Woolloomooloo

by Louis Nowra

As you walk up Crown towards William Street the western side is dominated by the East Sydney Private Hospital and the eastern by the Boulevard Hotel. On the way one passes narrow side streets and lanes like Faucett, Badham and others, places where people once lived but now stand empty, merely phantom streets and lanes that serve no other purpose than as access points to a main thoroughfare.

  Parallel to Crown is Riley Street where I once had an office in a building, which in the 1970s operated as the headquarters for Filmnews, the paper of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative. Their utopian purpose was to support ‘those film workers who are developing a critique of the monopolisation of Australian cinema by overseas interests, those who are working to create alternatives to the dominant mode of commercial cinema, and those who are working towards building a community of film workers who share common political and social goals’.

  By the time I rented a space most of the offices were for film and TV producers with fake timber walls hidden by tired posters of films they had produced years before and on the cheap. Unproduced scripts and how-to-write-a-screenplay manuals filled the flimsy bookcases; on top of them were Logies and AFI awards gathering dust. Unlike the ideologically correct members of the Co-op, these men and women were desperate for commercial success or just a second chance to produce a movie that would put them back in the game again. I didn’t stay long. My office with its scruffy carpet, drab walls and grimy window looking onto Riley Street became too depressing, and I soon left for an office on William Street.

  The Riley Street Garage, a swish restaurant and bar a few doors down the hill from William Street at number 55, hadn’t opened at that time. It’s now a beautifully restored art deco garage from the 1920s with an atmosphere the owners hope conjures the sensation of an ‘upscale Manhattan brasserie’. Below it is Busby, a cocktail bar with a big leather couch and armchairs that serves plates of oysters, imported cheeses and charcuterie boards, along with champagne, aperitifs, digestifs and whisky.

  One of the two houses built at numbers 6 and 8 in the 1850s has a plaque acknowledging the spot as the original site of Palmer’s farm:

  Residence 6&8 Riley St, E. Sydney, Land Originally Granted To JOHN PALMER by Crown Grant Under The Hand of Lieut. Governor Phillip Dated Feb.25 1783. Land Passed to Mrs Ann Riley 1822.

  Next door, on the corner of Cathedral Street, is the former Aquatic Club, now called the Villa, Woolloomooloo. For over fifty years the elegant three-storey structure towered over its neighbours. A magnificent, ornate building with a delightful curved front, it was impossible to miss in a street that had no trees. In 2007 it was converted from residences to executive offices and, supposedly, a climate-controlled art gallery. Painted white, its original colour (during the 1970s and ’80s it had a cheap paint job of horizontal bands of black, white and brown), the splendid design cannot be seen as clearly as it used to be because the building is now hidden behind several large trees.

  To the left, at the abrupt end of Cathedral Street, is the Police Boys’ Club, which was started in the old watchhouse lock-up in 1937 by Police Commissioner McKay. It was an unqualified success, gathering one thousand members in just two weeks. Most of the boys wanted to learn boxing. Assaults in the area plummeted as the boys gained much more satisfaction from thumping an opponent in the ring than a stranger in the street.

  The original lock-up sat squat and toad-like at the end of Cathedral Street, its concrete columns and sandstone walls inspired by Grecian architecture and designed to instil fear and reverence for the judicial system. But it wasn’t large enough for the growing club, so the old lock-up was torn down and a serviceable, plain three-storey building replaced it. Thankfully its pragmatic blandness is hidden by a dozen or more tall pine trees and casuarinas. The western side of the Police Boys’ Club faces Boomerang Street, which begins at William and continues, in a street shaped like its name, to join Sir John Young Crescent. Boomerang looks innocuous now, especially with its kindergarten filled with colourful playground equipment, but before and just after the Great War, it was an infamous spot for prostitutes, who would show off their attributes under the few street lamps. Priests from St Mary’s Cathedral would furtively connect with cruising men in the shadows of the bushes. The gay beat survived into the 1960s and those who frequented it were nicknamed ‘The Boomerangs’.

