My quiet street

COMMENT
At a meeting about late-night trading policy last week, Jo Holder from the Darlinghurst Residents’ Action Group (DRAG) asserted to councillors that I lived in a quiet street, meaning that my arguments against the repression of Kings Cross were possible because I don’t experience the alcohol-induced fallout. This is the second time I have heard a DRAG member say this at a meeting.

I suggest these self-appointed authorities on my street spend a weekend here.

Unlike those who complain about Kings Cross but live high up in apartments, often with double glazing, our residential strip consists of mid-1800s bald-faced terraces whose front doors open directly onto the narrow footpath. Our rattling sash windows are open in summer because we don’t have air-conditioning. We are up close and personal with the street action.

Our houses are one minute from Kings Cross station, just at the distance where youths finish their beer and alcopops, some smashing the bottles, others rolling them down the pavement or leaving them on our doorsteps before stopping to urinate on a parked car. It’s the only route for vehicles and pedestrians between Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo and points beyond, so we get all the traffic.

Many of these revellers have an irresistible desire to upend garbage bins. Try this: Go out tonight and throw an Otto bin onto the street. It’s loud. Then attempt to skateboard on it through a trail of smashing glass while your mates cheer you on and girls scream with laughter. Then, perhaps, throw some bins onto cars parked in the street.

This happens every weekend in our street, usually between 3–4am, the magic time when we old people, if woken, cannot get back to sleep.

Then there was the screaming naked woman whose embarrassed boyfriend was trying to drag her back down the street to home, sometimes by her hair. We got up, naked ourselves, and gave her shelter and a sarong until the crisis passed. (The two have since rebuilt their relationship and are doing OK.)

Less distressing is the sight and sound of people having sex in the street. One good-looking couple were at it, both starkers, she bent over with her face against the bonnet of a car, he standing behind with his pants around his ankles, both ignoring bemused passersby. Next morning her long, wavering finger trails remained in the dew on the duco.  All the neighbours spotted that one and we had a good gossip the next day.

Another girl orally entertained several guys who loudly expressed their enthusiasm and encouragement in a blow-by-blow description. By then we had become too jaded to get up and look, content to follow the dialogue, giggling.

Then there was the sword-fight. A couple had come down from the Cross and seen a guy vomiting. The young guy razzed the muscle-bound vomiter who stood up, roared at him and gave chase. The young guy ran to his car, opened the boot, pulled out a full-sized sword and pointed it at his pursuer who roared again and simply slapped it aside before planting the young guy face-first against his car and threatening to work him over, the girl pleading to let him go. This went on for several minutes until the couple managed to drive away, the vomiter punching the car, after I had yelled out the window threatening to call the police.

Ah, the car action! Never mind the police cars regularly siren-screaming past 6.6 metres from our open window, and the roaring pre-dawn garbage trucks; many Sydney drivers are leadfoots, wheelspinning and turbo-blasting past before braking hard at the speed hump just down the road, sometimes setting off alarms in a parked car.

Partygoers prefuel in parked cars 2.7m from our house, often returning several times during an evening to swig vodka kept in the boot, do lines in the front seat, crank up the dance music, scream with laughter and ALWAYS for some reason honk their horns before hitting the next nightclub to sit on a $20 cocktail.

Then there is the extreme car action such as the 4WD which recently smashed into nine parked cars before sliding 15m on its side to a stop outside our house. That woke us up. Last week a 20-something blonde, apparently in an ice rage, screamed her way down the street hitting cars with some kind of articulated club before ripping the wiper off my neighbour-musician’s work van and smashing its rear window. It cost him $750 to replace. We regularly spring sinister young men in hoodies breaking into cars. We don’t challenge them because they advance towards our house making loud threats. Best to just call the police, who occasionally can attend.

We wonder why pizza delivery scooters have to sound like chainsaws screaming past – they are hardly icons of male virility – but no night is complete without half an English football team breaking into deafening victory chants – again 2.7m away.

It’s tales like this that a small minority of residents bring to Councillors, horrifying those genteel souls with the “intolerable” street mayhem. They claim rights to a good night’s sleep equal to that of someone who chooses to live in Pymble.

We, on the other hand, love the edgy vibrance of the place and could tell you just as many beautiful, exciting or heart-warming stories of the most tolerant and well-knit community we have ever experienced. We love being “out” only two steps from our front door, and pity the sods who face the trek to Fairfield or Pymble after a night out. We love the slight shock when you tell innocents you live in Kings Cross. We love our collection of books, films, poems and songs about the colourful history of our chosen suburb, something Pymblers lack. We love rubbing shoulders with super-models, famous writers, celebrities and movie stars while affecting the cool to ignore them. We love the best people-watching in Australia. We love the loyalty and kindness you often find in a mentally ill sex-worker drug-addict who has been reviled by elitists. We love the way people wear their hearts on their sleeve here rather than shrivelling under the pretence of normality demanded by suburban hypocrisy. We are entertained watching respectable men in suits sneaking in and out of the nearby gay brothel. And some of those ‘terrible’ British backpackers end up dancing in our lounge room. All this makes the downside worth it, and here’s the rub: these things only collect in every city’s party precinct, where the night dwellers live and the partygoers go. You can’t delete the nightlife and keep the “vibrance”.

There is nowhere else in Australia we could live. Kenneth Slessor summed it up in 1933 with the lines You find it ugly, I find it lovely, now set in brass in our footpath thanks to ex-City Historian Shirley Fitzgerald.

But a few who find it ugly, crucially our councillors, want to restrict the place in an attempt to “normalise” or “civilise” it. They don’t understand that the very definition of Kings Cross is NOT to be normal, that it IS civilised, the last refuge for those who abhor suburbia. Their burgeoning regulation oppresses the vast majority who come here and have a good, pleasant time. There is no allowance for young people simply testing their limits and learning some lessons, like all of us with any go in us did when we were young.

While the good citizens of Pymble are happy to watch Underbelly and live the adventure vicariously, there is a current in human society who want the real thing – after all, real people had to create the events of Underbelly and the myriad other stories of Kings Cross that titillate the world.

Lord Mayor Clover Moore wants to legislate her version of a “sophisticated” late night culture into being, with bookshops and art galleries open at 3am. Terrific. But the city will remain a destination and the sad fact is that a few who visit from the suburbs, the ones who do the real damage, are the sort who last week beat up a wheelchair-bound man at Mt Druitt station. Short of building a wall around the city, these people will come and do their damage. But the dead hand of regulation oppresses everyone else. It makes venues more expensive to operate, creating those $20 cocktails and fuelling the prefuelling. It creates monoculture because it stifles low-budget grassroots enterprises from which the green shoots of culture spring – like the forced closure of the fabulous QIRKZ venue in Sydenham, The Hopetoun Hotel and others. It kills the late-night economy and all those jobs for students and out-of-work actors, designers and artists.

Regulation has banned most street activity. Never mind bookshops at 3am, you just need to allow the street vendors and portrait painters back. Take the time limits off buskers in party precincts, let people tell fortunes or sell dodgy watches or perfume with a lively Cockney spruik. Adding colour and life to the streets reduces tension, lightens the mood, gives people something to do besides drink and dodge bouncers, puts eyes on the street, and creates a money-earning street culture that will distract the suburban thugs.

The bad guys are a police problem, one they are in fact controlling better and better. A flowering late-night culture is a precious asset that should be encouraged, not repressed. And I have still not heard a valid reason why the minority who hate it can’t move to Pymble, as we ourselves may do one day if our tolerance level falls below the party-precinct threshhold.

by Michael Gormly