by Louis Nowra
Other artists have attempted to paint the area, sometimes like Olsen in a flamboyant abstract, colourful style, but Herman knew that the ’Loo was a place without nostalgia or pride. Only realism could do full justice to a place without illusions where, as the writer George Farwell remarked, ‘the ’Loo dweller’s sole defence has been his cynicism’. Yet this uncompromising reality enthralled Herman, and in the late 1960s he feared that progress would obliterate a place to which he had become so emotionally attached; he once said that when Woolloomooloo was finished, then so was he.
In 1966 Robert Drewe reviewed Sydney’s Little World of Woolloomooloo by Isadore Brodsky. Like a lot of people who had never lived there and only knew of its reputation, he was dismissive of Woolloomooloo and its future:
Nowadays, the ’Loo has been exhausted and overwhelmed by the carnal and carnival gaieties of neighbouring King’s Cross, upstaged by toffy Potts Point and built out by the Navy. Harry’s Café de Wheels still sells nourishing pies and peas at all hours to weaving returned sailors and the ‘Eternity’ man, Mr Arthur Stace, still leaves his yellow-chalked copperplate trademark on its footpaths. Eternity, however, may end tomorrow for the ’Loo.
In his Requiem for Woolloomooloo George Farwell fondly remembers his time living in a boarding house halfway between an old warehouse and the Fitzroy pub: ‘Even when you saw no-one there were always the voices; strident sometimes, muffled at others; scraps of disconnected talk, protests, scalding, erratic laughter … Life was never lonely in Dowling Street.’
In 1969 the State Planning Authority announced a vast redevelopment scheme that would cover more than ninety acres, transforming it into ‘another Manhattan’. It joined a long line of government plans that would soon be forgotten. What was real was the demolition of houses that began in the late 1960s to make way for the eastern suburbs railway, which would open a decade later, having dispersed residents and erased houses and streets. By the time Farwell’s book was published in 1971 under 1000 people were living in Woolloomooloo. The boarding house where he had once been a tenant was still there, but it was empty and boarded up. The area looked like a bombed-out city. The last lines of his memoir were a goodbye to a place he had loved: ‘In a few years little will be left of what we now know as Woolloomooloo. No-one in authority cares … Let those of us who remember prepare a requiem for the old Woolloomooloo.’
FROM WOOLLOOMOOLOO TO AVOCA BEACH
I WAS AWAY WHEN I HEARD THAT PETER HAD DIED. But how did he die? When I returned to the Old Fitzroy it was difficult to know which story to believe. There was the one where he committed suicide. Another claimed he was given a ‘hot shot’ of heroin by a prostitute we all knew, and after he died she dragged him out into the street so she wouldn’t be linked to his death. The last person I knew who had seen Peter alive was Sophie, who had been working behind the bar that night when Peter came in for a beer, bought a bottle of wine, and told her he was going out on a date. ‘He looked really happy,’ she said. I favoured the prostitute theory. On several occasions he told me that the way he wanted to die was to be given a hot shot and expire in the arms of a whore. He had paid for sex with a prostitute I knew; she was a junkie and the one time he had been with her she had shot him up. ‘It was great, I just floated away,’ he told me.
Although he could be fun to be around, he was afflicted with severe melancholia, and on several occasions had attempted suicide. Most memorably was the time when the police broke his door down and found him near death, lying in a pool of water in the living room. He had turned on all the taps in the place and was bleeding from wounds in his leg where he had kicked the glass top of his coffee table to pieces. It was after this incident that Woolley helped arrange for him to go into rehab. Of course, he fled before he was supposed to be discharged and turned up at the pub a few hours later in an effervescent mood, amused that when he had tried to hang himself he was foiled because the bathroom towels in rehab were only half size. He had mixed with ice addicts, which he said was one of the reasons why he escaped. ‘Those women ice addicts — they can never recover. Their brains are fucked. They scream and rant all day long.’
