There’s no place like Woolloomooloo. A rambunctious working-class enclave smack dab in the middle of one of the most breathtaking settings on earth.
You want extremes? Go to the ’Loo. You’ll find extreme beauty, for it is located on one of the most stunningly picturesque bays of Sydney Harbour, it’s a quick stroll to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair with its views of the Bridge and the Opera House, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Domain, the Finger Wharf (built between 1911 and 1914 as a wool shipping wharf and used as a departure point for diggers sailing away to fight overseas in World War I), and above it all, to the south-west, is the towering cityscape of Sydney whose big bright lights at night seem so high you can’t tell them from the stars. Yet in its narrow streets, lanes, parks, pubs, cafés and convenience stores, terrace- and townhouses, you’ll also find extreme poverty, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness.
Once, close to 200 years ago, Woolloomooloo was one of the most desirable addresses in all Sydney. The wealthy and powerful lived there in sprawling sandstone mansions set in sumptuous gardens. It was safe and law-abiding, a world away from the larrikins, vice dens and rampant boozing that had turned Paddington and The Rocks into no-go zones for respectable citizens. Residents of Woolloomooloo shopped for fresh produce in bountiful market gardens and you could stroll down to the bay and take your pick of fish that had been caught just an hour or so ago. Yes, as in all the inner suburbs of Sydney, there were tanneries, brickworks and factories belching smoke, and coal-fuelled steamers loading and unloading in Woolloomooloo Bay made the air and water filthy, but the delights of the suburb were compensation. And anyway, the brisk salty winds whipping in off the Harbour usually whisked the pollution away.
The ’Loo began to change around 1850–60 when inner-Sydney dwellers took advantage of better roads, public transport, gas and water supplies and improved communications to move away from the bustling, noisome and increasingly populated city to the new garden suburbs of Ashfield, Strathfield, Rockdale, Chatswood and Manly. When they departed, their mansions and their gardens were demolished and new factories or cheap workers’ terraces were erected in their place and filled with the people who toiled in the factories and their families. Suddenly, and increasingly so in the early twentieth century, Woolloomooloo was overcrowded with poor people who were rich in spirit; people whose numbers were added to by maritime workers and by the many thousands who were flocking to the city from the bush to find employment. In time, the factories closed down and industry was relocated in Sydney’s west and south, and the flimsy, shoddily-constructed buildings were converted into boarding houses.
By the 1920s, Woolloomooloo was a seething slumland of ramshackle, falling-down terraces and rooms-for-rent, bloodhouse pubs, cafés, corner shops and brothels. Unemployment was higher than elsewhere in Sydney. The crime rate too. Lawbreaking is often a symptom of poverty, and, a far cry from its halcyon days of a hundred years before, the ’Loo became one of Sydney’s more dangerous addresses, home to razor gangsters, drug dealers, sly grog shops, standover men and prostitutes. It was a hangout for the likes of Tilly and Jim Devine, Kate Leigh, Guido Calletti, and Frankie ‘ The Little Gunman’ Green, who lived for a while in Cathedral Street.
About the time that we moved to Woolloomooloo, in 1973, it retained the colourful squalor of past eras, although parts of it were being bulldozed for low-cost and Housing Commission accommodation. When we rolled up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and desperately glad to escape from Camperdown, and moved into a small, neglected terrace in Dowling Street, the Finger Wharf was a working wharf, still twenty or so years from being transformed into a luxury site of multimillion-dollar homes and apartments, restaurants where the cost of a single meal could feed a Woolloomooloo family for weeks, and a berth for huge power boats. Occasionally today I’ll treat myself to lunch at the Finger Wharf’s pre-eminent restaurant, Otto, and sit there among the merchant bankers, radio shock jocks, sports champions and stars of TV and the screen, and gaze around the bay, remembering the old days when I would sit just there on the dock dangling my bare feet in the water and Woolloomooloo was my playground, battlefield and schoolyard.
Our house was a rundown 100-year-old terrace at 148 Dowling Street. When we moved in they had begun moving the families out of the houses across the street from us and knocking the terraces down and putting up town houses of brick with modern kitchens and bathrooms. We called these little clumps of new blocks the Posh Area. It seemed to us that the tenants who were placed in them considered themselves a cut above us, saw themselves, tongue in cheek, as the silvertails of the ’Loo.