  The street swings into Sir John Young Crescent, and a block or so along, on the corner of Crown Street, is a handsome wedgeshaped building. Built in 1892, it was known as the Sydney Coffee Place, one of the biggest temperance hotels in Sydney. But alcohol soon won out (as you think it would in Woolloomooloo) and in 1904 it became the Marlborough Hotel. It changed its name to the Pacific Mansions before Sydney Hospital purchased it in 1920 and it became part of their Ear and Eye Department until 1996. It was then refurbished, renamed the Harbour City Hotel, and has ended up a scruffy backpackers’ hostel.

  Woolloomooloo truly ends at another corner, where Sir John Young Crescent meets Palmer Street, marked by a flamboyant edifice that has remained almost unchanged since it was first constructed. This exquisite building came about because of the post-1865 land reclamation that was simultaneously to enlarge Woolloomooloo and radically alter its demographics as it became a busy docklands, with an influx of sailors and waterside workers wanting accommodation and drink. The reclaimed land around Sir John Young Crescent was marked out and subdivided, but it was not until 1876 that buildings were officially recorded in the street. One of the first was the extraordinary Royal Domain Hotel, designed by its initial owner, Richard Nancarrow, who leased it for a couple of years before shifting in himself in 1877.

  Driving in from the north, the building was impossible to miss with its wide curved frontage and ornate architectural combination of Victorian Classical with elements of Romanesque Revival. Three storeys high, but seemingly higher, it has a basement and a rooftop terrace. The curved corner is rendered double brick with a sandstone base and the hipped, highly decorative slate roof is topped with corbelled polychromatic brick chimneys. On the western side ground floor is a narrow walkway behind a colonnade of slender brick columns. Its very lack of purpose adds to the sense that the architect was fulfilling an intensely personal fantasy.

  When Nancarrow died, he left the hotel to his widow, who ran it until 1902. Publicans came and went until it was purchased by a JN Bolgraat, who changed its name to the Hotel Merryfield in 1932. As the wharves began to close, the hotel lost customers and in 1973 it became a commercial building, its insides carved up for offices. Then in 2004 it became a residential dwelling, still maintaining its original internal features, including ceilings, cornices, joinery, flooring and fireplaces. All this was due to an extraordinary couple, the Wrobels.

  Fred Wrobel (Frederick Wroblewski) arrived on a cattle ship at Woolloomooloo wharves from Poland in 1949. Twenty-five years of age, he was the only one of all his family to have survived the Holocaust. He worked as a bookkeeper, a jeweller, studied art and developed an obsession with racing yachts on the harbour. He married a young nurse, Elinor Ring, a gentile who shared his passion for art. Soon they became important collectors, owning paintings by Jeffrey Smart, Grace Cossington Smith, James Gleeson, Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor. Their house in Double Bay became so crowded that Wrobel sold his racing yachts and in the early 1980s he and Elinor opened up the Woolloomooloo Art Gallery the corner of Nicholson and Dowling streets (Sali Herman did a lovely painting of it for the Wrobels).

  Their lives were to change because of one artist. At a gallery opening Elinor noticed a crab-like figure with intense blue eyes, wearing a beret and carrying a string bag. She was fascinated by him and not a little apprehensive, thinking to herself, ‘If I talk to that man, my life will change forever.’

  At another gallery opening she saw him perusing the paintings alone and summoned up enough courage to approach him. This was John Passmore, then in his seventies, a difficult, often bitter recluse whose paintings he believed to be under-appreciated, as indeed they were. Since he returne
d from Europe in 1960 he had lived in seclusion, seldon-exhibiting. His paintings are a taut amalgam of expressionism and abstraction that reminds me of Ian Fairweather’s work. If any painting typifies his intensity it is Boy and Sea Bird (1951). It depicts the Woolloomooloo baths, where sea birds peck at a young man in a frenzy not unlike Hitchcock’s The Birds. It’s a work pulsating with anxiety, joylessness and pain.

  Elinor wasn’t alone in being captivated by him. Patrick White had used him as one of the inspirations for the artist Hurtle Duffield in his novel The Vivisector. During the few years they knew one another Elinor became Passmore’s ‘mother figure, daughter and protector’ until his death in 1984 in a Redfern hostel for destitute men. He left all his work to her. The will was contested but she won and in 1985 there was a major Passmore retrospective which belatedly confirmed that he’d been one of Australia’s great modern painters.

