Home Page - Save Our Kids - AT CLUB CASTELLO

Club Castello is in Kellett Street, Kings Cross, a grimy back land known in the past for its gambling joints. Itself once a gambling club, Castello’s was taken over a few years back by people connected with several of Sydney’s gay clubs. Currently the favourite hangout of the children of the Cross, Castello’s most regular patronage is likely to be aged between 15 and 19.

It was just after 2 am on a Thursday night. Inside Castello’s it was hotter still. The shutters were locked because neighbours complained about the din. The crowd had gone but the air was still blue-grey with smoke, and the jukebox blared the same songs over and over again, with an occasional syncopated rattle as another empty beer can was kicked against a wall.

About a dozen stayers lounged near the pool tables. A boy collapsed on to the beer-soaked carpet and lay there, inert. A friend slapped him awake. A skinny tattooed blond load, 14, sucking on a Tia Maria and milk, pushed 20c pieces into a machine that occasionally spat some back.

Behind the bar was a boy called David. He had started as a bar useful picking cans, glasses and drunks off the floor, and was then promoted. David is 15 (and has, since that night been fired). The question of an under-age barman serving liquor through most of the night to under-age customers is academic. Castello’s has no liquor licence.

Upstairs, in a room with the fake chandelier and tattered wallpaper of former pretension, perhaps a legacy from the gamblers, were two boys at the pool table and a solitary onlooker, another scrawny kid with half-blond hair. His name was Ian, and he said he was 15. He looked younger. Ian ran away from his parent’s place in Liverpool, a western suburb of Sydney, nearly a year ago. Since then, he has had neither a regular job nor a regular place to stay.

One of his new friends took him to Costello’s a few weeks back. Yeah he came in every night. That night he was tipsy but more tired than boozed. He wanted to leave but couldn't yet: the friend he was to travel back to Liverpool with was still working or drinking, or something, downstairs. He counted his money. He’d spent $31 in two days, he said and had about $6 left, just enough for a half share of a taxi back to Liverpool that night. Yeah, he made the money cracking it. He’d done it a few times in the past week. Yeah with people he met at Castello’s.

Downstairs, by 2.30am the same pair were at the pool table again: the same song trumpeted from the jukebox – a number called the Killing of Georgie, about a gay boy bashed to death; the same bored or bombed spectators were still drooped listlessly around the room.

Cathy, 13 and Jenny, 17, had sat there for over an hour, Cathy on Jenny’s knee, both of them unsmiling, silent, smoking like somnambulists. They had the perfectly clear irises you see in young children, or kids on dope. That night, like any other, they’d taken three or four Mandrax sleeping pills.

They were at Castello’s most nights. “There’s nowhere else to go,” Jenny said. “I’ve been in the Cross , on and off, since 1973. I was, uh, 14 then. Mum used to go and shack up with everybody.”

Jenny was in State homes until she was eight. In her teens, she was regularly declared to be uncontrollable, or found in possession of dope, and graduated to girls’ homes. “So I nicked off and come up to the Cross.”

“I live with me father now, at Belmore (8 miles south-west of the city). Yeah, I’ve been cracking it for uh, nine or 10 months. I’ve got regular customers, six of them. Someone up here was talking about trying it, so I tried it. I’m not a professional prostitute or nothing. When I need the money I crack it.. I hate it, the thought of it makes me feel sick. Sometimes I feel real slack. Sometimes I walk down the street in Belmore, and everybody’s talking about me. Yeah, me father knows. He doesn't interfere with my life.”

That evening, Cathy had moved in with Jenny. “It’s me mother, she thinks she owns me,” Cathy said. Tonight she nagged. That’s why I just walked out. I can’t live with her, she tells me what to do. Like she thinks she can run me life.”

The last time Cathy was in school was 2 1/2 days in May, 1976; “I didn't like it.” She wanted a job, she said. “In a factory. I’m too stupid with money to work in a shop or anything like that.”

For the past two year, since she was 11, she’d been at the cross most nights; usually until close to sun-up.

Cathy is the third youngest of nine children, Her mother, a pensioner, lives in Leichhardt, an inner-western suburb of Sydney. Her father is dead. A couple of her sisters also go to Castello’s.

Cathy and Jenny had paired off a few days before. The fashion now dictates that most kids of the Cross who are not homosexual declare themselves to be. Asked about it, Cathy shrugged. “I dunno.”

Jenny said “Girls, they don’t hurt you. Guys they hurt you. I just don’t care for guys no more. I just don’t like life. Full stop.”