Terminus

by Shirley Fitzgerald

  Most importantly, the pub was now establishing itself as a music venue, with Greg organising the bands. In the 1970s and 1980s pubs were important venues for live music. Many bands that went on to fame and fortune began by playing on the pub circuit. The eighties was a flourishing period for pub rock, before pokies overtook performance spaces and tighter laws were introduced to police live performances. As Don Heep put it:

  We rode the wave of the music scene in the eighties. I’ve worked in a hundred pubs and the Terminus was one I always remember. It was a fun sort of place though it was a tough sort of place … Never big crowds. Rough house sort of people. A lot weren’t working. There was booze and dope and a bit of the other. Roger Janes was the leader of the band. The only reason we played there was because of Bob. He was a serious music fanatic as well as a fitness fanatic. I think about it a lot.227

  Lyn Wallis, one of Australia’s most highly regarded jazz drummers, remembers the ‘boxer’s pub’:

  I played there with Roger Janes’s band every Wednesday night for about a year … My memory is a bit hazy – they were my drinking days … Roger, Don Heap, Marty Mooney, Gary Walford … they had a stage. It was a good job … They were such nice people. The younger son, Mark, he was a real gentleman, a really quiet young guy … He was a boxer too … he was very polite too … it was mainly locals … and a few jazz fans would go. Geoff Bull used to bring visiting jazz people there … there was never like a giant crowd there, that was what was nice about it. It was very relaxed … a really family-friendly pub.228

  The McElwaines paid the musicians a fee and did not shout them drinks and this is remembered as a civilised way to do things. With free booze, things could get out of control. John Regan’s band played on Saturdays for about three years.229 Like everyone else, Regan’s memories are of a mixture of a tough gig and family-friendly place. He says that the bikers liked his band and ‘looked out’ for them. If some stranger became too drunk and perhaps made disparaging remarks to the barmaids, Bob could be seen leaping over the counter and evicting the said troublemaker within seconds. During the week there was food available, but not on Saturdays when nothing was served in the hotel. Regan recalled that ‘our lives were enhanced by the fact that during our break a group of Aboriginal ladies headed by the fantastic Maggie Williams would cook us lunch in the barbecue area not open to the public.’230

  John Regan playing on stage at the Terminus. For three years Regan’s Rebels played every Saturday from 1 pm to 11 pm.

  Photograph courtesy of John Regan.

  Then, in 1982, random breath testing (RBT) was introduced into NSW and, almost overnight, the life went out of the pub scene. The breathalyser and ‘Don’t drink and drive’ advertising campaigns had a huge impact on the way people behaved. Gone were the days when the Terminus could attract anyone from outside the area. As Kim McElwaine put it, ‘we used to have drinkers from out Blacktown and Palm Beach way. They stopped drinking, of course, and they went near home. They used to tell me that they got home and could not remember driving across Spit Bridge.’

  In October 1983, Bob McElwaine went into voluntary bankruptcy, and not for the first time. A lot of money had gone into upgrading the kitchen with a state-of-the-art stainless steel fit-out and creating an ‘incredible’ Chinese restaurant in the dining room, with gold foil wallpaper and stainless steel woks and, as Shirley said, ‘everything was spent.’ Then he bought a yellow Ferrari. It was the Ferrari, or what it stood for, that was the straw that broke the back of an already strained marriage. Shirley was no longer prepared to keep going into debt and mortgages, and now they had lost the pub through bankruptcy. She lived in Sydney until 1989, working several jobs to keep afloat, but she never went near Pyrmont after the family left the Terminus.

