It’s a wintery Tuesday night in Kings Cross and on the emptied dance floor of nightclub Candy’s Apartment 30 young men and women are getting a pep talk on the dangers of drugs.
Far from addicts or delinquents, these talented and hopeful musicians are copping a lesson about what is expected of them as resident DJs of one of Sydney’s most popular clubs.
The man they are hearing from is Tal Chalak, an events organiser who has dedicated decades to the local music industry, and who has decided to rear these youngsters and instil a wholesome ethic into running a club in one of the country’s most notoriously drug-addled areas.
Marred by scenes of violence and alcohol abuse, Kings Cross has been subjected to lockout procedures and the establishment of a State-run taskforce to freeze liquor licenses.
But while public perception of the area may be comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah, for many young entertainers Kings Cross is a a launching pad for musical stardom.
Club DJ Mark Shorter’s break came when he was asked to perform on his 18th birthday. Now 19, Shorter, who DJs with his best friend under the guise ‘Vengeance’, has been employed to run events under Chalak’s company, The Music People.
Shorter says DJing has provided him with a surprisingly stable source of income. To him, ‘the Cross’ has been “a gold mine of work” – an entertainment industry with young people at the helm.
At just 20 years old, booking agent Sasha Skalrud is in charge of sourcing similarly young talent for events staged throughout Kings Cross, and has helped The Music People build a reputation for breaking up-and-coming performers.
“Everyone now knows that we’re the place that gives everyone a shot. Realistically we’re the only club that does it on a major scale, and we’re now known for it,” he said. As well as booking DJs for its events, the company also acts as a record label for its musicians, facilitating them to record and release music that could be played on the radio.
At FBi radio in Redfern they’re nurturing them even younger. The station is about to reignite its Underage Sets competition for the 4th year in a row, encouraging under-18 ‘bedroom bangers’ to compete on-air to make a name for themselves.
FBi Station Director Meagan Loader said it was their search for the next “little thing” in DJing. “Pretty much every year, the DJs that have won, and some of the entrants as well, are now the up-and-coming DJs in clubs.
“It really gives them a whole lot of confidence,” she said.
Just off the Darlinghurst Road strip, Soho nightclub on Victoria Street is tracking down its own stars, inviting hopefuls to test their skills in the first of many DJ competitions to grab a performance slot at the premiere venue.
With eight DJs battling it out against each other for a shot at the grand final, organiser Paul Shaw says this was a great way of accommodating the huge demand of people wanting to perform at the club.
Young, baby-faced Shorter would line up as an easy target crossing any of the drunken revellers that have tainted the vibrancy of the strip in recent times, but, to him, that thought doesn’t even register. To Shorter and his colleagues, the thumping, heaving neon-lit strip is the gateway to a fascinating career.

In the 1920s Sydney was sprawling out as a modern metropolis and, in many aspects, was a world not so different to what we know today.
The drug trade centred in East Sydney and Kings Cross, and one could live a wholesome life in Darlinghurst without ever knowing of the prostitution and violence that went on just a few doors down.
Peter Doyle, author of Crooks Like Us, a book of police photo archives from the 1920s, says the criminals of Sydney’s past were not so different, either. A disillusioned bunch, their mission was to see how far they could cross the line without getting caught.
“Those photos take you right into the time, and not just the time or the period but right into that moment, the place.
“They were mixtures of bad and good, and humour and greed, and ruthlessness and sometimes redeeming qualities as well,” he said.
Peter Doyle will be talking about some of the seedier characters that lurked our streets on September 10 at the Justice and Police Museum as part of History Week 2009, running from September 5 to 13.
Doyle says today’s Sydneysiders would be truly shocked at the gruesome events and people that wandered their backstreets.
“As we grew up the Australian stories that we knew were of sports people or people in the bush. But, in fact, for most of the last century most of the population lived in the big cities, and we didn’t really have the low down on that, so it’s been left out of our own mythology.”
Youth gangs marked out territory in most inner city suburbs, stalking Pyrmont and Surry Hills and Victoria Park.
Conmen were a popular breed of criminal. Some would target hotels, checking in as respectable guests, then entering others’ rooms in the dead of night to steal what they could.
“It’s good to know there was that sort of sexy stuff going on, anti-authoritarian stuff going on right here in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, the places where we now live,” said Doyle.
The City of Sydney will also be hosting a series of talks at Customs House, including The Shark Arm Murder – a chain of killings that ensued a tiger shark’s regurgitation of a human arm in Coogee Aquarium in 1935.
On September 8 Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe will be hosting Redressing Scandals Past, a seminar on corruption against Aboriginal people, and on September 10 the Scandals, Crime and Corruption symposium will feature a range of talks at the State Library of NSW.

