Mandy
Sayer's `The Cross'
Angelika Fremd
The character dubbed `the galley cook' in Mandy Sayer's `The Cross' reflects,
"I've always lived up here in the Cross. The street, see, it starts up in Darlinghurst- near St Vinnie's, where I was born- and runs right through the William and Darlinghurst Road intersection, and right on down what'd have to be the most beautiful dead end in the country. Sometimes I wander down there when I'm stoned and stand hanging onto the wrought-iron fence and I commune-you know. I perch at the top of the sandstone cliff. I gaze at the corrugated surface of the harbour-the white sails bobbing toward Kirribilli, the seagulls scalloping across the horizon-taste the sting of salt in the air, listen to the ferry whistles and the hydrofoils whirring around Fort Denison until I become them and they become me, until we're dissolved into one curious moment.
Even living in the city- what some people reckon is a seedy, tarty-looking place-I can still have my communing time, just like I do at sea. I can sit on my front veranda and the tall plane trees that line my street rustle in the wind, so much so that they begin whispering. Saying stuff a purely carnal experience.
I don't go into the strip joints, but it's fun to amble through the neon lights and watch the barkers outside the Love Machine and Stripped Poker, trying to hustle in Tommy from Toongabbie and Doreen from Doonside. This is the other side of the Cross, see? It's only two hundred yards from the whispering plane trees and deteriorating Victorian homes. I like to cop a battered sav from Antonio's and wander about. A few years back, lots of hippies and the Children of God moving in and I can always score a bag of grass around the El Alamein Fountain. Or down at the Flea Market where they sell those velvet dresses and leather bags and crystals. It used to be a jazz joint down in the basement, but now it's all tarot cards and mood rings. So in the Cross, we've got this sort of weird intersection between the old-timers with their walking sticks and poodles, the bodgie businessmen with strip joints and drag shows and blue movie houses, the hippies in their rainbow gear and tabs of Clear Light, the pros in their hotpants and lace-up boots, the yank sailors swarming up from Garden Island, grogging on and losing their caps to Shirley and Nikki from Penrith, the bikies lounging on their parked Harleys every Saturday night, and a few Italian migrants on the corners, selling Granny Smith apples and coconuts and Queensland pawpaws cheap.
It's a delicate ecosystem, see? One that me and Gina and the others are trying to preserve."
Gina is the pseudonym for Juanita Nielson the famous newspaper editor who took on the developers and their crooked friends in the seventies when they tried to buy up a row of stately old homes in Victoria Street in order to demolish them and replace them with high-rise flats. Nielson herself lived in one of those homes. It is not known what happened to Juanita Nielson who disappeared without a trace feared murdered.
In her book `The Cross' Mandy Sayer fictionalises the story of Nielson's fight against the developers and Kings Cross heavyweights. She creates three different versions of what may have happened to Nielson.
Sayer's account paints a vivid picture of Kings Cross in the seventies. Her character, the galley cook, explains why people clubbed together to fight against the proposed development; they were preserving the past. `The galley cook' says,
"If it could've become your life, you might've taken back the houses as your own, to be your home. You would've wanted to look after them like we did, see? Because you wanted to look after what'd become your life and the ghost of what other people's lives had become. You wouldn't have been nostalgic for the past, but the future."
A young, homeless Aboriginal girl who later dies in a suspicious fire in a squat in Victoria Street describes another face of the Cross community of the time.
"I walk around the Cross it's a funny place always something going on. At the Wayside Chapel they give you clothes I got a white dress it fits but gets dirty quick. I wash it at night it's dry in the morning.
Sometimes I go to the library and look at magazines it doesn't cost anything. You can get free coffee at the Drop-in Centre and biscuits if you get there by twelve I usually do. On Thursdays at six they give you chicken soup and Mondays cheese and macaroni it's hot and tastes good with a lot of salt."
Gina says of her own life at the Cross,
"I'd already lived in Victoria Street six years when Sol Levine bought up a whole chunk of the historical homes and evicted all the low-income tenants. Not that I was directly affected or anything. No, I owned my own little terrace and my business. No, it was the principle of the matter, and the aesthetics of it, too. The Cross has always been this little bohemian, urban village. Full of artists and writers and hippies and old people and migrants, full of cafes and second-hand shops and bookstores and flea markets and corner milk bars, and yes, up in Darlinghurst Road the strip clubs and jazz joints."
Sayer portrays a community threatened by development, a scenario which many feel is likely to be repeated in the nineties with the developments occurring in preparation for the Olympics.