To make our terrace habitable, Mum and I, and her brother Don Messiter, a gruff, no-nonsense bloke, pitched in and cleaned out about thirty years’ worth of garbage – it was stacked up 2 metres high in the house and out in the yard – tacked some lino on the kitchen floor, painted the walls and ceilings, and got the fireplace working. Unfortunately, the rats were harder to get rid of than the rubbish. We could hear them scampering day and night in the wall cavities, and it was not unusual for a big brown monster to brazenly scurry across the kitchen or lounge room floor. Yet, for all its faults, I thought our little home was pretty wonderful, and we lived there for six years before we moved to another Housing Commission home nearby at 114 Forbes Street.
After our previous locale, Woolloomooloo was paradise. It was poor and decrepit and if you didn’t keep your eyes and ears open you could get into trouble, but to us it was the Promised Land. It was full of kids – most of them, like me, doing it tough, living in government-subsidised accommodation and with limited chances of ever making a career, but all out for a good time, whatever it took.
There was the bay to swim and fish in, and beyond it the sparkling Harbour where kids ventured in rowboats.
Some 30 per cent of the dwellings in Woolloomooloo then were condemned terraces, languishing like prisoners on death row in a weed-engulfed block of land abandoned except by rats, cockroaches and the homeless, waiting resignedly for the wrecker’s hammer. We kids invaded the rotting hulks and made them magical cubby houses. There were vacant lots to play Cowboys and Indians in and a particularly brutal game of hide and seek called Hares and Hounds where half the kids, the hares, had to run off through the suburb and hide from the other half, the hounds. A hare was on a hiding to nothing because when he was finally caught, he had to stand still while the hound belted him. Now, the game couldn’t finish until every last hare had been unearthed and dealt with. One day it was late and one kid, Shane Ross, had succeeded in eluding his pursuers. We hares, who included Shane’s brother Mark, were standing around in a disused factory wondering where the hell Shane was when suddenly we heard a loud crack and looked up to see him fall right through the dilapidated Gyprock roof above us and land at our feet. Despite the wounds that Shane suffered in his fall, we hounds proceeded to deliver the punishment he so richly deserved.
It was mainly an area of Anglo and Italian families, and the Italians outnumbered the Anglos. After some early head-butting I got on well with the Italian kids even though, in a delicious twist, they called me ‘Wog’. There was Max Ruello and his cousins Sam, Leo and Johnny, Eric Parisi the paddle tennis king, the three Squadrito brothers and their cousin Joe Squadrito, Michael Borlotti, Mickey Grech, Vince Losurdo, the Ianni kids ... These boys lived their own spaghetti western. Thinking of them today I can picture myself walking down past their houses in the ’Loo and smelling the mouth-watering aromas of garlic, parmesan cheese and meatballs cooking and hearing the noisy and theatrical Mediterranean clamour inside those little homes.
We played touch footy in the Domain, which was right by my school, St Mary’s Cathedral Christian Brothers High. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, a burgeoning mob of local kids would surge through the streets, calling up to their mates’ windows to join them for a game. It reminded me of that old TV show The Texas Rangers, where it started with one lawman walking down the street and he’d be joined by another ranger, then another until there was a whole posse parading through town. Sammy Ianni’s family moved from the ’Loo to Five Dock in Sydney’s inner west, yet he kept returning to play touch footy. He used to complain, ‘Gees, guys, I come all the way from Five Dock and none of you bastards will even pass me the ball.’
More than any other memory, I retain abiding impressions of the warmth and friendliness of my neighbours. They were cash-poor but spirit-rich.
Every time I return to Woolloomooloo it’s like I’ve been overseas and I’m arriving home again. I get a warm and tingly feeling that comes from remembering all the wonderful experiences I’ve had in that little suburb, a compassionate, supportive community of good friends who would give you the shirt from their back if you asked them for it. Growing up in the ’Loo, you could always find a friend to hang out with. I was talking to an old mate from Woolloomooloo, Eric Parisi, recently and he told me, ‘Mate, I’ve never felt so good as I did when we all lived down the ’Loo. They were the best times of my life.’ Hear, hear!
