What happened in Australia in the late 60s and early 70s, served to make significant numbers of people unemployed, taking the actuality of that condition into the lives of families and individuals, in many, for the first time since the pre-World War Two Depression. Almost immediately, the term ‘dole bludger’ entered, or re-entered, everyday language:’Good t’see these Relief blokes workin’,’ I heard a railway worker announce to his mates, loudly enough for all of us to hear. Obviously, some people had finally found someone to look down on. About ten of us had been sent from the Paddington CES to work with a gang, maintaining track between Redfern Station and Central. On the first morning, one of our number was too drunk to sign on. One or two didn’t turn up at all. We were a motley crew – I’d be the first to admit that; myself; Ralph, the jack-of-all-trades, Cornish merchant seaman; Irish John, a fairly-recently arrived carpenter and a few older men who, frankly, hadn’t worked anywhere in any capacity for quite some time. It was work of a kind I’d done before, replacing old sleepers, with a bit of shovelling and tamping down of ballast involved. Within a week, we held a quiet rebellion, insisting that we be paid some of our wages in advance; we got that. Within a fortnight, there were only a couple of us still there and, within three or four weeks, it was all over. All in all, it was a bizarre little exercise. Back down at the MT, Frank B talked a little excitedly about the work he was doing over at Rozelle, also on rail track, adding a touch of pathos to a scene which didn’t especially need it. Of the people I knew involved in this scheme, one managed to get an ongoing job. Otherwise, it was an ugly and unsettling time for most men. We hadn’t, according to the relevant minister, Clyde Cameron, been going to be placed in menial jobs; however, we were. For men who’d been driven into survival mode, a few weeks of paid work meant very little. Most of us had been there and done that. For men on the outer, the Relief scheme meant nothing but another example of distant, uninformed parentalism; government playing with lives with the hope that it had guaranteed positive outcomes. Men who wanted to work would be given the opportunity. Those who didn’t, would be driven out of what were perceived as comfortable niches they had carved for themselves. A newspaper article from this period reported that one man had told a magistrate he had been unemployed since 1942. There were also tales of people collecting the dole under several different names and of those in full-time work collecting unemployment benefits. In the MT, one man was, reportedly, prosecuted and forced to pay back money he’d gotten in this way. A good many more men, myself included, didn’t report the odd day’s casual work they got while getting the dole. I expect that was kind of balanced out by the tax rebates we never claimed. Using a bodgie name was one way of getting around a very bad work record.
I won’t attempt to discriminate what was a perceived threat to a person with the entire weight of a society pressing down on him or her and what was a real one. Saltwater Jack, for example, worried that he could be charged with misappropriating public monies because of his lifestyle. It was generally believed that having the MT’s postal address stamped on your dole form meant you probably wouldn’t be offered work. Who could tell? Perhaps even the idea that you were at the bottom of society’s heap was an erroneous one. Perhaps we had too much time on our hands to be pondering these things in the first place. There was more than enough to be anxious about without inventing things. While it may have been deemed just about the ultimate in irresponsible lives to live, there was no sense of the carefree that I could detect. On the contrary, anxiety was almost always high. Even if you were safely bedded down in the MT, that was as good as it got.
When the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government took power in 2007, the plight of the country’s mentally ill people and of the homeless, were high on the agenda; the new prime minister’s rhetoric is well enough recorded. My own politics are my own business and I greeted Labor’s victory with mixed feelings. Having been homeless but basically sane, insofar as I knew who I was, where I was and when, in 1972 when we elected the first Labor government in twenty-three years, firstly, I was much more directly affected by that change and, secondly, much less able to consider its implications. John de Hoog, then-academic and author of Skid Row Dossier, had hinted to me as far back as 1968 that one of the effects of a Labor win would be a radical increase in unemployment benefits (the dole). In that year, 1968, I’d gotten one cheque – for $9.60 – the standard payment for a single male. In inner Sydney, that wasn’t, by half, enough to keep a roof over your head, even in the smallest space in a rooming house. An article inside a daily newspaper of that year, made mention of a national unemployment figure of less than 60,000; virtual full employment.
