Kings Cross – Its Life and Times

Kings Cross is a no-holds barred place, where backpackers, prostitutes, strippers, chefs, mad men, poets, beggars, booksellers, doctors, gangsters, sailors, musicians, drug traffickers, eccentrics, judges and artists live side by side. Part flaneur, part historian and part eyewitness, in Kings Cross – a biography, Louis Nowra – acclaimed writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist – has produced a portrait of Sydney’s King’s Cross from both the past and today. On Tuesday 18 February 2014, Louis Nowra addressed The Sydney Institute to reflect on his impressions of the Cross and on some of its colourful life and times.

KINGS CROSS – ITS LIFE AND TIMES

LOUIS NOWRA

The name has become a shorthand for vice. When the media mentions it the adjectives “notorious”, “sleazy”, “red light”, “sinful”, “violent”, “dangerous”, “hellish” and other similar pejorative terms are needlessly attached, as if the reader has to be constantly reminded of its scandalous reputation. For nearly 90 years, Kings Cross has been synonymous with crime, drugs, sex, violence, bohemianism and immorality.

It is the most densely populated area in Australia, with residents who range from the wealthy to the underclass, people who live in some of the most exquisite examples of art deco buildings or sleep rough on the streets. Famous people have lived in the Cross and others have become famous by living there. Backpackers, junkies, whores, strippers, chefs, madmen and crazy women, beggars, booksellers, doctors, musicians, writers, gangsters, drug dealers, eccentrics, judges and artists live side by side. It is one of the most diverse and tolerant communities in Australia.

For decades, it was a safety value for our society and at the forefront of our nation’s social and cultural changes. So much so, that I am making a claim that the history of Australia is impossible to imagine without acknowledging the contribution of Kings Cross to modernity, female liberation, the art of living in high rise apartments, and how it provided a refuge for those whose behaviour, ideas, ethnicity and sense of morality was, for many decades, at odds with mainstream Australian society and culture.

It’s strange to think that an area so small – basically ten streets – has such a profound effect on the national imagination. It was Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling, governor from 1825 to 1831, who was to see the true potential of the sandstone ridge. He ordered that the land extending from Woolloomooloo Bay, through Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and southwards where Darlinghurst Gaol would be eventually built, to be divided into 17 allotments, with a minimum lot size of eight acres. He stipulated that the houses must cost at least 1000 pounds, an extraordinary sum at that time. The first seven land grants were made in 1828 and further allotments in 1831.

The mansions, built on the ridge called Woolloomooloo Hill, would hover above the stink, dirt and crime of the town. The villas looking down on the town would be a visual statement of the city’s grandeur and a constant reminder of the gulf between the swells and toffs high up on the hill and the convicts and emancipists below in Sydney Cove.

These were glorious mansions, impressive and imposing with standards of luxury not seen before in the colony, but Kings Cross itself was the result of an old man’s dull pragmatism destroying a younger man’s vision. Thomas Mitchell, the 38 year-old government surveyor, a brilliant man of volatile moods, knew the city would expand beyond the ridge to the east and realised that the Aboriginal track that led up the hill (William Street) could become a glorious broad avenue. In 1830, he sent his plans to the 63 year-old Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay, owner of Elizabeth Bay House. Macleay disliked Mitchell intensely and opposed the scheme.

Macleay took the opportunity of Mitchell’s long absence, surveying and exploring, to change the plans, so that the street ran straight up the hill, on a much steeper gradient, and stopped at the top of the ridge without crossing over it and extending the route down into Rushcutters Bay and then beyond. Instead of the wide thoroughfare imagined by Mitchell, Macleay narrowed it. The result of the Colonial-Secretary’s self-serving interference was that Kings Cross would become Australia’s worst bottleneck, a Gordian knot of seven streets running into one another at the top of William Street, creating such a tangled havoc that the intersection became infamous for its traffic problems and accidents. The solution only arrived in 1975 when the Kings Cross tunnel was opened. Earlier, in 1916, the southern side of William Street was demolished to widen it to the width Mitchell originally envisaged. The economic and social cost of both solutions was enormous. All this could have been avoided, but then self-interest nearly always defeats the visionaries.

