by Louis Nowra
The street he named after himself originally descended uninterrupted from William Street to the bay. Since the late 1970s, when the viaduct was constructed in the brutalist style of the period, Dowling Street has become a spluttering thing. Where once you could stand at the top of the street and look straight down towards the wharf and see ships that seemed to be within touching distance, now you have to be within 100 metres of the bay to have any view of it at all.
The section of Dowling Street south of the viaduct is short, with beautifully restored Victorian terraces on the eastern side. Opposite them is a former warehouse that once belonged to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and now houses the Cancer Council. This stolid building nudges against the viaduct, which has taken up the space of a row of exquisite terraces demolished for the railway line.
It’s a pity that number 151 has vanished, because that three-storey terrace was home to artists and designers from the late 1940s to the middle 1960s. There’s a delightful sketch by an anonymous artist of the rear of it, showing the artist Alannah Coleman painting in a doorway while a man contentedly reads a newspaper in the sunny garden notable for its single tree — a palm. Later Coleman opened a gallery in London promoting Australian art. David Strachan was another artist who lived there, a painter and a teacher who was a member of the so-called Sydney Charm School. His gentle, lyrical still lifes, nudes and portraits were highly sought after during his lifetime.
One celebrated tenant was Frank Mitchell. He became a resident in 1949 and quickly became known for his beautifully designed women’s clothes and his fashion parades in the rooms downstairs. He had been an air gunner during the war, then gravitated to the theatre, where he painted background scenery and assisted the costume designer. He had no formal training in fashion or tailoring but, with supreme confidence, held a parade the year he shifted in. Bill Harding, a writer friend of mine, knew Mitchell a few decades later and said he had a hilarious, sharp sense of humour and would say of a garment he didn’t fancy, ‘It looked like it’d been designed by someone who’d read about a dress, but actually never seen one.’
Women adored him and ‘Down in the tenements of Woolloomooloo’, as one reporter said, the fashion parades were always highly anticipated. Women’s magazines avidly quoted his imperious advice, as this fashion editor did in 1953:
For leisure wear he decrees trousers when taking her leisure indoors, the Mitchell girl wears a trouser suit of black velvet. Worn with a cerise satin sash, it is bead embroidered at the neckline and side buttoned at the trouser ends. In party mood, the Mitchell girl varies her style with tight pants of coral pink faille striped with gold thread. Black silk jersey makes the off-the-shoulder blouse. Very fetching.
The cheap warehouses and large terrace houses in Woolloomooloo attracted many fashion designers. Trent Nathan, the men’s designer, established his successful business in Cathedral Street during the 1970s, and on the northern side of the viaduct, a few doors up from the Old Fitzroy Hotel, lives Vivian Chan Shaw, who started her career in the 1960s, opening up her own boutique in the Royal Arcade in the city. She specialised in exquisitely detailed designs made from jersey, silk and panne velvet as well as knitwear, selling to overseas clients like Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack. She added jewellery designs when she shifted into Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building in 1986 and has operated there ever since, working in partnership with her daughter Claudia Chan Shaw, who once presented the television program Collectors. In 2013 her mother’s career was recognised in an exhibition, Vivian Chan Shaw, 40 Years — A Retrospective.
For years the most recognisable building in Dowling Street was the Standard Steam Laundry, an enormous three-storey Victorian structure that stood from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Its severe brick façade promised hard, unrelenting work, its look of grim permanence made even more intimidating by the huge chimney that towered above it.
Owned by Louis Hermanson and Leo Witkosky, it was one of the largest laundries in Sydney, employing up to eighty-five young women, widows who had children and women whose husbands couldn’t work. It supplied the major hotels in the city. Laundering was a cut-throat business, with over 400 laundries across Sydney and another two in Dowling Street: Alfred Hill’s Federal Laundry near William Street (the building is still there, as is its original Laundry sign), and near Cowper Wharf Road was Welby’s Hygienic Laundry.