They were halcyon days when the sun was always shining on the back of your neck and no matter how dreadful things were at home, on the streets, for a little while at least, we were kings. Ten of us would go to the movies together and all sit in a bunch. Many of the friendships I made there have turned out to be life- time ones.
We all had nicknames. I was known as Stork because I was tall. My brother Stephen was the Shadow or Sunshine. Dave Harrison had long, stiff limbs so I nicknamed him Tin-Legs. There was a kid we dubbed the Guru because he could grow a beard and sat cross-legged like the Maharishi. Another boy was Bear’s Fur for no other reason than he had a lot of straight, thick brown hair on his head. A fellow with round, protruding eyes was known as Marbles, and as far as I know he still is. The Clock had one arm shorter than the other. One wharfie from Woolloomooloo dock answered to the name of the Judge because, said his mates, he was always sitting on a case. And another wharf worker was the Fog because he’d never lift.
Another local, Norma Kelly, is my friend to this day. She is a generous, hard-working and brave woman who has had a challenging life but always made her home warm and welcoming. I’ve been lucky enough to be in a position to help her sons Luke and Jaidyn. She has done her absolute best for them and your best is always good enough, even if you sometimes fail.
There’s always been an unfair stigma about Woolloomooloo. While it may not be the wealthiest joint in Sydney with the most palatial houses, it is a place of heart and character. People do it tough there yet so many of us have made a success of life. And because of where we come from, we’ve had to be twice as smart and twice as tough to succeed. I remember once when I swore, a teacher chided me and said, ‘You sound like you come from the back blocks of Woolloomooloo.’ I had great satisfaction in saying to him, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do.’ I know some of my neighbours have claimed to hail not from Woolloomooloo but Potts Point, because they didn’t want others to think less of them. I can understand them doing that, but I’m glad to say I never have resorted to lying about my home suburb. I have always liked the idea of being a Woolloomooloo boy.
For all the years I attended St Mary’s, all the ’Loo kids would meet each morning at around eight on the corner near our place and we’d walk as slowly as possible through the suburb and along Cathedral Street together to school. We’d be distracted by a game of touch, a can to kick, a rumble, a drunk under the bridge to heckle. Not once do I remember arriving at school much before one minute to nine. Once the headmaster expressed his exasperation that it took the kids who lived closest to the school the longest time to get there. ‘It’s not as if you have to come by helicopter!’ he said.
The Squadrito brothers, Dominic, Frank, Jimmy and their cousin Joe, in many ways epitomised the kids of Woolloomooloo. They’re still my friends to this day and I’ve never stopped admiring those blokes. Dom and Frank were masters of any ball game they chose to play, be it rugby league, cricket, basketball or tennis, and Dom, especially, had incredible skills and hand–eye co-ordination. Frank, one of those natural leaders in life, was almost two years older than me and we were great mates. He convinced me to play rugby league for Chelsea with him in the South Sydney juniors competition and when he switched to play with Bondi United he took me with him and we were the premiers. Jimmy never had the skills of Dom and Frank but he was a boy who was always in for a dig, giving everything 120 per cent effort. He was the organiser, corralling us, forming us into teams, marking out our field with witches’ hats and afterwards telling us what we’d done wrong in the game. Jimmy was the catalyst for our touch footy competitions. From our early teens until we were in our twenties and moved on to other pursuits, Jimmy organised us into teams and devised the various competitions. There were enough of us to make up four or five teams as well as a girls’ side and mostly we won the comp against other localities.
Joe Squadrito became a first grade rugby league player for the South Sydney Rabbitohs. He was an elegant, gazelle-like runner, a boy with perfect composure and balance with a ball in his hands. He was a neighbourhood star and he always looked the part, wearing the latest Souths and Balmain jerseys emblazoned with sponsors’ logos. I have an abiding memory of Joe. We were all playing touch footy together, not in the Domain, but on the concrete basketball court in the Woolloomooloo playground. Five minutes into the game we all had concrete scrapes and grazes on our elbows and knees. Joe made a break and ran to score but we were closing in on him and the only way he could score that try was to dive and plant the ball on the concrete in the corner an inch from the sideline. He flew through the air gracefully as if in slow motion, plonked the ball down and somehow, defying gravity, he slid on his stomach and used his hands to push himself back up into the standing position, all without receiving a scratch from the unforgiving concrete. That was the coolest thing I ever saw.
