Knockin’ About Newtown

I arrived at the Courthouse Hotel in Newtown on Anzac Day, 2018, assuming Dennis and Tom were there to play two-up. I hadn’t understood when they invited me to join them that they were the ones running the game. Every year for the last 20 years they returned as a team on the one day of the year it was legal to play – riding the resurgence of Anzac Day commemoration. Dennis boasted about the youthful crowd of ‘all sorts’ they attracted – a pair of brothers, a gay couple, a group of butch lesbians – regulars that returned year in, year out. It was a very diferent Newtown to the one they once knew; ‘full of people like me’, I joked. Te local butchers, bakers, greengrocers, and corner stores had been replaced with trendy cafes and boutiques. Te same housing stock once condemned as slums was now prime real estate. Late-night partiers, pushed west by the lockout laws in the CBD and eastern suburbs, now filled pubs along King Street. LGBTQI locals that had made the area home since the 1980s paraded to ‘keep Newtown weird and safe’. But despite these changes, Tom and Dennis enjoyed coming back. Tom put it this way: ‘It’s strange because livin’ up the Coast I don’t get down here that often but when I come here, I feel like I’m home even though it has changed’. Dennis agreed: ‘It all began here. Your travel in life, walkin’ through life, which road you were gonna take in life. Everything started here. Tis is where your family were, this is where your friends were’. In the decades that Dennis and Tom were born, inner city suburbs like Newtown were associated with crime. When historian Sue Rosen interviewed long-term residents of Newtown in the 1990s about what it used to be like, they often rejected this association. Tey told her that ‘real’ criminals did not live in their neighbourhood; they were in the adjacent suburb, over that way, not here. But the Newtown Dennis and Tom once knew was a place of crime and they were well and truly mixed up in it.

Tom and Dennis running two-up at the Courthouse Hotel, Newtown, Anzac Day 2018. Photo credit: Christopher Woe Photography