Charles Freyberg may be the closest that Kings Cross has as a chronicler right now, except that he uses the form of poetry rather than prose to record the momentous changes taking place in the suburb.
In Sacred Remnants, his third book of poetry, Freyberg once again takes us on a deeply personal journey through the suburb where he has lived for much of his life, the memories of friends both present and gone, as he delves forensically into his own family’s often disturbing past.
Like Kenneth Slessor, Freyberg is writing at a time of accelerated change for Kings Cross. While in the early sixties Slessor wrote about the introduction of an organised under life into the area, Freyberg is using poetry, as in To The Bourbon and Les Girls, to announce the demise of the Cross as we have known it for most of our lives.
Opening with the word ‘Ayesha’, referring to a well-known local identity and an early member of the Les Girls troupe of transgender performers, the poem places her on a KX market day, with the memory of Les Girls and the Bourbon and Beefsteak bar far behind her, as the buildings have fallen to the wrecking ball.
At the pinnacle
the CEO,
smiling like a slug in a suit,
bloating himself on impoverished imaginations
adding to his pipeline of properties…
Real estate is the dream, a mythology told and retold
all other stories erased.
“In Kings Cross there are still remnants of a few bars, but the communal life that was in places like the Bourbon and Les Girls is more or less gone,” Charles Freyberg, poet, said.
Another poem, with close memories of the area’s strip clubs and the Piccolo Bar, is To Elizabeth Burton, a paean to another local identity who elevated stripping from a tawdry bump and grind show to an art form.
“Elizabeth Burton was a KX figure who was much loved, and there are other friendship poems like To Kate and Mae, and you see the sacred remnants of these people in those poems,” Freyberg said.
A more melancholic turn of the collection tales place when Freyberg and his elderly mother travel to Queensland to trace the roots of their mid eighteenth century Irish forebears, only to discover darkness at many turns.
“My great-great grandfather Ahern was a founding member of the Queensland Country Party, but also was a founder of the Cherbourg community and stripped the Aboriginal people of their sacred stories,” Freyberg said.
The poem Cherbourg conjures the trepidation that Freyberg and his mother felt when they visited for the first time. Another great-great grandfather was possibly involved in, or knew about the early massacres of Aboriginals in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast area.
“My family were involved, and I just wanted to delve back into what they had done, and it’s like Australia and Kings Cross, where you strip a place of its sacred stories, and what’s left?
Other subjects that enter into Freyberg’s canon include the 2023 Mardi Gras Parade, Darling Harbour in the time of Covid and the poets’ discoveries in outback Queensland and distant counties in the UK, all viewed through the unique and compassionate gaze of the sacred.
“I am talking about things that are difficult to describe in prose, those things that are very powerful and hang at the border of our memory, and it’s hard to quantify what they are,” Freyberg said.
Charles Freyberg’s Sacred Remnants is available from IP (Interactive Publications) and Amazon.
Words: John Moyle
Image: Charles Freyberg – photo by John Janson-Moore