We were originally from New Zealand. I had been a post graduate student at Cambridge University since 1961. We came to Carlton in 1965. We had lived in New York for a year where I had been commuting, and I was determined not to commute again. Because I was working at Melbourne University, therefore, my initial reason for coming to Carlton was quite simple. We were looking for a place where I didn't have to travel very far to work. At first we didn't see it as anything more than temporary.
The first impression when we moved here came from some old friends whom we initially stayed with. They told us that some people were being very daring moving into the inner suburbs. They showed us one house in Amess Street that some friends had moved into. I remember my initial impression was, that it didn't seem quite right for us because the area looked a bit rundown. Then I found this other place to rent, rather dilapidated but opposite a park so that made it seem acceptable. But once we'd been here a while and absorbed the atmosphere in Carlton we simply got to like it.
We were a little different from many of the people we met as we had come from New Zealand after some years in New York, and prior to that in England, and we had never been in Melbourne before. So the contacts we built up were with the people who lived around us, mostly professional people who had recently moved in. A lot of them were working at the University as well. We liked the parks and could appreciate the streetscape and the old houses.
When I helped start the Carlton Association, the active people in the Association were largely professional people. There were obvious reasons for that. They were the ones best equipped to be articulate on issues and had contacts, knew whom to lobby in government. But there was always wide spread support from the whole population. Pensioners in particular often said, 'We always thought this; we're glad you're doing it, we agree with you.' The migrants were a little harder to involve directly, because many who came to Carlton wanted to stay here only until they could go somewhere better. However a few migrants who had been here a long time were sometimes involved and they always supported us. They would join in a large demonstration. The whole cross section of the community would be there on those occasions.
Students actually were not often interested, because the initial problem that we were concerned with was the Housing Commission and that seemed an issue of preserving the old housing stock, the streetscape and the Victorian atmosphere of the place. The students, although politicised, really didn't see these as major world wide concerns. They were more concerned with foreign policy and anti nuclear campaigns. In addition they were transitory, and saw local problems as very low level kinds of issues.
At first many people's involvement in resident action was a personal thing. They liked Carlton and people just wanted to keep it that way, or in the case of the schools they wanted to change things make the schools better. Similarly in the case of traffic control. At one stage there was a potential threat of the traffic density building up to a point where it became unbearable. So you wanted to change that pattern. You can see the roundabouts and street closures that have gone in, which are designed to reduce traffic. So there was a protective feeling for the area where people themselves lived which was wide spread amongst all cross sections of the permanent residents.
But as it went along these problems attracted attention throughout Melbourne and Victoria because they crystalised into major issues, like the Housing Commission one. It didn't just become the question, 'Should the Housing Commission build on this block in Carlton?' It soon became, 'Should the Housing Commission be building these high rise ghettos at all?' And that was the way we fought it in the end. We didn't say, 'We want to save Carlton.' We fought it as much on the grounds that the Housing Commission, that was supposedly providing low cost housing for people who needed it, was not doing it the right way, and that these high rise buildings were becoming slums. In fact now the Commission themselves buy old housing stock to renovate, so in the end they accepted our argument.
The freeway issue too was another which started off as just a simple concern that people's houses were in the path of the projected freeway and they didn't want that. But when we came to fight it we realised the issue was not, 'Should it be here or should it be in the next suburb?' It was, 'Should there be inner city freeways at all?' You can't fight it by saying that you would rather the freeway was in Brunswick than here. The same concerns apply to the Brunswick people as to us. The freeway had to be fought on major, general, grounds. 'How do you control traffic in a large city? 'Should there be freeways for commuters?' In order to fight the freeway we had to go into a much larger framework.
It was the railway land which first brought the unions into our streets in a fully committed way. The railway land is beside a defunct railway line, just to the north of Carlton. At the time it was used as a dumping ground by the railways, and there were trains which ran through once or twice a day, carrying goods. But this large block of land had lain vacant. The long campaign to get the land into the hands of the Council so it could be turned into a park, was carried out initially by Fred Hardy, one of the Councillors representing this area. Then we learnt that Kimberly Clark intended to erect a huge warehouse for Kleenex tissues, almost covering the whole site. Fred Hardy, being a member of the Labor Party, had contacts with the unions. He said, 'I think I can get the unions to put a ban on this.' So he was the one who brought the unions in.
Initially, it didn't seem a big deal. The unions came along and said, 'Sure, we will help you out.' But the developer decided to tackle the unions front on instead of negotiating with them. He tried to build this warehouse by starting at five o'clock in the morning and by passing them. I think this really got the unions' backs up, and they came in a big way. Then once they ran on that issue, of course, it became very straightforward to seek their support on other issues too. It's very interesting that this was the start of the green bans, which are usually associated with Sydney. At one time the National Trust and the unions had quite a connection, more specifically the builders' labourers as they were the union most directly involved. They had bans on any sites throughout Melbourne to protect historic buildings. The unions had a genuine concern, they believed in the issues. They supported parks and not warehouses, but they were also in it for their own ends. That was a key factor as far as the Carlton Association was concerned. It meant, essentially, that we bought time. It was the same with the freeways. While the ban was on we had a chance to argue the case.
Actually the very first union involvement was not with the railway land, but it was with the Housing Commission. The first black ban was placed on the Lee Street block. The unions did have a black ban on that, again through Fred Hardy. That was more or less simultaneous with the black ban on the railway land. But it didn't achieve the right profile that the black ban on the railway land achieved because it was never directly contested by the Housing Commission. The Commission was prepared to negotiate with the unions over a period of time, whereas on the railway land the developer tried to build anyway, so it became an open involvement.
Carlton has changed now, but not as much a some people would say. Because our activism to improve the environment was successful, property values have risen. The earlier professionals who moved in were the poorer professionals, especially academics, whereas now successful doctors and lawyers are buying the substantial homes. Old age pensioners are affected, and it's more difficult for poorer migrants to move in. But with the University and hospitals close by, the transitory population of people like students and nurses is still quite high. It remains a very mixed community, both in terms of the range of occupations people pursue, and the mix of nationalities. The local school still has the biggest range of nationalities of any school in Victoria. Carlton still has a village atmosphere about it, an the feeling that it is a pleasant community with many different things going on and an interesting variety of people.