What was there at that time, just down the road in the old, two storey building occupied by the restaurant, was one of those individuals who, through their force of personality and ideas make a distinct mark on the city and the society they inhabit. The mark these few make can be elegant or it can be blunt. It can be subtle or it can be loud.

Bob Gould’s mark was certainly not elegant. It was blunt and loud yet in it’s loudness it was considered and well argued.

…he suggested I come down to this Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street on Saturday…

I encountered Bob as the Autumn of 1967 became the Winter when I stumbled upon an old school friend. That my encounter happened in that year, at the birth of what became the youthful counterculture, I like to think is significant. My friend and I had been at Brisbane State High together and unbeknown to each other—we lost contact after our school years—we had made our separate ways to the big city—Sydney. Certainly bigger, more worldly and more dynamic than Brisbane during those years, that’s for sure.

My school friend, Keith James, had acquired the accoutrements of 1960s youth—long hair and beard—and I failed to recognised him at first. But he suggested I come down to this Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street on Saturday for the parties and folk music that was regular weekend fair.

Keith worked there and was to be found in the record shop of number 35. That was all there was initially, the annexation of number 37 Goulburn Street came later. There, over that summer of 67/68, I became acquainted with the music the shop stocked—Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, Surrealistic Pillow, The Doors, Country Joe and the Fish and all the rest of that cultural pantheon. What an odd fit with the heavy, hardback Marxist tomes displayed above, I thought. It was juxtaposition that epitomised the Third World Bookshop and the social movement that was to grow within it. And presiding over it all was Bob Gould and his accomplices, the Percy brothers.

That’s how I got to meet this Bob Gould character. He was usually ensconced behind the bookshop counter or was to be found in animated discussion on political points that were beyond my limited life experience.

…As noteriety made the bookshop better known, more and more young people were attracted to it and these Bob would engage in conversation…

I got the impression that Bob was a little critical of the youthful counterculture then taking shape, yet he accepted us and tried to put our heads straight…  well, as he saw straight anyhow. I remember him as argumentative, mentally formidable, sometimes boisterous and exuberant, loud and a force in the world in the way that a strong seasonal wind is a force… always present and always blowing a gale against the pillars of the establishment.

Bob’s traditional Marxism was not something that most of this youthful cohort would identify with. Their politics was bound up with the youth culture in a blend of lifestyle, personal expression, music and exuberance in what became known as the New Left. It coexisted uneasily with the old Marxist left but both shared an opposition to the war in Vietnam. That was the glue that bound them in uneasy alliance and that held together the diverse social assemblage around the Third World Bookshop.

As noteriety made the bookshop better known, more and more young people were attracted to it and these Bob would engage in conversation. Yet, like everything Bob did, there was reason behind his questions about who they were and where they came from. It was as if he was doing some kind of survey of the demographic that was attracted to the bookshop. Once, he remarked that it was the brightest of those middle class kids who were attracted to the place and the youth movement it housed.

If there was one thing that stood out in Bob’s character, apart, that is, from his alert intelligence and his articulateness, it was courage. Why courage? Because that’s what it took to stand up and oppose the establishment, whether that establishment was the government of the day or the establishment of the old left wrapped in its own version of conservatism. Bob’s courage was also evident in opposing a war that, in the mid-sixties, was largely unknown to the Australian public.

In his own way Bob was a Cold War warrior, but with a difference. He was not afraid to turn his critical gaze on the Soviet Union as much as he would turn it on the Western powers. By the time the Third World Bookshop and the youth group, Resistance, made its appearance, Bob had already raised ire of old left conservatives by opposing the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Later, he did a rerun of that by opposing the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, making the link between that invasion and the war in Vietnam and painting the inhabitants of the Kremlin and the White House with the same critical brush.

His was a Marxism with a more independent streak that was based in the history of Australia’s own lobor movement. Added to this melange of Gouldian politics was the politics of his predecessors… when it wasn’t Vietnam that was his focus it was Irish republicianism.

It’s probably trite to say that Bob was a product of his time, but it was those times that formed him and in whose waters he so ably swam. It was on the outgoing tide of those waters that some of us encountered him as the late sixties gave was to the seventies. While it was Bob the political creature that some encountered, it was Bob the bookshop proprieter that othes found him as, and again it was his formidable force of character that carried him through this phase of his life.

In this role, he built a commercial mini-empire on publishers remainders and the notereity and experience that he gained through the Third World Bookshop on its varied journey over the years from Goulburn Street to George Street to Leichhardt to King Street, Newtown. Then there’s the shorter-lived bookshops in Melbourne and Adelaide of the late sixties and early seventies I think the Adelaide shop lasted into.

…a surruptitious, behind-the-counter sale of books banned by the state government…

Any remembrance of Bob must recognise that the bookshop, in its successive Goulburn Street venues of number 35-37, then its move across the road to larger premises at number 20a, was the platform for assaults on NSW’s censorship laws. Socially, the laws became increasingly untenable as the sixties gave way to the seventies with that decade’s freer social attitudes.

There, in 20a, along with the newspapers of the US underground press, as it was known (wasn’t one called the Berkeley Barb?), the Personality Posters and the rest of the stuff was a surruptitious, behind-the-counter sale of books banned by the state government. Occasionally, when they belatedly got wind of Bob’s audacity at disobeying unpopular laws, the police would stage a raid to seize the offending titles. Somehow, the media would have been tipped off about the impending raid and would be there, waiting at the bookshop. Needless to say, the police would usually leave with only a few of the offending books and, after they left, trade in banned books would resume.

…Bob accepted those middle class kids of the late sixties into the social melange that was the Third World Bookshop…

So, Bob Gould—leftist with independent line, bookseller, political intellectual, labour movement champion and influencer of the numerous people who encountered him. He leaves a legacy of daring, appropriate to his role as a change agent. But as I say farewell to Bob with these inadequate words, I ask myself what lessons his life, in the period that I encountered him, leave for me. These I sum up as the value of courage, the value of questioning everything irrespective of source, the value of applied intelligence and the value of acceptance of people different to yourself, just as Bob accepted those middle class kids of the late sixties into the social melange that was the Third World Bookshop.

Edith Piaf’s song, coming from the mouth of that sax that cold Sydney afternoon, is a sentimental piece. As it rose over the Sussex-Goulburn intersection I turned, hands in pockets against the chilly wind, and walked on, feeling a little sentimental myself about that old building just down the street. It occurred to me that the passing of the man who once inhabited the place, whose voice and laughter would rise above all others, whose cutting intelligence was so formidable, marked the ending of a seldom acknowledged and very occasional presence in my own life.