Even when the Standard Steam Laundry closed, after the council had resumed the buildings running along Duke and Reid streets, the chimney remained, dominating Woolloomooloo as a stern reminder of Victorian toil. Once the laundry was demolished, the land was cheaply paved with concrete to make a playground for the kindergarten across the road for a couple of years, before the space became an improvised car park.
Recently two young archaeologists spent a couple of days digging up part of the site as part of the council’s half-hearted search for artefacts that might be of significance, things that might, if found, stop or postpone the building of a four-storey apartment block for low-income earners, an outcome that the council was anxious to avoid. The two men exposed the foundations of the steam laundry, which held no interest for them, even as an example of industrial archaeology. I asked them what would happen if they found Aboriginal artefacts. ‘That’d be six months here,’ said one, excited at the prospect, having not uncovered a single such artefact in all his digs in Woolloomooloo.
There’s a large mural and the outline of a house marked out on the wall of the building next door, like a ghostly etching on the bricks. This apartment block is seldom noticed but is of immense significance. It’s a monument to a brief period when the workers of Woolloomooloo were part of a great social experiments. Promoted by the lord mayor, David Gilpin, it was part of his party’s civic reform agenda in response to the problem that workers were being priced out of housing in the inner city where they were employed.
Gilpin was a produce merchant, schoolteacher and farmer who fought endemic corruption in the council. Obsessed with banning boxing matches, and the intricacies of Biblical interpretation, he may have been labelled a wowser, but his principles were above reproach and in 1923 he helped initiate the building of working men’s flats in Dowling Street. He envisaged that the scheme would spread throughout the inner city. However, when construction commenced in 1924, he led a breakaway group within the Civic Reform Association, which split the party and by 1925, when the building was officially opened, he was no longer lord mayor.
On 22 June 1925 selected tenants moved in. There had been so many applicants for the flats that the final selection had to be by ballot. The flats with four rooms were let for 25 shillings a week and those with five rooms, 29 shillings a week. The rents were fixed on the basis that the flats were self-supporting. Similar flats were on course for Pyrmont when the scheme was quietly dropped. Developers in league with the new councillors argued that the land around the city was too expensive for working men’s flats and should be for houses the middle class could afford. Greed had defeated principles once again in Sydney. This simple but attractive block, with its graceful façade and recessed balconies, is a reminder of Gilpin’s idealism and concern for the working class.
If one looks across the road at the row of terraces built during the redevelopment of Woolloomooloo in the 1970s, one can’t but help notice that these flimsy, cheaply built houses seem as old as, but less substantial than, the magnificent renovated Victorian terraces they jostle with. By comparison, Gilpin’s working men’s flats, now ninety years old and built to withstand the vicissitudes of time, are sturdy, well built and ageless.
Dowling Street is as seasonal as any street in London. In summer the plane trees between the Old Fitzroy and the playground obscure the houses with rich green foliage that shades and softens the graceless exteriors. For some residents, autumn, with its thick rustling carpet of dead leaves littering the footpaths outside their doorsteps, is a reason to complain about the trees, as is spring when pollen causes hayfever and the round, la
rge seeds scattered everywhere make walking precarious. Some locals believe the trees cause asthma in humans and illnesses in their dogs. On winter nights the bare boughs lit by streetlights lend an eerie atmosphere, like a brightly lit movie set empty of people but charged with inexplicable menace.
Perhaps I feel this because I know what lies behind some of the doors. In a crime that the Sydney Morning Herald headlined, ‘A Mystery from the City’s Wild Side’, one late summer’s night in 2005, Isaac Dinsdale, thirty-three, a tough scaffolder, opened his door in Dowling Street to find ten teenage boys and adult men waiting to talk to him. There was an argument, a wild brawl broke out and, after being knifed several times, Dinsdale pushed himself through the group and ran for his life. Chased by his attackers, he tore past six houses and headed into Stephen Street, just past the old sandstone dairy, where he slipped and fell. The mob jumped on his chest, kicked him in the head and screamed abuse, calling him a dog. The commotion echoed through the street, and dogs barked furiously. One witness, who peered through her blinds at the melee, said, ‘They were punching him, kicking him, laughing … it was like they were fighting amongst each other to see who was going to hit him next.’ A few people tried to stop the thugs, and one man shouted, ‘He’s had enough. Get off him!’