A bed in the Salvation Army’s Foster House (House O’Bricks) in the late 60s, cost 60 cents a night – another 40 cents for two meals; a dollar a day. Again, if you got only the dole, theoretically, you couldn’t afford to stay there. I don’t know how much the Sydney City Mission’s Night Refuge (The Soupie) cost, only that it wasn’t free and more than half of the beds were taken up by permanent lodgers. In the early 70s, it was $1 a night; meals included. At the Methodist Mission’s refuge in Francis Street, East Sydney, it cost 60 cents for a bed but the food was free. To the extent of my knowledge, apart from isolated, and very small, refuges in country towns, those were the options for a homeless man in New South Wales. Those, and the Matthew Talbot which was free and held 500 men, including staff and permanent guests (pensioners). In the main dormitory, there were 300 beds, roughly one-third of the beds available to homeless men. For women, there were 12 beds in total, all at the Sisters Of The Good Samaritan(?) in Surry Hills.
Until Labor took power in New South Wales in 1976, out-dated laws existed which could seriously affect the lives of the homeless. There was a Vagrancy Act, including ridiculous clauses containing phrases like ‘insufficient means of support’ which could, and were, used to gaol homeless pensioners and other men found committing no more serious act than sleeping among bushes in city parks. You could get up to six months in gaol for that. There was no defence really, except money, and no opportunity for bail. There was an Inebriate Act which was applied, to any extent, only to inner city men and country-dwelling aboriginals. Again, you could be sent to a psychiatric hospital for up to six months. Behind the scenes, so to speak, no psychiatric facility wanted people admitted under this Act and a system of rotating men, and some women, was developed so that ‘you could end up anywhere’ – anywhere being Goulburn, Orange or Morriset (country-situated hospitals) as well as the urban psychiatric hospitals. Again, there was no defence and no opportunity for bail. People were sent for psychiatric evaluation - whatever that might have involved - usually for fourteen days to Long Bay Gaol, appeared again in court and then escorted to whichever hospital. I should add that it was possible to voluntarily commit yourself under this Act. Some men did this to avoid gaol time on Vagrancy charges or to have a break from the grind of living on the street, or, in the case of a couple of men I knew personally, to hide. Other men told of how they were escorted in the front door of the hospital only to walk out the back; some bragged of having beaten their escort back to the city. In truth, I did hear one man speaking at an AA meeting who was grateful to have been given the Act since he’d gotten sober that way. Generally, however, it was regarded as a bit of a joke or another harassment. One man, William Leonard Stinvics, made the newspapers after being injured in the cells at Central. A sergeant, Colin Crawford, claimed to have accidentally fallen on Stinvics. As his personal history emerged, Stinvics had done more than 200 Acts. Since that would involve a minimum of 50 years, he’d obviously completed very few of those terms.
In New South Wales it was, effectively, a crime to be poor and, to some degree, to be different. While no particular Act specified this, the list of forbidden behaviours, even lifestyles, forced on people due to misfortune, bad management, disability or choice, proscribed by law, was extraordinary. Until 1970, for example, there was a law against fortune telling; a leftover part of anti-witchcraft legislation. Picking up cigarette butts from the pavement was forbidden. Within the law, paying an amount of rent higher than a decreed percentage of your income was illegal. Outright begging could have you charged. You needed to have in your possession, sufficient money to book into a hotel for the night. There was a publicised case of a man in country NSW, driving an XK-120 Jaguar, who was locked up for not having $10 in cash on him. And on and on.
