So there I was, sitting in the dark in a strip club late one Saturday night, wondering how a nice girl like me had ended up in a place like this. But we’ll get to that later.
If you’ve travelled all this way to Sydney, chances are you’re going to pay a visit to Kings Cross (you may even be reading this article in one of its hostels).
A populous part of Sydney (the most densely populated area of Australia, in fact), ‘The Cross’ has been the home of the wealthy, the bohemian, the rock star (real and wannabe), the social misfit, the hip, young urban and the just plain sleazy.
It’s been immortalised through pop songs and has been the backdrop for more than one Aussie movie about the underworld. It’s seen the rise and fall of a thousand-and-one nightclubs, seen a million men vomit on their shoes, watched a billion tired old strippers’ lame acts and has more sex shops than you can poke a… erm… stick at. The Cross has something for everyone, as I was about to find out.
Kings Cross and its surrounds started life in colonial Sydney as one of the poshest suburbs in town, full of mansions boasting harbour views. In the 20th century, The Cross became the hang for bohemia – beatniks, artists and the like.
Then during the sixties, American GIs started coming to Sydney for time out from the Vietnam War. This is when The Cross became red light central and the hub of Sydney’s organised crime. Notorious criminals rubbed shoulders with crooked cops, and illegal gambling, prostitution and heroin flowed unabated.
While there’s definitely still some dodgy stuff going down in The Cross these days, the surrounding suburbs of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay have become decidedly gentrified, with the new yuppie residents calling on the council to clean up the main drag. One walk down Darlinghurst Road on a Saturday night, though, and you know they’re fighting a losing battle.
Another controversy in the last few years has been the introduction of a shooting gallery (not the kind where you get a cuddly toy for the best shot – it’s a safe injecting room). The subject of numerous ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the Sydney papers, the injecting room has saved a lot of needle-using drug addicts’ lives.
Let the games begin
Despite its big reputation, Kings Cross is really small – basically where William Street meets Darlinghurst Road, which ends at the fountain, and a few side streets and alleys thrown in. It’s in one of those side streets that my night begins.
There’s still an air of bohemia in Kellet St, with its old terraces decked out in fairy lights (and a few red ones) that give a warm, inviting glow – quite a contrast to the lurid neon of the main drag. It’s too early for the way cool Iguana Bar, which is the haunt of music industry types, and is open till 6am.
We may be back later, but first we head to Melt, just in time to miss the $10 cover charge. Melt feels more like a house party than a club. There’s a cool crowd tonight – art school graduates types, but thankfully without any pretentiousness (the door staff are friendly and welcoming – unheard of!).
Later on one of the owners, Walter Tuarae, says he got the inspiration for the design from his own living room. The music’s great – no doof doof, just a good mix of soul, roots and jazz.
I love the laid-back ambience and the drinks don’t break the budget. Walter tells me that on Thursday nights he has a house band that jams with musicians and singers from all over Sydney. I’ll be back.
I could stay all night in this cosy sanctuary, but eventually we leave, stopping for a bit at Mansions in Bayswater Road, which used to be a dive but is now a pretty good pub with large screen televisions, pool tables and funky people.
After a drink or two here we decide to get in amongst the action along Darlinghurst Road, and do a spot of people watching.
The thing about Kings Cross is that no matter how bizarre you are, there’s always someone else who’s weirder. As we walk up the main drag, a man who seems to be having a psychotic episode has a ghetto-blaster turned up full blast.
We pass a group of spruikers – big burly blokes in badly-fitting suits, whose job it is to entice people up the dimly lit stairs to see a strip show or live sex act.
I’ve decided that if I’m really going to experience Kings Cross, I can’t really leave without seeing a strip show. We walk past a few spruikers but none of them seem to think we’re their target audience – they’re more interested in guys travelling in packs.
Sporty spice
Eventually I walk straight up to a spruiker outside a club called, originally, ‘Strippers’, and tell him I want to have a go. He looks at me as if I’m joking, but then tells me he’ll let us in – for the special price of $15.
I don’t know if this really is a special price, but it seems reasonable though, so my posse and I climb the narrow stairs, pay our money and go into the ‘theatre’ – a dirty little hovel that smells of musty old carpet and puke.
A barman in a tiny bar that looks like a hotdog stand urges us to have drinks. As we pay him, he keeps the $5 change and says “A tip for the barman? For looking after you all?” I want to tell him to get stuffed, but I don’t think it’d go down well, so I shrug and we sit down.
