by Louis Nowra
Woolley and his friend Vince spent some years attending to various courses at TAFE. One was about cleaning and their teacher showed them how to pull a plug from a urinal and if there was still ‘white gunk’, that meant you had to clean it more thoroughly. They did another course but had to put up with four arrogant French backpackers who constantly complained about Australia, especially the weather and our bread. It was the complaints about Australian baguettes that broke both men. ‘They got to us,’ said a cheerful Vince, remembering the moment, ‘so we had to deck two of them.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘But, man, they shouldn’t have bad-mouthed our baguettes.’
Their most recent course was one that particularly interested Woolley, caring for the elderly. Vince failed when he mixed up two coloured tubes, accidentally giving the realistic dummy a douche in the mouth. They also had to pretend to inject adrenalin. ‘It was just like in Pulp Fiction,’ said an enthusiastic Vince. ‘Straight in the fucking chest!’
Certainly Woolley’s compassion towards older men is extraordinary. I once asked him why.
‘You see, Lou, these men have no-one else. They’ve screwed up with their families, so no-one visits them and they live lonely lives. There’s a lot of loneliness in Woolloomooloo.’
When he has his exquisite hand-made leather bag slung over his shoulder I know it’s full of paperwork. He fills in forms for men who can’t manage, the illiterate, those who have left a bureaucratic mess behind at their deaths (Woolley having to track down children and relatives), and arranges paperwork for those old men who are to be placed in nursing homes.
There’s a sense that Woolley’s empathy has been hard earned by events in his own life. His evident concern for these lonely old men, some of them rascals and bastards even in middle age, is admirable. Even when a loopy and aggressive Ritchie punched him in the head and knocked him down, giving him headaches for days, Woolley feared that the police, if they were called, would do more harm than good. What Ritchie needed was health workers to make sure he took his medication. Being arrested by the police would solve nothing. This is not to say that he’s not critical of some locals. There are those whom he holds in contempt for their cruelty and wickedness.
I once pressed Woolley about the source of his evident empathy with the hurt, lonely, obstreperous, intemperate, delusional and shambolic locals. ‘It’s because I was in the Army. You get to care for people who can’t look after themselves. They need order, which I try and provide. In other words I teach them CRAP; Consistency. Responsibility. Accountability. Persistence.’
It’s his humour, trust and affection for fellow humans that is so appealing, and when Eric had skedaddled after conning the locals, Woolley took longer than most of us to recover from the betrayal.
‘I really liked him,’ he said on more than one occasion, shaking his head and trying to comprehend how a man he regarded as a friend would hurt so many people. Though I suspect, that unlike everyone else, Woolley would forgive him if he returned and apologised.
Perhaps, above all, I’ve found my Virgil, my guide, to be someone who in just over fifteen years since he arrived in Woolloomooloo, has fallen in love with the area, with its pockets of beauty, its weird combination of public housing and private dwellings, of those who need help and those whose personal stories are never to be judged but accepted as examples of the foibles and failings common to us all.
THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD
TWO YEARS INTO THE TURN OF THE CENTURY and a week before Christmas, Mandy and I had finished our lunch at the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel and were walking up Forbes Street when we saw preparations for a children’s performance in Tom Uren Place. Parents, relatives and friends were still dressing the children, so we sat and waited until there were about thirty people in the audience.
One boy had a tin drum hanging from his neck and he kept playing it, oblivious to efforts to stop him. Then the performance started. It was a nativity play, and the teenage girl playing Mary had her own baby as Jesus. The three wise men were boys dressed in robes borrowed from the opportunity shop and had towels around their heads to indicate they were Arabs.
As the children acted out the arrival of the three wise men, the drummer boy kept playing over the top of their dialogue. It was as if he was possessed by the drum. An adult went up to him and whispered to him to stop. Which he did briefly, as the wise men gave presents to a mute Joseph and an appreciative Mary holding her newborn.
