I WENT to Hyde Park to feed my totem animal, the Ibis. I’ve defended this noble beast time and time again, against many a detractor. Imagine my shock when I went to take its photograph and it stuck its beak right in my Greek salad (not a euphemism).
Keeper? Switching my allegiance to ducks.
TIlly Devine and her curious hat.
I’M no rubbernecker, but I’m not averse to snouting around a crime scene.
The next Underbelly series sees Sydney’s Darlinghurst tagged Razorhurst, as it was back in the 1920s and 1930s. The series will focus chiefly on vicious brothel madam Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, who ran flophouses and gambling dens. The pair racked up multiple assaults and manslaughters between them
Tilly Devine’s main beat was Woolloomooloo, where I’m sloping down Cathedral Street – at which local gangster Guido Caletti, according to my Time Out guide to the burb, slashed someone to pieces.
Daily newspaper The Argus reported after Caletti’s death: “Some Sydney gangsters of his time dressed like Savile Row at Randwick racecourse and like lumberjacks in their night haunts. Guido was always well tailored, in the glitter of a night club or in the darkest gulch of East Sydney. He could be suave and polished in speech and he could plumb the lowest ooze of language for forcible idioms.”
Also, if you’re curious to know what ‘gingering’ involves, look here.
I have a mosey around Woolloomooloo and stop at the gloomy, gorgeous East Sydney Hotel, est. 1860, for some gruesome pâté on toast. The joint smells of Gluhwein, and favours those mournful, callous-thumbed sort of troubadours. It boasts “interesting mixed clientele” and, unusually for the area, no pokies.
The other end of Cathedral Street is Skid Row, with the interesting mixed clientele hovering their bums out of bushes and taking dumps. If I lived round here, my crim name would be Mad Ginny Bung-Eye.
You can do a more hardcore tour of Razorhurst here.
Keeper? Cross-referencing neighbourhoods with the history books is fun.
Captain Moonlite
CREAKING with grizzly paraphernalia, the Justice & Police Museum celebrates 230 years of lowlife scumbaggery around Sydney Harbour, which is sparkling innocently not 100m away.
Here, you can window-shop prison masks and gags from the 1800s, marvel at handcrafted knuckledusters, shanks and maces, peer at reconstructions of murder victims’ skulls, and rifle the files of Communist sympathisers, targeted in a spate of pointless espionage by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (their website today looks like they’re trying to sell you home and contents insurance).
There’s also an intriguing little clipping on world yarn-spinning champion Tall Tale Tex Tryrrell, which led me to this.
Some ASIO records are available through the National Archives of Australia, so I take a seat at a computer and type some ‘persons of interest’ into the search function, just for shits and giggles, you understand.
You are then invited to sign the guestbook next to the computer. As IF! Not five minutes ago I listened to a recording of a former ASIO agent giving his tips on how spies can blend in (don’t wear a trench coat). I don’t think his equally blindingly obvious advice for the general public would be “leave your signature wherever possible, particularly when looking up your dubious mates in databases.”
Next I stumble across the invariably handsome bushrangers. It’s enough to make you want to take a death mask home.
My favourites:
Captain Moonlite: A university-educated lecturer in prison reform, turned bandito and confidence trickster. And an ‘incurable romantic’.
Joe Byrne: Kelly Gang member, fluent in Cantonese, a poet, opium addict, liked to dress in tweeds. You don’t find many of them to the pound on RSVP.
Joe Byrne. He's dead here, unfortunately.
Keeper? Love police museums and jails. I like going back out onto the street and seeing everyone as a crime scene photograph.
I HAVEN’T been back to Cronulla for 10 years. I lived here while on a working holiday, which was my attempt to clean up my act by leaving England. And coming to Australia! A-HA-HA-HA!
Anyway, not much has changed, other than Paddy’s Bar – at which I had to tolerate The Cranberries on repeat and dodge eight-year-old Irish dancers trundling across the dance-floor, all while bearing an armful of steak plates – now reborn as JD’s Bar and Grill.
Oh, fun fact: the lowly waitstaff of Paddy’s Bar were continuously monitored and grilled about money that kept wafting off from the till, resulting in an environment of heightened paranoia and unpleasantness. The mystery was solved one morning when I turned up to work and discovered that Paddy himself had fleeced the entire joint, right down to the kegs, cutlery and pats of butter, doing a diddly on his business partner.
I give that fine establishment a miss and head to the beach for a modern-day reenactment of Puberty Blues. This iconic Oz novel and film was co-written by Kathy Lette, pre-churning out chuckles days. In essence, a pair of dispirited teenage girls, back in the late ’70s, waste away summer days by gawking at surfers and minding their Chiko Rolls as they zip around arrogantly on the waves. My puberty, by contrast, was spent pining after a sulky lifeguard at Slough Swimming Baths, dodging floaters and perverts in goggles.
Keeper? Will think about what book to recreate next. I’m wearing hot pants in Debbie and Sue’s honour, by the way.
Louise Hawson: Brighton-Le-Sands
I STUMBLED across a fantastic book, 52 Suburbs, by photographer Louise Hawson, which was borne out of her blog, www.52suburbs.com.
