NAKED CITY: REQUIEM FOR WOOF WOOF

For over a decade the loveable canine Woof Woof has been entertaining shoppers and tourists in the CBD, along with his handler Harry ‘The Dogman’ O’Reilly. Whether it’s barking along to an old Smokey Dawson record or impersonating a beached whale, Woof Woof has delighted everybody with his amazing animal tricks.

Now it seems Woof Woof’s busking days are well and truly over as the Sydney Council reinforces not only a ban on animals busking but insists that all buskers take out public liability insurance covering millions of dollars annually.

“It’s just ridiculous,” Harry the Dogman told us as Woof Woof went through his routine outside the Zara shop in the Pitt Street Mall. “Woofy wouldn’t hurt a flea, in fact he is home to about two thousand of them. The only person he has ever bitten was a council parking inspector who mistook him for a small Japanese car and tried to put a ticket in his mouth.”

Harry also explained that Woofy often performs public duties free of any obligation to drop coins in the hat. “Only last week I took him up to Martin Pace where four Occupy Sydney protestors rolled him out and bedded down for the night.”

When he’s not busking in the CBD, Woof Woof is also a favourite on the children’s party circuit where he is constantly in demand as both a jumping castle and a vacuum cleaner to suck up all the half eaten fairy bread and squishy cakes that the kiddies make a mess with.

“It’s so unfair,” Harry lamented as three Chinese tourists gladly handed over ten dollars to be photographed with the “giant wombat.” “If I hired a koala suit and danced around the Pitt Street Mall playing a ukulele, nobody from the Council would object, provided I had my buskers licence and my public liability. When a real animal comes on the scene all they want to do is ban it, regardless of whether’s it’s a snake, a dog or a performing chook.”

Busking with animals has long been a tradition in Sydney Council precincts. For many years in the 60s and 70s, Owen Lloyd, known as ‘The Birdman From Kings Cross’ entertained passers-by with his unique collection of budgies and a homemade instrument alongside the El Alamein Fountain. The feathered crew of Sambo, Georgie Boy, Bluey, Prince, Percy and Toby are now long gone as is the Birdman himself who died in 1987. Now it seems, as a result of brutal Council regulations Woof Woof will suffer a similar fate.

“It will break his heart, if he can no longer perform,” Harry lamented this week.  “Without the adoration of the public he will probably curl up and die. I am already considering having him made into a memorial rug. Damm those heartless bureaucrats!”