Writing these words, those of Joan Baez come to mind, and although they are about another significant figure from the collective past shared by some of us, I think they describe Bob’s entry as an influence in our own lives:

“…You’re a savage gift on a wayward bus

But you stepped down and you sang to us…”
(Winds of the Old Days, Joan Baez).

Thanks, Bob Gould, and farewell. Your life touched ours in so many ways.

TRAINING WAS MINIMAL, just brief instruction beside the strip on how to exit the aircraft with a couple practice exits while still on the ground. Then some serious sounding instruction on deploying the reserve chute – just in case – and a little practice at a parachute landing roll. Then it was “let’s go” as three of us climbed into the seatless space behind the pilot of the Cessna 182.

As we roared down the airstrip I didn’t have time to think about this being my first jump. We climbed and the countryside below took on that patchwork pattern of farmland seen from an aircraft window. Only it wasn’t through a window that I watched the land fall away below. It was through the door of the Cessna, or where the door would have been if it hadn’t been removed.

My 'chute about to deploy with a loud POP!

We banked into what seemed like a long climbing turn and then reduced our rate of climb as we headed for the drop zone. I was to go out first, then the pilot would climb through another 1000 or so metres for the others to exit. It all sounded so simple.

What was less assuring was being told earlier at the drop zone how one of the group had just landed when a gust of wind came along before he had time to get out of his parachute harness. The wind inflated his canopy and pulled him along the ground… and into a barbed wire fence.

Then there was the warning to steer away from farmers’ dams, which I took somewhat seriously.

I was jumping a type of parachute known as a T10, an olive green military conopy. This you steer by pulling down left or right, depending on the direction you want to go, on a line with a toggle attached on either side at shoulder height. Simple, it sounded.

The silence was abrupt after the roar of the engine on our climb out… just the hiss of the aircraft as it passed through the air. No time to think about that, though. “Into position,” the jumpmaster called as he signalled to the opening where the door is normally attached.

Exiting is interesting. We were leaving the aircraft on its right hand side and you start by crouching at the open door, ignoring the earth a long way below, then putting your right foot on the boarding step, which is on the wheel strut, while reaching out with your left hand for the wing strut which you grip with a certain determination. You then reach out with the other hand further along the wing strut and cross step onto the wheel – which the pilot had thoughtfully locked by putting on the brakes to stop it rotating – with your left foot. Holding on grimly with both hands with your right foot just hanging there in the slipstream, the theory is that you are in the position to make a stable exit from the aircraft when the jumpmaster shouts “GO!”.

POP! I look up and feel a certain satisfaction as the big green canopy blossoms into its proper shape above me. No twisted lines, and that’s good news… no need to remember to release the canopy, tear away the ripcord of the reserve chute on your front, deploy the canopy by pushing it outwards and then to recall that the smaller reserve canopy has a faster rate of descent and isn’t all that steerable.

Exiting seemed to happen rapidly but hanging there drifting downwards over the landscape was the most pleasurable part of the descent, though I did watch those farm dams as I had been instructed. But all too soon the ground was rushing towards me. I checked out the wind direction and speed marker at the drop zone below and turned the canopy to steer into the gentle breeze. Then… bump crumple and roll… up onto my feet to gather in the canopy… then release the harness. Terra firma, but I was in no hurry to walk on solid soil again… I kind of liked it up there.

So ended my first jump. At the end of my next one, however, I found myself going through my parachute landing fall amid the long grass of some farmer’s field. Just a second’s delay in exiting has carried me way over the drop zone. As I stood and gathered in my canopy I thought it fortunate that this farmer did not graze bulls with a strong sense of territoriality.

Having missed the drop zone, I end up in some farmer's field. Safely landed in the long grass and getting out of the harness.

For reasons no longer clear I came to associate that outlook from my high, east facing window with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue that, I think, was there in my modest stack of LPs (long playing records, for those who don’t know) along with Dylan’s Blond on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. I knew nothing of Gershwin’s music nor the circumstances of the piece but it seemed to somehow speak of the city and sitting there at the window with it playing softly it created a sense of calmness and excitement that were somehow combined. It’s a feeling that I still experience when I hear the piece.

I had come to live in Kings Cross, I guess, because it was reputedly the arty bohemian quarter. That was true at that time, but it would soon change with the influx of US military personnel on rest and recreation leave and something that they would bring from Vietnam with them—heroin.

Yet there was still time to enjoy the Cross before it changed… the bookshop in the plaza off Macleay and Orwell streets where I found a volume of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley and where I spent a lot of time browsing… the record store on the corner nearby with its Francois Hardy EPs (extended play record, for those who don’t know) in the window… and the streets lined with old buildings in need of a good paint job—this was well before the time when those same buildings would be accorded ‘heritage’ status. Then, they were just old and faded.

I had come into contact with a group of friends who were among the crowd I knocked around with in Brisbane not all that long before. They had moved into a squat, a huge old terrace house just around the corner and down Bayswater Road a short distance. Their names have long faded from memory but I remember one of them, a slim, short guy with a mop of yellow-blonde hair who wore square, wire rimmed sunglasses like those of Roger McGuinn of The Byrds fame. I don’t know how we came to meet up again, but they didn’t stay around all that long and after once visiting them in their squat I never saw then again. Another dissipation of friends going off in different directions in life.

At the time I was working for one of the city’s old family-owned department stores—Nock and Kirby’s—where I was part of a small team that did merchandising displays in the store. ”Meet me at seven at Museum Station this evening”, Jack Hawkins, a signwriter and member of the team, said on noticing a book by American Buddhist, Alan Watts, in my back pocket.

Watts, I later learned, had been one of those creatives of the American cultural underground of the fifties, the Beats, along with writers such as Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. I was unaware of that fact then and a year or two would pass until I stumbled upon On the Road. That book affected me with its depictions of a freewheeling life that went on below that supposedly conformist, white-bread, white-shirt-and-tie surface of American society of the fifties. It led me to another of Kerouac’s works, The Dhamma Bums, and, learning that Kerouac’s practice was to write about his life and his friends simply by changing their names and disguising fact as fiction, the books became more real to me as I realised that, yes, there are ways to live other than that of the social mainstream.

Kerouac’s books seemed to offer tangible confirmation that my sympathy with the nonconformist, the different in society, was a reasonable predilection to have. Why I felt this, that there were better ways to live than the paths offered by the mainstream, I don’t know. Perhaps in some subtle way it was my father’s influence. Not that he lived that sort of life–his was a life well and truly within the social mainstream–it was just that he had a mind that was open to the acceptance of difference. Maybe that had rubbed off on me.