When he first started coming to the Old Fitzroy, he rented an apartment just around the corner from the pub. He had had an important job in telecommunications and specialised in microwave technology. In his early fifties, he wore expensive suits with colourful ties that matched his brown complexion (even he was unsure of his ethnic background). His manners were those of a gentleman, and his deep resonant voice would be the envy of any radio actor. He said he had once sung baritone in a professional choir and it was easy to believe.
His energy seemed boundless. He organised for a group from the pub consisting of German Dave, Cornish Adam, Bald Dave and others, to go scuba diving, rock climbing and fishing. Older than the rest, he was adventurous, physically adept and familiar with all these activities and more. The group folded when he organised a yum cha lunch at a Chinese restaurant and he was the only one who turned up.
It was around then that something inside him broke. One day at work he took off all his clothes and walked around proudly announcing to everyone that he was ‘naked as the day I was born’. He was told to take some months off for nervous exhaustion but it wasn’t long before he began to change. The shirts went unironed, his suits became creased and he seldom shaved. His cheerful demeanour became prey to moodiness and he’d sit on his bar stool staring vacantly at his hands or at the brick wall, barely able to greet anyone, even his favourite barmaids. There were times when only the sight of an attractive woman would make him forget his funk.
He became an easy target for a couple of drug addicted women, one of whom would kneel before him, placing her head on his knees, seductively begging him for some money.
‘You know what the money is for, Peter?’ I’d ask, and his face would brighten with happiness.
‘Yep, drugs and the pokies, but what can I do, Louis, when a woman is on her knees before me?’
His insomnia grew worse and when the pub closed of an evening he’d walk the streets until dawn. Sometimes he was seen sleeping in his car in Kings Cross after he’d visited a brothel. Then, his rented apartment was sold, he slept in his car outside the pub, daily becoming more rumpled and depressed. One evening he crashed into three cars as he tried to park. Doctors discovered he had a small brain tumour affecting his sight, which meant he had to give up driving. His father died and he returned to the north shore to care for his mother, or so he said, but really he seemed to have no other place to go.
His only true home was the pub and his only friends the Motley Crew. He’d take two buses and a train to get to Woolloomooloo from his mother’s house and then, early in the evening, he’d walk up Reid Street, stooped over with melancholy and a heavy backpack, and return home across the harbour. I had never seen a man disintegrate so quickly.
When the date of his funeral was announced we heard that the family didn’t want anyone from the Old Fitzroy to attend. It was only thanks to the intervention of a son, whom none of us knew about, that we were invited to the scattering of Peter’s ashes at Avoca Beach.
Garry drove Cornish Adam, Sophie, Tony and me up to Avoca on a sunny morning. At Avoca we caught up with Woolley and others. Peter’s family were middle-class and reserved, so different from the raffish Motley Crew. No wonder they had been reluctant to invite us — we were representatives of a world totally at odds with theirs and were proof that Peter had been living a double life.
A son delivered a eulogy on the walkway alongside the beach, standing in front of a sunny backdrop of surfers and crashing waves. Then we all walked up a path to a high point overlooking a whirlpool churning between the rocks. This was Peter’s favourite fishing spot. His sons walked down a slope onto a glistening wet sandstone ridge to scatter the ashes into the fishing hole. Sophie, with her black bob, black clothes and preternaturally white face followed, thinking the other mourners were behind her, but they remained with us to watch the ritual. She s
tood alone, like a black spectre (or, as one wag said, ‘Dracula’s daughter’) watching the ashes drop into the sea.
After the ashes had been swallowed up by the waters, the mourners carefully walked down the slope to drop flowers into the fishing hole. Peter’s mother didn’t think she would be physically able to do it, so remained on the walkway. Tony, with the ease and gentleness for which he is known, put his arms around her, comforting her as she wept silently. As he said later, ‘That was probably the first time she had talked to an Aborigine, let alone been held by one.’
The relatives went to have something to eat at the local bowling club, while we visitors from Woolloomooloo headed back to Sydney. There was no sense in staying to have lunch with Peter’s family, as we had nothing in common, except for him, and even then he had made sure the two groups never met.
