He went to pick it up and I’m into him. We ripped the bloody door off … I had him down on the footpath and I was punching the hell out of him … I’m into him and the bloke [at the bar] pulled him off and he said “You’ll bloody well kill him.” He grabbed his bag and run. He was a real mongrel and he used to bash his wife. She was real nice. You can’t let ’em get away with it. I said if I ever catch you round here again I’ll belt you …
Darcy said that he didn’t come back ‘and wasn’t I glad … He’d walk in across the road and I’d shake. I think he would be shaking too. Wife bashers were like that – cowards at heart.’
PASTIMES APART FROM DRINKING
In Sydney people had made a living from illegal gambling forever. It was not considered a serious crime and penalties were light. Everyone knew who the local SP bookies were, and where to place a bet – often in a pub, so that recreational drinking was not disturbed. A further attraction of a pub was that it often had the only telephone within cooee. Little kids often worked as runners and knew all the betting lingo. But times were changing and in 1962 a Royal Commission into Off-the-Course Betting estimated that there were about 6000 SP bookies in NSW, creaming off a lot of money that could be going into the state’s coffers. In 1964, as a result of this enquiry, the state-run Totalisator Authority Board (TAB) was established. Its headquarters were just down the road from the Terminus, at 485 Harris Street, in a building known to locals as the Bushells Building.
At first the local SPs scoffed, betting that the punters would prefer the old ways to using the new, sterile TAB outlets. In the first few years these TAB betting shops were slow to multiply, thereby extending the life of the SPs well into the 1970s. As the number of these outlets increased they eventually dominated the trade, not least because the TAB took the control out of the hands of the bookies and made transactions transparent.
Abe Kersh did the honours at the Terminus in the early seventies. He would ring through the bets to Uncle Bert (Bert Dunn) at the Ways Terrace flats and he would put the bets on.194
Carol Twist recalls that her long-deceased ex-husband, Oliver Twist – yes, that’s what they called him – worked for an SP bookie who operated out of the Terminus on Saturdays.
One time he took a bet off a couple of men and ‘forgot’ to place it on the horse. Like if it’s a hundred to one you’re going to lay it off. He thought it had no chance of winning, but it came in, and there were these two men knocking on my door. They had a gun. I’d never seen a gun before and I didn’t even know he was working as a bookie. They were demanding their money. I got them to come with me across the road to my girlfriend’s house. I used to hide my wages there because Oliver would just drink or gamble with them if he ever got his hands on them. We were both shit scared. Fortunately I had enough to pay them off …195
Gradually the SP bookies became a memory and part of the romance of the old Pyrmont.
Then there was the pastime of pilfering from the wharves. As it had been in poorer times, this was still viewed as more or less legitimate. As publican Darcy Hassett put it, ‘it’s a wonder they didn’t bring the bloody wharves up.’
Jennice Kersh recalled the time that her mother got hold of some material and her brother Raymond, who was a tailor, made lovely curtains out of it. Then they discovered that people all over Pyrmont had curtains made from the same material.
You ordered what you wanted. We were so poor. It’s hard to understand today. All the pubs had stuff. One day a fella turned up with classical music records and some French perfume. Mikel Hurley said the only person in Pyrmont who would be interested in these was my mum, Edna Kersh. She bought them. Raymond has still got the records – beautiful music – and I was 14 when I first wore French perfume. Now I always have to have some.196
Darcy Hassett remembers that perfume too. When someone came to him to complain that a toilet at the Terminus wasn’t flushing, he went to investigate and found the cistern crammed with bottles of French perfume.
Although it was once true that the shoes, tools and foodstuffs that dropped off the back of a truck could make a significant contribution to actual survival, now the trade was a bit more diverse – like the automatic toaster someone brought into the pub before they had been released onto the market.197 At the time these kinds of household goods had a much higher value, relative to income, than they do today and were not to be sniffed at. As former Pyrmont worker Geoffrey Preston put it:
You could get anything at the Terminus. The same few blokes offloading stuff, telling the cops they had a license to sell, never being able to produce it. You could get anything you wanted in those days … you could get steak knives, stupid things, anything you never wanted. I dunno why I bought ’em. Had a few drinks I suppose. I didn’t even know what steak knives were.
