Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  There was no self-censorship in her, so she could come out with the comment, ‘I know this sounds strange but when I’m in a bus in London I often think we’ve taken in too many blacks.’ Because of visa regulations she had to do a short stint of menial work in Australia and chose to do it in Darwin. What appalled her was that ‘everyone thought I was a little Abo’, and she had her first experiences of Australia’s casual racism. Not long after returning from up north she was forced to leave Australia because of visa irregularities (not the first time it had happened to bar staff over the years). She returned for a visit some four years later, her smile as infectious as ever, with a huge engagement ring given to her by her Irish boyfriend who, it was rumoured, earned his money from promoting cage fighting in Vegas.

  Garry tries to make certain that there are always both sexes behind the bar, but if there are only men, then the female staff disparage it as a ‘sausage fest’ and if it’s only women it’s called a ‘taco fest’. The staff have been an eclectic mixture of actors, budding authors, several art students, philosophy majors, and, in the time I’ve been drinking there, six barmen have become doctors. Several actors have gone through their training while working at the pub and some have gone on to successful careers. There is always the period just after graduation when the euphoria of finishing their acting courses had faded, and they begin to despair of finding work. When they do their happiness is palpable, while the unhappiness of fellow actors working behind the bar who have yet to even secure an agent is hidden by an actor’s mask of loud congratulations for the lucky soul.

  The staff have come from across the globe: Dutch, Turkish, English, Irish, Scottish, Danish, German, Swedish and Norwegian (Maia once remarked of her Norwegian background: ‘It made me carnivorous’). There’s an uncommon camaraderie and real affection between the staff and goodbyes can be torrid affairs with much booze and tactile sentimentality. For a couple of years it was the fashion for the staff to save up enough money for trips to Mexico and South America, returning months later with tales of stolen luggage, magic mushroom ceremonies, and preparations for the predicted Mayan apocalypse.

  It says something about the atmosphere of the hotel that staff will also turn up on their days off. Maia even paid for flowers out of her own pocket to ‘brighten up the place a bit’. The regulars and staff go to the theatre, exhibitions, other pubs and on excursions together. Even though there have been bar staff infatuated with other staff there has been only one serious affair between a regular and a barmaid. This wasn’t welcomed as it upset the casual dynamic of the social relationships between staff and customers. ‘It’s really offensive,’ opined Cockney Michael, ‘to have to watch them making goo-goo eyes at each other.’ The barmaid in question resigned when the relationship became permanent and the couple shifted in together. Occasionally they turn up together at the pub, hand-in-hand, as if acknowledging the importance of the place where they met.

  There has been a regular turnover of chefs. The Malaysian cook Richard resigned a couple of years after Mandy and I started going to the pub. Plump and gay, he had been running the kitchen before Garry bought the hotel and concentrated on only one dish — laksa. He wore a corset under his T-shirt that pushed his breasts up into an impressive cleavage. He adored Coco and would feed her chicken pieces. Sometimes when Coco rejected his titbits, he would be on the verge of tears; on other occasions she would wander into the kitchen and Richard, overjoyed by her visit, would feed her while customers impatiently waited for their orders, some of them incredulous that, after patting and feeding Coco, Richard would serve them without washing his hands. Coco so adored him that she’d sit on my lap outside and wait for his car and, when Richard arrived, she’d greet him with a dance. Besides Coco, his other great weakness was falling hopelessly in love with young men, telling me in his sweet high-pitched voice, ‘Oh, I am so in love with him!’

  When he left, his cousins took over the kitchen and, as they were vegetarians, they didn’t cook the standard hotel fare of steak and chips but served up fried dumplings and spring rolls. The regulars were appalled — this was nothing like pub grub. Chefs came and went as Garry tried to find the right formula for the pub. A chef with a fondness for cocaine was so inexplicably slow that customers could wait up to an hour for food, or simply be forgotten. The idea that cocaine is a stimulant was at odds with his lethargy. For a time there were two French chefs, who seemed out of place in a hotel kitchen. They had the superior air of men who thought their cooking deserved Michelin stars and made it clear that the Australian’s love of chicken was a sign of our culinary barbarism. ‘You Aussies eat so much chicken,’ one used to sneer. When Stevie ‘Sticks’ waved his walking stick at them one night, complaining about a dish, they were livid. He tried to apologise a few days later, saying he had been joking.

