Rough and ready

King Street, Newtown, 1960. Photo courtesy of City of Sydney Archives

it and I come out on Billy, straight up the aisle, and I had the cap guns goin’ and everything. Tey barred me for a fortnight. Dennis missed the community of knowing who lived in every house on the street and that the neighbours would pitch in half a pound of pumpkin, half a loaf of bread, or a quart of milk if someone lost their job. ‘Goin back in them days, everyone helped everyone’, he reminisced.

It made Tom sad listening to Dennis’s fond memories of his childhood in Newtown. ‘I think, well I should’ve been a part of that, you know, I should’ve been running the streets doing the things that they were getting up to and I never got that chance’. Newtown had changed by the time Tom arrived on the scene. ‘By the time I started coming here and exploring it was completely changed. Te cemetery had gone and all those places Den used to knock about.

Te stables had all closed up’. Yes, he haunted the same pubs and courted the same strife. But family didn’t surround Tom.

So for me it’s a bitter-sweet thing when I come here. I come here and I know that I’m home and I feel home, but it also makes me a bit sad because I was taken away from it all. He may have followed in the footsteps of his brother, but he was denied the chance to walk that road with him. Tom was also inducted early into the rough and ready ways of the streets but, unlike Dennis, he was alone. He had to make his own way, first when he ran away from home at thirteen and later when he left home for good in 1974. ‘I lived on the streets for most of my teenage life so I had to learn to fight and to look after myself’. Eventually he squatted in an old abandoned house in Drummoyne. It was rundown and he only went there of a night to sleep. ‘I stole a little foam mattress and blanket out of the back of a panel van. I had a little torch and candles’. He kept his homelessness hidden from the other members of his gang. When Tom was sixteen a small gang of Sharpies became his brothers and accomplices. Sharpies were known for their signature style. In Tom’s day it was a tight t-shirt, jeans cropped at the leg to show of shoes worn without socks, and an ‘animal cut’ (now known as a mullet). Unlike other Sharpie groups they weren’t particularly territorial; they’d knock around Newtown, Central, Balmain, Ryde, Gladesville. ‘Over the posh area, Tom!’ Dennis teased when Tom described the places they’d roam. ‘Compared to Newtown’, Tom agreed, ‘not that I lived in any of the posh houses’. Newtown was where the gang’s nights out always started and often ended. ‘Tis was our meeting spot. From here we’d decide where to go next’. Tey’d usually start with a drink at the Marlborough Hotel and then move on to Glebe, Balmain, or Kings Cross. ‘If we were getting up to mischief we’d meet back here in Camperdown cemetery or Victoria park’. When I asked what ‘mischief’ meant exactly, most of what Tom described was petty crime. Te gang usually went outside of the suburb to actually commit the crimes.

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‘We’d all split up and meet back here and divvy up whatever we’d made ... Newtown was like our safe haven ‘cause nobody knew us’. Tere were the ‘two bob crimes’, as Tom called them. Tese included jumping the fence of a Milk Bar or takeaway shop of a night to steal crates of bottles, which they’d sell back to the shop the next day. Or they’d follow the Postman’s run and steal the money out of birthday, Easter, and Christmas cards as they were delivered. ‘Surprisingly, we made good money from that scam’, Tom said. Stealing the bread and milk money that people left out was an easy way to earn a few bob. Tese crimes kept money in the pockets of three of the Sharpies, but behind their back Tom and two of his trusted gang members were getting more serious. Tey had even hatched a detailed plan to hold up a bank on King Street, Newtown. Tey figured that it was so close to the police station no-one would suspect them to be foolish enough to attempt it. Te idea was to lure the police away by staging a decoy robbery at the Camperdown Bowling Club. In the end they decided that the trafc on the main road made for no easy escape route and the heist just wasn’t worth the risk. Even so, for Tom the plan marked a transition from the two bob crimes of adolescence to the more serious crimes that would come to land him in prison. Mischief also involved getting into brawls. Fighting had long been a default response for Tom so the violence of gang life came easily to him.

If someone picked on me at school I’d just hit ‘em. Yeah I was back then very violent. You know I used to go lookin’ for fights.

Because I knew no diferently and I didn’t know how to walk away. On the one hand, violence seemed to follow Tom. He didn’t know if it was his look or demeanor, but it seemed that wherever he went people would pick fights with him. On the other hand, he acknowledged that he was quick to erupt.