When he took them home and gave them to his mother, she must have known they were illegally obtained and she threw them in the bin. ‘That’s gratitude for you.’198
Although most people didn’t know it yet, the sixties were to be the last days for this kind of activity. In 1963 the first wharf in Darling Harbour was converted to receive roll-on roll-off cargoes, and initial plans were being made to develop a new container terminal at Port Botany. The industrial waterfront, so integral to Pyrmont’s history, was on the cusp of extinction.
A YOUNG MAN’S FANCY TURNS TO PYRMONT
Geoffrey Preston won a scholarship to the engineering workshops at CSR in 1964. He had some relatives who had worked in Pyrmont so the area was not altogether unknown to him. All the same it was a very different place for a 17-year-old lad from suburban Carlton. At lunchtime he tagged along with his workmates to the Terminus and 50 years later, he recalled it like it was yesterday. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Four schooners, and fish and chips for lunch. You gotta put that fish and chip shop in the book. I can taste ’em now. We’d be ordering our fish and chips and the bloke from the health department would be checking out the cockroaches in the kitchen. We didn’t care.’
Those four schooners that were apparently OK for him were nevertheless recalled as excessive for others. ‘There was a bloke, thin as a grasshopper. He’d walk in, down four schooners and go back to work. Worked at the char house at the distillery. Permanently pickled I reckon.’ All the same, the mates could get pickled too, ‘and after a few we all tipped the barmaids. They would have earned more than us’.
With the enthusiasm of youth, he remembered the Terminus as ‘a friendly place, magic. There were no fights in the bar. I felt very safe there. No-one ever drank at the Pacific or the Pyrmont Arms.’ This was certainly not true, and most memories are of packed houses at all the pubs. According to Geoffrey, everyone who worked at CSR went to the Terminus, although on closer questioning, he agreed that this wasn’t really true either. ‘There were four classes of men at the CSR – “A”, “B”, “C” and “D”. The bosses, the “As”, they didn’t go, but the “Cs”– the leading hands – some of them did, and the “Ds” – all the rest. A lot of CSR blokes did. McCaffrey Services too.’
After a few years working at CSR, Preston went to sea: ‘It was an extension of going to the pub. I would listen to the stories and then go and look at the ships in dock. It seemed like a natural progression to go to sea. And that was my downfall. It all started at the Terminus. I’ve been around the world three times, but I’m always happy to be in Sydney.’
After some time as a seaman he got a job back at the sugar company and resumed drinking at the Terminus. Summing it all up in 2017 he said that: ‘It was a beautiful time, a beautiful life. It was a workingman’s area … The Terminus was an ideal workingman’s hotel, everybody was accepted. I never saw one fight there, there was no bigotry, everybody’s accepted, terrific people … or maybe it was the grog. Yes, that’d be it.’
The Terminus, 1960.
Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Tooth & Co. papers, N60 -YC-700.
7
The downhill run
It was regarded by many
as the toughest pub in Sydney, whose clientele comprised of hardened merchant seamen from the docks. Outlaw biker gangs … plus a collection of undercover narcotic squad detectives. The barmaids were exceptional in the fact that they worked topless, many of them covered in tattoos. My band ‘Regan’s Rebels’ was a hard-rocking country band enjoying a three-year residency at the pub. Tough work in a tough pub. In fact, the customers were such a bunch of hardened characters that there was very rarely any trouble at all. The Terminus in those days was easily recognised by the rows of beautiful shining Harley Davidson motorcycles parked outside, and the soft aroma of marijuana smoke drifting all around.
JOHN REGAN, 2017.199
IN 1971, old St Bartholomew’s Church up on the hill overlooking the wharves was pulled down. For half a century, land where houses had been demolished for the deep railway cutting just north of John Street remained vacant. The road bridge that was promised to reconnect the streets severed by this cutting remained a promise.200 The proposed building of flats on the vacant land never happened. Not then, anyway. There was a rickety footbridge across the lines near St Bede’s, which people remember for its splinters.
