Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  It’s a relief to come back out onto Forbes Street and find a trio of three-storey terraces on the western side, magnificent products of the economic boom of the 1880s that have been restored to their former glory, reminders of the time when the area had pockets of superb architecture. Across the road are three similar terraces, not so impressively restored. One is a backpackers’ hostel, one of the many sprinkled around the streets. Further down from these terraces towards the bay is a large modern office block, a nondescript modern building of four storeys.

  This is number 99 and its long northern wall faces the small park under the viaduct where the homeless gather. At the rear of number 99, fronting onto Talbot Place, is the Matthew Talbot Hostel. Level three of the office block is the Ozanam Learning Centre. In the bastardised English of social work–speak the OLC is:

  … an early intervention centre that supports people who are at imminent risk of homelessness or those who require social inclusion options to prevent them from falling into cycles of disadvantage and marginalisation … The OLC aims to break the cycle of homelessness by supporting people to achieve their personal goals.

  The reality of how it functions becomes clear when they list what the centre offers. During the average week there are over forty activities, with about 120 people attending daily. Classes include those with TAFE accreditation, cooking and nutrition instruction, computer workshops, social media and iMovie courses, learning to use Facebook and Twitter, counselling sessions, painting and drawing, tenancy care workshops, the Women’s Loft, yoga, a spirituality program where you ‘Come, pause, imagine and explore life’, and physical activities like tennis and basketball.

  The Ozanam Centre is one of many organisations — religious, government and philanthropic — that are needed in Woolloomooloo, where human beings, the flotsam and jetsam of society, who, through fate, family dysfunction, addiction or mental illness have washed up in the last place in Sydney that will accept them. Here, they will attempt to turn their lives around; if that is not possible, these organisations try to soften the hardship of their existence.

  The viaduct dominates this part of the ’Loo. A small park sits beneath the overhead railway with a lawn, a couple of impressive gum trees and a flamboyant jacaranda. From this point the viaduct becomes lower, almost reaching head-height as it descends underground into Kings Cross Station. The park is enclosed by a cyclone fence and the gate is permanently padlocked. The ground underneath the viaduct is always in the shade, where nothing grows. It’s as if the park exists to prove the supremacy of the railway line over not only the human beings below, but nature itself.

  A few steps further on and we arrive at a two-storey terrace, narrow and long. This is Twin Peeks, a lingerie restaurant, which opened in 1999. I’ve never been inside and had not heard about it until I started drinking at the Old Fitzroy.

  Late one afternoon a hefty guy in a black suit and white shirt, looking alarmingly like Tony Soprano, loomed over me and demanded I take his gift of a $50 note. I had seen him arrive at the pub a short time before, accompanied by a girl with artificially bright blonde hair and wearing a skimpy dress. With a chilling determination he set about downing several whiskies while she tried to make small talk, not drinking, and forcing a smile when he ran his hand up and down her bare back.

  He began to take an interest in Coco as she did some tricks for customers, then came and stood over me, intently staring at my dog, who was perched in a begging position on my lap. His plump belly, obviously the result of years of rich food and alcohol, swallowed up his belt, his eyes sparkled with cocaine. He pulled out a massive roll of bank notes, peeled off a fifty and handed it to me. I told him I didn’t want it. His chemically induced cheer snapped into menace. ‘Take the money, bro,’ he snarled, his face gleaming with sweat. I did so and watched him strut off to the toilet. I motioned the girl over. ‘Here, you take it,’ I said, knowing she was hanging out for money. She paused briefly, plucked it from my fingers and thrust it into her purse.

  He returned as she was leaving. ‘Hey, where are you going?’ he yelled.

  ‘I have to get back,’ she said, and introduced another girl who had just arrived. The new girl wore flimsy white shorts and a bra too small for her ample breasts. He greeted her with a lecherous smile and bought her a whisky, which she sipped, slightly keeping her distance, as if afraid he might turn on her. As he drank his mood grew more volatile, and he’d swivel around, grinding his teeth and looking for trouble. Then, without warning, he grabbed the girl by her arm and shouted, ‘We’re going to the Cross,’ and hurried her out the front door.