Jimmy Squadrito was a keen cricketer and he had this trick where he could make it appear that he’d dropped the ball when he was fielding, but he really had it firmly in hand and when the batsman chanced an extra run, Jimmy would hurl the ball at the stumps. He rarely hit them.
There were the Dymock brothers: Jim (who went on to play rugby league for Australia), ‘Paul’, Angelo and Milton. Each was a gifted athlete, yet of them all, Milton was the most naturally gifted, all silky touches with the footy and he seemed to have loads of time to get things done on the field. He didn’t go as far in sport as Jim because he lacked his brother’s application and killer instinct. Milton coasted, Jimmy busted his gut.
Laurel Turkelson’s door was always open to us kids. She lived on the corner opposite us and never failed to have a cup of tea for me. A lot of the adults copped it from the youngsters, but never Laurel. At night when we’d be making a racket in the street she would come out and ask us to quieten down, and we did without a peep of complaint. Mary Raffa was another neighbour, a lovely woman. She broke her hip and Laurel, in the spirit of the ’Loo, let her stay at her house until she regained her health. Laurel, her husband Keith and daughters Michelle, Jan and Melissa looked after Mary so well, when her hip mended she didn’t want to leave.
There were always dogs following us around. Woolloomooloo was a suburb of mutts. Michael Borlotti had a dog called Butch and Dave Harrison had Caesar, a Casanova dog of indeterminate pedigree. Caesar jumped our fence and knocked up my poodle, Fifi. On 11 November 1975, the day that Gough Whitlam and his Labor Government were sacked by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, Fifi gave birth to a litter of four pups. I recall that the day after their birth I laid them out on newspapers all proclaiming the historic event of the previous day, and they looked very cute. All my friends wanted a pup. I gave Max Ruello a black and white one that he imaginatively christened Black & White. George Lucarelli, Eric Parisi and Michael Borlotti each got one of the remaining three. Eric’s new dog stacked on weight and within twelve months it was the size of a coffee table. Turns out Eric’s food-loving family fed the dog what they fed themselves: pasta and meatballs and beautifully roasted chicken.
Characters abounded in this vibrant and colourful place. The man who owned the corner store near us was Joe Napoli. He was obsessed with his compatriot, the Italian professional wrestler Mario Milano. Joe had posters of Mario on his walls and every time we went there to buy our milk and bread he’d regale us with details of Mario’s latest victory over Killer Kowalski or Skull Murphy at Sydney Stadium or on Sunday’s World Championship Wrestling on Channel 9. Joe’s hero Mario was a good-guy wrestler, clean-shaven scourge of the nasty guys who broke the rules, so imagine the crisis of confidence Joe suffered when Milano grew sideburns and a sinister moustache and became a baddie for a time. The swerve didn’t last long. It turned out he’d been hypnotised into evil-doing by Tiger Singh.
We rode our bikes in the streets, but had to be careful not to get run over by the cars that the local hoons would occasionally race up and down Dowling Street, deafening the residents and making the air thick with fuel fumes.
It seemed there were as many abandoned cars as there were people in our suburb, and it was not unknown for them to be set on fire. Even to leave a car in a Woolloomooloo street while you visited a friend or had a meal was to risk returning and finding it a smoking ruin. The locals didn’t worry about their cars being burned, because hardly anyone who had to live in Woolloomooloo could afford one.
Cars were especially at risk on cracker nights, when everyone went feral and reached for their matches. There was a big bonfire in Dowling Street every year. Kids would drag debris from all over the area and pile it up and light it and the flames would soar high and lick the overhead power lines. One such night things got out of hand. Locals were actually dismantling cars parked on the street, and dumping everything they could carry – tyres, seats, radios, the belongings of the owner – onto the bonfire. Then they ripped the boards off the abandoned houses and threw them into the flames. It was the biggest bonfire any of us had ever seen. To stand within 10 metres was to lose your eyebrows and the hairs from your arms. One cracker night, the immense heat from the bonfire melted a streetlight and an electrical cable snapped off and swung, sparking and crackling, above our heads, like a huge glittering snake gone berserk. Given my history with electricity, no one vacated the scene faster than me. When the police and the fire brigade converged on Dowling Street to try to extinguish the fire storm, we all booed.