Houses continued to disappear. Some were resumed in Fig Street on the boundary between Pyrmont and Ultimo to make way for a new freeway. They were left empty for years and, by the time 19 of them were demolished in 1976, plans for the freeway had been shelved. This kind of assault on the area was repeated over and over. There were vacant blocks of land everywhere. By the eighties, planners and developers were regularly calling these ‘brownfield sites’ trashed places where industry had walked away, leaving a legacy of pollution and desolation.
In 1973, the only supermarket closed down. And by the end of the 1970s, it was announced that the Pyrmont Bridge would be pulled down. In the end it was kept, closed to traffic and opened in 1981 as a pedestrian walkway. This suited a lot of people, but effectively cut off direct traffic access to Pyrmont. As it had been in the last century, Pyrmont remained an unknown place to most Sydneysiders who took little notice of its fortunes. Locally, there were angry public meetings, protests, trade union ‘green bans’ and clashes with the police. Politics in Pyrmont had been dominated by the Australian Labour Party for a long time, but membership of the once-powerful Pyrmont Branch of the party had dwindled to almost nothing by the 1970s. It became embroiled in internal scandals and by 1980 it had been formally closed down. The vacuum was filled by grassroots RAGs – resident action groups such as UPROAR, Ultimo Pyrmont Residents Opposed to Arbitrary Development. These kinds of groups tended to fight the changes occurring, issue by issue, but the battle was too much for many people as they watched on while many of the residents slowly moved out.
Not that any of these local issues were of much interest to the drinkers at the Terminus. By now they were almost all workers who came in from other places. In 1978 there were 780 employees at Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), but only 33 of these lived in Pyrmont or Ultimo. The company claimed there were 1000 car trips and 550 bus trips made each day along with 550 heavy vehicle movements. The company used these statistics in negotiations to buy up public streets, to get rid of housing and private traffic movements that were impeding their operations.201
The Terminus was lucky to have customers from the sugar company because other sources of drinkers were drying up across the peninsula. No more came from the Schute, Bell, Badgery and Lumby woolstore across the road that closed its doors in 1971. By the early 1970s, all of the wool brokers operating on the Pyrmont peninsula had decamped to the suburbs. And most significant of all, the Darling Harbour wharves were slowly becoming redundant as a new era of container shipping led to the dock work moving to Port Botany.
In 1960 the goods yards covered 56 acres (22 hectares). There were coal jetties where the National Maritime Museum now stands. A large naval depot shared Darling Island with facilities for handling wool, wheat and coal. Jones Bay wharves handled wheat and general cargoes. Coal, coke, shale, metal, timber, foodstuffs, cargoes of all descriptions all came through the Pyrmont wharves. Then it stopped. Most coal sidings were out of commission by 1975. The Pyrmont Power Station sidings stopped work in 1978. One by one, the wharves closed down until the last goods train left in 1984 and the goods yards were formally closed down in October 1984.202 Merchant shipping moved progressively to the new Port Botany, tourist passengers went to Circular Quay, and immigrants who used to disembark at Pyrmont 19 now flew into Kingsford Smith Airport.
Some of the men on the bar stools at the Terminus still came from the F. J. Walker meat-processing and cold-storage company in Pyrmont Street. This firm lasted at its Darling Harbour address for longer than most. According to John Hutton, who worked there, around 100 men were employed in the early 1980s.203 The Waterside Cold Stores at the end of the peninsula in Point Street was closed in 1979, but the building remained tenanted for years and became known locally as the bean sprout factory. It was the only place in Pyrmont that was sprouting.