When the Vagrancy Act was created in the late 1910s, some of its clauses had been included to combat prostitution and living off prostitution. Periodically, into the 1970s, this Act was used to that purpose. Indeed, a team of detectives led by a sergeant, Donald Robertson (Robbo) had been given the job of clearing prostitutes out of the lower end of Albion Street, Surry Hills, and stayed on to perform the Sisyphean task of doing the same with drunk people in and around the Haymarket. Robbo told Jan Sharp, an ABC producer, in 1973, that he saw his job as being ‘to move them on.’ A glowing report in a Sydney newspaper, on his retirement, painted him as a father-figure and helpmate to homeless men. As was the case with the now-repealed Summary Offences Act, a policeman at or above the rank of sergeant had inordinate power to determine what, for example, was offensive behaviour. He, or she, could recommend people for consideration – which included detention – under the Inebriate Act. Plea-bargaining, although it wasn’t known as that, was common, taking place when people, usually sick, sorry people, were in the cells at Central Police Station. It was a starkly simple process; take the Act or do time for Vag. Robbo, in his grey suit and heavy-rimmed glasses, seemed to be on the street all day and into the night, turning up in back lanes, outside the Matthew Talbot, generating fear as he prowled through pub lounges down in the Haymarket.
Always present in the mornings at the Central Court of Petty Sessions, was a Salvation Army officer and, in his way, he contributed to a recruitment programme for Skid Row. Men, usually younger men, were able to elude custodial sentences with the provision that they go to live and work in Foster Street; the House O’ Bricks as it was known to stiffs. In its turn, stiff, was the term generally used to describe a man on Skid Row but only at that level. In larger society, he was a plonko (cheap fortified wine drinker) or derro (derelict). In itself, Skid Row was an American term and never used by stiffs that I ever heard. As well try to criticise Nellie Melba’s voice or Don Bradman’s batting technique as criticise the beloved Sallies in the post-war years. The Sallies had been there in the jungles of New Guinea, handing out mugs of tea and wads of cake. No-one seriously questioned the Salvation Army’s activities. Hadn’t the Sallies, since Victorian times, been on the frontline of the battle against the drink? There were those images of an SA officer protecting mother and child from drunken father and showing that same man the deep error of his ways the morning after. In the world of 60s and 70s Australia, the approach of the Sallies was moralistic, punitive and Christian, despite AA’s insistence on a personal understanding of a deity. I did hear an SA officer, addressing a group of young visitors, say how he liked ‘to get them the morning after – first thing.,’ suggesting, clearly, that the ‘cold, grey light of the dawn’ produced significant and lasting insights into your own behaviour. However, I didn’t personally experience the Sallies approach to what are now known as de-tox and re-hab (detoxification and rehabilitation). There were reports from men who’d gone through the process, however. Some expressed amusement and bewilderment that they’d scrubbed pigs’ bums with toilet soap in the course of their daily jobs on the farm; being, usually, city types, they found that rated a mention. There were other, far more sinister, reports of violence; of men being punched and kicked; in the name of therapy, no doubt. The average man on the street, if there was such an entitity, hadn’t benefited behaviourly from any punches or kicks he’d taken in his life that far. Indeed, punishments, bashings and the forms of bastardisation in the armed services or in boys’ homes and gaols, or at home, had undoubtedly contributed to his current situation. It had in my life.
Structurally, men were admitted to the newly-opened Challenge Clinic, on the first floor of the House O’Bricks, to sober up and dry out. They then moved to Bridge House, some sort of accommodation and indoctrination centre in the inner suburbs and then to Miracle Haven – the old HG Palmer (electrical retailers) estate on Lake MacQuarie. In its effects, this was extremely similar to the judicial processing of a man through the holding cells and magistrate’s court through Long Bay Gaol to a psychiatric hospital; an institutionally imposed ‘geographical’ – a term used among AA members to describe moving from one place to another in the hope of escaping their problem. I don’t know what the Sallies’ success rates were, or are today, but no doubt they operated on the basis that one person saved justified the existence of the treatment programme. Men on the street expressed opinions of the process as being a destructive one, reducing a person to a malliable and dependent state. One man I spoke with, J O’S, a former journalist, described acts of violence at Miracle Haven, by one SA officer in particular; some kind of ‘thump therapy’ no doubt. Jack, despite his qualifications, probably wasn’t the most reliable witness on the planet, but he definitely wasn’t drunk, raving, out of his mind or anything like that, when he told me these things.
