Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  Beneath the bravado of Woolloomooloo was a subterranean current of despair. It seemed as if the locals were possessed of a singular melancholy that could only be relieved by ending one’s life. Juries at inquests were reluctant to return a verdict of suicide, but sometimes the evidence was overwhelming. An inquest at the Revolving Battery Hotel in 1882 concerned John Kerr, a forty-one-year-old father of six who hanged himself. He had lived with his wife of fifteen years in Dowling Street but, due to paralysis, had been unable to find work. He had become so depressed that he would often say out loud that he would not live to see Christmas. One evening his seven-year-old daughter went down into the kitchen and told her mother that her father was in the bedroom, bleeding. Kerr’s wife ran upstairs and saw her husband hanging from a rafter. When she cut him down she fell to the floor, his dead body landing on top of her.

  The noose was common. One sixty-four-year-old woman hanged herself, afraid she was going to be put into a mental asylum. An Italian, who had only been in Australia for seven months and had not been able to find work, tied a strap to the ceiling and was later found dead. Peter Wilson, lodging in Charles Street, made certain of his death. When he was told by doctors that he had a disease of the brain and would lose his eyesight, he was depressed for a week, but seemed to be recovering when he told his landlady, Mrs Metz, he wanted to be left alone to smoke his pipe. She went out and a quarter of an hour later a little girl passing the window saw Wilson hanging from a rope tied to the bed. She told Mrs Metz, who rushed home and on opening the bedroom door, saw Wilson hanging from the top of an iron bedstead. His head was split open and blood was pouring from it — he had smashed his skull open with an axe before making sure of his death by hanging himself.

  One of the saddest suicide attempts was that of William King in 1903. Aged only 15, he managed to get hold of a revolver and shot himself in the chest. Neighbours rushed him to hospital in time. King’s father had committed suicide a year before, and his mother had died in hospital. He had no friends, and was alone and miserable. He was employed as a street sweeper and often threatened to end his life because he had nothing to live for. His landlady said that he had attempted to strangle himself with a towel some months before, saying he was tired of life.

  During the 1880s the most popular poison was Rough on Rats, an arsenic-based poison generally washed down with beer; even so, it was a painful way to die. Strychnine was also popular. At a coronial inquest at President Lincoln Hotel, the jury heard about fifty-four-year-old Louisa Harland of Dowling Street. She had been married for thirty-four years and was said to be on ‘friendly and affectionate terms with her husband’. One morning, as he was about to leave for work, she said quite casually to him, ‘Dick, I won’t be alive when you come back.’ When he returned from work she was dead from strychnine poisoning. The husband turned up at the inquest but was useless as a witness, his mind muddled by grief and drink.

  What is striking about these incidents is just how many boarding houses there must have been in Woolloomooloo, populated with despairing tenants. Arthur Heath, aged thirty-five, was found by his fellow lodgers in a Dowling Street boarding house with a bullet wound to his mouth and deep razor cuts to his wrists. A revolver lay beside him. He was a waiter with no relatives and had been out of work for eight weeks. The lodgers noticed he had been behaving in ‘a strange manner’ for a week or so, complaining he could neither talk nor sit still and fancied he was going mad.

  Boarding houses were also the scenes of violence and madness. In 1888 a drunken William Carroll, forty-six, had an argument with his wife. He tried to hit her with a water jug but was prevented by their lodger, sixty-year-old Leonard Dewberry. Three years before, Carroll had been jailed for twelve months for inflicting grievous bodily harm on another man. His wife worked as a charwoman and was said to be a genial and gentle soul, compared to her husband who was aggressive and violent when drunk.

  On this occasion Carroll went out into the backyard, apparently having calmed down, only to return a short time later. Dewberry had gone to his room when he heard what sounded like someone falling onto the sitting room floor. He glanced outside his room and saw Carroll walking up the stairs with an open razor in his hands. Shortly afterwards he was horrified to see blood seeping into his room. By now thoroughly alarmed he rushed into the front room only to see Mrs Carroll’s skull smashed into splinters and her brain exposed. Nearby was a bloody axe. Dewberry ran outside into the street and yelled out to a group of passers-by, ‘For God’s sake, go for the police. I believe Carroll’s murdered his wife.’ Carroll was later found upstairs on his bed, his windpipe completely severed.

