The Bizarre Hidden History of Sydney | Tony Robinson's Time Walks | Absolute History

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show [Music] this must be the most iconic view in the whole of australia the iconic opera house the iconic harbour bridge the iconic harbour itself enough of all the iconics come down here a minute we've all seen this view about a million times before we don't keep staring at it like a bunch of lunatics i'm gonna take you on a walk somewhere slightly different trust me it'll be great [Music] i'm walking all around australia today it's sydney and i'm hitting the streets of its oldest suburb i'll untangle the secret of the australian crawl you're lost relive a pioneering balloon ride from the 1880s and have words with some eccentric champions of free speech stupid igbo on paper my adrenaline's really up first things first though i don't go anyplace unless i can spell it w double o double l o m lw you know what that is no you weren't even listening were you it's not a very good start isn't it before we head down to willamaloo which is of course where we're going i want to show you this intriguing seat it's called mrs macquarie's chair and it's on mrs macquarie's point which you get to along mrs macquarie's road have you noticed a theme emerging here that is because in the year 1810 a bloke called lachlan macquarie became the governor of new south wales and he tried to load it over everybody and they've really gotten his case and both he and his wife got very miserable in fact he tried to resign three times before his resignation was ultimately accepted and i imagine her sitting here day after day looking out to see thinking to herself why oh why do i have to stay on this lousy continent why won't people let me go home [Music] still it can't have been too bad they ended up staying for 11 years [Music] there's a pair of lorikeets up there i think that's their nest i know they're very common in sydney but they blow me away every time [Music] one thing australia loves more than its sporting heroes is naming something after them this pool just up the road from mrs mac's chair is named after andrew boyd charlton a 1924 olympic gold medalist but we might never have heard of him if he wasn't for a bloke called tom's cavalry tum's who exactly forbes who were the cavals they uh conquered the swimming world in australia they were the top swimmers of the time they were the first family of australian swimming and it was them who set out to show australia and the world that this new stroke which we now call the crawl was better than previous strokes they did want to prove that you didn't have to kick the legs you could merely trail the legs behind you and you would go faster than the current stroke which was a side stroke at that time so how did the couple set out to prove that the crawl was so great they demonstrated on a race they set up they wanted thomas cavill to have his legs tired and to race against the orthodox side smoker and guess who won well you will see who won right now right we've got two volunteers here alan and scott you start to look a bit cold ellen very cold well you're gonna be sid davis right so you're the guy who did the trudgeon yep so you put one on the side yeah and your feet it's key exactly scott you're going to be tums cavil so you are the guy who's doing something nobody's ever seen around here before the crawl except in order to demonstrate quite how efficient it is tums lashed his feet together so if you can wrap that around your legs well we go off to the finishing point right folks how should we start them in the old-fashioned way old-fashioned way teddy all right gentlemen ready steady go you're lost but that was quite impressive wasn't it that's right that's what it was they then pressed the the swims of the time it impressed them they had to get to the crawl strike how much did he win by do we know well the the records tell us he won easily well he certainly did today anyway thank you very much for that story that was absolutely great thanks daddy now this was the beginning of the australian crawl right but a few years later the americans picked it up and started doing it and guess what they called it the american crawl typical look come here this is the kind of thing i love being confronted by it when i'm on a walk i've no idea who created that art installation but half of it the silver stuff looks like it's some kind of monster coming out of the harbour doesn't it whereas the brown stuff that could have been something that floated away when all these industrial processes were going on at the beginning of the 20th century so i haven't got a clue who created that don't know what it means but it is pretty good isn't it i think art that says something about national identity is a sign of a country that's proud of its culture don't you we brits are proud of ours which is why for centuries we've been imposing it on everyone else robert burns the supreme scottish poet number of times he visited australia zero number of poems he wrote about australia zero number of statues of him in australia eight [Music] so time to head for willamaloo no i'm detouring into sydney's domain once elitist governors had stopped trying to make it their private park it became public grounds popular with walkers lovers and more recently outdoor concert goers i'm interested in a small section called speaker's corner atheists i call them stupid ignorant people i saw life as a series of meaningless obstacles you are destined to burn in hell for more than 130 years it's been a magnet for people with plenty to say about every subject under the sun and who don't mind playing to a crowd your life is meaningless until someone comes along and gives it a meeting i wonder why i feel so at home any questions so far yeah i've got a question yeah why do you do this why do you run the risk of being laughed at week after week if you can hold a crowd here you can hold a crowd anywhere but the reason i persist is because it's so much fun i just love it can ever go you can have a go go for it i'm not going to be as good as you but [Applause] thank you very much it is very easy isn't it to deride these men to laugh at these men but i tell you they understand the crucial importance of freedom of speech and you may say why does that matter today why when we have the internet and laptops why does freedom of speech matter so much well i will remind you it is only 50 years ago under the menses government the people's right to speak was under threat and it's precisely because these days are so easy