I lived in Parkville when I was a student at Melbourne University in the 1950s. I lived at no. 30 Carlton Street for a few years in the early 1960s before I went overseas. Then in 1967 I came back and lived here at 390 Cardigan Street, which was then owned by a friend of mine and we bought the house from him in 1968. At the time this seemed to be a great folly because the Housing Commission was pulling everything down around this area, stretching right over towards Rathdowne Street and Nicholson Street. This house wasn't directly under threat in that there was no order on it, but it was indirectly, I would imagine, totally threatened. The Commission's scheme seems to have been to redevelop all the area and some part of that programme was already being very actively pursued. All the houses just to the north of our terrace here, going up to Lytton Street, were all demolished in the couple of years after we moved in. In a master plan that the University had, the intention was that this area would be compulsorily acquired, and made available to the University. The overall scheme was to re build the entire section of Carlton from Grattan Street up to the end of the Cemetery, and from Swanston Street across to Nicholson Street. In fact had it not been stopped, it would have all now been completely re built.
The Commission was created in 1938 after the slum crusade in the 1930s, principally to deal with the problem of slums. The Commission wanted to get rid of very poor quality housing and attempt to give very low income people decent housing. Many slum houses were largely rented by absentee landlords. In Carlton there were areas of these 'slum pockets', just little collections of houses in a centre of blocks. The clearance of slums was linked to the Housing Commission's house building programme which from the late 1940s was increasingly an industrialised process, using concrete panels. As the Commission's work in building villa developments in the outer suburbs ceased, and the Commission's work tended to be in the inner suburbs,the production of the concrete units, I think, began to 'wag the tail of the reclamation dog'. So the Commission was each year obliged to undertake more and more slum reclamation. This way the slum reclamation scheme broadened to encompass houses that weren't slums.
Diverse grounds were advanced for justifying this demolition that went well beyond any consideration of the houses being slums. The need to increase density of living in the inner suburbs, for example, is an argument that is just resurfacing again. The intention in fact was to re plan a complete area, and in Carlton it was going to proceed along two parallel fronts. One was the creation of public housing units, principally high rise units like those in Lygon Street, and the second was private developer estates, like the Carinya Garden development in Lee Street. In that case the Commission compulsorily acquired the land, an then tendered it to a private developer, who just progressively redeveloped the area. The downfall the scheme was this move out of old slum reclamation (where the Commission was dealing with generally agreed, very sub standard houses and into tampering with the overall fabric of the community, and destroying very substantial an well built houses. That gradually aroused a enormous reaction right across Melbourne.
I can remember in the early 1960s going with professor of Architecture to the area just over her Lygon Street and Palmerston Street, where demolition was starting, to find that a general mayhem was being caused. I was really rather distressed, because very good houses were being pulled down, and this was being done in a very brutal way. Little seemed to be done for the people who were affected, and they were completely powerless. During the 1960s I wasn't active, but was passively observing the situation and sometimes getting angry. Then in 1968 I was invited to a meeting down in Carlton Street organised by Eric Benjamin and Lindy Joubert. The concern of most who were there that evening was with social issue (they were mostly social workers), and we decided to create some sort of association. We were reasonably young then, and were still complete novices in this. Our attention was focussed on what we later called the Lee Street block, bounded by Princes Street, Lee Street, Lygon Street and Drummond Street. The Commission was in the process of issuing what were called 'notices treat', a requirement under the Housing Commission to purchase their properties. Right from the very beginning this constituted, to those of us in South Carlton, the focus of community activity.
Round about the same time there was also a group created in North Carlton, which was more concerned with immediate social issues, problems to do with children, schools and so on. It was decided that these two little collections of people should perhaps combine, and a meeting was held in St. Michael's Church Hall up in North Carlton. There was a big turnout, and I was asked to speak on the implications of the Housing Commission's slum clearance programme. I can remember very clearly at the meeting becoming aware of a very angry group of people in the audience. They turned out to be people from this reclamation area which the Commission was moving into, the so called 'Lee Street block'. They were expressing great resentment, fuelled principally by a sense of powerlessness, and the knowledge of what had happened to their friends, including those who had lost homes for the building of Carinya Gardens. I spent some time talking with those people that night. They were asking us that if we formed an association, what would we do, and we didn't know what we could do. But we did present the Housing Commission with a little flimsy report where we attempted to argue that their grounds for clearing the area could not be justified. We managed to get a small number of people on that block to sign it, and agree to be actively opposed to the Commission proceedings. We then prepared a much more extensive report shortly after that, trying to argue why this area shouldn't be reclaimed.
