The El Alamein Fountain in Autumn

The El Alamein in Autumn series by Simon Bedak (2026) 

"Following my being born, I was brought home from the hospital in Paddington to a flat not far from here at 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. 

My infancy was spent at eye-level with bright lights of Ground Zero as it was in 1966, comprised of 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. 

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. 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. The nuns hit us with feather-duster canes and the rulers, as did the teachers. I recall being thrashed and humiliated with everyone else in my class for drawing colouring in a rotary-copier image of a badly drawn pig in 'yellow' rather than 'pink' as was the normal colour. 

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 slum of Woollahra. 

"No," my mother corrected me, "That's the way a 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. 

Which brings us finally to these photos.

My father for his part was a barman, karate black-belt who'd refereed at World Championship level, and of course, a bouncer at Kings Cross strip-club. 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 marvellously kind Texan named Bernie Houghton and overseen by Mike Connors who is one of the finest fellows in existence.

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. 

Late one day,  I was walking near here at the corner of Roslyn Street and Darlinghurst Road that I was first propositioned by a prostitute when 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 ANZ Bank. 

She was a large woman who had a swastika tattoo on her arm. I was in a summer school uniform of khaki with a small schoolboys' cap and my 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. 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 the 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?  - these El Alamein photos are made to make my Art 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 "Art" can cost as much as a house or yacht, it's the 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. 

In this case, these works are priced at what it costs to buy just two-packets of 50 cigarettes in Australia today.

The works are inspired by a conversation between Sydney artists Lloyd Rees and Brett Whiteley discussing 'form' or 'light' and the resulting vortexes.

The works are signed by Simon Bedak and there is free delivery to anywhere in the world. And if you don't smoke, consider getting buying one."