by Louis Nowra
Perhaps the most dangerous feature of a barmaid’s life was that a great many of them took a liking to drink, and ‘once the passion gets a firm hold of them, then goodbye respectability’.
Her close friend became an alcoholic, starting off with a fondness for bottled stout and ending up drinking cheap rum. She drank away her money, her furniture was impounded and sold for non-payment of rent, and she and her two young children were ejected from their home and ended up living in a squalid tenement room in a Woolloomooloo lane. One could fall no further.
FROM WOOLLOOMOOLOO TO TAMWORTH
IT STARTED OUT AS A JOKE. KATE, WHO WORKED for the Australian Hotels Association, told me about a competition I might be interested in. The AHA was holding a contest for the best pub song, with a top prize of a thousand dollars. She knew I wrote songs with my friend Stewart D’Arrietta and suggested we might want to enter. As coincidence would have it, we had written a song called ‘Thank God for Beer’ for a musical we were working on. The final would be held in Tamworth during their Country Music Festival. I suggested to Stewie that we enter the competition as a bit of fun, even though I thought we had no chance of winning.
A few weeks later Kate arrived at the Old Fitzroy and told me the song had made the shortlist. I don’t know who was more amazed, Kate or me. There was an article about the finalists in the Sydney Morning Herald and, although Stewie and I were mentioned, the piece concentrated on a country garbo whose song was also in the competition.
‘We’re screwed,’ said Stewie, ‘they’re not going to allow city slickers to win.’
Every room or caravan park in the Tamworth area had been booked out so we wouldn’t be staying overnight. We drove up with Mandy. On the way Stewie was worried. ‘What if they think a song about God and beer is sacrilegious, Louis?’
I laughed off his concerns. ‘It’s just the nerves talking, Stewie.’ He shook his head and told me I was naïve.
There were men dressed in black like Johnny Cash parading around the shopping centres, women in retro 1950s frocks singing on street corners, and buskers in such gaudy cowboy outfits that they wouldn’t have been out of place in the gay Mardi Gras.
The final was held in the Pub, a big beer barn that lacked atmosphere. The audience slowly arrived. They had to, many of them were morbidly obese and walked with pained effort. Not only the middle-aged but also the young were grossly overweight. As they waited for the show to begin they devoured prodigious quantities of cheap mains and free desserts, washed down by litres of Diet Coke. This was an image far removed from the cliché of lean and abstemious country people.
Once the contest started and I had sat through the first three songs it dawned on me that I didn’t like country music. The songs seemed to go on forever, with a simple verse / chorus structure. The lyrics were monotonous variations on the themes of pubs and drunken larrikins, and were all sung in a grating nasal twang.
Eventually Stewie and I were introduced. As if to confirm our status as outsiders, Stewie was wearing a Fedora hat and hipster suit more suitable to a New York club, and I was in a suit. We looked like aliens. In order to inject a little levity I told the audience we were from Woolloomooloo. Once they heard the word I felt a sudden lack of support in the room. We weren’t from the country, but it seemed as if we were mocking them, pretending that Woolloomooloo was an urban home of country and western. When I stepped off the stage to allow Stewie to perform, I saw expressions of suspicion and distrust on every chubby face.
Our song was based on a rollicking sing-a-long chorus and was blues tinged. Stewie sang it well, his inimitable voice reminiscent of Tom Waits. When he got to the middle eight lyric, ‘Jesus must have understood/ That a little bit of spirit/ Makes a man feel good/ He turned water into wine/ It would have been beer/ If he had more time’, I felt a distinct chill from the audience members around me. Even so, I noticed many a plump toe tap during the chorus of ‘Thank God for beer’.
There were another couple of singers whose ditties were like aural torture to me, then it was over and we waited for the judges’ decision. I noticed something in me had changed. I had come all this way just as a lark but now I wanted to win. It was not only about the money but I had a brief, vivid fantasy about the song being discovered by a brewery and being used in TV ads for years. The royalties would be my superannuation.
