The story of Derwent Street from 1975 to 1980 continues …

By Brian McDonald, with some input from Rodney Hammett, June 2025, from Bulletin 4/2025

Brian, with his girlfriend Liz, had moved into 18 Derwent Street in 1975, and this is how he remembers the people and neighbourhood over the period from 1975 to 1980. (See the first part of this article in Bulletin 03/2025).

Next door was an old lady we called ‘the Witch’. Her husband – ‘the Penciller’ – had been a clerk at the CSR sugar factory in Pyrmont, or was it in Balmain? There was also a 5-year-old boy with a mental problem who would walk around all day in his pyjamas which were too large for him. The Witch called him Cupie. He would swing off the Hills Hoist in the empty backyard where the Penciller was sitting in the sun, and he would croak, ‘Get off that … Get off That’. Cupie would stand at our front door and call me ‘Biann’ ‘Biann’ or ‘Izz’ ‘Izz’ until one of us let him in. I suspect he was a foster child and The Witch received some payment to look after him, but clearly, that wasn’t happening.

This evil woman was always hosing down the footpath; that way she could keep an eye on what was happening in the street. As more houses became vacant, all she had left was to spy on us, and report any strange behaviour of ours to the rental office. The Witch doesn’t miss a beat when, one day, she proudly tells me that she was one of ‘Tom Laming’s girls’. I can only imagine what that means. Figure 1 shows the corner of Mitchell Street and Derwent Lane where one of the patrons is posing for me. A little bit further up the lane in the direction of the pointing finger is the ‘The Golden Gloves’, a gym and boxing training enterprise run by Tom Laming. He was also the owner of the big second-hand store on Glebe Point Road called ‘The Dealatorium’, and he also owned an American car that took up two parking spaces. Tom was treated like the Lord of the Manor by the locals that were left.

Tom did, however, have a soft spot for the battler. One example was his promoting of an Aboriginal boxer, Dave Sands from Kempsey, who was already established. There was also Terry Gordon, a Glebe woman who trained for two hours every day after work in his gym in Derwent Lane – even though women were not allowed to fight by the Boxing Federation. Boxing promoters were known to look after themselves financially before they looked after their boxers; many boxers ending up with nothing. It would be especially hard for a Koori boxer from Kempsey with many relatives. Every Christmas Laming would hold a party for the kids and dress as Santa Claus to give presents. He didn’t have a need for padding. Tom’s criminal history would have gone back to the gangs of Glebe in the 1930s.

The Witch continued her story about how Glebe was a close-knit community during the Depression era: ‘People would buy their furniture on the Never Never.’ ‘What’s that?’ I ask? ‘You know, we would pay a couple of bob, every week. If one of our neighbours was broke and going to lose any furniture, we would carry it over to the neighbours, until the rent man was gone.’ Then there was the story of one of the trams being overturned on Glebe Point Road. And when a well-known person died in Glebe, they would count how many cars made up the funeral procession out to Rookwood Cemetery. I am fascinated by her stories. However the final ‘Rookwood’ moments for the Witch and the Penciller were not far off.

There was also Gary the scoundrel in Westmoreland Street. All sorts of unusual things would turn up in his house, which he had taken from Sydney University. I once saw a small, ancient Miller tripod that the Uni would have used to mount their cameras for their film group. This had been relocated to his house, standing in the backyard as an ornament or for his amusement. Gary shared a terrace with Esther and Dave. I had three days a week free, and sometimes I would get an early morning call from the Post Office to fill in for one of their posties who was off sick. I could end up walking the streets of Balmain or Leichardt delivering mail for the day. I told Gary about this work, which was available if he wanted it. The next time I saw him, I asked if he had any work with them. He said, ‘I saw an incinerator on my route, and I burnt the letters.’ ‘You can’t do that’, I said. ‘But it was only bills’. I saw his true nature after that encounter.

One morning, I came out to the street to check on our barbecue food van, which was parked in front of the house. We used the van for film catering, and I sensed someone staring at me. I turned and saw a strong, pale, tattooed, tough-looking guy standing in front of the Witch’s door, in his very brief undies. The police driving past didn’t bother him. He turned to me and asked, ‘Can ya drive me an’ me mate to Balmain? We’re on the run; we have just escaped from jail. Is that your Monaro GTS?’ ‘No, I borrowed it from my young petrolhead neighbour, Pete the Plumber to tow our food van,’ I said. It turned out they were former foster children of the Witch. As I drove them to Balmain, they kept looking out the back window and shared stories of crime adventures and police chases that had taken place along the Balmain streets. The Monaro GTS, equipped with a V8 engine, would have been an ideal fast getaway car for them. Driving them to Balmain was better than them borrowing, perhaps stealing, it. I guess they were captured and sent back to jail; back with their prison mates, telling about their adventures of escaping.

I met an artist who confided to me that he had been kicked out of his Glebe Point Road house by his wife. They had five kids. His solution to homelessness was to string a hammock between the upper branches of one of those large Morton Bay Figs in Victoria Park, close to Parramatta Road. At least the bats would leave him in peace when they went off to feed at night. He would go to his day job, which was painting a mural of Disney characters on the walls of a child’s nursery in Elizabeth Bay with harbour views. The house had been in the Fairfax family newspaper empire for many years.

Ernie used to fix fridges, washing machines and sometimes computers. Most of the work was undertaken in a house on the corner of Catherine and Westmoreland Street, on the footpath in front of a garage with living space above (Figure 2). He provided a wonderful service for the poor people and single mothers in the community by recycling and re-gassing these broken appliances. He had a talent to fix anything electrical, but he was an eccentric. If you visited Ernie and engaged him in conversation, he would share with you his paranoid visions of what the government was up to. Mind you, in this day and age, when we learn about government wrongdoing, maybe he knew something we didn’t.

We had a ‘paper lady’ who used to make her rounds with the afternoon paper (Figure 3), a custom that was soon to die out.

For a few years, the cry of ‘Rabbitoh’ could be heard as an old, rugged, dishevelled man in his beat-up, dusty Holden station wagon would still have some inner-city customers with fond memories of the food that saved them from going hungry during the Depression in the 1930s. But they were fast disappearing from Glebe and were now living in a plot in the Rookwood cemetery.

This was an in-between era because, by 1996, the last travelling salesman for Encyclopædia Britannica had been laid off. The set would have cost between $1,000 and $1,500 and would have been paid off with monthly instalments.

The Salvation Army band came around fishing for souls. Our Daisy dog was everybody’s friend, she couldn’t help herself. In this photo (Figure 4), Daisy is going around rubbing her back on everyone’s legs, causing them to miss a beat. Across the other side of the school playground, Glebe Point Road can be seen.

As the Government worked through the estate fixing front fences, the new picket fences were painted in the traditional-style colours, and the outside of houses were renovated. But the interiors hadn’t yet been renovated, so not all the houses were occupied. However, the tree-lined street looks lovely.

Figure 5 is the view from our front window showing our little yellow Morris panel van that was used to take our mobile food stall, which we set up every Saturday in Paddy’s Market.

It was an interesting time to live in Glebe, the old criminal face of that inner-city area would surface with the characters that lived there.