As the nineteenth century wore on, economic downturns meant that the huge estates were sub-divided and more people came to live on the ridge. Victoria Street became one of the most fashionable in Australia, its beautiful avenue lined with terraces. Poorer people resided in the many boarding houses that were pervasive in the area, especially towards East Sydney. William Street became a buzzing, bustling thoroughfare. Still, the area didn’t know what to call itself; its official and unofficial names over the years had included Windmill Road, Woolloomooloo Heights and Darlinghurst. The name was changed in 1897 to Queens Cross to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.

Thinking that the name might be confused with Queens Square in the city, the name was changed a few years later in 1905 to Kings Cross, honouring King Edward V11. The name was never officially gazetted so it was uncertain just what area was covered by it. At first it only applied to the intersection of William Street, Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street, but it quickly became less a specific geographical location than a fluid definition that could never be pinned down. The name morphed into the colloquial term “the Cross”, not so much a real address as one whose boundaries were left up to the imagination of its inhabitants and fantasies of those who dreamed of visiting it.

Two things happened in 1912 that were to redefine home life in Sydney. Australia’s first public housing scheme, called Daceyville, was built, in order to remove people from the city slums. It was a deliberate act of social engineering and also about improving the morality and respectability of its inhabitants. The same year something else happened that was just as significant. The highest apartment building in Australia was completed: Kingsclere at 1 Greenknowe Avenue, Kings Cross. The spacious apartments were fitted with the latest American technology, such as “telephonettes”, intercoms, automatic lifts and an open air cinema on the roof.

These two events were symbolic of the division between a life in the suburbs and inner city apartment living. In the early 1920s, Kings Cross was still a slow-moving hamlet and on Darlinghurst Road itself there were no restaurants, food stores or hotels. However, by the middle of the 1920s the landscape of the area had changed dramatically with the construction of many apartment blocks.

If one is to pin point one of the first moral panics about the Cross then it was during the late 1920s when women, wanting to be liberated from the stifling morality and domesticity of suburban life, shifted into these high rise flats. Mainstream Australians saw the flats as a denial of family life and they were rumoured to be dens of depravity. The unsupervised mixing of single women and men in apartment blocks became a moral panic exploited constantly by the tabloids, like Truth’s campaign against the immorality of “flat life”. For both women and men high rise living not only meant parties, but a loosening of sexual morality and a sense of freedom that the anonymity of the Cross gave people.

There may have been new gorgeous art deco and Manhattan style buildings but there were still the ramshackle terraces, divided up into many flats for those unable to afford the new apartments. The low rents and its location close to the heart of the city meant that Kings Cross became a sought-after place to live for bohemians. As the writer Dulcie Deamer said of the Cross in the 1920s, its “half-broke, sanguine, visionary world of artists and sculptors, poet-scribblers, holed-up in basements, third-story attics, any living crevice that was cheap”.

It was booze that was to first determine the Cross’s reputation for crime and violence. Pubs used to open at six in the morning and shut at 11 pm but in 1916 a referendum gained an overwhelming majority of votes to close hotels at six o’clock. The era of sly grog had arrived. Sydneysiders were prepared to pay inflated prices for their illegal alcohol. One of the consummate sly groggers was Kate Leigh. Once a prostitute then brothel owner she had her men push handcarts up William Street to the Cross supplying thirsty drinkers and brothels in Kellet Street and the original “Dirty Half Mile”, Kings Cross Road.

Leigh’s arch enemy was an Englishwoman Tilly Devine who, on coming to Australia, worked as a prostitute in Kellet Street and Bayswater Road. Her career as a brothel owner owed itself to a law passed in 1908 which criminalised street prostitution and made it illegal for men to operate brothels or profit from the earnings of prostitutes. The result was that women like Leigh and Devine could own and operate brothels.