Stop the blame game on the 311
The Government’s Spokesperson quoted in second last paragraph of your story on the 311 bus (‘Council rejects STA bid to cut parking’ 27/8/2009) needs to get their facts straight and stop blaming Council when it was their decision to buy buses which cannot run without extensive road changes, not just the removal of the parking spaces in Billyard Avenue.
Ms Moore met with a delegation from the 2011 Residents Association in June this year and provided them in the briefing with a summary of a letter received from Sydney Buses.
The letter (dated 13/2/09) outlined Sydney Buses’ assessment of using the new longer 12.5 metre buses to service the 311 bus route via the Ithaca Road/Billyard Ave/Onslow Avenue “loop”.
It states that Sydney Buses decided not to service the “loop” because:
•    The narrow winding roadway is inadequate to be used by 12.5 metre-long buses unless approximately 35 on-street parking spaces were removed.
•    The road grade change at the intersection of Onslow Avenue and Billyard Avenue may be too excessive to be used by 12.5 metre low-floor accessible buses.  Note: Sydney Buses did not undertake a field assessment to verify this.
•    Even if the City agreed to remove the extensive lengths of on-street parking, the parking demand and likelihood of illegal parking would restrict access for 12.5 metre buses.
•    The roundabout at the intersection of Onslow Avenue and Elizabeth Bay Road would need to be reconstructed to allow 12.5 metre buses to turn right.
•    Ithaca Road would need to be made one-way northbound because 12.5 metre buses need the full road width to negotiate the mid-block curve south of Billyard Avenue.
The letter includes a map of the extensive removal of parking (about 35 spaces) and other changes which are needed to allow the 12.5 metre buses to operate.
The letter also outlined problems for the 12.5 metre buses turning at Cathedral/Crown Streets and Cathedral/Bourke Streets, which require the RTA to approve changes at the traffic lights.
It’s time the Minister stepped in to stop the blame game and get some sensible action on this issue. To imply that the 311 is now running on time because a two minute loop has been cut from the route is absurd! As is the STA spokeperson’s statement that it would months to change the timetables. Give us a break!
All that has to happen is to put the Billyard Avenue loop back on the run with the current Bus. If the bus is two minutes later at Central, surely that is less important than giving back a bus service to the less mobile and elderly residents of Elizabeth Bay who have had their access to public transport removed by the cutting of the loop.
Judith Parker, 2011 Residents Association

City of Sydney Council has resisted pressure from police to enact drastic new measures for its closed circuit television (CCTV) system that would allow it to be used for general intelligence gathering for crimes including terrorist activity.
Under the proposals set out in the first review of the City’s Street Safety Camera Program, police would be allowed direct access to the CCTV control room in Town Hall House to track people in anticipation of committing a crime and provide footage to the media.
Council CEO Monica Barone said last week that police were putting pressure on staff to approve the changes, but on Monday Councillors voted against them, pushing an alternative motion to have interested parties plead their case before a committee.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore said future changes to the use of the system would have to keep with original intentions of increasing street safety and discouraging crime.
Councillor Chris Harris called the proposals “real Big Brother stuff,” while Councillor Shayne Mallard likened them to a spy network.
Dr Lesley Lynch, Assistant Secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties (NSWCCL), said that proposals to extend the use of the CCTV surveillance system posed significant risks to private and civil rights.
The current Code of Conduct states that the cameras ‘may not be used for general intelligence gathering’. Dr Lynch said that extension of the scope of the program to allow intelligence gathering on individuals and locations would be ‘unnecessary and dangerous’.
The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union also joined the debate saying that increased access to CCTV footage would allow police to act on “draconian” legislation that gives construction workers no right of silence in police interrogations with a penalty of six months’ gaol.
“This cctv footage can be used to interrogate an average worker on a building construction site,” said CFMEU Assistant State Secretary Brian Parker.
“If something that appears in that footage doesn’t appear to be exactly right, they’ve got the right to interrogate them and if they don’t answer the questions, they can be put in jail.”
NSW Police declined to comment on their intentions for the City’s CCTV system.
In the last three years the number of cameras have increased from 50 to 81 and now covers the City Central region, Kings Cross, Surry Hills, Glebe and Woolloomooloo.

