This is not something I’ve made a song and dance about. It’s just a fact. If I see a homeless person on the street and I have a spare five, ten, fifty or a hundred dollars on me, I will give that money to that person. It’s the very least I can do. We’re all brothers and sisters. Some of us have good luck and/or work hard and acquire a loving family and a job and a house. Others have bad luck, an addiction, or they make a mistake and end up on the street.
There are many reasons why someone’s life goes off the rails. In my experience, the most common reason is alcohol. I know, because for a while in my life I was homeless because of my addiction to booze. The cycle – and I have first-hand experience here – often goes like this: you take a drink, the addiction kicks in, it comes to control your life. It affects your relationship or your marriage, making you irresponsible, angry and violent. It affects your work because you are too hung-over each morning to arrive on time and you drink at lunchtime or whenever you can sneak out for a hit and when you are drunk you commit blunders and become unreliable; you get the sack. With no money coming in you cannot pay your rent or mortgage, and you end up without a roof over your head, with your loved ones and your job all distant memories. Desperate for money to buy more booze, you steal or mug, and you end up in jail. If you do not turn your life around – and there is no harder task once you’ve reached this stage – you die. Simple as that. Alcohol steals your love, your job, your self-respect and your life. I’ll go into my battle with the bottle and its consequences in a later chapter. For now, I’ll talk about some of the homeless people I met while I was sweeping the streets in the early and mid 1990s, trying to earn some money and to stay physically and mentally fit for my legal career after I left Chris Murphy’s firm. I didn’t know it, but these homeless were living, breathing warnings of what I would become.
Since my childhood in Woolloomooloo, home to the Matthew Talbot Hostel, the shelter for homeless men which is run by the St Vincent de Paul Society, I was used to seeing and hanging out with the homeless. Sometimes I’d see a homeless man stiff and still under a blanket on the footpath and I would know he was dead. I would sit with the homeless men and women in the shade of a tree or a terrace house and hear their stories, how they had landed in this desperate condition. Again and again, back in my Woolloomooloo days, I learned as they reeled out their tales that alcohol was the cause. I called them all Sunshine. They called me Sunshine too. They drank ‘sting’, a concoction comprising methylated spirits and cheap port or muscatel, which was sold by a couple of the local grocery stores in the ’Loo. Sometimes they gave me a sip. In so far as a tearaway teenager can care about anyone, I cared about them, and when I’d learned that one or the other had passed away, I was sad.
I threw myself into my work with the City of Sydney Cleansing Unit, based in Frog Hollow, Surry Hills. My job was to sweep the streets at dawn, cleaning up the previous night’s litter and detritus and dead animals and vomit, so all would be sparkling when the people emerged from their homes for a new day. My beat was Riley Street, Devonshire Street, Lansdowne Street, Campbell Street, Foveaux Street, Albion Street, and the lanes and alleys all around them. I gave it my best, even though many days I woke up, an hour or two before sunrise, hurting in body and soul from drinking too much the night before. I must have had a hell of a strong constitution. Each morning, starting at four-thirty or five, dressed in my council uniform, I’d sweep and pick up rubbish and I took pride in knowing that when I finished with a street it looked as good as it would ever look that day. After three hours of street-sweeping I’d go home and shower and then get stuck into a big breakfast of fruit salad and a hot cup of tea at a café, then go to work. At night I would drink. Next morning I’d be back out there with my broom and I would do it all again.
I befriended the homeless men at the Edward Eager Lodge, a crisis accommodation centre sheltering and feeding nearly eighty homeless a night, in Bourke Street. There was a huge increase in homeless people in the 1990s because governments in their wisdom, or lack of it, turned them out of institutions that cared for them. They had to vacate Edward Eager or whatever hostel they had spent the night in at 6 am and they’d be on their own for the rest of the day. One morning I saw a group of homeless sitting in the sunshine sipping surreptitiously from their flagons and brown-paper-wrapped bottles and I asked them if they were up to lending me a hand. I told them I’d be happy to give them a cut of my wage. A bunch of them were glad to be asked. They took as much pride in a job well done as I did. I paid them in whatever cash I had on me that morning, and in friendship. I made each man responsible for his own patch of territory. Manager Bruce Collins and the other bosses on the council were amazed that I could clean so much of Surry Hills so thoroughly and so quickly. Little did they know I had a lot of help.
The men from Edward Eager made up their own names for the streets they cleaned. Short Street was christened Mission Impossible Street because it was always really scungy. Chisholm Street behind the Taxi Club was Frenchy Lane because of the scores of condoms that littered the gay meeting place. Just around the corner from Edward Eager Lodge, on the corner of Hunt and Campbell streets, there was that little pocket of sunshine between the tall buildings where I had first encountered the homeless warming themselves in the early morning glow, sitting on a discarded lounge and drinking their sting and VB; we called this space the Lounge Room.
There was something in me that wanted to hear these poor men’s tales and to lend them a hand. There was definitely a connection between us. My mate in the council’s stores department put aside all the brooms, hats and uniforms that had reached their use-by date and he gave them to me and I passed them on to my troops. Once I noticed some people looking in disgust at the homeless street-sweepers and overheard one saying, ‘What a disgrace! Those council employees are drinking on the job!’
