Shelter from the Storm: Bryan Brown, Samoan Chieftains and the Little Matter of a Roof over Our Heads

Mayu Kanamori

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Siobhán McHugh is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. The Snowy, about the people who built the Snowy Mountains scheme, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 1990 and became a radio series and television documentary. Minefields and Miniskirts, a book and a radio series, features the untold stories of Australian women in the Vietnam War. Cottoning On investigates the environmental and social changes wrought by the cotton industry. Among her many other achievements, Siobhán was co-writer of a television documentary, Echo of a Distant Drum, and an international television series, The Irish Empire. She lives in Balmain in Sydney.

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Shelter from the Storm

Bryan Brown, Samoan chieftains and the little matter of a roof over our heads

Siobhán McHugh

ALLEN & UNWIN in conjunction with the NSW Federation of Housing Associations

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Copyright © Siobhán McHugh & the NSW Federation of Housing Associations 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 1999 Allen & Unwin 9 Atchison Street, St Leonards NSW 1590 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Shelter from the storm: Bryan Brown, Samoan chieftains and the little matter of a roof over our heads. ISBN 1 86508 160 4. 1. Housing—Australia. 2. Public housing—Australia. 3. Australians—Interviews. 4. Minorities—Australia— Interviews. I. McHugh, Siobhán. II. NSW Federation of Housing Associations. 363.50994 Set in 10.5/13.5 pt Goudy by Midland Typesetters Pty Ltd, Maryborough Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney

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Contents Preface

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

1 A Samoan Symphony: The People of Proctor Way, Claymore 1 2 Pretend Mum: Toni Haywood 22 3 A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood: Bryan Brown 29 4 Hate Street: Cooremah Housing Company 39 5 Poor Little Princess: Jean Cinis

47

6 Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies: Emoh Ruo Co-op 7 A Ghetto it Wasn’t: John Alexander

77

8 I’d Rather Live in a Caravan: Annette Seymour 9 Goodbye Saddam: Emad and Hashem

107

11 Sarajevo to City West: Susie Jeftic

120

12 A Hard Nut to Crack: Kath Rogers

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99

10 Daceyville Days: Margaret Gleeson

127

13 High Hopes in a High-rise: Jennie George 14 Family Matters: Tom Slockee

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139

146

15 Kidney and Car Wanted: Sharon Petrie

153

16 How Green Was My Valley: Mark Latham 161 17 Elderly Rebels: Van Lang Co-op

171

18 Rainbow’s End: Nimbin Young Adults

182

19 Running from the Rent Man: Jennifer Westacott 20 A Place to Belong: Siobhán McHugh

191

201

Notes 211 Index

212

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Preface

In 1997, Joan Ferguson, then Executive Director of the NSW Federation of Housing Associations, decided to commission a book about people in public and community housing. Years of meeting tenants had made her realise what a colourful, diverse bunch they were, their lives so much more interesting and complex than the stereotyped image in the media. But the book was no indulgence. It made good business sense: if people knew who the recipients were, and how and why they lived there, they would then appreciate the purpose and benefits of social housing. Widespread public support might then halt the continuing decline in government funding for the sector. Because of my varied background in oral history, I was approached to record the interviews and write them up. I was to select a wide range of past or present tenants, of different ages, viewpoints, social and cultural backgrounds and geographical locations, in diverse public and community housing situations. A few of them should be well-known figures. All of the interviews were to focus on personal stories. Otherwise I had carte blanche, full editorial freedom and creative control. I was immediately interested—it was an unmapped area and I would meet an eclectic array of people. But I was also attracted by how universal the topic was: the fundamental human need for shelter. When I started interviewing people, I was surprised and moved by their candour. Their unflinching openness about their mistakes and misfortunes and their hard-won insights are illuminating for us all.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks first and foremost to Joan Ferguson, former Executive Director of the NSW Federation of Housing Associations. Without her strong commitment, the book could not have happened. She is in turn grateful to her mother, Alison Ferguson, for fostering her passion for social justice. Thanks also to the State Council of the NSW Federation of Housing Associations; to Eleri Morgan-Thomas, Estelle Lohman, Cassandra Thorne, Wendy Rockwell, Elizabeth Matka and Michael Stewart at the Federation; and to Phillipa Bellemore and Kim Roberts for help in the early stages. Shelley Barwick has been a conscientious and efficient transcriptionist, whose warm feedback I value. Liz Warren generously provided expert technical advice on everything from tape recorders to configuring a new computer. In researching and arranging the interviews, I have had the enthusiastic support of numerous people, including Brian Murnane and all the staff at Argyle Community Housing; Karine Shellshear at ARCH; Anh Tran at Fairfield Community Health Centre; Eloise Murphy at City West; Mary Hanoun-Killa of the NSW Ecumenical Council; Leslie Wyatt at Hume Housing; Phil Thornton; Fran Hopkins at North Coast Community Housing; Bobbie Townsend of the Women’s Housing Company; and Di Campbell at Pacific Link. For financial support, thanks to the NSW Department of Housing, the Uniting Church 2 per cent for Development Committee of the Board of Social Responsibility, the Association to Resource Co-operative Housing, and Shelter NSW.

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Shelter from the Storm Portrait photographs tell their own stories and Mayu Kanamori, Rhys Roberts, John Tregurtha and Monica Wolf have added another dimension to the book with their powerful visual interpretations. Thanks to David Marr for permission to quote from his George Munster Lecture on editors. Many thanks also to publisher John Iremonger for his faith in the topic, which could not have had anything to do with his own public housing background in Villawood, and to Colette Vella and Mary Rennie for their thoughtful and meticulous editing. Thanks to our celebrity subjects, John Alexander, Bryan Brown, Jennie George and Mark Latham, for outing their modest origins. And finally, sincerest thanks to everyone interviewed for being willing to talk about the hard times. May your days of adversity be few.

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1 A Samoan Symphony The People of Proctor Way, Claymore

After the prayer meeting we walk around and sing a little bit . . . then we do our patrolling round . . . look for troublemakers, give them a word of advice . . . we come back about midnight and do the singing again and then at about a quarter to one we sing our independence song. —Chief Maik Tuisila

In 1996, a Samoan chief called Maik Tuisila approached Macarthur Community Tenancy Scheme with a strange request. He wanted to be housed in ‘the worst street’ on the notorious Claymore Housing Estate in Campbelltown, in Sydney’s south west. Brian Murnane, from Macarthur, had no difficulty acceding. Twenty-five houses in Proctor Way had lain vacant since five people were killed in a house fire in the street in October 1995, the culmination of protracted violence, drinking and feuding. Claymore had many problems, including a 52 per cent unemployment rate, but Proctor Way was the pits. Even with two decades’ experience of working with the homeless and down and out, Brian Murnane was taken aback when he first visited the street in late 1995. It was virtually out of control—a no-go area. There were some people with a number of problems, having difficulties, and they used to sit out here and have drinking parties. There was a fire going and you wouldn’t have walked through. . . it was intimidating. I don’t know whether they would have done anything to you or not—depends on how much alcohol they

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Shelter from the Storm had consumed at the time. The house fires were like a safety valve that blew . . . four houses in the street burned down in a month. And with all the media attention and focus on it from the Department of Housing and others, there was a mass exodus.

Maik Tuisila was one of those reading the newspaper reports. Perturbed by suggestions that Pacific Islanders were prominently involved in the disturbances, he decided to intervene. I have seen the paper, a lot of criticising, saying too many troublemakers around here . . . they break and enter and steal things . . . and the media says, ‘It seems a Samoan, it seems a Tongan’ . . . A lot of problems used to be here. That’s the reason why I decided to come and live here.

Chief Maik Tuisila traces his lineage back to the four royal families of Samoa. Like many of his people, he headed west, first to New Zealand and then Australia, in pursuit of better opportunities. His royal pedigree did not count for much in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl where he taught high school accountancy. An adaptable type, he’s also driven taxis, trucks and, for a time, the Sydney Red Explorer bus. Unlike many Islanders, he is not a large man, and at sixty-something, he seems a rather unthreatening figure for a self-appointed vigilante. But Maik has two powerful forces to draw on: the backing of fellow Samoan elders in the area, some of them of formidable physique, and an unassailable belief that he is divinely protected in his mission to keep the peace. I never had a fear about the violence . . . I was relying on our Heavenly Father for the inspiration and protection . . . and the good personal feelings in dealing with the public round here . . . Fifteen of us Samoans, we walking around . . . so the people they can look at us and they are afraid to do anything because the amount of people walking around, probably they will come and tell them off . . . If we see anyone committing a crime we straight away advise the police, because that’s what we have been told.

Maik’s Neighbourhood Watchdogs are nothing like the vigilantes who have appeared in the rougher urban communities of the USA. No civilian commandos or red-bereted guerillas here, just fifteen men aged 30 to 60-something, shining torches here and there as they amble around the streets and across the reserve. Their activities are not without ritual. Each patrol begins and ends with singing, sometimes a cappella, sometimes with one or two guitars

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A Samoan Symphony along, always with sublime harmonising of evangelical songs from the various denominations to which these Samoan Australians belong: Assembly of God, Latter Day Saints, Emmanuel Fellowship, Seventh Day Adventist. After midnight, the group signs off with a stirring rendition of the Samoan national anthem. But though Maik confesses they sometimes make up the words to it—‘just for fun’—this choir has a serious intent. ‘We are singing there as protection for the community’, he explains. ‘So when the troublemakers come around, they hear the people are there, and won’t be coming back.’ When he started living there, Maik discovered that ‘Fijians, lot of Tongans, Samoans and Polynesians’ were indeed implicated in crime in the area. ‘The media on one stakes was dead right.’ But the Islanders’ prominent involvement may just have reflected their high numbers on the estate, which caters for many migrants who have arrived in the last twenty years. Built in 1977, Claymore is a textbook example of a disastrous experiment in public housing. Instead of a reasonable social mix of age, wealth and household type, it is a concentrated cluster of the severely disadvantaged. Single-parent families occupy almost half of the 1000 homes. Almost half of the 4000 odd residents are under fifteen, only 1 per cent being over 65. Almost half the individuals of working age live on less than $250 a week. Unemployment is four times the rate for the Campbelltown area and nearly six times the national average. With poverty and unemployment come social problems like drug and alcohol abuse, violence and crime. Over half of 652 Claymore residents surveyed in 1997 were afraid to leave their homes due to possible burglary. Although 42 per cent of mothers of young children said they felt at home there, 54 per cent of them still wanted to move. Isolation and a dearth of amenities and services compound the difficulties. As a crime deterrent, the Watchdogs’ unlikely musical strategy appears to work. Police records for March 1997 to April 1998 show a 30 per cent drop in crime in Claymore that year, with only 7 per cent of the malicious damage and break-and-enter offences occurring in the three streets most assiduously patrolled by the Samoans. The improvement also reflects the community-building activities of Macarthur CTS. But why whould the attentions of these courtly chiefs prove so persuasive? Is there some hidden menace to their ministrations? Paepae Fomai, who moved into Proctor Way in 1997, sees no mystery in it. ‘Samoans might just look like giants to the troublemakers’, she says.

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Shelter from the Storm ‘But I sincerely think that because we have got faith in the Lord, they see something in us that scares them.’ .... Kylie Evans (13), Angelyne Tutu (10) and Joseph Nunes (14), at Claymore Neighbourhood Centre. Nearly half the 4000

The Claymore Youth Club building is a low pavilion alongside the grim, barbed-wire enclosed shopping centre. Inside, it’s a raucous world of teenage exuberance and the clack of billiard balls. Roger, the youth worker, is the only white face. Lisa is sixteen, a big girl with a beautiful shy smile. Her parents came here from Samoa in search of a better life. She’s happy living at Claymore, wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

residents of the Claymore

We all get along. We meet up in the afternoon, because every single one

estate are under fifteen,

of us has to do jobs in the house [after school]. Once it’s all finished we

but there are fewer

come on down to the youth centre or the shops and just hang out, tell

playgrounds than on

everyone about our day, just blah, blah, blah, chat and that. At night we

private housing

go for walks trying to get fit, we don’t let anyone see us during the day,

developments nearby.

pride and that, that’s why we always go at night, just walk around and get

(Mayu Kanamori)

4

some exercise . . .

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A Samoan Symphony I got jumped one night because I was walking home from my friend’s party trying to look for my mate, because, like, she ran off and I had to go and get her because, like, she was only fourteen . . . I was just walking through the streets and I just got jumped from, like, a big guy. He just grabbed me, you know, like normal guys just grab you. They want this, they want that. He was drunk, like, I could smell the alcohol on him . . . I started crying and I just ran to the party and told my brothers. It was all right, because they took me home. I just got over it. I just had a little bruise. That’s it. I was only young then. But now it’s all right because I know everyone.

One of Lisa’s brothers is a mechanic and the other is looking for a job. Lisa is in year eleven and knows exactly what she wants to do. She giggles nervously at the thought of it. I really want to be a fashion designer, because I love designing. I can’t really sew because my fingers get stuck with the needle, or pinched or something . . . but my little mate, I design them, like, for formals and that, and she sews. She wears it herself so it’s all right. I love art. But I don’t know if I could make it . . . If I do graduate, I’m going to be the first person to graduate in my generation . . . It’s hard though, because you’ve got to balance your schoolwork, you got your Church stuff and, like, home, and try to have some fun, hang out with your friends . . . But you’ve got a lot of pressure from your parents to graduate so you can get a better job than just become one of these factory workers.

For a supposed dead-end place, some of these kids have high aspirations. Ivan, another teenager at the youth club, is considering university. What I’m going to do, I don’t really know. I think I want to be a teacher . . . but in a couple of weeks I’ll probably want to be a lawyer, something like that . . . I live with my mum, my brother and my sister and no father and I’ve been living in Claymore approximately twelve years. I was born in Mozambique. Our family moved here when I was two . . . I think it was all that war and stuff . . . [my mum] wanted to find a better life, a fresh start, so she moved to Australia and it really helped a lot. I can walk around Claymore any time, in the night, in the morning— it’s fine. If people don’t want to say hello to you they don’t. If they say hello, you say hello back and that’s okay.

....

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Shelter from the Storm Walking seems to be the dominant theme at Claymore. The Samoan elders traverse the estate all evening as benign vigilantes. Meanwhile their children and grandchildren are endlessly patrolling their own boundaries. To the uninitiated, both groups could appear quite menacing. Chris, a very big fourteen-year-old of Samoan background, gets angry at the way people stereotype him and his mates. We walk everywhere at night, just for exercise and that, and people probably think we are looking for trouble . . . sometimes, if we’re walking by the road, people will shine high beams at us. We hate it when people do that— they should mind their own business. And, like, everyone gets really ticked off and that, and then they’ll start taking out their anger on throwing stuff at houses and that. Some of us try to stop them, but can’t, that’s it. We’re not up to trouble. But if we go to a place, people stare at us. They will keep on staring at us. Some of my friends, they’ve got short tempers, they’ll say something, then they probably get us kicked out of the shopping centre. But we’re just there hanging around, meeting friends, probably play some basketball and then go home.

One reason why half of Claymore seems to be constantly on the move is that there’s hardly anywhere inviting to sit down. Claymore shopping centre looks like a concentration camp, and whereas most small parks in Sydney have benches, and bigger ones have picnic tables and a barbecue area, the huge grass reserve behind Proctor Way was, until recently, an eerily uncolonised space. Its location, behind instead of in front of the houses, is one of the many design aspects of the estate that militate against social cohesion. Claymore was built to the Radburn plan, a radical American design that inverts the normal practice of having houses front onto the road. Instead, the houses face onto a vast public open space, and are interconnected by narrow pedestrian walkways. The backyards of the houses adjoin a garage, situated on enclosed streets or ‘ways’. Residents effectively have no sense of having a front yard or entrance area. Their privacy is limited because the houses are closely built at split level. Their backyards are tiny, because the expanse of green out front is supposed to compensate as a common recreational area. But as Brian Murnane found when he came to Claymore in late 1995, the reality is very different. It was a no-man’s-land, a dumping-ground, an area that nobody had any sense of ownership of. The children didn’t play there because there was too

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A Samoan Symphony much rubbish and broken bottles, it was too dangerous . . . People with drug problems would come and do break and enters and then could run and hide in amongst the trees because they were all scrub and rubbish.

One of the first initiatives undertaken by Brian Murnane and the Samoan community was the reclamation of the reserve. Over seventeen tonnes of rubbish were removed and the trees cleared of undergrowth to deter loiterers. A large area nearest the houses has now been transformed into a spectacular communal garden. Taro, that starchy Samoan staple, naturally dominates, but banana plants, sugar cane, paw paw and even tobacco also feature, along with more conventional fare: broad beans, tomatoes, potatoes, silver beet. Two Josephite nuns who moved into Proctor Way to provide childminding and literacy support have added a frivolous touch—masses of pink daisies—but for Chief Tuisila and the Samoans, the primary purpose of the plantation is practical rather than aesthetic. That garden is not just a garden. It’s our eating stuff. We eat those things! Save us a lot of money. That’s the reason I’m very fond of and interested

Chief Maik Tuisila, wearing a suit for his day job as a court interpreter, in front of the spectacular communal garden he helped to plant. Maik is one of ‘50 to 60’ Samoan chiefs on the Claymore housing estate. By night, the elders patrol Proctor Way, singing beautiful harmonies to deter ‘troublemakers’. Police records show that crime has dropped 30 per cent in a year—but the neighbours now complain about the singing. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm in doing that. I keep on telling people, not only the Samoans but the Tongans, the Fijians, the Chinese, all the people around this area, when this garden is ready, we are all sharing it. I’m a sociable person. Whoever walks by near my garden, I always say, ‘Hi, how are you, where are you off to?’ Some of the people, when I say ‘Hi’, they just walk straight past, but next time when they walk back I say ‘Hi’ and they say ‘Hi’. I’m not a troublemaker. I’m just a person doing the garden there for the welfare of the people.

The doomsayers warned Brian Murnane the garden would have to be enclosed and supervised or it would be trashed. It is now in its fifth year of production, unfenced and thriving. An army of volunteers tends it, composting and mulching, weeding and watering. There is no set procedure for distributing the produce. Brian has witnessed the odd local break off a few stalks of silverbeet on the way home for dinner. Others operate in extended family groups, looking after and harvesting a particular strip. ....

Paepae Fomai (‘call me Pie’) and her seven children tend one section of the garden on behalf of the Emmanuel Christian Fellowship, which is led by her husband. Three generations of family and friends gather most evenings for a pre-dinner prayer meeting and singing session in the converted backyard at Pie’s home. There’s a tarp to keep out the rain, lots of sofas and carpet underfoot, plus a power point to amplify the lone electric guitar played by Pie’s son. But this music is about blended voices: a traditional form of Delilah, a melodious Hold My Hand. The Reverend Fomai, whose huge bulk makes Pavarotti look slight, weighs in with a deep baritone. His father’s voice lighter, Maik Tuisila falls in the middle and Paepae provides a sweet, true counterpoint. The older kids join in with gusto, the teenagers a bit self-consciously. Paepae reminds them what it’s all about. ‘The Lord said to Joshua . . . lead the people, go and walk around Jericho six times and the seventh time, you will blow the horn and those gates will just come down, through praising the Lord. And it did happen— the Bible says so.’ The voices mingle and soar, a transcendental outpouring of faith, hope and shared humanity. The singers are soulful, but not transported. A woman quietens a child without missing a beat, toddlers wander through the crowd munching chips. There is no writhing on the ground

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A Samoan Symphony in religious ecstasy, none of the performance associated with some Charismatic or Pentecostalist gatherings. Just twenty people sitting on old sofas under a tarp on a grimy estate, singing their hearts out. Unfortunately, the neighbours were not impressed. They used to complain, ring the cops on us. I talked to a couple of families—when they partied, they had their music going sky high, and they were smashing windows and throwing things . . . I said, we understand. If you party, it’s no problem to us, it’s your thing. But when we sing it’s not as if we’re fighting or drinking. We are just praising the Lord. When the cops came by, we said we are not partying up large or doing drugs or anything—so they said it was all right.

Although her husband holds the title, Pie is the spokesperson for the group. She is articulate and forthright, and unswerving in her commitment to the Lord. Religion informs everything in her life. ‘It’s a thing we know we must do, worship the Lord. It doesn’t matter what fellowship. Praising the Lord is our main aim.’ Like Maik, Pie’s indomitable faith gives her confidence in situations that would daunt others. Like when we first arrived, our fourth week here, our car just got burnt right in front of our front door . . . they came back to make sure it was alight. We had people throwing rocks . . . that’s how bad it was. We heard before we came it was a really bad place but we thought coming with the name of the Lord, we can probably help the situation . . . through praising most of the time. When we first came, the house on the other side, they used to have fireworks any time of the year—the really loud ones that sounded like bombs. One of the men that lived there worked where they make fireworks, so he brings them home and they’d just do it every night . . . and when the cops came down, they don’t arrest anyone because they can’t find anyone in the house. All the neighbours were really annoyed. One girl had to start work at five in the morning and her mum said she would cry because she couldn’t sleep—the fireworks were going into her bedroom until the early hours of the morning. We were under here hoping the things won’t fall on the house and burn it down—that’s mostly what we were worried about. We moved here in November and by Christmas week we were sick of it. So we thought, we will go to the Lord with prayer to get help that this will stop . . . so we went to the Lord and in one week that family shifted out.

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Shelter from the Storm Paepae Fomai and part of her extended family, under the tarp they've rigged up in the backyard to accommodate their nightly musical prayer meetings. Front row, from left: sons David (9), John (4), Socratees (6), Paepae, daughter Sharlene (7) and father-inlaw Uisavali Lafai (73). Back row, from left: Fili Fomai (nephew, 15), Tatupu Lafai (niece, 16), Siu Fomai (son, 20, with headscarf), Peta Fomai (daughter, 11), Malaefono Fomai (son, 18), Taito Paita (father), Mauapi (uncle) and Austin Fomai (husband). (Mayu Kanamori)

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One of Pie’s sons is a runner with the recycling trucks that cart away Sydney’s bottles and cardboard. The other children are still at school. The Fomais left Samoa in pursuit of that universal migrant’s dream: A Better Life. Life, for the children especially, is limited in Samoa. You could go to university, come back, work in the plantation. There is not enough jobs. So our first aim was to go to New Zealand to have our children, so they can have a good future. Then we got a calling from the Lord to start our Fellowship in Australia. That’s why we shifted over here . . . my husband and I and the kids, then Mum and Dad and our extended family. Our first word to our children is that you have to believe in the Lord. That is the strongest point. And they have to live a good life—find a good job and stick to it . . . Other races, when you are 21 you are given the key to go out and enjoy your life, but to us, when you are 21, that’s opening up a life amongst the family. You are an adult, but you are still a baby to us . . . I think once they go out flatting and that, they get in all sorts of trouble.

