Epilogue

Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, 7 June 2021

In the final month before my exhibition, I realised that I cannot visit all of Sydney’s streets with female names. I would have liked to go to Sandy Glen, Nadine Close, Kerry Avenue or Kim Street because I know women with these names who might possibly visit the exhibition and should find a photo with their name. But this would have meant to do many more trips to far-away suburbs. Looking at some of them on Google maps also told me that these streets are mostly residential and very similar to each other. I took some screenshots from the map, but that was not the original idea. So the most logical moment to stop was with the exhibition Random Discoveries in April 2021.

There were also a few streets in my vicinity that I had missed. One of them was Roslyn Street in Kings Cross. This street has a lot of memories for me as I lived nearby in Macleay Street when I had come to Sydney in 1997. It marks the beginning of my life in this city. That’s why I want to include it here at the end of this journal.

In those days the street was busy by day and night. There was the Café Amsterdam at the corner to a small lane. Smoking was still allowed in cafés and bars then. In the ‘Amsterdam’ people often smoked other stuff than just cigarettes. Next door was the Baron’s, a bar to chill out late at night. On the other side of the street was the Piccolo Bar, an iconic café since 1952. The owner Vittorio himself was always present, making cups of coffee and chatting with customers.

My visit today is not the first one since the heady days of the late 1990s. I’ve been here many times and know that the ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Barons’ are long gone. Instead, there is a commercial building by the Architects Durbach Block which won the Harry Seidler Award. It is impressive but somehow cold and impersonal. At least on my last visits, Vittorio was still there, sitting outside of his café and talking to his friends.

This time, after lock-outs and lockdowns the street looks sad. The Piccolo Bar is closed, and newspapers boarding up the windows. I heard that Vittorio has retired and wants to sell it.

It is the beginning of June 2021 and I don’t know yet that the longest lockdown is still to come.

An unexpected history lesson

Victoria Street, Kings Cross and Darlinghurst on Thursday, 5 March 2020 

The photography class I am teaching at WEA was scheduled for the Kings Cross field excursion. We meet at the Victoria Street exit of Kings X station in spite of heavy rain. I suggest we could stay a while at the Tropicana Caffe and take photos through foggy windows with raindrops, like the American photographer Saul Leiter. Passing Kings Cross Hotel, there is an especially heavy downpour. We stop outside under an awning for shelter. While there, I try to get some specific colour fields into my photos. That was one of the assignments I gave the students: Follow a colour. We go on to the Tropicana in the Darlinghurst part of Victoria Street. This was the place where the international short film festival Tropfest started in 1993. By the time I had moved from Melbourne to Sydney in 1997 the festival had already spilled out into the street. Rows of chairs and a screen were put into Victoria Street next to the café. Later it moved to Centennial Park and then to Parramatta. The Tropicana Caffe dates back to the 1980s and was, some say it still is, a place where local artists were hanging out to chat with friends and develop creative ideas. Or sit by themselves and draw. I remember it from the late 1990s when it still had its original style. Later it was renovated and lost, in my view, some of its flair. Today the creatives present are the students of my photography class. But sadly, no foggy glass panes.

Later we arrive at the Kings Cross part of Victoria Street near Orwell Street. The rain hadn’t stopped all day. By 4 pm it's dark like on a winter’s day. The lit shop windows, the fading light, the yellowing leaves on the plane trees give the street a slightly European autumnal mood. A slim, young man stands in the middle of the street next to a rubbish bin. It looks "compromised", marked with black and yellow security tape. It accidentally matches the man’s runners. He is guiding the traffic around the bin. After a while, he abandons his mission and tells us some of the histories of the immediate environment.

Here are the Butler Stairs, built in 1869 to create access between the higher and wealthier Potts Point and the lower and poorer neighbourhood of Woolloomooloo. That’s where the servants and maids lived who worked for the rich people up on the ridge, climbing up the 103 steps possibly several times a day. I’m disappointed to learn that the stairs are not named after the servants, but after an Irish draper called James Butler. He was an alderman on the Sydney Council and instrumental in the building of the stairs.

Then our new tour guide tells us about Juanita Nielsen who had lived nearby at 202 Victoria Street. She was a journalist and activist in the 1970s, fighting against demolition, redevelopment plans, and the forceful eviction of residents in Kings Cross. She disappeared in 1975. This mystery has never been solved, but it is assumed that she was kidnapped and murdered.

Another local resident of Victoria Street was the Green Ban activist Mick Fowler who was fighting for the same cause as Juanita. He has a plaque in his memory at the side of the stairs.