It’s a photo essay of Sydney in all its glory, finding beauty and intrigue (and patterns, as Louise’s eye picks up the minutiae of the architecture around her) where you might least expect them.
It was worth coming to Louise’s exhibition at the Museum of Sydney (incidentally, if any curator from the MoS is reading this and would like to feature my blog, get in touch and we’ll talk $$), as I get to hear her take on the project.
“This was one of the most fulfilling years of my life,” she says, piped through the walls, “a reminder not to walk through life on fast-forward.” You betcha!
Remaining as wide-eyed as though she were a tourist overseas, Louise got to know her home city more intimately. She preferred, she says, the western suburbs, as their perceived ugliness made them all the more interesting. Although I notice she didn’t cover Rooty Hill.
Louise Hawson: Brighton-Le-Sands
Keeper? Yes, will visit more random suburbs while I am here.
I DON’T want to come to Hooters with a gaggle of girls doing the testosterone tourist thing. I want to come alone, to hit it like a SWAT team, soak up its juices and browse what I imagine will be quite fetching cotton merchandise.
You’re supposed to pull your obnoxiously large Subaru into the parking lot before entering – that becomes obvious when Hooters turns out to be a 25-minute walk from Parramatta station.
“Welcome to Hooters!” a disembodied voice calls out.
There are 460 Hooters across the States, and more restaurants in 27 other countries.
At the bar today is a group of fluoro-vested men, here for the beer, but it’s only 5 o’clock so the cavernous joint is largely empty. It’s done up like a kid’s party, with orange and black balloons, coloured lights and comfortable, wipe-down booths. My booth has a TV screen, my own dedicated bottle of barbecue sauce, and a whole roll of kitchen paper.
I peruse the menu, which is littered with boisterous humour and has a misplaced apostrophe, here: “EXTRA’S”. It’s got a friendly enough tone, though; I like it.
Fittingly, I’m reading John Birmingham’s collection of essays, Off One’s Tits. Birmingham’s like the last bastion of blokehood; he directly challenges the masculinity of any man not admitting to a carnivorous mania. Here’s a sample passage: “It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a pack of hefty blokes in possession of a good appetite must be in want of a pork fest.” And another, from another essay: “real chicks dig guys with cars, scars and bacon breath”. Elsewhere he observes that tweedy-looking college boys seem like “a good fuck and some pork crackling might be the end of them”. You catch his drift?
I think Birmingham would disapprove of the fact that my Hooters Girl turns out to be a middle-aged man in a finely striped shirt. Maybe this is down to the multiple lawsuits Hooters has had to contend with in the States, from litigious larrikins who were denied employment on the grounds of not having humungous breasts. (If this cracking down on funbags strikes you as unfair, you can always subscribe to Hooters Magazine.)
My signed memorabilia.
I order a soy latte and my serving man doesn’t so much as flinch. Then I order a smothered chicken burger with curly fries, and it arrives within 10 minutes. It’s hot, salty, and indeed smothered to death by capsicum, mushrooms and Swiss cheese: all for a mere twenty-two bucks. The spiral design of my potatoes keeps me amused for so long (much in the manner of crinkle-cut chips, when they were first invented) that my smothered chicken burger goes cold. It’s no less tasty, though. (NB: If you’re a bloke of the Birmingham persuasion, you should be ordering ribs. Hooters are famous for them.)
Meanwhile, there’s nothing for the surrounding Hooters Girls to do, so a bunch of them choreograph a boot shuffle to Steps’ ‘5,6,7,8’, which is blaring through the speakers: “My rodeo romeo / A cowboy god from head to toe…” I will report that their hair is disappointingly unboofy, but points are won back when one picks up a hula-hoop and starts spinning in her regulation orange hot pants and white tank top, apropos of nothing.
Back to me, and I’m having both stomach pains and palpitations. I’m not sure what the former’s about, but I’m putting the latter down to my revamped salt intake.
And on to that merch. I’m sorely tempted by a $40 tight tee, and I like the tasteful owl logo… but I’m concerned that plastering ‘Hooters’ across my chest might invite ridicule from the sort of men I’ve seen at the bar. I might appease myself with a laptop bag, baseball cap, or even a kid’s tee for the young nephew, but instead I opt for a $15 stubby cooler – it seems churlish not to.
On the way home, a Doctors Without Borders fundraiser corners me at Redfern Station. After just 30 seconds of startling stats about starvation in Kenya, I thrust that incriminating cooler deep into my bag and resurface with my purse, signing up for two years of donations on the spot. And whaddaya know – my indigestion eases.
Keeper? Ye-es. I think.
There's the IGA.
WHEN I spot Rooty Hill on a Sydney CityRail map, it’s a given I have to pay the joint a visit. It just sounds so… jaunty.
Upon boarding my Emu Plains train, a sense of foreboding settles upon me. I notice Rooty Hill is right next to Mount Druitt. That’s the neighbourhood always targeted by the cops in Channel 9’s gripping series, RBT. The Mount Druitt residents are universally outraged that meth shows up on the breathalyser when they haven’t even taken pause to pop a can of Bundy.
