CART (2)Walkie Talkie
Café DOV, Potts Point
20/08/2012
Tonight I want to pay tribute to the literary and artistic traditions of 2011, the area encompassing Potts Point, Kings Cross and Elizabeth Bay. I will talk about writers currently living in this area, take a look at some of the luminaries who have lived her in the past; I will talk a little bit about how writing has changed and become more challenging for writers in recent years, and then I will read from one of my books a short passage about the area.
I am happy to answer questions about my writings – including my writings about women but won’t anticipate your interest here.
More writers here than any other postcode in Australia – and have always been artists, actors and all sorts of bohemians.
I have lived across the road since 1993. In that time I worked as a magazine editor but since 1997 I have been a full-time writer. I have written four books and have published two updates of my first book Damned Whores and God’s Police. In the late 70s, before I headed off to Canberra and New York and back to Canberra for a bit over a decade, I lived in Elizabeth Bay – first in Clanricarde in Billyard Avenue, then in what we used to call Deco Towers, the only skyscraper in those days in Elizabeth Bay Road.
Some of the other writers who live in the area today are (in no particular order):
Delia Falconer, Mandy Sayer and Louis Nowra, Peter Robb, Frank Moorhouse, Murray Bail, Patti Miller, Linda Jaivin, Joanne Burns, Jimmy Thomson and Sue Thomson, Indira Naidoo, Tim Herbert and Paul Keating.
The Cross will never inspire writing that is light or trite. The romance of the place is that it embodies the tougher, edgier side of life. It is a place of risks, full of gamblers who seldom win much and who often lose everything, including their lives. Sometimes this can become depressing, but it sure beats the sounds of the suburbs. (Even though, these days, it seems at least on Friday and Saturday nights that the suburbs have come en masse to us.)
You will never hear a lawn mower in Kings Cross and that, for many of us, is entirely a sufficient reason to live here. Give me sirens any days. That is what attracts those of us who live here and who have written about it. That won’t change, even though the Cross will, as it always has, continue to evolve, to take on new looks and, at times, whole new identities.
Mandy and Louis’s book In the Gutter… Looking at the Stars is a marvelous collection of writings about the Cross from the 19th century on.
It includes such diverse offerings as:
- Ivor Indyk’s marvellous essay on the building of the Chevron Hilton by his Uncle Stan – the notorious developer Stanley Korman – mentions the traffic jams on McLeay Street in 1960 as thousands of Sydney-siders drove past to inspect this marvel, a place where such legends as Eartha Kitt, Johnny Ray and Jerry Lewis were to perform. The Chevron has been replaced by the Ikon.
- A map of cultural landmarks showing places such as the Gazebo, scene of Barry Humphreys’ spectacular last bender before he got off the booze for good, to the Piccolo Bar, subject of poems by John Tranter and Yusef Komunyakaa, or to Wylde Street, these days prohibitively fashionable but in the 1940s the scene of the hilarious Gala Drag and Drain party described in Jon Rose’s book At the Cross.
- Or the Aquatic Club, at 15-17 Greenknowe Avenue and demolished a few years back to make way for a regiment of town houses where Peter Finch used to drink, Steve J. Spears used it as his office and Chips Rafferty coming back from a long lunch with Jerry Lewis at the Journalists’ Club “managed to die on the path outside”.
If I could just mention a few of the famous literary landmarks – I wish more of them were marked:
17 Darlinghurst Road, near the corner of Langkelly Place, now the Astoria Hotel is where David Scott Mitchell used to live
99 Darlinghurst Road, Flat 2 near the train station is where the great poet Mary Gilmore lived
73 Roslyn Gardens – the old house Lulworth that is now part of St Luke’s hospital (where the great man himself Gough Whitlam now lives) was the childhood home of Patrick White – and the setting for several important scenes in his novels Voss and The Vivesector.
Closer to where we are tonight, Orwell Street has a wonderful history. The Metro Theatre used to be the Minerva. Peter Finch acted there, Charmian Clift was an usherette
The map at the beginning of this book is great. It guides you past the houses where some great books were set or written. I was thrilled to learn, for instance, that Dymphna Cusack and Florence James wrote Come in Spinner at 18 Orwell Street, just a few yards from where I live. It was always a book I loved, ever since I first read it as part of my research for Damned Whores and God’s Police and it was my introduction to the history of Kings Cross.
I was also enthralled to learn that not just one but two successful female literary partnerships lived in Orwell Street, just two houses apart, although at different times. M Barnard Eldershaw, the literary name of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, authors of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, lived at 22 Orwell Street.