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A Samoan Symphony Traditional Samoan attitudes are very different from those that inform the liberated lifestyle of the average teenage Australian. ‘They’re still strict on girls at home’, explains Lisa. ‘You know, ‘‘girls be home, boys do whatever’’. I’m right because my dad’s not like that. He gives us the same freedom as the guys.’ Lisa has only one real complaint about Claymore. The bad thing I hate—the drugs and that. That goes on in all the suburbs, but here everyone starts off young, the drugs, the smoking, alcohol and that. Like just little year seveners . . . Just marijuana, that’s the only drug I tried. Because there are limits. And, like, I know my limits because my brother’s always there with me . . . It’s a good feeling then, but when the buzz goes you just sit there, because you’ve still got to go home anyway to face your parents, your problems. So drugs are not the way to go. Because all my friends are kind of, like, hooked on speed or, like, coke and all that . . . I’ll just stick to my cigarettes, that’s about it.

....

It’s not hard to see why young people in Claymore are disaffected. Fourteen-year-old Chris would like better sporting facilities, while Ivan, a year older, has an even more simple request. I just think we should have more light. Like more streetlights—something new to look at. And more parks for the little kids—activity things, near the shops, around the schools—because most of the kids are just playing marbles all the time. They get pretty bored.

The public housing estates in Campbelltown have far fewer amenities than the private estates alongside. The provision of adequate playgrounds in an area teeming with kids seems elementary, but so great was the physical and psychological distance between the old-style Department of Housing and the beleagured tenants that residents’ complaints often fell into a black hole of bureaucracy. After the fatal fire in Proctor Way, the Department brought in Brian Murnane and his crew to manage the three ‘worst’ streets on a more human level. By being based right in Proctor Way rather than ensconced in the comfort of Campbelltown, the team get to know the tenants and the issues by chatting to residents on the street and engaging in the universal Claymore activity of walking around. Brian holds regular street clean-ups, when people off-load their junk into skips instead of dumping it on the reserve as before. Afterwards

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Shelter from the Storm residents cluster round the sausage sizzle and exchange gossip, ideas and have the odd whinge about how the estate is going. ‘We found that ideas come better from an informal gathering such as a barbecue than to have a meeting where you are asking people to come up with ideas to develop the community.’ Kids roll up in droves for a can of Coke and a free hot dog. The day I was there, three lively teenagers dropped in. One, an Islander, was solicitous about the small boy he was minding, finding him a drink and making sure he didn’t get onions with his sausage. Another spoke passionately of a bike track that had been removed. I asked them were they worried about crime and violence on the estate. ‘No’, said one. Had they ever witnessed any? There was a pause. Then from the ‘Anglo’ who’d done most of the talking, ‘We can’t say we haven’t done it.’ ‘Don’t be stupid mate’, cautioned his friend. ‘Don’t dob yourself in.’ But pride or naivety overcame common sense. His friend looked on in agitation as this personable fifteen-year-old described how he’d stolen a television set from a neighbour’s house the previous week and flogged it for two hundred bucks. He’d got away with it—the cops didn’t know him. What would he do with the money? It was already gone, on movies, video games, hanging out. He got another hot dog. ‘Stupid thing to do,’ he said suddenly. ‘If I could’ve went back, I would’ve. But it’s too late now.’ When I mentioned the impromptu confession to Brian Murnane, he was dismayed for the boy. If he got away with it once, he’s likely to do it again. One more bright, appealing youngster with a foot on the slippery downward slope to the Claymore stereotype. A month ago, all he wanted was a bike track. But whether or not you go on to a life of drugs and delinquency, as Chris has found, you’re already branded. People think that Claymore is bad and if you are from Claymore you are bad. I’m not bad—I don’t do all that stuff. I know people who do, but everyone is just stereotyped in Claymore. Like if we are going out for the day with friends, the police will follow us. They’ll jump on the train with us, and check us and that. Then we’ll go to Macarthur [station—near Claymore] and they will sit outside, still undercover, and then when we jump back on the train, they will jump back on with us. That’s how it is. Last night we were just hanging around behind the Claymore shops and police just pulled up and said we were trespassing . . . they go:

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A Samoan Symphony

‘If they see us there again that night, they will lock us up for trespassing.’

Malaefono Lafai (18),

And if that’s trespassing, I’m just worrying if that’s right or wrong. We just

Fili Fomai (15) and

need a chance.

Daley More (10).

We respect the elders. When they walk past we just say hello. If we

Islander teenagers, many

are sitting down in Proctor Way in a friend’s house, they will just come

of whom are built like the

over and say, ‘How are you doing, it’s all right, it’s cool, anything

proverbial brick dunny,

happening?’. We go ‘No’ and he’ll just walk away. And if he asks us to go

endlessly roam the streets

inside we would probably just go inside . . . because we don’t want to

of Claymore. Given the

make trouble.

inadequate sporting facilities, it is their way

Claymore may be a tough place to live, but at least it’s their own. Ivan and Chris walk around their ‘borders’ in much the same way as soldiers patrol a hard-won territory. Newcomers can upset the balance, says Ivan. The new people come in, they don’t know anyone, they can’t socialise very easily, so that gives them a weakness. It’s like a target . . . It’s better

of letting off steam and getting some exercise, but residents often assume that they are up to no good. (Mayu Kanamori)

if they try to talk to you . . . We’re going to say hello back. Claymore, it’s like the world in one place. It’s really cool. I like that . . . if we go out of our little area we will feel like aliens invading somewhere. Because they just look at us and say ‘Who is that?’, because

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Shelter from the Storm they’re used to their own type of people, you know, quiet people—keep to themselves in one house and know the next-door neighbours and one person down the street. For us to go there and be walking around, it wouldn’t be usual for them . . .

....

One winter, Roger and Judy at the Youth Club took a bunch of teenagers down to the snow. Chris’s friends told him what happened. ‘They told me they don’t want black people there. People kept staring at them, they didn’t like it . . . As soon as racism comes into it, everyone gets really angry.’ Besides Islanders and the odd African like Ivan, there are other black faces in Claymore. Serena, a young Aboriginal woman, lives alone, but she has cousins on the estate. Her boyfriend’s traditional bark paintings adorn the wall. He’s in prison. In the meantime, her two huge Rottweilers provide company and protection. She came here from Canberra after a series of let-downs at work and home. It was hard when my father died. We was very close. He was my best mate. He taught me a lot. After he went, I just went off on the wrong track, and done silly things—drinking a lot, no security about myself. I ended up here in Sydney and I got to the point where I thought, you know, nobody needed me . . . I went to a refuge for a little while. This is my first home. I’m very, very proud. And I feel like I’m somebody now. Hopefully I’ll have a job soon.

The area also has some classic Australian types—none more so than Charles Moore. Until 1984, Charles was a comfortably off small businessman. His service station had built up to ‘quite a considerable concern’, but the sixteen to eighteen hours a day he worked, seven days a week, inevitably took a toll. One day I collapsed and they put me in hospital with bilateral hernias and a twisted bowel et cetera . . . it took me twelve months to recuperate and of course things got a bit behind. I had borrowed $90 000 to purchase a house, but not being at that time versed in moneylending and the borrowing business, I made a mistake and let them tie the service station and all the rest of the thing together, and after being ill, when I came out of hospital, I found the thing was too far behind, I couldn’t catch up with the mortgage and they just crashed—took the house, business, everything.

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A Samoan Symphony At 62, having worked himself into the ground all his life, Charles found himself on the street. To add to the stress, his wife, Joyce, got cancer—and then his brother developed dementia. After a privately rented home fell through, Brian Murnane found Charles a home for himself and his two dependants. He still had a desperate burden. I carried the both of them . . . Joyce was in her last days, 24 hours a day I was looking after her . . . until about 1994. Which of course was traumatic, still is really, after 22 years of very close marriage, you just can’t replace that . . . And then [my brother] suffered with dementia, a veinous ulcer on one leg and a failure of the liver. I cared for him from 1990 until he died in 1997. I had to carry him physically, to wash him, clean him, toilet, everything, and that was more or less a 24-hour job because in the night I’d hear a noise, I’d have to get up and see what was happening . . Settling down here . . . at least that’s given me a bit of an uplift—some solidarity.

Charles Moore is not a man who ever wanted or expected to need charity. Deeply conscious of how Macarthur Community Tenancy Scheme supported him, he tries to repay the favour by helping out the other tenants. If something goes wrong I just fix it . . . like, for argument’s sake, if somebody has a door problem, somebody that has been intoxicated, kicked the gizzards out of it or something, I’ll fix the door up for them and while I’m there I might fix a window or move this or do something else . . . I’m technically a motor engineer, that’s what I went to the college for . . . many people come to me with their little car problems. Sometimes I get a few dollars, sometimes I just say, ‘That’s all right, see you later’ . . . because I had sufficient to go and eat and spend a few dollars if I wanted to. As long as I get something to carry on, I’m quite happy.

Now 76, Charles is far from retired. Besides keeping busy as Macarthur’s Mr Fix-It, he is learning about computers and considering a new business venture. It’s the challenge, not the profit, that drives him. The traumas of the past fifteen years have taught Charles a lot, about himself, and about life. He has developed a greater understanding of and tolerance for people he might once have dismissed as bludgers. And although he is no longer financially well off, as he once was, he knows the value of what he does have. I’m proud of the house and the way I keep it. It’s not a palace, but it’s still all right . . . it’s home and therefore I appreciate it. But being a recipient

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Shelter from the Storm of government aid, well, I’m very, very grateful—and if anybody was not grateful, there is something wrong, mentally. It’s a bottom rung of the ladder of course, but it’s established the fact that there is hope and there is opportunity there to do better. Naturally, if for argument’s sake I did do my business venture, I would notify the pension people and say, ‘Thank you very much for your help’, and then be on my own again. But I think it’s helped me in this way, that I have got around amongst a lot of people I would never have been around—unfortunate people, underprivileged people—and I can see they have really been battling. So that’s an education to me . . . I’m quite happy to be amongst them and do what I can. If anyone cares to ring me up, I’ll go and help.

Brian Murnane started working with homeless men at the Matthew Talbot Hostel in Woolloomooloo in the 1970s. On a wet winter’s night they might have sheltered 500 men, many of them people living by day in developing areas like Campbelltown, where their networks were. A men’s refuge was eventually built out west, but with the high unemployment of the early 1980s it couldn’t cope with the demand. Thus, in July 1983, the Macarthur Community Tenancy Scheme was born. The Macarthur team houses people who fall through the cracks of our welfare system. Here’s how it works: in New South Wales, people who need help with long-term housing put their names down with the Department of Housing and wait. There are currently 95 000 people on the list across the state. A four-bedroom home might take eight years to come up, a high-rise unit only a few months. Location is also a factor. If you insist on Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs you’ll wait a long time, as the public housing stock there is very limited. The average wait for public housing in Sydney is three or four years. In an emergency, such as a flood rendering a family temporarily homeless, the Department can provide limited accommodation in motels and caravans, or assist with rentals in the private market. But there are still lots of people on the waiting list desperate for a home who don’t satisfy the Department’s emergency criteria, or who may have been evicted from a Department property for rent arrears and need to learn to meet their obligations as tenants before they will be rehoused. They are picked up by community housing organisations like Macarthur, which, as smaller, localised non-government bodies, can act quickly to find them suitable accommodation where they can stay until the Department comes up with something better. But community housing organisations see their role as going far beyond managing properties. They

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A Samoan Symphony also provide individual support, listen to tenants’ personal problems and put them in touch with professional counsellors, agencies and services which can help them. Brian Murnane has encountered many problems. There was a different problem for each person . . . things like gambling, drug addiction, alcoholism, major family problems, people with a psychiatric illness who just couldn’t cope without some support . . . just left to their own devices they weren’t able to maintain their tenancies, they were constantly being evicted, whether for non-payment of rent or what was considerered to be inappropriate behaviour in a residential area. When the recession came in ’82, ’83, many people in their late forties lost their job and had no prospect of getting another one. In many cases, they were unskilled labourers and many of the industries they were working in closed down . . . employers were going for the fit younger people, and people with tertiary qualifications were competing, and the younger ones got the jobs. So for many men, it was easy to slip though the system. They might have an occasional drink to drown their sorrows, then that became more frequent and the next thing you know you had a man who was homeless with a drinking problem. I realised that if we were going to overcome the drug and alcohol problems, one of the major factors was to have stable life housing that was secure and affordable . . . once people get a house and get their life settled, then they want to re-establish contact with family and friends or children . . . it has a major stabilising influence in their lives.

Brian Murnane is enormously sympathetic to the plight of those whom others dismiss as rejects. Many of the men he houses have come through institutions, either hostels or prisons, so they work well in sharehouse, being used to living with other men and working to a roster. Women, on the other hand, don’t like sharing with other women. They prefer their own space. ....

In 1998, Macarthur CTS merged with Wingecaribee Community Housing to form Argyle Community Housing. Although the teams will now manage up to 300 properties, rather than the 80 handled by Macarthur around Claymore, Brian Murnane is determined to retain the same handson, localised approach that has been shown to work so well.

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Shelter from the Storm We don’t want to become a mini Department of Housing . . . The key to our success here has been developing a close relationship with our tenants, so no matter how big we got, we would look at dividing our administration to keep it very close to the tenants, so that we are very much in contact with their needs and able to address them fairly quickly.

The Macarthur approach, now seen as something of a model for the industry, has the enthusiastic backing of a revitalised NSW Department of Housing. Jennifer Westacott, Deputy Director-General, intends to apply some of its methods: One, they have property ratios of staff to tenants which are very different to ours. Secondly, at Claymore, part of the solution was that they were only taking people who wanted to go there . . . who said, ‘Yep, I’m willing to give it a go’, whereas we are managing a history of people who have been going to those housing estates because they didn’t have any choice and never really feeling like this is what they wanted to call home . . . Community housing in Proctor Way almost had a bit of a clean slate in the sense that they started dealing with vacant properties. We are dealing with estates of thousands of people with a long history of frustration with us. What we have really picked up though is a need for us to think about the organisation not as one Department, but as 77 client service teams, and try to get a local focus . . . try and give our client service people the kind of decision-making freedom they’ve got in community housing. Now that is very hard to do in big bureaucracies, because people want sameness from bureaucracies, they want the McDonald’s approach.

In February 1999, the NSW Minister for Urban Affairs and Planning, Craig Knowles, came to Proctor Way to launch a report, Home and Housed, that analysed changes in the community since the CTS team moved in. Claymore had had plenty of media attention before—the latest in 1997 when a partially blind single mother was burgled three times in five weeks and then savagely raped. This was the first time the television cameras had arrived to record good news. The progress described in the report was extraordinary. The earlier stampede out of the area had been completely turned around. In fact Argyle now had a twelve-month waiting list. It’s 80 properties had shown remarkable tenant stability, with only four houses being vacated in the

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A Samoan Symphony period—two for personal reasons and two because of rent arrears. Efficient maintenance was one reason for high tenant satisfaction—as one tenant commented, ‘Mr Brian gets things done’. Routine repairs were generally carried out within a week, compared with an eight-week wait by a Department of Housing tenant on the same estate. Remarkably, a residents’ survey revealed that Proctor Way, once the ‘worst’ street in Claymore, now led the estate in terms of safety and security. The 1995 rate of two police call-outs a day to the street was down to zero for seven months running, while in nearby Abrahams Way, a notorious drug pusher had finally been apprehended. People were no longer afraid to walk around at night, neighbours had got to know each other and looked out for each other in small ways. There was a new sense of pride abroad. Even the street was cleaner: garage doors once covered in obscenities remained undefiled when the graffiti was removed. The new neighbourliness was catching. A Best Garden competition attracted growing interest, though the colourful flowering combinations of the two Josephite nuns have won hands down for the last two years. ....

The Samoans aren’t big on flowers, or grass. Maik Tuisila goes for the nomaintenance look—the grass is covered with bricks, which are overlaid with carpet. Sofas are set around the perimeter. Who cares if it rains— they’ll dry. And when it’s dry, the Samoan community gathers here, or maybe in the house across the way, its yard covered over with gravel in preparation for the next ‘hangi’, when chicken or fish will be placed on hot stones, surrounded with vegetables and covered over to cook for several hours while the guests celebrate a wedding or special event. The wider community still hasn’t quite got to grips with Samoan ways. The last time they had a hangi, a neighbour, seeing smoke, called the fire brigade, which promptly doused the feast. But if Maik has his way, communications will soon improve. I keep on telling my people, all they have to do now is be sure they will get acquainted, work together with their neighbours, call them mates. Because that’s how the Australians are saying it: ‘Hi mate.’ Because we are not in Samoa any more, we are in Australia, so we are all Australians living together here. It doesn’t matter where they come from, we are all Claymore residents. The Housing Department, they are sitting in the desk and chair with paper

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Shelter from the Storm

Samoan worshippers

and pen. But we are the ones living here, so we have to do the best we can

from the Emmanuel

in dealing with all these things. That’s how we manage to have a better life

Christian Fellowship

’round here.

dressed in white for a special Mother’s Day prayer meeting. The woman on the left is Vailima Taito, Paepae Fomai's mother. The Fellowship has branches in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. ‘It doesn't

Maik Tuisila is writing a ‘culture book’ describing traditional Samoan greetings and customs, which he hopes to publish in English and Samoan. Samoan custom distinguishes between talking chiefs, who preside at functions and make speeches and welcoming addresses, and non-talking chiefs, who come together to discuss community issues and plan new directions. Although there are some 50 to 60 Samoan chiefs on Claymore, his royal lineage places Maik at the top of the hierarchy. He invokes his position infrequently.

matter what Fellowship’, say Paepae. 'Praising the Lord is our main aim.’ (Mayu Kanamori)

I only act as a chief when all the Samoans getting together on special occasions—then I put myself to play my role as chief, because I’m the one who knows how to do our culture and our dance sort of stuff. [Otherwise], as I telling my people, I’m not acting as a chief, I’m acting as a servant.

When he saw an ad some time ago seeking justices of the peace, Maik applied, and after sitting various legal exams, qualified as both a JP and

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A Samoan Symphony voluntary court interpreter. Although his social welfare benefit is his only income, he spends every working day attending courts from Newcastle to Canberra on behalf of Samoan plaintiffs. Forty-nine local courts, 37 district courts, 24 compensation courts and nine supreme courts—that’s all the courts I’m working with those problems with my people . . . assaulting, domestic violence, compensations, sporting injuries, general laws.

It’s a busy life for a man in his late sixties—court interpreter by day, counsellor and peacekeeper by night, and cultural icon at special events. Perhaps one reason Maik can handle it is that he doesn’t feel he has too long to go before things are in better hands. I’m looking forward to the future life and I hope our Heavenly Father will give me . . . an opportunity of seeing the Second Coming of our saviour, Jesus Christ, in the year 2000. That’s what we think—the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Mormon branch—according to the Bible and according to our belief. But in other versions the Bible says God himself is the only one who knows when the Second Coming will occur. Tomorrow, next week, next month or next year? We never know.

The Samoan presence in the area was recently honoured by the planting of ten tall palm trees at the entrance to Proctor Way. Late one night, long after the mellifluous strains of the Samoan anthem had ended, seven of the trees were carted off to adorn houses in the nearby private housing development. The people of Proctor Way took it as a compliment—life’s got so much better up their end, the robbers have changed sides.

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2 Pretend Mum Toni Haywood

When he was younger, he used to call me ‘Mummy Toni’, or he would say ‘my pretend mum’. I never encouraged him to call me ‘Mummy’, because I’m not his mother and I didn’t feel it was the right thing to do. Now he just calls me Toni and he thinks that’s so cool, and of course all his mates think it’s excellent!

Toni Haywood and her ten-year-old son, Braithe, look like any singleparent family. But in the past six years their lives have been turned upside down. In the process they have made history in the Family Law Court of Newcastle. It all started when Toni met Braithe’s mother, ‘Jackie’, in far from the usual social circumstances. I was a prison officer with the Department of Corrective Services . . . and she was in the jail that I was working in at the time. Nothing happened while she was in jail, we were just communicating and we became friends. Then I left the job, she got out of jail about three months later, and we got together. I was very naive, I guess, and I didn’t know at the time that she was a drug abuser . . . People look at you with raised eyebrows and say, ‘How can you work in a jail and not know somebody’s history?’. It wasn’t my practice to look into the inmate’s history . . . unless you delve into past files, none of that information is readily available and I didn’t bother. I took her on face value, and because she wasn’t in jail for a drug-related crime,

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Pretend Mum I honestly had no idea of her drug history . . . She would look me in the face and say, ‘I had nothing to do with drugs’. And unfortunately, or fortunately—I’m not sure which way to look at it these days—I was brought up in a house where you didn’t steal or you didn’t lie; they were the two golden rules. So I had never been confronted with people who could actually look you in the face and blatantly lie to you. So I was conned.

Toni was then in her early thirties, a confident and independent career woman with good friends and a supportive family. She had paid her own way since she was sixteen, earning enough to travel overseas and maintain a nice apartment. Although she had been a prison officer for three years when she met Jackie, nothing in her life had prepared her for the stresses that lay ahead. I came from a single-parent family, but my mother wasn’t in public housing and to my knowledge didn’t even know it existed. She was never the recipient of any benefit. She worked all her life after my father left, so all I knew was that you worked hard and you saved and you paid your bills, and so I thought, one day I will have a house and a partner . . . I wanted to be a young mum—apparently at the age of nine, Mum says, I used to say, ‘By fifteen or sixteen I want to have a child’. Of course, at sixteen I was having heterosexual relationships, so I thought I would get engaged and married. Then the time came when I entered into a gay relationship and felt that was right for me . . . so a white wedding and a child wasn’t part of the scheme of things really. There were times when the body clock craved for a child, but I didn’t know if or when I would have one . . . I’m certainly happy just raising Braithe, but I still have my maternal moments where I crave my own child as well.

Braithe was nearly five when he and Jackie moved in with Toni. His mother had been taking drugs on and off for more than ten years and his father was unknown. Braithe had been ‘abandoned’ by Jackie with various friends from time to time and had only had one stable period, with a guardian. For obvious reasons, he was not an easy child to cope with. He was quite attention seeking, and a little hyper, and used to play all these games . . . A lot of it was just normal childhood behaviour, but I wasn’t to know how to deal with it all, I had never had children around me. So for the first six months, I fed him and treated him as part of the household, but I didn’t actually feel this bond to him—I thought he was an obnoxious little child. Then his mother started coming and going, and of

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Shelter from the Storm course when he was left in my care, we tended to cling to each other, and then a bond formed, which is now very maternal.