And we’d tease everyone who couldn’t run fast enough to catch us, more often the homeless men and alcoholics who frequented the Matthew Talbot Hostel and slept rough huddled around bonfires on the footpath. Mick Fowler, the gruff old wharfie and union activist who would wage an heroic battle to save the workers’ cottages of Woolloomooloo from developers in the 1980s, was even a target. We once burned down Mick’s front door.
We had the Finger Wharf to fish from and mooch around, and the docks where the big merchant ships lay at anchor. There would be containers full of cars stacked on the wharves and big cranes from which we would leap 15 metres into the water. From such a height, the impact was so hard when we hit the water we had to wear sandshoes to protect our feet.
We worked out how to start up and drive the forklifts that the wharfies had left strewn around the wharves when they knocked off for the day, and we raced those little trucks with their two big prongs sticking out the front like rhinoceros horns up and down the Finger Wharf. We did that, until one of us, Charlie Ianni, was crushed. One of the gang slammed his forklift into reverse by mistake and the unlucky kid was standing behind the machine and was rammed against the wall. I’ll never forget his terrible scream and seeing him jammed flat, his eyes popping and his chest crushed. Someone called an ambulance and he survived, but wherever he is, I reckon he’d still be feeling the effects today.
When we were not rampaging along it, we’d swim under the Finger Wharf. Who cared if we were slashed by the barnacles on the big wooden pylons? Because there were more fish in the Harbour then, there were more sharks, too, and we always kept a wary lookout for fins. Not that, as I recall, I ever saw a shark in the bay. You never knew what you’d swim into under there – rats, dead dogs and cats, all kinds of debris – but one thing we could be sure of, a swim in filthy Woolloomooloo Bay would leave you with an ear infection.
One of my favourite pastimes, then as now, was to go down to the wharf and dangle my bare feet in the water, close my eyes and turn my face to the sun. The warmth would course through my body. At those times, I felt like I was the Mayor of Woolloomooloo. This was my heartland, my town, and today, nearly forty years later, it still is.
We were so poor. It was a struggle every day for Mum to put something on the table. Typical fare for the Dack kids, and for her, would be dripping on toast (for those of you who don’t know, dripping is the fat from roasted meat. Mum would catch it in a tin as it dripped from the cooking meat, and when it cooled and congealed, it was a cheap and tasty spread.) Another snack was salt and pepper on a piece of toast. And how can I forget that other staple of our childhood, tinned beetroot on stale Sao biscuits? It’s funny; when you’re poor and hungry, everything remotely edible tastes pretty good.
Of course, being on a meagre single parent’s pension and being paid little for her cleaning jobs, Mum couldn’t afford to give us pocket money, so we resorted to other means of scraping up a little cash. We vied for paper routes and scrounged for bottles. No one was as good as Stephen at finding soft drink bottles in the neighbourhood and cashing them in. He always seemed to know where to look and he’d collect them in the basket of his bike and cash them in for five cents each. Following his lead, all the kids got involved in bottle collecting and Woolloomooloo being a thrown-away bottle kind of place, mostly we were able to gather enough to buy a sixty-cent bag of lollies and an ice cream by dusk.
There was a pub on just about every corner in the ’Loo, and getting drunk, like lighting fires, was a popular pastime. Every night I’d be kept awake by shouting and the sound of people being hit and things beings smashed. For a few months, these sounds intimidated me, and I would lie in bed feeling frightened and threatened, until I got used to it, and the cacophonous serenade of the Woolloomooloo streets became as normal to me as the cries of the kids playing long after dark and the blasts of the boats’ horns on the Harbour on a foggy morning.
The nightclubs were rough, full of working men in shorts and T-shirts who’d get pissed and fight, and spivs with sideboards and Merv Hughes moustaches, wearing flares, brown and grey shoes and purple or yellow shirts with long pointed collars trawling for the local talent. On one night that lives on in Woolloomooloo folklore, the daughter of a club proprietor was slapped by a patron and a huge brawl erupted, flowing out onto the street; cops came from everywhere. The police from Darlinghurst and Kings Cross knew their way to Woolloomooloo.
When we arrived in Woolloomooloo, the Eastern Suburbs Railway was still being built. Naturally, after dark and on weekends when the workmen went away, my mates and I ventured into the caverns where trains roar to and fro today. Carrying our torches, we’d walk as far as you could go. It was an overpowering environment. Scary, dark as the grave, the pungent smells of wet earth and rock and gunpowder making our heads swim.