We missed out on the third and then the second prize. My heart began thumping. We could win this! There was a theatrical pause from the MC and he announced the winner. For a moment my mind was a blur. It was as if the winner’s name was in another language. Then the realisation hit me.
‘I told you he’d win,’ Stewie whispered into my ear.
It took some minutes for this to sink in, then the garbo came over to our table, still clutching the winner’s cheque. He was shy and humble.
‘You know, boys, yours was a good song.’ We both congratulated him and wished him well for his future career. ‘No, that’s it,’ he said, ‘this is the last time I’m gonna perform or write songs.’
I couldn’t believe it — we had lost to a guy who didn’t want to sing or write any more. It was a long and silent drive back to the Old Fitzroy, with Stewie occasionally looking across at me, sighing and shaking his head, ‘You had to fucking say we were from Woolloomooloo.’
THE WOOLLOOMOOLOO OUTRAGE
IF THERE WAS ONE INCIDENT THAT BESMIRCHED the name of Woolloomooloo it was ‘The Woolloomooloo Outrage’. It occurred over the evening of 10 September 1883 and into the following day, and so horrified the nation that the suburb became a byword for callous depravity.
Shortly before 7 a.m. on 11 September, Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Phillips was taken to Sydney Hospital by a policeman. She was in a coma, very cold and with a faint pulse. She died around 5 o’clock that afternoon. Constables Waples and Clough had found her in a stable near Griffiths Street, Woolloomooloo. She was lying on rotten straw, a sack across her legs. A jacket covered her to the waist, but below that she was naked. Pieces of her torn dress were found nearby. There were blisters on her left hip and on one of her legs, where she had been burnt. There was graphic evidence she had been a victim of mass rape. Doctors determined that her death was caused by exposure and shock from the injuries she had received.
The main culprits were soon arrested and one of them, George Kingsbury, twenty-five, admitted his guilt and gave evidence that led to the arrest of several other men and boys. He justified his quick confession, saying ‘I could not see, being charged with murder when others are guilty and more guilty than me escape, while I was punished.’ It wasn’t long before the terrible truth emerged.
Elizabeth Phillips was a familiar face in Woolloomooloo and the local police knew her well. She was thirty-three and had been convicted thirty-five times, mainly for drunkenness and obscene language. As the coroner would say of her at the inquest, ‘She was a completely degraded creature and whatever her attractiveness may have been within a period so recent as her early womanhood, she had fallen morally and physically as low as it was possible for a woman to fall. She had arrived at that stage of her career that reformation was no longer possible.’
She had been released on the morning of 10 September after serving a month for breaking a window, and once the pubs were open she bought a bottle of rum. Later, a woman passing by saw Phillips lying on a footpath and asked if she lived locally. A tetchy Phillips told the woman to stop asking so many questions. Worried about her, the woman gave the drunken Phillips her hat.
Around 7 o’clock that night, twenty-five-year-old Kingsbury, a carter from Dowling Street, went to McCormack’s stables to buy some horse feed. Half an hour later he came out into Griffiths Street, at the corner of Bourke, and saw a drunken woman lying on the ground surrounded by several boys and men. Edward Williams, a few years older than Kingsbury, gave Phillips a kick and told her to get up. ‘Mind your own business,’ she slurred. Williams asked the others for help, then grabbed her by the feet, while another held her by the waist, and the
other three followed.
Phillips screamed ‘What are you going to do to me, leave me alone,’ as they took her to a side lane near the stables. The five of them propped her up against a fence where Williams tried to rape her, only stopping when a woman behind the fence shouted, ‘Go away out of that. Don’t be doing that here!’ One of the men, James ‘Dummy’ Conners, a labourer from Forbes Street, pretended he was Phillips’s husband and loudly told Phillips what he was going to do with her when they got home.