  Domestic arguments and beatings were not unique to Woolloomooloo, but they seemed to be more brutal and bloody. Henry Sheehy, a fisherman, was a ‘big burly fellow’ and a vicious brute who regularly beat his wife, Susan, ‘a delicate and forlorn-looking woman’ who had had six children by the age of forty-three. He also beat his children, on one occasion so badly assaulting his daughter Emily that her mother fainted. Another time he took Emily to the Domain and tried to rape her. Emily managed to escape and attempted to drown herself in the bay, but was saved. When Susan asked him for 30 shillings a week to support the family, he struck her savagely and repeatedly with a brace. The blows killed her. Her body was laid out on a slab in the morgue, looking like, said one of the doctors, ‘a mere skeleton’. Her injuries were both old and new. Her head had no fewer than twenty scars, both eyes were completely destroyed, the nose had been broken, on both sides of the head were depressed fractures of the skull which allowed the doctor free insertion of a probe into the brain. Her six children were led in by staff to view the body, which they all kissed ‘most fervently’ and it was some time before they could be removed from the room.

  Women seldom killed their spouses, but one who did was Olive Donne. Late in the morning of 7 August 1913 she walked up Dowling Street to Barry’s Butchers. She entered the shop and confronted her husband, William, who worked there. He hadn’t been home in a fortnight and she asked him where he was living. He refused to say and told her to stop blubbering.

  ‘Go and sit in the sun and I will see you at one o’clock,’ he said.

  ‘Well kiss me then and I will go,’ she offered.

  But he would have none of it and tried to brush her off by offering to kiss her at one o’clock. But she wouldn’t leave the shop because, as she later told the court, she thought if she waited there he would return to her. By now William was angry and said he’d get Mr Barry, the owner, to remove her from the shop.

  ‘Don’t drive me too far,’ warned Olive, taking a small nickelplated revolver out of her handbag. ‘Look, I have a gun.’

  William laughed, bragging that he wasn’t frightened of it.

  ‘It isn’t for you. I will shoot myself,’ she said, and at that instant the gun went off. William fell to the floor, shot through the heart. After the shooting the clearly demented Olive, unable to comprehend what had happened, asked the arresting policeman, ‘Will my boy ever speak to me again?’

  When Olive was brought up from her cell into the courtroom for the trial she was on the verge of hysteria and had to be physically helped by a female warder. Florence Ringoose, who boarded with the Donnes, gave evidence. William had been seeing other women and one time had brought another woman home for dinner. While they ate he openly admired her hair and wished he could brush it. During the meal he constantly criticised his wife, telling Olive that her hair was shabby and ugly.

  Then he disappeared for two weeks. Every night, the lodger told the court, Olive stayed up and waited for him to come home. When she heard footsteps near the front door she would go outside in the vain hope it was her husband returning. She searched for William through the Woolloomooloo streets and lanes, looking for him everywhere. As far as the lodger was concerned, Mrs Donne was ‘a broken-hearted woman’.

  When the prosecutor presented the murder weapon in court, Olive became hysterical and fell into the arms of the warder.
When she later spoke about how her actions had hurt her family, especially her mother, there was a loud scream from the gallery. It was her mother, who then burst into hysterical weeping. Olive cried out as her mother was removed from the court, ‘Oh, my mother. Oh, God have mercy. Have mercy! Have mercy. Dear mother, how I love her.’

  The warder standing beside Olive wept, as did the female witnesses. Many spectators cried and several men in the jury ‘put handkerchiefs to their eyes’.

