"Clover Moore is a boor, stays at home and scrubs the floor..." Kings Cross Children's Nursery Rhyme.
This essay is a response to the bullshit article in the "Daily Terror" about our Lord Mayor trying to clean up the sleaze of Kings Cross by getting rid of the strip joints and limiting the number of night clubs. The area has been an entertainment district for aeons, a big city like Sydney needs such a place, we all work hard and want somewhere to let our hair down, and the Cross is IT! Just cause Clover's got a punk razor-cut and no hair to let down, and is so tired from 2 jobs, M.P. and Mayor, she doesn't go out for any fun, doesn't mean the rest of us have to be sticks in the mud. All the area needs is better management, more security and street cleaning, but she's too busy to think of that, easier to pick on bullshit like "sleaze". She's got her priorities wrong, she should be much more concerned with limiting the apartment-towers mushrooming up everywhere and over-congesting the small area with too many residents. This influx of new middle-class denizens now want to change the "bohemia" atmosphere, that attracted them here in the first place, to a nice, quiet retirement village and Clover's only thinking of their votes, and possible bribes.
There's a proposal to knock down the quaint Baron's Pub building in Roslyn Street and put up yet another overwhelming apartment tower block, a move that would destroy the atmosphere and style of the street and the Cross as a whole, one of the last vestiges of it's old glory wiped off the map, turning the place into a boring airport waiting lounge with shopping as the main form of entertainment, like Singapore. Clover should remember her street-fighting antecedents and work to retain the Cross's funky, historic flavour, that's what tourists want, not more glass towers. In the old days the Cross used to jump on the weekends, it was exciting and fun, regardless of all the sleaze, and everybody made money and was happy. With the so-called clean-up many businesses went bust and the only money made was in the pathetic pokie palaces. We want the Cross to jump again, crowds of fun-lovers throwing their money about, but that's not in Clover's ken, she's got a huge pay packet and perks, business can go jump in the harbour.
I was highly bemused at her equation of "sex, crime, art and money"!!! Where does ART come into it? Her council knocked back the funding for the Kings Cross Arts Guild Annual Arts Festival, all us struggling artists were left with no support, no venues, no audience, we had to fuck-off, starve or die in ignominy and maybe in fifty years a few of us might get a little brass plaque set into the footpath announcing that "once so and so had taken a dump right on this spot." Us living artists get it in the neck, but oh, yeah, millions was handed to the corporate arts bodies to hang those bland, safe banners from every lamp-post in the city, like so many arse-wipes, (tho I do like the 'Buddha with the lotus' banners down near China Town.) I have a dream of running an "arts market" for visual artists in the small park opposite the Piccolo Cafe in Roslyn street but I bet I have an uphill battle to get council permission. Repeat, it's the apartment towers that have reached saturation point, dear Clover, not the night clubs, we want the Cross to keep it's Montmartre milieu, we artists want to continue to live, work and play here, and we need your love, not your antipathy!
