by Louis Nowra
What’s unnerving for onlookers is that all of this behaviour is public. There is no privacy for the homeless and the wretched, even for those who wish for it. Anger, misery, lust and joy are there for all of Woolloomooloo to witness. The weather ages their faces, as do their addictions, so that it is often hard to tell someone’s true age. They’re so used to their solipsistic world that they don’t notice they are a daily spectacle. Everything about their lives is on display, as if they were a living zoo. It’s amazing that a few manage to leave this public stage and find a purpose in their lives that enables them to rejoin society. Some homeless have been found permanent accommodation and recently an ice addict went through six months of rehab in order that she could prove she was ready to look after her child, who the authorities had been forced to remove from her.
Perhaps one of the most astute and knowing observers of what goes on was Nick David, who ran the convenience store in Tom Uren Place for thirty years. He thought that there was a higher concentration of single mums and people with problems dumped into Woolloomooloo. As far as the homeless and mentally ill were concerned, there were not only too many sufferers all in one place, but they made the area ‘unpredictable’. His solution was to be calm, and in the shop he’d teach his assistants to follow his mantra of ‘Address them by name and chat to them.’
Even so, those who congregate, live and party near Matthew Talbot have undermined what was to be a crucial feature of the redevelopment of Woolloomooloo: a town square. On a long brick seat behind Nick’s shop is the small brass plaque unveiled in 1981 but now crusted over with grime, that outlines the important role taken by the former Minister for Urban and Regional Development, Labor MP Tom Uren, and residents and ‘certain trade unions’ in ensuring that most of Woolloomooloo was preserved for residents. Few locals or visitors ever notice it, so they don’t see that it also proudly announces the square’s name: Tom Uren Place.
As I walk and poke around Woolloomooloo, I’ve come to see that there are gorgeous, wonderful, weird pockets and small enclaves, nooks and crannies, where beautiful terrace houses, secret gardens and overlooked magnificent buildings are to be found. It’s glaringly obvious that there are huge differences between incomes and lifestyles and education. Woolloomooloo is a series of fragments, phantom lanes and truncated streets, and sometimes a cacophony of building styles. Nothing seems to hold it together and although the planners of the late 1970s may have made mistakes, they were united in their view that there had to be a town square, a place which would bring everyone together, for markets, meetings, festivals and fairs. It would be a special spot that unified residents, a thriving town centre that gave coherence to the area.
Quite simply, a square is a physical and spiritual focus that binds a neighbourhood together. This didn’t happen because it quickly became a shabby zone of welfare services and tribes of desperate men and women down on their luck who have run out of alternatives and find themselves at the end of the line in Woolloomooloo, their futures all used up.
And yet, and yet … as residents and the welfare charities know, there’s simply nowhere else for these people to go. Woolloomooloo is used by the welfare system as a dumping ground, and has been for a long time. Like the plaque, the idea of a town square has long been forgotten. In June 2013 Woolloomooloo’s ‘historic town square’, as one newspaper called it, was subdivided and a third sold to developers by the state government. There are plans for residential and retail development (and how many times have locals heard this over the last hundred years). If it goes ahead it will finally kill off any dream of Woolloomooloo having a true town square.
ZONE OF THE REAL
IN VAGRER, THE NARRATOR, MALCOLM, IS A PLAYWRIGHT who earns money by tending the bar at the Ritz (the Old Fitzroy). At the end of the novel Malcolm writes and directs Homeless: the Musical at the downstairs theatre. My character (Hughie), ‘an old stallion of the theatre industry’, has brought along his wife (Sandy) and some ‘notable’ theatre friends to the opening night. The play is a huge success:
The epic finale exploded with the crashing of trash cans and the beating of oil drums — the whole room clapped in time, yelled and screamed and went wild. Malcolm turned around … and saw various Ritz locals up the back, drunk, but proud nevertheless.
It’s a joyous ending with a theatre entrepreneur buying the rights for a large sum of money.
It never occurred to me that any of my plays would be on the same stage. But Red Line Productions decided to present my first full-length play Inner Voices for their 2016 season. I was initially reluctant because I had written it forty years ago and hadn’t seen a production in decades and, as Hughie says to Malcolm, ‘I remember when my first piece was performed, and I remember when the latest one was too — that fear never changes, no matter how many scripts you write or however many are performed.’
Hughie was right. But I was more apprehensive about this play than many others, because it was my first and I had forgotten so much of it and consigned it to my distant past. Did I really want to see what my younger self had written?
I stayed away from rehearsals. One of the reasons I drank at the Old Fitzroy was that it had nothing to do with my writing career, a career that was impossible to imagine when I had been a kid on the Fawkner Housing Commission estate. My father had been a truck driver, my mother had killed her father, both my grandmothers had ended up in an asylum and my stepfather had been a jail bird. Perhaps this accounts for my attitude. Since I went to university, and found myself in a milieu where so many others came from privilege and had a sense of entitlement, I felt like an interloper. Maybe that’s why I found an ease and existential relief in my years at the Old Fitzroy, and in Woolloomooloo itself.