  Passmore colonised the Wrobels’ lives and in 2003 they shifted into the Merryfield, mainly in order to house 270 of his paintings. The urn filled with his ashes is still there, and there are always around forty of his paintings on display at any one time on the ground floor. However, as I discovered first when Woolley took me there and then on subsequent visits, the Passmore Museum, as it’s now called, seems to be always shut. Woolley and I have tried to reach through the iron railings to tap on the glass door to try and gain entry, but our reach is never long enough and all we can see is the sliver of one Passmore painting on a side wall near the entrance.

  Outside the building one’s ears are constantly assailed by traffic noise. The magnificent building seems marooned on its corner, hemmed in by expressways on both sides and facing the vacant mouth of the northbound tunnel of the Eastern Distributor. The railway viaduct cuts off views of the sky to the north, and, across the road to the west the bunker-like Domain carpark dominates the view. Even the steel cage of the pedestrian overpass from Bourke Street to the Domain seems to avoid it.

  Once this building signified the gateway to Woolloomooloo; now it’s momentarily glimpsed in a car’s rear-vision mirror, a symbol of how Woolloomooloo has been turned inside out and remade by time and redevelopment. Still, it remains, even in its reclusive aloofness, a gorgeous, charming structure, a triumph of individuality and one man’s dream.

  VIRGIL IN WOOLLOOMOOLOO :

  PART2

  EVER SINCE I WAS YOUNG, IF I HAVE TO CHOOSE between fight or flight, I’ll always make the stupid choice over safety. One Friday afternoon Woolley arrived with a bag full of screwdrivers and bolt cutters. With the help of German Dave and Alex, he began to saw through the chain that tied a bicycle to the telegraph pole outside the pub. The bike had been there for some weeks and Woolley decided to ‘free it’ and give its parts to a local refugee community to help them repair their bikes. As this was underway, two drunken guys arrived. They were an odd couple; one was slightly plump, balding and older than his companion, a thin man with glasses. Swaying before us, the older guy asked if our table wanted to see a magic trick. Shelley said yes and he sat down while his younger mate stood at the other table brooding about something. The drunk at our table kept on demanding a tea towel so he could do the trick. I told him to get it himself. He stood up to berate me and accidentally smashed a glass. I told him to leave but he refused. He stood up, obviously wanting to punch me, which was the wrong thing to do. Furious at being threatened, I pushed him away.

  The younger man attempted to come to his mate’s aid, but I pushed him away too, telling him to fuck off. Satisfied they were on their way, I went inside to get a wine and as I did so I saw the older one run to my chair and, in an act of defiance, sit on it. Any rational response was impossible. I rushed outside, dragged him out of my chair, ripped open his shirt, hearing with great satisfaction the stutter of buttons popping off, and threw him to one side, causing him to bounce against the wall of the hotel.

  His partner screamed out, ‘If you touch my darling I’ll kill you.’ So of course I went to throttle him, then someone pulled me away and thickset Woolley grabbed the thin one in a headlock. He held the man’s head so firmly that he could easily have snapped it off. Realising that I was only inflaming the incident, I retreated inside, followed by Woolley.

  Inside was a happy Chemical Frank celebrating his release from remand on a charge of possessing precursor drugs to create methamphetamine. The bar manager, Christian, went outside and told the two men to leave the premises. Fuming, they moved unsteadily onto the street and called the police.

  I stayed inside with Woolley and Chemical Frank as the drunken duo waited fifty minutes for the cops. As afternoon turned to evening the police finally arrived. The male cop was thin and young, his partner squat and portly with a uniform that was too small for her. The policewoman was the one in charge and she spoke to the two men. One of them complained about how his shirt had been ripped open.

  ‘Look,’ I heard her say, ‘they’re studs, not buttons’, which was not only news to me but meant I hadn’t damaged his precious shirt.

  Then the cops came inside to question Christian about the incident. They asked for CCTV footage but the barman said he didn’t know how the system worked and they’d have to wait until Monday. They moved on into the mezzanine area to ask if anyone had seen the incident. No-one had, and they returned to the bar. I sat meekly in a chair with my two dogs snoozing on my lap while a now benign and avuncular Woolley was propped up at the bar, sipping a beer. The policewoman asked if I had witnessed anything. I answered with a parody of a gay lilt to my voice that I hadn’t seen a thing. She gave her partner a look as if to say ‘What can you expect from an old poof?’ and with a sigh went outside and ordered the drunks to be on their way. When they refused the female cop told them they’d be arrested if they didn’t.