Sydney City Council is contemplating enforcing a range of restrictions on Darlinghurst’s Gaff nightclub following reports of alcohol-related violence in the area.
The suggested measures have arisen as the Oxford Street backpackers’ bar takes on the Council in the Land and Environment Court for approval to increase its floor space by 60 per cent.
Violence flowing down Riley Street was shown in a report by A Current Affair last month, prompting the City of Sydney Council to take action.
The video showed revellers damaging property and vehicles, urinating and brawling with each other.
Council has proposed the erection of noise barriers and cutting trading hours, and reviewing the venue’s outdoor seating arrangements to control the behaviour of patrons.
A patrol from midnight to 6am in the immediate area has also been suggested.
Christine Byrne of Hyde Park Community voice said there had been a noticeable increase in Gaff patrons gathering in neighbouring streets.
“They have clearly been identified as Gaff patrons by the residents in those areas because these people talk about going to the Gaff and coming from the Gaff and how cheap the grog is,” she said.
“There are quite a lot of people till all hours of the morning.
City of Sydney Councillor Chris Harris said the nature of the area itself called for trouble.
“The problem is there’s too large a concentration of late night premises in the area serving alcohol with no regard to responsible service of alcohol laws,” said Cr Harris.
But he said the council was limited in what it could do about violence in the short term.
“We’ve got limited powers here, we can approve the development applications but in terms of enforcement that’s really a police matter.”

The owner of the Gaff declined to comment.

by Annette Lin

Waterloo’s Factory Community Centre is taking sustainable living to the next level, giving old and ruined bicycles a second chance in their Cycle Re-Cycle Workshop.
Since relaunching the program at the Centre in January membership has boomed by 500 per cent, with up to 70 people coming together each Monday night to repair used bikes or build them from scratch using donated parts.
The resurrected vehicles can then be donated back into the community or sold for a nominal price.
Originally run from Newtown as the Nunnery Bike Group, the Cycle Re-Cycle Workshop is run by a group of volunteer bicycle enthusiasts who wish to promote cycling as a means of transport by providing easy and affordable access to bicycles.
As well as bikes, volunteers recycle furniture and household items to disadvantaged groups, such as people who are unemployed, single parents, elderly, disabled, and low income-earners throughout the Redfern-Waterloo area.
Established by local residents in 1995, The Waterloo Recycling Workshop (WRW) is a not-for-profit volunteer group supported and managed by the Factory Community Centre.

The next time you advertise a room for rent, you may find yourself sharing quarters with a mum or a dad and a couple of children in tow.

As travel, rental or mortgage costs become more unmanageable single parents are increasingly seeking out share accommodation to help them cope.

Now with over 1600 members, single parent accommodation and childcare website Space4 was started by single mum Sophie Andrews in 2007 to help others in similar circumstances.

“I separated from my husband six years ago, and when we separated…I couldn’t afford to stay where I was. Purely by chance a friend of mine with a daughter the same age separated the same week, so we ended up house sharing together for 18 months,” said Ms Andrews.

“It was just such a huge benefit for me, having someone there who understood what I was going through. And so I just wanted to create something that would give others that opportunity.”

Parramatta resident Kim Dennis and her 12 and 13-year-old sons are looking to move into Sydney’s inner west with another single-parent family. Ms Dennis, a media professional, says she needs to live closer to work but can’t afford inner city rental prices.

Having unsuccessfully lived in share accommodation before, she sees the advantage of renting with similar-minded people. “We used to live in Bondi with two flat mates and it just didn’t work. They didn’t understand the kid thing,” she said.

After experiencing life as a single mum, Summer Hill resident Vee Malnar said share accommodation would be ideal to ease the rental burden, as well as other household responsibilities.

“Alone, you do all the meals yourself and shopping, and if you can share not only good company, but also being able to share the household things that you have to do…you really are setting up a family, in a way, with a friend,” said the childcare worker.

She said the economic downturn was forcing people to try new options: “I think people are trying it because times are tough, financially. Rent in Sydney is just amazing high and it’s just getting worse.”

Fear has struck the inner east’s dog owners following reports of several dogs being poisoned, resulting in at least one confirmed death.
Locals suspect the dogs were deliberately baited after discovering patches of snail bait littered around Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst Streets, and antifreeze added to water bowls in Rushcutters Bay Park.
Woolloomooloo resident Paul Jumikis’s Kelpie, Louie, died in July after consuming snail bait left outside the East Sydney Hotel, a known dog-friendly pub. A week later he discovered more snail bait in his rear laneway that appeared to have been neatly dropped, despite there not being a plant in sight.
Snail bait was also dropped along Crown Street, from Cathedral to Oxford Street.
“At first I just thought that I was really unlucky, that it had spilt out of someone’s shopping bag, but when I found a patch of it in my back lane I couldn’t think of any other explanation, except that, you know, it had been deliberate,” said Mr Jumikis.
“It is the most horrendous way that a dog or any animal could die.”
Ingesting snail bait, for which there is no antidote, will cause uncontrollable seizures and hyperthermia, leading to probable death in dogs.
While six dogs were allegedly poisoned with antifreeze in Rushcutters Bay, neither local police nor the RSPCA were aware of any such incidents. The City of Sydney conducts rat baiting in the East Sydney area, however a council spokesperson said that all pesticides were restricted to safe baiting stations inaccessible to dogs.
Following Louie’s death, Mr Jumikis erected posters warning that someone was deliberately poisoning dogs in the area.
Local Peter Bartlett also believes the snail bait was laid for that purpose, and now steps up his guard whenever walking his Pomeranian, Douglas.
“We advised everyone that we possibly knew that had animals. Naturally, everyone advised everyone they knew to watch out for it,” he said.
“It was around the bloody streets for ages after.”