  ‘I’ve been in Australia twenty-three years,’ said one of the Frenchmen in his thick Gallic accent, ‘you think we’re stupid, but we know you were not joking. Get out! We will never cook for you again!’

  ‘Fucking frogs,’ Sticks yelled and lurched out of the hotel.

  There were some excellent chefs, one of whom may have been cantankerous but he enjoyed mixing with the Motley Crew so much that when one of them turned up with some hash one day he made it into brownies for everyone. An hour later silence descended on the bar while we stared vacantly at the fire or up at the plastic chandeliers with their dusty electric candles that, to me, seemed as spectacular as the chandeliers in the Palace of Versailles.

  The entwining of the lives of staff and Crew became acute when Garry’s son Adam was in his last year of medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital and found himself part of the team operating on Tickles after he had fallen down the Butler Stairs. Even though Adam had served him drinks for several years, and a tipsy Tickles had frequently sighed over Adam’s beauty, telling him he was the spitting image of Michelangelo’s David, both pretended not to know each other: Adam called the patient Anthony or Mr Birch and Tickles called Garry’s son Dr Pasfield.

  After ten weeks in hospital and two skin grafts, Tickles was allowed home, and a few weeks later he limped into the pub. As he walked in Drew asked how he was feeling. Tickles stopped and stuck out his chest proudly. ‘Alive!’ he shouted. Adam was working behind the bar and, worried about Tickles’s drinking, announced a maximum number of drinks for him — two.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ leered Tickles, ‘now I know you really do care for me.’

  A COLLECTION OF ROOKERIES

  THE FIRST CASE OF THE 1881 SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC was reported in early May in the George Street home of a Chinese merchant. Woolloomooloo seemed to have escaped, but in December there was an outbreak in Plunkett Street. The Cook family of six children was infected. Their house was roped off and no-one was allowed to approach within twelve feet (3.6 metres) of the dwelling or any part of the fence, and it was expressly forbidden to go anywhere near anyone living in the house. Their clothing was burnt and they had to stay cooped up in their home until they recovered.

  Cook himself was a milkman and it was thought he had inadvertently spread the disease delivering milk from house to house. But there was also speculation that the Plunkett Street cases had come from contact with smallpox sufferers who had embarked for the Quarantine Station at North Head from Cowper Wharf. The disease quickly spread from Plunkett Street to neighbouring houses, to the Eastern Market Hotel and from there to Fowler Square and on to Charles, Corfu and Duke streets. The publican of the Eastern Market Hotel on Forbes Street and his wife were quarantined, along with their young children and two boarders; it seems that two doctors went for a drink at the hotel after visiting the Cook family and had inadvertantly passed on the disease. By the time the epidemic ended four people had died out of the nineteen cases in Woolloomooloo.

  Seventeen years later there was an outbreak of typhoid, which only confirmed to the public health authorities that Woolloomooloo’s lack of sanitation, the narrowness of its streets and lanes, its dilapidated terraces, an
d overcrowded and damp houses, were threats to public hygiene. The miasmatical theory still held sway — that is, that disease was spread by noxious exhalations or, quite simply, that ‘The smell of places was enough to create disease.’

  The problem was, as an article in 1919 reported, that Woolloomooloo was a festering sore of slums where:

  … bedraggled, hopeless-looking women stand at doors. They are living in an environment of dirt; the world has crowded in on them with all its bad smells and insanitary circumstances and the unfortunates, naturally and inevitably, even unconsciously, assume the nature of their surroundings.

  Thus the denizens of Woolloomooloo were stunted, weedy and misshapen because of their unhealthy surroundings.

  A New Zealand journalist, GB Nicholls, visited the ’Loo in 1910 and described it to his readers back home as a place where 5000 people were packed ‘as closely as herrings’ into a space 400 yards (365.8 metres) long and 200 (182.9 metres) wide. It was where children played ‘in narrow streets alongside the public house door, about which were men and women in all signs of degradation… [and are] vicious, weedy looking, filthy tongued and filthy minded gaolbirds’.