The men then carried her to the nearby McCormack stables, as Phillips pleaded for them to get her a cab. They laid her down on a pile of straw where Williams, Conners, Kingsbury and George Meyers raped her. Two others heard about what was happening and arrived to join in: fourteen-year-old Alfred Barker and twenty-year-old Herbert ‘Ginger’ Lahiff, son of the owner of Lahiff’s Hotel in Forbes Street and recently returned from hospital after seeking treatment for a venereal disease. After each had had their turn, Williams raped Phillips again. Two other men, also called Williams (Alfred and Joseph Williams), heard about what was happening and arrived to join in. One witness was to say that Alfred had told him he had heard what was happening at the stables and that he was heading off there ‘to go for her’.
By now it was just after 9 p.m. and Edward Williams and Kingsbury decided they wanted a drink. A happy Williams wore the hat Phillips had been given that morning, and the two men visited William Selfe’s Champion of Freedom Hotel in Bourke Street. After a glass of rum they returned to the stables where Williams raped Phillips again. Some other boys, including another fourteen year old, visited the stables to stare at the abject figure on the straw, who was incapable of speaking or even reacting to what was happening to her.
Bored, Conners went for a drink at a hotel on the corner of Bourke and Woolloomooloo streets, while Kingsbury, not entirely sober, spotted a local, Alexander Campbell, a plumber and cab driver, walking down Bourke Street. Kingsbury called after him, ‘You’re Stuart’s pimp’ and ‘a bastard’. Soon the two men were fighting. The brawl, watched by a dozen young people and old men, went on for ten minutes until a policeman appeared. Instead of stopping the two men, according to Campbell the policeman ‘told us to fight on’. The fight ended a few minutes later because Campbell broke a ring on his finger and the two men, with the help of the crowd, searched for it, the fight forgotten.
Kingsbury remained in the street talking to Barker and Edward Williams until just after eleven, when they went back to the stables where the insatiable Williams raped Phillips again. Kingsbury dozed and woke up to see Williams tearing off her clothes, chortling, ‘You will see a bit of fun when she wakes.’ Barker removed her boots and stockings. According to Kingsbury she was still alive but didn’t utter a word when stripped of her clothes. Kingsbury slept while the other two guarded the scene and stared at her naked body. It was during this time that one of the trio left the stables and returned with a hot flat iron and burnt her arm and leg. At 5 a.m. Williams threw a sack on her before threatening the other two, warning them to not mention what they had done. Then they all left for their homes.
By six o’clock the news had spread throughout Woolloomooloo. McCormack, the owner of the stables, noticed the body on the straw but did nothing. A John Edwards went up to a fellow worker at the fish market and said, ‘There’s a sight I have never seen in my life — a woman lying naked.’ These two men were joined by another fishmonger and they strolled up to the stables where they saw a stranger put an old bag over Phillips’s head. She was on her back with her legs open, wearing nothing but a black jacket that was open at the front. Her breasts and stomach were exposed. One fisherman felt her chest and head and remarked that she was ‘as cold as death’. Without hurrying, they returned to the fish market and, when they couldn’t find a policeman, went back to their work. Another fisherman heard the rumour and after seeing her body, ‘thought women could do more for her’, headed off to the local pub to gossip about what he had seen. It was a labourer, Henry Maddox, who after he had overheard men talking at the fish market went to the stables where he recognised the woman he had known for three years as Lizzie Phillips. He contacted the police and accompanied her to the hospital.
The inquest scandalised Australia. The Attorney-General was to say, ‘It is a revolting and tearful case … with information that would embarrass the jury.’ And indeed it did. Many spectators, members of the jury and the press were appalled at how casual and callous the Woolloomooloo locals had been. The woman who supplied the hot flat iron offered the excuse that she didn’t remember anything because she was ‘too drunk and I’ve been taking chloroform’.
Elizabeth Orr, aged only fifteen, told the inquest that she had recognised Barker as being part of the crowd that night, and that the next morning she had talked to Barker about what happened. Barker gave her such a graphic and obscene account that all the newspapers could report of her testimony was that it ‘was evidence of the most disgusting nature’. The shocked coroner asked how Orr could have been on such familiar terms with a boy of fourteen that he ‘could tell this to you?’ The girl just shrugged and said, ‘He told me so.’ Evidence that followed revealed the pitiless indifference of those who saw the body in the morning but made no real effort to report the crime. But it was not only that; it also seemed to the police that locals were deliberately hiding the truth and protecting the guilty.
