THE NAKED CITY: NO PLACE FOR ECCENTRICITY

Sydney is a city where at least some of us have fond memories of the eccentrics, ratbags and even colourful criminal milieu, who were once visible on a daily basis throughout the CBD, and Kings Cross. For those still interested, there’s both a shameless nostalgia and real sense of cultural significance cultivated on sites like ‘Stations of the X’ and ‘Up The Cross and Down the Loo’ on Facebook. But where are the urban characters and oddballs today in a Sydney that has become almost soulless, compared to the vibrancy of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s?

There are obviously many factors at play and times do certainly change. Would a bunch of Tik Tok, video game loving kids today have any interest in an elderly man, busking with a group of budgies on Darlinghurst Road or alongside the El Alamein Fountain? That was Owen Lloyd, the ‘birdman’ of the Cross, who regularly delighted all ages in the ‘70s and ‘80s with his avian sideshow.

Whilst Arthur Stace of ‘Eternity’ fame is still celebrated today, there are many notable and sadly forgotten eccentrics who traversed the streets of this city on a regular basis some thirty to forty years ago. Perhaps the most recognisable (he even featured on Channel 7’s nightly closedown clip), was Joseph Cindric, ‘the trolley man’, who pushed a hand made trolley around the streets of the CBD relentlessly from the ‘60s through to the ‘80s. There was both a sadness and mystery as to why he trudged daily over every inch of pavement in the city, apparently sleeping at night in Hyde Park.

It was only when he died in a nursing home in 1994 that his true identity emerged, with the National Archives documenting that he had arrived in Australia in 1948 as a Yugoslavian refugee from Germany. Remarkably the staff at his Ashfield home nursing had had kept his beloved trolley and realising its significance passed it on to the Powerhouse Museum where it remains today.

In a previous Naked City column I recalled a night in 1974, when sitting on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall prior to a Roland Kirk concert I witnessed the once in a life time, alignment of the eccentrics. The trolley man, Sandor Berger and the ‘fan man’, all of whom had been crisscrossing the streets of Sydney for decades, all met together for a few seconds on the corner of Park and George, without any acknowledgement of each other – confirming a mathematical probability that might not be witnessed for another twenty years.

I have never been able to find one iota of information on the elusive ‘fan man’, who was a CBD regular in the 1970s. He would wander the streets daily and, catching your eye, pull out an oriental style fan to perform his own brief Madam Butterfly. On the other hand, Sandor Berger, who died in 2006 aged 81, remains one of this city’s great ‘street’ eccentrics. His remarkable life is surely deserving of a book or documentary and he is well remembered on journalist John Stapleton’s blog (thejournalismofjohnstapleton.blogspot.com/) as well as a chapter in Chris Mikul’s Bizarrism’.

I remember speaking to him at a screening of Ken Loach’s Family Life at the Walker Street Cinema in North Sydney back in the early ‘70s. He had his regular cardboard sign, “Psychiatry Is An Evil – It Must Be Banned”, affixed to his back and was handing out his hand-printed flyers. Hungarian born and a survivor of Auschwitz, he would have arrived in Australia in 1949 as a young man baring enormous trauma – his parents, grandparents and other family members had all gone to the gas chamber. Thankfully his prolific output of poems, erotic fiction and numerous largely unpublished letters to the Sydney Morning Herald have survived in both the State Library and the National Archives.

With any amount of bizarre, perverse, and outrageous behaviour readily observable on the internet today, the days of the ‘street’ eccentric capturing our attention would appear long gone. Even the buskers are doing it tough, with Council compliance definitely not on their side. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, a backlash against homogenisation and the social pressures therein, will see a new breed of eccentrics take to the streets of Sydney, as omnipresent as parking inspectors and hoons on a Saturday night.