It turned out that the prostitute had indeed given Peter the heroin hot shot. He had threatened suicide on many occasions but had died the way he wanted to. Which is more than many can say.
LOWER FORBES STREET
PEOPLE SELDOM NOTICE THE REDUNDANT RED PILLAR BOX that marks where Forbes Street becomes blocked to traffic at Cathedral Street. A weather-worn metal plaque says that such letterboxes were in use from 1851, and this particular example is a reminder of the early days when Woolloomooloo became a residential hub. But it’s also a symbolic marker of how this lower section of Forbes Street was regenerated and rebuilt during the 1970s and 1980s.
On both sides of Forbes Street are further reminders of the past. On the western corner of Forbes and Cathedral streets, at number 174, is a building that now houses the Hope Street charity. Constructed in 1858, it opened as the Victoria Inn, then new publicans, the Rhodes family, renamed the hotel after themselves in 1861. At the time it was a two-storey brick hotel with ten rooms and a slate roof, a yard at the rear and a number of small outbuildings. The year after the end of the American Civil War the hotel changed its name to the President Lincoln, a pub so popular that it expanded in 1882 to become four-storeys with nineteen rooms. It remained the President Lincoln until it closed in 1924. It was converted into a pharmacy with a dwelling above. Since then it has operated as a variety of shops, including a hair salon and café, until Hope Street, run by Baptists, rented it out. Hope Street, perhaps one of the most significant charity organisations in the area, cares for the most marginalised people, many of whom are homeless, living with addiction, mental health and physical issues.
At the rear of the Hope Street headquarters is a charity café specialising in coffee, tea and cakes. Woolley and I went to the opening. Well, not quite an opening, the place wasn’t ready yet. There was tea and instant coffee available and some cakes, but no customers, only Hope Street staff. The space had been gutted and there were plans on the wall of how it would look when it was finished. The concrete floor was marked with red texta to show where the counter and chairs and tables would be. Through the large windows I could see and hear half a dozen homeless men and women, drunk and pilled up, abusing each other, tearing up newspapers and official letters and scattering them to the winds.
On the opposite corner, also facing Cathedral Street, is an equally old building. Over the years it became a local favourite as a fish and chip shop, a milk bar and now as Stan’s, a popular takeaway shop run by two Chinese men, whose ease and compassion dealing with some very disturbed people is remarkable. The menu is extensive: honey chicken, beef with black pepper, fried rice, noodles, grilled fish, Chinese stir-fry, packs of fish and chips and, as I can attest, some of the best hamburgers in Sydney, with slices of tinned beetroot a heavenly addition to the beef patty, fried egg, bacon, lettuce and tomato.
If anything reveals the shoddy construction of the first houses built in the area it’s the two terraces next to Stan’s, built in 1853, which are among the oldest in Woolloomooloo. Both are single storey, with one shuttered window and an attic. Obviously they would have been cheap to build and gloomy to live in. Empty now, and seemingly untouched by the redevelopment of the rest of Forbes Street, they remain a vivid example of how quickly such terraces became slums. The two doddery houses are hemmed in by later terraces, as if they are propped up to stop them from collapsing in a heap. Next door, the cheerful charm and attractiveness of number 122 seems to deliberately exaggerate the poor quality of its neighbours. This is one of the few surviving Georgian shopfronts in Sydney, with slim window frames on the first floor and large green wooden window frames on the ground floor. It was a pawn shop in the 1930s and more recently an electrical contractors’ office, then Harvey, an ice addict I’ve known for years, rented it until he ripped off some bikers in a drug deal and they set fire to him (he survived, only to be caught in a police sting a month later; the court subsequently ruled he wasn’t to enter the house or come within a kilometre of Woolloomooloo).