  There was an increasing number of newspaper reports about how the slums bred vice, crime and disease and that the first step to reduce crime would be to demolish those areas, especially Woolloomooloo, which was a ‘noisome labyrinth of sinister, tortuous streets and lanes’. The cramped nature of the terraces meant babies were literally brought up in the gutters and their feckless mothers were ignorant of ‘all the household arts’. It was hopeless to expect high morals from people who were compelled to live with four or five families in a single dwelling.

  One of the most strident critics of the slum was Archbishop FB Boyce. In his 1913 report The Campaign for the Abolition of the Slums of Sydney, he likened the narrow streets and antique buildings to the slums of London as ‘centres of dirt, vice, crime and ugliness’. There were only tiny backyards for children to play in and there was no chance for ‘the moral and physical health of the children, nothing but the degradation inseparable from life in the congested areas’.

  The answer was the razing, not only of the slums, but the removal of the community. A life in the suburbs was the ideal, a sort of rus in urbe. As the left-wing playwright Louis Essen wrote: ‘There should be wide, tree embowered streets and avenues not twisted slums and alleys.’

  It seemed from the beginning of the twentieth century that something would have to be done about Woolloomooloo. There was a constant stream of aldermen, town clerks, lord mayors and committees visiting the area. They were shocked at ‘the collection of rookeries’, the huddled, smelly streets, sly-grog shops and ‘cowering houses of shame’ where the front doorstep was the ‘favourite lounge’, and how the respectable poor were forced to live side by side ‘with the thieves and lowest prostitutes of the city’.

  Having registered their shock and dismay, and announcing their determination to do something about it, the authorities as usual did nothing, and the slumlords, most of whom did not live in the area, were free to continue to charge high rents for houses that they neglected and allowed to decay, on occasion bracing the exterior walls with huge struts to prevent a terrace collapsing completely.

  PRINCE GIUSTINIANI’S HOVEL

  A GRAND VICTORIAN MANSION ONCE STOOD a few doors down from the Prince of the Gypsies’ terrace in Dowling Street. It became a tyre warehouse until it was converted into a local recreation centre named after Juanita Nielsen, who was murdered during the time of the Green Bans. On its northern side is Nicholson Street, named after Sir Charles Nicholson, founding father of Sydney University, who once owned the magnificent villa Tarmons up in Potts Point.

  On the southern side of Nicholson Street are new townhouses with cantilevered balconies and arched openings. Their design was an attempt to harmonise with the short strip of federationstyle terraces across the street, whose narrow façades and tiny balconies (more for decoration than for standing on) look quaint and attractive. However, nearly a hundred years ago these houses were considered examples of the demoralising effects of slums on the residents. They were so small that the housewives sat on the single step outside their front doors, taking no interest in their homes, while their menfolk, returning from the wharves after work, found their houses so cramped and ugly that they sought out ‘sly-grog shops and gambling dens’. If that wasn’t bad enough, the backyards were so tiny — 3.6 metres by 1.8 metres — that the Reverend Tugwell of St Peter’s Church in East Sydney said that children couldn’t play in them, and ‘we must remember that a boy without a playground is the father of a man without a job’.

  The next street along, Bland, was named after a now-forgotten doctor and politician, William Bland. In the 1927 film Kid Stakes Bland Street was the last street before the bay. What is now a bustling petrol station was an untidy desolate strip of land adjacent to the wharves. The street was seldom mentioned in the press, though there were two notable reports. A young woman from number 18 tried to commit suicide by drinking a solution made by soaking three boxes of wax matches in a cup of water, and four years later, in 1912, a desperate woman living a few doors down failed to show up in court for trying to pass counterfeit coins. A policeman went to Bland Street to fetch her, but was told by a neighbour that if he wanted to find the accused, he’d better go to the morgue, because she had poisoned herself.

  In the late 1980s two men shifted into Bland Street, which was then a narrow, dour pathway inhabited by feral kids and homophobic adults. Lorenzo Montesini had come from a privileged, cosmopolitan upbringing in Alexandria, Egypt. His mother had been a fashion model and his father a sporting hero. After the family split, he came to Australia and fought in Vietnam, where he met Robert, another soldier. Back in Australia they lived in Melbourne together before moving to Sydney, where the only place they could afford was one of Woolloomooloo’s more untamed streets.

