In the early 1960s I was a student at RMIT and the University. Like so many others I came to Carlton because of the necessity to find some central cheap accommodation, which was plentiful then. I was from the country and very fearful of city life. I'd been told the city was a terrible place where nobody spoke to anybody, where you never even got to know your neighbours. But I found exactly the opposite. People living in terrace houses in Macarthur Square found it impossible to avoid each other. The tiny backyards were usually full of rubbish. People sat on their front doorsteps and talked to one another, everyone helped each other. Macarthur Square at that stage was very unfashionable, and there was the sense of camaraderie about how everyone else saw this as the least desirable address in Melbourne. It was the cheapest address and a house here was under $2,000; a house in the outer suburbs was $14,000, so for less than one seventh of the price you could live in Carlton. But the whole area was under threat and everybody knew it had no future. Despite that it provided a very convenient and inexpensive place for migrants when they stepped off the boat to establish themselves. It was a very exciting and interesting little village, and I thought it was fantastic. I loved it.
You certainly got to know your neighbours quickly. One reason obviously was the site size. Many houses had twelve foot frontages which were narrower than the suburban driveway. People just had to acknowledge and talk to the people who leant on the fence when they went to the corner store. But also the common sense of an enemy brought people together. It might sound strange because it was devastating to have the 'urban renewal' programme going through bulldozing Carlton, but at the same time it brought a sense of community, bringing together people from all walks of life. The migrant presence was very strong. I can remember the little pulleys with rope that migrants purchased at the hardware store. They would run their washing out to the elm trees in the middle of the Square. There were small disputes with people about washing dripping on to cars, all good humoured. It was almost a European atmosphere the bright colour schemes that suddenly appeared, so the drabness of the inner suburbs was quickly remedied by a cheap can of bright pink or bright blue from the hardware store, which later was a matter for some derision by Anglo Saxons. Migrants saw something here that they could not get in their homeland but which they could quickly acquire in Australia.
After Jan and I married, we bought a house in Princes Street for a very small amount of money from an elderly gentleman, and found out we had been hoodwinked. He was already aware that there was a Housing Commission order on it. We blamed ourselves and the fact that we didn't have any money to get a solicitor. Our first house, then, was taken from us, demolished, and we were given about one fifth of what we paid for it. It was a very minimal amount of money but to us it was literally everything. I remember not being able to eat for a couple of days every now and then, and it was pretty tough.
We then borrowed some money from parents and bought a second house in Princes Street. That one in turn was given a Housing Commission order which was delivered like the black cross during the plague in medieval times, because they would come and paste a large sticker on the front door which said that your house had been declared unfit for human habitation and you must vacate it immediately. Further, if you did not demolish it, it would be demolished at cost and the bill sent to you. I remember coming home from work at that stage, having just commenced employment and finding Jan crying her eyes out in the bedroom from seeing this on the front door and receiving the registered mail. Our parents certainly thought we were mad, and had warned us against living in this terrible slum area, but we had persuaded them that this place had a future. Now we had lost our money, our reassurance to our parents, our house again. It left us distraught, and we took some time to recover. But it made me even more determined to see the area survive, because I knew so many of the people had accepted their fate, not because they weren't fighters but just because they had been worn down by it all. Many of them were getting into their twilight years and really didn't want to have to start all over again elsewhere. The migrants felt that the whole thing was targeted at them, that the only reason this area was being demolished was that it was a stronghold of migrants, who were seen as second class citizens, 'wogs' and 'dagos'.
We then bought a little house in Neil Street, an unsuccessful brothel as it turned out. It was threatened with police raids daily and was up for sale. We could, for £100 deposit, no interest, (these are vendor terms), £18 a week and a total price of £900, buy a house. It seemed unbelievable that over a period of eighteen months we could pay it off, with no interest and no requirements whatsoever to prove our securities. To us it was the absolute palace of palaces because it was close to the city and convenient. I did something which at that stage almost turned everybody's heads. I began to renovate the house. 'Don't waste your money, son', was the advice from the elders in the street. The area was immensely depressed. One in three houses at that time had no front door, was open and all the belongings strewn out all over the street. The empty houses were rat infested, derelicts slept in them at night, fires were a nightmare event. The Housing Commission adopted the tactic of sending local agents to speak to housewives, particularly migrant housewives, during the day so that they would sit there worried that all their hard work and accrued wealth, which perhaps they had not enjoyed in their own country, were going to disappear. Some migrants were convinced that if they sold early they would get a better price than if they sold later. So many people, while not actually served a summons and thrown bodily out into the street, were frightened out of their homes and we had to start a campaign to try and persuade them that they should sit tight and we would help each other. They were really worried about their own future, and who could blame them?
