El Alamein en automne (The El Alamein Fountain in Autumn)

"Following my being born, which is as horseshit a way of a beginning as any other, I was brought home from the hospital in Paddington to a flat not far from the El Alamein fountain in Sydney's Kings Cross. I inhabited a cot in a top floor one-bedroom apartment at the top of William Street above the Colluzzi Bar. 

To speculate on why I've turned out this way, this may be partly to do with my infancy being spent at eye-level with bright lights of Ground Zero as it was in 1966. Ground Zero is at Kings Cross, Sydney.  The area at eye-level comprised  the brightest bulbs and neon flashing all night, advertising the Stripperama, Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (Your International Passport to Smoking Pleasure), Penfold's Wines and, of course, the  heavy monster-sized Coca-Cola sign, as well as other crapola crying out for the attention of all.

Apart from the bright lights, learning to walk, being doted upon by loving parents, attending kindergartens at Rushcutters' Bay and The Women's Rest Centre in Hyde Park, for some reason when I was about 8 days old, my mother insisted on having a mohel chop a bit off the end of my knob. 

Presumably, this was for aesthetics. 

The issue didn't come up again until I was in kindergarten, pissing at the trough with one of my best mates who, together with his sibling, had been affected by thalidomide (around Sydney as a surprisingly large number of kids had, enough to turn your head for a moment but then, being kids where I was, everyone else was just you - but wearing someone else's skin). 

In my mate's case, it affected his voice into a unique, utterly musical series of squeals which the rest of his friends not only understood as perfectly formed and thought out words, but didn't matter to anyone because, well, we were being domesticated by fierce nuns and if we fucked up, fates worse than death awaited after they'd killed us. The nuns hit us with feather-duster canes and the rulers, as did the teachers. I recall being thrashed and humiliated once, along with everyone else in my class (except the wonderful Anne De Cavahlo who was not only magically kind, but had the neatest hand-writing in the world) for 'incorrectly' colouring in a rotary-copier image of a badly drawn pig in 'yellow' rather than 'pink' as was the normal colour. 

On the page, the outline of the pig itself was made in stinky alcohol smelling bright purple, rather than fkn pink. I got whacked harder for pointing this out. The teacher's name was Miss Jenkinson who later married in 1972 to become Mrs Bloom. I mention this in the hope that if she is still around, she looks up Holy Cross Junior School in Woollahra one day and the Goddess Google in her pay-per-view wisdom lurches this reference her way. Anyway Mrs Bloom, all is forgiven xx You were a fabbo teacher and it was just a bad day.

Anyway, to get back to it, when I was 5, I reported to my mother that because of the thalidomide in my view, my mate's dick was peculiar and odd curly looking piece of flesh, very different to my own and the couple of other regular dicks I'd seen at the piss-troughs at the Temple Emanuel Synagogue kindergarten, which was located on the very tough upper-east side of nearby slumlessness of Woollahra. 

"No," my mother corrected me, "That's the way the normal penis looks when males are born, you've been circumcised." 

The what, whys and whens were all explained to me in my mothers' impeccably logical, matter-of-fact kind of manner, the countenance of which can only be mastered by both the exceptionally gifted and/or the utterly insane.  The woman who'd brought me into the world whole, had thrown a piece of me away because of, well, that bit was never fully explained.

Which brings us finally, to begin...these photos.

My father for his part was a barman, karate black-belt who'd refereed at World Championship level, and of course, was a bouncer at a Kings Cross strip-club. Dad's nickname was Rigo. He was a Hungarian gypsy who believed in anything that might win him the Lottery. 

Behind the El Alamein fountain which is the subject of these photographs is where the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar once was, owned and run by a marvelously kind Texan named Bernie Houghton and overseen by Mike Connors who is one of the finest fellows in existence. I spoke to Mike out of the blue just the other week and he said he's 83, still living at Bilgola Plateau and his Gary O'Callaghan style voice is exactly the same.

Anyway, I played here at the El Alamein fountain as a largely unsupervised infant and child, among the hippies, prostitutes, migrants, barmen, waitresses, bouncers and strippers. My mother had been a waitress at the Piccolo Bar and at Sweethearts, before motherhood and cancer fkt things up.

Late one afternoon after school,  I was walking near here at the corner of Roslyn Street and Darlinghurst Road and it was here that I was first propositioned by a prostitute. I was 10 years old. She was one of the ladies who worked the street at the lovely sandstone wall in front of what was an ANZ Bank. 

It's a kebab joint these days. And that my friends is true progress.

She was a large woman who had a swastika tattoo on her arm. I was in a Waverley College summer school uniform of khaki with a small schoolboys' cap and my brown Stanely Stamford schoolbag.

My eyes were straight ahead when I heard the words I can still hear today..

"Would you like a Go, Love?" the large woman with a Nazi tattoo asked me.

And, as quick as a flash, I whipped out a polite nervous "No, no thank you," and kept walking towards the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar. 

Never thought to mention it to anyone until this moment. Nor the uncirumsized thing. Just came back to me.

My mother didn't approve of tattoos, and thought even less of Nazis. As for her views on prostitutes, I would find out to our peril much later on when my father didn't take up the self-preservation afforded me by a polite No, no thank you and ran off with prostitutes the moment my my mother became crippled, disabled by cancer and a surgeon's botched operating that rendered her legs useless. Anyway, dad did have tattoos which may've explained his views, but I digress.

Very much in the spirit of Would You like a Go, Love?  - my wish one day is to make these El Alamein photos accessible to those who might like a piece but do not have the monies to spare to buy Art that is created for the sake of art. 

When even the most commercial pop-out offerings called Art can cost as much as a house or yacht, it's an artist's obligation to do their best while still alive to cut-across the market and make some of their works accessible to everybody who might wish to own it.  These works are inspired by a conversation between Sydney artists Lloyd Rees and Brett Whiteley discussing 'form' or 'light' and the resulting vortexes. It's a brief conversation I saw in a doco about Brett and it's on repeat inside my head daily.

Anyway, if ever I decide to sell my art, the works are signed by me and there is free delivery to anywhere in the world. Well, except Collingwood. 

Go Blues."