  They joined two small terrace houses together and decorated them with ornate wallpaper, chandeliers and antique furniture, glittering with lashes of gilt. They created a dining room with a French ormolu table that could seat sixteen and which featured three large thirteen-branch silver candelabras. The table setting consisted of silver cutlery, crystal glassware, Waterford goblets and embroidered napkins. It was, Lorenzo agreed, ‘Ruritanian but fun’, and unimaginable if you only saw the dull exterior.

  Lorenzo never tried to hide the fact that he was an international Qantas steward (albeit in the ‘pointy end of the plane’) but it was soon news in Sydney society that he had several impressive titles as a result of his exotic background — Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia and Baron Alexandroff. It was no wonder, wrote Lorenzo later, ‘that everyone wanted to come and see the hovel with the chandeliers’. Celebrities, the wealthy, caterers, journalists, decorators and ‘people who often made things happen in that machine of Sydney social life came … as you can imagine, the boy from Woolloomooloo was thrilled to be mixing with these people’.

  Of course, some visitors found that when they left Lorenzo and Robert’s terrace their luxury cars had been scratched sometimes with obscene insults and occasionally their tyres had been deflated, but that didn’t matter. The juxtaposition between the grim street and the camp opulence of the interior was amusing, and wealthy and influential guests enjoyed the piquant pleasure of slumming in deepest Woolloomooloo. A pleased Lorenzo observed, ‘The world came to our little dump.’

  But what to make of Robert and Lorenzo? They didn’t want to be seen as a gay couple and referred to themselves as ‘room-mates’ or ‘chums’. It helped that Robert was bisexual; what he regarded as his burden of not being able to orgasm for hours during sex was regarded as an enormous plus by his female conquests.

  The relationship between the two men may have been obvious to fellow gays, but Robert, with his moustache and macho behaviour, seemed straight, which meant that a visitor like Lady Primrose Potter saw Lorenzo as a potential suitor for her
daughter Pitty Pat. The Potters were filthy rich and Sir Ian, Pitty Pat’s stepfather, a sort of David Niven lookalike, was also a founding member of the Liberal Party. Lorenzo liked Pitty Pat but adored her mother much more, and she in turn saw Lorenzo’s titles as something befitting her daughter. There is nothing a certain type of Australian woman hungers after more than a royal title for her daughter, unlike the commonplace honours doled out to all and sundry in Australia.

  With the determination of a general, Lady Primrose made her plans — aided by Robert, who urged his ‘chum’ to marry — and with Lorenzo’s reluctant acceptance (‘it got out of hand’), a wedding was announced for 1990. It would take place in Venice, with a ceremony in the glorious Basilica di San Pietro. The upshot was that gay Lorenzo was marrying into one of Sydney’s richest families and Pitty Pat would become a princess. The engaged couple’s picture was on the front cover of colour magazines and their future wedding attracted the media here and overseas.

  But four days before the wedding Lorenzo had had enough of the farce. He scampered off with Robert through the nocturnal streets of Venice, searching for a hiding place. ‘Groom runs off with best man’ was one of the kindest headlines. Reporters who had been sent to cover the wedding were gleeful. They could have fun with this, and did. A male lackey of the Potters found where Lorenzo was holed up and delivered the coup de grâce: ‘You are finished in Sydney society.’ Lorenzo was ridiculed, but far from retreating into his extravagant nest, he decided to brazen it out. There was something courageous and, dare I say, noble, even princely about this.

  The man who wanted to mock him the most was late-night TV show host Steve Vizard, a former lawyer who modelled his television persona on David Letterman. Never before or since has Bland Street witnessed such a scene as when Vizard decided to interview Lorenzo in a live broadcast from his home. By dusk Bland Street was choked with vans, production trucks, a huge satellite dish and a mobile studio. Gobsmacked locals couldn’t believe it. That night, said Lorenzo, was ‘a major event’ in his life — and those of his neighbours.