  Later I found out that earlier that day he had spent hours at Twin Peeks, which is apparently one of the longest-running stripping and eating venues in the world. On the internet it trumpets its menu and wine list and boasts of flirty girls, young, beautiful ‘with multicultural skin tones, firm bottoms and perky breasts’. They not only serve food, but also perform, entertaining the men throughout the meal. The promise is that there will be one lingerie waitress for every five customers, plus three girls prancing around nude and a pole dancer who swings out over the dining table as the men eat. Dinner comes to about $130 and if you want ‘dessert’, or in other words a private show, that costs you an extra $150, which will be debited to your credit card as ‘Bentley Restaurant’.

  The custom for bucks’ parties is for the men first to have drinks at the Old Fitzroy, then walk down Cathedral Street to Twin Peeks, afterwards returning for ‘a cleansing ale’ at the pub and then heading off to a strip club or brothel in Kings Cross to end the evening. It is common to see a dozen or two dozen guys from their late twenties to late thirties standing outside the pub in their uniform of shiny shoes and fitted shirts hanging over their tight trousers, downing shots of hard liquor and rubbing their cocained noses, their bodies restless with testosterone and bravado.

  Sometimes the girls come for a drink at the Old Fitzroy before starting their night shift. They wear heavy make-up, their bodies are lithe and their sexy attire is secreted in their large carry bags. They stroke one another a lot, as if they are soldiers calming each other before a battle. In a few hours’ time they will have to put up with leering, vulgar comments, crass behaviour, and the men’s belief that, because they have paid for the show, they own the girls.

  The reason the girls talk to me is because of Coco. One girl in particular took a great liking to Coco and would carry her everywhere around the pub until it was time to go to work. She was twenty-one years old and often talked about how she was saving to buy a house in Bankstown (‘the only place I can afford’). Blonde, with too much mascara (like the other girls she used heavy make-up as a sexy mask), she was an ordinary suburban girl with a fondness for dogs.

  The men who go to Twin Peeks are from all sections of society. Perhaps the most obnoxious group was a self-satisfied bunch in their late twenties or early thirties who had come up to the Old Fitzroy after a long lunch. Tipsy and coked, they reeked of privilege, and it wasn’t a surprise to hear they were all graduates of St Aloysius, Jesuit private school on the North Shore, something they loudly bragged about. The groom was tall and handsome and proudly recited the names of all the famous men who had graduated from his alma mater. As he sniffled and wiped his nose he told me how everyone in his group was wealthy and had important positions in the law, business and politics, and that this enabled them to take expensive holidays together in London and LA. One of their clique was getting married and they were planning his buck’s party in Las Vegas. ‘If you’ve seen Hangover, 1, 2, 3, this will be even better.’ Several of them wanted me to take their photograph. Their sense of entitlement oozed from their sweaty pores. I gave back their cameras before they headed off to a strip joint in Five Dock (‘Unlike Twin Peeks, you can fuck the girls’) where they would conclude their night of slumming.

  During the early 1970s the terrace that houses Twin Peeks was known as Bonnie’s Silver Cage (judging by the name, its function may not have been dissimilar to
the present establishment) and next door on the corner was the popular Woolshed Bar and Restaurant, its rear yard now occupied by a bland block of apartments stretching back to Judge Street. For a long time the site was Woolloomooloo’s speaker’s corner. This was due to a tree.

  Apparently planted around 1906, a kurrajong grew on the roadway, a metre and a half from the Cathedral Street footpath. No-one seemed to know how it had come to be planted almost in the middle of the road. It was a traffic hazard and subject of endless discussions in the City Council, but year after year the aldermen left it alone, perhaps because it was one of Sydney’s best-known landmarks. By the middle of the 1930s it was over fifteen metres tall and known as ‘The Tree of Knowledge’. On a summer’s night children used it as a ‘whippy post’ (a base in the game of hide-and-seek) and locals spoke of it as a symbolic marker of their origins. In 1936 a judge and his retinue of legal dignitaries visited the area to investigate illegal SP bookmaking; an old woman came up to them and said she had lived in her present house for thirty years but, more importantly, she had ‘lived by that old tree in Cathedral Street for twenty-five years’. This confirmed her as a true Woolloomooloo local.