Often at night, we’d climb up onto the top of the overhead tunnel structure, which bisected Woolloomooloo, and look down over our suburb. There was a brothel directly below our vantage point, one of the busiest in the ’Loo, and after dark there was a steady stream of men going in and out. Though the streets and alleys were dimly lit, it was surprising what you could see. The street lights reflected directly onto the faces of the prostitutes and their clients. We could see them, but they couldn’t see us. One of us had a camera with a flash unit attached but no film inside and when a punter emerged, we’d fire off the flash at him and yell, ‘Smile … you’re on Candid Camera … We’re sending the photos to your wife!’
Another trick was to climb down from our perch and steal the chairs that the prostitutes sat on in the street when they vacated them to go inside the brothel to entertain a client. Often we’d return the chairs in pieces. Our fun and games ended when the sex workers set their protectors, detectives from Darlinghurst, onto us. They chased us away and threatened us with arrest or a good belting if we returned. The girls paid the cops for protection so the officers didn’t take kindly to our disrupting their little earner at the brothel. Through the week the policemen would come and bang on the door, the signal that the prostitutes should front with their money and pay them a percentage for ‘protection’. The girls who had made no money that night leapt from windows or ran out the back door because they knew they risked being jailed as an incentive to make more cash in future.
In time, a mate and I befriended the prostitutes. We would sit and chat to them out the front of the brothel and they’d pay us ten dollars, sometimes more, for our time. Sometimes if a weirdo came and menaced the girls, we’d scare him off. I was surprised by the number of well-dressed businessmen who frequented the place, often leaving an expensive car in the street – they were lucky their cars weren’t torched – while they were inside. One fellow, well groomed and always wearing a beautifully tailored suit, became obsessed with one of the women, and visited three or four times a night. I’ll never forget one girl who worked there. Her name was Christy. She was a prostitute by night with a pricey cocaine and heroin habit, and a high-flying hostie with Ansett during the day.
I have never touched drugs, and I know what scared me off. There was a woman at the brothel, not a bad sort at all. Even though I was just a young teenager, one night, off her face on heroin, she came up close to me, fondling her crotch seductively and moaning, ‘You want a bit of this, don’t you, sonny?’ I was terrified, tongue-tied. She stood there for a bit, then went back inside for a moment and returned with a bucket. She put the bucket on the ground in front of where I was standing, took off her knickers and urinated noisily into it. She watched me the whole time, her eyes rolling around in her head. I was horrified. I thought, If drugs can bring you so low, count me out.
We were hanging around the brothel one night when we heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Five blasts, from a nearby house, then silence. Someone must have called the police because within minutes the street was crawling with them. They grabbed everyone in sight and started grilling us. A detective pulled me roughly to one side and wanted to know everything I’d seen and heard. I did my best James Cagney impersonation and bristled at the heavy-handed treatment, telling him, ‘Fuck off!’ He was tempted to haul me in, but really I was no more stroppy than the other bystanders who were being questioned and he let me go. It turned out that the shots were fired by some jilted lover. Apart from some holes in a wall, no damage was done.
My cosy arrangement with the hookers ended when my mate proved himself to be a bit too greedy. One night when the girls were particularly stoned (there was a huge bag of pot on the premises, the biggest bag of pot I’ve ever seen), slurring and weaving and way out of it, this bloke crept inside the brothel and stole twenty dollars from a prostitute’s handbag. At sixty dollars a trick, in cash, and it being an even busier than normal night, he knew there’d be a stash of money around. Drugged-up as they were, these girls were sharp as tacks when it came to the money they’d earned. Soon one girl charged outside and right up to us. ‘There’s twenty bucks missing. You fucking little bastards! We pay you to be our friends and you throw our trust in our faces and rip us off.’ The thief sheepishly produced the twenty-dollar note and handed it back but it did no good. ‘Fuck off, we never want to see either of you again,’ was the girl’s parting shot.
I had mates who ended up in jail or dead. For some reason, perhaps because I would never bring shame to Mum, I shied away from serious trouble when it would have been easy for me to get embroiled in the shenanigans of the kids I knocked around with. I was never tempted. There was no choice to make. Stephen would have a tougher time resisting the temptations of the wild side.
