The Sydney Ducks and ‘hideous orgies’
In the early years of San Francisco, one neighborhood was synonymous with vice, crime, degradation and allaround sleaze: Sydney-Town.
Sydney-Town was located in the waterfront area around Pacific and Montgomery streets, at the southern edge of Telegraph Hill. It took its name from its Australian denizens, known as the Sydney Ducks.
Word of the Gold Rush led thousands of Australians to head for California. As Sherman Richards and George Blackburn note in “The Sydney Ducks: A Demographic Analysis,” an article in the Pacific Historical Review in February 1973, the first Australians showed up in San Francisco in April 1849. By mid-1851, a staggering 11,000 had arrived, including 7,500 from Sydney.
Most of these immigrants were not criminals. But some were exconvicts who had been transported from Britain to the penal colonies in New South Wales, later known as Australia. These ex-cons were known as “ticket-of-leave” men, after a document of parole showing that the possessor had served his time.
As Jay Monaghan notes in his 1966 book, “Australians and the Gold Rush: California and Down Under 1849-1854,” the largest number of ex-cons to ship to California were not from Sydney but from the island of Van Diemen’s Land, now called Tasmania. In late 1849 and early 1850, more than 21 percent of immigrants from Hobart and Launceston, the two main towns on the island, were ex-cons, compared with 12 percent from Sydney. But no Americans had ever heard of Van Diemen’s Land, and so the expression Sydney Ducks, not Hobart Ducks, has gone down in history.
The Sydney Ducks settled in San Francisco just east of a tent neighborhood called Little Chile that was populated by Chileans, Peruvians and Mexicans. Prostitution there was rampant. According to the classic 1855 book “The Annals of San Francisco,” “The women of all these various races were nearly all of the vilest character, and openly practiced the most shameful commerce.”
In “The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld,” published in 1933, Herbert Asbury writes, “Sometimes as many as half a dozen Chileno women used the same rude shelter, receiving their visitors singly or en suite, with no regard whatever for privacy . ... A few made pretense of operating wash-houses, but there were scarcely any who did not devote the nights to bawdy carousal and to sexual excesses and exhibitions.”
Sydney-Town soon swallowed up this den of vice, but scarcely improved it. The district was filled with dives, gambling dens and lodging houses bearing such colorful names as the Noggin of Ale, the Hilo Johnny, the Magpie, the Bobby Burns, the Tam O’Shanter and the Jolly Waterman. A contemporary journalist described these places as “hives of dronish criminals, shabby little dens with rough, hangdog fellows hanging about the doorways.”
Some Australians, familiar with convicts, immediately recognized the ticket-of-leave men by the way they walked. According to Monaghan, an Australian 49er named Davison “noticed that some of these hangdog fellows walked with the peculiar swinging gait a man learns during years in leg-irons.”
The San Francisco Herald reported, “The upper part of Pacific Street, after dark, is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters, who resort to the groggeries that line the street, and there spend the night in the most hideous orgies . ... Unsuspecting sailors and miners are entrapped by the dexterous thieves and swindlers that are always on the lookout, into these dens, where they are filled with liquor — drugged, if necessary, until insensibility coming upon them, they fall an easy victim to their tempters.”
According to Asbury, three of the most debased Sydney-Town dives were the Boar’s Head, the Goat and Compass and the Fierce Grizzly. The Boar’s Head featured a woman having sex with a boar, the Fierce Grizzly featured a chained grizzly bear outside the door, and the Goat and Compass was the haunt of a Sydney-Town character called Dirty Tom McAlear, whose claim to fame was that he would eat literally anything offered him for a few cents. When arrested on the novel charge of “making a beast of himself ” in 1852, McAlear testified that he had been drunk for seven years and thought he had last bathed 15 years ago.
The most serious charge leveled against the Sydney Ducks, and the one that finally led to the demise of Sydney-Town, was arson. Gold Rush San Francisco was devastated by no fewer than six catastrophic fires, and the Sydney Ducks were strongly suspected of starting most of them, in order to facilitate looting and burglary.
“When the different fires took place in San Francisco, bands of plunderers issued from this great haunt of dissipation to help themselves to whatever money or valuables lay in their way,” the Annals noted. “With these they retreated to their dens, and defied detection or apprehension.”
Outrage over the fires was partly responsible for the formation of the Committee of Vigilance in 1851, the first of San Francisco’s two famous vigilante groups. In June 1851, when a Sydney Duck named John Jenkins was caught while trying to row to Sydney-Town after stealing a safe, the newly formed committee sprang into action, gave him a cursory trial, and hauled him to Portsmouth Square. As the procession passed the corner of Clay and Kearny streets, several Sydney Ducks tried to free Jenkins, but were driven back. Jenkins was hanged from a flagpole.
Anther ruinous fire, also blamed on the inhabitants of Sydney-Town, soon followed. The Committee of Vigilance lynched two more Sydney Ducks, deported 14 back to Australia and ordered an equal number to leave the state on pain of death.
The derelicts from Down Under realized the jig was up and fled. Many later returned, but were scattered for good by the second Committee of Vigilance of 1856, which deported a number of Ducks and scared away the rest. The squalid heyday of Sydney-Town was finished. Its place would be taken by the Barbary Coast, which will be the subject of a future Portals.