that these men should hold up the torch for the right of all of us to say whatever we want whenever we want regardless of what we're saying because when things get tough there'll be nobody around to say it at all thank thank you nice to meet you see you again i really enjoyed that my adrenaline's really up [Music] now in order to get from the domain to wollomaloo i want you to imagine i'm a 19th century daredevil called armory lestrange and that the small blue party balloon i'm blowing up is actually a giant newfangled hot air balloon it was the year 1881 what could possibly go wrong with a hot air balloon flight well quite a lot actually the gas that they used was coal gas which was very flammable and also made you very giddy if you got too close to it and as for the balloon itself it was really heavy so when he tried to take off it just wouldn't budge so what did he do he cut the basket off the ropes and then he platted the ropes together to form a sort of sling and then he climbed onto the sling but of course now the balloon was too light so when they let it go he went hurtling off towards walla malou he was really worried now that he'd end up over the sea so he let out some of the gas from the balloon the problem with that though was that he became so dizzy with the effects of the gas that he slipped out of his hoist so now he's just dangling from the ropes surely the bloke was going to die but no finally the balloon began to descend on willamaloo but it wasn't a gentle nice descent this was hell to skelter smack down onto the houses of palmer street right here and though you and i might think that was a really inglorious end in fact it was a huge crowd in the street and they cheered and lifted him onto their shoulders and took him guess where to of course the nearest pub for a celebration but there's a very interesting postscript to this story stay there excuse me can i come in for a minute thank you there was a woman in the house and when she heard all the fuss she opened up the blinds to see what was happening but of course that sucked all the gas in from the balloon which immediately ignited blew the roof off her house and lit up the entire area luckily no one was killed but i reckon eyebrows would have been in short supply around palmer street for a few months [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm at the top end of palmer street now on the corner of burton street and it was here that a lot of people reckon a little miracle took place there was this guy called arthur stace and he was an alcoholic and a meth drinker and he was a jail bird and he was in this church the burton street tabernacle and he heard the preacher say i wish that i could say the name eternity on every street in sydney and stace came out and he thought well i could do better than that and he dropped to his knees and he started to write the word eternity is so extraordinary about this is that up to that moment he had been almost completely illiterate he couldn't have spelt the word eternity let alone wrote it but after this in magnificent copper plate much better than the rubbish that i'm doing he continued to write the word eternity throughout the streets of sydney and by the time he died they reckon that he'd written it over half a million times decades later stacey's simple message was broadcast to the nation during sydney's millennium fireworks display you'd have needed a lot of chalk to write one that big [Applause] there are two things i know about australian history one there's much more of it than most people think and two sooner or later you'll have to go into a pub to find out about it it's not easy being a dedicated seeker of the truth you know larry of all the dodgy pubs around here this must have been the most notorious wasn't it certainly was it was the dodgiest pub in the area it's hard to imagine that now isn't it it's really quite nice it is back in the day in 1927 1932 the period of the razor gangs it was um frequented by gangsters uh various low lifes that's in the middle of the depression by the way so it was an absolute blood house why was it like this i mean a few years previously willamaloo had been quite a posh area in the early years of the 20th century when the transport grid happened in in sydney uh the people who could afford to moved out to the suburbs which left the inner city places like this um to those that couldn't afford to live anywhere else who was the dominant figure around here the dominant figure in this area was definitely tilly divine by dominant figure we really mean unscrupulous vicious underworld crime boss and you thought she was some sweet old lady [Music] in the 1930s everyone knew about tilly apart from anything else she was the owner of 30 brothels but we're going to tell you a story that i'm betting you haven't heard it happened in february 1945 at her house which was a quick stagger down the street from the tradesman's arms handy because tilly liked to drink or 10. hi uh excuse us how you doing um uh you live here yes did you know that tilly devine once lived here i didn't know that yeah would you mind if we come in uh because we want to show people about that story absolutely the current occupants don't know it yet but they're going to help me recreate a memorable lover's tiff which involved tilly her boyfriend and a gun right you are no longer damien kate is this all right with you by the way okay you are eric parsons parsons who was tilly's boyfriend right and you are tilly okay uh eric would you go upstairs to the bedroom sure i bet you didn't expect to hear that from another bloke when you got out this morning um okay so the copper burst in he was called sergeant gilmore okay uh and he sees tilly and what did he say to her he says uh mrs devine i believe that there has been a shooting at this address today and tilly said i don't know anything about it yes i'm absolutely correct that's superb and the copper then said well can i go upstairs and have a look yes thank you you stay down there kate we'll come back to you later on now the cop is racing towards the bedroom he bursts in and there is eric although not like that no in fact he was under the covers oh okay with his eyes closed alrighty pretending to be asleep uh are you all right have you been shot uh no i'm good correct so he sees the black there he doesn't appear to have been shot and the policeman leaves he did correct yes but then he changes his story doesn't he yes he changes his story and confesses that tilly did it correct yes tilly tilly uh tilly has to stand trial she has the policeman