Yet, ironically, having said that, it was the migrants who really cranked up the academics (for want of a better name) in the community, who proposed some sort of action, like some nice planning documents or deputations to the Minister. It was at that large meeting of 600 people with standing room only in the Church of All Nations where a trembling migrant gentleman (I can see the veins standing out in his forehead now) stood up shouting 'I've been here for an hour and a half and I can't understand why you bloody Australians say you've got the lucky country. I came here to settle because it would be good for my children, and to work hard and earn a home, and if this happened in my country, which is a dictatorship, we'd be out in the streets with guns, and you just sit around here talking about deputations.' It really brought a lot of people, myself included, to think 'This is absolutely right. Why are we so passive? Why do third generations Australians assent to this, whereas we would argue that Australia was a good place because democracy was alive and well? Some people said, 'Right, let's do something very inflammatory and aggressive and get some attention.' And so we marched to Queen Street to the front of the Housing Commission offices and burned the effigy of the Minister. This was cited by security officers as a great threat to the Government of the day. Many of us who were marching were politically babes in the woods, and just exercising our right to question things as students, or young adults. But it was seen as far more serious than that by the Government. It probably started them thinking that they should take this seriously. Hence I think a lot of the deputations were given an audience and were listened to, although the Government only used it as a tactic to find out how to fight fire with fire. They changed the name from 'slum reclamation' to 'urban renewal', which seemed a nice way of dressing it up in a different way.
When residents did resist eviction, it was very physical, very violent and very nasty. We set up a telephone tree plus a door knock system for when the police came. We thought that we could bring some attention to the problem by making sure that police would not simply walk in and throw people out on the street. It would be a messy business, which would be resisted. I remember very well a pensioner in Rathdowne Street, (on the south side of the Carlton Baths), who was involved in a particularly nasty row. A row of seven terraces were vacated, vandalised, many of them set fire to we suspect a deliberate pattern of violence took place. We assisted a particular elderly woman who was being evicted from her home. She said she would be more than happy if people would support her to dig in, to stay. She did stay but the scene got very violent and she was injured. Wardrobes and dressing tables were thrown out on to the street and broke into splinters in the process. She was dragged screaming from the house, holding on to architraves and anything else she could. It took some two hours with the crowd building up, coming with whistle calls around the estate over the road and everywhere, till finally there were about 300 to 35C people there, chanting and making the police's job particularly unpleasant. They obviously just wanted to get their job done and get the hell out of there.
There was another woman in Victoria Place whc had a false leg she also refused to go and barricaded herself in. There were nasty scenes developing from that. She fell ill and had a heart attack during the whole exercise, was put in hospital and died Looters came in and stripped the house, certainly not the local people. The Housing Commission was not trading in real estate, they were trading in people's lives.
Certainly some of the old people and migrants who were forced away from their network of friends, from expanded family and public transport, became suddenly dependent when forced to other locations. Because residents trusted me, I sat through some interviews with evicted people. One fellow who moved out to the Western suburbs, was living in a bungalow behind his daughter's home He had become totally devastated by moving away from the situation where he knew everyone in the Pitt Street, Carlton street, the kids going past on the way to school, leaning on the front gate and having a chat to everyone, going to the shop over the road, getting on a tram to go to the city or medical clinic, going to see his beloved Fitzroy play and walk home again. Now this was all gone and he was totally dependent on his daughter to provide transport even to get up to the shop to buy his necessities. He felt terribly obligated, a nuisance even, and feared that he was crowding his daughter's family life. Prior to that he was in the very favourable position of owning his house outright, having no debts in the world, able to live very successfully on the pension. He was suddenly thrown into a foreign environment, too late in life to be able to make new friends. It really came home to me then that they were not just talking about losing their homes, but destroying their lives.
I suppose as an engineer involved in architectural planning I despaired of the great Australian half acre block and its isolation and its social consequences. It seemed that here there was something we should really be taking notice of, the close knit community which seems to develop where there exists a sense of place. But my motive was not just altruism, wanting to help other people; there was also an element of sheer bloody mindedness about it. Carlton suited me. I loved the location and a lot of the things whether it was Jimmy Watson's or the Victoria Market seemed to be so fascinating to me, this heaving life and activity which didn't exist in the middle and outer suburbs. It was absolutely extraordinary that someone could put you on 'Skid Row' and do so in the guise of responsible government. While I certainly sympathised with a lot of people who couldn't defend themselves, I didn't just want to be a knight in shining armour. It was something you could not walk away from once you'd got involved and seen these things happening around you. There were many times when I thought that we would never prevail, when I thought 'It's all jousting at windmills.' At the time it wasn't necessarily obvious where it was all heading. There was enormous despair.