There’s no formula. Some kids grow up part of a loving and supportive family in a secure environment and yet go off the rails. Others come from a background of violence, deprivation and abuse and lead decent and productive lives. I admire these people so very much. Maybe we’re born a good person or a stuff-up, and our true self inevitably emerges in spite of conditioning, good fortune or bad.
My experiences with police had not, by and large, been pleasant ones. I’d been kicked in the arse by the best of them and of course I was bashed by that psychopath at Camp MacKay. So I surprised myself when I started having so much fun at the City of Sydney Police Boys Club (as the old former police station in Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo, was called at the time. In 1985, Police Boys Clubs became known as Police Citizens Youth Clubs, or PCYCs, to give their due to the girls who were joining; and in 1995 the name was changed again to Police and Community Youth Clubs which allowed the retention of the PCYC acronym). Back then the club was basic. A nondescript old three-storey former cop shop and inside a workout area, a boxing room, trampoline, and mats, gloves, skipping ropes, medicine balls, hand weights. The other vital component was a group of police officers and trainers who were as caring as they were tough. Men of the streets such as boxing trainer Bruce Farthing. To all intents and purposes, Stephen, who joined the club at the same time as me, and I had no father, and the men of the Police Boys Club filled the gap. They disciplined us, guided us, developed our character, got us very, very fit, and gave us a sense of responsibility and a home away from home. Being a member of the club made me feel wanted, as if I belonged. I was never going to be a champion boxer, footballer, a champion anything. That didn’t matter. It was enough that I sweated hard. The men who ran that club as much as said to me: ‘I recognise your talent, I respect you for it, I will help you.’
I first walked into the club aged twelve, and to this day I often drop in, to train there or conduct business in my role as Patron and Life Governor. The club’s mission today, as it was when I first joined and back when it opened its doors in 1937, is to get young people active in life, work with them to develop their skills, character and leadership, and to prevent and reduce crime by and against young people. The five-point star above the ‘Y’ in the logo symbolises fitness, honour, loyalty, friendship and citizenship.
Unlike my brother I wasn’t that into boxing. I was quick and could punch hard, but I didn’t have the killer instinct that you need in order to want to knock someone out; I preferred just working out. I became competent with a skipping rope and can still skip for half an hour without stopping by mentally breaking the time into five- and ten-minute chunks. The rhythm of swinging that rope, of jumping, and going ‘phoo-phoo-phoo’ as I skipped – I found it all very calming.
The guys at the Police Boys Club made me consider cops in general in a different light. There are bad apples and there always have been, but I have enormous respect for the police. How would you like to do a job where you could be called to a domestic dispute and be confronted by a maniac wielding a gun? Or attend a road accident with no survivors? And for all the dangers, receive low pay and work long hours, and take a beating from the media, politicians and the public? It’s the old story: police are the first to get bagged by the public and the first people we call when we are in need of help.
The club became a home away from home for me. There, skipping or boxing or doing sit-ups till my stomach muscles screamed, I could forget. Forget my abusive father who kept showing up like an evil troll in a fairy tale with his violence and drunkenness to trash the life Mum was trying to make for us. Forget the pain and sorrow I saw daily in Mum’s eyes despite her best efforts to put on a glad face. Forget the poverty that was all around me. Forget my struggles at school. Forget to pretend to be an insensitive thug so I wouldn’t stand out from my mates. At the club I didn’t have to pretend. I could be myself, and that was enough.
I don’t know if the electric shock fine-tuned my senses, but after it I became very intuitive. I seemed to know things whereas before I was not particularly perceptive at all, just ambled about in a daze like most kids. I seemed suddenly to know what people around me were feeling and thinking, how a situation would develop. I could tell if a person had good or bad intentions, whether they were telling me the truth or a swag of lies. I have retained that intuition and often it comes in useful in my life and work. I can usually tell if a person is going to be important in my life. I felt this buzz when in my late teens I literally bumped into John Ireland, the man who would change the course of my existence, and I felt it the first time I met my wife, Mary.