Deciding there were too many witnesses, the mob ran off. One man hurried to inform Dinsdale’s de facto, Kirsten Henderson, who was several blocks away at her cousin’s house with their children. By the time she reached Dinsdale he was unconscious; knife wounds had punctured his heart, slashed an artery, cut into his large intestine and sliced his aorta. He died soon afterwards.
Dinsdale wasn’t perfect. He’d beat his partner, fight with strangers and even friends he thought had turned against him. The murder was never solved. There were a few brave individuals who told the authorities what they had seen, but most refused to cooperate with the police. The detectives investigating the case accumulated fifty folders and a dozen boxes about the case, but could not break the silence.
This was typical of Woolloomooloo. Throughout its history there have been those who are suspicious of the law, but really it’s such a close community that witnesses run scared. One anonymous local spoke for many, saying, ‘Everybody’s too afraid. We have to live here … There were lots of threats that got passed through the telegraph … from word of mouth … that the people that actually put the knife in … will get you. Every time the court case was coming close, it’d happen. If you have children, do you really want to worry what’s going to happen to your kids?’ One suspect’s phone was tapped and he was overheard saying of one witness, ‘You’d better tell them to watch their faces and their houses … fucking evil things will happen.’ Everyone in the street knows the perpetrators, but they will continue to keep quiet, as most people would in those circumstances.
The police and ambulances are familiar presences in the street. Ferocious domestic fights and crazed drug behaviour are commonplace. The arrest of drug dealers means nothing, as they are immediately replaced. Mental breakdowns are common and, since I’ve been drinking at the Old Fitzroy, two young teenagers have hanged themselves. Heart attacks take many, including, most recently, a middle-aged woman who mentally wrestled daily with seven personalities that fought over her soul.
Yet, on the eastern side especially, those who have lived in the area since the 1950s still have a strong sense of community and close friendships, which I can vouch for having been invited to their homes to talk and drink with them. Squeezed between two terraces on the eastern side is a building that is completely out of character with the street. This is the former Margaret Sloss library. Opened in 1963 in front of a hundred people — chairs were arranged on the blocked-off street — it has an alienating frontage: a stern wall made of bricks, with every fourth brick protruding in a kind of stepladder to nowhere, with only a sliver of a vertical window to relieve the wall’s hostile blankness. If any design would put you off going to a library, then this would be it.
What’s unseen by anyone but a knowing local is that behind the terraces old and new on the western side of Dowling Street is a hidden gem of a park called Denis Winston Place. Winston was an expert in town planning and in the 1970s had been the spiritual guide for the planners redeveloping Woolloomooloo. He died in 1981, a year before this tranquil oasis of lawns, gardens and trees was officially opened.
In order to create the park most of Judge Street was bulldozed. Ayesha’s flat is part of a new block that overlooks the park with its jacarandas, robinias and peppercorn trees. There are seats with jagged edges on the brickwork to stop people sitting there for too long, and a bronze sculpture and fountain, ‘Aphrodite’ by Margel Hinder, a foremost modernist of her era. During the 1980s the fountain would have been a beautiful object, but now it no longer works, scum fills the bronze basin, and the council shows no interest in repairing it.
Denis Winston Place reveals some of the better achievements of the urban planners, but further down Dowling Street, at the corner of Best Street, stood a structure that symbolised their failures. One of the problems with keeping some of the original labyrinthine lanes and alleyways was that many of them never saw any sun, and narrow Best Street is a prime example. The new houses are always in the shade and have little light. A sort of sandstone grotto constructed on the corner, like a spectral bus shelter, highlighted the planners’ mistakes. It was so dank, damp and dark, that the sandstone developed a sickly green tinge of moss and mould and it was demolished.
