LOUIS NOWRA Woolloomooloo: A biography. Reviewed By Tom Patterson
Nowra’s affection for his suburb is all through this book – offering Woolloomooloo as both a place of refuge and an ideal to aspire to.
In the mid-19th century, a new type of dandy appeared in Paris. They were rich enough to be idle and could be found in the boulevards and arcades that Haussmann had carved out of the arrondissements that surrounded the Ile de la Cité. These flâneurs thought that a slow stroll was the best way to take in the sights, smells and sounds of the modern city. To make sure they didn’t miss anything by moving too fast, sometimes they would walk a leashed turtle.
Woolloomooloo by Louis Nowra is set in present-day Sydney. He’s a dandy in his black suit and he is a keen observer of this suburb that is a byword for the unloved and violent. But Nowra’s version of the flâneur is Australian modern. He’s not rich, he’s not idle and he doesn’t affect a turtle. Instead he has as his pacesetter and guide Coco, the unleashed chihuahua.
The flâneurs weren’t as vacuous as they sound. Their aim, in part, was to overcome the shock of the urban environment and to examine the positive experience of this new type of city. They were interested in history, as well. Not just the celebrated events of glorious deeds, wars and nation building, but they thought there was value in the forgotten, the rags and the refuse. These are Nowra’s subjects, too, which he examines through the narrative threads of memoir and history. The memoir sections often revolve around ‘the Motley Crew’ who drink at the Old Fitzroy Hotel:
… Ayesha was the one exotic face among the performers. As she once said to me with a laugh, ‘If political correctness had been around in the late 1960s, I would have made a fortune from all the racist remarks.’ Photographs from that time show an incredibly beautiful woman. She would later work in Hong Kong and tour outback Australia many years before the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert popularised the idea.
The history sections range from pre-European to the present. As well as describing events, Nowra has a good grasp of cause and effect:
Constructed between 1911 and 1913, the Finger Wharf had changed the ecology of the ‘Loo. Cargo ships carried our wool to the world, and passenger ships brought the world to Woolloomooloo in the form of seamen and migrants. The sailors and wharf workers populated the brothels and pubs, and with them came punch-ups, venereal disease, drugs, impregnated local girls and drunken killings.
Nowra calls the combination of his narratives a biography. It’s not a bad description, because it allows the inglorious history of the place (and much of it is an inglorious history) to be contrasted with the lives of the people who live there. What emerges is a picture of Woolloomooloo as a place of refuge. Somewhere for the single mothers, the drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless, migrants, artists and misfits. It would be easy to romanticise this, but Nowra is too good for that. Instead, what he carefully shows is the community in the slum. Sometimes violent, sometimes criminal, but also a place of small triumphs, hope, joy, and acceptance:
Ayesha was dressed flamboyantly in a leopard-print outfit and pillbox hat (‘Exactly like Jackie Kennedy’s,’ she whispered). I was wearing a black suit and white shirt, and sitting between us was Nathan, with his curly hair and skinny frame draped in opportunity shop cast-offs. I could see the visitors trying to fathom our relationship. So we posed for photographs as a family, with Ayesha and I the proud parents of a son who was dressed like a beggar. It was our hope that back home in the States the visitors would show the photographs to their friends, astonishing them with pictures of this typical Australian family.
The affection Nowra feels for the suburb is all through this book: ‘… I was glad to be down in Woolloomooloo … [it] reminded me of how Kings Cross used to be’, somewhere people came to be ‘transformed by its values and attitudes and escape from suburbia.’ Nowra makes a convincing argument that Woolloomooloo is an ideal to aspire to. When he attends a ‘typical American play – a verbose, melancholy slice of life about the failure of the American Dream’, he is bored by what he sees. He prefers Woolloomooloo, where happiness and fulfilment are pursued before economic wealth.
Australia as a country has never been wealthier and its richest suburbs — Darling Point, Edgecliff, Rushcutters Bay and Point Piper — are in Sydney. They are full of big, empty houses, box hedges, labradors and boredom. These suburbs don’t have great restaurants, or exciting theatre, or music, or places to dance, or bars, or room to be different. A flâneur wouldn’t bother to get out of bed to explore them. As Sydney gets richer, we are remaking the city in the image of these suburbs. Kings Cross is dead. Paddington is dead. Surry Hills is dying. It’s got so bad that in June every year masses of Sydneysiders fly out to have fun in Hobart.
One of the problems with biographies is they all end the same way. If the box hedge does cross over Brougham Street, maybe Woolloomooloo can live on as an idea. Sydney needs it. It needs somewhere for the chancers and the curious, the artists and the students, the migrants and the refugees, the lost and the lonely. It needs them because they might be us and because they are what make the flâneur in all of us get out of bed. We might even need sav-blanc-sipping, chihuahua-walking, suit-wearing, dope-smoking, neighbour-baiting, history-reading ratbags. They might make us look at what we have neglected, to see how wonderful we can be.
Louis Nowra Woolloomooloo: A biography NewSouth Publishing 2017 PB 352pp $34.99
Tom Patterson lives in Sydney. He also writes for Neighbourhood.
You can buy Woolloomooloo from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
