This year is the 90th anniversary of Luna Park, that iconic amusement park by the Sydney Harbour Bridge which I will always remember every time I think of Sydney and relive in my mind those few short times I lived and worked there.
The very first time was when the ANZ Bank in Canberra sent me to a ledger-keeping course at their staff training college above one of their branches somewhere along George Street. That was sometime in 1966, only months after I had arrived in Australia, and my English was still pretty elementary, which didn't stop me from getting on like a house on fire with the only other student in the class, a young girl from Hungary who worked in one of the Sydney branches. This prompted the kind instructor, a middle-aged lady, to express with a twinkle in her eyes on more than one occasion her regrets that I wasn't also living in Sydney. As I said before, my English was still pretty elementary at the time and her remarks went straight over my head. Funny how this has always stuck in my mind, and I certainly remembered it when I walked past the same building in more recent years and discovered that it now houses a pub.
My second time in Sydney was in 1972 after I had completed two years on the Bougainville Copper Project in New Guinea, and I was looking for work and for a place to stay in Sydney. I still have my old Gregory's Street Directory in which I had marked the places affordable to me at the time, such as the Ritz Private Hotel just across from Hyde Park in Elizabeth Street for $3 a day and the Mansion Hotel a few blocks up for $3.50 a day, including breakfast. In the end, I finished up staying at a rambling old boarding house in McMahons Point at the bottom of Blues Point Road across from - yes, you guessed it! - good ol' Luna Park.
The above photo, which I "stole" from a real estate advertisement, shows the unchanged rooftop of what was then a rundown mansion divided into some thirty or more rooms let out to the same number of boarders, but now houses half a dozen multi-million-dollar apartments.
It was a double-storey building, with the communal television lounge and dining room and separate bathrooms taking up most of the ground floor, and a sweeping staircase leading up to a balustrated landing above, with our individual rooms down a dark hallway. In the evening a no-longer-quite-so-young lady would stand on the landing behind an ironing board. She was said to be doing the ironing for the boarders but even to my still innocent mind it seemed that she also had other ways by which she was earning herself an extra few dollars to pay the rent.
The roofline of the old boarding house can be seen two doors down from the red star
The whole place was run by an old man who always wore a greasy old singlet splattered with the residue of the eggs-on-toast he would serve us each morning, apart from which he did nothing much else except chase us for the rent. The place was grimy bordering on the verge of filthy but the views from its garden of the harbour and the still not-yet-finished Opera House made up for it all, even though there was no view from the window in my room which was obscured by a flyblown mirror above what would today be an expensive antique dressing table. Tipping on my toes, I could just get a glimpse of Luna Park and, if the window was left open which it always was as the room was stifling hot, I could also get a full blast of the terrified screams as the Big Dipper did its rounds while I was desperately trying to get some much-needed sleep.
That second stay in Sydney was not much longer than the first, and I soon returned to New Guinea, after which the same company, after only nine months, sent me back to Sydney in what they had held out to me as a big promotion as their Australia-wide group financial controller. I briefly stayed in that same boarding house again while I wasted my time doing little more than signing cheques all day in the company's head office in Crows Nest. No wonder I started looking for another job in the islands which I took up in 1973 as secretary of the electricity authority in Honiara in what was the British Protectorate of the Solomon Islands.
In later years, I had come through Sydney several more times but never to live and work there again until finally, in 1985, I returned "home" from my last posting in Greece and decided - quite mistakenly, as it turned out only a few months later - to make Sydney my new home.
Strangely, my new employers were also located in Crows Nest which made me look for a place to live in nearby McMahons Point again. Luna Park had already been closed down and was slowly decaying (before its significant revitalisation and reopening in 1995) and the old boarding house had also long gone, but by then I was cashed up enough to buy my own pied-à-terre on Blues Point Road which I lived in just long enough to receive and pay the first quarterly electricity bill before deciding that Sydney was not for me, and I hurriedly relocated to Canberra.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