  LICENSEES OF THE TERMINUS: 1977–84

  NOVEMBER 1977 ROBERT DESMOND MCELWAINE

  OCTOBER 1983 HOTEL CLOSED

  DECEMBER 1983 SANDRA MITCHELL SPOONER

  JANUARY 1984 PETER THOMAS J. & LINDA ANNE WHITFIELD

  DECEMBER 1984 TERMINUS IS SOLD

  Tooths took possession of the hotel in October 1983. Sandra Spooner was given access on a weekly rental lower than the one the McElwaines had paid and the Tooths Yellow Card, the last of many for the Terminus, was annotated ‘short tenancy only. Hotel to be sold early 1984.’ At this time Warren and Sandra Spooner were running the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown as a successful live-music venue and perhaps Tooths hoped to resuscitate some life into this failing asset. But it did not work, and nobody seems to have memories of this time at the Terminus or of Peter and Linda Whitfield, who held the fort on an ever-reducing rent for most of 1984 until it was sold in December. Why the company did not put the hotel on the market immediately after it took the license back from the McElwaines may never be known. As far as anyone seems to remember, the McElwaines left and that was the end of it.

  A POSTSCRIPT ON THE MCELWAINES

  Memory is an odd thing, and there are memories of the McElwaines that have nothing to do with their time at the Terminus; they are at best, half-truths. However, because so many people believe them, to ignore them would result in appearing to have got the story wrong. They relate to the infamous Milperra Massacre.

  Greg (Dukes) and Mark (Gloves) McElwaine were members of the Comanchero Motor Cycle Club. In 1984 the club split, with one section rebranding themselves as Bandidos Motorcycle Club. The McElwaines were now members of the Bandidos and at this stage Phil (Knuckles) also joined. On Fathers’ Day, 2 September 1984, there was a ‘swap meet’ at the Viking Hotel, Milperra. There were stalls selling biker paraphernalia, live bands playing and a pig roasting on a spit. What was supposed to be a good day out turned to horror when the Comancheros and Bandidos began shooting. Seven people were killed, six bikies and a 14-year-old girl, and another 21 people were injured. Sydney was stunned.

  On the day there were 197 police involved, and the round-up of suspects in the following weeks involved another 144 detectives. Sixteen Comancheros and 28 Bandidos were charged with murder. The trial dragged on and on and the verdicts were finally handed down in June 1987, almost three years after the massacre. Greg (Dukes) and Mark (Gloves) were imprisoned for manslaughter and Phillip (Knuckles) was charged with affray and given a two-year good behaviour bond.

  For three years people followed the case. Over the years, memories of the actual sequence of events have become clouded with many people compounding the sad story of that family’s links to the Milperra massacre with the closure of the Terminus. Sometimes a murder theme is thrown in for good measure. As one reputable person put it, ‘one of the McElwaine sons was murdered at Milperra and that evening the old man closed the pub and it never reopened’. Another said ‘… it only ended when the bikie thing happened.’

  The facts are that the McElwaines left the Terminus in late 1983, almost a year before the massacre occurred. At this time the McElwaines were not living in Pyrmont. None of the McElwaine’s sons were killed at Milperra and none of them were charged with murder.

  A related story concerns Bob McElwaine who was supposed to have gone bankrupt over the trial. As one person incorrectly observed, ‘Young Phillip went inside over the massacre and his dad went into debt over it. The old fella went broke paying the barristers.’ Bob McElwaine did go into voluntary bankruptcy, and that was the trigger for Tooths to take back the Terminus and place it on the market. But this all happened in 1983, well before the massacre. The Bandidos bikie gang to which the McElwaine brothers belonged had put criminal barrister Chris Murphy on a retainer a few months before the shootout, and it was he who represented them in court.231

  There are other confusions about that fateful year of 1984. The reader might remember that Bob McElwaine planned to run around Australia back in 1980. He didn’t actually do it. Just after leaving the Terminus, he was in the news again when he ran in the Westfield Melbourne to Sydney Ultramarathon of 875 kilometres. He was 59, too old to be expected to perform this feat, but he was in debt and is sup
posed to have said that he was running for the money. Cliff Young, who had won the race against the odds in the previous year was even older and, if nothing else, Bob liked a challenge. His performance was not stellar but he did finish the race and, from the outskirts of Sydney, he was given a full escort by the Bandidos. Cliff Young did not win this race either, but he was given a car for a ‘best achievement award’ – not a Ferrari, but a car anyway – and he gave it to Bob when he reached the finish line. This act of real generosity soon turned to dross. Bob McElwaine spent a few days in hospital recovering from the race and, as soon as he was released, he drove the car, had an accident and wrote it off.232 When he later appeared in court to give evidence on behalf of his son Phillip, it was a ‘tired and jaded Bob McElwaine, [who] limped to the witness box supported by a stick.’ He had been hit by a car when out jogging and he gave his occupation as ‘invalid pensioner.’233 He died in 2014 on the day before Fathers’ Day.