Within a year, the situation had deteriorated badly. Jackie no longer tried to hide her drug habit and abused Toni physically as well as verbally. Toni didn’t know where to turn. When she told people what was happening, they didn’t take her seriously. Domestic violence involved a man and a woman. What they didn’t realise, says Toni, was that Jackie’s ten years in and out of prison had taught her to be as tough and strong as any man. In the end, feeling helpless and intimidated and afraid for Braithe, Toni took the child and hid out in a women’s refuge. For three months previously, while Jackie had been absent, Toni had had to stop work to look after Braithe. Concerned that she could not support him on the dole, nor could she work while he was abandoned with her, she approached Jackie’s parents, to see if some long-term solution could be found. They said they had been watching the situation for years and felt quite helpless. They were in their latter years and a little bit of ill health, and didn’t think they could give him the lifestyle he needed with the energy he needed. They just said they would support any action I took. So I made a decision that this little boy deserved more than just to be passed around from pillar to post and used as a form of money gain by his mother—so I sought custody in the Family Court. He came to the refuge with me and then DOCS [the NSW Department of Community Services] handed him back to his mother, because they didn’t believe any of the stories I told them . . . There are some very good people that work for them, but at the time, I had to watch them take a child off me and put him in a situation . . . where some horrific things happened to him and it took him a while to get over it . . . Then he lived with a mutual friend of his mother’s and mine for about three months, then I got him back and he stayed with me [with] access visits [by] his mother . . . Finally, after observing her and lots of crisis situations, [DOCS] supported me in my application to the Family Law Court.

After twelve months of legal proceedings, Toni became Braithe’s legal guardian. Although she had already been looking after him for nearly two years, now the relationship was different. This insecure six-year-old boy was now fully dependent on her. Toni was overwhelmed at first by the transformation in her life and the responsibility she had taken on.

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Pretend Mum I didn’t know about refuges and community housing . . . I’d been working and very independent, so to suddenly be without any income, asking people to feed us, put a roof over our head . . . The hardest thing for me was to ask for help because I had never done that in my life. I think it actually caused a lot of my depression . . . For the first couple of years of having custody, I was always scared that his mother could take me to court to seek custody back, that she would take him away from me. So it was always like he was on loan to me for a short period, and I guess I felt the way most foster people do. You don’t know from one day to the next how long you’ve got the child with you. But now I know that Braithe will be with me for as long as he wants to. And his mother won’t seek custody, because she really has her own selfish desires to fulfil. She won’t let him forget he is her child and constantly reminds him of that when she feels the need, but she won’t seek custody of him. I only have a couple of friends. Obviously with that sort of lifestyle, having to go to a refuge and taking on a child, and having somebody like his mother as a threat in your life, you lose a lot of friends . . . you sort of seek a lot from them, ring them up and ask them for advice, and yes, it’s been very stressful. I’ve been through a couple of stages of depression and had some counselling . . . I needed to be in a small safe town with a network of people around me, not a big place like Sydney.

By a stroke of luck, one of Toni’s friends, Diane Campbell, worked at Pacific Link, a community housing organisation in Maitland. Toni and Braithe were eventually allocated a duplex, a two-bedroom villa with a fenced yard, in the NSW coastal town of Port Stephens. It’s a ten-minute walk from the surf beach and Braithe loves to surf, so it’s perfect for him. There’s lots of sports in Port Stephens, which he gets involved in, and it’s a really safe community—he can get on his bike and go riding with his friends for two hours and it’s not like Sydney, I don’t have to think, ‘Oh, is he okay, somebody’s taken him’, everybody watches out for everybody. You’ve only got to say, ‘Have you seen a little boy on such and such a bike?’ ‘Oh yes, he’s down there.’ It’s wonderful.

Once they had a place of their own, Toni addressed Braithe’s behavioural problems. At seven he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

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Shelter from the Storm It took two difficult years to work out the correct level of medication for him. His emotional state was not helped by his mother’s false promises over the phone. In the five years that I’ve had custody, she has probably visited him three times and made ten to twenty calls. She might ring once in a three-month period and do all this, ‘I love you, I miss you, I’m coming to visit you’, and he puts her on this pedestal, and then he won’t hear anything for six months. So he’ll act out, be really disruptive, do all these little things to annoy me and make me angry. It’s testing me constantly—whether I’m going to do the same thing, let him down, break promises, tell lies. Every Christmas he obviously hopes for a little present or a visit or something and it never happens. He’s had five years of a disappointment and let-down stage, now he’s going through the anger stage with her.

Six months ago Toni took up part-time work, but Braithe started getting his medication wrong and playing up. Toni thinks it’s his way of seeking attention, telling her he needs her to be around. She’s decided to postpone work for another year, when he starts high school. In the meantime, she has joined the board of Pacific Link as a tenant representative. I always said to myself as I was going through all the court battle and receiving all this assistance and guidance from different people in government organisations and departments that one day I’d like to give a little bit back to the commmunity. So when I learned about the housing position here, that it was a voluntary position and you were helping to house people and advise them, I jumped at the chance. I’ve been on the committee for three years and will probably stay on as long as they’ll have me . . . In the old days, Department of Housing residences actually stood out. They were always these very plain looking brick houses or cement unit blocks and they really stood out visually, whereas community housing, it’s just individual houses or duplexes in different suburbs and there is no way possible, unless you told people, that they’d know. I mean, I don’t have a problem with people knowing but there’s no way they’d know unless you wanted them to. I’ve probably met about 50 per cent of the tenants. The ones I meet I’ve really enjoyed meeting. Quite often you’re able to sit down and discuss where you both have come from and give each other a little bit of advice, or if it’s somebody new, you might be able to guide them on different government agencies and where they would best be able to seek help.

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Pretend Mum

Toni Haywood with Braithe (10) and her newly-born son, Kye. Her partner, Gail, is working full-time and supporting the family, who have now relocated to a larger house in Port Stephens, on the New South Wales mid-coast. (Mayu Kanamori)

After years of being single, Toni has now got a steady relationship. Her partner, Gail, recently moved in with her and Braithe, making things ‘a little crowded’. Their official status with government agencies is inconsistent: Social Security does not recognise gay de facto couples,

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Shelter from the Storm whereas the community housing organisation does, not least because it means they need only allocate one property instead of possibly two. Toni hopes that in time, if something slightly bigger becomes available in Port Stephens, the three of them will move. Although she misses her mother, who is a five-hour drive down the South Coast, she finds the community very supportive and feels she and Braithe are settled at last. Even myself, being in a gay relationship, it doesn’t seem to bother anybody . . . there’s no bias, not in employment, not in my social life, not at all with the community, and I’m involved in it quite a bit . . . I go up to the school and do a bit of volunteer work, I help out with different sporting things like managing the soccer team, the safety house program . . . I feel very safe. I have never felt safer in my life, and I’m talking about even when I was single on a high income and renting. I watch friends of mine on the private rental market—next minute there’s a ‘For Sale’ sign up on their house and they have to move. I feel like the house is my own, because that’s what Pacific Link encourages you to feel, that it’s your home, and you can plant trees or gardens or do what you want to do. I know it’s not going to disappear from under me . . . well, I hope anyway. I guess I’m encouraged to think it will always be there . . . I feel really well now and I think Braithe feels very happy and secure too. Emotionally, I feel I have recovered from the domestic violence and the family law battle and all the insecurity . . . I still get a little bit stressed every now and then when Braithe gets a little attention seeking with his ADD . . . like if there’s been another contact from his mum and another let down or broken promise, you can understand why he gets a bit funny and testy or does things wrong just to get your attention, even if it’s not good attention. But he’s worth it. He is a really wonderful little boy. He is so loving and he loves to please people. He’s worth every minute of it.

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3 A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood Bryan Brown

I’ve done all my laundry all my life. I can iron. I learned to make sure the dinner was on at seven o’clock every night, make sure the peas were done . . . I came from a place where a woman had to go to work, and I was the oldest in the family, so I had to make sure the house worked right for when my mother came home.

It’s hardly the image one associates with the macho roles Bryan Brown has played, in everything from Dead Heart to The Thornbirds, but it’s true: off the set, the tough cop/glowering canecutter with an eye for the ladies is a real whizz at housework. At 50, Bryan Brown’s life divides neatly into two halves. For the last 25 years he has been a professional actor, star of Australian classics like Breaker Morant, A Town Like Alice and The Shiralee, and of international hits like Gorillas in the Mist, FX and Cocktail. He has played opposite Michael Caine, Sigourney Weaver and Tom Cruise, and has the bucks to prove it. His million-dollar waterside home on Sydney Harbour is a long way from the Housing Commission development at Panania, in Sydney’s south, where he spent most of his other 25 years. But it all depends what you’re used to. In the early 1950s, when Bryan, his younger sister, Christine, and his mother, Molly, took possession of their modest fibro house at Panania, they were over the moon.

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Shelter from the Storm Bryan Brown, actor. ‘I've done all my laundry all my life . . . my mother was a single parent with two children and nowhere to live . . . I came from a place where a woman had to go to work. My idea of work was doing the washing, the ironing, cleaning a house. How you did your job was important—not what your job was.’

Just the fact that this was our home—that was the really fantastic thing, I think. It must have been absolutely wonderful for my mother to have it. Because until then, we’d been in a hostel called Bradfield Park. English migrants came there, and Australians who had nowhere to live and were after Housing Commission homes . . . It was actually a very beautiful area, at the back of Lindfield, trees and all that, where we used to play. We lived there anywhere from nine to eighteen months. I know I was definitely four there, I know I went to kindergarten there. I remember the hostel very fondly, because it was like, even though it was the end of a tin shed, it was yours.

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A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood Molly and the children had been lucky to get into the hostel. Molly had a friend whose son had a word with a politician, and a place came up. Before that, the family had been staying wherever they could: with an old aunt near Penrith for a year, and with a close friend of Molly’s in Marrickville. Bryan never really knew his father. My mother married my father when she was about 33 or 35. He was a tram driver I think at the time, but he had no steady job. He’d been married and divorced and then he married Mum. He wasn’t very good at responsible things like holding jobs, and at that stage, probably quite a drinker. He was often not there. He’d be gambling, wouldn’t be back at nights. And I know that there was a knock at the door this night and some men demanded his whereabouts—he owed them £500 or something— and if he didn’t pay it he’d be dead. And the story I have from Mum is that she had £500 in the bank and went and got it and gave it to them, and that was the end of her money. When he came back, she said, ‘Don’t come here again’—and that’s where it ended. It did happen that he did come back one night, and sweet-talked her into the cot and my sister was born, which was a lucky thing. So basically my mother was a single parent with two children and nowhere to live. She was an only child. Her mother died when she was fifteen or sixteen and then her father died at about twenty and she had no family at all. I think she had a couple of Gilhooley cousins, but immediate family she had none.

The Brown background was English. The Gilhooley side was Irish Catholic. Although Molly did not make much of her Irishness, her identity as a Catholic provided both spiritual and practical support. Religion got her through a lot of hard times. Also, the Church was a community. That’s where she’d get work. The first thing she’d do whenever she moved in was to meet the priest and say, ‘If you know anyone that wants their houses cleaned, I’m looking’. So she always nutted out jobs. She also was a pianist, she’d play for ballet or gymnastic-type schools. She was involved with a dancing school at Padstow for about ten years . . . Sometimes she’d have to work until seven o’clock at night with the piano, and we’d go to one of the ladies’ houses, where we’d do our homework. They’d feed us too and then Mum would come and pick us up.

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Shelter from the Storm So it was a great area—very communal. On a Friday night, there’d be get-togethers and she’d play the piano and we’d go up and sing and muck about. And through that, there’d be wonderful people who’d come down and fix up something if it went wrong. The carpenter would come, or if she needed something dug up in the backyard, one of the men from the parish would come down. So that area of community really existed because of the Church . . . And as a street filled out and you played with every kid in every house, if Mum had a difficult chore or something, all the men would be only too happy to come over and sort it out for her. If you were sick and home from school or something, I’d go off with her that day while she did the person’s house. If she got sick, there would always be a lady down the corner that would come up with food for us at night, or whatever. That sense of help was always there.

But while the community in Panania may have accepted a single mother, the authorities were less understanding. Bryan’s acting began before he started school, when his mother coached him to lie to the welfare man. We could never say, ‘She’s working at Mrs So-and-So’s’. It was always, ‘Oh she’s gone off to visit Auntie So-and-So and she’ll be back in a minute’. Because if the welfare bloke found out she was working, then they would take the pension away—and they could take us away.

Despite poverty, the lack of a father and of other relatives, Bryan’s family was close and his childhood happy. He did not feel in the least deprived. There was absolutely no adversity in my life. There was in my mother’s life, I would have thought. But there was no way there was in Christine’s or mine. We had everything that you could really want, in terms of her devotion to us, people to play with, friends and stuff like that in the neighbourhood. We might have liked to have gone to the beach more often! Except it was such an ordeal, packing, walking up [to the station], getting the train, getting a bus. But she did everything she could to give us outings . . . She was never someone that talked about wanting money—and yet, boy could she have done with it! She was always very practical about dough, it had to pay off this and that, but she would never be saying, ‘Oh God, I wish I had that house!’. She was never materialistic: never had a

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A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood car, never wanted a car. Energy and effort was what she was about— what she put into her children and her home, not what toys were available. Whatever you have to put into children to help them get up, she put in. She was always there at the football matches, at the prize givings, she was always wherever I was. So subconsciously, the fact that I was important came across to me. I never had low self-esteem. My sister never had low self-esteem. That has to be because of our mother. She was an extraordinary woman. Bryan Brown on his Holy Communion day. His acting began at the age of four in the Housing Commission home in Panania where he lived with his mother and sister. ‘It was always, “Oh she's gone off to visit Auntie Soand-So and she'll be back in a minute”. Because if the welfare bloke found out she was working, then they would take the pension away—and they could take us away.’

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Shelter from the Storm A loving family was one major plank in Bryan’s youth. A good education was the other. I initially went to Revesby Catholic school. There were 175 people in my class. I can remember telling someone: 175! They couldn’t believe it. That’s how many were in the class. They were suburban schools, new areas, not many schools around, and they were packed. If you couldn’t pay the two and six a week or something, you just had to tell them and you didn’t have to pay. The Catholic schools were always very good in that. When we got into high school, both my sister and I, we both won scholarships, so that relieved it. My sister went to Mount St Joseph’s in Milperra and I went to Kingsgrove De La Salle. Kingsgrove was more middle class. That was ten stations up the line, therefore the parents might have been bank managers. My area was more tradespeople, mechanics, a couple of men in our street were wharfies. There was one man who worked at the taxation office—no-one else went to work with a shirt and tie. Nobody went to university. No kid that I grew up with went to university, or any kid you mixed with, or their brothers—that was never at all a part of it.

When Bryan won a scholarship to Sydney University, he looked set to buck the trend. The only problem was he didn’t want to go. In fact he had no career ambitions of any kind. There was nothing I wanted to be, nothing I wanted to do. I mean, I loved school. I loved doing exams and coming first, second or third in the school all the time, because that was more about competition than anything else. I was fairly quick and had a good, sound intelligence. I very quickly knew what exams were about, what to cover to get through. I also knew there were loads of kids far brighter than me in the class that were never going to get the pass I’d get because I could suss out what had to be done. So there was a native survival intelligence that maybe got passed on from Mum . . . I didn’t want to go to university because I knew I’d blow it. The fact that there wasn’t anything there I was interested in meant I’d just get into the social side, muck around with girls, and I wouldn’t study. It wasn’t as if there was going to be a Brother there saying, ‘Have you done your homework?’, and you get six whacks if you hadn’t. It was going to be up to me and I wasn’t going to have the passion for it, so I was going to fail—which was not going to be the best thing to hand my mother after all the stuff she’d done.

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A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood So I finished school and we had the January holidays, and suddenly it was like, if I don’t go back to school, what the fuck do I do?? And so I figured I may as well get a job and earn some money. And because I was good at maths, someone had talked about this thing called an actuary— so I entered the business world and AMP.

Bryan spent four years at AMP, studying the statistical outcomes on which insurance companies base their premiums. It wasn’t the most exciting way for a young man to spend his life, so he switched to insurance salesman, since they at least got out of the office and seemed to have more fun. Reflecting now on his lack of drive, he puts it down as due, like so much else in his life, to his mother’s influence. As a worker, she was his role model, but since she was a cleaner, he never had any notion of a career path. My idea of work was doing the washing, the ironing, cleaning a house. And my mother did it in such a way that it never seemed to be an inferior job. When she cleaned a house, she cleaned it really well; when she ironed someone’s stuff, you could see she took pride in how she delivered it to them. How you did your job was important—not what your job was. The fact that there was never an increase, and you went up to that level of cleaner, then that level, meant the idea of career [was not] in my mind at all.

Although his work was not particularly satisfying, it introduced Bryan to different kinds of people and opened up new horizons. Moving in this white-collar world while still living at Panania in the Housing Commission home, Bryan became conscious of a class system for the first time in his life. I started to become aware that the world has certain values it places on where you come from, what you do, what your father does. It was trendy to be in Paddington. Where I was was very untrendy. I remember lying at a couple of parties and saying I came from Paddington. I thought I probably had a better chance with these girls I was chatting up! But only a couple of times. Most people knew where I came from. It’s pretty hard to hide the fact that you’re living at home with your mother in Panania! And I didn’t have a problem with it. Every now and again I’d think, ‘She’s probably not going to be impressed—oh well, I’ll go for that one instead.’ It wasn’t a big deal, but I was aware of it. A little.

....

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Shelter from the Storm Oddly enough, the humdrum world of insurance led Bryan into acting and eventual stardom. I got involved with an end-of-year revue at AMP and that led on to me wanting to join amateur theatre. So during the four or five years I was a salesman, I was also involved with the Genesian Theatre, acting, writing and directing. All my time was spent on that, and I’d suddenly have to race out and make some money—and at 25, I went, ‘Well, I’d better see what’s going on’, and I flew to England.

Eighteen months later, Bryan was with the eminent National Theatre of Great Britain. Only five years after he left for England, he bought his first house, in Newtown, an inner Sydney suburb. I hated the idea of paying rent. I remember Mum having the bottles: that’s the electricity, that’s the gas, that’s the rent. So when the opportunity came up, when I was doing Newsfront, I went, ‘Well, the rent money is becoming the mortgage payment. That seems a bit of a smarter move.’

Bryan’s career quickly took off—much to the relief of his mother, who had been aghast at his decision to throw away a good, steady job for the notoriously insecure and not exactly respectable world of acting. Like most working-class kids, theatre wasn’t part of the Brown family’s milieu. My mother loved ballet, so she had taken me to see Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dance Swan Lake, when they were here. I was very unimpressed—spent most of the time trying to find bottles under the seat I could get threepence on. But the area I grew up in, no-one talked about theatre. No-one went to a play. Nobody knew what a play was! It just wasn’t what you did. Your activities were sport, which was great, I love sport. The interesting thing is, when I did become involved in theatre and do plays at night, all these people I mixed with, guys I played football with, would come to see it. It was like, Bryan’s doing it, so we’ll go and see what it’s like.

....

Theatre wasn’t the only thing absent from those early public housing enclaves. In the early 1950s, when the family moved in, Panania was on the very edge of Sydney, beyond the reach of the railway. It was still semirural, its numerous market gardens being gradually resumed for housing. With many basic needs unmet, streets still unpaved and hardly any gutters, cultural amenities were not a high priority.

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A ‘Houso’ in Hollywood The first thing that went into Panania was a pub, and it was a long way down the line before a library was there. A swimming pool was very necessary. We went to Bankstown for that and eventually Panania got one. But none of the areas that give creative stimulation, which a lot of kids need, particularly if they’re emotionally in trouble. I mean, I saw kids get into a lot of trouble when I was growing up. I had mates go inside at seventeen and stuff, but those kids weren’t necessarily from the Housing Commission houses. They were more to do with an area that was deprived of amenities—things that middle-class kids can have, like a little theatre or a musical society or a library. Those things aren’t there to get your attention. So to get some attention, or to have some fun, you might do some bad things. At the same time, the parents probably weren’t tough enough, weren’t giving the kids enough focus and direction. But then they might not have been helped along the way either, those parents, to know what to focus on.

Bryan believes that if parents and children have enough emotional and practical support, the family will thrive. The way Molly Brown’s two children have turned out certainly defies those who allege single parents and public housing are a recipe for disaster. Bryan’s sister, Christine, is an acclaimed author and teacher in the area of adult and migrant literacy. Bryan’s career success is well known, but he’s also immensely proud of his wife, actor Rachel Ward, and their three children. Although the family is now wealthy, the Brown kids have no airs and graces. They go to the local public school, where both parents take an active role—Bryan’s spruiking at the Christmas raffles is most persuasive. He’s tried to pass on to his children the solid values he got from his mother, such as not being materialistic—but he confesses it doesn’t always work. ‘They snub their noses and say, “Shut up and give me another twenty dollars!”.’ Bryan acknowledges that his mother ‘has shaped what I go after in my life’, but politically, they’re quite different animals. Bryan is concerned about Aboriginal rights and has appeared on Labor platforms supporting the arts, whereas his mother voted Liberal—a curious choice for a workingclass woman of Irish Catholic background. Bryan thinks she was as radical as she was conservative—she just didn’t realise it. With feminism and all that sort of stuff, we used to say to her, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, you made a complete and utter life on your own without anybody, you were an absolute feminist’. ‘Oh don’t talk to me about that sort of rubbish.’ She was very simple and straightforward, my mother. She wasn’t

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Shelter from the Storm massively intelligent, never academically very good, but she had a really good understanding of survival and she had bred into her great values. But she was very much about the status quo. She believed in Menzies and those Liberal politicians, she respected authority. She respected the people in power. People that had made a lot of money were good people. She had no cynicism at all, she believed in people, so she respected the office—which is a good thing. It’s just that you get proof at times that people abuse things. But Mum had some really in-built dignity and she believed in the dignity of other people. Maybe the reason I get involved in certain things is because something is not getting the respect it deserves.

Molly died a few years ago, in a retirement home Bryan had bought her near where he was living, on Sydney’s northern beaches. I said something like, ‘Well this is yours, you don’t have to pay rent or anything,’ and she said, ‘I have never owned a house before, this is really amazing’. But in truth, she was really attached to where she built her home. It’s hard to move people. There are reasons why she had to move, why she wanted to move, but when it all boiled down, just having that whole community thing, even though she was getting older and frustrated, that was her life and her home was there. She missed a lot of that stuff in the last couple of years.

The phone rings and Bryan Brown reverts to movie star and film producer. He speaks quickly, abruptly. ‘The tenth? Can’t make it, I’m in Geneva . . . sold into fifteen countries, yeah, mate, good, no make it two pages, do yourself a favour, I want to get the story . . . how’s the weather up there, good?’ He’s a busy man, with a healthy ego, a strong presence. A courier arrives with a package, looking for a Bryan Brown. ‘That’s me, mate’. The courier either doesn’t know or care about film stars. Bryan Brown doesn’t mind. Although his surroundings are salubrious, his core is still down-to-earth working class—Panania, not Paddington. I have never had a reason to decry where I came from. I’m very proud of my mother. I’m very proud of my home. I am moulded by that place, it had a huge input into me. But other things [have too]: I’m bright, I’m actually an incredibly well-travelled man who has sat at many tables of many types of people. I’ve worked in 25 countries. I’ve travelled to 40. I’m quite a sophisticated character. So my world view is quite different to the boy that left there when he was 25. But I’m shaped by those years. There’s no question about it. Absolutely shaped.