I turned and told him, ‘You’re wrong, mate. They’re sweeping those streets out of the goodness of their hearts.’
Bruce Collins also told me that when he was showing council general manager Brian Porman how the streets were cleaned in East Sydney they kept seeing drunk men pushing brooms. Brian had told Bruce that those sweepers had to smarten up – ‘ They’re our shop window!’ – and ordered them fresh jumpers.
Truth be told, they were not the most reliable bunch of blokes. Many would be absent after having had too much to drink the night before, or as a result of the savage bashings that all street people cop. There is a lot of violence among the homeless. I’ve known men to be beaten to death for a comic book or a transistor radio.
There were enough men for two groups. At first I called the better and more reliable sweepers the A-Team, and the second-stringers the B-Team. Then, for a bit of fun, when the war between the Australian Rugby League and News Limited broke out over the control of rugby league, the A-Team became the ARL and the also-rans were known as Super League. I had to drop a guy named Noely from the ARL to Super League when he stole a mate’s radio to hock for money to buy a couple of bottles of beer. The need for drink, you see, is far stronger than friendship.
I had a wonderful rapport with them and I joked that rather than representing them in court (as I was doing for some, free of charge of course), I’d be ‘presenting’ them in court, as if they were lords or knights meeting the Queen. Not a great play on words, but they liked it.
What a bunch. I didn’t rouse on them if they didn’t do the job. Many were people who had once known love and success. There were failed family men and women, failed factory and office workers. Failed managing directors. They crossed the line, hit the bottle and couldn’t get back. In me, they recognised a kindred spirit. To please me, they swept, shovelled and picked up litter. When I took a holiday, they went into hiding, refusing to help out my replacement – a very nice young bloke and former rugby league star, Stu Topper – and emerged from the shadows on my return.
There was Womba and Dolly, and Kiwi, a former professional man whom I made my second in command to delegate the jobs to others. And Stuey from Adelaide. He had fled to Sydney after he committed an armed robbery to help pay for his wife’s drug habit and was sent to jail and on his release went home and found his wife in bed with another man. There was a sad and lovely fellow who had been a pastor in New Zealand. While driving with his wife and children they had had a head-on collision with a truck and everyone was killed except him. He turned his back on God and came to start his life anew on the streets of Sydney. The pastor would drink himself to death.
There was Johnny. He had been a representative player in rugby union and went on to play first grade rugby league. He was an alcoholic. To him, alcohol came before everything. He lost his fitness and health, his million-dollar home, he lost his family, his job. He ended up on the street, sleeping rough. His favourite drink was metho, boot polish and orange juice and he ate stale bread softened up by a soaking in Drano. He was barred from the local hardware store on William Street because the proprietor feared he would steal some potent chemical from the shelves, drink it and die. He was kicked out of Matthew Talbot for drinking on the premises. One morning Johnny woke up and his mate, who had been sleeping beside him on the street, was dead and covered in blood. The police came and questioned Johnny, understandably considering him the prime suspect. Johnny said he’d tell the police everything he could remember, but first they had to give him a drink. Of course, he had nothing to do with his friend’s murder. He was just a victim of homelessness. Today, it makes my heart soar to be able to report that Johnny has pulled his life together. He is sober, and he is reunited with his children. He is working. He helps homeless people like he once was. Johnny is one of my dearest friends. There are occasional happy endings.
I was horrified by the stories my homeless mates told me. I always thought James’s, Alison’s and my life was traumatic, and it was, but others had terrible things happen to them too. These lost souls had sunk to the bottom, while we Dack kids were somehow managing to stay afloat. Slowly it seeped in that what had happened to them could happen to me. It’s such a fine line between living in Point Piper and living in a cardboard box in East Sydney. You turn left instead of right, take a risk, decide to get behind the wheel when you know you’ve had too much to drink, or bad shit happens to you that’s beyond your control. You can come from a secure and loving home, have hopes and dreams and ambition, but if your cards fall a certain way, you’re a goner and there’s nothing you can do about it. This first-hand knowledge of the misfortune that alcohol can bring, however, did not make me stop drinking. What’s happened to them, I stupidly told myself, can’t happen to me.
Next time you see a homeless person, stop and consider how they came to be where they are, and if you’re up to it, give them a smile, a hug and a dollar or two.
James by this time was president of the City of Sydney PCYC. A plan was put in place to help youngsters from the area who had got into trouble avoid a criminal record. They would front a board at the PCYC comprising a senior police officer, a solicitor and a member of the local community, and if the offender seemed a suitable candidate, his or her punishment would be doing so many hours of community service sweeping the streets under my authority. Bruce Collins convinced the Sydney City Council, specifically Town Clerk Leon Carter, that this was an excellent idea and so it turned out to be. ‘Grab a broom,’ I’d say when they showed up. Sometimes they were surly, usually they pitched in. I like to think I helped turn them from a life of crime.
I certainly knew where they were coming from. Most had the same broken home background as me. It helped too that I could fight and, more importantly, that they knew I could fight. They kept their lip to themselves. Just like the homeless people, I treated these kids as friends. The experience was beneficial to everyone, including me. I kept on their hammer, yes, but when they had to appear in court I also defended them for nothing. I stayed in touch.