Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

  The place was badly ventilated and most people, sellers and buyers, smoked pipes. It was against the law, but because it was considered cruel to force men not to smoke for the three hours they worked without a break, the law was never enforced. The principal authority in the market was the Inspector of Nuisances and, for many years, he was the respected and vigilant Mr Seymour, a large bearded man, always wearing a cap and a tie, but no jacket. His main job was to inspect the catch when it arrived to make sure it was fresh enough to be sold in the market. He also classified the quality, and seized fish unfit for humans. Such catches would be immediately destroyed. Any fish below the recognised size and weight were also confiscated and sent to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. His other job was to stop fishermen attempting a private transaction. Seymour was said to ‘Seymour’ than some people desired him to see.

  He’d arrive punctually at 4.30 a.m. and the auctions would begin at 5.00, when he would call out ‘Now, then, for the first lot!’ and the hawkers, baskets in arms, ‘swarmed about him like a hive of bees’. A ‘miniature pandemonium’ broke out with noisy bantering and bartering as people made bids and sellers called attention to their catch; one man might yell above the cacophony, ‘I’m selling mullet. Give us a bid ’ere. Two and nine I’m offered. Two and nine — three-three and three. D’ye expect me to wrap ’em up and give ’em to yer?’ Contrapuntal to this would be his neighbour shouting, ‘Here y’are. A nice lot of garfish. I’m selling garfish, garfish, garfish. What shall I say? Three and three and six — and nine, four, four and three. All done at four and three — at four and three? Done!’ Mixed with this would be the cries of fishermen whose catch was still alive and kicking on the dusty concrete floor, ‘Fish, alive, oh!’, and piles of writhing prawns, ‘Prawns. Alive! Alive! Oh!’ There was mullet from Newcastle, whiting from Lake Macquarie and the harbour, fish from the Clarence and Richmond rivers, even from Tasmania. At certain times of the year the range was enormous: cod, salmon, saltwater eels, lobsters, gropers, bream, crabs and butterfish would be laid out for inspection.

  Among the buyers was the occasional woman (more on a Friday, when nuns bought fish for their religious orders), plus Italian fishermen, Indian and Chinese hawkers. Seymour knew the names of all the dealers and hawkers, even their nicknames. As a contemporary journalist reported, ‘One native of the Land of Rice and Pig-Tails caught the eye of Seymour and was greeted with the salutation, “Now, then, trot along Chin Chong Soo, how many?”’ After Soo bought his fish, he ‘lit out for Surry Hills’. Amid this noise and movement local kids would scramble and fight among themselves for the discarded fish offal they’d use for bait later that day.

  Because of its lack of ventilation the market was pongy with the stink of fish, and the practice of displaying fish on the floor became a health issue, with fears of contamination. In 1889 a new fish market opened, bounded by Wilson, Forbes, Plunkett and Bourke streets. It was 172 feet (52.5 metres) long by 72 feet (22 metres) wide, covering an area of 12,384 square feet (1150 square metres). The market itself was on the ground floor, above which was a smaller floor and this, in turn, was crowned with a clocktower topped with a weather vane featuring a metal fish.

  The ground floor had a high arched ceiling with steel struts and was supported by ornate iron columns. The exterior was beautiful: the cornices and capitals of the pilasters and finials were of Pyrmont stone, and in each bay between the pilasters were ornamental white bricks. Inside, the glazed white bricks formed a dado at a height of about a metre and a half around the whole interior, giving it a cool and refreshing appearance. Everything in the new building was designed to rid the market of rank fish smells. There were large louvred ventilators, a number of arched openings fitted with delicate wrought-iron gratings that allowed fresh air inside. Instead of wooden tubs and fish on the floor there were long rows of marble-topped tables to display the catch, opposite a long row of washing tubs with individual taps. Cold stores had refrigerated air pumped through shafts to preserve the fish. The large gas lamps were soon replaced by electric lights. An ornamental stone drinking fountain quenched thirsts as did a popular coffee bar. It wasn’t an idle chauvinistic boast when one newspaper wrote that the Eastern Market ‘is unrivalled in the southern hemisphere and will compare favourably with the best and largest of those in the old world’.