You couldn’t help but notice that Jack Hawkins was an ordinary-looking man possessed of an extraordinary calmness and insight into life. That night I found out why. We met at seven and Jack took me across Hyde Park to a meeting of the Buddhist Society. That was my introduction to Buddhism and, later and after much reading, I came to understand Jack’s equanimity when I encountered it in others involved in Buddhism. For me, though, it was all too early. Life was there to be lived and it encouraged a more dynamic interaction than that proposed by Buddhism. I was not quite ready for a life of contemplation.

Memories of Jack remain with me. His calmness, his insight, his focus on doing his job well, his apparent satisfaction with life and his place in it, his taking the time to introduce a wayward youth to a new idea after noticing that particular book in his back pocket. That, I realised years later, was practical Buddhism in action, Buddhism expressed by someone who had integrated it into their life. Perhaps it’s because of that connection with Buddhism and the writings of Alan Watts that I associate Jack with his namesake, Jack Kerouac, whose writing I would discover soon after I lost contact with him. I couldn’t put my finger on those things at the time but I somehow understood that here was a man apparently conventional on the outside but quite different to his contemporaries on the inside. This was something I hadn’t encountered before. Jack was ordinariness and extraordinariness combined in one person and I think it was this unity in contradiction that impressed me though at the time I doubt I would have been able to articulate that feeling.

I don’t know how long I stayed at that job but it couldn’t have been all that long, and when I left I didn’t think anymore of Jack. But as the years went on the memory of him would return as flashbacks triggered by something in the moment… our meeting at Museum Station, those earnest middle aged people at that meeting that night, Jack carrying out his work with a methodical approach that was impressive, and the link with Alan Watts, and… did Jack know of Kerouac and did he ever read him? Not that I would be at all surprised if he had.

I left that job, I guess, because I was restless and I knew that within a couple years life could turn out very different if my marble was plucked from the barrel of chance and I was sent on an all-expenses-paid journey to a hot and sweaty land of forested mountains, rice paddies and hostile people far away. But that prospect seemed far off at the time and I didn’t think about it… it simply wasn’t a presence in mind. Now it was time to move on in life. I had met my memorable character and maybe I set out in search of more. Was I living my own search for meaning? If so I couldn’t have put it in such terms at the time and I had no consciousness of doing anything like that despite the influence that Watts’ book had had on me. Maybe it was something carried out below the level of everyday consciousness.

It was on cold winter mornings that I descended the switchback stairs of the building that was temporarily my home at the Cross, to emerge onto the empty asphalt of Macleay Street and walk downtown to work. At that time of day the city was fresh, not in the sense that it was clean, there was just this newness to it and that brought a feeling that, yes, life was alright and I was glad to be immersed in that moment on that street in this city. Wind would blow pages of discarded newspaper along the footpath and the few people about hurried here and there on their business. I would join them on that grey, early morning street until I turned towards the city to walk down William Street past the crumbling, down-at-heel enclave of Wooloomooloo, a place close in distance but not in mind. That would change, but not just yet.

The way south from Byron Bay passes through the spreading southern suburbs of the holiday town and enters the adjoining dormitory settlement of Suffolk Park where the road to Bangalow takes off. Don’t stop in Suffolk unless your brain requires caffeinating to start the day—you can get a reasonable cup at the
cafe in town or, at other times of the day, a cold beer at the pub—for we are southward bound… not far southward, it turns out.

Ascend the gentle uphill that takes you out of Suffolk, pass Bateson’s quarry that has so troubled local greens at times and do as the sign suggests—turn off the Byron-Ballina road and head down to Broken Head.

If you follow the narrow asphalt it’s full length, all of a few kilometers, you stop where the road stops—at the car park behind the beach. Look behind and you see the green grass of the caravan park, largely bereft of happy campers a good part of the year but packed full come the holidays. This and similar places hidden along the east coast are the surviving remnants of Australia’s traditional family holiday, end points of so many long road trips over the generations that are etched into the memory of today’s adults.

The caravan park occupies the lower slope of the headland and, standing there, you see the yellow sand of a long, long beach backed by low, coastal scrubland that stretches all the way to Cozy Corner at the foot of Cape Byron. Somewhere along there, hidden by the spray from the sea, is the beachfront of Suffolk Park. In the opposite direction a walking track takes you along the rugged, rocky coast of the Broken Head Reserve, a rough remnant of coastal-rainforest-clad slope falling steeply from ridge to sea to culminate in cliffs, rocky headlands and small, sandy beaches. The only noise here is the surge of the surf punctuated now and then by the raucous call of some large bird.

It’s that ridge above the coast that we are bound for today.

Finding Serendipity

Those who know where they are going leave the asphalt that connects the Byron-Ballina road to the beach and take an inconspicuous turnoff. This soon becomes a gravel road barely wide enough for small cars to pass. It’s is a low-gear drive that winds and twists its rocky way upwards through the coastal rainforest, a green wall of tall trees, dark understorey and dangling vine from which the occasional scrub turkey dashes suicidally to cross the road.

A few kilometers go by… then the road crests at the ranger station and house. Go further and you begin the descent to Seven Mile Beach, one of the area’s lesser-frequented coastal locales, and you pass the pyramidal form of the house built decades ago by surfing movie producer, George Greenough.

Today, though, we leave the road opposite the rangers station where a small sign carries the name ‘Serendipity’.

That proposal crashed, as did the Brigade, on the hard rocks of corruption…

Told by the man who bought the property and the hand built house that sits on the crest of the ridge, it was acquired so that he and his fellow shareholders and residents could protect the rainforest reserve from developers.

Protection of this sort has a fine history here on NSW’s far north coast. Every few years, it seems, locals have a new development proposal to stop. Back in the 1980s it was the White Shoe Brigade form Jo Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. That proposal crashed, as did the Brigade, on the hard rocks of corruption.

In the 90s Club Med became one of the casualties, the proposal stillborn well before the first hole could be dug. The latest points of conflict have been the tourism development of department story millionaire, Harvey Norman, and the redevelopment of an existing holiday park on the north side of town. Both of those went ahead, but not without scrutiny by local environmental interests. The incident led to Harvey offering verbal criticism of locals, which, like an incident around the same time with television fishing series host, Rex Hunt, did not go down well with locals.

Serendipity dates from the 1970s when Ian Cohen, who founded the establishment, came to town. Ian, long the popular, sometimes vociferous Greens MP for the region, retired from parliament with the state election of 2011. That transition from local environmental campaigner (that included several unsuccessful runs in local government elections) to politician brought a personality change in Ian, something of a mellowing. It’s unlikely that this can be put down simply to growing into middle age, rather it’s an example of how environments shape and change people. Gone is the loud, confrontational  campaigner, now given way to the quieter but no less determined, and far more politically savvy, politician.