Once I was walking in Woolloomooloo and I saw a homeless man sitting in the sun in Bourke Street near a telephone box. I had never met my mother’s brother, George, only been told about this bloke who walked the streets and slept rough, but somehow I immediately knew that this fellow was him. Something compelled me to walk up to him and say, ‘Is your name George?’ He mumbled something unintelligible and hustled away. Eighteen months later I was at an aunt’s house. There was a knock on the door. She opened it. There stood the homeless man I had seen in Bourke Street. She said, ‘James, I want you to meet your Uncle George.’
One afternoon I came home from school and my father was sitting in the kitchen. Mum was there, squirming on her chair and looking alarmed. The old man had knocked on the door, said he was sorry for all he had done and that he had turned over a new leaf and pleaded to be allowed to return to the family. Mum being Mum, hoping against hope that he was really reformed, knowing that any money he brought into the house would be welcome indeed, gave him another chance.
It didn’t work out that time, nor any of the other times, usually a few months apart, that he’d snake his way back home.
What would always happen was this. He would be fine for a day or two, singing his old English novelty songs, helping around the house, doing the shopping. Then he would start drinking again. When he was drunk he would hit and yell and smash things. He would rough me and my mother up. As far as I know, he never touched Alison or Steve. It was Mum and me who he had it in for.
Nevertheless, every morning she dragged herself, aching and humiliated, from the bed of the man who had attacked her, and went to work. She single-mindedly, against all the odds, kept earning the money in nasty, backbreaking jobs to put food on our table.
My father’s drinking would get increasingly worse, and then, always after one huge final fight, he would storm out of the house, vowing that he was finished with us and we’d be fucking sorry for treating him so badly, mark his words. For Mum and me, his departure was cause for a celebration. The relief we felt every time he left was immense. We prayed that this time he would stay away. Mum would only rarely discuss my father with me, just give me a bigger hug when he was out of our lives once more. Those hugs spoke volumes.
I had never been able to forget when I was seven. I had heard my father bashing my mother that night at Camperdown and I had reacted in fear and shame, pretending to be asleep. One day, I swore, I would pay him back.
Just from being around my mother I developed loyalty, self-esteem, self-belief and a sense of morality. She was a very proud woman and I like to think that I’ve tapped into her strength. After she contracted cancer a few years later, it took six years for the disease to kill her and I watched her fight it every day. Imagine a single woman working a night job in a poor and pokey house with three kids and no partner trying to provide for and entertain the kids, and never a boyfriend. I never saw her with another man. She was a very intelligent woman. She never had the chance to use her intelligence. I’ve come to think that she existed only for her children, never for herself. She never did a selfish thing, and always put our needs and desires before her own.
My mum was never broken down by anything except her cancer. I’m sure my father was responsible for damaging her body and mind to the point where cancer took hold of her. She’ll live again in this book and that’s why I’m doing it. She exists for me, every single moment of every day. She was a soldier in a pretty heavy war. She died knowing I loved her.
When I was about thirteen, my old man, after staying away for some months, again slithered back into our lives. Maybe he’d had an attack of the guilts. No matter. What did matter was that he was drunk and demanded to drive Stephen and me to a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop and treat us to a feast of chicken and chips. We were too scared to resist and against all my instincts we went along. He hustled Stephen into the back seat of his car, and motioned for me to sit in the passenger seat beside him. He smelled like a distillery. We made it to the store, and he bought a big bucket of fried chicken pieces, told Stephen to hold it tight and we’d share it out when we arrived home. We got in the car and headed back to the ’Loo.
Suddenly, he jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and I saw the speedo hit 100 kilometres per hour as we hurtled through the narrow streets. He tore blind across cross-streets, cackling hysterically. I thought we would die. At the bottom of the street was a solid brick warehouse and he made straight for it, going so fast that everything outside was a blur. I reached behind me and clamped my hand on Stephen’s thigh and braced for the crash. Suddenly my father slammed on the brakes. The bucket of chicken shot forward from Stephen’s hands and chicken flew everywhere. The car halted a metre from the wall. I leapt from the car, crying and screaming. I yelled at my father, ‘You fucking, fucking … bastard!’ and ran off into the night. At the corner I turned to see if he was chasing me, but he was still inside the car, scrambling around on the floor picking up the pieces of fried chicken. Stephen stood by helplessly. He looked to me as if he was counting his blessings at having survived and yet seemed sad that our night out with our father had ended this way.