I came to the inner city some time in the mid fifties and lived in Parkville, Brunswick and then Carlton in various kinds of accommodation, flats and rooms, so that I'd be close to the University. At that time I was doing an Arts degree part time. In those days Carlton had an enormous number of students in it. Practically every second house was a student house. Otherwise the area was very old Australian. I don't think the migrant population was so visible, but certainly they were here. When I married we decided to stay in Carlton.
Politically we were very involved and we wanted to be close to the University, because a lot of our political activities related to the clubs at the University, like the Labor Club and the ALP Club. I was also teaching at the Princes Hill High School, so that was another reason for staying in the area.
My husband and I were both country people. Even then we had a big thing about creating a community, particularly I did. By the early sixties I was much more aware of the migrant population, and it seemed very much like home. I grew up out of Mildura in what was a soldier settlement area. There were lots of migrants there from all over Europe. I really felt quite alienated in the city, and Carlton seemed to be the only place like home. Most of our friends came from the eastern suburbs, and they seemed to be so totally Anglo Saxon. In Mildura I had been to a primary school where in the forties there must have been twenty different nationalities. I decided that if I had children I wanted them to grow up in that kind of area. Carlton had the potential to be even more egalitarian.
Carlton was still thought of as a slum. All my husband's relatives said, 'You can't live in Carlton, it's a slum.' It was acceptable to be here as a student but not to settle here. My mum was a farmer's wife and she wasn't snobbish in any way, but she thought of it as a place where Squizzy Taylor was likely to shoot you, or the painters and dockers might throw a bomb. I can remember going into the city and trying to cash a cheque. If you said you lived in Carlton nobody would cash it, Myer and those people. I developed this trick of saying I live in Princes Hill which they'd never heard of, and somehow I think they confused it with Surrey Hills and they would accept it. When we went to get our first bank loan, (my husband Phil Molan, was solicitor and I was a school teacher), we couldn't borrow money because Carlton was thought of as slum and people thought it was all going to be razed.
The school was interesting too. There were a lot of Jewish kids in the school; it was a predominantly, Jewish area. We didn't run the Princes Hill High School on Jewish holidays or Jewish festive religious days because there weren't enough kids. There was a tremendous social feeling at that school It was just amazing. It really was a great school terrible old buildings and all that stuff, but the relationship between the staff was fantastic, and the relationship between the students and the staff was unbelievable. There was unity in that messy fire trap of a school. There were lots of Italian kids who all used to work at Genevieve. They worked hard to keep the families, and then they'd come to school so tired they couldn't keep their eyes open the poor little buggers. And they'd say 'Oh yes, we've been at work at Genevieve's.' So the students were a mix by then Slavonic too.
So that's what Carlton was like when I came here and what attracted me to Carlton. Proximity to the city didn't mean a thing to me but proximity to the University and the lifestyle did. I think unconsciously it was in my head that this was more like the village that I'd come from, as well as the multiculturalism. But something else was there which years later led to setting up the Carlton Association. It felt more homey even the corner store kind of stuff, and the fact that we all knew our neighbours in those days.
A lot of my social life prior to marriage and then after it would have been around the University clubs. The group of people that I mixed with were pretty frenetic do gooders, so I suppose a social outing would have been demonstrating against Menzie's White Australia Policy. There was a lot of stuff about going to the pubs of course, and even before the days of women's liberation, those women who were involved in politics went to the pubs. It seemed to be only those who were politically involved who did that sort of thing.
When I became involved in founding the Carlton Association I had the feeling that ordinary people weren't being heard at many levels, that politicians were being removed from the people they were supposed to be representing. I must have been conscious of what was going on in Europe, the student revolts and the demand for student participation, because I named my son after Red Danny. I had a sort of burning desire to bring politics back to grass roots. A couple of years before I'd tried to interest the local ALP branch and said, 'Look, you're passing all these motions but you don't know what the average person wants.' It was a small revolt against the branch's intellectualism, I suppose, and being a woman. I was starting to say 'Look at the schools here, you really don't know what they're like.' Many members were barristers and solicitors and academics; there were still a lot of the old locals but they found it hard to get a word in.
I didn't feel that what they were saying was relevant locally. After that I made the suggestion that we needed a local residents group, which would also be a way of getting more people into the branch, especially a cultural mix. But everybody was too busy getting the numbers to get on a party committee or something.
Two people expressed interest. One was Roger Grimshaw who was a New Zealander, and another Mal Cormack, who was a Presbyterian minister and belonged to a world wide movement called Students for a Democratic Society, which pressed for participation of people. They had a branch at Melbourne University. There were crosslinks between them and a group of inner suburban ministers, of whom Mal Cormack was one. His ministry was in the high rise Housing Commission flats, and he in fact lived in one of the flats. We three just went off on our own and started talking with a few like minded friends. After a few months we decided we'd have a public meeting. In those days, even if Arthur Calwell had a meeting in his electorate, he'd only get half a dozen people along. Mal Cormack was great on making up brochures and I think we must have paid for it ourselves. We leafletted the whole area. I just went around with my baby in the back of the car, leafletting. Over two hundred people turned up and we got publicity, and it went on from there. We were united by this concept of community and people participating. We intuitively knew that communities and personal interactions were coming to an end in this big technological society. We were concerned about education, the rotten deal for migrants, the overuse by women of tranquillisers. Saving Carlton from the high rise was really something that hit us afterwards. It hadn't been a big part of what we were doing at the time when we started. We linked with a group of south Carlton people, including George Tibbits and David Beauchamp, who were fighting the Housing Commission demolition plans.
I had a friend who was part of the '26 Rebel Unions' which had been banned from the Trades Hall Council. This was the beginning of the unions becoming involved in the environmental issues. What caught them were issues to do with participation. One of those, Ken Carr, whom I knew quite well because I had worked for unions, spoke to people. Before we knew where we were we had Norm Gallagher putting a black ban on the area. It was quite amazing. We were all there the first day when we took the union leaders through the houses and they spoke to people. Then ensued a massive battle that went on for years to save that area from being demolished. And it has been solved, and some really good things have happened. We did help to get many more people involved in schools in the days when it wasn't heard of to have parents involved in schools parents just weren't allowed in the door. We brought to light all the needs of the inner suburban area and we worked with other similar areas. On the welfare side, a lot of really wonderful things happened, to assist house bound women by linking them up with friends, or by someone saying, 'Come along to the Mothers' Club.' That networking kind of thing worked. It was part of our philosophy, but nobody has written it up. It's one of the unheard of things in the Carlton Association, mainly done by women.
A lot of us in this North Carlton group had very much, 'help the underdog' attitude. Most people weren't really self interested. If it was self, it was a psychological thing. Most of us could manage to buy a house wherever we wanted. Because so many of our activists held political and philosophical principles which talked about participation, and people not being suddenly swiped out of their houses, they were really important. I think the people who did most of the work were not directly self interested in terms of a monetary interest. They became, if they weren't when they got into it, the type of person who is 'do gooding' too. It was a bit of a top down movement. Even when it had 900 people who would willingly sign a petition and race around encouraging others to do so, there was a fairly high level of involvement, but it still always came down to a small group of the executive or the committee structure to do the organising work.
I think the greatest achievement of the Carlton Association is that it floated an idea. Maybe we picked it up by osmosis from what was happening in Europe and America in the sixties, but it certainly promoted an idea about what people now call, 'people power'.
The first Carlton Arts Festival