To see Serendipity as merely another manifestation of the intentional community movement of the 70s is to misunderstand the place, it’s origin and it’s history.

When Ian and his shareholders acquired what would become the de-facto intentional community of Serendipity, they found themselves the owners of a large wooden house surrounded by a broad verandah supported by thick treelike posts, and a large forested expanse of land that falls from the ridge crest inland and downslope towards the Byron-Ballina road. Here they set up home, conveniently close to the track that leads downhill to the surfing beach.
To see Serendipity as merely another manifestation of the intentional community movement of the 70s is to misunderstand the place, it’s origin and it’s history.

Ian is a tall, strongly built, suntanned man whose spiritual interests have more to do with Buddhism than his family’s Judaism. Veteran of numerous environmental campaigns stemming right back to those against sand mining, Ian rose to prominence through his dedication to making the natural environment one that would be worthwhile passing on to future generations. He also had a reputation as a fiery character, his loud voice somehow amplified by his tall stature. Eventually, his environmental campaigning would lead from the close dampness of the rainforest around Serendipity to the quiet corridors of state parliament.

An unusual sort of domesticity

A succession of visitors made their way to Serendipity. The place had a reputation as something of a refuge, a shelter you could go to chill out after some particularly gruelling environmental campaign. Perhaps more than any other intentional community, and largely thanks to Ian’s presence, Serendipity was closely connected to the campaigns of the natural environment that so strongly marked the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. By the 1990s, however, residents were attempting to steer Serendipity away from this role. Yes, Serendipity had been a community settlement but it was always something more than this.

At Serendipity, Ian occupied one of the outbuildings adjacent to the house. They were single room dwellings somehow appropriate to the materially simple life enjoyed by the residents. Others lived in similar structures and at one time there was someone living in a dilapidated van tucked below the rainforest trees, their power supply consisting of a vary long extension cable strung from house to tree to van.

Inside, the house consisted of a spacious living/dining area, a large bathroom, a bedroom and a set of stairs that took you to an upstairs room housing a large Buddha statue and used for yoga and meditation. During the 1990s, a couple with a small child bought a share in Serendipity and moved into the bedroom.

On clear days you could stand on the verandah and looking north and you might just be able to discern the peak of Mt Warning

The bathroom at Serendipity came with a conventional flush toilet but this was seldom used. A more rustic and, according to Ian, environmentally sound double pit toilet was built on a ledge flattened into the slope between house and road. Concealed by the bush, it was not visible from the road or from the house above, but passing vehicles could be momentarily glimpsed through the vegetation as they passed.

Like so many rural homes, Serendipity harvested the rain that fell on it’s roof and stored it in a large, galvanized iron tank on the eastern side of the house. The place would today be described as a ‘sustainable house’, however it was no different in this respect to it’s contemporaries on intentional communities and to rural dwellings where self-provisioning in water, energy and food was merely business as usual.

On clear days you could stand on the verandah and looking north and you might just be able to discern the peak of Mt Warning on the horizon. Look closer, where the land forms the top of a gentle slope and you would see a vegetable garden that descended to the scrub below as low terraces. This was the province of the more enthusiastic residents but it was not an intensively managed garden and could have been far more productive that it was. This reflected the reality that most of the residents worked and had only limited time to devote to the garden. Most of the food that people ate at Serendipity came from organic retailers in Byron. In this sense the place did not live up to the stereotype of the ‘self-sufficient’ community, but it never set out to do so and, anyway, that had more to do with myth than reality. In this way it might not have been all that different to other intentional communities.

Food was a communal affair at least once a week. On Friday evenings residents would make the effort to be home to share an evening meal. Salad, as always, played a big part in the Serendipity diet and meat never made an appearance —Serendipity was a vegetarian household. It was also an alcohol-free household, those feeling the need for a cold beer on hot summer evenings being forced down the road to Byron’s bars.

Ambience subdued and quiet

Life at Serendipity changed over the years, as you would expect. Generally, during my association with the place, the shared meals were convivial but the day to day ambiance of the place was subdued and quiet. This was all to the good in as much as the place served as a refuge from the chaos of life beyond. Sometimes there would be a flurry of activity as when banners needed painting for some campaign or other, but these times were the exception.

For Peter, starting the day by driving his Kombi into Byron was his Monday to Friday reality…he worked in the childcare centre in town. For Fiona, the day started in her Yellow Mitsubishi van but at the Byron-Ballina road intersection she turned in the opposite direction to David, southwards for the run into Lennox Head where she worked at the local town planners studio. She would joke that she would leave work to come home to people painting banners to campaign against the projects her employer was engaged in the planning of.

Some days there was a complication when one of the local pythons would be found twined around the meusli container

So it was that some who lived at Serendipity had day jobs and would disappear in the morning to drive the winding gravel road to the hardtop. Like so many intentional communities, Serendipity residents were car dependent, public transport being non-existent beyond the bus service plying the Byron-Ballina road. Sometimes, the hardier would ride a bicycle to town. Like surfboards, there were several community bicycles. In an age when people await the arrival of peak oil and rising fuel prices, the isolation so sought out in the hills by some of those early communards is turning into a liability as distance equals increasing costs. Serendipity is better placed in this regard, being isolated from Byron but not beyond a bicycle commute.

If people were around in the evening other than the Friday shared meal, they would share in preparing food that would be eaten together from the low table, the eaters seated on cushions. Breakfasts were more or less personal affairs unless others were eating at the same time, and meusli from the communal muesli container was a standard for those start-of-day meals. Some days there was a complication when one of the local pythons would be found twined around the meusli container.

Living in a rainforest, wildlife becomes a daily presence. One or two green tree frogs would populate the kitchen sink. Pythons were a presence around the house and residents in the outbuildings would at night hear a slithering sound coming from the space between roof and ceiling. Another reptilian presence was the long, slim brown tree snake. Unlike the python, these were venomous though reputedly not aggressive. People were more cautious around them and the family in the bedroom inside the house were a little concerned to discover the creatures in the wall cavity. Once, a child staying at Serendipity, a Tasmanian named Ailsa, came inside to report a snake in the ferns by the front door.

There was a more persistent form of wildlife than slithering, legless reptiles, however. These were flying insects— mosquitoes—and their presence required sleeping under a mosquito net. No one should have been surprised at their presence in the rainforest, though, as it is their habitat.

People – variety, temperaments and quite a mix

During my association with Serendipity there were two shareholding residents living there—Ian and Penny—before the family moved in.