  The tree became a meeting place for residents to discuss issues or politics. There’s a lovely drawing by the journalist, artist and social activist Len Fox called The old tree, near the corner of Forbes and Cathedral streets. It shows eight men, all wearing overcoats on a cold winter’s evening in 1948, listening, seemingly without much enthusiasm, to a Communist orator standing on a ladder leaning against the tree. As Fox said, ‘The tree was a local meeting point [alive with the cries of] — Double the Dole! Out Menzies! Stop Fascism!’

  The kurrajong vanished in the early 1960s but the site remained the most recognisable and obvious spot to assemble, especially when residents protested the commercial development and destruction of Woolloomooloo by developers like Sid Londish during the early 1970s. The protestors met outside the Woolshed, mostly men in the beginning, probably a hundred or so, holding banners denouncing plans to transform the area into an urban expressway and demanding: ‘Build resident homes for people on this Commonwealth Land — not office blocks for foreign investors.’

  The Woolshed is gone and the significance of this corner forgotten, except for a few older residents and unionists, but the protestors won. Across Cathedral Street and down lower Forbes Street is the evidence.

  THE BAY OF FLOATING HATS

  BEFORE TREES LINED THE FOOTPATHS, AND THOROUGHFARES were blocked or truncated, you could stand on William Street and see all the way down to the bay. The waters around the wharves were deep at high tide. In some places, as long as it wasn’t near the sewerage outlet, it was clear enough to see the sandy bottom. In the warmer months, when the waters were calm, the sea became an intense emerald green; the sky was so clear that locals could see all the way across to the wealthy suburbs of the north shore. In winter the chilly winds ruffled the surface of the bay, its colour became an ominous dark inky green, and fishing boats would hurry back to shore racing the storms coming in through the Heads.

  On hot summer nights residents opened their windows and doors to let in the cooling harbour breezes. In the moonlight the waves were, according to Kenneth Slessor, dusted with ‘diamond quills and combs of light’, and residents slept on the foreshore seeking relief from the heat. There were times during the day when the waters were so tranquil, and the sun burning so brightly, that it was impossible to look at the mirrored surface of the bay without squinting. It’s hard to imagine now just how much it dominated the sightlines, and the hours of work and relaxation. Fishing, swimming, sailing and work on the wharves were part of daily life for the locals, and for many the bay defined and regulated their lives.

  Nellie Stewart, once an unrivalled prima donna of the Australian stage, was born in Cathedral Street in 1858 and remembered the area fondly in her autobiography:

  Woolloomooloo in my baby days was still a rather jolly and picturesque waterside suburb… It lay on the lip of one of the gladdest little cities in the world. It overlooked the most glorious harbour I ever saw. It shone under a sky that became in my memory always pellucid, and it still had all the Conrad Martens’ glamour. You young people can’t imagine what Port Jackson looked like in the gladsome Seventies.

  The bay’s allure was powerful and drew many people to it. On a warm evening in early February 1877 Fanny Hamilton, in her early fifties, left her house in Brougham Street and walked down to the water. This was not unusual. She had been in the habit of sitting on the wharf of a summer’s evening to enjoy the fresh air, but sometimes it took willpower not to jump into the inviting water. As she told her sister, who lived nearby, those times she had been tempted to drown herself it was only the thought of her six children that stopped her.

  At about six-thirty the next morning Fanny’s husband, Robert, a blacksmith, was on his way to work when he saw people running towards the bay. When he asked what had happened he was told a woman had drowned. Curious, he wandered down to the wharf where he saw a body on the shore. It was his wife, wearing the same dress she had had on when she’d left their home. Locals carried the corpse back to the house.

