Woolloomooloo

  LOUIS NOWRA is an acclaimed author, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. His plays include The Golden Age, Inside the Island, Summer of the Aliens, The Boyce Trilogy, Radiance and Così (the latter two were made into successful films for which he wrote the screenplays). His novels include The Misery of Beauty, Abaza and Ice. He was the principal writer for the landmark, multi-award-winning 2008 SBS television series First Australians and created the TV series The Straits. He has written two memoirs, The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon, and co-edited an anthology of writing about Kings Cross (with Mandy Sayer), In the Gutter... Looking at the Stars. Kings Cross: a biography was published in 2013. His most recent novels are Into That Forest and Prince of Afghanistan. He lives on the border between Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo.

  Also by Louis Nowra and published by NewSouth:

  Kings Cross: a biography

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Louis Nowra 2017

  First published 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Nowra, Louis, 1950– author.

  Title: Woolloomooloo: a biography / Louis Nowra.

  ISBN: 9781742234953 (paperback)

  9781742242699 (ebook)

  9781742248158 (ePDF)

  Notes: Includes bibliographical references.

  Subjects: Woolloomooloo (N.S.W.)—Biography.

  Woolloomooloo (N.S.W.)—History.

  Woolloomooloo (N.S.W.)—Social life and customs.

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Cover design Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover image State Library of New South Wales: Ted Hood collection (portraits), a3236012

  Printer Griffin Press

  All reasonable efforts were made to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

  This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

  CONTENTS

  MAP OF WOOLLOOMOOLOO

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE OLD FITZROY

  THE NAME EXCITES RIDICULE AND ODIUM

  THE MOTLEY CREW

  MC ELHONE STREET TO THE SECRET GARDEN

  TOMMY IN THE FREEZER

  WHAT WOOLLOOMOOLOO WANTS

  VIRGIL IN WOOLLOOMOOLOO : PART 1

  ST COMICALS TO THE McELHONE STAIRS

  THE REVOLVING BATTERY HOTEL

  THE MAN WHO WANTED TO KILL ME

  THE REVOLVING BATTERY HOTEL OPENS

  FROM WOOLLOOMOOLOO TO TAMWORTH

  THE WOOLLOOMOOLOO OUTRAGE

  DOWLING STREET TO THE HOUSE OF THE PRINCE OF THE GYPSIES

  AYESHA

  A DIFFERENT WORLD

  THE OLD FITZROY STAFF

  A COLLECTION OF ROOKERIES

  PRINCE GIUSTINIANI’S HOVEL

  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  DEATH RAYS

  UPPER FORBES STREET

  THE BAY OF FLOATING HATS

  AN OLD FITZROY FIXTURE

  BETWEEN WARS

  THE FINANCIAL WIZARD

  WHEN WOOLLOOMOOLOO WAS A FILM SET

  DAY IN THE LIFE

  ENTROPY

  FROM WOOLLOOMOOLOO TO AVOCA BEACH

  LOWER FORBES STREET

  THE EMPEROR OF WOOLLOOMOOLOO

  CHEMICAL FRANK

  BOURKE AND PALMER STREETS

  THE MOTHER OF THE PLACE

  THE ENTRANCE BECOMES THE EXIT: CROWN AND RILEY STREETS

  VIRGIL IN WOOLLOOMOOLOO : PART 2

  THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD

  ZONE OF THE REAL

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Garry Pasfield, Graeme Curtis and Mandy Sayer.

  It is an extremely common mistake: people think the writer’s imagination is always at work, that he is constantly inventing an endless supply of incidents and episodes, that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin air. In point of fact, the opposite is true. Once the public knows you are a writer, they bring the characters and events to you — and as long as you maintain your ability to look and carefully listen, these stories will continue to seek you out.

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some people’s names have been changed for obvious reasons.