The jury deliberated for seven minutes and then returned a verdict of wilful murder against Edward Williams, James Conners and George Kingsbury. While the jury held ‘the gravest suspicions against Alfred Williams and Joseph Williams’, because there was insufficient evidence of wilful murder against them, they were released. The sensational inquest had been an ordeal for the jury and its foreman who, speaking for them all, told the court that it would have been better if the evidence had not been published.
Edward Williams was hanged but Kingsbury and Conners escaped the death penalty. A few months later charges of rape were brought against Lahiff, Meyers and the ‘undersized’ Barker. They pleaded not guilty and, in a surprising move, the Crown dropped the case against them because they felt there wasn’t enough corroborating evidence. The three were discharged in late March, but the narrow escape didn’t seem to bother ‘Ginger’ Lahiff at all. A few months later, on 1 July, a newspaper reported that:
The youth Lahiff, one of the Woolloomooloo larrikins concerned in the outrage, who got off the charge of murder with the others by the skin of his teeth, was up today, with three others for burglary. As he was being removed into the Black Maria, five maidens belonging to the fashionable suburb in question, ranging from 14 to 17 years, dressed in tip-top style, assembled to see their ‘blokes’ off. They ran for some distance after the van, and cried out most lustily to their friends to ‘keep up their pecker’. It was said that two of the girls are Lahiff’s sisters. It was all the police could do to keep them back from embracing the prisoners.
The behaviour of Lahiff and the girls only confirmed that Woolloomooloo was a sewer of immorality and that the Crown prosecutor at Edward Williams’s trial was right when he said the outrage ‘indicated a danger in the future of the country … I hope that future legislation would be able to turn the youth of this colony from depraved and vicious courses and make them respectable members of the community.’
The stigma remained and for years whenever there was a pack rape in the rest of Australia, the Woolloomooloo Outrage was always mentioned as a yardstick of revolting behaviour. But for Woolloomooloo’s critics there was one bright light of hope. Plunkett Street School was opened in 1884, not far from where Elizabeth Phillips had been so viciously gang raped. It was thought the school would bring a sense of morality and improved social behaviour to an area that sorely needed it. As the Evening News put it, ‘After the late disclosures in the Woolloomooloo tragedy, it is very evident that the children of this district will grow up perfect savages if they are disbarred from the privilege of education during their early years.’
; DOWLING STREET TO THE HOUSE OF THE PRINCE OF THE GYPSIES
COMING INTO KINGS CROSS FROM THE CITY by train over the viaduct can be an exhilarating experience, especially when the jacarandas are flowering in the streets of Woolloomooloo. It’s as if the whole area is covered in a mesmerising purple haze.
There are other times when I am in the streets and hear the metallic screeching of the omnipresent trains overhead and I think that the viaduct was built so that train passengers could avoid being socially contaminated by Woolloomooloo. Down below, the viaduct can be an oppressive presence, and by the time it descends to ground level at Dowling Street, just before entering the tunnel to Kings Cross Station, it becomes a brutal concrete scar that severs a street that was once a primary thoroughfare but is now reduced to fragments of its former self — so much so that bewildered drivers and pedestrians searching for a house number can find themselves confronted by the viaduct, not knowing whether Dowling Street continues beyond it or becomes a new street entirely.
Given its reputation, it is one of the ironies of Woolloomooloo that many of its main streets are named after men in the law. Forbes, Stephen and Dowling were Chief Justices and, when no specific name sprang to mind, one was called plain Judge Street.
James Dowling, who named these streets, had come out to Sydney in 1828, aged forty-one with a large family and ended up being the second Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. His judgments were well considered and just, his ego was contained (highly unusual for a judge), and he was known for his tact and kindness. Despite his frugal habits (including walking from Brougham Street to work in the city), he was constantly in debt. Underpaid and overworked, he collapsed on the bench in 1844 and died soon afterwards.