  A month or so after the new market opened, in a very macabre Woolloomooloo touch, a fish dealer, William Golding, twenty-nine, a family man of intemperate habits who lived in Dowling Street, was found dead outside the market in the early hours of the morning. Buyers and sellers had passed him by not realising that the man sitting on one of the windowsills had been dead for hours.

  By the first decade of the twentieth century the market began to seem tawdry and unsanitary. Dirty water, choked with offal, filled the single gutter behind the tubs, and the sack aprons of the fishermen and dealers ‘looked as if they had not been cleaned for half a century’.

  It was closed down and later renovated to become the Sungravure printery, specialising in comics and magazines. For local children this was a place of great temptation. They’d pester the workers for comics or rifle through the rubbish bins for off-cuts. The striking building was demolished in June 1961 to make way for the Astor Motor Hotel. Later it was converted into a home for nurses and later still, with few changes, it became the present apartment block, with a bronze plaque misspelling the street as Plunket.

  Almost next door is Plunkett Street Primary School. It has shifted several times in its history. Originally it was the only public school in Woolloomooloo, and from 1878 to 1885 was in a small building in Dowling Street. Its most famous teacher was Paul McCormick, composer of the national song ‘Advance Australia Fair’. He left before the school shifted to a grand new building on the corner of Bourke and Plunkett streets. Fronting Bourke Street, it was one of those sturdy, forbidding Victorian-era schools built of brick, with a belltower and an anaemic dome held up by columns. The long narrow windows, typical of the period, allowed little sunlight in, as if protecting the children from the harsh Australian glare.

  The completion of the building in 1884 was greeted with relief by the moral guardians of the press, who thought, ‘The sooner the school is opened the better, for at present the means of education in the neighbourhood are next to nil.’ Or as one editorial put it, ‘the school will make sure the children won’t grow up to be perfect savages’. Perhaps the press should have been worried about the staff. In late 1900 the headmaster was fired after he had ‘reigned by means of anarchy’. His replacement was Alexander James Kilgour, a tall, imposing man with a head too small for his body, a trimmed beard and moustache, and ‘strange spectacles with lenses sliced horizontally along the middle’. He transformed the school. A rigid disciplinarian, he didn’t use the cane and, amazingly, Plunkett Street became a champion school for military drill, where ‘the pupils learned manners and everything else’. The skills he learnt in Woolloomooloo he would take to Fort Street, where he became one of its most famous headmasters.

  Once he left, order was hard to maintain, and in 1911 some of the students trashed the school and set fire to it, almost destroying the whole building. The school added to its dubious reputation in 1924 when the pupils went on an excursion to Taronga Zoo. The zoo management made a formal complaint about the students setting up a boiler in the picnic area and selling the hot water to the public. Even the headmaster was sympathetic to the pupils’ actions, because they were trying to raise money so everyone could ride on the elephant.

  For some people the children of the Plunkett Street School were the authentic voices of working-class Australia. Cartoonist Jimmy Bancks paid regular visits to the school so he could chat with the kids in order to keep his larrikin character Ginger Meggs ‘honest’, and to ensure that his characters spoke with the true argot of inner-city boys.

  The school’s playgrounds were the streets, the bay, the Botanic Gardens and the Domain, where every year Bird Day was celebrated by pupils inspecti
ng nests and identifying birds. They also greeted returning servicemen from both world wars. In 1945 the kids went on strike so they could welcome home former prisoners of war who weren’t receiving the heroes’ reception the children thought they deserved. They sneaked out of school and lined Cowper Wharf Road. As the buses filled with POWs passed, the excited children stood around a blackboard on which they had chalked ‘Welcome Home’ on one side and ‘Plunkett Street School on Strike’ on the other. After the last of the POW buses passed, the children returned to school.

  Eventually the stately Victorian building was torn down and replaced by one of those 1970s government buildings that had the temporary feel of a migrant hostel. The new school was the product of an education department that believed Woolloomooloo’s population was declining and the soon to-be-razed houses would mean fewer pupils; in a way, they were right. Mandy went to the school in 1971, when its reputation was so toxic that a friend of ours, who had been a kid living in Kings Cross at the time, begged his father to send him to any other school because he was afraid of being beaten up.