The kids had that seriousness of amateurs trying to remember their lines and cues, which gave the play a ritualistic feel. A drunkard, oblivious to the performance, walked across the stage, treating the actors as if they were merely a hallucination, as did a scarecrow of an addict a few minutes later, weaving his way through them as if they were a pesky gauntlet. The children, used to such things in Woolloomooloo, didn’t even blink but went on with their lines until it was time for the drummer boy to let loose. He didn’t stop, he was like the bunny in the battery advertisement until one of the three wise men snatched the drumsticks from him.
Mandy and I found it very moving. The children, many of whose parents had separated, or were addicts or alcoholics, had been determined to do it right and had succeeded. At the end, when the audience applauded, the children laughed with relief. They may not have fully grasped the full significance of the nativity in the birth of Christianity but they had proved they could perform it.
It was the first and last time I have seen Tom Uren Place used in the way it was intended. It was meant to be Woolloomooloo’s town square. But since it was inaugurated in 1981 it has been a sinkhole that has attracted the homeless, the mentally disturbed, drug addicts, alcoholics and the lost. It’s divided into two areas, one on the northern side, and the lawn across Cathedral Street under the constant oppressive shadow of the viaduct, which is so dominating that it’s as if those below it live a subterranean existence.
These are the people who cannot get into the huge Matthew Talbot hostel nearby. Named after a nineteenth-century Irish drunkard who reformed and helped alcoholics — and, in 1975, was given the title ‘venerable’ (aka, the patron of addicts) by the Catholic Church — the hostel started up in 1938, then shifted to Woolloomooloo in 1965. It’s now a major operation catering for men over the age of twenty-one in need of temporary accommodation, with services that include medical, psychiatric, optometry and podiatry care. The hostel is also a go-to place on prison release brochures. There are ninety-eight beds and nearly one-quarter of a million meals are served a year. All this is run by ninety-five professional staff, assisted by nearly 400 volunteers. The demographics have changed slightly over the years as the visitors become younger, many of them damaged by drugs and, as one survey noted, 70 per cent have ‘some form of nervous disorders’.
Demand for the beds is high. On average forty-five people sleep outside in the vicinity of the hostel. Most remain there in order to access the services Matthew Talbot provides. Family breakdown, drug and alcohol issues, and rent increases are the most common reasons they gravitate there. These people are the public face of homelessness. The more feral rough sleepers flock on the lawns near the two toilets, while the other group, mostly older men, hovers around the deserted Woolloomooloo Police Station, seeking the safety of the streetlights.
This is the end of the line for many of the homeless. Tom Uren Square is their last refuge, one without dreams or hope. What many of them share is a combination of addictions, lack of ambition or values that the rest of society holds dear, and the sense they cannot fall any further. Living in the shadow of the viaduct, they seem to exist in a sunless parallel universe where normal morality does not apply. Even the gigantic murals fixed to the ugly concrete pylons of the eastern suburbs railway, depicting the struggle to save Woolloomooloo from high-rise development, are fading away, ignored by the homeless, but seeming to reflect their drab and dreary existence.
There’s no sense in being sentimental about many of the homeless under the viaduct. Before the toilets were installed the
y’d shit and piss in the open. They still grope and have sex in public, and women residents continue to be harassed and prop-ositioned as they go to Nick’s Supermarket, the only shop in the area. The beggars among them importune with such menace that people give them a wide berth. Others yabber away loudly to themselves and scratch the sores on their legs, arms and chest. This behaviour is fuelled by drugs, especially ice, and for those suffering from mental illness the effects of ice are catastrophic. Inhibitions, and even reality itself, dissolve away. A local painter, Justine Muller, who was raised in her parents’ pub, the East Sydney, just along from Tom Uren Square, runs an art therapy class for the hostel’s homeless, and over the years has seen that not only are the homeless getting younger but many more are suffering from mental illness.
And that has been one of the problems for Woolloomooloo. Since the asylums were closed, it’s one of the few places that tries to absorb and care for the mentally disturbed after they have been cast onto the streets to fend for themselves. Now, as the gentrification of Kings Cross and Potts Point accelerates, the homeless and the mad have also been forced down the hill into Woolloomooloo.
