My Sydney

Sydney’s been my home for 33 of the last 36 years but she’s still more a mistress than a marriage. She’s hard to get to know but it doesn’t take long to be seduced. And, while I’ve had flings with other parts of the world, she’s always welcomed me back.

At age 11, I was allocated a dormitory bed where I could watch the flying boat take off across a sparkling Rose Bay. The school was in the suburb where Tony Hancock committed suicide and Kerry Packer owned a mansion. It was a posh, privileged, private school but it didn’t seem that way to me.

Lots of bush kids were packed off to boarding school as part of their lot, and most of us knew our parents were doing it tough on the mortgage front to make it happen. This was a time when the seedy side of Sydney sat just below the surface and occasionally just above it. Travelling through Kings Cross on a bus, even passing the blackened gutter where underground figure, Joe Borg, had been taken out with a car bomb, you felt that she was a naughty, but nice kinda town. The taxis ferrying us from Central railway back to school would take us along Chapel Lane, just so we could see the over-made-up, underdressed prostitutes winking from their doorways.

These were the days of illegal gambling clubs – the Forbes, the Thirty-Three and Telford Clubs – sort of underworld glitter serving free drinks and cigarettes, dotted with celebrities who still grace the small screen. Perce Galea would sit above the baccarat table in his Forbes street terrace house on a tennis umpire’s chair, overseeing the gamblers and giving a nod when an envelope needed to be passed through the front window grid for a police pick up. In 1964, at Rosehill, Perce (also known as 'The Prince') was so thrilled at seeing his horse, Eskimo Prince, win the Golden Slipper he reached into his pockets and flung ten pound notes into the crowd - and not just a few, they say it was like confetti. Other ‘colourful racing identities’ like George Freeman would be seen at the races, rubbing shoulders with colourful racing premiers like Sir Robert Askin.

The courts still see the occasional cop up on a charge – it’s been a Sydney tradition for two centuries – but these days it’s more drug related, since gambling is pretty much legal everywhere.