Anyway, there are plenty of merits to Rooty Hill: the art of the meringue is not dead, you can buy a house for $250k and there’s a nice big pub. It’s out of postmix, but that’s likely to bother only me.
And there's the hill.
Keeper? No. Not as glorious as yesterday’s venture
* but isn’t.
“OUT of interest, what are you going to do on Shark Island?” the skipper of the Captain Cook Cruises boat smirks. I’ve just picked the joint at random, back at the ferry terminal at Circular Quay, and handed over my twenty bucks.
From the distance, Shark Island looks to be a lump of rock with a couple of trees on it. It’s a good thing I brought a book.
While Shark Island’s a popular wedding location (I find the odd champagne cork), it’s a 250m-long, deserted beauty spot all other times. Today I’m the sole inhabitant, and I let loose with a couple of cartwheels as the boat pulls away. It’s mine alone for two whole hours. I can’t find my lighter, but never mind, never mind.
Over the next couple of hours, I entertain all my childhood Swallows and Amazons fantasies. I duck a fence and go for a paddle, which is English for wading, and find a bit of ancient crockery. I scratch my name on the bulbous sandstone formations with a jagged shard of clay (the forensics team will find that, should it emerge I’m not alone on the island after all), pick a path between aloe vera plants and palms, sit among the oyster shells on the beach, and plot the various routes out of here if I had to make a break for it (top choice: swimming to nearest buoy and sitting sheepishly on it).
Between 1879 and 1975, Shark Island was used as both an animal quarantine station and a naval depot, which explains the sinister, dilapidated stone buildings dotted around. I feel a lot like I’m being watched – you can’t tell me those rich kids in Rose Bay across the way don’t all have telescopes – but this is without doubt the best way to spend an afternoon in Sydney, or anywhere ever. And luckily the skipper remembers to pick me up again.
Keeper? Yes. I don’t reckon I’d go mad alone on an island, either. Not like Tom Hanks.
An oldy but a goody.
I’VE been determined to bother a camel before these 365 days are up. Coming from Slough, I find them as alluringly foreign as palm trees and Chiko Rolls.
According to our guide Rebecca, there are over a million wild camels wandering around the Nullarbor (through which Layna, Simone and I have just scored a path, getting from South Australia to West). You can wake up after a night of camping and see their footprints all around you.
They must have all been refueling on powdered lattes at some quaint truckstop when we motored through though, so Simone and I head to Kalamunda, a suburb in the foothills of Perth, to have a go on some domesticated beasties.
Rebecca tells us camels aren’t nearly as moody as horses, which is a relief. At best, horses are shirty; at worst, they try and mess with your head. My camel, Henry, doesn’t deliberately try and walk me into low hanging branches or stop suddenly in his tracks to rip up grass.
While camels can reach speeds of around 70km/h, we take a leisurely stroll through the beautiful bushland of Beelu National Park, where Henry, Amelia and Zara get to rip up a smorgasboard of passing plants – and keep the paths well pruned while they’re at it.
There are few birds around, but kangaroos stop dead and watch us pad past. We leave the beaten track to avoid a mountain bike race, although it wasn’t really necessary: camels don’t have a flight instinct. They’d rather turn around and check something out.
Back at the ranch, an emu wanders around in the gentle breeze and one of the camel whisperers tells us about his working day. Breaking in a wild camel, he says, can result in being bucked five metres in the air. Male camels are on heat, rather than the females, and once a female is slung in the pen there’s a frenzy of camel humping and slobbering – the sound effects of which we are treated to over a piece of cake.
You too, can have a go on a camel.
Amelia chewing.
Keeper? Yes. Camels rule.
I WENT to see The Panics play last night, and I noticed frontman Jae stared up and to the right as he sang, sometimes right over his shoulder.
This is because he was using his imagination to recreate the world he’d written about.* You look to the right when you’re creating, fabricating or lying. Looking left means you’re retrieving actual information.
It’s more complex than that, though – we access different parts of our brain depending on whether we’re using our imagination, or recalling smells, sounds or visuals.
This human lie detection website gives me some scenarios to pose to my two guinea-pigs.
1. Ask someone to think of the noise of thunder. When a person’s eyes look to their right, they are constructing an auditory thought.
Simone: Looked right.
Layna: Looked right.
2. Ask someone what they wore yesterday. People look up and to their left when they’re remembering a visual image.
Simone: Right, up.
Layna: Right.
3. Ask someone to picture a boat on the ocean. This is a visually constructed image, and they should look up and to their right.
Simone: Right.
Layna: Right.
4. Ask someone to think of their favourite song and play it in their mind. This is recalling an auditory memory and they should look to their left.
Simone: Right.
Layna: Right, then left.
5. Ask someone how it feels to walk in wet sand. They should look down and to their left as they recall a sensory impression like taste, smell, or feeling. We look down and left when we’re conversing with ourselves.
Simone: Down and right.
Layna: Left.
Keeper? Yes, will be watching everyone extremely carefully from now on. Including myself.
* in my opinion.
Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
Hey man, now you're really living 
You must be logged in to post a comment.