For some inexplicable reason the local police station is closed so residents are used to police cars and ambulances hurtling down from Kings Cross to the square. It’s no exaggeration to say that these homeless can at times create a Walpurgisnacht of disturbing behaviour, mostly towards each other. When drugged and pissed out of their minds, they have no awareness of or concern for anybody else. Their addictions cocoon them from the world. The centre of Woolloomooloo belongs to them. At times this is an urban badlands where no-one cares about the law or acknowledges they are answerable to anything other than their own desires.
You can see this in a recent arrest. A fifty-one-year-old man was caught with several bags of ice just metres from the Woolloomooloo Police Station. Police were patrolling Bourke Street near Tom Uren Place in the early evening when they noticed a man and a woman surrounded by drug paraphernalia. When they searched the man they found small plastic bags, believed to contain ice. Any sensible person wouldn’t behave like this outside a police station, even if it was closed, but the cop shop went unnoticed because only the drugs were real to them.
Practically every day someone belonging to this tribe, which is ever changing due to rehab, prison and death, is in trouble or is causing trouble. In the same month as the couple on drugs, police arrested a homeless man for outstanding warrants and found he had a number of ecstasy pills on him. Then there was a forty-five-year-old man arrested in the early hours one morning for pushing over an older man who fell backwards and struck his head on the footpath. He was taken to hospital where he eventually died. The unconcerned younger man was found the next day in the Matthew Talbot Hostel and later charged with murder.
And as for honour among thieves, forget it. One afternoon I saw a homeless woman pull some money out of her purse and a man wearing a knapsack came out of nowhere, snatched it from her and hightailed it into the back lanes. She screamed out after him, ‘You dog!’, an epithet that has more power here than the usual obscenities. Some of the people under the viaduct looked across at her indifferently, as if watching something happening behind a translucent screen. The robbed woman screamed, ‘That maggot’s taken my money. Someone help me!’ No-one made a move.
The sounds of screaming, crying, threats and drunken laughter fill the night as they attack and abuse one another, sometimes taking it to extremes with any weapon they can get their hands on. In the same year as the above incidents, a brawl broke out in Tom Uren Square and a man was stabbed in the shoulder. A few hours later a masked man threw a Molotov cocktail at the homeless, then another an hour later, and finally, just after one o’clock in the morning, a third one was thrown onto a mattress and blankets which exploded into flames. What amazed witnesses, and those who saw the incidents on CCTV, was that no-one was hurt.
After several months of investigations there was a major police raid related to the Molotov cocktails on several homes in nearby Forbes Street. Police arrested nine people, most belonging to the Young Woolloomooloo Boys gang, who were dealing heroin and cannabis, believing that the petrol bomb attacks were drug-related.
What was not reported in the media, except for a local newspaper, was that as the handcuffed men and women were led out of a house in Forbes Street, the neighbours ‘whooped with joy’. This was telling. It’s constantly overlooked by outsiders that many residents are tired of Woolloomooloo being a dumping ground for the mentally ill, druggies and dealers. For years the locals have raised their concerns about the gross and often illegal behaviour of the homeless people sleeping rough on doorsteps and around Tom Uren Square. As one journalist observed, ‘The community, many of whom are disadvantaged themselves, bridles at shouldering so many of Sydney’s most extreme homeless people.’
Then there are the affluent newcomers, mainly young professionals, who have shifted into the area only to find out that the homeless, maddies and drug-fucked crazies are bringing down property values. A group of vigilantes decided to teach these homeless people a lesson. On a cold June night in 2003 Percy Murray, a fifty-eight-year-old Aborigine, was sleeping under a tarpaulin in Talbot Lane, which runs beside the hostel building, when he was awoken by people kicking him ‘like a dog’. His attackers were three or four smartly dressed young men, who screamed at him to get a job. They sliced open his forehead and lips with their kicks and finished by throwing a shopping trolley on him.