  The grieving children were shocked, as was her husband of twenty-six years. Sure, he had slapped Fanny across the face for some ‘tongue’ she had given him, but there seemed to be no strong reason for her to take her life. The previous evening when he had arrived home Fanny asked him to take her to Blondins (tightrope walkers who imitated the famous feats of Chevalier Blondin, who had walked across Niagara Falls). When he said he wasn’t very well, she ‘became excited’, but not angry or threatening. The children agreed at the inquest that their parents were on good terms and Fanny herself was of sober habits.

  As was the custom, the jury at the inquest was reluctant to call Fanny’s actions a suicide and instead fell back on the open verdict of ‘found drowned’.

  Drowning was one of the most common ways to die in Victorian-era Sydney. In 1877 there were 170 coronial inquests. Six were murders, and sixteen were confirmed suicides, most from gunshots and poisoning. There were forty-two cases of drowning, and of these only two were women.

  Over the years the bay had attracted many of those suicides. There was one man, a grocer by the name of Charles Donohoe, who was so delirious from typhoid fever that he got out of bed and walked naked through the nocturnal streets of Woolloomooloo before leaping into the water. In 1910 John Selby, who had been a patient at the Rookwood Asylum on and off for about twelve years, was granted a day’s leave of absence. He walked all the way from Rookwood and threw himself into the bay. For someone like George Larkin, drowning himself was the solution to his dismal life. He was nearing fifty, and hadn’t been able to find employment as an engineer for some time and it had been impossible to provide for his wife and five children. One cold winter’s night Larkin went down to the Domain side of Cowper Wharf, took off his dark chesterfield overcoat with its velvet collar, then his grey tweed suit and a ‘much-worn tweed cap’. In one trouser pocket was a razor blade and in the other a letter: I intend to commit suicide. I am homeless, friendless and destitute.

  For some, alcohol made the decision to suicide much easier. George Robinson, a fish dealer and hawker in his early sixties, was well known because he had lost his left hand and replaced it with an iron hook. He left his job at the fish market in Bourke Street one evening and, as usual, when he had ‘a few shillings, they would burn a hole in his pocket until he drank them’.

  After being refused service at one hotel because he was so drunk, he staggered to the wharf, still clutching his fish basket, and walked off the pier — or jumped, no-one was quite sure. He was found the next day, fully dressed, still wearing his hat and holding his basket, his head and shoulders out of the water, his hook stuck into a pier, his boots gone. When the body was found it was half-ebb and at high tide water must have covered it entirely.

  One of the more macabre deaths occurred in 1872. One afternoon a Woolloomoo
loo woman was in the Domain when she saw a very drunk Robert Pope trying to climb over the iron railings near the Palmer Street gates. He failed on his first attempt, and before she could stop him trying a second time, he had clambered over the fence and run past her, his trousers torn and blood ‘running from him’. After he had gone, she looked back and saw blood glistening on the tops of the railing’s iron spears.

  Pope continued down to the bay and ran towards two men, one called Cortasan, the other Livermore, who were working in the coal yard near the wharf. Pope went up to Cortasan, ‘looking like a madman’, his clothes ripped and blood soaking his groin, and held out a bloodied hand, demanding Cortasan shake it, which he did. Pope then ran around the coal heap and jumped into the bay. On hearing the splash Cortasan and Livermore rushed to see what had happened and saw a coat and hat floating on the water. Cortasan grabbed a pole and put it in front of Pope, who was five feet under the surface. The drowning man caught hold of it with his left hand and Cortasan was able to gently raise him to the surface, when Pope suddenly let go of the pole and sank without a struggle to the bottom, a sight that so disturbed Livermore that he ran away, excusing his behaviour because, ‘I suffer extremely from nervousness.’

  Pope’s body was identified by his fourteen-year-old daughter. He had been living apart from his four children and his wife, who, his daughter said, he was ‘troubled by’. The blood had come from a severe injury to his scrotum caused by having impaled himself on a spike of the iron railings. A receipt was found in his pocket: he had recently insured his life with the Mutual Provident Society. The inquest’s verdict was ‘death from accidental drowning’.