Like self-imposed geographical cures, these periods of sobriety, essentially imposed through an external discipline, didn’t last. It’s difficult to judge whether they did more harm than good. Some men claimed they’d only gone away ‘to build up a bit of a bank’ in any case so I suppose they’d achieved their aim. It was never clear, however, what their purpose in saving the money was since they appeared to drink it all on returning to the city unless, of course, that was their purpose. Single, whether through circumstance, choice or inevitability, these men didn’t have any responsibility outside of themselves and there was always the Talbot to fall back on. This last notion seemed to make some men uneasy, leaving them wondering whether they had tried hard enough on their last venture into the general run of society or, worrying whether their next would be successful. It wasn’t as though, in reality, there was some kind of impenetrable barrier, but, being on the outer had a profound effect on a person.
AA maintained that it was all about a person hitting rock bottom, achieving a moment of clarity and building a new future one day at a time, keeping it simple. I knew that there was further to fall. More than likely, so did many of the other men. AA peddled a more frightening, message; again, a simple one. If a man didn’t stop drinking, he faced death or the dreaded ‘wet brain’, becoming a shambling, incoherent wreck in permanent hospitalisation. Members spoke knowingly of Korsakoff’s Syndrome; the only brain disease, some revealed, that was visible to the eye on dissection. The only person in the Matthew Talbot who was, sadly, a shambling, incoherent wreck was an ex-boxer, DL, who lived there as a pensioner and had been brain damaged due to punches to his head, caused by poor or negligent management. However, frightening the life out of us was deemed necessary because we were at the end of the line, the bottom of the heap and, not incidentally, a captive audience. At the lunch-time AA meeting held in the basement of the Sallies’ building in Goulburn Street, for example, Gordon gave out tea and biscuits at intervals from around ten in the morning and there were often less than a dozen men left there by meeting time. At one of those meetings, I sat with Davie S, listening to a little bald bloke who claimed to be an ex-jockey who’d been brain damaged, he said, due to a fall from a horse. We’d heard him speak before and the content was boring, repetitious and a little incoherent. In any event, after chairing the AA meeting, he went directly to the Town Hall pub for a schooner. We saw him there. Still, if I had spent an hour and a half addressing a largely empty room on any topic, I, too, might have needed a drink. AA meetings were, for most of the men, also a bit of a grim joke. Most of those blokes who went to Gordon’s around nine in the morning, were up at the Methodist’s in Francis Street watching the lunch-time movie or playing cards by noon.
What was it, this antipathy toward Alcoholics Anonymous and its speakers? Was it that individuals wanted to invalidate the message of AA’s speakers; that alcoholism was a disease? I’ve given an example of one of the reasons above in the hypocrisy of the character who chaired the meeting at the Salvation Army and went directly to the pub for a beer afterward. Who was he kidding, us, or himself? Most of us, myself included, were there to be off the street and for the tea and biscuits. That, in itself, could be described us more than a little hypocritical. Also, often there was little a man living on the street could relate to in what many of the speakers had to say. While it was true that speakers told of having lost everything, they were addressing audiences of men who had never had very much to begin with, so, despite the obvious honesty of many, acceptance of their message tended to be tinged with disbelief and even scorn. Further, at almost all meetings, we were a captive audience and that was no small thing. While it was true that you weren’t compelled in any sense to be there, it was also true that you felt resentment at being made to wait, as was the case with the hand-outs such as Commonwealth Street and the Lifeline where the service came first. And, of course, there was that dangerous assumption that we must be alcoholics and the lesser one that we were lapsed Christians struggling to regain our faith. Such was the power of the first assumption, that they said around AA, you hadn’t been to a meeting until you’d been to a Matthew Talbot meeting. Clearly, members viewed this as the heartland of alcohol-induced misery and displacement. Inevitably, there were a few who saw AA as an opportunity to hone their stand-up comedy routines. They got the laughter they evidently wanted, or needed, but little else. There were others who wallowed in some torment, speaking half-inwardly to some personal demon, who only alienated the entire audience because that is what we essentially were; an audience. Unlike other AA meetings, when they were over, there was no general mixing of people; the chair and the speakers pretty well stood around chatting amongst themselves. This tragi-comedy was played out day after day, week after week, so that we came to know the speakers and their stories quite well. No doubt, from their angle, we became the usual crowd.
