Kangaroo bakpak is
situated right in the heart of Surry Hills. This inner-city
suburb stretches south from the nightlife hub of Oxford Street
and encapsulates trendy bars and cafes, diverse restaurants,
live music venues, performance spaces, art galleries and Sydney's
hippest set.
Here is a short list of some of the other nearby
attractions:
Crown Street
pubs cafes and cheap eats
Sydney Cricket
Ground
Sydney football
Stadium
Fox Studios
Fox Studios
movie centre
Centennial
Park
Moore Park
A number of
small theatres and art galleries
Swimming pool
Gym
HIstory of Surry Hills
The fashionable
traveller who calls the chic district of Surry Hills home
for a while should ponder that the area’s vibrant streets
were not always Sydney's trendiest address. As Sydney's hip-set
sips on café lattes and local wines in cafes, bars
and restaurants that line the inner-city suburbs pavements,
they are surrounded by a history of crime, sleaze, toil and
hardship.
The area's seedy undercurrents of shame started in 1792 when
Captain Joseph Foveaux- the paymaster of the corrupt New South
Wales Corps- was suspiciously granted 100 acres of land in
the shifting sandhills just south of the city centre. The
‘Rum Corps’- as they were known for their illegal
trade in liquor- were at the time presiding over a governerless,
anarchic Sydney.
By the 1840s,
the Riley Estate had developed into an overcrowded slum, attracting
the city’s new and desperate, being infected by the
reaches of The Rocks’ Bubonic Plague. In the late 1800s,
the area was a haven for criminals, boasting 200 ‘rough
as guts’ pubs- with the area near Campbell Street acquiring
the name ‘South Sydney Hell’- before being demolished
and rebuilt. Wexford Street suffered a similar fate, with
the Chinese community’s opium and gambling dens and
brothels replaced by Commonwealth Street- a manufacturing
hub that mercilessly underpaid its workers.
When the
Depression hit in the 1930s and welfare queues grew, the Surry
Hills Anti-Eviction Committee formed with the support of the
communist Unemployed Workers Movement to keep themselves off
the streets. But, ultimately, the working-class were gentrified
from the suburb- first by immigrants seeking cheap, central
housing in the fifties, then hippie students in the 60s, and
by the time the trendophiles were mainstays in the eighties,
the district was evolving into the bohemian and ecclectic
space it is today.
