“Excuse me sir. Would you like a woman?”
I looked at the young girl and smiled just like I did every evening and I said, “No thanks, I’ve already got one.” and continued on my way.
Welcome to Sydney’s Kings Cross where prostitutes line the street, dodgy characters hang about in doorways, and desperate, beady-eyed men cruise the streets in V8-engined Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons, one arm hanging out the window, massive sunglasses covering half their faces, a leer on their lips. And that’s only the police.  
The main street through Kings Cross is not very long - you can drive it even at a crawl (which is what most blokes do...) within five minutes - but in those few hundred metres there’s enough vice to keep many a pervert contented. Of course, people live in Kings Cross too (locally it’s known as The Cross) and they’re not all prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, car thieves, spruikers (these are the chaps who try and get your attention as you walk past their dubiously named clubs, who try and entice you inside), con artists, low-lifes and the dodgily wealthy. There was also me and Jade.
What happened was, Jade and I landed in Sydney with not a clue where to stay. We approached the Customs desk and the Customs officer looked at me, looked at my passport and then looked at the immigration form I’d filled in and looked at me again and said, “Have you got a criminal record?”
I looked at him. “I didn’t know you still needed one.”
They have a small back room at the Customs hall. You don’t want to go there. Personally I was puzzled as to why they thought a criminal record might possibly have been stuck up my arse, but there you are, they’re the professionals and certainly the effort they put into the search made me think they must be on to something big.
Once I was out we went over to the accommodation bureau. Jade walked, I shuffled. I think it was about a week before I could sit down again properly.
The accommodation bureau people fixed us up at the Gazebo Hotel in Kings Cross.
The Gazebo is a fine looking hotel - in a 1960s kind of a way - (and if you get to see that excellent film, Dirty Deeds, you can see the Gazebo exactly as it would have been in 1969) though now that’s all gone. But the building is still there, even if it’s now home to multi-million dollar apartments rather than hotel rooms.
When we were there it was a reasonably modern hotel with a decent view over the city. It was fine for a couple of nights because although it was relatively expensive we knew no different and we were just glad to be in a hotel and not on a plane. There’s a picture of me the first night and I look like a criminal who hasn’t slept for a week.
It took me a good two hours to unwind and while Jade slept the sleep of the dead I gazed out the window at what was to become our new home - though we didn’t know it then. As I watched the August sky suddenly darken I could hear cranes clanking out there and jack hammers jackhammering, or whatever they do. This was to be a feature of our lives here, this constant building, and this constant noise as Sydney moved steadily towards the 2000 Olympic Games.  
The next day we went for a walk, strolling along, oblivious to the fact that this was really a pretty dicey area. Of course, coming from London we were pretty careful anyway and there were certainly plenty of people to be careful about, I can tell you.
The history of Kings Cross is a colourful one for sure but basically it all revolves around crime. In this small patch there have been no end of unsolved murders, disappearances, shootings, knifings, scarrings, and all other manner of nastiness. If you offended someone here and they wanted to take you out there was always Sydney Harbour - one of the world’s three deepest, and the keeper of many secrets. It’s said that numerous locals are down there, still wearing their concrete boots, the fishes their only companions.
There used to be this copper, let’s use a false name and call him Kelly (because, you know, I like living...). He worked Kings Cross, it would have been back in the 1960s, and like a good number of his colleagues he didn’t believe in what the Americans might call due process. Kelly just didn’t trust the law to take the right action. He decided it would be better if some of the criminals he came across - the really nasty ones, you understand - never made it to court. What was the point he would say as he held his police service revolver to their heads and looked away and pulled the trigger, when all they’re going to do is let you out so you can do it all over again. He was never arrested, never even cautioned about his behaviour, and he retired, as police officers often do, to the north coast where he lived out his sunset years with a nice view of the sea. Now, it’s very difficult to find anyone in King’s Cross who disagrees with Kelly’s approach. That’s the way it is.
The police in Sydney have been investigated more often than the criminals. This is the thing though - lots of them are criminals. In the late-1990s they brought this policeman in from the Met in Britain – Peter Ryan – to head the New South Wales police. Some said they chose a Pom because they couldn’t find anyone here who they could trust to do the job. Certainly there’s a rough and ready approach to lots of things in Australia and the police are a big part of it.
Back in the 1970s in particular crime was rife and some of it was down to the police. Members of the Robbery Squad, for example, routinely went out on crimes - that’s committing them, not stopping them. More recently, during the last decade, officers at some local stations in Sydney were encouraging the drugs trade. They’re on film doing it. They arrested drug sellers but instead of charging the dealers with crimes that would have seen them taken off the streets and imprisoned, they let them go with a warning, but only on the understanding that the drug sellers paid them thousands of dollars a week. Of course, to do this the drug dealer had to work much harder, which meant selling more drugs on the streets. So these coppers were building the drug trade. What hope was there? Some say, what hope is there, because no-one can feel confident it’s not still going on.
Other times the crimes the police investigated would be brutal beatings, or perhaps a kid had got killed. If the coppers knew who it was but couldn’t prove it they’d go to one of the stashes of weapons they’d purloined off criminals over the years. You know, tainted weapons, weapons with a history already, and they’d plant these on the people they suspected and next thing you knew they’d be in jail.
Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get back to where we were. In Kings Cross today you can get just about anything - I’m talking about the food now. There are loads of restaurants - not all of them pleasant it should be said - and there are lots of sidewalk counter take-aways where you can get pizza and pasta, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Thai food, and sometimes you can have all that wide and varied choice at each and every counter.
There are also lots of press photographers cruising around because lots of well known and wealthy people go to Kings Cross for, ahem, entertainment. Usually this involves consuming copious amounts of alcohol, hooking up with a hooker, despite the fact that you have a wife or steady girlfriend back at home, and then getting into some kind of punch-up, usually with a chap of South Sea island build, or to put it another way, you tangle with a big fucker of a bouncer who asks you to leave just once and you, foolish because the drink has made you that way, give him some drunken abuse. The end result is a picture in the paper of your imbiber looking glassy-eyed, arm draped around a scantily clad girl who is clearly an entertainer of sorts and certainly not Mr Glassy-Eyed’s girlfriend or wife, and there will also be a rivulet of drying blood down one side of his face or a closed eye where the South Sea island bouncer clocked him one, ‘just as a warning’. This edifying sight will be shown in all its glory in the following day’s newspaper, usually just before Glassy-Eyed is due to fly out on some rugby or cricket tour. Good stuff. The thing is, these sports blokes can do no wrong because they are the crème de la crème – these are Aussie sports stars. Their transgressions are soon forgotten, well, as long as they’re winning matches.
After a few days at The Gazebo we checked out and moved to a motel, which was not too bad, and much cheaper. It was run by this Iranian guy and his son, who we soon named FatSo. FatSo drove a Mercedes-Benz, which I think had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. It was one of those super-big 1960s bullet-proof Benzs, which don’t fit in any garage anywhere in the world but apparently could slot into a car parking space in The Wolf’s Lair in Bavaria without so much as a squeak. The car was so heavy that everywhere it went it damaged the roads and every time FatSo went out in it so much fuel was used the folks up in Queensland had to go without petrol for a week or so.
These Iranians had adopted the Australian way in so many things, not least that they preferred cash and would write all of their incoming room payments – those in cash at any rate - in pencil in a ledger they kept under the desk. Either they were concerned about the number of used plastic pens littering the environment or they intended to rub the pencil entries out and alter them before sending the ledger to the taxman. I don’t know, but it seemed like a strange way to do business, even to my relatively unbusinesslike eye.
I spent many a long hour talking to FatSo, sitting out on the back porch gazing over the city, often sipping a beer with him. In his laboured Iranian accent he told me all there was to know about Ossies, as he called them. “Ossies, they not like to work. They lazy buggers. That’s Ossies. We work hard, we have this place. Very well liked in community.” I think that was wishful thinking. Barely a day went by without some new graffiti being added to the copious metal of his Merc or spray-painted on the motel walls. Usually it was along the lines of, “ Lazy Iranans (they couldn’t spell very well, these Ossies) take all our jobs” which struck me as a bit bizarre, if they were so lazy how come they could pick up someone else’s job? I never figured that one out.
I’d often find FatSo down in the underground car park, most of which his ludicrously big car took up, trying to get the latest slurs off the coachwork, muttering in Iranian under his breath about Ossies.
People who’ve visited Australia but who don’t live here will generally tell you it’s a pretty racist country, but Australians just can’t believe that. The truth is a question of what’s acceptable. It’s not seen as derogatory to call an English person a Pom, though in fairness that’s usually coupled with Bloody Pom, or Fuckin’ Poms, or Pommy Bastards. Most Australians don’t see this as racist behaviour, though clearly it is. They also don’t have much of a problem with the copious use of the word Wog, their derogatory term not for black people - of which in any case there are so few in Australia - but rather for those of Italian, Greek or even Lebanese extraction. Again, the word has been used so much even some Italians sometimes call themselves Wogs.
Of course, if you choose to live in Australia there’s not much you can do about it. If you complain about anything, say anything at all about their country which they don’t like their standard retort is, “well, if you don’t bloody well like it, why don’t you go back to...(fill in the country here of your choice)”. Surely there’s room to fix things that aren’t right? It’s not healthy to leave bad things as they are. Every society has to grow and to adapt to the bigger world out there, so to get annoyed when people point out things that are clearly wrong is sad really. But there you go. This is where we were and this is where we were planning to stay, well, at least for a little while, so we kept quiet, which is not a good thing to do, but sometimes you have to...
And then it happened. Within two weeks I had a job! I started work as Managing Editor at a publishing company in Crows Nest. The day they phoned me and let me know we were ready to fly back to the UK. We even had our bags packed and by the door. They called and said they’d managed to change our visa to a business visa. Jade and I had a bit of a chat about it, which went something like this:
“So, what do you think?’
“Well, do you like it here?”
“It’s okay. Might be fun for a while.”
“Yeah, that’s what I reckon.”
So?”
“So, yeah, let’s give it a try for a few months at least.”
“Okay.”
And really that was that. We had a new home and all we had to do was find somewhere more permanent to live.