Whether the person who was speaking at an AA meeting was genuinely a non-practising alcoholic or suffering some other problem wasn’t the issue. Indeed, whether men among the audience took private solace from identifying with various speakers and their messages, also, wasn’t an issue except to themselves. The fear, anxiety, self-doubt and confusion; the implied hopelessness; the either/or message that a person had to stop drinking or die or become as dead…Those were the issues. People looking for help in getting out of the sorry state they’d found themselves in, didn’t need the added load that they might be suffering from a terminal illness like cancer. Most places, including the Matthew Talbot, that invited the homeless and jobless into them, had a hanging scroll or a more permanent reminder of the AA Twelve Steps somewhere on the wall. Between those and messages of the God Is Love variety, we were given daily, indeed hourly, reminders of implied shortcomings beyond our inability to keep a roof over our heads, hold down a job or feed ourselves. Our major problem, it was definitely suggested, was a spiritual one. A person in that position - sharing large dormitories at night where it was difficult if not impossible to sleep; traipsing the streets for miles in several directions to meet needs like clothing; kow-towing to any junior clerk in government offices, such as the CES; and a myriad other daily humiliations, some of which were virtually ritualistic - was frequently physically ill, exhausted, troubled and depressed. Most, however, didn’t need lessons in living from day to day, taking things as they came and hoping for better things to come. Indeed, some might have, tongue in cheek perhaps, claimed that that kind of world view had gotten them where they were.
No-one, however, could have any meaningful knowledge of why all these people were there. No-one had ever taken that kind of survey. A survey, when it did come after Labor came into government in 1972, was of the quantitative kind; how many homeless people were there? Before that, only the unemployed had been counted and that meant how many people, homeless or otherwise, were actively looking for full-time work and/or had applied for or were getting, the dole. A rough estimate of the percentage of unemployed a
At the Matthew Talbot, at least one man in ten worked on the staff. If he was getting any, he was allowed to keep his dole or pension money. Variously, men were employed in the kitchen as cooks or kitchen hands; some worked in the laundry; some served meals, swept floors and wiped down tables in the eating area; some swept and mopped floors in stairwells and other areas; some stripped beds and swept the floors in the main dormitory; some kept the covered way and outside yard free of litter. A few, mainly pensioners, helped collect and sort incoming mail; acted as watchmen and gatekeepers; and two men did the work of the hostel’s clothing store, sorting, storing and handing out clothes to staff, guests and pensioners. All of these men lived in the hostel. Ordinary staff, waiters, laundrymen and so forth, were given four ounces of Champion Ruby cigarette tobacco a week. Cooks, the I/C, 2I/C and the I/C of the laundry, were given six ounces a week. All staff who worked seven days, were given one day off in that time. While the length of a working day varied, for example, on those days when sheets were changed on all of the beds, roughly 1000 of them, laundry men put in 12 to 14 hours. Men in the kitchen regularly worked 15 to 16 hours. Again on laundry days, which preceded the re-allocation of beds twice a week, dormitory staff and the I/Cs worked 15 to 16 hours. At least weekly, the floors of major areas of the hostel were scrubbed by machine and, upstairs, the floor of the main dormitory was also scrubbed periodically. Other jobs included unloading the hostel’s van of bread and other donations. The van driver had a paid job. Men on the staff slept in small dormitories or in the pensioners’ quarters. The I/Cs had cubicles within a staff dormitory. Off-duty nightwatchmen had cubicles in the main dormitory. There was an entirely tacit agreement that, if you were on the staff, you kept your drinking to your days off, stopped or otherwise kept it under control. It was a variation of the Honour System and, by and large, it worked. Those were the working and living conditions for staff around the time 1970 – 1975.