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4 Hate Street Cooremah Housing Company

My father was Irish. He married an Aboriginal. And if he didn’t want or think much of my mother, he would have got out of it a bloody long time before he had ten kids! All our life we run: ‘Get under the bed, run to the river you kids, run to Granny.’ We was always running. When I was little, my sister used to put me on her back and run. I could never understand until I grew up and found out they were under the Aboriginal Protection Board. We were watched and hounded like dogs. I think I was about seven or eight when they got us. We were all together at the police station. They told us were going away on a holiday. Ten years I think it was. A long holiday. My mother was taken, they committed her, reckoned she was insane. He used to come and see us when we first went into the orphanage, but we all nearly pulled the clothes off him when he was leaving, cryin’ and hangin’ onto him . . . I think he was told not to come back, he was upsetting the kids.

Keith Byrne has a big mouth, a quick temper and a devilish sense of humour. The temper he ascribes to his Irish side; the humour that makes him laugh at injustice instead of succumb to self-pity is surely Aboriginal. The combination of assertiveness and irreverence has served him well in combating the enduring racism of rural New South Wales.

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Shelter from the Storm A lot of people passed for something else, Maoris or Indian, and then the Board left them alone. And even when we come out of the homes, we could [only] go into a hotel if we passed off as an Italian or something. If you started talking like an Italian you could go and have a beer. I done it many times. But Aboriginal was a dirty word. You couldn’t say you were Aboriginal. ‘Get out you dog!’, they’d say. The best thing that ever happened to Aborigines was they brought in the ‘New Australian’, or the ‘wog’ as they called the European, and it was a great thing to us because when it was just black and white we got hell. We weren’t allowed in the streets at certain times, weren’t allowed in the hotels, weren’t allowed to voice our opinions, you know, we couldn’t speak our native tongue. You’d get six months for talking that . . . Then the New Australian come, or the wog, and they were the best thing that ever happened to us, because people was racing to put shit on the ‘bloody wogs’ then. And it was a strange thing, a lot of us were running with them and saying, ‘Yes you wog, so and so!’ [laugh].

In 1970, Keith and Marie Byrne and their five children became the first Aboriginal family to be placed in public housing in Glen Innes, a small pastoral town in the north of New South Wales. Once it was known that it was earmarked for Aborigines, the house came under attack, even during its construction. Although they had moved into town just recently, the Byrnes’ application was accepted immediately by the Housing Commission, for reasons that only became apparent later. The Byrnes were given the house because, although Aboriginal, they were lightskinned. When we moved in it was like a circus. It even got a name in the paper as Hate Street. People thought we were some strange people from other planets or something, the way they were talking about us . . . They drove up and down the street, and you could hear people say we beat them [to a house], ‘They’re white kids! Look, they’re not black kids,’—because I had one blondie kid and one red-headed one who went right back on my father’s people. After we got in there someone [Aboriginal] came running down the street and said, ‘How did you get in the house before me? How long did you have your application in?’ I said I just put it in. He said, ‘That’s a bit raw. We’ve had ours in for six months.’ [We were] acceptable because we were fair, you see.

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Hate Street Even today, those people in the street, I don’t talk to them . . . I look upon them as people that were judging me before they even knew me.

At the time there were only about eight Aboriginal families in the town, which Marie Byrne remembers as a conservative grazier enclave. The old squatters . . . they liked the blacks working for them years ago, but your place is back on the fringe, back in the bush where we can’t see you. We’re not supposed to be up in the streets living with them, oh no. But they accept you when they get to know you. You have to prove you’re an A1 citizen.

The Byrnes’ son Chris quickly developed a practical defence against discrimination. ‘I got into boxing, and they sort of left me alone after that. They all wanted to be your mate’. Besides boxing, Chris was a star student and good all-round sportsman. But, he laughs ruefully, his prowess could annoy people too. You always get someone with a chip on their shoulder, see if they can knock you down. And as soon as you give them a hiding and put them in hospital, you’re the one that’s going to jail. That’s the way it works.

Today, Chris Byrne is Chair of the Cooremah Housing and Enterprise Corporation, which provides housing, employment, training, educational, environmental and tourist services to the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community in Glen Innes. Founded in 1984, Cooremah manages fifteen houses in town and is in the process of constructing units. It also runs a large property of about 3500 acres, situated about 50 kilometres outside town, which was recently returned to the local Ngoorabul people, as Marie Byrne explains. It has great significance for us because it’s built on our dream track. This is where they started from . . . The people in town said it will end up like a garbage dump, all broken down cars and bottles everywhere and kids running around with snotty noses . . . when they come out and seen, they got the shock of their lives!

Using labour obtained under the Commonwealth Community Development Employment Project (CDEP), commonly known as work for the dole, Cooremah has rebuilt the old shearers’ quarters, added modern kitchens, toilets and meeting rooms, and is in the process of refurbishing the original homestead. Although it has rather incongruously

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Shelter from the Storm retained its European name, The Willows, the complex will be used for Aboriginal tourism, conferences and cultural events. ....

Now supposedly retired, Keith Byrne is often to be found at The Willows down by the river. It took him a long time to find his way back up to his country after losing his childhood to the homes then factories to which the ‘stolen generations’ were consigned. I knew I come from up this way somewhere, always something telling me where I come from. And I got on the train, come to Moree, then up through Inverell. I knew I had an auntie somewhere. So I just kept asking around and someone told me where she was . . . Then I met this Aboriginal side of me, and I knew what side wanted me, and I been with the Aboriginals ever since. Like, I’m an opal miner, I could have made a lot of money on opal mining . . . but the last fifteen, twenty years I have been working with Aboriginals, trying to get things going, trying to pass on what knowledge I have to the younger people . . . We come from here in the beginning. My mother and father got married over here—their ashes are spread in the river and there’s a plaque [for] my mother and brother and sister and a nephew. My father worked across the river as a fencer, horse breaker. One of the best they reckon, horse breaker.

Keith never saw his father again after his dad stopped coming to the home. Late in life, his father tried without success to locate his children. Keith’s sister eventually found their mother, working in a mental institution, ‘in the belief no-one wanted her . . . She took her home and had her right up until she died, and there was nothing wrong with her.’ Keith is not bitter about what happened to him. Nor is he interested in compensation for himself. But he passionately believes the government could help make it up to the ‘stolen generations’ by establishing a shelter for today’s abused Aboriginal children. He would love to see kids with problems ranging from drug addiction to broken homes accommodated and supported at The Willows, to heal in tranquillity. In the meantime, Marie and Chris Byrne, along with other members of the Cooremah Board, try to cope with the dysfunctional and disadvantaged families that are the legacy of decades of discrimination and despair. Alcohol is a major problem. The elders have banned it from official

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Hate Street Cooremah premises, but as Chris points out, it’s not possible to exclude it from individual homes. ‘In the urban area, you can’t say you can’t have a drink. They say it’s a social thing, we can do it. They are paying the rent for the place. They’ll hit you with the Tribunal . . .’ The Aboriginal community around Glen Innes is small, about 250 people, but Cooremah’s success so far has attracted more Aboriginal people into the town—anyone who is over eighteen, of Aboriginal descent and has lived in Glen Innes for nine months can join. The ten members of the Cooremah Board range across ages, families and communities. Women elders like Flo Cuttmore and Marie Byrne take a strong role. Marie has been agitating for housing since the 1960s.

Marie Byrne (left) and Flo Cuttmore at one of the old-style humpies around Glen Innes—this is where Aboriginal people used to live before the

For the first seven years we never got anything, just went along with the

advent of Cooremah

flow. Then we formed the Land Council and we got four houses . . . before

Housing Company.

that, Aboriginal people were in camps up on the common, humpies, any-

(John Tregurtha)

where. Mostly they worked on stations.

Many Aboriginals would prefer to be housed out of town, but the costs of laying on sewerage and infrastructure are prohibitive. It becomes a vicious circle: unemployment and lack of youth amenities in town add to the sense of alienation, giving rise to increased alcohol and drug abuse, which in turn undermine the housing program. ‘There is no work in this town’, says Flo Cuttmore. ‘As a matter of fact, there is just about four or five black people employed by the mainstream system. The rest are all on CDEP [or] pensioners and social security.’ Two of Flo’s four daughters have passed away, leaving her to look after the grandchildren. They’re now grown up, with no prospect of permanent employment. Marie is still fighting to set up a youth centre. There is nothing for our kids, nowhere they can get off the streets . . . what I had in mind, we’ve got a big shed and let the kids do it the way they want to. But you’ve got to go to the Council, they stop you from doing anything . . . The stigma is still there.

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Shelter from the Storm With parents like Keith and Marie, Chris Byrne is no stranger to speaking his mind and getting things moving. As Chair, he has plenty of ideas for Cooremah’s future. I would rather us build the houses, because that way we’re creating work amongst our own people and getting tradesmen out of it . . . and the money ain’t going out of the Aboriginal community . . . We got a building project coming up and I’ve been assured by one builder that he’ll take on three apprentices, maybe four. It sounds good, we’re on our way.

Other initiatives have included a Koori cafe, serving bush tucker, and the establishment of a women’s house, where female relatives can stay while visiting men who are doing time on the prison farms. A safe house for children is next on the agenda. Although there is still much to learn about the running of ventures like these and the ambitious complex at The Willows, the Cooremah group, and their associates at the Land Council, are determined not to give their detractors a field day by coming unstuck. As Marie Byrne explains: We don’t waste our money! They say we’re one of the meanest Land Councils around . . . We are trying to set up things that will make us selfsufficient, that we don’t have to rely on the government for hand-outs. While we are working our way up, we’re entitled to it, so we use it to climb up the ladder, but we’re really hoping to achieve self-sufficiency . . . It took us a long way to get to where we are, because we found a lot of jealousy with our own people . . . dealing with our own people there was more jealousy than with the hierarchy.

While Aborigines at the bottom of the ladder were used to falling foul of the white folk’s system, it has hit some hard to find that their own people are now among the law enforcers. Chris Byrne has a thankless task. For the long-term benefit of his people, he has to ensure the housing company is run efficiently. But in the short term, that can mean evicting some of the neediest individuals in the community. Some tenants look after their houses well, and keep up with the relatively low rent, but others, often caught up in the treadmill of unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, do not. If the situation cannot be controlled within two months, Chris has to initiate eviction—an expensive, and explosive, process.

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Hate Street You’ve got to wait 60 days, and within that 60 days they know that they’re

Chris Byrne became

gunna go. So what do they do? They go berserk . . . $15 000, that’s what

Chair of Cooremah

you’re out of pocket, because the place is wrecked and you’ve got to

Housing Company

change the carpets, repaint the place, all that. And they’re not working.

because he was ‘sick of

There’s no chance of getting the money back off them . . .

nothing being done’. In

I can put up with people drinking, but if they’re drinking and drug

1970, his parents were

taking you can’t get sense out of them, they’ll abuse you for anything.

the first Aboriginal

They’ll say it belongs to them, ‘I’m a member’ . . . As a chairperson, I’ve

people to be allocated

got to get up there and talk, and you more or less put your own relatives

public housing in Glen

out of a house and that’s the hardest thing, because it’s a no-win situation

Innes—only because

for both parties. They’re losing a house and you’re more or less losing

they were light-skinned.

your relatives. It’s very hard.

Notwithstanding, their

It makes you angry in one way that you think, like, that person

arrival provoked such

signed the contract in good faith and—there is no other way to say it—

racist outbursts that their

they shit on you, and shit on your company and them being a member.

street became known as

You know, you lose trust in them. You don’t want to give them a second

‘Hate Street’.

chance.

(John Tregurtha)

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Shelter from the Storm Then you are answerable to your board of directors if you don’t act on what they pass at a meeting. You’re shot down whichever way you go. [But] I got sick of sitting on the sidelines and nothing being done. We’ve been banging our heads against the wall for the last ten years and going nowhere . . . so I made up my mind to have a go [as chair] for twelve months.

Despite the endemic problems of the community, which cannot be solved overnight, under the steady leadership of Chris Byrne the future augurs well for Cooremah. His mother Marie is not in awe of her son’s position. ‘If he’s no good to us’, she warns, ‘we’ll vote him out and vote someone else in!’.

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5 Poor Little Princess Jean Cinis

Every morning I pull the curtains back and open the screen doors. It’s sunny and beautiful most days. I look out on all of those Moreton Bay figs and the garden and the pergola, and the lovely birds, and I say, ‘Thank God for the Department of Housing!’. Because I pay $30 a week here. If I owned my own place it would cost me more than $30 in upkeep. If it was private rental, I could have a landlord saying, ‘I’m sorry . . . I’m going to sell the unit’. But I’m never going to get kicked out of here unless I don’t pay my rent and I’m nasty to all the other people, which of course I never would be. So I feel like I’ve got security for the rest of my life. And really, when you’re 71, you need some sort of security in your life!

Jean Cinis never dreamed she would end up where she is. Her story begins in London, in 1926. Her parents were both ‘in service’—her mother was a cook, her father a footman. Although Jean adored her older brother, emotional displays were not encouraged. Jean often felt out of place in such a reserved family. Her older cousins were particularly mean to her. You know how you know that you’re not liked and I didn’t know why it was. I don’t know whether it was a jealousy thing—I was very quick at everything and I was good at school and I was the fastest runner. I could balance walking along all the breakwaters out to the sea. And I’ll always remember this particular day, in the summer holidays. We were on a jetty

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Shelter from the Storm and it was covered in barnacles and mussels. They said, ‘Let’s play pirates’. They blindfolded me and I was supposed to walk the plank. But what they did was they pushed me off the end of the jetty into the water and I couldn’t swim. A fisherman grabbed me, but I cut my back on all the shells and things. I can remember him saying, ‘What are you doing! What are you doing!’. And they said, ‘It doesn’t matter— she’s a bastard anyway’. He took me home and told my mother what happened, and there was a big row between my mother and my grandmother to the point where my grandmother started to pack. And when my mother went over to clean the church, my grandmother got me on the stairwell and she punched and she kicked and gave me the biggest hiding I ever got in my life—because I’d caused trouble, she said. So it was at that moment when I was told I was adopted. I mean I was eight, I didn’t really know what adopted meant, but I had an idea and I thought, ‘Great, I don’t belong to these people. It’s what I wanted.’

Jean’s parents had received ten shillings a week to foster her—half as about three, c. 1929. She much as her father received on the dole. They refused to say who her real was eight when she found mother was, but Jean suspected it had something to do with a mysterious out she was adopted. Her visitor called Auntie Louie.

Jean Cinis in England aged

cousins made her walk the plank for a pirates’ game,

I can remember this lady taking me to the park. She used to put a blanket

then pushed her into the

on the ground and I would sit there and she crocheted or knitted.

water although she couldn't

I remember what she looked like, the dress she used to have . . .

swim. ‘They said, “It

But later, after I was a little bit older, I suppose three or four, she

doesn't matter—she's a

didn’t come . . . I have to tell you I went through my mother’s papers and

bastard anyway.” ’ Jean

I found letters from Auntie Louie and all the signatures and addresses

was 65 when she discovered

had been cut off! They were determined that I wasn’t to know who she

her birth mother.

was. Finally, we moved to London when I was thirteen, just before the

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Poor Little Princess war, and we lost contact with her because of war and she moved around and stuff . . .

The war changed everything. When Jean met a young air force recruit, she succumbed to the romance of the uniform and the air of unreality that war brought. At seventeen, she married him—and got away from her false family at last. Jean was still seventeen when her eldest son, David, was born. Martin followed, a year later. The war ended and her husband returned—only to disappear two days before the birth of Jean’s third son, Timmy. Jean’s hopes of replacing the unhappy family of her youth with a loving one of her own were now under considerable strain, as she matter of factly recalls. I was left with three children under three when I was twenty . . . My husband went back into the airforce, so after going to court and getting maintenance . . . I got the airforce pension, which was two pounds, five and six a week—and I mean I paid fifteen shillings a week rent. After the youngest one started day care, I worked for a dentist in London. His assistant was Australian, so all of a sudden I was being told how wonderful Australia was, and those Smiley films came out about the way that children lived in Australia and I thought, ‘Oh God, what a wonderful life!’. I thought they would have a better future here. There were advertisements in the paper at the time on Fairbridge Farm, and the way they sold it to the English people was that these children got a good education and a good start and the rest of it, and I just thought it would be the best thing for them. They left for Australia in August 1951—and I was still there. I’d never ever really thought of giving them up, so I took a job bringing out two children whose parents had been killed in a car accident. My fare out was paid and I stayed with the grandmother in Melbourne until the children got to know her. I got here Christmas Eve and I rang them Christmas Day. David was seven, Martin six and Timmy five. I spoke to David and he wasn’t happy . . . they had cottage mothers and stuff like that, but they did a lot of hard work on the land. I was concerned.

After four weeks, Jean got to Fairbridge Farm, a centre for post-war British child migrants, near Orange, in mid-west New South Wales. She got a job as a bush cook on a nearby property.

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Shelter from the Storm Rather strange, when you think I’ve never been a very good cook, and I’d never lived rurally at all. Gosh, I can’t tell you—snakes in the wood, here we were getting the cows’ milk, making our own butter and of course all you get is mutton. You’ve got to think how many ways you can cook it to make it interesting—but I didn’t care ’cause I could see my kids every weekend. It was good fun. It’s learning you see. ’Cause I believe life’s a learning experience. Once you stop learning you might as well be dead.

Jean then got a job at a local hospital, where she met her second husband, a Latvian migrant called Eddie Cinis. We were married and I was pregnant again and we went out to Fairbridge Farm to get the kids back. I really thought I’d have a lot of trouble getting custody back . . . and the headmaster said, ‘Just take them home and don’t bring them back’, and nobody ever argued or said anything. They all went to school in Orange and they called themselves Cinis.

The next few years were fairly stable. Besides the three boys, Jean and Eddie now had a daughter, Stephanie, and a son, Alan. They borrowed enough to build half a house, then lived in that while they earned enough to finish it off. ‘I know all about laying foundations and carrying water up from the creek!’. By 1968, life seemed to be getting easier. The family had moved to Sydney when Eddie, a mental nurse, was transferred to Gladesville Hospital. The two eldest boys, now in their twenties, had left home, Stephanie had started high school and was being acclaimed as part of a singing/dancing act, and Alan was seven and settled at school. Then Eddie was killed in a car accident. He was 41. With Eddie’s insurance payout, Jean paid $15 000 for a house in Avalon, on Sydney’s northern beaches. But with three dependants, she also needed regular income. One day, while she was picking up studio shots of Stephanie’s show, a photographer noted that Alan would make a good child model. Jean approached an agency, but was horrified at the steep fees. Discovering it only cost $4 for a theatrical licence, she promptly started her own business. I started a children’s agency called International Children. One of the first jobs we did was the cover of Kamahl’s 100 Children album. It was a lovely cover. We were up at North Head at seven in the morning and it was like he was coming over the top of the world holding hands with all these children—and Alan was one of them. From then on, he just took off as a child actor . . .

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Poor Little Princess As a teenager, Jean had also loved acting, joining a London drama club. She did ‘some professional productions’, but her activities were cut short by the war, marriage and motherhood. She revelled in her new showbiz career, even if, as an agent, it was secondhand. In her hey-day in the 1970s, Jean represented some big names of stage and screen, including Benny Hill, Bill Kerr, Peta Toppano and Barbara Rogers. Jean had set up the agency with the small amount remaining from Eddie’s estate, renting premises in North Sydney. As the business expanded, she focused on the variety acts she knew so well and took on two staff to handle growth areas like pop music. The long trip home to Avalon and back each day became tedious. Jean considered renting out her lovely home at Avalon and leasing a new place closer to the city, but was persuaded by a real estate agent to sell instead. That was her first mistake. I thought he had my best interest at heart, but of course he didn’t. He wanted the commission on the property. So I sold it and we came to buy in town, but my daughter was being a bit difficult at the time—she didn’t want to live here, and it was going to ruin her life if she had to to do this or go there . . . so we rented. And then [Stephanie and Alan] wanted horses and we had horses. So it sort of dwindled away and what was left, I put into the business. Then when the business disintegrated . . .

Jean’s second mistake was to go into a partnership without a legal agreement. Unable to afford to give her two staff a pay rise, she had lightheartedly suggested they could instead be partners and earn next to nothing, like her. They agreed, with alacrity. In 1978, Jean was badly injured in a car accident in Queensland. After five days in intensive care and a long convalescence, she returned to the office in Sydney. There was a letter on the desk. They said they were splitting the agency, they had formed another partnership, and I was out. I’m not really very good at business. I guess I just trust people too much. And I really didn’t believe that something like that could happen . . . Nobody else ever invested any money in that agency but me. And I literally didn’t get anything out of it. I moved to Gladesville. I got a house there and was still operating but the incentive wasn’t there any more . . . and the other two had the established phone numbers and the established office and the established everything. And that’s part of being an agency—the phone numbers. You have to let everyone know you’ve moved and who you represent and that’s quite a lot of expense, setting that up.

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Shelter from the Storm Jean never recovered financially from the agency break-up. In her fifties, her children finally reared, she found herself penniless and unemployed—and increasingly worried about how to keep paying the rent. I was then on the pension and I just couldn’t afford $145 or whatever [rents] were going up to a week. I hadn’t even thought of public housing—I mean I guess there were times way back, even in Orange, when I could have applied for public housing and it just never occurred to me. And I forget who it was, but somebody said to me, why don’t you apply to the Housing Commission. So I thought, ‘Oh well, I know there’s a long wait, fair enough—so I did’.

....

Jean was eventually allocated a bedsitter in Dundas, in Sydney’s north west, in a block occupied by mainly elderly tenants. Her placement coincided with the release of the Burdekin Report on housing the mentally ill. This controversial report recommended moving many mental health patients out of psychiatric hospitals and into the community, with back-up services. But in Jean’s block, things didn’t work out that way. A lot of them were put into the Dundas area because that’s very close to Rydalmere and Gladesville [psychiatric hospitals]. Suddenly the mix [of tenants] changed. There was no back-up services . . . yes there are mental health teams, but the teams had no way of coping with all these people that were being sent out. They were put there and more or less dumped. People with learning disabilities—the man who moved in next door to me couldn’t read or write, he didn’t know how to budget, he didn’t know how to cook . . . One of the alcoholics was put in this bedsit with nothing. He had the stove going with the door open to keep warm in winter. I had one of those folding beds and I gave him that and loaned him a doona, and the other tenants—we gave him saucepans and stuff, but if we hadn’t have done that he’d have had nothing. We had one man that was sort of totally alcoholic, another was schizophrenic and then the next thing you have is the alcoholics having a high old time with the schizophrenics, the schizophrenics drinking and going off their medication, which is about the worst thing they can do . . . you know, you get a schizophrenic walking up and down talking

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Poor Little Princess to himself and hosing the roof at three o’clock in the morning because he thinks there’s blood on it . . . and suddenly you get a whole different situation. The tenants were locking themselves up behind their doors, afraid to use the laundries.