  As we watched the two men stagger off up the street towards Kings Cross, Woolley said, ‘You know, Lou, we could have easily taken those guys.’

  This was totally uncharacteristic behaviour from Woolley, who always tries to be calm and diplomatic, even in the most trying situations. But, as I realised retrospectively, he was trying to protect me. In fact he’s not only a gentle soul, but has a green thumb that has surreptitiously changed parts of Woolloomooloo.

  On his travels around the streets, Woolley becomes a Johnny Appleseed, sowing seeds in desolate spots, planting shrubs in culde-sacs or in hotel garden boxes. If in doubt about the identity of a leaf or flower he has found, he visits the Botanic Garden Herbarium to get an expert opinion. Woolley is fascinated by nature. One day he emailed me thirty-six photographs of fungi his friend had taken on her honeymoon in Tasmania. Because I’ve had a lifelong interest in mycology he thought it only right that I should be the one to identify them.

  He seems to know everything that’s going on and is called upon when people are in strife. The Frisco Hotel would ring him up early in the morning when the staff forgot their keys and then Woolley would use his huge metal bolt cutters to cut through the chain barricading the door. One night the staff were brutally attacked by two men, high on ice and very drunk, who had just been released from jail. The beatings were so savage that when Craig the painter, hearing the screams and shouted obscenities, looked out his front door not far from the Frisco, he thought one of the staff was being killed. Next morning Woolley was at the Frisco rubbing special cream onto the black eyes of those staff members who weren’t in hospital, alleviating both the pain and the unsightly bruises.

  I have no idea where he got 25-kilogram bags of rice from, but he came to the pub over several days to give them to the Chinese cook. She was stunned and asked in broken English why he was doing this. When he explained they were a present, she didn’t understand. Suspicious, she believed he wanted something in return. It was so difficult to convince her that it was a gift that he stopped giving her the rice because it confused her too much. She wasn’t used to unconditional kindness.

  He tries to protect those who are vulnerable. When Danny, an occasional blow-in, was drunk and obnoxious on
e evening he turned on Ayesha, snarling ‘you’re the ugliest man I’ve ever seen’. She was furious and fled home, only to return a few minutes later to berate him. Woolley defused the situation by lifting Danny from his seat, forcing him outside and ordering him to leave. The skinny loser took one look at solid Woolley and obeyed.

  When I saw a telemovie about Carlotta and Les Girls, which briefly featured an actor playing Ayesha, I asked Woolley if he’d seen it. He said he hadn’t because, ‘I don’t want to dislike it and have to lie to Ayesha.’ As it turned out, no-one admitted to seeing it, fearing Ayesha’s reaction, but she surprised us all by bringing up the subject and saying, without the slightest touch of camp bitchiness, ‘It was very good.’

  Woolley likes a drink. Even after downing many beers and whiskies he has an amazing capacity to stay articulate, though he grows quickly impatient with interruptions and becomes annoyed by my questions. I’ve tried to match him with Irish whiskey or gin, but always give up well before he has. He and Tony have been seen late in the night at the Old Fitzroy dancing to ‘Ebony and Ivory’, with Tony parodying Aboriginal dance and Woolley imitating Michael Jackson. Though one night he realised he had perhaps drunk too much when he found himself watching a preview in the theatre. It was about two American cops and not long into it one hit the other, who fell onto the floor.

  ‘It was such fucking good acting that I thought the guy was dead and I was going to get out of my seat and check his pulse when he got up. That was enough. I needed a piss, so I walked out.’

  He’s a glutton for knowledge. He accompanies Carl to public lectures by astronomers, physicists and robot experts (and a woman environmental scientist whom the two men dismissed as a ‘tree hugger’). Part of the attraction is to turn up early because there’s free wine and cheese available, but as Woolley said after a recent day at the University of New South Wales with Carl, ‘The naval architecture lectures were brilliant.’