Sydney, 1920s

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”.