It was the razor gangs who brought light to Kings Cross. By the end of the 1920s the Cross may have been described as Sydney’s Montmartre, but its reputation was also that of a wicked dark place festering with crime. John Milton wrote, ‘When night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.’ This baleful observation was something that the Sydney City Commissioners agreed with and in 1929 they determined that Kings Cross and William Street would be so brightly illuminated ‘that it will be impossible for a visitor from “the Loo” or Surry Hills to strop a razor in the street without attracting undue attention’.
The plan worked so well that crime quickly retreated into the penumbral back lanes and side streets. It meant that the main streets were safe, even for women. By 1932 light was so synonymous with the Cross that the Sydney Morning Herald published a poem called ‘Lights of King’s Cross’ by a Muriel Feldwick, an occasional writer and admired soprano who sang often on the radio (her repertoire including the now seldom heard ‘Two Little Curly Headed Coons’). For Feldwick the neons and bright lights were like a glittering galaxy that had the alchemical power to make ‘day out of night’.
When the Frenchman Georges Claude introduced neon signs to the United States in 1923, they became immediately popular and chic. Earning the soubriquet of ‘liquid fire’, the signs had such a hypnagogic intensity and enchanting brilliance that some people would stare at them for hours, mentally giddy, mesmerised by the reds, blues and greens that gave the illusion that the buzzing light inside the tube was a pulsating, living entity. It wasn’t long before the first neon lights came to the Cross and by the early 1930s they were one of its most celebrated attractions.
There were locals who objected to them. In 1938 several residents in a Bayswater Road wanted an injunction taken out against York Motors and its neon sign of red and green that blinked out the commercial haiku, The peak of perfection – Chrysler, Plymouth. As far as the tenants of 40a Bayswater Road were concerned, the neon sign was so bright that ‘Photographs of their flats can be taken by it and newspapers can be read in the flats.’ As one plaintiff put it, ‘We cannot go to sleep with this bright light shining upon us – or play cards or enjoy a book.’ The tenant also said that although the sign went off at 11.30 at night, he needed to go to sleep before that. Justice Boyce, hearing the case, made a crack about the reputation of residents in the area: ‘From what I have heard I would imagine that any earlier hour than that for going to bed would not be general at Kings Cross.’ But the plaintiffs won the case, when the Judge – who inspected the sign one night – granted the tenants a restraining order on York Motors preventing them from illuminating their neon sign between 8.15 pm and sunrise.
For most people, however, the neon signs were magical and inviting and, as a practical Kenneth Slessor was to remark, if he wanted to sleep at night it was an easy matter to cover his bedroom window with a canopy of shirts or a dressing gown to shut out ‘the viridian green moonlight streaming from the largest and most illuminated bottle of beer in the world’.
As more neon signs lit up the top of William Street, they became a psychedelic siren call to beauty, excitement and entertainment. The Cross became an incandescent beacon and William Street the yellow brick road to this luminous Oz on top of the ridge. There is a newspaper photograph from early 1939 entitled ‘Nightly Brilliance of King’s Cross’. The shot was taken across the waters of Rushcutters Bay, on the eastern side of the ridge, and the dark waters are radiant with reflected light from the Cross where light streams out of flats, from streetlamps and outdoor neon advertising so that it seems a luminous oasis amidst the Stygian gloom of the city and suburbs.
By the time he came to publish his volume of light verse, Darlinghurst Nights, in 1933, Slessor had been enthralled for years by the neons and how they altered the very concept of the heavens. In his imagination the stars became neon ‘alphabets of lights’ and, from the heights of a flat, the whole of the nocturnal Kings Cross took on the appearance of a permanent solar eruption or, as he puts it, a ‘fiery hedge’. Even the hazy brilliance of distant constellations didn’t match up to the neon’s nebulae, and who wouldn’t be seduced by William Street’s ‘red globes of light, the liquorgreen/ the pulsating arrows and running fire’?
Just as parents take their children to see the department stores’ Christmas decorations, so people visited the Cross during the Depression just to gaze in awe at the neon lights and the brightly lit shops that stayed open until midnight.
All that changed with the fear of Japanese invasion. The government claimed that Sydney would be the second largest city in the British Empire to be blacked out. The first test blackouts in late 1941 had mixed results at best, with Kings Cross as usual acting as if it were a law unto itself. In spite of intense work by 10,000 wardens during the blackout, the worst area proved to be Kings Cross, where ‘innumerable’ lights were reported. There was such disregard for co-operating in the exercise that a government spokesman said that Kings Cross had caused observers considerable alarm with one spotter plane reporting that its neon signs could be seen at 5000 feet. It was not only the nonchalance of the Cross that irritated the government but the attitudes of the people themselves. Instead of remaining indoors, thousands of residents paraded through the streets laughing and joking in what was called ‘a carnival spirit’. They were guided by the glow of thousands of cigarettes that from the sky resembled an immense swarm of fireflies or, as one astonished pilot reported, ‘Kings Cross looked like a large birthday cake with all its candles alight.’ The authorities ordered the residents to install black curtains on their windows and forbade them to go out onto the streets when the air raid sirens sounded, but as soon as the all clear sirens went off, they were back on the streets again. As one woman remembered, ‘It was all very foolish but I think we thought nothing would or could ever happen to the Cross – she was safe and beautiful and she loved us.’
This is an extract from Kings Cross: A Biography, out now from NewSouth