  The judge directed the jury to deliver a verdict on whether the revolver was fired deliberately or accidentally. The jury had a quick consultation among themselves and the foreman told the judge they had come to the unanimous decision that the gun had been fired accidentally and she was not guilty of murder. The judge, who was also seen to be overcome with emotion, agreed with the verdict. The warder escorted Olive from the dock and she was driven off in a cab with her mother, never to return to Woolloomooloo.

  THE OLD FITZROY STAFF

  THERE IS SPARSE FOOTAGE OF THE OLD FITZROY on the internet, but one of the first videos that comes up is of two men, flaming like human torches, running down Reid Street towards the hotel. In the flickering darkness a large crowd can be seen cheering and applauding. When the two burning men reach the footpath, the staff put out the flames with fire extinguishers.

  This was actually the end of an event that had begun in the main bar some minutes earlier. There was a larger crowd than usual because it was the tenth anniversary of Garry buying the pub. I was ordering a wine when a guy wearing a brightly coloured Mexican wrestler mask ran from the kitchen area into the bar and started a fight with someone I hadn’t seen before. The wrestler chased the man outside and flung him onto a small wooden table on the footpath. There was pandemonium and cries of shock from bystanders trying to get out of the way. The wrestler paid no heed, ran up a ladder propped against the wall and jumped from it onto the man who was still laid out on the table, seemingly unconscious. The impact broke the table in two. The victim sprang to his feet, grabbed a can of petrol, splashed it over the wrestler, then ran across the street, jumped into a car and deliberately drove it at the wrestler who, blinded by the petrol, staggered onto the road. On being hit, he rolled off the bonnet and, with a roar of pain chased the car up Reid Street. The car and wrestler disappeared around the corner. Just as we were recovering from this extraordinary scene, the two men reappeared, both now on fire, running down the street towards us.

  It was one of the most memorable pieces of theatre I have ever seen. No-one except the two men, the staff and Garry knew what was going to happen. It turned out that the man in the Mexican wrestler mask was Max, one of the barmen, and the other guy was a mate of his. Both had dreams of becoming stunt men in Australian films. They had rehearsed the act earlier that afternoon when they were sober, but they’d made so many mistakes that could have resulted in their deaths, they’d decided to sink a few beers before performing it for an audience.

  This emboldened Max and his mate and a week or so later they decided on another stunt for a sausage sizzle day at the hotel. Patrons had to wear fancy dress. Garry came as Barney Rubble from The Flintstones, while his assistant was dressed as a banana. Max and his partner were so confident that they drank even more beer than the first time. That was a mistake. When they set fire to each other, Max breathed in instead of out, his gullet was scorched and he collapsed in agony. An ambulance arrived and Garry and his assistant were so worried that they jumped into a car and followed it to St Vincent’s Hospital. All work stopped momentarily in the emergency department when Barney Rubble and a human banana arrived. Max survived with a slight hoarseness the only sign his throat had been burnt.

  Max was like many of the staff in that he mixed socially with the Crew. One Christmas while Garry was away surfing in Indonesia, he was unaware that a couple of the staff had organised a Christmas lunch at the hotel for those ‘orphans’ who had nowhere to go. The windows were blacked out and Max, Dave (he of the cultivated beard) and Brett (sporting a beard and thick blackrimmed glasses — a hipster look before it became a cliché) hosted the day. There were about a dozen regulars and we all brought food. There were plump legs of ham, rich plum puddings and more than enough seafood. Everyone wore Christmas hats, and drinks were so plentiful that the party soon got raucous. Monica, a barmaid, arrived to help out but she seemed terrified of something we couldn’t see and crawled under my table, moaning about dinosaurs coming to eat her. What substance she had ingested no-one knew, but she seemed to feel safe under there and we soon forgot her. Mandy was tap dancing on the table to a Britney Spears song and Max and Dave had filled up two toy plastic machine guns with alcohol and were shooting it into the mouths of the guests when the front door, accidentally left unlocked, swung open and two Japanese women in their early twenties entered. Obviously tourists, one held a Japanese guidebook. They stopped, stunned, unable to believe what they saw — four eager people sitting on the floor, their backs against the brick bar as two yellow and red machine guns shot spirits into their willing mouths. What with the music up at top volume, Mandy dancing on the table and others drunkenly singing along, it must have looked like a madhouse. The two tourists turned and fled. No doubt the guidebook’s description of the Old Fitzroy as a quaint local wateringhole hadn’t prepared them for this delirium. Not long afterwards Mandy slipped and fell from the table while Monica, still cowering beneath it, cried, ‘They’re coming! The fuckers are coming!’

