Kings Cross

Book excerpt: A longtime resident of Kings Cross, celebrated Australian author, playwright, and screenwriter Louis Lowra, in an ode to the neighborhood, cajoles readers into reimagining the most infamous and misunderstood place in Australia, a magnet for bohemianism, cosmopolitanism, and organized crime. In a wildly energetic book that walks the streets, sits in bars, chats with locals, and spends time in clubs and apartments where the walls, if they could talk, would tell a story or two, Nowra traverses the history and the future of his beloved neighborhood. He burrows beneath the sensationalist narrative of an underbelly of sex and sin to reveal stories and a cast of characters too astonishing to be fictitious. Backpackers, prostitutes, strippers, chefs, poets, beggars, booksellers, doctors, gangsters, judges, artists, and others live side-by-side in Kings Cross, and eyewitness, historian, and man-about-town Louis Nowra is the perfect guide to a no-holds-barred place that is as much physical as it is a state of mind.