Penny was an ex of Ian’s, a slim, olive skinned young woman with dark curly hair that fell to shoulder length, and large brown eyes. Of lithe build, Penny could be described as of Mediterranean appearance and, in fact, was of Greek heritage. Her manner was calm but you could see an alert sharpness behind those sparkling eyes and a potential to be critical were that ever required.

Like Ian, Penny had a history of involvement in environmental campaigning and with the help of Gummy, a quietly spoken but practical man living at Tuntable Falls community in the hills behind Nimbin—an hour and a half drive into the hinterland west of Broken Head—she built a small, two level cottage on the south-facing slope just below the parking area at Serendipity. Needless to say, neither of them saw any value in consulting the council’s building inspector about the construction. Eventually, she fell in with Gummy and moved to Tuntable.

All of those I met at Serendipity could be described as calm personalities though Ian, and I suspect Penny, could be fiery when riled. I saw this once when I told Ian that, in his absence, someone he knew had pitched a tipi in a clearing further into the property. Ian’s reaction immediately made it clear that he was not happy with this or with the person and I believe he soon asked him to move on. Clearly, there was some history there. Better not to ask, I figured.

Peter was not given to emotional surges. He rented at Serendipity and, as already revealed, worked at a child care centre in Byron, his calm personality no doubt an asset in the job. Somewhere in his early thirties at the time, David was not tall but was slim of build and relaxed of speech, his wavy brown hair worn pushed back from his tanned face. He seemed content with his life in the little community and in his work in town, however David lived with a challenge.

As already told, Serendipity had gained a reputation as something of a rest and recreation centre. One day, a woman with a young child in tow turned up. She must have been in her thirties and was quite attractive… not what you would call either tall or short. She wore her dark hair to below ear but above shoulder length. Her olive complexion and softness of speech made her one of those women who some men feel an instant rapport with and who are easy to like.  And so it was that this was the way Peter reacted, so much that, after her few days staying at Serendipity, he asked her to stay on… with him. She politely declined and for Peter it was opportunity lost as she returned to Sydney.

One day, a police officer turned up at Serendipity. He was looking for Peter who that afternoon had driven his Kombi off the winding gravel road and down into the rainforest, where it came to an abrupt stop. He was unhurt but the incident revealed that challenge that Peter was living with—his struggle with alcohol. The good news is that, years after we had all left Serendipity, Peter was achieving success in this struggle.

Overall, Serendipity was a quiet place to live, something of a world set in the rainforest and apart from the tourism of the town and coastal strip

Sometimes, you associate a particular food with a particular person. And, so, sprouted ryegrain bread came to be associated with Warren. Why? Because he baked the stuff. You would walk out onto the verandah and there, resting quietly in the sun, would be several loaves of the moist, heavy stuff curing, or whatever it is that sprouted bread does in the sun.

Short of stature but not of imagination, Warren was one of those people on whom it is difficult to pin an age. My guess is that he was in his late twenties or early thirties. Appearance wise, Warren would have looked at home during the heyday of the intentional community movement. Long, dark hair was parted in the middle so that it flopped almost to his shoulders, though, unlike so many of that time alluded to, he remained clean shaven. Personality wise, he was pleasant company and quiet, the impression being of someone reflective and capable of deep thought.

A house, a community

So this was Serendipity, a house on the edge of the forest atop the high ridge of the rainforest reserve. Of course it was more than a house on a block of land—it was a small community made up of those who lived there. It wasn’t a tight community and it was relaxed in its doings. It was a changing community as people came and went but it retained a stability that was cohesive.

Overall, Serendipity was a quiet place to live, something of a world set in the rainforest and apart from the tourism of the town and coastal strip. In that way it could have been seen as a refuge, however those that lived there were firmly engaged in the world beyond. A monastery Serendipity was not.

Precious times

Once, Fiona was offered a share in the place but turned down the offer, and in the years since she has wondered at the wisdom of that decision. So do I.

They were precious times for me, those short years I was associated with Serendipity and the people that life and its currents of uncertainty threw together there. I recall them all, some clearer than others, and they are fond memories. I also remember the place… the big timber house, the outbuildings where people lived… the loo in the bush on the slope… the python in the kitchen… Warren’s sprouted rye bread… the garden… the forest… and that long, winding gravel road all the way down to Broken Head and beyond.

Serendipity is still there on the edge of the rainforest on the crest of that ridge. And so is that little sign that points from the road.

Now that he has retired from parliament, Ian might have more time to rise with the first light of dawn, pick up one of the shared surfboards and set off downhill through the rainforest to the surging sea. Next time, let’s hope that he avoids stepping over that log across the track and onto a python, or having to quickly exit the water again after a menacing dark shape with dorsal fin passes below his surfboard.

In the good company of others we would trek into the forests and ascend to the mountain ridges for weekends or sometimes longer. Then, weary at the end of the day we would light a small fire and cook a meal together while enjoying the banter of fellow travelers in the wilderness. Next day would being much the same, only—weekend drawing to an end—we would not pitch tent and light another small fire, instead we would board a car and, in loose convoy, turn with regret back to the city, feeling hungry.

I remember Lucy too. She sated our hunger. A large woman somewhere in middle age, she owned the takeaway on the edge of Ouse. City bound after a couple days or more in the wilderness of the state’s south west, we would stop at Lucy’s for a toasted sandwich or hamburger and hot chocolate milkshake. Returning from longer wanderings in the wilds, how we would crave fresh bread, even if all we got at Lucy’s was sliced white. I doubt of there was any other type in town.

Remembering a fellow traveller is understandable, though remembering a fast foods takeaway and it’s owner is puzzling. Perhaps it was Lucy’s good humor and welcome when you walked in. Perhaps it’s the fact that a stopover at Lucy’s was something of a ritual for walkers. It’s not something that has bothered me until now.

I do recall the—probably true—story told by Des Sheild of how he once ordered a hot sardine milkshake from Lucy and how she went to fulfill his order. I imagine he promptly cancelled and opted for something less weird… never did get to hear that part of his tale. Des was a Queenslander who trained as a school teacher and who made the move south. Liking what he found, he settled in the state and quickly came to love it’s mountains and valleys through which he walked extensively. He had a slapstick sense of humor which he demonstrated frequently and was always bright, funny company.

We weren’t all that long out of the Vietnam war in those days and I recall Des saying that his brother had been a helicopter door gunner over there. Not the safest posting with the Green Machine but it was one he survived. Des missed the war, his marble not being plucked from the televised barrel of fate by some imagined important person, and so missing out on conscription into the Army and a tour of the Asian tropics.