In that time, Brother Geoff Tarlinton worked as both staff manager and hostel maintenance man. Below him, an I/C and 2 I/C ran the staff generally and there were local I/Cs in the kitchen and laundry. In paid positions, there were a hostel manager, his secretary and a clerk. Volunteer brothers of the Society, handed out the large amount of mail in the form of Social security cheques. Around 74-5, a new job, Night Manager, was created. This, it was said, was due to problems with the behaviour of some unsupervised nightwatchmen. Those of us who’d been turned away when we tried to get in after hours, thought we knew what that meant. The first man in this role, CP, was an outsider in the sense that he hadn’t lived in the hostel as a guest. However, he was expected to live-in; the first paid staff member to do that to my knowledge. A cubicle in one corner of the main dormitory which had been used as the Dispensary, was fitted out as his room. I recall him as a bustling, energetic man who seemed determined to be everywhere at once; kind and fair with no macho agenda. By the early 70s, more younger men, under 35 year-olds, were living in the Matthew Talbot and some of those had been joining the staff and one or two were made nightwatchmen. Discretion was a necessary quality in watchmen at the hostel, as it is in other forms of security work. We’d all seen what happened when one ‘air-raidin’ (noisy) drunk was allowed in, but, there was no sense in leaving empty beds upstairs when a man turning up at the gate, risking arrest, or, when it was wet or cold, needed one. The simple fact was, many men saw the Matthew Talbot as home and it was a homing pigeon instinct which brought them there when they’d had a drink. There was nothing particular to men in the MT in that. Inevitably, there were accusations of favouritism directed at various nightwatchmen. The original cyclone-wire front gate got many a kicking and a lot of watchmen took many a cursing from irate men looking to get in. The Tank (Drunk Tank) a room with four bunk beds, was there at basement level for men who could stand up and behaved calmly but who’d obviously been drinking. Because of fire regulations, the outside door to the Tank had to stay unlocked. Some men went further than giving the front gate a kicking and scaled the walls, getting up as far as the flat roof of the shower and toilet area where, one night, a man, TW, was hosed off by a couple of watchmen, GM and BD. Men also climbed the fence around the open yard, attempting to get inside.
The first alteration to the hostel since it had been built, was the creation of a covered area, covering about a third of the yard at the south-western corner. This did serve as a place where men could be under shelter and off the street but not in the dormitories, TV or eating areas. The Matthew Talbot was getting busier, however, and on many nights, men were sleeping on folding beds on the floor of the eating area and on the benches of the covered way with a blanket and pillow. For the first time in a long time, several years, sober men were being turned away entirely; the hostel was full to overflowing. The economic pressures on society in general are well recorded elsewhere. There was no longer full employment and strikes in the building industry had left men who usually lived, not all that far from the Matthew Talbot, both geographically and in their lifestyles, were compelled to use the place. The deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric patients also put greater, enduring, pressure on all varieties of low-cost and no-cost accommodation. Derelict buildings around Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross, left vacant for the building of a road tunnel, had the floors boards torn up so that men couldn’t sleep in them. Squatting, that is, occupying and living openly in houses which had usually been ear-marked for demolition, wasn’t yet a political statement and alternative accommodation. While it was true that many men slept in derelict buildings in and around the area of the Matthew Talbot and further away in the inner suburbs, they did so in secret, often keeping the location of ‘a good empty’ hidden, even from other stiffs. Men who had a reputation for ‘air-raiding’, loud and seemingly endless rants when they were drunk, presented a security threat if you wished to keep your quiet little corner private from often irate neighbours and the police.