We’re just in time – a girl in a tiny black and white striped skirt and top, jaunty little hat, and six-inch clear plastic platform shoes bounces onto the stage to a really dodgy recording of Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock”.
She soon loses the striped outfit and bra and after a bit of wiggling on the spot dancing (what else could she do in those shoes?), she gets really sporty and does lots of hand-stands and splits in front of a mirror (and shows us that silicone breasts never droop, even when you’re upside down).
I’m quite impressed by her athleticism, especially when she crawls up a pole and then hangs upside down again (still wearing those shoes!).
Finally she ditches her g-string, walks into the audience and puts a mat down on the empty chair next to me. She lies down on it, spreads her legs and pushes her crotch into the face of the delighted man seated behind me.
I really don’t want to see just how thoroughly she’s waxed, so I look into her face instead. She smiles at me. I smile back and then we both laugh, sharing an “aren’t men weird” moment. Then it’s pretty much over.
I think I’ve had my fill of sleaze for tonight. We think about visiting the Bourbon (formerly the Bourbon and Beefsteak – a Kings Cross icon) on Darlinghurst Road, but it has a queue stretching half way down the street.
So having spent some time watching a girl taking off her frock, we finish the evening in Oxford Street watching a man who’s wearing one. But that’s another story altogether…
While trying to drive across the Simpson Desert, LIZZIE JOYCE and her partner were forced to hitch a ride with some dodgy truckers.
Early one January morning my boyfriend Dan and I set off on our trip across three states, covering 3,000 miles on what would turn out to be the best trip I have ever done, not to mention the most dangerous. We were attempting to cross the Simpson Desert on our way to Alice Springs from Sydney. We were fully prepared and set off in our 4WD loaded with equipment, including 60 litres of water, a double swag, a laser beam,
and an Epirb signal.
After 10 hours of driving, watching the landscape turn from highways and tall buildings to red earth and eternal horizons we glided past an old mining town called Cobar, stopped for a wee and drove on through, thankful that this ‘Hicksville’ town was not our destination. But while driving at an average speed of 120km per hour, the trusty car (which I was assured had “just had a full service and was made for driving across such terrain”) was disintegrating and the entire wheel was about to fall off.
Ugly mothertruckers
Suddenly, the brakes started to fail and smoke started pouring out the front passenger tyre. We were 120km from the last town and with at least 100km to the next, Dan decided we should drive on (without brakes) and see if we could make it to our destination. Luckily it didn’t last long anyway as the car stopped in defiance and we were forced to pull off the road in the middle of nowhere. Within minutes two semi-trailers driving in convoy by brothers, pulled up to offer us help and I’ve never been so glad to see two spectacularly ugly truckers before in my life. Freaky Brother One then began to undress me, with his eyes, almost frothing at the mouth at coming in such close proximity to someone of the opposite sex, while Freaky Brother Two was pretending to be a mechanic and baffling Dan with his bullshit. It was turning into Wolf Creek.
Nothing could be done with the car, and we had no choice but to accept a lift from Freaky Brother One to the nearest roadhouse 13km up the road. But then he said there wouldn’t be enough room in the cab so Dan should travel with his brother and I should hop into his cab by myself. By this point I was close to hysteria and there was no way I would be getting in that lorry by myself.
So we both hopped in with Brother Number Two. Dan settled in the middle of the very spacious cab which had enough room to house a small Albanian family! Relieved to be on our way to a phone box and in relative safety, (even if we were in being driven by an axe wielding maniac I had enough faith that Dan could knock him out if it came to it) I thought it would be plain sailing from here. After a couple of minutes on the road Brother Number One starts becoming agitated – he thinks he has lost his keys as he can’t use the radio to contact his brother. He pulls into the side of the road and asks me to hop out to see if he had left them in the door lock. This forced me into ungraceful acrobatic maneuvers in order to hang myself out the door and reach round to grab the keys, with freaky brother one more than enjoying the view of my ass in the air. The keys were there, so off we set again in stilted silence.
Roadhouse blues
Finally we caught sight of the roadhouse and saw our escape was only minutes away and we made a sharp exit from the freaky brothers. Good riddance!
The roadhouse turned out to be a petrol pump and a shop that was about to close. They had a phone though and we arranged for a tow truck to pick us up and take us back to the nearest town… Cobar (the Hicksville town we drove through scorning) where we would have to wait for the next three days for the car to be repaired. How ironic that the town we were laughing at turned out to be our refuge.
So we skipped the Simpson Desert and took another route to Alice Springs where we arrived two weeks later with the biggest smiles and the best memories!
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