Lower Forbes Street is a showpiece of the achievements of the young urban planners who redeveloped much of Woolloomooloo. The most obvious transformation has been the street itself. After being blocked off to traffic, six raised lawns were planted like green oases, some with clumps of casuarinas or plane trees providing shade, and continue to Nicholson Street. On either side are houses, some built from scratch, but designed to conform to the basic shapes of the remaining nineteenth-century terraces that were deemed structurally strong enough to be gutted and reconstituted.
But it’s the private house on the corner of Best Street, at number 70, that featured over the years in many a tabloid. This was Bottomley’s Hotel, where baby Sarah Ogle, child of William Bottomley and the intellectually disabled Alice, died from malnutrition and neglect. In the nineteenth century the hotel attracted a rough crowd: sailors, wharfies and those who worked in the nearby fish market.
If you halt two metres outside the front door of the present house, you’re standing on the spot where two men once lay wounded and near death. In 1904 a few residents and three German sailors were drinking inside Bottomley’s when one local ‘hurled an offensive remark at a German in respect of his nationality’. An argument started and the publican ordered the men to go outside, where the two groups continued to shout obscenities at one another. A brawl erupted, and one German was punched to the ground, then beaten and kicked around the head. His two comrades tried to intervene but were pushed back. The assaulted German tried to stand up but a local pulled out his revolver and shot him in the forehead.
A local policeman was close enough to hear the gun and see the flash. He ran towards the mob but all the locals escaped into the dark laneways. The two sailors tried to help their mate, who was lying in the gutter, groaning, but his condition was so bad that when he arrived at Sydney Hospital the doctors made no attempt to remove the bullet. Witnesses blamed the Germans for the clash and the two visiting seamen were arrested for brawling.
In the early hours of one morning in 1946 a young British sailor was found in almost exactly the same spot. He had been shot through the chest and was lying on the footpath in a pool of blood next to the gutter. He was found by two Australian sailors late in the night. The wounded seaman said he had been at a party in a house, probably in Best Street, judging by the trail of blood, but could not say whether a man or woman had shot him, nor could he give an address of anyone at the party. When the police arrived he lost consciousness before he could tell them where the party had been held. He was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Investigations led police to an address in Best Street not far from where the sailor had collapsed. They arrested two men and one was charged with intent to murder and the other with being in possession of an unlicensed revolver.
Best Street itself was more like a lane, dingy and narrow and with a miscellaneous collection of houses where no two were the same. One can detect a flavour of how it had looked on the northern side, where semi-detached cottages and sandstone terraces have been recycled for Plunkett Street School and the Distance Education Department. On the southern side of Best Street are drab new townhouses, thankfully hidden by a twometre high
wall of weathered grey sandstone blocks.
Other houses now recycled for use by both the school and Distance Education are numbers 52 to 66 in Forbes Street, once known as Bottomley’s Terrace, cheap dwellings built on the site of the old Royal Yacht Hotel. Further on towards the harbour is number 36 Forbes, a substantial three-storey property built in 1885, now divided into three apartments. For a long time it was the Eastern Market Hotel, so named because it was next to the Eastern Market, unofficially known as the Woolloomooloo fish market, a building that was probably the most recognisable in Sydney.
For years fishermen, or ‘catchers’ as they were known, found that they were rarely breaking even. The new wharf, completed in 1864, meant that more catchers could unload their fish, but middlemen, who bought the catch at the docks, were the ones making money. In 1873 a fish market opened in Woolloomooloo where catchers could sell their fish without the intervention of commission agents or middlemen. The holders of stalls paid a weekly rent and sold directly to customers, and it was extremely successful.
In the early hours of the morning Cowper Wharf was hectically busy as catchers unloaded their boats onto carts that took the fish to the market, a dark warehouse with small windows, badly lit by gas lamps. The catch of the day was washed in wooden sinks and laid out on the concrete floors for the buyers to inspect. Up to 150 hawkers came to bid for the fish and crustaceans from 4 a.m. onwards, and after making their purchases quickly scattered onto the streets of Woolloomooloo, East Sydney and beyond.