Opposite this corner is Dowling Street’s sportsground, where once four gorgeous terrace houses stood with steeply pitched roofs like gingerbread houses. In the sportsground there is always movement with tennis players and basketballers. The kids’ playground with its brightly coloured furniture is a reminder that during the 1930s this was the only children’s playground in Woolloomooloo, no doubt because it was close to Plunkett Street School. It now also has a flourishing community garden planted with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees, plus a stoic coffee bush whose beans are made into a special limited edition brew once a year by Toby’s café in Cathedral Street.
Just past the school in lower Dowling Street is a row of Victorian houses, and at number 41 is the terrace where the Gypsy prince Costa Sterio once lived. Woolloomooloo has always accepted groups that have been spurned by other communities, and the Gypsies are no exception. During the 1940s (this was because they couldn’t travel during the war) it was said that at least half of Australia’s Gypsies lived in Woolloomooloo. Some were bottle-ohs, others hawkers, and women told fortunes. Most of the Gypsies lived in semi-derelict houses in lower Bourke and McElhone streets. The Gypsy Queen resided in Palmer Street at the corner of St Kilda Lane.
Costa Sterio, the Prince of Gypsies, died in 1943 at the early age of thirty. A Gypsy custom was, and still is, that the eldest sister, mother and wife of the dead man should sit with the body until the funeral. Gypsy children invited passers-by, even strangers, inside to view the body, and so it seemed everyone in Woolloomooloo was invited to troop through the terrace into a small room empty of any furniture except an ornate satin-draped coffin.
Hundreds packed the house over the weekend, crowding into the front room where Sterio’s embalmed body lay in state. He wore a brown double-breasted suit and hat, his fingers sparkled with rings valued at £450 and a chain of gold sovereigns was draped across his waistcoat. Dressed in long black frocks and sitting on the bare wooden floor opposite the coffin were Sterio’s mother and his twenty-five-year-old widow, Elizabeth (whose real name, Ruby, she hid from non-Gypsies). They smoked and said nothing, ignoring the flash bulbs, a brawl between a black American sailor and a white man outside the window, and the comments from visitors staring at the curious scene.
No relatives attended because it was a superstition that being in the house where a family member had died would bring evil to them, even after the body had been removed. Missing was a crucial component of the Gypsy custom: the eldest sister. Sterio’s sister was suppose
d to be mourning with her mother and sister-in-law but she had been sentenced to three months’ jail and had eleven more days to serve. The minister for justice refused to release her and the funeral had to be postponed for ten days.
It ended up being one of the most ostentatious and theatrical funerals seen in Sydney for some time. Held at the Greek Orthodox Church in upper Bourke Street, over a hundred mourners, who waited outside the church for two hours before the ceremony began. Once the church doors opened more mourners arrived. Women and children climbed up onto the pews and altar steps to catch a last glimpse of the prince. Police were called in to control the excited crowd. Some packed the church’s balcony, which it was feared would collapse. The service was continually interrupted by weeping, shouts and prayers. After the chanting of the Greek funeral service concluded, the lid of the coffin was opened and members of Sterio’s family pressed forward and kissed the lips of the corpse.
The Leichhardt Municipal Band marched ahead of the procession to Rookwood Cemetery. A special floral car was piled high with expensive flower arrangements. At the grave relatives threw in silver coins, and his mother poured a bottle of brandy over the casket. As the moans and lamentations rose higher, Elizabeth threw herself down at the graveside begging her husband to return, while her mother-in-law wept and muttered ‘My little boy, the youngest.’
Immediately after the funeral police ordered two female members of the Sterio family, Sophie and Helen, out of New South Wales for three years. The women had been found guilty of stealing upwards of £30 from a US serviceman. The judge at their trial concluded that the women were menaces who preyed on US servicemen. The Americans may have liked having their fortunes told, but ‘with the simplicity of children, handed over their money and were surprised when some of it disappeared’.
AYESHA