We attempted to make it a public issue by getting it in the newspapers, doing anything that would attract television. At the time that was a somewhat novel thing to do. We very quickly discovered that if we created any sort of fracas, (I don't mean violence), if we could mobilise people and notify the television stations that they would have something to film, the media responded. We organised open days of the area, and we advertised to encourage people to come to the area and look at it, and give their views to the press. We were fortunately rewarded in that a lot of people came, who said that it was wrong that these houses should be called slums. Politicians came too, and gradually we were able to mount a public pressure against the Commission's intentions in that area.
At the same time we became involved with other groups in other suburbs who were facing similar problems. I used to go over to Richmond and other places to talk to people who were living in areas that were being pulled down, trying to help them mobilise public support. I also tried to use some of the more socially conscious university students doing architecture to make studies of these areas, focussing on the quality of the housing which was pulled down, and where the people went who had lived in the houses. This was very influential with the State Government in suggesting that in fact this reclamation programme was creating enormous problems. The private redevelopment schemes in particular were displacing people, causing a great deal of hardship, and giving an advantage to people who were really quite well off. Gradually, with this mounting pressure, the Commission was virtually forced to abandon its plans and didn't ever take action against any of the people who wouldn't treat.
A very small number of people did sell. There was one quite tragic instance of a man who lived in one of the lovely red brick, two storey terrace houses in Drummond Street just around the corner from Princes Street, who was very scared of authority and of the police. He sold to the Housing Commission secretly, and just abruptly left. We later found out that with the quite paltry amount of money which he received for that lovely big brick house, he had been able to buy a ramshackle little house down in Abbotsford.
I suppose the principal reason for being able to stop the Commission, and allow the force of public opinion to work, was that some of the unions agreed to support this campaign. What they did, which was very simple, was to refuse to disconnect the services, the electricity and gas. Without having them disconnected, the Commission couldn't satisfactorily move to pull down individual houses which was the Commission's procedure. It would buy one house, not waiting until it bought the others, and knock it down. This would put the fear of God into all the others.
I think it's very sad that the Housing Commission, which began as perhaps the most significant social welfare agency that's ever been created in Australia, should have come to grief so disastrously on all these issues. Especially so because it was shown to be working in the worst way possible to help poor people, when really it was established on the most charitable and humanitarian grounds that you could imagine.
It was that aspect, challenging those big public bodies, and especially inducing people to break the law or threaten to break the law by refusing to treat, that was really the nerve wracking part of going up and speaking to those people. Some of them were really quite old people, they were in their seventies and they didn't have very much. They certainly had none of the advantages we had, not only our youth but also our education and background. To induce those people to withstand one of these big government bodies I found very distressing.
We were helped in this fight by information from overseas. I had been in England in the mid 1960s, and had direct contact with some of those schemes where old areas were being refurbished, areas that were quite poverty stricken, in the industrial heartland of England in the north west. We also got stuff from Canada, and America, and the Commission was increasingly aware of that.
I don't think the Commission dealt sympathetically with the areas that it was reclaiming. Indeed, I think the Commission was in some respects very ruthless. Everyone who protested against the Housing Commission and the slum reclamation programme was in my view absolutely and totally justified. It was the most vile enterprise against many quite hapless people, people who were vulnerable to those sorts of standover tactics. I thought it quite horrific. They compulsorily took from one group of occupiers, (some of whom owned the property, and some who rented), pulled down the property, and dispersed them with very little regard for the consequences. They then re housed others who received in some cases quite a distinct advantage. To me it was a moral issue. I used to hear through the hospitals of people who were treated for nervous breakdowns, especially migrants and so forth. These stories were just so awful, and I felt that nothing could justify that misery.
By the end of 1972 I was quite done in, although I must say the struggle was very beneficial because it created a new situation in Melbourne. Prior to our doing this, protests weren't very well organised, and were all mixed up in the Vietnam protest. Those big Vietnam protests gave strength to smaller protest groups who were concerned with more immediate environmental issues. It was a very great experience for the community because it started that destruction of government departments which were acting a' controllers of the community, and it began this process of government agencies taking account of what local residents feel. It became increasing!, clear that if local people would speak out about what they wanted or what they felt, their voice might be heard.