  Max’s dreams of becoming a stunt man in Australian films evaporated when his visa ran out. Before he had to leave there was a mock marriage in the main bar between him and Tickles. Both men were drunk and thought that a gay marriage was a wonderful solution to the problem of staying in Australia. Ayesha was Mother of the Bride (from then on she would always greet Tickles with a shout of ‘Daughter!’). There was an official Certificate of Marriage with the words:

  We the Peoples Republic of The Old Fitzroy having authority under the marriage act 1961 to solemnise marriages, hereby certify that I have this day at OLD FITZROY HOTEL duly solemnised marriage in accordance with the provisions of that Act between Maximiliano Edwin-Ellis Smith (Maximum Risk) and Tony ‘Tickles’ Birch in the presence of the undersigned witnesses. Dated this Third day of January in the year 2010.

  Max didn’t remember the night at all but the marriage certificate was framed and still hangs near the reproduction of John Olsen’s painting of the hotel interior.

  He returned to bar work in London soon after and Dave took off for Berlin. They were examples of just how porous the lines could be between staff and the locals. One barman who integrated himself into the local community probably more than anyone else was Nathan Roche. On taking the job he rented a room in a decrepit boarding house in Bourke Street which was a short stroll to the bay and only a couple of minutes’ walk to the Old Fitzroy. The windows of his small room were black with dust, the toilet at the end of the corridor was rusty and dirty, as were the showerheads and taps. The whole place smelt terrible, ‘a combination of mould, unwashed carpet, dust. It seemed like it had been abandoned and haunted for many, many years.’ Residents regularly died of overdoses and besides Bob, the violent psychotic, there was always a loud religious nut screaming out verses from the Bible in the early hours of the morning, his voice contrapuntal to the cries from the other boarders of ‘Fucking shut up!’

  The psychotic began to threaten Nathan so Woolley organised for him to shift into a share house closer to the hotel. One morning around 10 o’clock his housemate, Greg, urgently woke him up: ‘You gotta help us, Nathan. We need your expertise.’ Barely awake after a late night, Nathan followed the plump figure out into the street and down to a house a few doors away. In the kitchen Greg’s mate Brian sat at a laminex table, his eyes glittering, grinding his teeth. Brian was wearing rubber gloves and Greg put on a pair. The table was covered in white powder, small plastic bags and a set of scales.

  ‘Now listen, Nathan, we’ve been up for three nights and we have
no idea if this new batch is good enough.’

  ‘What could I do?’ Nathan told me later. ‘I mean, they seemed to be okay, a little wired maybe.’ So he pulled up a chair and sniffed a line of ice.

  ‘How is it, mate?’ asked Greg.

  Nathan felt nothing for a few moments and then it was as if his mind exploded. The ice was so powerful he couldn’t talk, all he could do was give a thumbs-up. That was all the other two needed. They cheered and told Nathan he could have as much as he wanted, but he’d have to help bag the stuff. Nathan didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours.

  One of the most popular barmaids was Tash, a twenty-five-year-old from London, the product of a mother from Ghana and an Irish father. Or, as Graham said to her, ‘You’re a garnish then?’ Her East End accent sounded as if it belonged to one of those working-class English sit-coms. She had glossy dark skin, animated eyes, a vibrant smile, a husky voice and an appealing laugh, as if everything about life amused her. She once worked for immigration in England dealing with asylum seekers, but loved Sydney and her job at the pub.