Vietnam might have been winding down but another war was in the offing and I know that Des had a lot of sympathy for the wilderness lobby that was preparing to fight that war over on the Franklin.

Around that time, he got into a life changing situation with Catherine, a young woman who would occasionally appear on easier bushwalks. Catheine was a quiet and easy going, something of a calming presence then in the second half of her twenties. She wore her long, fair hair parted down the middle, but what was special about Catherine was the fact that she was an artist who produced wistful, atmospheric images in watercolor of mountains and rivers. Being a practical sort of person, sooner rather than later Des married her.

And That’s when I lost contact with him, or perhaps doing so was also due to moving to a small city in the north of the state to manage an adventure sports equipment shop.

In recent times I’ve tried searching for Des and Catherine on the web and on Facebook, without success. It’s just this curiousity I have to find out how they fared in life. I imagine them happily hunkered down in some rural town, Des teaching and Catherine exhibiting her paintings and both of them sitting around the log fire on cold winter nights. But that’s an idealized image and you never know how life turns out for people… it’s something of an unpredictable experience pushed this way and that by the winds of change.

As for Lucy and her fast food establishment, I’ve never been back to Ouse. The last time I might have visited was after a group of us climbed Mt Anne, the highest peak in the South West, one hot summer’s day. I have no specific memory of stopping there that time but, come to think of it, I have no memories specifically linking Lucy’s with any particular journey into the wilderness…just a generalized memory of stopping off there on the way home. If it was that day, however, then it was significant in that that climb was the last time that that small group would be together as well as the last time I ate at Lucy’s, for after that walk we all went our separate ways.

Catherine’s painting did figure one last time. The woman of checked wool shirt and clunky boots had bought a painting from Catherine which she hung above her fireplace…an image in faded blues on the white of watercolour paper depicting Mt Olympus emerging from the mists. But, like Catherine, Des and Lucy, that painting has disappeared too, lost in a flash flood in far away Tennant Creek.

“We wrote to the Post Office mail exchange in Redfern today”, she said about herself and another of the women who lived at 168—Mazz, I think. “…and we asked how we could go about exchanging our males”.

I don’t recall how I responded but she stood with that smirk across her face, her head tilted back as if in challenge or boldness (probably both) and her hands clasped behind her back, the sort of pose she struck when she thought she had been rather clever about something.

The mail exchange didn’t exchange partners for adventurous females, but what it did was serve as a representation of the industrial thinking inherited from the 1950s and 60s. A monolithic building in the worse of the modernist industrial cheapskate style, what it and those who managed what went on in it succeeded in doing was bringing together an eclectic collection of people to work there… the wayward, the accepting-of-their-lot-in-life, the refugee, the immigrant, the money hungry, those who couldn’t care less about money, the regular drunkard, the trade unionist, assorted leftists, the wild and the calm, the traditional Australian working class and assorted youth culturists of the era. I guess I was one of the latter.

If the work was uninteresting and boring, which it was, then the people you worked with were the saving grace of the place. But like so much else in Australian society at the time, the exchange and its shifting inhabitants stood close, though not yet at, the doors of change, for in the coming decade and more social and economic change would rip through that culture as surely as it ripped through other parts of society.

The mail exchange was a five-day a week reality in my life at the time. Only seldom would I work Saturdays—they were too valuable to me and I was anything but a workaholic. I had planned only a brief stopover that day I answered the job ad and sat in the room with a few dozen others to be told that, yes, there were jobs for all of us. Six months, I told myself… six months here then out and on to something else. What that something else was I had no idea, I just know it would be there. Life at that time was an open-ended affair and there was always something new to go on to. A couple weeks of training followed our recruitment then we were given shifts to work.

My planned short stopover was to turn into a rather longer one spanning several years. Looking back I shouldn’t have been surprised. Life was then in drift mode as the 60s moved forward to give way to the 70s. I had nowhere else in mind that I should be and I was content living in the big share house with my friends.

Rob Dummett, who also lived at 168 Cathedral Street, joined the exchange around the time I did and worked in another section on another floor of the establishment. Paul Schubeck, another resident who spent time as 168 before spending time in a different type of institution, worked there too.

Working class immersion

Working at the Redfern mail exchange was immersion in Australian working class culture. It was a unionised workplace and industrial disputes big and small had accompanied the establishment from its opening not all that long before.

There were hundreds employed to process the mail on its three floors, a clerical workforce and another workforce of technicians who maintained the electromechanical machinery. It was a 24-hours a day operation with the overnight shift receiving higher pay to compensate their odd hours. For the inhabitants of that shift, that was the attraction.

Stratified roles, variable but repetitious work

The mail processing staff was stratified. There was the bulk of the staff who did the actual work of sorting. They were divided into sections organised by a supervisor — let’s call them ‘gangs’ though that term was never used. The supervisors did little apart from standing around, moving the gangs to new tasks and spending a lot of time talking with the workers or other supervisors. You could tell the supervisors for virtually all of them wore white shirts and ties. Inside a small office on the fourth floor on which I worked was what I would describe as a manager. He, too, was of the tie-wearing class and spent his time doing what looked like filling in lots of forms. Somewhere, secreted in an office on another floor, was the man who managed this rather busy enterprise. He was rarely seen. This was not the era of management-by-walking-about.

The job was varied. There might be a period on the loading docks accepting and checking in the big, canvas bags of mail from the vans whose drivers collected it from post boxes and post offices around the city. The drivers would take the bags from their vans and swing them onto the loading dock. Here, they would be checked off and the number and origin counted and listed. The checking job was easiest—all you did was stand there with a clipboard marking off the mail bags as someone else called out their origin. A basic literacy was the only qualification for this job.

The bags were stockpiled, then placed on conveyors that delivered them to the fourth floor. Handling the bags was generally a two man affair unless they were light. Time might also be spent at the other end of this conveyor, where the bags came off and slid down a chute. There, a man would cut open the string that sealed the bay and upend its contents into a bay. The man on the other side would remove some of the mail and sort that held together by a rubber band and identified by a label—which signified it was all going to a common destination— into bags hanging from a steel frame. When filled, these bags would be taken away. The rest—the loose mail—was left to fall through the opening base of the bay onto a conveyor, from where it went for sorting.

Time was also spend sitting on a bench and taking letters from a narrow conveyor belt and sorting it, according to destination, into pigeonholes whose bottom would open to pass it onto another conveyor for further final sorting elsewhere in the building.

But the worst job, the job despised by all, was the thankfully infrequent assignment to the bag room. Whenever a supervisor mentioned that we were off there his announcement would be greeted with a collective moan. The bag room was an enclosed, dusty room in which mail bags were folded and stacked. Today, it would probably be classified as a hazardous workplace on account of the poor ventilation and dust-laden atmosphere. It was understandable that all hated it.