Violence often broke out between the Leigh and Divine gangs, battles between up to thirty men who shot, hit and slashed at one another in open warfare on the streets. A 1927 Bill outlawed the carrying of concealed firearms and handguns. Gangs took up the razor against each other. The following four years have been called “the worst mob wars in Australian history”. The razor attacks grew more frenzied and between 1927 and 1932 there were over five hundred victims. A law was passed sentencing anyone who unlawfully possessed a razor to a six month jail term.

The law worked but the wars between gangs and gangsters continue to horrify the public and in 1936 the incorruptible Sydney Police Commissioner, William Mackay, convened a meeting with Divine and Leigh. He offered them a deal. The police would go easy on sly grog sales and prostitution but in return both women had to agree to stop the gang warfare. Mackay had come to the conclusion that the best way to restrict crime was to confine it to one area and therefore have it under control. This was a pivotal point in the policing of Kings Cross.

From now on morality was relative. Policing the Cross would be done with the knowledge that the area was the one place in Australia where certain criminal activities would be tolerated in order to stop their spread into the rest of the community, especially the suburbs. As events would prove down the decades, the elastic morality of the Cross would corrupt many a policeman.

But beyond the dark lanes Kings Cross itself had become something special during the 1930s when it became the vanguard of cutting-edge architecture, neon light signage, plus a focal point of all things modern: innovative food, ethnic diversity, painting, technology, music and interior design. By the late 1930s the Cross was said to be home to about 60,000 people in an area of barely one square mile and had the reputation here and overseas of being Australia’s Montmartre.

The growing population needed places to eat as many of their kitchens were small or non-existent. The area became celebrated for its cafes and restaurants throughout Australia with one reporter asking rhetorically, “Is it not a legend that no-one in the Cross can cook?” And what a thrilling range of cuisines to choose from. As one admiring witness wrote: “You can eat in nine languages up at the Cross – English, American, French, Swiss, Russian, Chinese, Mexican and Hebrew.”

But what the range of food tells us is that the ethnic mix was like no other in the rest of White Australia. Here were people from all over the globe. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany many refugees fled to Australia and sought out Kings Cross, because it was the most tolerant and cosmopolitan place in the nation, or as a contemporary local said, the refugees made their home in the only part of Australia that could truly be called “grown up”. There were so many Jews that some newspapers reported that the Cross was threatening to become a Jewish colony.

The Cross became a fashion hub with frock shops, dozens of dress makers and many dry cleaners. For visitors there was an added frisson to spot bohemians who had become synonymous with the area. Middle-class women flocked to the flats. It was also a haven where unmarried couples could live together and one of the few places where homosexuals were tolerated. To others it was a fantastical place of a bewildering mix of people where “All life therein is self-contained. When a man presents a visiting card that features Kings Cross, he may be a governor’s aide, a gunman, a gigolo or a garbage contractor.”

Since the 1920s there had been an increasing sense that Kings Cross made the rest of Australia seem staid and parochial. But it was more than that; locals saw their area as an island, a refuge that was isolated from the puritan values and cultural desolation of the suburbs. They felt separate and “different” from the rest of the country. In other words, Kings Cross had become the most vital, dazzling and sophisticated place to live in Australia.

During the Second World War thousands of American servicemen spent their leave in Kings Cross. Their presence meant brothels, prostitutes, illegal alcohol and so called “charity molls”, those who had sex with them for free. Australian women adored romantic Hollywood movies and the American servicemen seemed to personify them. They had more money than Australian men, more sartorial style and actually gave flowers to their dates. No wonder women poured in to the Cross, as did teenage girls to such an alarming degree that girls’ homes and orphanages were ringed with barbed wire so the girls couldn’t get out.

Once the Americans left, Kings Cross seemed to lose some of its vitality. Sure, it still had a vibrant nightlife and thousands loved living there but the 1950s was a stagnant era even in the Cross – few new restaurants opened, the neon lights seemed less bright, less magical than a decade before and only one apartment block was built.