  THE OLD FITZROY

  ONE DAY INSTEAD OF TURNING LEFT, I WENT RIGHT. I was with Coco, my Chihuahua, who was so sure of herself on the streets that I didn’t need to use a leash. For her afternoon walks we had always gone left and headed up William Street into Kings Cross. This time, for some reason, she went the opposite way after leaving the front door. I followed her as she walked the twenty metres to the corner, where she turned right into McElhone Street. We headed down the street to a small strip of public land called Daffodil Park, but instead of exploring it, Coco continued on, past the kindergarten with its green steel railings wreathed in passionfruit vines, and at the next corner turned left, heading down narrow Reid Street into Woolloomooloo.

  I paused at the top of the short street to see where she was headed. At the end of Reid Street was the Old Fitzroy Hotel on the corner of Dowling and Cathedral streets. I had been there a couple of times, but at night, and several years before, and I could barely remember it. It was a pub that wasn’t on a main street, so you either had to seek it out or find it by accident.

  Coco trotted down towards it with a certainty of purpose as if she had an appointment there. As we neared the pub it struck me just how odd it looked. It was three storeys high, with a recessed balcony and two Victorian-style bay windows on the first floor, and a further two bay windows on the second floor. It had a red brick façade with two blank scrolls where the date the hotel was built could be inscribed. Metre-wide stripes of white concrete demarcated the three storeys, as if band-aids were keeping it together. The window and door frames were painted a dark blue. It seemed ancient and decrepit, yet there was something eccentric about it, as if it had been designed by an author of Victorian fairytales with a sense of humour. Outside, a couple of dozen drinkers were milling about enjoying the sunshine.

  Without waiting for me, Coco made for the front door and trotted inside as if she had been going there all her life. I followed her in. The bar was dimly lit by three small plastic chandeliers hanging from a ceiling painted a congealed-blood red. Two overhead fans turned lethargically. There was a fireplace with a diagonal black flue leading up through the ceiling. The whole room was cluttered with a delirious and incongruous mix of objects fixed to the exposed-brick walls and arranged around the top of the bar. On the back wall of the bar a stuffed hairy goat’s head with glass eyes and twisted antlers peered down on the staff. The bar counter was an L shape and built on top of bricks so old they had convict markings. The grey carpet was shiny with wear. The far corner window featured a metre-high neon sign of the red outline of a coffee cup, with steam indicated by four wavy yellow lines. What was immediately apparent, and so different from most hotels, was that there were no televisions. I ordered a gin and tonic from the barman while a blissful Coco rubbed her belly across the threadbare carpet. As I waited for my drink I saw a small blackboard near the firepl
ace; written on it in chalk was the message: Dear Alcohol, I thought we had a deal. You were going to make me smarter, funnier, dance better. You and I need to talk. There was something immediately cosy and friendly about it, as if I had exited from the city through the wormhole of the front door and suddenly found myself in a country pub.

  I went outside, sat down and sipped my drink. Most of the customers, judging by their overalls, lumberjack shirts and plaster-covered boots, were tradies, labourers and sparkies. With my black suit, white shirt and Chihuahua on my lap, I looked effete and out of place. Coco was captivated by all the people and, as gregarious as ever, leapt off me and jumped on the lap of a tradie sitting nearby. Soon she was upright in a begging position, looking like a bug-eyed meerkat, tapping him on the chest, wanting a scratch. The man was amazed at her agility and remarked, as most people did on seeing Coco perform, that he had only seen snappy, yapping Chihuahuas before, but this one was different.

  After a couple of drinks we left for home, but the next day Coco turned right again and we ended up at the Old Fitzroy Hotel. This was the beginning of my almost daily attendance, which has continued for more than eight years. Coco’s discovery of it had come at the right time. Kings Cross, where I lived, was changing permanently. Once a place celebrated for its diversity and tolerance, it was becoming an exclusive suburb only the affluent could afford.

  Cheap restaurants for the poor, pensioners and students in the Cross were being transformed into five-star restaurants, and a dozen hotels had become apartments. The Bourbon and Beefsteak pub, once famous for its louche mixture of criminals, cops, locals, sailors and tourists, had been sold and turned into an upmarket venue for the social set. I’d occasionally drink there because it was a convenient place to catch up with friends, but the staff were bored, many of them backpackers impatient to be travelling north, and the gleaming, vacuous interior didn’t have the warmth of the original hotel with its inclusive mixture of people and clutter of objects so diverse that it resembled an opportunity shop. Other pubs along Darlinghurst Road had been converted into beer barns where locals were barely tolerated.