On the fourth floor were rows of sorting machines fed by letters sorted and placed upright. Though not a demanding task, the so-called ‘face-up table’ where this was done was not a particularly popular place. The letters fed into the banks of sorting machines crewed by an all-female workforce. Each letter would land in a little window in the machine and the operator would consign it somewhere on the basis of its postcode.

The pace of work was leisurely. Nobody hurried. The reason for this, I was told, was because it was process work. It was continuous and did not have the satisfaction of having a start and a finish to the job. This was considered to be discouraging.

What a social mix the staff were. There were the payday moneylenders, those who had migrated to Australia and ended up here in the exchange, the odd industrial communist, avid unionists and those less avid, people who had drifted in here in search of employment and settled, quiet people and the boisterous… a real mix of humanity from a real mix of backgrounds.

I finally settled on the 6am to 2.30pm shift as I lived nearby, first in a room on Goulburn Street in the city, then later at 168 Cathedral Street in Woolloomooloo. It wasn’t far to walk to work and get there for the early start. Finishing in the early afternoon left plenty of the day for myself.

It was a cold trek on winter mornings. I would pull on my brown corduroy jacket with its fleecy collar and walk through the still quiet streets in the crisp morning air… down George street to Central, along the lane beside the Dental Hospital which was then separated from Central by a corrugated iron fence, then along past Prince Alfred Park to the exchange at its other end. It was an enjoyable walk winter or summer because then city had that empty-of-people feel to it… and streets were devoid of all but the occasional car. Arriving at work, like everybody else I would leave my stuff I my locker then head out onto the floor when it was time to start. There, the Bundy would make a loud CLICK! as we inserted our cards to record our presence for the day.

A complex mix of people

By sticking to the one shift you soon got to know the people who populated it. There would be a core of regulars who, like me, had chosen that particular shift because it suited them. Then there would be a shifting population who would come and go.

One of the regulars was Max. He was maybe in his late 40s or early 50s, of stocky build, thick black short-cropped hair and trim black beard. A pot belly made it plain the Max liked a beer or two or three or even more a day. He was ex-Navy and boasted that he had once had sex with a woman on the Cahill Expressway where it passes over Circular Quay when it was still a construction site. A western suburbs resident, on his annual holidays he would hitch the caravan to his big car and head off on the traditional Australian road trip holiday along the east coast.

Brian was a quiet, thoughtful man of around 50, tall, slim and bald. Like James, he was gay at a time when that sort of thing was not what you made known. We all knew, of course, though I didn’t suspect it and Max pointed it out to me. Nonetheless, both Brian and James were accepted by all and not a word of condemnation was heard. This might have been robust working class culture, however it was also an accepting culture.

James was of average height and of slim build with an olive complexion. He also had had an interesting past. At one time he lived in Hollywood where he appeared in some movies, musicals I think he told me. He certainly knew about that scene though his quiet nature made it necessary to ask him about it—he wasn’t the sort to divulge personal information unasked.

Peter, who lived in Manly, was a tall man in middle age whose son was an opponent of the war in Vietnam that was then raging. He liked a few beers or glasses of wine and had led an interesting life. Of English origin, before World War Two he lived with his family in the British colony in Shanghai and could speak some Chinese, something we learned when a group of us ate at Chinese restaurants. He was a quietly outspoken but kind man, the type you always get a straight answer from. He was fully supportive of his son and considered the war a waste of life.

Charlie seldom worked our early morning shift. A man perhaps in his mid to late forties, Charlie was an elected union representative. He was also a communist who had a great deal of credibility among the workforce and was respected. When dealing with worker’s complaints, his was a considered, negotiating approach to management. Charlie and another staffer were studying electronics and would later join the technical branch of the Post Office. I was led to suspect that his wife had enough of his willingness to repair broken electionic equipment. One day he suggested I take my malfunctioning reel-to-reel tape recorder around to his house. When I arrived, though, his wife firmly informed me that if I had brought the device around for repairing, then Charlie was not doing it. He suggested I leave it when departing and he later returned it repaired.

Ron was a young man recently returned from a tour of Vietnam. His weapon there was the M60, a weighty, medium machine gun. I recall his telling me one day how he had virtually cut a Vietnamese in two with it. How he coped with the prevalent anti-Vientam was sentiment at the exchange I don’t know. He was non-political and had probably been made somewhat cynical by his experiences.

Speaking of the war, on occasions a few of the staff would take time off to attend the big Vietnam Moratorium marches in the city. These were massive affairs that would fill the streets and attracted thousands. The Moratorium brought the message home to the federal government that people had tired of the Vietnam adventure. It would all be over by 1972.

These people made up the core of the 6am shift. In culture and outlook they were traditional Australian working class. Most were married with families (James had a male partner in his Potts Point apartment) and it’s probably true to say that most lived in the western suburbs. These were not the distant western suburbs of today—they were for the most part what are today’s middle ring of suburbs. This, the late-1960s and on into the start of the new decade, were a time of growth for Sydney’s west, a time of suburbanisation and urban sprawl.

Christmastime was different. To cope with the increased volume of mail, the Post Office employed what were called the ‘Christmas casuals’ many of whom were female, unlike the permanent workforce. The comparative visual qualities of these females was sometimes the focus of discussion among we permanent staff.

Eye candy values aside, one year I did get friendly with Christmas casual Robyn, a slim western suburbs girl with long brown hair cut into a fringe across the front. Her life, however, proved just a little too complicated with past relationships and a young child, so the whatever potential there theoretically was soon dissipated. We went our respective way without really getting started.

Fortunately for some of the workers but less so for the management, the mail exchange had been built within a couple minutes walk of the Woolpack Hotel, and it was not uncommon for staff to disappear there during working hours when they were rostered onto the receiving dock. True to their working class culture, Max and some of the others were avid drinkers famed for their ‘liquid lunches’. They would go to lunch and disappear until later in the day, having spent the intervening time in the Woolpack or further afield at the courthouse Hotel. On occasion, a large group would go to a restaurant in Chinatown for a lunch accompanied by a plentiful supply of wine.

Not being yet used consumption wine in quantity and being plied with it by the others—I remember that it was red wine that day—I must have surprised them all by being sick there on the restaurant’s table. Of the rest of the day I remember nothing. I woke up sometime later on my bed at home and learned later that Max had dented his car getting me there or getting home himself. I think I backed off after that.

