A Surry Hills Girl

Just finished reading Ruth Park's The Harp in the South (the title apparently refers to Irish immigrants in Australia), which is set in my once desperately poor Sydney neighborhood — Surry Hills. Love to walk city streets here, anywhere, and try and catch in my head how they might have been in the past. (The Herald's 100 Years of Herald Photography has been quite brilliantly helpful in that...) In Surry Hills, the remnants of old signage (love the Paramount movies sign on the Deco building in Brisbane Street), the crooked narrow streets lined with mean terraces, the old factories (now apartment conversions, of course), and the corner pubs, all tell a story. But Ruth Park does it better. I won't be able to walk these streets now without seeing ghostly, grubby barefoot urchins disappearing around corners, hat-wearing drunks weaving their paths home after the Six O'Clock Swill, and frumpy, weary housewives in aprons sweeping frontsteps.
Hilarious too, to read of the "Surry Hills girl". Says the pawnbroker Joseph Mendel to Hughie, when the drunk father attempts to seek some redress for the loss of his (pregnant) daughter Roie's honour:

"You are perhaps aware that a Surry Hills girl finds it difficult to obtain a position in the city. She may be educated; she may be more highly moral that similar young ladies in more prosperous suburbs, but her address is against her. Most Sydney people persist, somewhat biasedly, perhaps, in thinking of Surry Hills in terms of brothels, razor-gangs, tenements, and fried fish shops."

Have been wondering what that red light in the building across from me is... (have been told that my neighborhood is home to swingers groups and sex clubs...) And love too, Park's prose on the family's Christmas pudding.

"Now Hughie had, long ago, been a shearers' cook, and could make a curry hot, sweet and luscious, with surprising bits of chopped-up date, green peaches, and sliced banana floating mysteriously in it. And he could make soup, and brownie, and the curiously named sea pie, which is nothing more than a stew with an oversize dumpling roofing it. But, best of all, he could make a boiled pudding, dark as midnight and rich as Persia, and containing so many dates, prunes, cherries, sultanas, and currants, that, as Hughie himself modestly said: 'You couldn't spit between them'."