Never one to duck a difficult situation, Jean tried to help. But her attempts at mediation only drew her into conflict. Across the road was a house that came empty, and this lady was housed there with her son, and she’d had a lot of mental problems and also alcoholism, but prescription drug abuse as well . . . she was causing a lot of trouble with the single men. She’d be yelling and screaming and carrying on with them—there was a lot of harassment going on . . . One poor man got lung cancer and he was only quite young. He used to cycle everywhere and he put this racing bike together. And when he got cancer and he was in hospital and it was confirmed there was nothing they could do, they said he could go home. He had oxygen there and he was finally back with his friends, who used to visit him. But she started to harass him then. She knew he was going to die and she wanted the bike for her boy . . . on one occasion she went into his flat and took his oxygen mask off. And he’d finally had enough. He had a portable oxygen mask and he took the bike across there one day and said, ‘Look, take it and leave me alone’. His family complained and I complained, we were asking the Department to evict her, but they wouldn’t do anything at that time . . . She’ll ring them fifteen times a day some days and just give them a bad time. But they keep saying, ‘Where are we going to move her to??’. Then she struck up a friendship with the man next door to me who couldn’t read or write. He’d not come from a mental hospital, he’d actually been working in a hospital as a cleaner, he just wasn’t very bright, didn’t have an education or anything. But he had money, because he’d had his superannuation from the hospital, but there was a guardian looking after it. And she started befriending him and he started drinking and then he wasn’t eating properly and stuff . . . So I talked to him and got him gardening. He didn’t know anything about gardening, but when he discovered he liked it he was growing tomatoes and spinach for everybody and he loved it. At five o’clock in the morning he’d be out there talking to his plants. He was having a lovely time! He still wasn’t eating properly so I said, ‘Okay, what we’ll do is, if you give me $20, I’ll feed you every night. If you’re not going to be there, I’ll

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Shelter from the Storm give you a piece of red cord, tie it onto your balcony and then I’ll know that I won’t cook for you that night.’ So he was getting really good meals and vegetables, plus a dessert every night. Then he started going over there and she came and abused me saying I was ripping him off . . . Twelve o’clock at night . . . she came banging on my door and said, ‘He hasn’t had his dinner tonight, where’s his dinner?’ And I said, ‘Well I’m sorry but I took it into him several times and he wasn’t there. The restaurant’s now closed.’ ‘Oh, you’re ripping him off . . .’, and of course she’s woken the whole complex by now. I got annoyed and told her to piss off. The next morning there was a brown paper bag on the doorstep like a wino would leave behind and I accidentally knocked it—and there was all this smell of petrol and then I realised what it had been meant for.

Jean informed the police and the Housing Department about the petrol bomb incident, and was put down for a transfer. This time luck was on her side. In May 1994 she was invited to inspect a brand new unit at Pendle Hill, further west . . . They were building all these new sorts of complexes, much, much nicer than the older flats . . . I was just amazed when I saw it. I couldn’t believe it! I just burst into tears. We’re quite a multicultural mix. When I moved in we had one Filipino, two Turkish, one Maltese, one Lebanese, one Sri Lankan, one Polish, three English and one Australian . . . We have a special cottage for handicapped people and we have a young man down there with cerebral palsy who’s Italian. It’s really hard because of the English problem. The Lebanese lady doesn’t speak any at all, Yildas [from Turkey] manages to tell me if she’s got a problem and Fatima, who’s also Turkish, her English is a little bit better . . .

Jean is still rapturous about her unit, one of thirteen in a block that sits inconspicuously among traditional detached housing in a quiet street. Every Saturday now, accompanied by her adored five-year-old grandson, she goes sailing. Sailing? In Blacktown?? Jean chortles. All around the garages! See that lovely wooden pedestal there? That was $5 at a garage sale. So that’s what I do. You’d be surprised how often I get offered a cup of tea or piece of cake, stuff like that. And I love talking to people. That plant was 50 cents. And my bowl of cherries was $3 at Vincent de Paul. (I love that—‘life is just a bowl of cherries’.) And

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Poor Little Princess those cost $2, those lovely cups and saucers. The lace curtains came from a garage sale . . .

Jean points out her bargains on a guided tour of her unit. There’s a long lounge/dining-room, the shelves bursting with family photos and ornaments, a generous bedroom, modern kitchen, and large combined bathroom-and-laundry, complete with washing machine, dryer and a freezer bought second-hand for $50, the key to Jean’s housekeeping. I shop once every couple of months and fill it up and then I don’t have to worry about that part, just get bread and milk. The kitchen is lovely . . . Since I’ve come here I’ve gone with this pink and green and I really like it now.

The unit looks onto a leafy garden, presided over by a magnificent old Moreton Bay fig next door. The communal pergola is already covered with bougainvillea and passionfruit vines, some of the many touches that Jean has added. She points out each shrub and bush with pride. The Banksia has got tiny, little creamy yellow roses in spring, and no thorns. There’s a tibouchina there, I love that dark blue, and that’s agapanthus, they come up a lovely blue umbrella of flowers. The freesias do extremely well, and of course the drooping violet in the basket. I put pansies in there and this is one of those Brazilian vines with the lovely trumpet flowers. Those two are gardenias and round there I grow all herbs for cooking. The jacaranda flowered a little bit last year and the Cootamundra wattle I put in two years ago, that’s now 30 feet tall! That flowered last year for the first time, it’s beautiful—very cheerful in the middle of winter. It’s so quiet. Here we are in the middle of the day in a Department of Housing complex and, apart from the birds, you can’t hear a sound!

To her surprise and amusement, Jean’s efforts to develop a sense of community in the block were formally rewarded recently, when she was presented with a Good Neighbour Certificate. It’s a new policy of the Department of Housing, aimed at breaking down the sense of alienation that occurs in some housing developments. There was a special night organised . . . where high schools in the Western Suburbs perform plays on how to be a good neighbour and all the rest of it . . . It was really very interesting. My son Alan MC’d it and we arranged for the celebrities to go—Rebecca Croft from ‘Home and Away’ and Jamie Croft from ‘A Country Practice’ . . . My little grandson

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Shelter from the Storm was getting restless and I was playing up the back with him . . . and then they said my name . . . and they gave me this lovely basket of dried flowers.

Jean gave the flowers to another ‘lady’ there whom she felt deserved recognition, but kept the certificate. ‘I couldn’t give that away because it’s got my name on it’, she laughs. As if to demonstrate good neighbourly principles, a woman walks across the grass to peer into Jean’s unit. Another resident, she was worried to see Jean’s car still there at midmorning and wondering if she were ill. Jean’s neighbour had good reason to be concerned, because Jean spends most weekdays at the Western Sydney Regional Public Tenants’ Council, where she acts as a sort of intermediary between the Department of Housing and its tenants, supplying information and advice, steering bewildered tenants through the bureaucracy, smoothing official feathers and defusing all kinds of crises, from rats in the roof to threatened evictions. You see it’s really strange. When people go into the Department, they talk to a client service officer at the counter. He knows all the rules and regulations; he has them down pat . . . And so he tells them, but he forgets that either they’re not as well educated as he is, or maybe they’re stressed out with some problem they’ve got—they may not take in everything he’s saying. They may only take in every fifth thing he says . . . So a lot of it is a communication problem. And it’s not a case of blaming the Department . . . there’s a queue of people waiting to be seen. You’re in open cubicles, where it really is very hard to concentrate on what that person’s saying when you can hear the next person talking . . . We feel like we’re an extension of the Department to a degree. I mean, we’re not their enemy. Five years ago, when I started, the perception was that we were the enemy . . . there to police what they did and harass them and run them down. And that’s not what we do. Maybe they did in the old days, but not now. The majority of them are trying their best and really do care about these people, and let’s face it, there are pressures on them from above to run it as a business—but it’s social housing, and probably 90 per cent of those people are on rebated rent—so how can you run it as a business? It’s ridiculous.

The Western Sydney Regional Public Tenants’ Council operates from a fibro cottage in Blacktown. It gets enough government funding to rent

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Poor Little Princess an office, cover basic expenses and pay an administrator. As VicePresident (previously President) Jean puts in four days a week, unpaid. Julie, a young woman with four children under six fleeing from a violent partner interstate, was a typical case. The family had holed up in her mother’s one-bedroom unit, in a complex for the aged. Julie had only what she had been able to grab on the way out from her home. She was stressed and frightened and in no position to grapple with forms and officials. Enter Auntie Jean. Jean lodged the appropriate forms for immediate housing, but also convinced the Department of Housing to pay for the family’s temporary stay in a caravan park. Jean and Marianne, the office worker, drove the five family members there, then accompanied Julie to the St Vincent de Paul to get blankets and linen, before supplying them with food, nappies and other essentials. Two weeks later, a house came through. Delighted as Julie’s family was to get it so quickly, the house presented new problems. Jean and Julie returned to Vinnie’s, this time in search of beds, a cot, chairs, a table. ‘Again, they were wonderful’, Jean recalls. Julie returned to her new house to await the connection of the gas and electricity—another little detail Jean had thought of, along with lending Julie her mobile until the regular phone was on. Julie has now been awarded custody of the children and is trying to make a fresh start. We still keep in touch and make sure she’s all right . . . She’s talking about getting the children into care a couple of days a week—she wants to go back to school or TAFE or something. I really believe this girl is going to make it.

The Council has about 200 cases on the computer at any time. Jean cannot solve all their problems, but she certainly gives them all she’s got: a genuine concern for their needs, both social and material, a vast network of appropriate contacts and services, a dogged determination, infinite patience and lots of simple common sense. Like a good doctor, Jean aims to cure the complaint rather than just alleviate the symptoms. If someone is regularly behind with rent, she tactfully probes till she finds the cause: if the money is going on drink or drugs or gambling, she tries to get the individual help with their addiction. If it’s sheer poverty, she ensures the tenant gets the maximum social service entitlement. If it’s poor financial management, she organises budgeting courses. Along the way she might discover a client is illiterate, and with their permission will arrange a

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Shelter from the Storm teacher. It’s a unique blend of personal warmth and professional service that no official organisation could emulate. What we have to be is totally non-judgemental. And sure, we get people who lie to us and people we get sucked in by and people we help and then six months later they’re back on our doorstep again wanting more help. At one of our management meetings we said, ‘How many times do we help them??’. And I said, ‘As many times as they come’.

The Tenants’ Council office at Blacktown is bedlam. Jean is on one phone, trying to sweet-talk a Department official into reassessing a tenant’s failed claim under the Rental Assistance program. ‘No-one informed this applicant that she was eligible for removalist’s fees for her furniture to be moved from Queensland—a bill in the region of $1000’. She hangs up, satisfied. If Jean puts it in writing, the client service officer has agreed, the tenant will receive the full bond, because she had been misinformed about her rights. On another phone, Marianne is taking details of a ‘fumey’ carpet that a tenant has been trying for three months to get the Department to clean. Meanwhile the fax is spitting out reams of handwritten statements—testimonials of good behaviour Jean is collecting from other tenants to support a single father of six who has been served with an eviction order. His offence? Creating a disturbance. All right, concedes Jean, the party did go on for two days and got a bit out of hand—but look at how well he’s coping with his six kids. Glowing references from the day care centre, children always neat and clean, well behaved, lunches made, other tenants commenting on his general politeness—give him a break. Two women have alleged he assaulted them, but Jean thinks they’ve got a hidden agenda. Given the amount of evidence she’s accumulated in his favour, and the set of her jaw as she prepares to take on the Department of Housing official, it looks like the single father will be staying where he is. One person said to me very nicely the other day, ‘If ever I was in trouble, Jean, I’d love you on my side!’. Yes, I have altercations with certain people in the Department of Housing, but very few actually. I make it quite clear to them that this isn’t a personal issue, a win/lose issue between you and I. Because the winner at the end of the day isn’t me or you, it’s the client.

If she were ever to appear on ‘Mastermind’, Jean could give NSW housing policy as her expert subject. She has to know the rules inside out in order to have them bent. Then there are the guidelines. For instance,

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Poor Little Princess a person in dire need can be given four weeks’ bond instead of two, and two weeks’ rent in advance. But the applicant does not often know his or her entitlements—and even the Department of Housing staff can be unclear about it, says Jean. ‘A lot of people in the Department think of those guidelines as rules, but they’re not rules, they’re guidelines and you can go outside of them. They are expendable.’ A call from Jean is usually all it takes to sort things out. At the other extreme are the staff who take their role too seriously, as a current joke has it: Q. What’s the difference between God and a client service officer? A. God doesn’t think he’s a client service officer. It’s 4.30 p.m. and Jean still has a mountain of cases to sort out. Top of the list is a woman whose Department of Housing house was set on fire by her ex-husband, apparently in a jealous rage. Their young daughter was badly burnt in the incident. For days, the mother watched over her in intensive care, getting her new partner to move into her house in her absence to mind the other children. Someone informed the Department about the ‘lodger’. The mother was notified that she was in breach of the tenancy rules: she was only entitled to the house as a single mother with dependants. At her wit’s end, her daughter still appallingly ill in hospital, she contacted Jean. She believed her exhusband’s mother had dobbed her in. Jean has coped with all kinds of adversity, but one great personal disappointment remained. At 65, she decided to seek out her birth mother. It was easy to find out her mother’s name—an agency provided such services. Jean was called in for the usual counselling interview.

Jean Cinis today, a tireless advocate for tenants. If she were ever to appear on ‘Mastermind’, she could give NSW Housing Policy as her expert subject—you have to know the rules to get them bent. ‘Difficult things take a couple of days’, she says. ‘Impossible things take

It’s a bit of a harrowing thing, finding out your identity and all the rest . . .

a week.’

so we talked, and finally she said, ‘This is your real name’. She wrote it on a piece of paper and pushed it across. And I looked at it, and I said, ‘I knew that’. She said, ‘How?’. And I said, ‘I don’t know, but I knew that was my name’. I was Jean Dorothy Dethridge.

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Shelter from the Storm Her mother was listed as Alice Louise Dethridge, with an address in Hereford, England. She’d be 89, Jean calculated, but she might still be alive. Through a helpful overseas enquiries operator, Jean narrowed down the options. There were two Dethridges listed in Sydney. On a hunch, she rang one. I said, ‘I know this is a very strange call, but are you English?’. He said, ‘No—but my father was’. I said, ‘Do you by any chance have a relation whose name is Alice Louise?’. He said, ‘No. Wait a minute though, I have an aunt called Auntie Louie’. And I told him the story . . .

Jean’s childhood instincts about ‘Auntie Louie’ had been right. The glamorous lady who had taken her to the park was her real mother—and she was alive, a bit blind but otherwise well, and living outside London. John, the man Jean had spoken to, was her cousin. Another cousin was also in Sydney. Jean drove over to meet them. After they had exclaimed over the family likeness, they began to fill her in about her background. At first, it was like a fairytale. When I was a little girl, I used to fantasise, ’cause the Queen is three weeks older than me, you see, and I used to fantasise that she and I had got mixed up as babies, and any time now this great big Rolls Royce was going to come up and tell me that I was a Princess, and she wasn’t! I don’t know whether it was delusions of grandeur or what, but I always knew I didn’t belong to those people . . . I was a very pretty little girl. Everybody used to stop my mother in the street and say, ‘Isn’t she like Princess Elizabeth!’, which is probably where those fantasies came from.

In reality, Jean’s mother came from an upper class family directly descended from King George IV. Her mother had committed suicide when Louie was eleven. Louie had married, but had no other children. She lived alone. Jean’s new-found cousins rang D, an English cousin in touch with Louie, to tell her the momentous news. But the cousin was far from pleased. She was really unpleasant. I said, ‘What can I do? Can you tell her?’. She said, ‘Oh she’s not interested now, she’s too old, she doesn’t care’. I said, ‘Well you don’t know that—that’s not fair’.

From Sydney, Jean rang her mother’s number. When Louie answered, Jean was too overwhelmed to say anything.

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Poor Little Princess I pretended it was a wrong number. I just wanted to hear her voice. She was very well spoken . . . I said I was ringing from Australia and I thought I had a wrong number, and she was really nice, said, ‘Oh that’s all right my dear’, and we just talked for a few minutes and I hung up.

In the end, one of Jean’s sons broke the news to his grandmother. He told her they would not intrude further if that was what she wanted, but she said it was the happiest day of her life. A week later, Jean was on a plane to London. At a maisonette at Wharton-on-Thames, she knocked on the door—and was face to face with the mother she hadn’t seen for over 60 years. It was really strange. It was like a reverse situation, more like I was the mother! And she was calling me that sometimes. I’d say, ‘Louie! I’m not your mother, I’m your daughter’. And she’d say, ‘Yes I know dear, but you’re so warm and so strong, I feel like you are my mother’. So I stayed there for about ten days and we got on very well. She was really lovely, very social. But she wasn’t my type of person at all, you know . . . she was impressed with wealth and money and position, and all of the things I’m not, and she was always telling me about all these people she knew . . . and I naturally just listened to her and said all of the right things in all of the right places. But the place was terribly rundown. It was awful the way she was living. The toilets didn’t flush—she couldn’t see, she had food all down the front of her clothes. And she was a beautiful dresser when she was young. She used to turn the fridge off to save electricity and everything was going bad in the fridge, meat going mildewed. I went out and bought bottles of bleach and put stuff on the bath . . . I didn’t want her to know it was so filthy. I talked to her about maybe having someone come in and clean once a week. ‘Oh I can’t afford that dear!’ I said, ‘Well there are organisations who do that when you are elderly’. She had money all over the place, but she didn’t know. She kept on worrying about this poll tax they had brought in . . . and she wasn’t spending money on food or anything. She just wasn’t being looked after. I had a go at D about it. I said, ‘For God’s sake, why don’t you just buy her a washing machine or something, or get help?’. But it was too much trouble for D. [Louie] idolised D! D was the daughter she didn’t have. She was afraid to upset D because she wanted to go and stay with her. That would have been her total, ultimate finish of her life.

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Shelter from the Storm Although Jean was distressed at how neglected Louie was, and saddened by the gulf between them, she was pleased to see how well her children and Louie got on. Everybody phoned her. She spoke to Stephanie from America, and Timmy and David, and she was thrilled. They called her Louie darling. It was something she said, I don’t know what triggered it off. But she was rapt. Then David had to go to England on business and he went over to see her. And it was like love at first sight. She could see enough to see what people looked like and David’s very elegant. He’s gay, he’s an interior designer and he’s a very handsome man. And suddenly Louie was enjoying David. She loved men. She was a real flirt, at 90! But I don’t think she had any sexual relationship apart from my father. I think she was either so scared or so alone when she had the baby . . . She told me she later married and that her husband never bothered her in that way.

Like a ministering angel, David appeared on the very day Louie fell over and broke her hip. He took charge, visiting her in hospital, despatching D in short order and revamping Louie’s house. Unlike Jean, he wasn’t short of cash. When he was due to return to Australia, Louie begged to go with him. He had a beautiful apartment on the Gold Coast . . . He has a lovely old Rolls Royce, which she loved. David needs to be surrounded by luxury and beautiful things. And she loved smoked salmon sandwiches, that was her favourite thing. So she virtually lived in luxury up there till she died. She had a wonderful last year. I used to phone her two or three times a week. My phone bills were gigantic. I went up once . . . and then at Christmas time they booked a flat in Blues Point Towers on the corner of the harbour there and brought her down, and I took her out every day and she met her grandchildren here. She was very fond of Timothy too, because Timothy is a real charmer. She just loved men around her.

One day Jean had a call. Louie had had a stroke and was in a coma. She died that day. She had overturned her first will, which had left everything to her niece D. David was now the main beneficiary. Jean got a small bequest of £2000. She used it to buy a decent couch which she sleeps on when her son Timothy and his wife come to stay sometimes, with just enough left over to install large built-in wardrobes with mirrors. ‘I can put

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Poor Little Princess mirrors on the ceiling as well’, she laughs, ‘if I can find a man and we get into erotic sex!’. An oval photo of Louie is prominently displayed in Jean’s loungeroom. Jean is proud of how beautiful she was. Jean’s own hard life hasn’t helped her looks or her health. The drugs she takes for her arthritis have blown out her weight, but her face tells of her strength and her humour. That large body hides an even bigger heart, as so many luckless people who have sought her help can testify. But at 71, she’s not sure how long she can continue fighting for her ‘housos’. Besides her royal blood (‘So all of that bullshit wasn’t far off the mark’, she says with some glee), Jean has inherited an incurable degenerative condition of the retina. Her sight has been deteriorating for some time and soon she will no longer be able to drive. She’s considering her options. I’ve had too many falls and I’m running out of steam. Tim’s second wife is a lovely lady and they want me to come and live with them. I’ll go up and spend a couple of weeks with them, but I like my independence. I’ll phase in gradually. But I’m too old for a guide dog—I’m not going to get one of them, so forget about that!

The phone rings and Auntie Jean is back on the case, reassuring some other hapless tenant. She has a motto, which seems to sum up her whole gritty, irrepressible attitude to life and whatever it can throw at you: ‘Difficult things take a couple of days. Impossible things take a week.’

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6 Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies Emoh Ruo Co-op

I suppose you’d have to start with where we met, most of us anyway. Everyone was based somehow in the arts . . . and as a group they started Kelly Street Collective, an artist-run co-operative gallery in Ultimo. At that time, in the early eighties, there were a few of those sort of initiatives and they were very exciting, very stimulating. We had to run it ourselves, follow all those management systems like incorporating, financial management . . . having meetings by consensus, a lot of things that still apply here. We were conscious of the fact that we didn’t have secure housing, any of us—and Amalina . . . suggested that we might form a housing cooperative—which is what we did. Now that sounds very simple, but I can tell you it was not, because we were in at the very beginning, which meant the goalposts kept shifting!

Margot Currey was 49 when she and her husband, Alan, became foundermembers of the Emoh Ruo Co-op, in 1986. By the time their twobedroom unit was built, it was 1995—and Alan was dead. Though stricken by his loss, she regrets neither the hard work nor the long wait. She is merely saddened that he cannot share with her the home they had dreamed of. It was Alan who suggested the name Emoh Ruo—a quaintly oldfashioned touch for such a progressive, arty bunch. Margot laughs as she recalls how it came about.