A double life

For many working there, the job was perhaps a job-for-life. It was secure and the pay was reasonable. It seemed they had settled to stay. For that cohort on the early morning shift, however, it was a dissipative sort of lifestyle for which escapes to the Woolpack, drinking at the Courthouse Hotel and lunches in Chinatown provided high points in a continuum of otherwise uninteresting, repetitive work.

It was something of a double life for me. To walk out of the exchange in the early afternoon and walk home to Goulburn Street or, later, to drive home to Cathedral Street was to leave working class culture and to reenter the youth culture of the time. In the course of that walk working class culture was exchanged for the different ambience of our shared house.

Today, this sort of working class culture is seldom found. Too much has changed—the economy, working life, ideas, lifestyles and a generation. But, for just those short few years, having experienced it provided one of those episodes in life where you learn of another way of living that was so different to what you led before or afterwards.

A long way up... the stairs from Woolloomooloo to Potts Point have been worn smooth by the passage of generations.

Those days, I lived with an eclectic bunch of people in Cathedral Street, a long, straight thoroughfare connecting the heart of the ‘Loo to the city. Then, the ‘Loo was still the seedy, grey, working class enclave it had always been…a roughhouse, a refuge, a low income depression between the ridge of the CBD and that of Potts Point.

Our crew were social aberrations in this place, middle class refugees from the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs and one or two from the city’s West who had drifted east in search of a new life amid the inner suburbs favored by the youth culture of the time. Did they find it? I think they did but, like all things if this type, what they found was a variable experience.

We didn’t have all that much to do with the ‘Loo or it’s traditional inhabitants, though a few of us established loose connections with people nearby. We were well aware of our social difference but for us that old Victorian era house was a dormitory-come-social-centre from which most of us left for and returned from work to the company of our fellow inhabitants.

Leaving and returning

By 1971 we had left Cathedral Street, drifting away in ones and twos to other parts of the city or to other cities in other states. There, wherever it was that we ended up, we set about creating new lives, some of us as parents, all of us as entrants into adult working lives. Quickly, we drifted apart until years would pass between hearing of what one or the other was up to and where it was that they were up to it. Occasionally, we would connect as we travelled to the cities the others had settled in. These were good reconnectings and were times to renew the friendships of youth that had formed us and that still remain vivid in memory.

It was in the middle if that decade, the 70s, that Charmaine and I made a return visit to Sydney and to that old house in Cathedral Street. Yvonne was with us that day and so was someone else, though who I don’t recall. We had wandered down to the ‘Loo to see what had become of the house, even whether it was still there for the ‘Loo had gone through something of a transformation not so long before.

Sure, there it was, still much the same, the gravel patch below the Eastern Suburbs railway viaduct next door still much as we had left it. Five or six years hadn’t brought much change. We sat on the street front verandah and that unremembered person took photo which I still have…three people in front of an old building from which the wrought iron verandah railing had disappeared during our absence.

The old buildings have been done up since I first walked that steep flight of stone steps from Woolloomooloo to Potts Point. One day, perhaps in 1970, I remember looking down into that same small yard below the arches and watching as a woman - was she old or did it just seem that to me? - hung washing on an old clothes line.

Years pass

Years would pass and even when I returned to Sydney it was seldom that the old house came to mind…usually only when I was in a train traversing above the ‘Loo.

But in more recent years I have had reason to visit the ‘Loo and, out of curiousity, I would diverge to pass by that old building. But whereas other old buildings in the ‘Loo have had a facelift and something of a renewed life, not so that house. Sure, at some time it had received a coat of new, rather reddish and dull paint, and it had been put to new purposes, but steadily over the decades I witnessed it going downhill.

It’s the number of homeless that irks the locals, themselves residents of the social housing that dominates the ‘Loo

And so it went. My work now takes me into the ‘Loo more frequently and that enclave, once a working class roughhouse and refuge for those of lesser means, has become a roughhouse of the down and out. Next to the old house on Cathedral Street that neglected, dusty space was some time ago converted from gravel wasteland to social wasteland through the construction of Tom Uren Place… and has become a homeland to the homeless.

It’s the number of homeless that irks the locals, many of them residents of the social housing that dominates the ‘Loo. They are tired of finding homeless people dossing in their doorways, fighting each other, walking around drugged, those with mental problems screaming their way through the night, the abusive. It’s not that they lack compassion for some of the homeless, they are the first to say that some are decent people, it’s just that they feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. And those with children are concerned for their future too.

What made some locals angry was the story that leaflets had appeared on poles at some outer urban railway stations advising the homeless to go to the ‘Loo. Who was to blame? The Baptists, the story went, because the more homeless clients they had, the greater the grant they received. In these social circumstances, stories like this thrive and spread virally by word of mouth and it becomes difficult to separate urban truth from urban myth.

To walk down Cathedral Street from the city is to traverse a socioeconomic profile visible in the state of the buildings

What is to become of this place, this Woolloomooloo? There has been a minor infusion of middle class people attracted by the ‘Loo’s proximity to the city, however they are not socially dominant nor have they changed the place as they have done elsewhere. Still, their presence is resented by some social housing tenants.

To walk down Cathedral Street from the city is to traverse a socioeconomic profile visible in the state of the buildings. New apartments mix with old apartment buildings made new and all have the gloss of orderliness. There are cafes where people sit and talk and there’s the occasional small business. Trees shelter the footpath. Conspicuously, there are no homeless dossing on the footpath in this stretch of Cathedral Street.

Then, you come to the great social divide. It’s found at the end of the block after Toby’s Estate coffee shop and training centre. Cross Bourke Street and you’re in another part of Cathedral Street, another Wooloomooloo. The buildings have suddenly become tackier, there’s an atmosphere of social decay, and there are the homeless.

The city from Victoria street... so different now, the skyline.

Signs of change

There’s now a community garden in the ‘Loo where locals, mainly those middle class types, grow veges and fruit though some of the less affluent participate, which is surely a good thing. And there was a heroin dealer who used to hide his stash in the sweet potato patch which, when some gardener set about watering, caused him not a little consternation and panic. Like much else about the ‘Loo, he’s disappeared too.

So, some elements of this place change while others do not. Those things might reconfigure over the years but they retain the essential elements that have persisted in this grey, concrete valley between the ridges.

It’s only two or three times since that distant year of 1970 that I have made that climb up that long flight of stone steps from the ‘Loo to Victoria Street… to stand at the top and to turn and look back over the city. Now, of course, it’s a city transformed, a city more cluttered and vertical, a city whose early evening lights sparkle like some minature Milky Way. And some of those old Woolloomooloo buildings I pass might be cleaner than they were back in 1970 and might have a new coat of paint, but stop to look and you see the old below the new facade, thought whether that’s a trick of memory or of actuality I’m not certain.