  8

  A long time between drinks

  About 1980 I bought the little house next to the hotel. I was looking for something to renovate and this was the cheapest house in Sydney. I went upstairs and I could see the city and I thought this can’t be bad. The pub was still going then. It was a good hotel really. It was looked after well. But Pyrmont was bad in those days. You wouldn’t walk around at night. The house didn’t have hot water. It was really run down. ‘Ann’s Folly’, they called it, and a lot of people thought I was absolutely mad. My brother-in-law is a real estate agent and he said, ‘That’ll just crumble. She’ll never get rid of it.’ Little did I know that one day we’d be living in the area. It’s a changing place. It’s lovely watching it.

  ANN ABICHT, PYRMONT, 2017234

  WHEN Tooths put the Terminus on the market in 1984, everyone thought it would be a brave investor who would buy the old pub. Interest rates on bank loans were high and they would keep on rising until they hit 23 per cent in 1987. And more significantly, the bar stools were empty.

  The community on the Pyrmont peninsula was collapsing as industries closed their doors and aggressive freeways sliced through the landscape, leaving demolished houses and fragmented down- and-out neighbourhoods in their wake. It seemed that everything had closed down. The huge wool stores were empty. Workshops fell silent. Weeds colonised disused railway lines.235 Down the road the sugar works were hanging on and well into the 1980s, this sugar refining company was still physically expanding by buying up public roads and creating new car parks by demolishing yet more houses. In 1981 a fine row of National Trust–listed, company-owned houses in Jones Street were demolished for a car park that never got built. They were known as Smooges Terrace, so called because everyone reckoned that the way to rent one was by ‘smooging’ up to the bosses. People became very angry when these much-loved houses was demolished, but by then there weren’t many people left to protest.

  This excellent 1992 mapmaker could perhaps enjoy a drink at the ‘derelict pub’ today.

  Marla Guppy, Pyrmont Pieces Project 1992.236

  Nobody could make head nor tail of what the official vision was for Pyrmont. One arm of the state government, Landcom, had recently unveiled plans for high-rise residential development while a different authority, the Maritime Services Board, tugged in the opposite direction by announcing that it intended to blast away part of the point for a new container terminal in the early 1980s. Just before the Terminus went on the market in 1984, it was announced that the new Darling Harbour Authority would turn the old Darling Harbour goods yards into a leisure playground in time for the country’s bicentennial celebrations in 1988. This promised new jobs, but the development was turning its back on the Pyrmont peninsula and cutting it off from the city. As had happened so often before, opportunities for integrating ‘forgotten’ Pyrmont were lost.

  Eventually, if the anticipated urban renewal ever arrived, it would create new drinkers. For now, these plans were still on the drawing board and the casual observer looking around the area could see only decay.

  By 1991 the census collectors listed only 532 houses in the whole of Pyrmont and a population of just under 1000 people. The old hotel was surrounded by rundown and derelict properties, disused factories and vacant land. The early 1990s saw the destruction of the Pyrmont Power Station and the Walter Burley Griffin incinerator. While earlier generations had complained of the pollution these plants had generated, now their disappearance reverberated with a sense of loss of a familiar landscape.