But something was beginning to stir in the early 1960s. The Cross began to flourish as a chic nightclub and restaurant scene. Hotels like the upmarket Chevron Hilton played host to famous international performers, like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan. Restaurants like The Chelsea and others became the epitome of high dining. As usual there was also the undercurrent of the forbidden; prostitution and gambling. Plush illegal casinos operated with almost impunity, catering to Australia’s second obsession after alcohol- gambling.

It was Abe Saffron who was to recognise a trend before practically anyone else in Australia when he opened the first legal striptease show at The Staccato in 1959. It was immediately successful. It would seem tame now with choreographed acts and less bare skin than you’d see on Bondi Beach, but it was the beginning of the commercialisation of sex with Saffron making a fortune in distributing pornography across the country. Kings Cross was openly pushing the boundaries of conservative Australia, not only in matters of sex but also sexuality.

It had always been a place which gays escaped to and the camp scene was large. In the early 1960s Les Girls opened. At first, the idea of female impersonators was shocking but gradually it became one of the must-see visits for tourists.

For many who came to live there, the Cross allowed one’s personality and eccentricities to flower in an atmosphere of unique tolerance. The black singer Nellie Small could do what she couldn’t elsewhere, and that was to be able to walk around dressed as a man. Bea Miles, a plump rumpled figure who quoted Shakespeare for money, and was the bane of taxi drivers lives could have only have been allowed to exist in the Cross. She would have been locked up anywhere else. And there was the self- proclaimed Witch of Kings Cross, Rosaleen Norton, whose theatrical demeanour, make-up and chiselled teeth, scared some and amused others, but who became so well-known that people came to the Cross just to stare at her.

By the early 1960s there were traffic jams of a Friday and Saturday night and it had over 800,000 visitors a year. There was elegance and a sense of occasion in a visit to the Cross, but near the end of the 1960s it became the epicentre for cultural and social convulsions. For the second time in its history, it was invaded by Americans. From 1968 to 1972, 280,000 American servicemen came to the Cross on R&R from fighting in Vietnam. They were to change the area in several significant ways. The first was that these boys had no interest in upmarket nightclubs or cuisine. Restaurants went down market and strip clubs flourished, the acts becoming more tawdry. But the most insidious influence was hard drugs, especially heroin. Few Australians were addicts before the Yanks arrived, but many had become so by the time they left.

Young people were coming to the Cross escaping from their families as the generational divide widened. Many turned to drugs and then to selling their bodies to pay for them. Ted Noffs who opened the Wayside Chapel in 1964 was one of the few to recognise what he was to call “a horror movie in slow motion” as the drug culture took hold, later escalating with LSD and prescription drugs. He warned the police and politicians but they ignored him.

The 1970s was a hideous time for the area. Ninety per cent of houses and terraces in Kings Cross Road were demolished to make way for the tunnel in 1975. One of the most beautiful examples of Italianate buildings, a row from 1-13 Elizabeth Bay Road, was torn down. When you see what it looked like and how it enhanced the area now you almost weep. But the worst carnage occurred in Victoria Street when the developer Frank Theeman bought up many buildings wanting to tear down the terraces and put up cheap apartment blocks. In his fight against unions, students and local protesters he had on his side, the Premier, the police and criminals. It was a violent and vicious team. Protestors were beaten up, threatened with death and two women died in the cause to stop the demolition, one in a deliberate fire and the other, Juanita Neilsen was murdered on 4 July 1975 on the orders of the gangster Jimmy Anderson.

Although the protestors won, it was at a cost. Many of the destroyed buildings had to be demolished and a series of crass ugly apartment blocks sprung up at the northern end of the street. But it showed just how closely criminals, the police and politicians had become. Abe Saffron had been the major catalyst for this. He bribed Premiers, the Police Commissioner and politicians of all persuasions. He was a malignant and destructive force. It is no wonder that tabloids began to call Kings Cross “The Kitchen of Hell”.