  Unlike previous generations who came to Kings Cross to be transformed by its values and attitudes and to escape from suburbia, the new arrivals wanted to change the Cross in their own image. They may have been titillated by living in a oncenotorious address, but they didn’t want its sex shops, strip clubs, beggars or the homeless. There was an influx of new mothers who, naturally enough, wanted a suburban sense of safety for their children. They had demanded a huge new playground in Fitzroy Gardens. I argued against the proposal in a Town Hall meeting presided over by Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who had stacked the hall with mums, babies, prams and testy househusbands. My suggestion was that the playground would be better situated across the road in an empty park where it could be much larger, but the mums wanted to be near the restaurants and cafés. My other point was that the noise of children playing would annoy residents in adjacent apartments. As I was about to address the meeting my microphone was mysteriously switched off and I was howled down. Nevertheless, I was proved right. A couple of years later eggs were thrown at the playground and, after a tyre used for a swing was torched, an article on page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald mentioned my name several times as an opponent of the playground. The inference seemed obvious. For weeks afterwards I had locals coming up to me asking if I had done the damage. It was no wonder I was glad to be down in Woolloomooloo. The Old Fitzroy reminded me of how Kings Cross used to be.

  After a day spent by myself with imaginary people in my work as a writer, I needed a place to relax with people who had nothing to do with the arts. It was such a relief to mix with people who were different in their behaviour, values and ambitions from those middle-class dwellers up on the ridge who were pushing the gentrification of the Cross.

  If anyone is the creator of the special ambiance of the Old Fitzroy, it’s the publican, Garry Pasfield. He has owned the pub since the beginning of the millennium. He had once run a country hotel in Kyogle and one day, while visiting Woolloomooloo, he accidentally wandered into the Old Fitzroy and, immediately smitten with it, made the owner an offer too good to refuse. Garry is in his fifties, with broad shoulders and a firm, stocky build that hints at his strength, honed by years of surfing. He presides over his pub with the affability of a born host. Unlike the hotels in Kings Cross, there are no bouncers on the doors, and Garry has an uncanny ability to employ staff, mostly young, who become friends with the regulars and even, once or twice, lovers and permanent partners.

  The pub is more than its main bar. It has a permanently humid basement with a low ceiling where the kegs are kept and which doubles as Garry’s office, its desk facing a bank of CCTV cameras, which sometimes don’t work. On the lower ground floor is a claustrophobically small theatre that seats about sixty people. Beyond the main bar is a cramped kitchen. A few steps from it, and up a couple of stairs, is a mezzanine overlooking Cathedral Street with its jacarandas and casuarinas, where customers eat and, until the law changed, smoked.

  The first floor is an enormous space, which is available for hire, with couches, a pool table and a balcony (drunks have been known to deliberately drop glasses and cigarettes onto the infuriated patrons sitting below). The second floor had once been rooms for guests and staff but is now in a state of apathetic neglect, its ceilings and cornices browned with water damage, its rooms filled with abandoned spider webs dotted with the carcasses of dead flies, dusty old furniture and boxes with forgotten contents. It is reputed to be haunted.

  Hidden from most customers is a lower ground floor room that can be surreptitiously entered via a side door on Cathedral Street. This is the pokies room, its dim interior illuminated by eight garish poker machines with flashing yellow, blue, red and green lights, images of cartoon Mexican bandits, Egyptian pharaohs and Thai princesses and a moodily lit bouquet of plastic flowers in a glass cabinet. Unless the players come up to the bar to collect their winnings, you don’t see these Morlocks down in their garish netherworld, where they concentrate on the hypnotically whirring images and numbers, their every jab of the buttons eating up their welfare cheques.