All told about ten of these men, dubbed the ‘Matrix Mobsters’ (they were said to wear long dark coats similar to those in the science-fiction movie), assaulted up to a dozen homeless men sleeping rough in a terrifying rampage, kicking them, loudly abusing them for taking tax dollars and shouting at them to get out of Woolloomooloo.
Some of the attackers were tracked down and it turned out they were young professionals, including lawyers and IT managers, living in the millionaires’ row along the waterfront. One of them said they were fed up. ‘The final straw was one of the druggies pulled a knife on one of our wives while she was walking home from work along Bourke Street. Matthew Talbot Hostel and the police never did anything about it so we decided to give them a bit of their own back.’ The assaults were justified, ‘They terrorised us, we terrorised them.’
Probably nowhere else in Sydney is there such a glaring disparity between rich and poor. Affluent investors, yuppies and downsizing dinks spend fortunes on units and terraces while half the families living in the public housing exist on less than $500 a week.
The Matrix Mobsters complained that ‘bad elements’ that had been hunted out of Kings Cross had ended up as a growing menace under the viaduct. ‘They get $90 a fortnight in rent subsidy’ and for that they could get a room in a boarding house outside central Sydney. ‘This is a good area but the sight of the homeless and the crime from the druggies is holding us back.’
One of the homeless men who was beaten that night said he had heard them ‘coming down the lane, bashing people … I reckon they were a goon squad trying to force the homeless out of the area. This is becoming valuable land and we are in the way.’
Yes, these yuppies want their property values to rise, but they also want a safe neighbourhood and it’s not as if the filthy rich of the Finger Wharf are alone in this. Tension has been growing for years as residents have become sick of being harassed, abused and robbed by ‘undesirables’. After the Matrix Mobster attacks, many residents and business people were relieved that something was finally being done to clean up the streets. Other locals, including Housing Commission residents, praised them, saying they were ‘fed up with people shooting up in the parks and streets and smashing car windows and harassing locals for cigarettes and money … We wish police and hostel managers did more to clear the homeless and the drug addicts off the streets.’
Some have called this unruly spot under the viaduct the Bowery of Australia, but it’s not as if the homeless and the mentally ill are left to fend for thems
elves. They have social workers, medical professionals, educators, charities and volunteers to care for them. Of course, there are those rowdy Lords of Misrule who treat the streets as their own fiefdom, but many of the homeless shy away from the potential violence and anger of those on the lawn and huddle in their sleeping bags and mattresses around the convenience store, or further along on Bourke Street Park.
The major concern is boredom. They’re always waiting; waiting for breakfast or dinner at the hostel, waiting to be seen by doctors and welfare workers, waiting just to fill in the long boring day. December can be a futile long wait, as the homeless keep a lookout for the ‘$100 man’, a mythical figure said to appear at Christmas bearing wads of cash.
One thing that fills in the long hours for those not fighting or partying — and that means those around the desolate, empty police station — is reading. Sometimes when I’ve been passing through the maze of mattresses and bodies in sleeping bags, it’s seemed more like a library with recumbent readers than a public space for the homeless. The religious charities arrive in the evening dispensing coffee, tea and buns, accompanied by ‘Amazing Grace’ piped through tinny speakers on an endless loop echoing around Tom Uren Place like a willy-willy of aural torture.
In the morning it’s quiet. Many are taciturn, dealing with hideous hangovers or are irritable coming off drugs. You hardly hear a voice above a whisper and then around midday the laughing, teasing and singing starts and grows louder as the alcohol and drugs take effect. At times like these the atmosphere is like a wild party and when I’ve walked past the square around this time, I’m greeted effusively (even though they don’t know me) with offers to dance and sing with them. Women and men pash and grope one another. As the afternoon wears on, the atmosphere becomes brittle with demands for money to buy more drugs and booze. Jealousy, anger and raw emotion get the better of them. It’s such a volatile mood that a few, fearing the worst, sneak off across Cathedral Street to seek refuge. Anything can happen from this point on and does with a monotonous regularity. Soon the violent squabbles and riotous behaviour will be underscored by the sirens of paddy wagons and ambulances.