  When Mandy arrived to begin Year 5, there were only a hundred pupils, far fewer than the four hundred or so at the turn of the century. It was the smallest school she had ever seen. ‘It looked like a tiny two-storey office block, the walls were paved with flesh-coloured stucco and supported by columns of grey cement. Everyone from kindergarteners to sixth graders ran around in the same bitumen playground and used the same toilets and bubblers.’ There was no tuckshop, the children had to order lunch from the corner milk bar across the road, and no grade had more than fifteen students. ‘There were only four classrooms and four teachers, including the principal. First and second graders were united into a single room, as were we third and fourth graders, and those of fifth and sixth.’

  Because the children came from poor backgrounds no-one had to wear a school uniform. Another telling difference from other schools was that on a hot summer’s day all the kids were allowed to have a water fight, while the smiling teachers watched from the shade of the verandah. The teachers were eccentric. One woman smoked in class while one of her favourite boys brushed her long dark hair, and there was another female teacher, an alcoholic whose breath reeked of brandy, who was sometimes so unsteady on her feet she had to hang on to a chair or a fence for support. What appealed to the young Mandy, who at the time was a part of a family of five living in a cramped basement in Victoria Street, was that ‘No-one pretended to be better than anyone else.’

  This is still the case. When I gave a talk about Woolloomooloo to the kids who were writing a history of the area, there were only forty-four pupils, but their teachers and support groups, including an Aboriginal liaison officer, were impressive in their dedication to children who, in another school, would have been overlooked. The bitumen playground has gone and now the children run around on extensive lawns and tend vegetable gardens facing Forbes Street.

  A few doors down Forbes Street, past the former Eastern Market Hotel next to the school, are new townhouses with wall plaques crowing about the architectural awards their planners won in 1981. Across Nicholson Street is the Tilbury Hotel. Once the Cowper Wharf Hotel, it was a celebrated cabaret venue in the 1980s and ’90s, but now the hotel is focused on society’s contemporary obsession — food. It’s a pick-up joint of a Friday and Saturday night, attracting young office workers and business people who spend much money to impress their peers and, as one former waiter told me, ‘The amount of coke sniffed in the toilets is staggering.’ Which means the patrons’ concentration is so scattered that they rarely finish their expensive wines, so the staff get to drink them.

  It’s an extraordinary transformation of this quarter of Woolloomooloo. The corner of Forbes and Nicholson streets used to be known as ‘Wharfies Square’ or the infamous ‘Bull Ring’, where labourers were hired.

  There’s no formal acknowledgement here that highlights the brutal working conditions the men faced toiling on the wharves just fifty metres away. Even after the turn of the twentieth century wharfies were still expected to carry loads in excess of 350 pounds (159 kilograms) on their backs for up to 30 yards (27.5 metres), and often in shifts for twenty-four hours straight. Up until the Second World War men were hired under the ‘bull’ system, which meant that men were chosen for work by a foreman in a process known as ‘the pick up’ and could be rejected for any reason. Those who were not chosen earned no money, and many families lived a precarious existence.

  Union strikes and interminable negotiations managed to change the system and by 1949 the ‘bull’ system was replaced with one based on gangs and rosters, each with a name and identity. The wharfies also won attendance pay, sick leave, annual leave, first aid equipment and washrooms. To stand on Wharfies Square, with its splendid evenly spaced row of twelve palm trees, and look across at the stylish redevelopment of the Finger Wharf with its exclusive apartments and posh restaurants is to be astonished at the transformation. Or, as one former wharfie said to Woolley and me about the posh people now eating and living on the wharf, ‘If those bludgers only saw the filth and the rats we had to deal with, they’d be sick.’