  It didn’t take me long to realise the contrasting streams of customers the hotel attracts. There are the theatregoers, who generally arrive with a puzzled expression, unable to believe that the geriatric hotel holds a theatre. The audiences stand out for their youth, their uniform of black clothes, hipster beards and parties of tipsy women all talking at once. Opening nights are enlivened by the effusive greetings and air kisses of fellow actors. It’s easy to identify them as they arrive because they’re all staring at their mobile phones, which project glowing white lights onto their faces as if they’re carrying their own personal spotlights.

  The first floor has held ukulele rehearsals, drawing classes and parties. At the bucks’ parties the men dress as clowns (because, apparently, the grooms hate clowns), sailors or cricketers; the groom may be forced to wear a frock, diapers, rabbit costume or come as a prisoner with a ball and chain. Most are noisy affairs, but the worst racket, a combination of ear-splitting disco music, yelling and laughing, was a party of about thirty deaf men, many of them wearing hearing aids with wires attached to their skulls. They had two strippers perform for them. It’s impossible to know what happened up there but straight after their act the strippers, now dressed normally, fled the hotel, wheeling their luggage of scanty clothes and sex toys behind them. They were so shell-shocked by their experience that they openly sniffed cocaine in the front seat of their car before driving off to their next gig.

  At one buck’s party the groom wore convict-striped overalls, and a dwarf in a black suit, a truncheon in one hand and a schooner of beer in the other, pretended to be his prison guard. Two topless waitresses, one wearing a tiny tartan skirt that showed off her bare behind, the other a silver lamé miniskirt, came downstairs not long after the party began to rescue the dwarf, who had fainted in an alcoholic stupor next to the ATM, a
nd carry him back upstairs. The men who organise bucks’ parties must find dwarves funny because this one was a familiar figure at these events. The problem was that he always got thoroughly smashed and one time as I was ordering a wine I saw him rolling noisily down the staircase and onto the floor, where he lay still for a time before staggering to his feet and returning upstairs for more free beer, ridicule and a lap dance with one of the waitresses.

  When you sit outside, the tables are arranged against the wall of the hotel. To the right are half a dozen terrace houses that stop at a high concrete fence and a dense clump of casuarinas, eucalypts and bushes that hide the railway viaduct that cuts Dowling Street in two. Opposite the terraces is the local kindergarten, unique in Woolloomooloo for its Spanish Mission–style design.

  To the left are houses that make up part of the large housing commission estate in Woolloomooloo. For most of the year these houses are hidden behind the luxuriant foliage of the enormous plane trees lining the footpaths. In winter, however, the bare trees reveal the dowdy exteriors. In the warmer months the plane trees give the street the erroneous impression of genteel normality.

  The pub regulars in my time have been a mixture of caretakers, house painters, teachers, gays, straights, transvestites, lawyers, tradies, debt collectors, ex-crims, drug takers, meth chemists, mechanics, labourers, madmen (bipolar and depressives a speciality), fixers and a con-man. The weird thing for a newcomer is that this idiosyncratic mix of people happily co-exists.

  What becomes apparent when you sit outside the Old Fitzroy is that Reid Street, which comes straight down from McElhone Street, is a conduit from Kings Cross to Woolloomooloo and the scene of some unnerving, even bizarre sights. It funnels stoned skateboarders who race down it unconcerned about cars, ice addicts jabbering to themselves, the hollow-eyed homeless, those hurrying to the Matthew Talbot hostel to get to dinner in time, the coke dealer whose comings and goings is as regular as clockwork, police cars with sirens screaming as they rush to a crime scene, the woman dealer pushing a pram with her child sitting on a pillow filled with drugs, the alcoholic transsexual and the former heroin addict who accidentally fell on her pet rat and tried to resuscitate it by injecting it with her methadone. There is a constant stream of dishevelled, painfully thin addicts and crazies, some of them clutching a bottle of beer or a cask of wine, making for Tom Uren Square to find shelter under the railway viaduct on the corner of Forbes Street. One afternoon we cheered a lone cop puffing and panting as he ran down the street chasing a bearded drug dealer who, not knowing the area, turned right and found himself in the cul-de-sac created by the concrete fence of the railway and, realising escape was hopeless, abruptly sat down in the gutter and held up his hands.