by Shelley because it wasn’t morbid and talked of how nature did not die but recycled itself. I didn’t know until then that our Shelley had been named after the romantic poet. I surprised myself. My voice quavered when I wanted it to be firm, especially on the line, ‘She was our daughter of earth and water’.
After the service we filed outside. The attractive minimalist art deco façade of the chapel was very much in the LA style and was sharply defined against the clear sunny sky. I looked up at the chapel’s chimney as her body, transformed into white smoke, drifted into the blue sky before disappearing.
THE ENTRANCE BECOMES THE EXIT : CROWN AN DRILEY STREETS
NUMBER 1 CROWN STREET NO LONGER EXISTS, but between 1913 and 1916 a tall, thin man in his fifties, with long hair and a beard, would emerge from his lodging house there. He’d be dressed in a short white Roman-style tunic, with bare head, arms and legs, his feet in sandals, and drift off into the streets trying to sell his self-published book The Answer. On a Sunday, he’d walk the short distance to the Domain and lecture the mobs about his theories of sexuality, sometimes to an audience of a thousand people. He had been corresponding with the sexual pioneer H. Havelock Ellis since 1899, and prophesised that ‘I shall become a scandal and a voice crying in the wilderness.’
‘The Socrates of Woolloomooloo’, William Chidley (or just Chidley to the press and public), thought that the answer to human misery lay in vegetarianism, sunlight, unrestricted clothing such as he wore, and a correct method of intercourse that would take place in the spring and only between true lovers. It was his sexual theories that caused him constant trouble. The love of his life, Ada, an alcoholic, had died years before, and a mixture of grief and sexual guilt had gnawed at him until he remembered the most astonishing night of sex he had had with her. Without his penis being erect he had penetrated her and both had come to orgasm. He began to believe that erections hurt women and that the way to true sexual love was via his idyllic act of copulation because, as he was fond of saying, ‘Our false coition makes villains of us all.’
Needless to say, these theories were ridiculed. Moralists, of which there were many, thought them disgusting; he was obviously dirty-minded and possibly insane. That he preached these ideas to the public in the Domain, sometimes in front of girls, made it worse. Larrikins attacked him and the police persecuted him. In the space of four years, he was prosecuted on eighteen occasions. His room in Crown Street was raided and 1700 copies of The Answer were confiscated. He was imprisoned three times and once confined to Callan Park asylum. In the court case to determine Chidley’s sanity in 1916, an arresting police sergeant spoke for all the authorities when he observed that Chidley was the ‘most leniently treated man in Sydney’.
During the case his landlady appeared as a witness for him. Chidley had lived in her respectable lodging house in Crown Street for two and a half years and she thought him ‘a very nice and perfect gentleman’. And, she added, there had been no complaints from the lodgers or the neighbours against him. But, even though he wasn’t regarded as ‘a dangerous lunatic’, those doctors who were considered experts in ‘mental diseases’ deemed him insane. One government medical officer, who saw a thousand patients a year, was satisfied that Chidley was mad. Another doctor, Arthur Cahill, found Chidley was suffering from ‘moral insanity’, even though he was a ‘very gentlemanly lunatic’.
He was certified insane and incarcerated in the Goulbourn asylum, where he attempted to commit suicide. A Chidley Defence Committee was formed, and the press and even a few members of Parliament agitated for his release, but it was in vain. Later that same year, 1916, he died of a heart attack. His autobiography, The Confessions of William Chidley, was published in 1977. Alongside some eccentric ideas, it contains his beautiful, sane belief that human misery could be overcome by gentleness and love. No wonder thick-headed cops and medical authorities wanted him locked away.
The lodging house has been replaced by a huge apartment complex with an exterior so bland it is immediately forgettable compared to the row of terraces directly opposite. Because this is the beginning of Crown Street, near where it meets Sir John Young Crescent, few people know of this small enclave. Each two-storey terrace from number 2 to number 34 has a particular role to play in the row as a whole. There’s something selfconscious about the subdued colour schemes. Every front garden is thick almost to bursting point with frangipanis, exotic ferns, monsteras, rare succulents, camellias, vines snaking around towering palms, the bright scarlet flowers of poinsettias, and immaculately cropped hedges. The houses have names like Burdekin and Aston Villa, and, like the exteriors and interiors, the iron-lace balconies have been lovingly restored. This is the most consistent and beautiful row of Victorian terraces in Woolloomooloo and can only be matched by similar rows of terraces in posh Potts Point.
If you walk up Crown Street and pass dreary Bossley Terrace, there is a two-storey building at number 108 Crown, on the corner of Cathedral, which now houses a firm called Octet. Its website describes itself as, ‘an Australian based enterprise whose people have deep industry experience and knowledge of transaction finance and understand the structural market issues that businesses must face in order to grow and become successful’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it was Soren’s Wine Bar and Restaurant, at the time highly influential in educating Sydneysiders about wine. It attracted a diverse crowd of students, academics, media people and wine lovers.
One of the students was Irina Dunn, who attended Sydney University. After listening to a lecture by a professor of philosophy who remarked, ‘Man needs God like fish need a bicycle’, she changed it to, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ and wrote it on a dunny door at Soren’s, where it became so famous that it was later attributed to the American feminist Gloria Steinem. Dunn went on to become a teacher and politician and lived long enough to have Steinem acknowledge that it was the Australian who invented the phrase (and like her fellow Americans the capitalist Steinem was puzzled why Dunn hadn’t copyrighted it).
Ron Blair’s play, Last Day in Woolloomooloo, is a 1981 comedy about the final days of the inhabitants of a boarding house and their attempts to fight eviction by the developers. It was thought to be based on th
e boarding house that became Soren’s Wine Bar. The characters, as one reviewer wrote, are ‘Anzac boozers, an ageing poof and his pretty boy, your sentimental old barmaid who “manages” the joint and your average necromancer’. For much of its length it’s a realistic work but there’s a sudden lurch into absurdism at the end when a dead cat is resurrected. Its most attractive features are its characters and milieu, based on lodgers Blair knew when he ran a similar establishment. This odd group fears being separated because of events beyond their control. They are forced to confront potential loneliness, a feeling that would have been experienced many times in real life by lodgers during the resumptions and demolitions of boarding houses throughout the history of Woolloomooloo.
On the southern corner of Cathedral and Crown is one of Sydney’s oldest pubs, the East Sydney, which opened in 1853. It is a dark, cosy place, popular of a Sunday when customers come to hear jazz. The owner is respected by many in the area because he refuses to install pokies. It’s a sign of Woolloomooloo’s irreverent attitude to famous people that until recently there was a striking portrait of Jack Mundey (who had helped save the area) by Andrew Sibley hanging on the wall of the men’s toilet, a weird counterpoint to the heroic murals of Mundey and other Green Ban leaders on the pylons of the nearby railway viaduct. Sitting outside the pub of an afternoon, bathed in the setting sun, you can see the SOHO Galleries on the corner opposite; its huge windows display art that has no redeeming value except to match the colour of a wall or to fill up an annoying blank space in the home.