  Several angry films were made about the destruction of the area,237 and in August 1992 newspapers reported that 600 residents, a majority of the population, had seceded from Australia to form the Republic of Pyrmont. Their declaration of independence stated that ‘the residents of Pyrmont have been deprived of the inalienable right to security of habitation’ and that ‘the Republic will seek compensation from the Council of the City of Sydney for its failure to preserve its heritage.’ Passports were created and the boundary of the new nation was erected across Harris Street using barricades pinched from the construction site of the new Glebe Island Bridge. In a distant echo of those earliest European residents who railed against the authorities for failing to provide any services for forgotten Pyrmont, these new republicans wrote an open letter to Paul Keating, the Prime Minister of Australia, telling him that ‘the inhabitants of Pyrmont feel very profoundly that they have been betrayed by every level of government.’ Virginia Spate, who lived in Mount Street behind the pub, became Minister for the Arts, which was fitting for someone who later became Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney.238

  At one level this was just an elaborate stunt, but it came from the genuine frustration and anger of a community that felt unable to make its voice heard through the endless rounds of official ‘consultations’. Pyrmont was on the cusp of Australia’s biggest urban development to date, and it was inevitable that the small rump of residents felt betrayed and marginalised, believing that nobody had bothered much about Pyrmont until there was a buck to be made of it. Everyone was exhausted.

  Pyrmont Passport.

  Courtesy of Virginia Spate, Pyrmont.

  The Terminus was sold to Isaac and Susan Wakil (Citilease Property Group) in December 1984 for $250,000. The Wakils had migrated to Sydney from Romania and Iraq and, by the 1970s, they were beginning to create a large portfolio of vacant commercial buildings in inner city areas, including Pyrmont, where land values were at rock bottom.

  By the time the Wakils bought the pub they had already purchased a large swathe of land that stretched from Harris Street behind the pub through to Mount Street as well as the grand, old nineteenth-century Schute, Bell, Badgery and Lumby woolstore at 94–126 (known as 100) Harris Street across the road from this land. They used a very small part of these woolstore as their offices, leaving most of it vacant.

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Wakil entertained friends at their Vaucluse home. Mrs. Wakil chose a yellow crepe gown trimmed with gold sequins.’

  Caption and photograph courtesy of The Australian Women’s Weekly, 28 May 1975.

  Curiously, the Wakils continued to renew the hotel’s license for the next three decades, but if they ever intended to reopen it, they never indicated it. They simply locked up the building and waited for property prices to rise. They also bought and locked up the corner shop on the other side of Harris Street where drinkers used to buy their lunch. All in all, their acquisitions contributed to the growing lack of amenity in this struggling area.

  Loopholes in property legislation provided tax incentives that favoured capital growth over rental returns as properties purchased before 1985 were not subject to capital gains tax.239 Rental subsidies could be claimed for properties placed on the market, but actually leasing them could be avoided. This must have been the case for the fine, old sandstone house at 69 Harris Street, which was close to the hotel. There was a sign announcing that it was for lease, but as late as 2011 this sign still displayed a telephone number that did not even begin with the number 9, e
ven though this prefix had been added to all numbers in 1994.240

  If the Wakils held onto their properties for long enough, provided the world did not end, they stood a good chance of making a fortune. In the meantime the empty hotel looked attractive to squatters.

  During the 1970s, hundreds of houses in the inner suburbs of Sydney were earmarked for demolition to make way for new freeways that the Department of Main Roads (DMR) intended to build. Protesters sat in front of the bulldozers and planners did some rethinking and, in the end, many of these roads were never built. But market uncertainty and forced evictions from ‘DMR-affected’ properties left many houses vacant. Squatters moved in and, by the time the Terminus was sold, the idea of using surplus inner urban properties to house the unemployed and the poor had evolved into a ‘movement’. Squatting was claimed as a social right.

  One of the most tenacious and long-lived squats in Sydney was just down the road from the Terminus, in Scott and Cross Streets. Here, the squatters ignored various eviction notices in the 1980s and the last of them did not leave until the mid-1990s.241 In its final years, the City of Sydney Council was actively supporting their tenure. These buildings are now heritage listed and used by artistic groups, which some of the erstwhile squatters think is fitting, given their own interests. While the general public often imagined that squatters were drug-addicted hippies, some used this free Pyrmont accommodation to develop their artistic interests and some were professionals, including a couple of lawyers, dedicated to the social housing movement. A builder squatter who worked at keeping these places habitable recalled some local support like an ‘end-of-the-day’ cement dump from the Pioneer Cement Company near the fishmarkets, while a few strong men from the notorious Balmain Welding Company could be relied on to intervene if antisocial elements infiltrated the squat.242