  At the end of Forbes Street is the Gunnery, a three-storey structure originally erected as a bulk storage facility for the Sydney Morning Herald in the early twentieth century. The warehouse acquired its name from the period it was used for military gunnery instruction between 1945 and 1948. In the 1970s and 1980s it was a derelict building where squatters made music and art. Now it houses the Artspace Visual Arts Centre, with an exhibition space downstairs, four residential and seven nonresidential artists’ studios upstairs, as well as offices for Arts Law and the National Association for the Visual Arts. The studios are used predominantly for short-term accommodation and workspaces for international, national, and regional contemporary artists.

  The downstairs exhibition space focuses on installations and conceptual art. A few years ago an artist lived on the site in a small room pissing into bottles, so visitors could witness the gradual purification of his urine. On another occasion when I went there I was confronted by plastic bags filled with soil and shrivelled plant buds hanging from the ceiling (the symbolism escaped me, I should have read the artist’s interpretation). In the adjoining room a piece of corrugated iron was placed next to old floorboards leaning against a wall, with some broken plaster scattered around it. I pitied the poor cleaner who would come in at night having to decide whether this was rubbish or not.

  My most recent visit was during the twentieth Biennale for an exhibition called ‘The Museum of Non-Participation’ which, to quote the gibberish on the leaflet, ‘changes form as it moves through time and place, acting as a guiding conceptual construct rather than an identifiable institutional structure’. One section contained a blue neon sign saying You are the Prime Minister (‘an empowering invitation to take up the title role in a fantasy fiction’). Part of this exhibition consisted of badly drawn images, an ambient New Age drone as a soundscape, and a piece ‘appropriating the form of ornate colonial wallpaper, which initially may appear an innocuous form of decoration, but was a method for wealthy imperialists to transport a taste of Mother England’.

  It’s bad art that depends on explanation, rather than itself alone. The artists’ and curators’ statements are pretentious drivel, with obscurity overwhelming clarity and sense. This verbal sludge exists to hide the alarming reality that the ideas are clichés and, worst of all, not artistically realised, so that the works never achieve the transcendental or revel in the inexplicable of great art. This is a hermetic space, isolated from Woolloomooloo and its residents.

  It’s a relief to leave Artspace and feel and smell the cleansing salt air blowing in across the harbour. A few steps and I’m beside another red pillar box, matching its partner on the corner of Forbes and Cathedral streets and delineating the beginning and end of a street that is the best example of how Woolloomooloo rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of near oblivion.

  THE EMPEROR
OF WOOLLOOMOOLOO

  THE THEATRETTE WAS PACKED WITH TEACHERS, two dozen students and about the same number of parents, interested observers and police trying to ingratiate themselves with suspicious locals. I was there to launch a book the Plunkett Street School kids had written about Woolloomooloo. As I found a seat among the children, the lines from WB Yeats came to mind, ‘… the children’s eyes/In momentary wonder stare upon/A sixty-year-old smiling public man.’

  Earlier in the year I had been invited to talk to the students because I was writing a book about the area and I was a familiar figure just up the road at the Old Fitzroy Hotel. The pupils were aged between nine and eleven year olds. I talked about how one hundred years before a fire, deliberately lit by children, had once burnt most of the school, how decades ago kids used to play with rats, and why the neighbourhood had narrow back lanes for the night soil collection. The rats and shit-collecting fascinated the kids, especially the night soil men. They couldn’t believe life had been so primitive.

  Mandy was with me because I wanted her to also talk at the launch. As she had attended Plunkett Street School in the early 1970s, she had a better reason than me for being there. While we waited for the audience to file in I noticed a man, much older than me, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, his white hair neatly combed, sitting by himself. He had that aura of isolation and physical vulnerability common to the elderly. A teacher introduced me to him. I was stunned this was Sidney Londish, the very man who, in the early 1970s, had set out to banish the residents from Woolloomooloo and replace their houses with huge office towers.

  Known as ‘Quick quid Sid’ and ‘The grandfather of property developers’, and ‘considered the devil incarnate by those on the left side of the political fence’, he had been invited because he had given a talk to the students for their book. Feeling a bit sorry for Sid, and not knowing who he was, Mandy sat next to him. The first thing he said to her was, ‘I used to own Woolloomooloo.’