We moved to Carlton in 1968. We had been living in Croydon. I worked for the National Science Centre, which erected a new building, Clunies Ross House, in Royal Parade, and we wanted to live somewhere in its proximity. Our requirements were a four bedroom house, on a park and in walking distance of my office. And we found this house first off. There were other reasons for wanting to live in this area. We knew the Melbourne City Council provided good services, good roads, kept the parks up reasonably well and so on. It was comparatively unfashionable at that time. One of the reasons for prices of houses being low was that you couldn't easily get loans on old houses, certainly not on terrace houses. Carlton, like a lot of the inner suburbs, was a sort of staging post for migrant people. They would come off the boat, settle here and then move out. A typical example are the Italians who owned this house, who moved out to Preston.
As the years went by, I think, also, that Carlton attracted attention through these campaigns against the Housing Commission and the freeways. People began to know it was actually here, and that it wasn't a bad place to live. So the next wave of people that came in were, in the popular term, 'trendies'.
When we moved here, there was already opposition beginning to the Housing Commission flats. 'Meagher's monsters' they were called. Ray Meagher was the Minister for Housing at the time. In the mid fifties, there was an enquiry set up by the Bolte Government into the Housing Commission. The report in fact recommended against the high rise building except for elderly people, or young couples who wanted to live near the city, but not for family living. It's the family living that's been the problem with the high rise throughout the world. In England, they've even blown them up. That movement was beginning then. I suppose to be fair, the comment would be we capitalised on that.
The first time the Housing Commission was challenged was on the Lee Street block. We mobilised the unions and public opinion, everything, and it was a long fight. The Commission undertook the infamous 'windscreen survey'. There were two Housing Commission fellows who would get in a car and drive all round Melbourne marking out blocks for demolition That's the crude way they were going about it, without even inspecting interiors. There were coincidental circumstances. The daughter of Rupert Hamer, who was the Victorian Premier of the day, lived in that block, which helped us quite a lot. And the campaign went on from there. The detail is well documented in the Melbourne Times, but the strength of it was in the combination of articulate people with the unions; that won the battle.
The next battle was with a person, Harry Parsons. The Housing Minister, Ray Meagher, thought he would deal with the trendies, so he got this academic Harry Parsons over from Adelaide. They had this big plan to demolish practically the whole of that central area of Carlton. Around Christmas time we had a council of war and decided what to do. George Tibbits and Miles Lewis became the driving force in the group. We in effect launched a major publicity campaign against this. No one person did it. We recruited people to put their names to the report and write part of it. They were the eminent people of the time, far more authoritative than the Housing Commission, and we started events. We hired a truck and a stage, and assembled down at Spencer Street car park, outside the railway station. We had an effigy of the Minister on the back. We drew up in front of the Housing Commission headquarters and the effigy was duly burned. A man ran out with a fire extinguisher! There was all sorts of fuss and bother, but very good publicity. Eventually they withdrew the plan.
Almost at the same time the Government announced they would demolish all these blocks for a Commonwealth Games village. So we took the campaign to Edinburgh where the current Games were taking place and said well, quite literally, people's houses were being demolished for the next Games. We didn't want them in Melbourne. So that caused a bit of a panic amongst the other Commonwealth countries. That was successful.
The Carlton Association first became involved in freeways in 1971 when our local M. P., David Bornstein, found a map on the Parliamentary Library table. It was for a freeway from the corner of Nicholson Street and Princes Street right up to the other side of the High School, tipping the top of the cemetery and going diagonally up to the Sarah Sands. It was a little unfortunate for the C.R.B. that practically half of Melbourne University's Town Planning Department lived in this area and they were well motivated to fight. There weren't many planning experts around then but plenty of engineers, who knew how to build roads and bulldoze houses. Anyhow these town planners got out this report on freeways, and this freeway in particular. None of the parliamentarians knew anything about freeways. They knew a good one up the Tullamarine, they all thought they were good and they didn't really know anything apart from that. And this document we produced was in fact the basis for the Parliamentary debate. And then it came out that in places like the Road Construction Authority and the Melbourne City Council, engineers were making all these plans without reference to anyone! They were building these bits of freeways along creekbeds without anyone thinking about what was the overall cost in joining them up. No thought was given to the fact that they would have to demolish hundreds of houses. It was calculated some years ago (it's probably double that now) that it would have cost ten billion dollars, to complete the freeway network the engineers had devised. In other words, it was completely out of any economic possibility.
Anti freeway demonstration, Rathdowne Street.
An example of our tactics was one action we took over the railway land dispute. Negotiations with Kimberly Clark took place down at the Union office. We had all these big piles of paper. On top of each, the first ten sheets, were posters 'Kids Before Kleenex', and we announced that these would be handed out at supermarkets all round Melbourne.
We hadn't really printed all of them. Most of them were all blank paper but the Managing Director wasn't to know that. We threatened we would have people handing them out and you can imagine what that would have done to their product. Kimberly Clark climbed down immediately. That was a decisive factor, frightening the Manager Director of Kleenex the Storemen and Packers' Union pulling the rug from under them and so forth.
I suppose the other major campaign would be Royal Parade, enforcing the two storey building limit. That's why Royal Parade is like it is today and St Kilda Road is a real mess. The first fight was over Deloraine Terrace. One Sunday morning we had a ring from someone who said that there were men trying to demolish the place, taking cast iron and that sort of thing. We rang the police. The men were arrested and duly charged under the Historic Buildings Act which had come in. A lot of that came out of the Carlton Association. Eventually the place had a black ban put on it. It's been renovated and is one of the nicest terraces in Royal Parade. Then the two storey limit came after that. It was part of the Loy Yan (the big strikes at Loy Yan) settlement. You may think it disconnected but the unions were involved in both.
The union bans were very, very effective in those days. If the site was black, nobody would go near it. That was how the Victoria Market was saved and also the City Baths. They were both saved by Norm Gallagher. Today if you said to someone 'demolish the Victoria market', they would hold up their hands in horror. Well, when we became involved there, they wanted to put up an Inter continental hotel and demolish the whole thing.
There is always continual pressure when you've got people with money. They think they can use public land for practically no cost. Irresistible: that's why you need organisations like the Carlton Association to bring forward another view and to stop the rape of the parkland going on.
Thompson, Hardy and Gallagher, at the Nth. Carlton Railway land