sergeant gilmore arrest tilly charges her with attempted murder and the trial is to be held in a couple of weeks time but eric has had second thoughts and refuses to testify against her the whole case is thrown out why do you think you did that um i think he was either scared or he genuinely loved her so she is freed that's great yes and there's a happy ending to the story's indeed three months later they were married ah history doesn't record whether or not it was a shotgun wedding but we do know they lived happily ever after well actually 12 years later eric died but you know what i mean there can't be many countries in the world can they where you can just knock on someone's door and in about five seconds persuade them to do this massive reenactment of a shooting that took place there about 65 years previously it's mad it's brilliant but it is mad so we've been swimming without getting wet ballooning without leaving the ground and staging a home invasion without getting arrested i told you it would be a different kind of walk look at this look i love it when you see a plinth just plonk down in the middle of a pavement you know that either some kind of artwork was commissioned and it was never put up or else it was put out and then it was pulled back down again just hang on excuse me excuse me may i borrow you for for one second is that all right did you come over here you see this plinth would you mind getting up onto it for me in the in the 1990s a statue was commissioned of a woman called joy and the idea was that she represented all the street workers of wollomaloo please don't take it personally and uh could you could you cross your legs because that's how she had cross legs and then she was smoking a cigarette that's that's it that's exactly that's just like the the the photo of the statue and she was up there for about 18 months but then tragically her arms were hacked off by vandals that's good and her legs were hacked off as well you don't have to do that and then the council came away and took her down so there's no joy here unless you want to stay up there but i don't expect you to thank you ever so much bye [Music] i'm still on palmer street this is the beginning of the big freeway heading south but right here there's this funny little pretend field and in it there's a sheep and a cow and two big circular things that look a bit like dunnies what on earth could this be i will show you it's wool [Music] it's a joke [Music] [Music] i'm right in the heart of wollomaloo here and snaking through the whole area you've got the eastern suburbs railway up above us and the thing that really interests me is that on each one of these concrete stands here you've got a mural this mural for instance it's been here for over 40 years and it's hardly been defaced at all which is quite a tribute it tells a fascinating story can you see in the middle you've got the builders laborers federation marching in support of something called the green bands and that's their leader there a lot called jack mundy and up top you've got business leaders and politicians and if those guys had had their way then none of this would still be here it's the early 1970s and developers wanted wollomalu raised to the ground but the blf or at least the new south wales branch of the blf decided that its members would no longer work on these multi-million dollar developments unless a lot of affordable housing was put in unless local people were consulted and unless beautiful old buildings like this one put up in 1853 were protected and it worked look at this fantastic area isn't it beautiful and although the blf was central to this campaign it was local people who kickstarted it [Music] it is fair to say that the struggle to save all these houses wasn't entirely successful was it not 100 100 no in fact this is where it started this was the first house that was uh pulled down about 1971. so what we're seeing now is a rebuild a rebuild there was a corner shop here yeah uh owned by i think it was owned by but it went and this is where we all came down on the the next day when they were attempting to pull it down more and then there were the women myself and others who were trying to stop the bulldozers from operating we couldn't stop them but that was the catalyst to start then of the wollomalu resurrection group yes and what was it that you actually wanted we wanted this area here for low income families yeah but you see so close to the city so close to everything else they wanted it for other purposes if you have a look around all of this was saved none of this stuff would have been here exactly right so i wouldn't be able to do this walk that i'm doing today at least not in the wool of a loo that we can now see if it hadn't been for jim and all those people like him good on you [Music] call me an aging hippie lefty and plenty of people have but when the little guys take on the big guys and win i do get a bit goosebumpy [Music] my goosebumps and i are finishing our walk down by the water at one last wolomerloo icon it's called finger wharf and it's the largest timber pile wharf in the world loads and loads of wool past in and out of here and thousands of soldiers in two world wars it was also the first glimpse generations of migrants had of their new australian home after 70 years of faithful service the state government decided to demolish it in the 1980s so once again the unions and the people banded together and this building was saved by the green bands which is great it's a lovely place what are you ironically now it's a bit of an enclave for the beautiful people but all the fancy restaurants and waterside apartments do make it a buzzing if somewhat pricey part of the city so before you know it we've condensed nearly 200 years of history into a half day walk how good is that the word willamaloo is actually a corruption of an old aboriginal word meaning desirable location and okay i know it's sometimes been thought of as wollum lethal and wollam and lewd but actually woolamalou is still a very desirable location

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 72,935

Keywords: Absolute History, City History, Curious Chronicles, Enigmatic History, Hidden Gems, Historical Archives, Historical Secrets, Historical Walks, Settlement Era, Through the Ages, Woolloomooloo Tales, distinct history, hidden gems, hidden stories, intriguing past, off-the-grid adventures, quirky discoveries, secret history trails, strange history, time travel adventures, unheard history

Id: hmALD6Aw2Lk

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022