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies In those days, there was a lot of concern about co-ops being little enclaves of Left political persuasions. We were originally called Third Wave, which was considered a bit aggravating. So my husband was sitting up there one day, and he was great with words, and he said, ‘How about Emoh Ruo?’. And everyone thought this must be some big Aboriginal name—and of course in the 1930s, there were a lot of houses called things like Dunroamin, and Emoh Ruo, and someone said ‘it’s “Our Home” backwards’. Amalina next door just fell over laughing. So we’ve always been that. There’s an element of humour to it. It’s not a serious thing at all.

The Emoh Ruo Co-operative straddles two streets in Erskineville, in Sydney’s inner west. From the outside, it looks like any modern block, complete with security gates and intercoms. But its fifteen units have been designed with more than average tender, loving care. Each one has been moulded to suit the specific needs of the occupants: fifteen adults, aged from 60 down to the late twenties, eight children and two dogs. Margot wanted a large, open-plan area that could serve as kitchen, dining-room, lounge and art-room in one, or be cordoned off into areas if necessary. Alan and Margot had applied for a two-person unit; after his death, she wasn’t sure if she was still entitled to it. The co-op and ARCH [the Association to Resource Co-operative Housing] went to, I think it was the Ministry of Housing at the time . . . and they said as long as I was here, I could stay here on my own. So there are all those supportive kind of things if anyone has a special need . . . I said to Alan, ‘Let’s have a double and a single bedroom’, because we have family and I could imagine grandchildren, we’ve always had extended family stay and I want people to know that there’s a bed there . . . And everyone, the family, has appreciated that, because I think very often when family has left they feel there’s nowhere for them where their parents were. Then in the bathroom I said, ‘I have a washing machine and I’d appreciate if I could have it here’—we have two washing machines and a dryer in a common laundry down there—but I thought, ‘I can’t imagine myself walking down there and back every day’. And I wanted a bath as well, basically a small bath that children can have when they want to. And so they fitted everything in that I asked for. Everybody had different things.

....

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Shelter from the Storm Mishko, a Macedonian painter, and his two teenage sons, live in a twobedroom unit on the first floor. He was a latecomer to the co-op, joining in 1993. He met the group through his art gallery contacts. They explained to me what the co-op concept is and what [Emoh Ruo] was . . . they were involved much deeper and wider in concept and they participate with . . . architects. The space in the square metre, practically it’s everywhere the same, but the interior is differently made for every tenant . . . I have a two-bedroom, one dining-room. This was one huge space; I divided it into two because I find it more functional that way. I create a room for myself and a chance for my kids to have one as well.

Gary designed his single unit so as to maximise his work space. I was able to keep the bedroom down to the minimum, and a smaller bathroom and kitchen . . . the square footage may be similar to other places, but being able to juggle it like that ended up with good useful space. I’d asked for a single place on the floor down . . . but then it ended up better because I don’t have anyone’s footsteps above me and I’m further away from the traffic.

Gary’s interest in photography and the backstage part of theatre had led him into the Kelly Street Collective and hence the co-op. Although there was no formal vetting of a potential member’s philosophy, Margot believes that the people who eventually formed the group did have a lot in common. We don’t aim for a suburban block . . . Most of us wanted secure housing, that maybe wasn’t as conventional as others would want. And of course financially, that’s a very big part of it. We did decide that it was necessary for people to be involved somehow in the arts. So our co-op actually consists of musicians, painters, people in film, people interested in the technical media, one girl who does acting, art teachers, people like me who does a range of things . . . I used to do very big work, all installation type work . . . I do drawing, but it’s related to construction . . . I’m a maker.

....

At 60, Margot is the oldest in the group. Her bright, open unit is alive with artworks of all kinds: pictures, carvings and sculptures done by friends, paintings done by her daughter, a handwoven bag from Arnhem Land and of course her own creations, which include a patchwork blanket

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies

over a couch, done while she was convalescing recently from a broken neck. Margot went to art school after she had reared two daughters, and spent fifteen satisfying years pioneering an art therapy program for mentally ill patients at Gladesville Hospital. Her husband, Alan, was also a ‘maker’, but of more functional items like bridges and roads. He was a creative sort of man, wonderful with words and poetry and things. He had an engineering background. When we were in New Guinea, he was building wharves, airstrips, bridges and things . . . When we came down to Queensland he was working with the tin mines. He was gold mining when I first met him. As a couple, we never wanted to own anything. We were in Papua New Guinea when the children were born and they had as far as you could see to run around in, all the housing is provided, either by the person you work for or the government. Then we lived in all kinds of different ways in Queensland, and we’ve lived on beaches . . . so the kids have not been brought up in Sydney suburbs. It’s never bothered me that I never had a

Margot Currey was 49 when she and her husband, Alan, became founder-members of the Emoh Ruo Co-op. They had spent the early years of their marriage travelling around Papua New Guinea and Queensland, where Alan worked as an engineer. A co-op seemed like the ideal way of finding both a home and a community. 'As a couple we never wanted to own anything.' After nine years of planning and lobbying, Emoh Ruo was finally built—but sadly, by this time, Alan had died. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm house and garden on my own . . . I was brought up oddly, we’ve never been like that.

....

Mishko grew up in a ‘middle-class’ family in Macedonia. He studied art at high school, then worked in a glass factory for the import/export department. He married a solicitor, and in 1986, with his two small sons, made his first trip to Australia. In the beginning it was better prospects, opportunity, all that stuff. I would like to be in an exotic country—that’s how we felt about Australia overseas. We didn’t have a big knowledge about that.

In 1989 the family returned to Macedonia. Soon after, war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Although Macedonia was not directly involved, the tensions unleashed went further than the battlefield. Mishko watched with disbelief as former compatriots split along aggressively ethnic lines. Suddenly there were no more Balkans: you had to proclaim yourself a Serb or Croat, a Macedonian or a Slovene. To Mishko, this was as ludicrous as trying to ascertain whether the short black coffee he drank was Yugoslav or Greek—it was the same basic substance, whatever the cultural guise. He points to his own family history: his grandfather’s surname was Desic, the ‘ic’ ending indicating the family’s Serbian origins. But when the Bulgarians occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War, they converted such names to the more Bulgarian-sounding Desov. By the time Tito took over after the war, the family had headed north, to what is now Macedonia. The new regime decreed that all those residing in Macedonia should bear names with the Macedonian ending—so Mishko Desov became Desovski. Mishko believes the absurdity of the Balkan war is epitomised in his family’s headstone, which lists his grandfather as Desic (Serb), his father as Desov (Bulgarian) and will have his generation as Desovski (Macedonian). In 1991, Mishko arrived back in Australia alone, having separated from his wife. After taking a four-month CES course in bilingual office skills, he got a job as a mail sorter with an insurance company. It wasn’t very exciting, but he was anxious to send money to his children. He progressed to assistant underwriter. Then, in 1994, he was told he could be either retrained or retrenched. He chose the latter. ‘Because I have this dilemma with my kids, the retrenchment was a trigger for me to go back to my country, pick up the kids, come back here and restructure my life.’

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies Mishko and the boys rented privately at Arncliffe, in Sydney’s south until the co-op members were housed. For the teenagers, it was a huge change: they had to get used to a different country, foreign language, a new school and now a whole new community. Even living with their father was strange at first, especially for Victor, the elder boy.

Some of the fifteen adults, eight children and two dogs who comprise the Emoh Ruo Co-op in

In the beginning he is stuck in his room, doesn’t want to make friend with

Erskineville, in Sydney's

no-one—with one explanation, that he doesn’t want to suffer again

inner west. From left:

separation . . .

Amalina Wallace,

For the first couple of years, Mishko decided not to seek full time work in order to help the boys settle in. If he were still paying private rental, he could not have survived as he has, on the sole parent’s pension and a bit of part-time art teaching. But perhaps even more valuable than the financial support, the co-op has been an extended family the boys have come to know and trust, for which Mishko is profoundly grateful.

Mishko Desovski, Manojlo Desovski (Mishko's father), Louise Lammers, Zorica Desovski (Mishko's mother), Margot Currey, Esther Rhodes and Gary Luke. ‘This has probably

We have such an interaction where my kids, besides myself parenting,

got more people having

they are parenting from the co-op as well . . . in language matter, in

good input than just about

adopting all sorts of behaviour when they come to this country, where

any other group I've been

most of the things are foreign and there are emotional barriers from

in’, says Gary.

where they come from, having this situation is crucial for me as a

(Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm parent. I can say that my elder son, and my younger as well, he will not progress or have achievement at school if he hasn’t filled in some of the members here as extended family. They can pop in their door and ask questions . . . like Gary upstairs has a great importance to my older son, about questions like life or computers or whatever. So they don’t only grow up through me, they grow up through the co-op as well.

Right on cue, Mishko’s elder son, Victor, bursts through the door with a mate. With his blonde crew cut, board shorts and outsize T-shirt, he looks like any street-wise teenager. There’s no sign now of the introverted, brooding boy of two years ago. He exudes energy and enthusiasm, rhapsodising briefly about the co-op before rushing out again. It’s wonderful. Close to the city, to school, people you know—excellent! I usually go to talk to members of the co-op about computers, about movies we watch, going out and swimming and sports. I’ve got friends downstairs that go to school with me. The house that I used to live in is, like, very quiet, not much neighbours passing by, just a lot of cars, a busy area, nothing more. Here it’s much, much better. It’s really a great environment to live, yeah. It’s much more alive!

....

Crossing the large communal yard below, I meet Esther, on her way to the laundry. She came to Australia from Tanzania twenty years ago and got to know the Kelly Street group through her work in fabric design. Esther put her name down in the early days, when she had one child. By the time they could move in, that child was twelve and her second was nearly six. Like Mishko, she appreciates the back-up the co-op provides for single parents—for the adult as well as the kids. I like it for security reasons, it’s safe and you don’t have to worry about someone breaking in. And anytime you need help there’s someone around . . . so you don’t feel as if you’re alone . . . And you’ve got your privacy and all that. If I want to go and see Margot, I can go and see her. If I don’t, I don’t.

But how do fifteen adults and eight children manage to get along? Esther is not fazed by the group politics. ‘People have got their own ideas and their own problems and it’s just like a family living at home, with brothers and sisters who quarrel and fight and argue. It’s the same!’ But the co-op is slightly more formal. It has guidelines and principles,

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies articles of incorporation and legal responsibilities. The large common room in the courtyard has various purposes: one member uses it to work out with a punching bag, Mishko paints his large works there and the others sometimes book it for a party. But on Monday evenings, it’s given over to co-op business. These meetings are not to be confused with a social event, says Mishko. We put our agenda, trying to be as much as possible objective about the issue, solve the practical issue. We have all sorts of minutes. We operate in a very organised and methodical way, rather than starting to yack or gossip, which is not very productive.

To maximise the group’s efficiency, committees are appointed to handle finance, maintenance, gardening, collective cleaning, even a special birthday party. Margot explains that the aim is for each person to pull their weight. Some co-ops I think do have a dominant figure, but we most certainly don’t. People acknowledge that there are some people with certain skills but we don’t put that person in any position of authority or power—that seems to defeat the purpose for us. What we’re interested in really is everybody developing the skills to be able to manage . . . Like everyone should know how to take the minutes, or chair the meeting or, eventually, look after the finances . . . I don’t have a lot of computer skills and I feel I’d like to develop [them]. People can get quite nervous about how they appear but the thing is the co-op is there to help. Also it’s really important that everyone has equal access to information so they can decide how they’re going to respond to issues when they arise. They may interpret it differently—some people may read it, some may not. If they don’t, that’s their problem. I don’t actually have great expectations of other people. I’ve been around a hell of a lot longer than a 28-year-old, and I’ve lived in a whole range of places and different countries with family, people, so my idea of a co-op will be totally different from theirs. I’m a great one for letting it evolve. This co-op is very much one of those co-ops. It might appear that nothing is happening, but gradually, things evolve. So nothing is imposed on anybody. We’re very happy for people to dip in and out . . . You do find that when the need arises, people do move in and do things, without anything much being said.

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Shelter from the Storm Having worked with numerous theatre and arts collectives over the years, Gary has more experience of group dynamics than most. He believes Emoh Ruo has found a good balance. This has probably got more people having good input into the group than just about any other I’ve been in. We would have long periods where some would be more dominant, and then others take a turn. Over the years before we moved in, I think we’d already established a really good sort of village relationship of how we get things done.

But business aside, how well does the group function? Given their notoriously insecure, ego-driven natures, a co-operative composed entirely of artists might be expected to have some spectacular clashes. Margot admits there’s the odd flare-up. The personal and emotional issues, my word—we have our ups and downs! If those sorts of things happen we just withdraw for a while and let things settle down, without too much fuss. We’ve never had a situation where it’s been so bad . . . so totally disruptive, that it’s required outside counselling or anything like that.

Gary acknowledges ‘a couple of bits of friction. One or two of them haven’t been solved. Probably won’t be.’ He believes that explosive personalities simply weren’t included in the co-op to begin with. ‘Not everyone at Kelly Street was invited here.’ Those who were usually displayed a level of tolerance and social skills: what Gary calls ‘worldly discipline’. Mishko recalls one member who departed as a result of tensions with another, but in general, he believes the atmosphere is congenial. He laughs at the suggestion that the members might live in each other’s pockets. ‘It’s not a type of hippie community! We protect our privacy and individuality as well as interact with each other.’ ....

Apart from their espousal of housing co-operative principles, the group has no formal political position. Margot thinks the members would probably see eye to eye in many areas—but she’s only guessing. I think it’s in the way of what people do in their free time and work life, and what people say . . . you can tell what people think and how people react . . . There would be a consistent attitude towards those issues where the rights of people were of importance . . . some Aboriginal thing or the

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies rights of some minority group . . . conscience things. And so they’re usually considered to be Left ideas, whatever that means now. We’re basically Left, but we don’t talk politics.

Mishko echoes that description. ‘We are all in touch lately with Pauline Hanson! Whatever touches us in society, we are commenting on, like everyone else . . . no deeper discussion in the sense of political interaction.’ ....

To some outsiders, Margot muses, the members might seem like ‘a bunch of ratbags’. Gary reluctantly agrees that they are fairly middle-class— ‘lower grade yuppies’. But there’s one big difference: they don’t have a lot of money. Each member is subject to an asset test, and the group had to comply with Office of Community Housing guidelines requiring at least 65 per cent of members to be below a certain income. But as artists, their income is erratic. Some individuals occasionally get more lucrative work; if their income rises above public housing eligibility levels, then their rent increases too, up to private market levels. This extra contribution tops up

Mishko Desovski with his painting, ‘In the name of the Red Star, Black Swastika and White Coca-Cola’. Mishko's family name encapsulates for him the absurdity of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. His grandfather was a Serb called Desic. During the Second World War, the occupying Bulgarians changed it to the Bulgarian-sounding Desov. The family then moved to Macedonia where Tito decreed that the name become Macedonian: Desovski. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm funds for the co-op as a whole and is available for general maintenance and similar things. Thus, Margot points out, even if up to one-third of the members may at times be better off than the average public housing recipient, they are effectively supporting their more impoverished peers, thereby reducing the drain on the general public housing kitty. But Margot believes even the poorest co-op members on a minimal rent are paying their way, because of the time and effort they’ve contributed to establishing and managing the co-op—work that would otherwise have had to be done by salaried bureaucrats. You work very hard for this kind of housing. Very hard. You have to pay for everything in work. Everyone that I’ve ever spoken to has had great respect for the way we were able to hang in there all those years . . . There were times we’d put in nights and days; other times there’d be a bit of a lull, but we still had to have our fortnightly meetings . . . to keep up the information that was required of us, and we also belonged to committees and things. It did take up a lot of our time. Interestingly enough, we were facing a lot of blockages . . . we actually went to State Parliament and asked Sandra Nori, a [parliamentary] member here, to speak for us. We went to the Council, to Vic Smith—we had to do those kind of things to make sure the sale of the land went through. A group of co-ops had to approach the ombudsman because it just wasn’t progressing. There were a lot of hold-ups. The neighbours objected to the idea of public housing. They thought it’d be full of drunks and drug addicts and all sorts of things, so we had to do a PR thing where we went and introduced ourselves to everybody all around. Then we had to go to Council to maybe argue against any disapproval. We had heard people were going to complain. But no-one turned up, so we didn’t have to do anything. And since we’ve been here we do communicate with the neighbours.

Relations are mostly cordial now, but one woman remains antagonistic. ‘She does things like cut my hedge down’, Margot explains. ‘Every time I see her, I smile and say hello . . . I think she has a little bit of a problem, but that’s okay.’ ....

Tenants renting privately often get disheartened about making home improvements, as their landlords move them on and reap the benefits of their labour. With a five-year lease, renewable for another five years, the

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Artists, Ratbags and Lower Grade Yuppies members of Emoh Ruo have relative security of tenure. They are also in the strange position of being their own landlords. But the urge to beautify and enhance their surroundings comes from their deep sense of attachment to where they live. Interestingly, although the principle of state-provided housing is the same, to Mishko, the co-op feels very different from the sort of public housing he knew under a communist regime. The big difference, he explains, is that in Macedonia decisions were based purely on ideology, with no room for individual needs, whereas Emoh Ruo is ultimately concerned with everyone’s quality of life. In Macedonia, the communist society has actually implemented the system of co-op on level of state. Almost no-one owns a house over there . . . whatever we have was a collective possession. No-one has idea he will act about that, to protect or develop or make it better. ‘That’s the state’s—who cares. It’s not mine.’ That element, some kind of personal touch about what belongs to you, you are responsible for it—that was absent there. That element is not absent here. We all feel that this is our home. It is a government-sponsored project and all that stuff, but it is our home. And the way we manage it, the way we can live here, that will be our life quality. If we miss that point, we miss the whole aspect.

Ironically perhaps, but because it does not function on their enormous scale, this co-op has achieved what communist administrators could not. Margot thinks wistfully of how well it would have suited her late husband, Alan, a romantic of the old Left. He would have loved it. He was the ultimate co-operative or community person, didn’t believe in ownership of land, believed in shared facilities. He was about twelve years older than me, on the fringe of the [Sydney] Push and that generation . . . he wouldn’t ever buy shares or anything. He wouldn’t make money out of other people’s misfortunes. He just refused all that . . . he basically never changed. It’s a real old socialist way . . . ’cause you know no-one talks like that now. I don’t know whether they can afford to.

Although Alan is gone, Margot has a full and satisfying life. She’s relieved that the threat of being trapped on a pension with spiralling rent has been removed and she’s happy where she is: she likes her unit, gets on well with the other co-op members and is enjoying the broader community at Erskineville.

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Shelter from the Storm It’s close to everything I want. I don’t drive a car, and it’s close to public transport . . . my network is developing and I really like the area. I like the activity, the life on the streets. I’ve got two daughters and they enjoy coming and going. We have the opportunity to build a beautiful little oasis here. Any one of my friends that has ever walked in, it’s just been, ‘Oh this is great!’.

Margot’s only gripe is the way government policy towards housing cooperatives is constantly changing. After all these years of struggling to get the physical building, we still seem to be struggling with government concepts that keep altering. We’ll never be left alone because it’s public housing and at the end of the year we’re accountable to the auditors and maybe the Office of Community Housing . . . but I would like to think we could be given credit for our systems that we’ve got going . . . I’m just saying I’d like to see it as an accepted form of housing that is left to function on its own . . . It’s not something where people come and go—and I think that’s one of the differences with public housing. You want to build a community. Now that takes time. It’s important to think of people’s needs . . . and that people can look at what they have as being their home . . . I feel that’s terribly important, that the children have security, and everyone has security, and that they’re not going to have to go for any reasons other than what they choose to do.

Margot, Esther, Gary and Mishko certainly have no intentions of going anywhere. Gary jokes that they’ll eventually have to replace one of the stairwells with a lift for wheelchair access. At first, Mishko laughs that as an artist, he can exist anywhere—but then he gets thoughtful. Maybe before I experienced this co-op I would think that conventional living, on your own, in a flat or a house or whatever, is the ultimate way to live. But not any more. After this, I don’t think I would like [it]—even if I had money! I think this is the way I will really appreciate. I have a decent life, and I am surrounded by decent people. On the personal level, I can definitely say that my dream is fulfilled.

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7 A Ghetto it Wasn’t John Alexander

Publisher, editor and celebrated bon vivant, John Alexander seems an unlikely graduate of public housing. It’s hard to imagine this suave, successful media mogul as a snot-nosed kid running wild around the vast raw housing estates that ringed Sydney in the 1950s. That image might have fitted any number of kids of his generation and circumstances, but John Alexander’s ability to land on his feet started early. His ‘houso’ days were spent in the salubrious suburb of Turramurra, in Sydney’s northern reaches. I don’t know the full details of how my parents got on what was then the Housing Commission list, but I was born in North Sydney, grew up in a house in Willoughby and at about five years of age, moved to a Housing Commission house in North Turramurra, which was a bit like moving to the worst street in the best suburb those days . . . It was actually a rarity to have a Housing Commission estate in the midst of this very wealthy area—Bobbin Head Road—and some of the wealthiest homes in the city were on that same route. It was a very small estate . . . only fifteen houses . . . built on part of an old orchard. How they got allocated that outcome I don’t know—I think that’s part of the lottery of life.

John was the second of six children, an unusually large family at the time, particularly, he points out, for a Protestant one. His parents ‘learned tough’, growing up in the Depression, then both enlisting in the armed services on the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1957, married with

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Shelter from the Storm four children, they were surviving, but not yet in a position to get a mortgage. A stint in public housing was one way to get ahead. The Housing Commission certainly in those days was a slight stigma . . . but it was a more common route than it is [now]; it wasn’t the welfarebased outcome that perhaps it is for many people today . . . It was basically for those people who wanted a house but couldn’t quite afford to go to a bank. The borrowing rules were much tougher in those days . . . you needed a history of ten years’ savings to buy a house, and going into a Housing Commission house allowed you to build up some capital to buy your own house, which is what my parents subsequently did, and I imagine most people in that street did: move on.