For David Malouf it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the experiences a lifetime’s worth of reading has given him and those that happened in the flesh. But, to him, the former was almost always far more important. “You read something and, in reading it, it becomes an experience. You take it on like other forms of experience. So sometimes when you look back and ask, ‘where did I experience that?’ it’s hard to tell whether you experienced it in the flesh or experienced it in another skin while you were reading,” said the acclaimed Australian author and poet. Next Wednesday, September 2, David Malouf will be enthralling the crowd at the Powerhouse Museum about what reading means to him as one of the ambassadors of Indigenous Literacy Day. To Malouf the skill of reading equates to true power in the ‘first world’. “If you are illiterate inside our society you are living in a first world which is fast moving, and where people are empowered by the fact that they can read. “We feed our curiosity with reading and all of that is invaluable to us. We take it for granted, because reading has been given to us as a tool and after a time we come to think of it not as something outside us, but something that belongs to us, like a motor skill. It’s as close to us as that,” said the winner of the Australia-Asia Literary Award. Malouf is just one of several figureheads of the Indigenous Literacy Project, an organisation that feeds resources into remote Australian communities to address the literary crisis faced by Indigenous Australians. By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia’s Indigenous students do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy. In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard. Children’s author Andy Griffiths and Man Booker prize finalist Kate Grenville are also ambassadors for the cause. To raise money for the project, a Great Book Swap will be held at the Powerhouse Museum on Wednesday, and attendees will be invited to donate money and trade their books. Asked what piece of reading he’d like to get his hands on, Malouf said he had most of them in his bookcase at home. “I’d be a better trader than a buyer on this occasion,” he said.

This month, Redfern Town Hall hosted a day of celebrations to mark the suburb’s 150th birthday, but not all of Redfern’s residents were there to celebrate.

“Redfern is important symbolically for Indigenous urban Australia,” announced long-term resident of the suburb and Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, as she opened proceedings in Redfern Town Hall. “Redfern has many layers, and many stories to tell.” There is no denying that Redfern’s Indigenous community has experienced a turbulent journey throughout the past 150 years.

Heidi Norman, winner of the NSW Indigenous Fellowship in 2005, delivered a heartfelt speech on the impact of industrial change on the inner-city suburb’s local Aboriginal population.  “Redfern used to be one of the most densely-populated suburbs in Sydney, and there was a high level of Aboriginal participation in the phenomenal economic activity of the area,” Ms Norman said.

It is, however, a far cry from the state of the suburb now.  In particular, one cannot help noting the present state of the once-thriving ‘Block’.

There are many reasons for the decline, Ms Norman explained, with the major one being economic. “Economic activity dramatically declined from the early 1980s,” she said.  “Manufacturing became increasingly automated, and the sectors where labour input was required began to shift to less-developing countries in search of cheaper, non-union work forces.”

Saturday’s celebrations offered Redfern’s locals the opportunity to look back on the rich history of their suburb. Inside the Town Hall, afternoon tea was provided for local residents who were invited to drop in and share their memories, stories, photographs and memorabilia.

Guided walking tours were also led by historian Mark Dunn, who pointed out the area’s many historical landmarks, and showed people that Redfern’s past is not just ‘black and white’.

“All you have to do to see the extent of Redfern’s multiculturalism is to look at all the different kinds of churches,” he said. “You don’t build a church if there’s no-one to go to it.”

Redfern may be marking 150 years of history but, given the impact of past events on its Aboriginal population, it’s an occasion that not everyone feels like celebrating.  As Clover Moore said on the venerable suburb’s anniversary on August 8: “One of the great things about history is not only what it tells us about the past, but how it informs our present, how it reminds us that nothing is ever permanent, but is the result of actions and inactions.”  It’s a lesson that those who know Redfern, implicitly understand better than most.

by Drew Sullivan