With the falling away of customers, the takings at the Terminus declined, although the business did not totally collapse. Improvements in wages meant there was more money to spend on booze, while the closure of several hotels on the peninsula reduced the choice of drinking places. The Royal Pacific across the road had traded neck and neck with the Terminus for years, but the Terminus pulled ahead during the sixties so that by 1970, the total trade of the Royal Pacific was $48,398 and that of the Terminus was $75,165. This is the last date for which figures for the Royal Pacific have been found.204
LICENSEES OF THE TERMINUS: 1966–77
MARCH 1966 JOHN EDWARD BROWNE
MARCH 1967 ROBERT JAMES THOMAS BOURNE
FEBRUARY 1969 ROBERT CHARLES COLLINS
MAY 1970 JOHN WILLIAM COMBES
FEBRUARY 1972 ANTHONY PETER STEPHENS
JULY 1975 THOMAS JOHN MENDAY
As the sixties turned into the seventies, there was a high turnover of publicans at the Terminus. Things were even more unstable across the road at the Royal Pacific, where there were seven publicans in the decade following the retirement of the Barkers in 1968. Jimmy Barker or other Barker family members had held the license since 1943. All this instability reflected the growing difficulty of making these old hotels turn a profit in these depressed years of Pyrmont’s history.
John Edward Browne arrived at the Terminus with his wife, Eileen, in 1966. He had previously run the Rose & Crown in Parramatta, and arrived with good credentials. After about six months he got permission to sell Reschs beers. Tooth & Co. had purchased the Reschs Waverley Brewery many decades earlier and continued to market this brand as well as its own labels. The records don’t explain why Reschs beer had not been sold previously at the Terminus or why it was now to be made available. Perhaps there was more of the product to go around. Perhaps it had something to do with increasing competition with Barker’s (the Royal Pacific) that was receiving bottled beer from Tooths at this time, possibly Reschs or Tooths. Barker’s was a freehold Tooheys hotel, but Tooths’records show that it had been supplying it with bottled beer from way back in the 1920s. The amounts were only a small part of the Royal Pacific’s overall trade, but why was Tooths supplying a competitor with bottled beer? Was it because the Terminus did not have adequate storage? Or a bottle shop outlet? The answer is unclear, but the fact that Tooths kept records about the pub across the road has been useful for this book’s research.
‘Mac, a golden labrador with a taste for beer doesn’t turn a head sideways when he breasts the bar these days. He is owned by Mr. John Brown, licensee of The Terminus, who is pictured giving Mac his daily ration. Mac generally manages a schooner – about three quarters of a pint – drunk out of a stein.’ The caption neglected to mention the baby.
Caption and photograph The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August 1966.
With this new choice of beer available on tap, sales increased to levels not seen since the mid-1950s. Browne received a good report from Tooths after his first year of tradin
g, which noted that, as well as takings being up, the hotel was well run and all the rooms were occupied.205 But the level of trade was making it impossible to keep the beer at the increasingly cold temperatures preferred by his customers. Beer was tapped and stored in the troublesome cellar where the temperature rose in hot weather and the four instantaneous draught coolers and one bottle cabinet that had been installed in Vera Dempsey’s day were insufficient to keep enough beer acceptably cold. The company thought that a cold room should be installed in the cellar.206 Browne said that he could not afford this expense, and perhaps this is why the Brownes moved on after one year.
Robert Bourne worked for nine years as a clerk for the shipping company Burns Philp and then spent a year travelling before he arrived in Pyrmont. His parents were clearly anxious for him to succeed as they stumped up a substantial interest-free loan so that he could purchase the license for the Terminus. He could pay this loan back to his parents ‘over an indefinite period’ and his father went guarantor for a further bank overdraft.207 But all this security did not translate into making a smooth transition for Bourne to become a publican. Like Browne, his predecessor, Bourne had a problem with inadequate cooling of his beer. The peak-hour trade at lunchtime was so great that four people served and the eight taps were hardly ever turned off. He, too, was advised that a cold room was required but, like Browne, he said he couldn’t afford it.208 When it came time to renew his license in mid-1968, a memo reached the legendary Tom Watson who had been the General Manager of Tooth & Co. for as long as anyone could remember, explaining that negotiations had been ‘protracted and difficult’. Among other things, Bourne had asked for the long-overdue conversion of the old coke-fired boiler to an oil one, but refused to pay his share. Somehow Bourne must have found favour with the top man at Tooths as it was recorded that he was a ‘very good type of young man’ and that the company should allow him a lower rent than was usual and pay for the oil conversion.
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