It’s an unvarnished world, a zone of the real. The only painters who captured Woolloomooloo properly were the realists. Surrealism and pictorial prettiness can’t describe the stubborn basics of life that have always been its essence. The area wasn’t planned like the mansions and gardens of Potts Point up on the heights. Woolloomooloo happened quickly and haphazardly, almost by accident, because it was needed urgently by a growing population of workers. Like a weed it spread unchecked until it bumped up against the natural barriers of its borders in the east and west and the waters of the bay.
Up on the cliff face, Kings Cross was a phantasmagoria at night, promising illusions, sexual nirvana, glamorous opening nights at the theatre, gorgeous nightclubs and swish restaurants. Woolloomooloo didn’t offer illusions or nostalgia. It was a netherworld, an unsettling morally grey area teeming with the shadowy activities that always thrive on the urban margins. It may have been almost in the dead centre of Sydney, but it became the borderlands where, if you crossed into it, life came at you unadorned, without dreams, driven by frank biological needs, emotional extremes and raw desires.
This is partly why it was feared. The slums were what the rest of Australia hoped they had left behind in the rush to affluence and the suburban ideal. After the First World War the buildings themselves were a blight, an uncomfortable reminder for many Australians of our origins, a shameful sore of degradation and backwardness. It was a sinkhole where there were no possibilities for social advancement, personal ambition or idealism. Woolloomooloo’s sceptical view of life was anathema to the optimism of the Australian Dream, but it bred a bruised resilience that helped it survive.
It was as if Woolloomooloo was a reality overdose for the rest of the country. And humans can’t stand too much reality. That most locals were and are hardworking, loving and caring was beside the point. The fact it was a thriving port open to immigrants and transients like sailors, that men worked hard under the most trying conditions on its wharves and fished its harbours, is seldom remembered. Australians conveniently forgot it, except to use it as a social dumping ground. Even as I write, this amnesia is evidenced in the fact that the Woolloomooloo water system is the only remaining place in the whole of Sydney where wastewater and stormwater systems are not separated.
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bsp; There’s no denying that this is a place of chancers, criminals, drug dealers, loafers and gamblers, crazies, addicts, welfare recipients and the underclass. The line between the law and lawlessness has always been porous. But as long-time shopkeeper Nick David says, ‘There’s a lot of lovely people here. There’s some beautiful kids and beautiful families and you see them go on and do all sorts of great things, either sports or academic, but they’re the ones that don’t get spoken about.’
Unless you know where to look, Woolloomooloo’s beauty is unseen. It lacks poetry, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s when the streets were filled with derelict houses. There was no romance to those ruins, it was as if they just wanted to be put out of their misery. It’s an urban cauldron without metaphors — a place of prose.
In the decades leading up to the redevelopment it was thought that Woolloomooloo would fade away and become a giant car park or a metropolis of office towers filled with workers who lived elsewhere, but it survived. And despite the influx of the homeless, the mentally disturbed and the druggies, I believe it continues to embody a particular ethos and set of values that have been fundamental to the area since the 1850s.
The Old Fitzroy is an intrinsic part of this continuation, and in many ways represents the area’s flawed and fascinating character. It’s an essential hub of the community, just as the local pubs have always been. The houses were cramped, there were no theatres, dance halls and entertainment palaces and what the hotels offered were communal connections, human warmth and a sense of local identity. Beneath the abrasive and, at times, suspicious character of Woolloomooloo there is kindness, generosity, friendship and a refreshing lack of middle-class pretence. Yes, it’s easy to say that we patrons drink too much, smoke too much (some of us) and have a fondness for dope, but this is the reality. The Motley Crew could have belonged to any era of Woolloomooloo’s history.
For me the Old Fitzroy represents a separation of my social and literary lives. The production of Inner Voices meant that these two worlds collided and it made me uneasy. One of the virtues of the pub and its booze was that I didn’t have to think about my work. Now that would change.
The play itself is set in the time of Catherine the Great’s Russia and is about a boy discovered in a prison who could be a claimant to the throne. My feeling of claustrophobia in the small theatre meant I sat on the edge of a row, next to the exit. What amazed me was that I had remembered so little of the play that much of it seemed foreign. But there was no mistaking that the lead character, a boy who only knew his name and found it nigh on impossible to make sense of the world, was autobiographical. When I was eleven my head was split open in an accident and I had had to learn to speak and think properly again over the next few years. Watching the play I couldn’t deny that, despite its foreign location, the story had emerged from personal experiences during those years when I’d been attempting to make sense of the world around me. The director and actors did a marvellous job of a raw and intense play, though as I left the small theatre and climbed up the stairs to the bar, I knew I would be glad when the production finished its run — you can have too much of the past.
Even though it was winter, it was balmy outside when I joined Mandy. She was talking to Brad and a few other locals. I felt relieved that the opening night was over, but my overriding feeling was one of astonishment. It was hard to avoid the reality of the public housing all around me and the realisation I had come from that world, too, and I had gone on to write, something I would never, ever have imagined when I was young, when I was only interested in sport, living in a house that had no books with a family with little interest in the arts.
