Glebe 2037

Wentworth Park Rd Glebe

Growing up on the streets of Sydney in the 70s & 80s, was like benign the main character, in the TV crime series, Underbelly. An early life of family dysfunction, filled with, alcohol, homelessness extreme neglect, physical, mental, and sexual abuse. all leading me to drug abuse, crime and eventually the juvenal justice system and latter in my early adult life, long bay jail, one of the oldest, baddest, prison in NSW.

Growing up my younger brother Steven was my shadow; we were inseparable. Steven was only two years, my junior, we were the best of friends, not just, brothers, we were Mates. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for my oldest brother Garry, I don’t seem to have any positive memories of Garry at all. (Garry was always the odd one out, the black sheep of the family.)

Some of my earliest memories are of Steven and I walking the back streets of Glebe, with Tina our little sausage dog. We lived on Wentworth Park Rd, in one of the many old Victorian Terraced houses directly across from the dog track. Back then Wentworth Park Rd was lined with two and three-story Terraced houses, from the old railway bridge at the bottom of the street, up to the corner of Bay St and. further into Glebe, Ultimo and beyond. All of them were government housing, and all were painted that sickly yellow colour with green doors and green trim. (Heritage yellow and green of government buildings.)

It was June of 1974, I had just turned 6 I was enrolled in Kindergarten at Ultimo Public School, which was just across the park on the other side of the corner of Wattle and Quarry streets.

Back in the day, Glebe was a rough place to live. it was violent. Rife, with drugs alcohol crime, and underlying mental health issues many of them underdiagnosed and poorly treated, as many working-class, (blue-collar) neighbourhoods tend to be. Our home on Wentworth Park Rd, was no exemption, I was only young, yet I can clearly remember, the house being full of people drinking, smoking both cigarettes and pot, and contentiously fighting.

Even, the kids in the neighbourhoods, were violet. I can deistically remember one time, when Garry and I were playing with some of our Matchbox cars, in the back yard, of the Terraced house. when a group of older kids came through the gap in the fence, (all of the houses in the neighbourhood had missing fence panels) and demanded that we give them our Matchbox cars, Garry said no of course, one of the kids disappeared and quickly returned with a small axe, threatening to chop his hands off.

I was too young to remember when we lived with my father. My Mother left him when I was around, 1ish. After leaving my father, Rhonda, (a single mother with two young son’s Garry aged 3 and me around 1ish) hooked up with an Aboriginal guy, called Jimmy, he was with Steven’s father. It was Jimmy that we live in Glebe. Jimmy was an extremely violent man, an alcoholic and had a huge chip on his shoulder, about wighty. (which begs the question why the hell did he have a child with a white woman if he hated white people so much?) Into this, mix my mother thought it wise to bring my older Brother Garry, 3yo, myself 1yo and then got pregnant, two more times with Jimmy. who already had his own kids, living elsewhere in the neighborhood.

Mum, got pregnant, twice to Steven’s father Jimmy, (Mark, was first unfortunately he was still born in 1969) then Mum, had Steven in 1970. Mum, fled, her 2nd, valiant abusive drunken baby daddy, just after I stared at Ultimo Public School, in 1974.

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