Perhaps because they were surrounded by wealthier folk, perhaps just because there were only fifteen houses involved, this miniature housing estate developed a strong community spirit. It was a real mixture. There were migrants, some people from Austria, a family from Manchester across the road—really hard workers. We had the telephone—it wasn’t just a question of affordability, in those days you could wait three years to have the phone put on—so people used to borrow our phone. We weren’t the first television in the street, other people had it . . . you used to have dinner, get dressed in your pyjamas and dressing-gown and go down the street and watch it. Those families who couldn’t afford Christmas presents, other families used to chip in . . . So it was actually a much more socially binding lifestyle . . . much more interactive, inter-cooperative than perhaps our bunkered, sheltered lives today are. Our parents made sure we ate fantastic food. We always had terrific holidays, Christmas and birthdays were terrific . . . so it wasn’t poverty. Far from it. But it wasn’t luxury either . . . I shared a room with two brothers, and we had three girls in one room, three boys in another. That’s what it was like, so you had no privacy per se, and in those days that’s why kids wanted to leave home as soon as they possibly could . . . It was probably a great advantage in that it wasn’t a depressed economic area, an unemployment area. It wasn’t a massive estate with high crime, low aspirations and low expectations . . . The school I went to certainly helped. Good teachers, but hardly unique . . . the [primary] school was so wild with bush there were wallabies and the like at the bottom, a tiny school. One of my early

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A Ghetto it Wasn’t classrooms was a cloakroom! In those days, the state school system was a much superior system to the private school system, because private school teachers were paid less . . . so only idiots and wealthy youth went to private schools per se. But the public school system lagged behind this area’s natural growth and income levels, so the [high] school I went to was in Asquith, a bus and a train and a walk away . . . it was quite strange. You didn’t have a choice in those days, you just went where you were told. The high school I went to was actually one of those interesting combinations of being the best and the worst in lots of things. It had a large catchment on the North Shore, so it had the chess champions of the state, the open speaking champions, the debating champions, the highest number of Commonwealth scholarships of any school, private or public, in the state. Yet there was a high crime record, because of kids from different catchments, so it was one of those conundrums.

Although most kids they knew left school without even a Leaving Certificate, John and his siblings were imbued from an early age with the importance of self-advancement. John’s mother, in particular, instilled in him a passion for the arts and a determination to go to university. However, her poor health meant he sometimes had to stay home from school to help with the housework and the younger kids. Even before he left primary school he was unusually self-reliant.

John Alexander (right), as a child. ‘I started almost supporting myself at about nine or ten years of age. I used to caddy at the Pymble golf course . . . there was an assumption then that you didn't get anything for nothing . . . that's probably what's changed in the generation since then.’

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Shelter from the Storm I started almost supporting myself at about nine or ten years of age. I used to caddy at the Pymble golf course all weekend, started buying my own clothes and that sort of thing . . . [Later] I used to work at the local supermarket, mow lawns and all that sort of out-of-school activity . . . I think there was an assumption then that you didn’t get anything for nothing. You weren’t expecting handouts from anybody, particularly the state, and that’s probably what’s changed in the generation since then. But I mean you had that opportunity . . . opportunity of employment . . . ‘I’ll go and study this and take up that career, and if that doesn’t work, it doesn’t really matter—I’ll switch’. It wasn’t high aspiration . . . just to get a job that paid your way was enough really . . . but there was always an expectation you would get that job.

....

At seventeen, a year younger than his classmates, John left school and started as a copyboy with the Fairfax group, which part-paid for employees to go to university. He worked days at the newspaper and went to college at night, doing odd jobs on weekends to raise the rest of the fees. Journalism seemed to Alexander almost too good to be true—it gave him a licence to ask all kinds of questions of all kinds of people, satisfying his young, inquiring mind while at the same time allowing him to indulge his growing interests in areas like fine arts. I got into journalism because I didn’t want to work in an office, I wanted to be out and about . . . You meet people in extraordinary terms, you get remarkable access, and you get a chance to write and think about all sorts of things . . . I just thought nobody could be actually paid for doing that sort of range of terrific activities, whether the political journalist, the sporting journalist, the foreign correspondent! It wasn’t a job—it was a lifestyle.

Of course not all journalists achieve the sort of lifestyle for which John Alexander was to become legendary—fine wines, dining at expensive restaurants, elegant clothes, a beautifully appointed apartment and an impressive collection of art and antiques. But that is 30 years down the track. John started out as a finance writer, and stayed with money matters for nearly twenty years, eventually becoming Business Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984. Ironically, his success stranded him in the very station he joined journalism to avoid, controlling rather than writing the stories. Having built the Herald’s business section up to be the strongest in

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A Ghetto it Wasn’t the country, he went on to become a publishing phenomenon, leading both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review to unparalleled heights in his terms as Editor in Chief. As he succinctly informed Elisabeth Wynhausen of the Australian in 1998: ‘We have transformed two major newspapers, both in serious decline at the time, in terms of their circulation, their readership and, most importantly, their financial bottom line.’1 So how does he do it? What is, as one journalist quipped, ‘the Alexander technique’? Media reports2 suggest his success as an editor stems from understanding who his readers are and what they want to read about, hiring the very best writers to deliver the goods—and firing anyone who’s not up to scratch. It sounds simple enough as a formula, but it can only be executed by someone who combines a good gut feeling for people with, paradoxically, a streak of ruthlessness. Someone who is utterly pragmatic about what makes a good news story, who will spare no expense to cover whatever goes in the paper, but equally will have no compunction about deleting soft, ‘worthy’ items, which might bore or discomfit his readers. The stories rejected by Alexander, and the often blistering manner of his put-downs, are legendary. Among the celebrated anecdotes, on being told the undistinguished working-class suburb of Padstow was burning in a bushfire, he retorted, ‘That’s not a news story. It’s a community service.’ Then, hearing the fire was moving towards Sutherland: ‘Now you’re talking. We’ve got readers in Sutherland.’ Rejecting a photo of Bill Cosby’s murdered son for the front page: ‘Black kids don’t sell papers. Unless they’re from Redfern ramraiding DKNY.’ Even more savagely, refusing a story on homeless kids: ‘We write stories for people who buy newspapers—not sleep under them’. Apocryphal or not, such anecdotes have earned John Alexander many enemies. But they also say a lot about his character. This is a man who does not need to be liked—and for an editor, that’s a tremendous strength. As to whether he is actually as lacking in compassion, as some of his remarks suggest, he is more cagey: ‘Don’t confuse comments made to create an air of tension and severe questioning in the newsroom with views on life.’ Alexander maintains that he needs to voice strong, even outrageous, views in the office in order to counter ‘the natural do-goodery and political correctness of journalists’.

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Shelter from the Storm I used to make these offhand remarks . . . so that they would actually step back and start looking after an audience rather than looking after their own points of view and satisfying their own biases and opinions of life . . . these are just jokes made to create . . . an expectation and an edge, a tension, in the newsroom, to actually create better journalists . . . It’s not a question of ignoring the do-gooder causes, but a question of stepping back and being more self-examining than most journalists, particularly at Fairfax papers, have a wont to do.

Alexander was gratified recently to see one of his star writers at the Sydney Morning Herald, David Marr, correctly interpret the reason for his acerbic asides. Marr, himself highly acclaimed for his biography of Patrick White as well as his award-winning journalism, described Alexander as a fine editor, whom he greatly admired, despite his ‘obsession’ about saving the rich from land tax. Marr analysed Alexander’s editorial methods thus: John Alexander had this extraordinary way of making the most distasteful but I’m afraid to say very funny jokes about blacks and babies and foreigners and women and especially poofters . . . and what it did was to keep us on our toes and temper the instinctive do-goodery of journalists. It was a kind of creative irritation, a deliberate getting up of our backs out of which we wrote. And I realise how extraordinarily valuable it is . . . The great editor is a scourge, a seducer, a challenger, but also a protector . . . because in the end, you and your editor, however much you may be in dispute, feuding and exasperated with one another, you are on the same side in the same game. Or you were.3

....

In 1997, while still its Editor-in-Chief, Alexander became Publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald. Marr and other journalists argue that holding the two positions simultaneously entails a conflict of interest—that economics will inevitably dictate editorial policy, to the detriment of the paper’s content. Alexander had certainly shown his credentials as a scourge, a challenger, even a seducer. But protector? Before he was appointed publisher, he had not flinched from cutting staff, or exiling to suburban anonymity those who fell from favour. But it was all supposedly done in the best interests of the paper, so that those who were good at their job could prosper. Then in May 1998, the unthinkable happened. Alexander himself was sacked.

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A Ghetto it Wasn’t The media buzzed with rumours: he had gone too far, pushing for a seat on the board of Fairfax. He had opposed cost cuts that would have closed some foreign posts and merged the Herald’s Canberra office with that of its sister paper, the Age. He had hobnobbed once too often with key members of the Packer group, Fairfax’s great rival. Whatever the reason, he was unceremoniously dumped, leading bemused Herald journalists to strike in support of the leader with whom they had so often been at loggerheads. ‘He might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard’, explained one.4 But the gesture was in vain. Alexander quit his office that day, and with his customary élan, had a farewell dinner that evening at one of Paddington’s best restaurants with a few of his senior staff. It must have been a great shock to a man so used to accolades, but the setback was temporary. Within weeks, he was installed as Group Publisher, Specialist Magazines, at the Packer-owned group, Australian Consolidated Press. By March 1999, he had become chief executive officer of the media empire, his appointment announced as he launched a revamped version of Australia’s oldest periodical, the Bulletin. Now that he is back in the executive suite, Alexander can afford to be modest about his successful career. It was fortuitous circumstances. I didn’t go into journalism to reach the top of the pile, because these sorts of jobs were beyond most people. I never ever went into this business thinking that I was going to become allpowerful or have the jobs I’ve had. I think I’ve been one of the luckiest people around, that it all just happened by circumstances. Often these things do, I think. I never actually identified a better job than being in the publishing business . . . it’s a fantastic industry.

Although Alexander does not reveal much of his adult personal life, the glimpses one gets do not suggest a quiet family man. His Italian wife is a professional photographer, his fans include the influential broadcasters Alan Jones and John Laws and his friends are no less powerful: arts impressario Leo Schofield; Chris Corrigan, the controversial boss of Patrick Stevedores; and John Howard, the prime minister, whose less than dynamic vision for Australia is of a nation that is ‘relaxed and comfortable’. Curiously enough, Alexander uses those same two words to describe the public housing community of his childhood. So if it wasn’t trauma that transformed the clever, earnest boy of Bobbin Head Road into the feared and respected publisher of today, what

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Shelter from the Storm was it? How could a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ existence galvanise anyone to achieve what he has, starting out in his modest circumstances? Come to think of it, Chris Corrigan came from a family of battlers and ended up a corporate warrior pitched against the working-class world from which he came. ‘But he’s got a brain’, expostulates Alexander, getting worked up for the first time as he develops his idea and reflects more deeply on his formative years. I suppose if you’ve got a bit of a brain, you’ve got a chance. If you come from a very wealthy background but you don’t have a brain, you’re going to be caught out sooner or later, aren’t you? . . . I don’t want to destroy the thesis of the book, but too much can be read into the background. This is not getting out of Harlem and going on to the top of Manhattan, you know. John Alexander, Chief

I mean, it wasn’t impoverished, crime-ridden—just the opposite . . . the

Executive Officer of

opportunity I got would have been no different if we lived in a non-Housing

Australian Consolidated

Commission house around the corner. I probably would have been sent to

Press, is one of the most

the same state school for example . . .

feared and respected

My background has just made me very independent. That’s all. It

editors in Australia. He

hasn’t made me bitter and twisted about circumstances. I think I am one

grew up in a small public

of the luckiest people about. We could easily have ended up in a Housing

housing enclave in the

Commission house in Penrith or somehere like that. Now what would have

wealthy suburb of

happened then? Don’t know. Same outcome? Possibly. Probably. Don’t

Turramurra. ‘There

know. Living at Turrumurra made me truly aware that there were a lot of

were a lot of people with

people with a lot more money than you had. I lived on hand-me-down

a lot more money than

clothing from other people for years and it didn’t make me bitter and

you had. I lived on hand-

twisted about it.

me-down clothing for

I think it was perhaps the era as much as anything else . . . There

years—it didn't make me

was unquestionably a greater opportunity factor than there is today and

bitter and twisted.’

a greater expectation that you had to look after yourself because nobody was going to look after you . . . It’s 10 per cent unemployment or 8 per cent unemployment versus 3 per cent. You know, when people could get

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A Ghetto it Wasn’t out of the housing estates and there was an expectation they were going to get a job. And there wasn’t the safety net of the same scale as today to say, ‘Well if you don’t get a job don’t worry, you don’t have to work’. You had to go and get a job because otherwise you didn’t eat. There was no national health. If you didn’t pay for your private health system, then basically, if you got sick you were in trouble. We’re talking about 40 years ago. It was a different world. The social net has changed and the welfare system has got bigger . . . psychologically you have a generational transfer of a welfare dependency, which you didn’t have before, and the housing estates built up as essentially the people who can’t afford housing, so the state provides . . . One gets a feeling that the people who are pushed into or seek to go into public housing are life’s battlers, deprived, the so-called losers, and therefore there’s the question, does that breed on itself and reinforce that status, which is why they’re tearing down those housing estates in America now, why they’re tearing down those estates in Britain now, and have in some cases started to tear down the estates we have here. Whereas the Housing Commission system I grew up in was basically the halfway house. It was before you didn’t quite have the money to buy the big private house.

Even the subtle shift from the word ‘battler’, which conjures up an honourable, if difficult, existence, to ‘loser’, with its connotations of hopeless low life, says a lot about how society has changed since the 1950s. But whether they’re called battlers or losers, disadvantaged or underclass, how does John Alexander feel about such people today? Beneath his elegant, expensive appearance and his scathing pronouncements, could there lurk a bleeding heart? Have his own experiences given him more—or less—sympathy towards the underdog? He hesitates: ‘I don’t know if it makes you automatically sympathetic per se . . . of course, one is sympathetic to anyone who lives in hardened circumstances . . . I think it makes you feel like if you are prepared to work, push yourself, there is a way out.’ John Alexander certainly found it, and so did his parents. After some fifteen years in their unlikely public housing enclave in Turramurra, they bought into the well-heeled suburb of St Ives. John’s five siblings have all done well. Four of the six children ended up with a college education and all have gone on to good jobs, three in teaching, one in the private sector. Those who believe public housing breeds

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Shelter from the Storm dysfunctional behaviour will have to look beyond this lot for evidence. ‘Sorry’, Alexander agrees, somewhat sardonically. ‘We’re not quite the Addams Family, but no . . . it wasn’t this hard-and-tough horrible background which made you want to rise out of the ghetto. A ghetto it wasn’t.’

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8 I’d Rather Live in a Caravan Annette Seymour

I share this block with seven other women . . . I love it. I’ll hear Jude come home of a night and close the door, and I think, ‘Oh, there’s Jude home’. And if she doesn’t see me for perhaps a week she’ll knock on the door and say, ‘Are you all right?’. One of the other things I really enjoy living in the community of women is that it’s very non-threatening . . . you know, I’m guilty of going down to the clothesline just in my knickers and a singlet, because I don’t have to worry!

At 57, with two grown-up sons, Annette Seymour leads a quiet life, working part-time as a medical records clerk and dreaming of a relaxing holiday, maybe in Europe. But her path to her current home in Leichhardt in inner western Sydney has been tumultuous. Annette got married at 22, separated at 32, and emerged as a lesbian some time later. Along the way, ‘to turn a dollar’, she’s done an extraordinary range of jobs: ‘dangling spaghetti’ in a Heinz factory, peeling onions, picking strawberries, racing greyhounds, recycling wrecked cars, driving cabs, castrating pigs and running a used car yard. She’s also been a farm hand, chauffeur, secretary, businesswoman and, very reluctantly, after her marriage broke up, a housekeeper. Annette grew up on a bush property near Ballarat, in Victoria. She was five when she first met her father, who’d been away fighting in the war. Annette had been raised with her great-aunt and -uncle, whom she greatly admired. When her father appeared on the scene, she resented the intrusion.

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Shelter from the Storm As soon as he came home, I promptly tried to kill him. Literally! I waited until he had an old car, an old model T, they used to run them up on the ramps to do everything underneath—and I got in and let the hand brake off . . . I was very disappointed when I didn’t kill him. Apparently I said, quote, ‘I wanted to kill the bastard’. So it wasn’t a very good start. We had a depreciating relationship right through, I guess. We went up to the Mallee and he went to work on the railways, and that didn’t work for me, I developed nose bleeds all the time. He then started sexually abusing me when I was about twelve. So we had a very bad relationship, which culminated . . . with him cutting me out of the will when he died five years ago.

In the small-town Australia of the late 1950s, girls had few options other than marriage and motherhood. Annette suppressed any early homosexual feelings. I always knew it was there, but I thought it was something I could just get over, because it wasn’t going to work . . . forget about it, become part of the peer group. So I got married and went through all that stuff. It was a very rocky road all the time . . . I was married to a person who was a compulsive gambler and I guess it was never really going to work, because of my sexuality . . . but it came to a hopeless situation when I was pregnant with Jason. My then-husband, Greg, lost a great deal of money gambling and had a sort of nervous breakdown and stopped working. Everything seemed to escalate and we came to a point where we just said, ‘It’s got to end’ . . . He went to Queensland with a current girlfriend and I was living on an orchard with my son Mark, who was seven, and Jason, who was three months. So I then proceeded to try and figure out how to feed us. I had worked in offices most of my life, but I took a job in the Heinz factory, which was a great shock to the system, as you would imagine! I used to start at eleven at night and work through. I left one of the children with one sister-in-law and one with another, and I used to pick them up and then get Mark off to school and try and get some sleep . . . It was a very difficult time and I fully sympathise with women who actually do something drastic to their children, I really do. I can remember coming off shift once, and Jason was screaming, he was teething, Mark was yelling, ‘I’ve got to go to school in the morning’, and I just went out and walked around the fields that night, because I thought, if I go

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I’d Rather Live in a Caravan back in there, I shall put something over that child’s face. I can’t cope any longer. I was a real bad scene! And in the end, I went up to Ballarat and there was some Sisters up there, they ran a home, and I put both my children in there until I could try and get some sort of a grip on my life, and would go up every weekend and visit them.

To add to the stress, Annette’s former husband briefly reappeared, ‘borrowed’ the car—and promptly sold it. Nor did the nuns’ home work out: at nine months, Jason pined for his mother. When he developed pneumonia, Annette reclaimed them. In desperation, she took on a housekeeping job. I’m the most anti-housework person! But I thought, ‘That way I can get the children back with me’ . . . so I took on this job for this fellow in Dandenong with three small girls, and my boys and I were living in this tiny, little room in the house. I was doing the housekeeping bit by day and working night shift in a factory that made insul wool fibre bats or something. The girls unfortunately all wet the bed, so that was a bit of a drama, made worse by the fact that he was a very nice man but he developed an obsession with me, which sort of didn’t help much either. So that lasted probably about three months and got to crisis point . . . So I found another ad in the paper and this man was a pig farmer and in the army. He had two small boys, and because he was on special duties, he was called away at night for radio work and he needed someone to be there. And that worked out better, because I like the country . . . I had four children to attend to and also I had to look after the farm a bit—there were always cows getting out, or you’d have to hop in and help castrate the pigs—not that I minded, I’d rather do that any day than indoors housework! He gave me a bit of a retainer. That was, I think, the Whitlam time, when social security suddenly improved, so I got a pension as well, and of course we were being fed and housed, and that actually got us on our feet. We stayed there for about a year.

During that time, Annette managed to pay off some of the debts Greg had saddled them with, and even saved enough to buy another car. She waited till she had enough for a rental bond, then moved the family to Ballarat, where Jason started school. Annette’s childhood attempt to run over her father had revealed a precocious interest in mechanics. It turned out to be a very useful trait.

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Shelter from the Storm I guess I’ve always liked fiddling around with things mechanical. I was able to buy an old car for 25 or 50 bucks and tow them home. I always picked FB Holdens or things like that, because there was millions of them. I drove cabs on Sunday, and worked during the week, then on my weekends, I’d get underneath the car and get Jason to pass the tools, pull it apart, clean the parts up and then I’d put them in the Trading Post and augment our income in that way.

Annette saved enough to buy a large caravan, and the family got a permanent site in a park at Ballarat. It was a good time. The kids had lots of company and amenities, and Annette made a friend, Val, who minded her two boys on Sundays while she drove taxis. Then Annette’s cousin was tragically killed on the railways. Having grown up with him, he was more like a brother. Annette was devastated at his death, but it also made her aware of her own mortality. It was a classic learning experience—if you want to do something, you’d better do it now. And I had always wanted to go to England. I saved and I scrimped, and I got enough money to take us. Jason was six, I think, and Mark would have been about the thirteen mark. Everyone thought I was stark raving mad, but I thought, ‘No, look what happened to Noel, don’t wait.’ I loved England. Jason took to it, Mark absolutely loved it, because he’s a keen soccer player. We were there for a year and I planned to stay on . . . I didn’t have any real intentions of coming back. And a friend rang and said, ‘Are you aware your mother has had a serious stroke?’ . . . Anyway, I was thrown into total chaos, I borrowed the money to get us home and I had the most awful fight to get Mark home, he didn’t want to come back . . . My mother couldn’t speak and couldn’t move. She lived for another four months. We rented a tiny little caravan and then a very tiny flat, the boys were in the bedroom, I was on the lounge-room floor. They were screaming and fighting all the time. Mark was resentful because he’d been made to come home, I was on call all hours for my mother . . . I was a bit of a wreck, to put it mildly. At that point, I tried to commit suicide. I couldn’t sort of see a way out.

Annette’s friend, Val, from the caravan park, found her unconscious. She had taken an overdose of tranquillisers mixed with alcohol. The suicide attempt prompted the welfare authorities to take up her case. Mark

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I’d Rather Live in a Caravan was despatched to Queensland to live with his father for a while, and Jason was placed in foster care on weekends, to give Annette some breathing space. After her mother died, Annette began to reassess her future. I was starting to really question who I was and what I wanted to do. Jason was refusing to go to school, he wouldn’t shower. We had an ongoing difficult relationship. I was drinking more and more and going downhill, and I just knew my life was not getting better. And I had a long talk to my good and old friend Val . . . and I said to her, ‘I think I’m gay’. And she said ‘So what?’ and I thought ‘It’s not so bad!’ . . . I discovered there were newspapers for gay people . . . and I started writing to a couple of women, one in Brisbane and one in Townsville . . . My cousin Holly came out from England . . . and I said, ‘I’m going to go to Queensland. I need to sort out what’s happening with Mark, and I’m going to meet this woman. Do you want to come?’. ‘Great, yes!’, she said, ‘I’ll go with you’. And so off we went in the panel van. I left Jason in the foster home and promised him faithfully, I said, ‘You know I’ve always kept my word, I’ll be back in six weeks and we’ll sort out what’s going to happen to us all’. Whatever I said I always made a point of carrying out. And much as those poor boys got bundled around from one place to another . . . they always knew, I hope, that I loved them. Because it would have been much easier to just leave them there and run away screaming, because I’m not very maternal. I wasn’t born maternal at all.

The Queensland trip was cathartic. Annette accepted herself as a lesbian at last, and began a relationship with her correspondent from the paper. She removed the seventeen-year-old Mark from his father’s place, which he hated, and arranged for him to board with a friend. Jason then moved in with his father for a trial period, and Annette took a room in a local boarding house, where conditions were so squalid she had to hang her bread from the window to keep the cockroaches off it. Unemployed and impoverished, she applied for public housing for the first time. The long waiting list and a strong streak of independence had stopped her before back in Ballarat, along with the sort of public housing available there. It was a ghetto in the worst way. It was really terrible. You only needed to say you lived in Wendouree West [in Ballarat] and everybody didn’t want

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Shelter from the Storm to know you . . . There was heaps and heaps of domestic violence, lots of crime. You only had to drive through it and it felt awful, and I didn’t want us to be in that sort of atmosphere . . . I thought I would rather live in a caravan than in Wendouree West.