I sipped my wine and looked across the road at the fencedoff site filled with magnificent gum trees, weeds and the remains of the gardens that the City of Sydney had levelled three times. Soon it would become a four-storey apartment block. I’ve seen the plans and it will be a bland, unpretentious chunk of deliberately mediocre architecture that will serve its purpose as affordable housing, but it will destroy the pub’s only view of nature. The lorikeets, galahs, currawongs and cockatoos will abandon the site to a murder of crows. It saddens me but urban life is always about change.
Just as change has been a part of the Old Fitzroy’s story. Although I don’t believe in the supernatural, I sense the presence of the dead: Tommy, Chemical Frank, Stevie, Peter and Shelley. There’s nothing sentimental about this except that when I come down to the pub I half expect to see them as I pass their chairs outside, and when I enter the bar and notice the empty stools where they sat. The Motley Crew has been like a family, a dysfunctional one, grant you, but an enjoyable family all the same. The hotel, its regulars and staff have changed me, as has my time in this zone of the real.
In the writing of this memoir I have attempted to create a coherent narrative of Woolloomooloo and tried to overcome the oppressive weight of its reputation. I have walked its streets, finding out its history, studied the Rosetta stones of its many murals that give colour and significance to it. Over the years I’ve become aware that urban landscapes mirror the human psyche and Woolloomooloo reflects those who live here. I’ve also come upon, most times by accident or in the company of my Virgil, enclaves of beauty and strangeness, even weirdness, that only a patient urban explorer can find.
It’s gradually occurred to me that Woolloomooloo may be one of the few examples where a name has defined a place and, without the euphonious name, would be something less. While those newcomers up on the heights try to erase the name of Kings Cross (so that much of it is now called Potts Point) in order to increase their property values and social status, the attempts to change the name Woolloomooloo have thankfully failed. It’s a name that stretches back into the Aboriginal past. There have been countless songs about it over the years because it not only has a musicality to it but it is so unmistakably Australian. Even Monty Python based a skit on it (‘The University of Woolamaloo’). In the recent novel Dodge Rose by Sydney author Jack Cox, an old woman remembers when Woolloomooloo was going to change its name, and her mind plays with the name like something out of Finnegans Wake:
The old name, with its multitudinous vowels, has become synonymous with evil repute. Thank goodness they didn’t call it palmersham. O woolloomoolethal no longer! O woolloomoolewd never more! When I give up the ghost, all heavenly host I shall lead to your beautiful shore. On the woollooomoolittoral, fanned by the woolloomoolibertine breeze (bringing landlords who languish surcease from their anguish) we’ll drink to the woolloomoolees; we’ll be the woolloomoolucrative lodgers in woolloomooluxury vast, an eternitys stories shall tell of your glories to the infinite woolloomoolast!
The length and sound of its name has allowed outsiders to mock and devalue it, but somehow those vowels and soft consonants, strung together like a beautiful necklace of musical sounds, have embedded themselves in our country’s consciousness.
After finishing our drinks, Mandy and I said goodnight to those of the Motley Crew who were still at the pub. We left the Old Fitzroy and walked up the hill towards home, returning via the same route that Coco and I once took, when she led me down into Woolloomooloo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This short bibliography indicates some of the more important books and articles I consulted during my research. The National Library of Australia’s TROVE (the digital collection of Australian newspapers) was a wonderful resource, as was the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I used the City of Sydney’s image archives and its oral history project for ‘Giovanni Lo Surdo’ and ‘Nick David’ (interviewer Margo Beasley). There’s the inspiration and obvious influence of Iain Sinclair’s non-fiction works Lights Out for the Territory and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, Jonathan Meades’s writing and documentaries on architecture and spaces, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip and, of course, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Anonymous, The Life, Adventures and Confessions of a Sydney Barmaid, Panza, Sydney, 1891.
Aplin, Graham a
nd Storey, John, Waterfront Sydney 1860–1920, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984.
Attenbrow, Val, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, UNSW, Sydney, 2002.
Bellanta, Melissa, Larrikins: A History, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2012.
Brodsky, Isadore, Sydney’s Little World of Woolloomooloo, Old Sydney Free Press, Neutral Bay, 1967.
Campion, Edmund, Rockchoppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1982.
Coleman, James, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey Green Bans Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2016.
Cox, Jack, Dodge Rose, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2016.
Curson, PH, Times of Crisis: Epidemics in Sydney 1788–1900, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1985.
Dack, James and Dack, Stephen with Writer, Larry, Sunshine and Shadow: A Brothers’ Story, Pier 9, Millers Point, 2010.
Davison, Graeme, City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2016.
Farwell, George, Requiem for Woolloomooloo, Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney, 1971.
Kelly, Max, editor, Nineteenth-Century Sydney: Essays in Urban History, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1978.
Kelly, Max, Faces of the Street: William Street Sydney 1916, Doak Press, Paddington, 1982.
Lloyd-Tait, Emily, editor, Time Out: Pub Guide, 2014, Time Out Publishing, Glebe, 2014.
McGrath, Sandra, Sydney Harbour: Paintings from 1794, The Jacaranda Press, Hunters Hill, 1979.
Montesini, Lorenzo, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, Viking, Ringwood, 1999.