By the 1980s the distinct difference between day and night began to blur. Whereas before locals would go about their business of the day and leave the night to tourists and visitors so that the two worlds didn’t intersect, now they did. Druggies overdosed in the streets, thugs menaced you of a daytime and hookers became more aggressive because of their need for drugs. Prostitutes as young as 13, both boys and girls, became common. Paedophiles ranged freely, whether picking up kids at the El Alamein Fountain or at sleazy clubs like Costellos in Kellett Street.

The police themselves dealt in bribery, blackmail, drug selling, fake evidence and money laundering. They spent much of their time taking money off dealers and hookers and getting drunk with criminals at the Bourbon and Beefsteak. By the middle 1990s, the Cross had become unruly, ungovernable and corrupt. Only the 1995 Wood Royal Commission into the police force managed to stem the sordidness and the corruption of the Kings Cross cops.

By the turn of the century, the Cross was in dire straits. The striptease clubs like Porky’s and Stripperama had a declining patronage because quite simply, the rest of Australia had caught up with the so-called sexual revolution and men especially didn’t have to come to the Cross for sex because prostitution had moved to the suburbs. Les Girls became such a safe institution that it played the suburbs and RSLs. The internet supplied porn and so sex shops began to close. Even the iconic Pink Pussycat strip club closed.

Tourism had stalled after 9/11 and hotel rooms were empty. The City of Sydney decided to revitalise and transform the Cross. In the space of a few years, one hotel after another closed. By 2006, over 2000 hotel rooms had been converted into 1400 apartments for more than the 2500 people who shifted into the area. There was a huge demographic shift. The newcomers were cashed up professionals, both straight and gay, young couples and empty nesters. It was a transformation as dramatic as the boom in apartment living during the 1930s.

The area became a 24/7 entertainment district based on an alcohol fuelled economy. There may be posh restaurants, especially in Macleay Street, but the thousands of people who pour into the area of a weekend want to drink and party. Many young people come to the Cross to drink themselves into insensibility, drop ecstasy or take speed in the nightclubs. Bikers have taken hold in the nightclubs because they sell the drugs and make extra money from stand-over tactics.

As has happened over the decades since the 1920s, the Cross is still the site of moral panics, especially when two young men, in separate incidents, were King Hit in Victoria Street and died. Hysterical politicians and the media called for a curb to the opening hours of hotels and bars. What this panic failed to mention was that this wasn’t only a problem in the Cross. As usual, it was blamed for changes in our social attitudes and behaviour but these sort of violent actions also occur in the rest of Australia and even more frequently. But the Cross is has always been a convenient scapegoat for our baser desires and actions.

The demographic change has meant higher prices for flats and food. Bohemians and artists who were once a feature have shifted into cheaper areas, like Marrickville or Surry Hills. Residents have always understood that the Cross stood for values different from mainstream Australia, but now the people from the suburbs are shifting in, this tolerance and sense of diversity is withering as the newcomers aim to rid the area of its danger, edginess and difference, remaking the Kings Cross in their own bourgeois image.

And it’s inevitable that the area will be tamed. It was once a dangerous place, not so much for its criminal activity, but because it was the id of Australia, and that’s why it was and it is still feared. The Cross permanently undermined the myth of the upstanding Australian, a person of strong moral values, a paragon of normality and suburban rectitude. The Cross offered instant gratification, sexual immorality, neon-lit temptations and illicit pleasures. It appealed to the unruly desires of the id. What made moralists furious was that the Cross excited passions and loosened self-control. Moral lines were crossed as one slipped from the unambiguous morality of mainstream society into a vague immoral zone, where few things were forbidden and temptations were everywhere.

Perhaps the cruel reality is that Kings Cross has served its purpose. For decades it was the vanguard of modernism, sexual mores, music, art, design and nightlife and an escape from a parochial and puritan Australia. But now all that had changed. The rest of the Australia has caught up and Kings Cross is no longer needed as it once was.