Sydney, Australia: a forsaken city; a
colony; a penal settlement. This is a land where the brave and the bold come to
stake a claim. Those who cannot bear the climate, the remoteness, the harshness
of environment and spirit, are doomed to fail. Those who live here are notable
for their dryness, their cynicism and the asperity of their wit: charity is by
no means absent; however, it is rough and grudgingly offered. This is a place
where only the tough survive, in accordance with, and in spite of, the spirit
of the land.
In the minds of its founders, Sydney was
never intended to be a place of culture and art. From the earliest days, the
settlement was supposed to be a place where hardened criminals came to serve
out a pitiless existence, then die. Those in charge of this ‘Hell on Earth’
implemented ways to capitalise on the settlement’s manpower, location and
infrastructure; but they, too, never saw the city as being a place where
culture could thrive, nor civilisation spread.
This penal attitude has informed every
stage of Sydney’s development (and so too the rest of the nation). By the
1920s, a watershed was reached where the Rule of Law and the power of the
Lawless almost matched each other, strength for strength. Short-sighted changes
in legislation and the collapse of the world economy saw the creation of a
criminal kingdom, where the lawless battened on the cowering populace while the
police forces of the day struggled to gain ascendance.
Sydney became a criminal capital: the
oldest parts of the city became the hideouts of the most ruthless villains, who
dwelt side-by-side with Sydney’s most renowned aristocrats; glittering
nightspots nestled cheek-by-jowl with some of the most appalling slums in
Christendom; while some people starved in the streets below, others cavorted in
high-rise havens of alcohol and drug-soaked splendour ... although the
following day could see their positions reversed.
The police tried their best to alleviate
things, often resorting to brute force to obtain their desired ends. To compensate,
the villains stockpiled guns and carried straight razors to tackle their
opposition, forming together into ‘razor gangs’ to promote their agendas. The
focus of all this activity was a series of inner-city suburbs whose residents
knew to a hair’s breadth the sub-fusc
boundaries of their domains. The Rocks, Woolloomooloo, King’s Cross, Potts
Point, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Redfern: all of these villages
were grouped under the one nickname, which held a special and deadly resonance
for the populace:
“Razorhurst”.
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