ninglun
Says: January 15th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
This is ...
1.
CEDRIC WILLIAMS Says:
January 15th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
This is an interesting website and I’m going to look into it. I was intrigued when this site came up on Google, it appeared to have a reference to my site, but reading on, I cannot find any reference.
It is definitely akin to mine though, relating to down-to-earth stories of the old Oz in the tradition of Poor Man’s Orange and Harp of the South.
The row houses in the illustration could be Ruth Park’s Surry Hills. I was influenced by her when I read her books in the fifties. They were seriallized in, I think, the S.M.H. I could not afford to buy the book, as I was getting only seven pounds a week as a junior copy-writer at Proud’s the Jewellers in Pitt St Sydney. I remember Theo Wood was advertising manager. I could stand the city life in an advertising office for less than two years though and I took the train up to Cairns and worked cane-cutting and in sugar mills and then made my way working on trochus-shell luggers up as far as Thursday Island…a bit farther actually, as the “Lucy” (owned by the South Sea Pearling Company) made it once past Wapa reef right to Saibai Island, within sight of New Guinea’s mangroves.
My life of adventures started. I became like the bloke working in an office but yearning for the bush, in one of Henry Lawson’s poems. (I can’t recall which one.) More recently I was interested in the style of writing in “‘Tis and Angela’s Ashes, as I had wandered through the back streets of Limerick in the seventies, before Frank McCourt’s books were written probably, and felt a strange connection. I recall one old Irishman who looked a lot like my grandfather, Dick O’Keefe, asked me “Have you been over in America for a while and come back home?”
“Yes” I answered (though it had been five generations.)
You can leave my email address public if you want. I have plenty of time to reply to anyone. I even get a kick out of deleting spam, most of which seems to deal with Viagra and “member enhancement” (not that these are of any interest to me at seventy five years of age.) Thanks, ‘Ric Williams. “Williams Family First Fleeters Confirmation.” http://freewebs.com/daone89/index.htm
‘Ric, could you put that site address in a return comment? I would like to look at it too. Or, on second thoughts, were you referring to this site??? You had earlier been to the Whitfield family history pages; is it the first time you have seen the rest? Did my new template fool you into thinking you hadn’t seen it before? My row of houses is nearby, and is very much Ruth Park territory, being in Riley Street just up from Devonshire Street, around the corner from where Kate Leigh used to live, and where the brothels used to be. Further up some famous ones still are.
Email addresses in comments are for my eyes only; they never get published. WordPress doesn’t allow it — or at least I don’t think they do. Most people would be pleased with that.
Yes Ninglun….I think it was this site but with a line or two of my comment. I thought it was another site, sorry.
Funny how stuff is rearranged by Google or whatever. I came across “about us” on Google which was one of my stories, but it had no links to any other or my main page. I have a problem putting more stories and paintings on as I am dependent on my young son, who is so busy with his affairs, being seventeen and he will only comply to add to the site after many urgings.
I am duplicating the website on blog. com (or is it blogs.com ?)and it is supposed to be easier to manage so I might be able to do it myself. The website has not come up in google yet, maybe another week or two.
Those row houses have not changed much. I remember looking down the back lane at the brothels and the line of customers and wondered why did they want to do that. I guess I was about 17 myself then.
A year or two later I picked up this redhaired Hungarian woman in a Kings Cross coffee-shop, where we were drinking cafe royals and we were so eager we just reached a nearby lane, before we were at each other. I remember us slipping down onto the ground and the fray in my second best suit and my skinned knees.
Such are the forces of youth that make us do silly things. Keep in touch.
You should see inside those particular houses today! Someone I know owns one of the ones in that picture. It is quite luxurious, and you probably wouldn’t get much change from $800,000+ for it! In fact you might need more.
I used to go to the Tatler theatre and see foreign films, though I could only read the sub-titles. The Tatler was on the south side of the park (Hyde Park?) and after the show I would walk down into Darlinghurst, past the Crown Street Women’s Hospital and on into Surry Hills. My dad told me there used to be a razor-gang push there rivalling the Rocks and they sometimes fought. That was the era of bell-bottom trousers in the early twenties.
My brother met a girl at a dance and walked her home to a row house in Surry Hills. He asked her for a kiss and she replied. “You aint from around here, well. The blokes from Surry Hills don’t ask. They just take!” My brah took the hint and said it was worth it. I presume there was more than kissing.
He said she took his handkerchief when she went inside “Because it’s got you on it.”
They were a rough lot around there in those days and I was one time attacked near Redfern Station bridge because I had a “boong” girl with me and they wanted a piece of her. Somehow the one punch I got in and Tonia’s screams saved us. I went looking for them a couple of nights later with a ballpeen hammer in my pocket but luckily never saw them again.
There used to be a Chinese fish and chip shop between Central and Redfern station on the East side. Just a small, hole-in-the wall place. I ordered some meat and cabbage pastries that the old Chinese woman deep fried in pig-fat. They were the first Chinese food I had ever eaten and they were delicious at sixpence each.
For some years I operated a stall at Paddy’s market on Saturday and did pretty well. I sold jewellery, some of my own designs cast in mock silver and bronze and some Indian imported stuff. I made a few quid, selling the business eventually and going over to Europe and Morocco. An advantage selling this jewellery was I got to fit rings, bracelets etc on pretty young women and maybe it was the intimacy of touching, but anyway I did rather well in the amorous field too. Too well probably, because I began to think of girls as a replaceable commodity.
This attitude is the likely cause of me sitting at home alone in my old age, while my three sons I hardly ever see, are off doing the same things I used to do.
Great stories, Ric! Keep them coming. Surry Hills today seems tame by comparison.
Until the age of printing, then
radio, then T.V.
next vcrs the dvds then computers, cellphones, Ipods and what else is coming
down the chute?, it was customary for the older members of the family and even
the tribe, to sit around the fire at night and entertain, instruct and amaze the
younger members with myths, tribal stories and family anecdotes.
This historical wisdom instructed the group how to behave towards each other and
gave a sense of belonging and continuity and a meaning of life to all.
That was when there WERE families, long ago.
Nowadays, media, commercial and bureaucratic have taken over. These institutions
(including schools, admirable in many ways) distort the feeling of family.
In fact it seems they out to destroy all generational cohesion and replace peace
of what some might call the soul with an ever-present sense of insufficiency.
It is not too surprising people have become isolated, egotistic, erratic,
disjointed and that many face the future with futility.
The young seem to seek instant gratification, the kind they are programmed to
want. Newer “better” by comparison
makes older “worse” and obsolete.
This idea has been extended even to older people, especially when their desire
to purchase more has been sated and they are not so important in this frenetic
consumer non-society.
Older people are pushed onto the side-lines and their voices of collective
wisdom are muted by head-phones and Ipods blasting electronic rap beats into
bursting juvenile brains.
So thatleaves old me, strumming and humming on the front porch watching the
world zoom by.
The world of zoomers is oblivious to my archaic “uncool” rythms and irelevant
stories.
They dissipate acoustic vapour trails of boom-box ear-splitting “music?” all the
way to the next “now” sensation.
Am I just getting old and ornery? Is is time yet to go inside with all the other
well-preserved living corpses for the yellow pill and the little blue one and
the pink on that keeps cantankerous old buggers like me quiet?
What are we all sitting here waiting for anyway?
Well at least my name is not in the daily paper obits yet. I looked today.