The truth is that many people saw Carlton as fodder for the bulldozer. It was an unimportant area and as the planners said 'at the end of its useless life.' Politically slum demolition was a terribly popular cause to take up because people said the inner suburbs were slums, a visual blight on their journey from the suburbs to work in the city. This doughnut of decay around the city had to be cleaned up. While they didn't necessarily think that 20 storey precast flats were ideal, they said they were 50 times better than the slums they were replacing and that was the general attitude.
It's interesting to point out that in our block we did an exercise for which some of the figures are available for you. We had 84 people per acre living with the ability to have a pet, a bicycle, a small back yard with a kitchen window and able to see the toddlers playing in safety, some private space where you could read a book on a winter's day in a wind protected area, sunbake, you were at ground level, you had pride of ownership, a tiny garden, you had neighbours, you had a network. They'd built the high rise apartments which had none of those things. You were not allowed to have pets, not allowed to have a push bike, you were 20 floors up in the air, there was a playground where you got yelled at if you made mudpies, you couldn't make a tree house. All the basic fundamental social requirements were missing. They also realised they'd brought in one socio economic group which needed schools, so the next thing they did was to knock down the next block, which included three hotels, taking it right up to the Clare Castle Hotel, and this became the Neil Street Primary School. When they finished knocking that down they realised they needed a carpark so they knocked down further areas and the only building that was then saved was the Woolpack Hotel in Princes Street. This shows the order of their priorities, that they put people in despairing conditions and gave them a hotel to drink at, the only building that they maintained as a social centre. By the time they'd finished those exercises and claimed Neil Street and Drummond Street and closed them down, they finished up with 78 people per acre, which is six people less than in the original housing, but the tenants didn't have all of those assets. That argument became enormously persuasive in the eventual goal. It was costing $18,000 to build a high rise apartment, without land reclamation costs, but you could buy a terrace house over the road for $2,000. Had the Housing Commission bought up those and renovated them they obviously would have been millions and millions of dollars in front, and had more people per acre.
Then of course the F19 Freeway brought a new freeway threat to our door. I remember spending a night in the City Watch House. (Had it not been for John Howie bailing me out that night I would never have been allowed, because of the law, to become Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne.) We were just down there defending our rights, living in tents and doing what we could at the time. There were some 4,000 people camped on the nature strip that night. The police came down and started, without any warning, laying into all the students with batons and really beating them up. We put up the expected resistance and finished up in Russell Street for the night. That's pretty frightening. It was probably much more frightening to me than any of the other battles because I really didn't believe until then that the police would use that kind of show of force and, without provocation, such violent action. That was the mid seventies, not long ago.
If I were asked to rate Norm Gallagher's role in saving Carlton, on a scale of one to ten I'd have to give him ten, because without that kind of muscle there were no legal rights and it seemed no political rights, because there was a well entrenched Liberal Party in government and an uncoordinated and disjointed Labor Party which never looked like gaining power or even exerting some pressure on the Government of the day. Worse still, the Labor Opposition agreed with a lot of the views about the slum reclamation, which is extraordinary given where their power base was.
So, we were saved by Norm Gallagher's agreeing to come in and put a black ban on, as distinct from the green bans in Sydney. Norm Gallagher's approach was certainly not necessarily about conservation at the time. In hindsight it can be seen to be one of the best possible steps towards some sanity in the conservation arguments. But at the time he was certainly supporting people who were disadvantaged in society and needed some assistance. There was very little in it for their own members to gain in the way of work and jobs. They saved everything from the City Baths, the Regent Theatre, the railway land, the Lothian Terrace which was a big battleground in Drummond Street between Grattan and Queensbury, the battle on Deloraine Terrace on Royal Parade, whole rows of houses in Canning Street just short of Elgin Street. The Builders' Labourers were quite powerful then and of course Norm Gallagher had to pay quite a high price himself. He finished up in gaol and was knocked around, physically abused, shots were fired, there were attempted hit runs in the street. It was a pretty nasty battle. I think if you cited many of the things now, people would probably look at you a little incredulously and say 'That couldn't happen, not in Australia.' It was a pretty nasty period.
Now there are 46 homes in Carlton renovated by the Commission. I would defy any people to go around that area and say that is a Ministry of Housing house, that is Housing Commission. Quite rightly they are integrated into the streets and integrated into the society. The tenants have neighbours like you and I do, and are not identified as being over there on a high rise estate. So that is immensely gratifying, seeing that. It happens throughout Victoria, but it started here in Carlton.