In Brisbane, Annette was eventually offered a unit in a small block, for herself and Mark. They stayed there for a couple of years, during which she began another relationship. In the meantime, Jason was in conflict with his stepmother and Mark, being a teenager, wanted to entertain his friends in the small flat. Leaving Mark settled in a share-house in Brisbane, Annette decided to return with Jason and her new partner to the most secure place she knew—Ballarat. Annette managed a used car yard, her partner worked in a geriatric centre, and Jason went to school. For a whole seven years, life was reasonably stable. At one stage, my partner and I actually managed to buy a small unit together. I had my bit of part-time work, and I went back to uni. I wanted to study librarianship. But it was at the unhappy time when interest rates suddenly went up to about 18 per cent and I just couldn’t manage . . . so we sold that and moved into a rented place . . . Then Jason got to the stage, at eighteen years, when he wanted to leave home . . . and without coming to any great wars or unpleasantness, he went off and shared a house. The relationship was getting harder and harder, with serious issues that we seemed unable to resolve. Finally we ended it, but she remains a very close friend—I would trust her with my life. It was my fiftieth birthday, and I rode my motorbike from Ballarat to Sydney and stayed at an Anglican convent . . . thinking of what I needed to do next, and at the same time got a tattoo to celebrate my fiftieth birthday! And I decided—I’m a great one for feeling inside myself what I need to do—I felt it was time to come to Sydney.

Jason had moved in with Mark, who was already living in Sydney. Through a friend, Annette found a part-time job as a clerk at the Sydney Sexual Health Clinic. She could not do full-time work any more, the constant stress of her earlier life having finally affected her health. She got a bachelor flat in inner western Glebe, which took 70 per cent of her paltry income. In dire straits, with a bad back on top of everything else, she was reading the lesbian newspaper LOTL (Lesbians On The Loose), when she saw something about housing. Thus she encountered the Women’s Housing Company, a community housing organisation in Darlinghurst.

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I’d Rather Live in a Caravan

I rang them up and they explained that I could be waiting for up to three

Annette Seymour's

years, I had to go on the Department of Housing waiting list first, to be

journey from rural

eligible, and they’d send me a form . . . and I went though the process

Victoria to Sydney's

. . . and waited.

inner west has been

But I feel extremely fortunate. I waited only about six months . . . The first thing I looked at was a share house in Ashfield, but that situation I did say no to, because I got the feeling this woman didn’t particularly want me there. It was quite a strong feeling and I was very fragile at the time, so I spoke to Janice [the Women’s Housing worker] about that. Women’s Housing are just incredibly accepting and understand-

tumultuous. To keep herself and her two sons, she has done all kinds of work, from castrating pigs to cabdriving. She's also survived child sexual abuse, a feckless,

ing. They didn’t sort of make fun of me and say, ‘You’re lucky to get

gambling husband and

anything’. She said, ‘I know what you mean, I know this woman actually

her own fears of coming

wants someone else in there’ . . . So we went on for only a couple of

out as a lesbian. Today,

months and she rang me again . . . [and] took me to an address in

Buddhism helps her make

Waterloo. They were little rooms—8 foot by 8, I think, to be precise. And

sense of her life.

it was fairly basic, shall we say . . . fortunately, they had a big garage

(Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm so I could store my other things . . . I stayed there twelve months. I was very glad to have it, I felt quite safe there. The only unfortunate thing was we had a very large, mentally disturbed Tongan lady living underneath who used to light fires on her balcony to get rid of the evil spirits. So that was a bit frightening. We had lots of crisis teams arriving in the middle of the night, and some difficulties with security . . . The idea with women’s housing is that . . . you do have the opportunity to move into something better if it comes along. I can’t speak highly enough of the support given to us—you are always listened to with sympathy and understanding and I’m sure a lot of the time a lot of us can be extremely unreasonable! So Bobbie rang up one day. ‘We’ve got a place to offer you at Leichhardt’. I said ‘How quick can I look at it!’ . . . So over I came. That was a brand new villa. It was strange going to that from where I’d been, from this tiny space, you’re in this huge space. I said to her, ‘It feels as if I’ve been in jail!’. I felt like I wanted to go and live in the laundry, it was all so big. It was too big for one person really, but the main bedroom had an ensuite and a walk-in robe and a balcony, and the other bedroom was quite small . . . so how did you put two women in there and charge exactly the same rent? Anyway, it was very secure and very nice. I moved in. But one of my problems is it was upstairs–downstairs, and I have an ongoing back condition. When my back is bad, I really can’t move till the anti-inflammatory drugs take hold, so I’d be trapped either upstairs or downstairs. And I also had a feeling of isolation there . . . it was a walled courtyard . . . and I just felt totally alone. It was attached to another villa . . . but they were totally self-contained, you heard nothing . . . I’m quite a solitary soul in many ways, but I like to hear movement, or people, around me. So I was feeling quite depressed and really guilty, because I was in this lovely place but feeeling so alone and isolated. I spoke to Bobbie . . . said, ‘Is there any possibility of moving me to something a bit smaller?’. It so happened—and once again, this is, I guess, the wonderful flexibility of Women’s Housing—they had this block of units, which was purpose-built, I understand, for students. One of the tenants had a dog . . . which barked all the time and also tended to bite the other women . . . Pam didn’t want to lose her dog, so they were looking desperately to move her . . . So Janice brought me round here one night for a look and I said, ‘It seems perfect for me’, and of course Pam was over the moon when she saw mine . . . so we were allowed to make that exchange.

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I’d Rather Live in a Caravan Annette’s first-floor unit is one of eight in a security block set back off a busy Leichhardt street. Each unit has a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and lounge room with a small balcony, facing onto a communal courtyard and garden. The tenants are all single women, who range in age from their twenties to their fifties. For Annette, the situation offers the perfect blend of independence and community. A high priority with Women’s Housing is security. We have window locks and security grilles . . . and I guess we tend to keep a bit of an eye on one another. I mean, Judy underneath me is away on holiday now; if I heard a funny noise downstairs, I would check on it—whereas if I were living in some private block of flats, I wouldn’t do that in a mad fit. And we try to be thoughtful of one another . . . There can be some conflicts. We have one person here who, I think, has a few problems perhaps—but that’s life, you’re always going to get that. We try to be caring of one another and to work things out . . . Last week, I fell at tennis and I was here at ten o’clock in extreme pain, so I rang up RPA [hospital] and they said, ‘We need to see you tonight’. So I went over to Jen at this hour—she has a car—and said ‘Jen, can you do me a great favour?’. She said, ‘Of course, mate, of course’, and immediately took me up there, brought her plate of Vegemite sandwiches and said, ‘I’ll wait for you’ . . . So without being intrusive on one another’s space, you have this lovely supportive thing, which I find wonderful!

....

After such a peripatetic existence, Annette also appreciates the security of tenure the Women’s Housing Company offers. She has been in her unit for about a year now and knows she can stay there as long as she wants. In many ways, her life is good. She has a nice home, enough money to get by, a few close friends and, despite all the stand-offs and dramas of earlier days, a loving relationship with her two grown sons. I am very, very blessed in those boys. Because they had a very hard life. It was a real struggle. You had to fight. They were both very strongwilled children—get it from their mother I suppose! I’m very proud of them. They’re great human beings. Mark manages a clothing shop and Jason works in information technology, and considering the life they’ve led with their mother they are very well adjusted, and, I think, very

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Shelter from the Storm caring. They’ve accepted my sexuality without the smallest quibble. Jason was brought up partly with my partner and he always says how lucky he was to have two Mums. Mark says to me now how when he was fourteen or fifteen he could only see himself. He said, ‘I could just see you were stopping me from doing what I wanted. I didn’t have a thought as to what your life was like . . . what a rotten little bastard I was!’ We’re very, very close. I guess we’ve been through a lot together. They are my very good friends.

But though some parts of Annette’s life have turned out well, she has not resolved all her problems. Her health is deteriorating and her work at the Sexual Health Clinic, though part-time, is quite stressful. We see upwards of 20 000 clients a year—people who can be very threatening and difficult. We’re public service, so we are chronically understaffed. We have needle exchange programs . . . [sex] workers’ clinics, where you are dealing with pimps, who are very unpleasant sometimes. We have a huge and wonderful counselling service . . . people who may be suffering sexual abuse or problems in their relationship or who have been diagnosed as HIV positive or have herpes...we bring in illegal workers and give them videos, try to train them how to care for themselves before they get sent out of the country. I find though that . . . I have a great deal of difficulty in coping with people. I was sent to the anxiety clinic here . . . where they diagnosed me as having social phobia. I don’t cope well in crowds. . . in having to eat out. If I have to talk on the phone I actually lose my voice. At work they have been wonderful; they have never forced me to answer phones.

Even when she felt on the point of collapse, for five years Annette forced herself to turn up for work. She had no option: as a casual, she was told, she was not entitled to sick leave or holiday pay. Now it transpires that she should have been classified permanent part-time, and is owed a huge backlog of leave. She’s not at all sure what to do with it. I feel I’m in an awful mess at the moment, quite frankly, between the pain of my back, and waiting to go into the clinic for my Achilles tendon, and the emotional turmoil of a relationship with someone who is still trying to resolve all her issues as a lesbian. It’s difficult to allow yourself to trust again, to make yourself so vulnerable to being let down again, but I have to try. I do not want to spend whatever is left of my life alone. I believe I have too much love to give.

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I’d Rather Live in a Caravan So I’m very much wanting to take about six months off work, just to try and think what to do with my life—I mean I’m 57, I need to find some answers here. I feel I must make changes.

Ten years ago, Annette discovered Buddhism. That’s just one source of comfort and solace in her life.

Annette Seymour outside the apartment block in Leichhardt, Sydney, where she and seven other women have their own unit. At 58, she has finally got the motorbike she's dreamed of. ‘I get on a bike and get out in the country, and joy fills my soul. It gives me a great sense of freedom . . . of trying to reclaim a part of myself.’ (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm Compared to my early days, I feel very blessed that I am in such a supportive environment . . . I work, as you can imagine, in an extremely gay-friendly environment . . . we often laugh in there that the heterosexual staff are in the minority. I belong . . . to OWLS [Older and Wiser Lesbian Support group], and my sons are extremely supportive of me in all aspects of my life. My housing is very lesbian-friendly, very women-supportive. I’ve spoken to the girls [in the Women’s Housing Company] and said I would like to go and be in the Blue Mountains and they’ve said perhaps that’s a possibility—they would act as the tenant with the real estate agent and I’d still pay 25 per cent of my income. There’s a good women’s network there and yet I still have access to my friends and my boys . . . I have thought of going to Europe, because I have a British passport . . .

That will have to wait though, because the minute she’s saved enough, Annette is going to get herself a decent motorbike and head out on the open road. I’m one of these people that loves motorbikes! I think it’s in the blood. I’ve been riding since I was about fourteen. I get on a bike and get out in the country, and joy fills my soul. It gives me a great sense of freedom. There’s no explaining that to anybody that doesn’t do it . . . I think it’s a sense of trying to reclaim a part of myself, if that makes any sense.

Having had to re-invent herself so many times, Annette has much to reclaim. Although she’s still got a lot to sort out, if past experience is any indicator, she’ll come through. I don’t know—where do you get your strength? Some people are better able to cope with adversity than others. I think that I’m probably a battler by nature . . . and sometimes I think I’m as thick as two planks, because I keep getting hit and getting up again and they are the same sort of things and I think, ‘When am I going to learn??’ I mean, I’m a Buddhist as well and I guess it may be something to do with my karmic inheritance— I keep getting presented with these opportunities to learn, even though they are very painful, and you think sometimes you can’t pick yourself up ever again . . . I’m well aware that time is running out and I want to be in a better space at the end of my life . . . so I’m trying very hard to work out how I can get the money to get myself a bike and gather my life in some ways. I don’t give up easily!

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9 Goodbye Saddam Emad and Hashem

I lived in my country, Iraq, 40 years, but never I can see any democracy and freedom. When I came to Australia, first time in my life I can see the democracy and the freedom. I am very impressed. —Hashem, Iraqi refugee

From the battlefields of Iraq to a quiet cul-de-sac in Campbelltown, south west of Sydney—it’s been a long and eventful journey for Hashem and his friend Emad. At home, they would have had very different lifestyles: Hashem selling chicken in the city, Emad teaching mathematics. With a ten-year age gap and that gulf in education, they would have been unlikely friends. But to undiscerning Australian eyes, they seem the same: reffos, Arabic-speakers, Muslims whose wives wear the veil. Their minority status is one bond—there are relatively few Iraqis in Australia—and their Shiah religion another, but far stronger is their shared experience as enemies of Saddam Hussein. When the Gulf War broke out in January 1991, Emad was an officer in the Iraqi army. He joined up because he had no other option—anyone openly opposing Saddam would be in dire trouble. Ninety per cent of people don’t like war with Iran or Kuwait because they’re neighbours, same religion. We don’t like staying with Saddam Hussein because Saddam Hussein don’t give us freedom, democracy,

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Shelter from the Storm to say we don’t like that. Anybody spoke, just one little bit, they put him in the jail or killed him.

When the UN forces struck, and Saddam’s autonomy was undermined, disaffected Iraqis saw their chance. But as Emad discovered, without Western support, the huge popular revolt that followed stood no chance. About ten million people joined the uprising against Saddam Hussein— Shiahs in the south, Kurdish in the north and Sunni in some cities around Baghdad. Men, women, children, all ages . . . and the people in the army [who defected], they bring their weapons with them . . . and about fourteen of the eighteen main cities in Iraq fall to the people . . . We stayed in the cities fourteen to fifteen days, Saddam used some Iranian people against us and Sudan people and his group . . . then the Americans and the British, they don’t say it, but they don’t like the people [to] make government, they want only government they make . . . They allowed Saddam to use aeroplane against us and all the weapons. He killed the children, he used the weapons against the hospitals, the school, the mosques. And then we left our cities.

With Saddam back in power, those who had defied him fled for their lives. Hashem’s poor eyesight had kept him out of the army but not the uprising. A month before, he had got married. Now he and his wife fled to Iran, where they would wait two years for approval to come to Australia. Some rebels escaped to Turkey, while about 35 000 Iraqis ended up in Saudi Arabia. Emad, 29 and single, was one of them. His wife-to-be was another. Although the food was good and the camp had schools, a hospital and a post office, Emad found the experience oppressive in other ways. ‘We haven’t freedom to move to cities, to choose doctors or go to embassy. And inside the camp they put different sects: Saudi is Sunni and we were Shiah. Different mind.’ Despite the restrictions, Emad met and married his wife at the refugee camp. During his three years there, Emad managed to squirrel away most of the A$500 a month he earned teaching mathematics and computer programming. When at last a delegation from the Australian immigration authorities visited the camp, he easily fitted their criteria. Australia was not my choice—I like just go to any country, but the HCR [UN High Commission for Refugees] organise cases for us . . . many groups come and make interview with us and choose some people . . .

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Goodbye Saddam I heard that Australian immigration need people who have degree, whose English language good and who has good health—generally they choose the people because of that. I studied English in my country about fourteen years: two years in primary, six in secondary and in university all subjects in English. We spoke Arabic but we wrote and read sometimes in English. The first thing I heard about Australia, Australia is immigration country, and the population was mixed people from different background. I heard about Sydney more than Australia. That Sydney was beautiful, very beautiful . . . and there is many chances of job.

Emad, his wife and their baby arrived in Australia on 26 July 1994. Although the authorities gave them a warm reception and installed them in a migrant hostel, their situation was still somewhat overwhelming. Having to communicate practical everyday matters in English was a lot harder than using it for occasional academic purposes. But interpreters were available through the NSW Ecumenical Council, and with its help, the family was eventually allocated a Department of Housing property on the vast estate of Claymore, in Campbelltown. ....

Hashem had ended up on a different estate in the same area. Although Hashem did not have Emad’s qualifications, his brother had got to Australia before him and was able to sponsor the family. Hashem and his wife and child arrived in December 1992. After three months in a migrant hostel, the family moved to a private house in Auburn, in western Sydney, where their second child was born. The Department of Social Security covered their rent for the four years it took to reach the top of the Department of Housing waiting list. Hashem found a job in his old area of expertise—chickens—although this time, instead of growing and selling them, he was working in a factory that specialised in preparing poultry in the halal manner required by Muslims. With its high percentage of Arabic speakers, Auburn was a good place to acclimatise, but after a while, the family discovered its drawbacks. Sometime I like—because most of the relative and friend live there. Sometime I no like. Very population, very crowded, and the industrial companies around Auburn, Silverwater—too much smoke. My wife and children get asthma. They can’t breathe very well.

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Shelter from the Storm Hashem and his family eventually moved to Bradbury, a public housing estate in Campbelltown, where they feel more ‘relaxed’—despite the odd bizarre encounter with some apparently stoned neighbours. Some people knocked on my door in the middle of the night. ‘What do you want?’ I said. They answer me, ‘Do you want some parts for the car?’. I said ‘Now?? It’s two o’clock in the morning, what are you doing?’ I think they wanted to steal [from] me.

After he injured his back, Hashem had to give up his job at the factory, so he spends a lot of time at home. His only complaint with his new house was the long delay in having flyscreens fitted. Other houses had got them ahead of him, he claimed, yet his family were in particular need because their asthma prevented them from using insect repellents. Meanwhile, Emad was not finding Claymore the ideal place to begin a peaceful family life. Poverty and unemployment had left many residents depressed and disaffected. Some of them use drugs, some of them use alcohol—we don’t like that. Some of them make problems, stole money, without job, dirty area. Everything is bad, not good. Not same as private houses, private area. I did have some work, but all of them casual. Arabic teacher two months. Market research three months. Delivery two months . . . and sales agent with telecommunications company—self-employment. I explain to people what it is, show them the list of price, and if anyone like I will fill form and send it for my company. Some of them Arabic people, some English . . . and step by step, I manage to buy new things [for the house].

Then Emad had a car accident, which left him with medical problems and his wife with a broken leg. She could not easily negotiate the stairs in their townhouse, and both found it hard to get to doctors and physiotherapists. After a year in Claymore, they were relocated to a bungalow in Airds, on the other side of Campbelltown. The house is good, but there are some problems . . . bad kids, and the street dark in the evening. The electricity office don’t put lights . . . Far away for Campbelltown and Airds is not safety area . . . After I live here about two months, someone broke [into] my house and stole my money. I have $1300 for me and my friends—they stole [it].

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Goodbye Saddam Emad was devastated by the robbery of the savings he and his friends had pooled. He’s still got his furniture, but he’s now between jobs, back on social security, and trying to repay his friends’ portion of the money. Although he likes Australia, he is unhappy about some aspects of the lifestyle. Democracy is very, very good—better than I heard. And the freedom, the steady way of life, is good. But just one complaint. I hate the routine. In the job and everything. Because our life was not routine. Every day we meet different people, do different thing. Here, everyone come early to job for example, stay eight or ten hours and come home very tired, stay in the home. Social life not so good. Only go outside on the weekend and early evening. I hate this life—all the people stay in the house and do nothing. The relation between people different in Iraq, between relatives, between neighbours. Here the neighbour don’t know his neighbour’s name. And [if] any problem happen for people, they don’t care.

But such drawbacks seem minor indeed compared with the political and religious repression the men suffered in Iraq. In secular Australia, Hashem explains, he has much more religious freedom than in his Islamic homeland. [In Iraq] when I want to make the prayer, must I close the door and the blinds . . . Because Saddam and the army and the police maybe look [at] me through the window. When he see me, maybe the hanging for me.

Hashem’s English struggles to keep pace with his emotions. Saddam viewed devout Shiah Muslims with deep suspicion, Emad explains. Everyone who prayed and went to the mosque, particularly Shiahs, were in danger of being reported and accused of working with Iran—a charge that could mean imprisonment, or even death. Hashem nods vigorously and joins in. What he says next sounds incredible in the banal comfort of this Campbelltown house. Saddam Hussein, hanging with my family three persons. Because they pray. My brother—he left the wife and two children—Saddam Hussein hang him. And my cousin, and my cousin—three persons from all my family, Saddam Hussein hanging.

Such tragedies have made Hashem profoundly grateful for the Australian way of life. He feels moved to deliver this tribute: Thank you, thank you very much for the Government of Australia. I respect all the assistance from Australia. I respect all Government of Australia.

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Shelter from the Storm I respect too their police. Because when I was in my country I can’t see any democracy and freedom. When I come to Australia, I find the democracy and freedom and all the people respect the human.

Hashem’s children attend an Islamic school. Emad points out that it affords these Shiah Muslims more religious and cultural freedom than the Islamic schools available in Iraq. So far Emad has found Australian society to be generally tolerant of Muslims. No discrimination. Everything is okay. But sometimes from the bad people, for example our women wear cover, sometimes bad people they laugh, or say something. But the law and everything is fair, is okay.

Although the cultural accommodations have generally worked both ways, there is one sticking point—the Muslim practice, controversial in Western society, of taking multiple wives. Gender equity in Muslim societies is a complex issue: for instance, a country like Pakistan under a powerful female head of state, Benazir Bhutto, continued to allow the imprisonment of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of rape. Muslim feminists like Taslima Nasreen in Bangladesh and Nawal el Sadaawi in Egypt contend that feminism can indeed co-exist with a Muslim lifestyle—it’s all a matter of how the Koran is interpreted. Under the Koran, a man can take up to four wives if he treats them equally, but, cautions the Melbourne-based Muslim cleric, Imam Fahmi, it’s only an option, not a command. ‘It doesn’t happen here because the law stop[s] it. It does happen in the Muslim world, sometimes, not all the time . . . because [there is] no need for it sometimes. And Islam says if there is no need for it, don’t do it! You don’t have to do it.’ 5 Although Hashem will not flout Australian law, he believes he should be entitled to a second wife. His reason is simple. I need sex. For example, I married, I have one wife. Maybe my wife in the future is very sick—what I do? . . . Maybe she is old, or [has] some trouble, is very exhausted. Maybe I have another wife—but must I make fair together . . . when I bring some clothes [for my first wife] must I bring another some clothes.

Providing he does not indulge one over the other, Hashem feels that not only would he be justified in taking a second wife, he would be doing his first wife a favour, by sharing the burden of satisfying his daily sexual requirements.

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Goodbye Saddam Emad gives another example in support of bigamy. ‘The wife can’t get baby, can’t get children. What he do? Is hard, different to our belief.’ But in the end, Emad’s potential ‘need’ for another wife also came down to sex. The Koran forbade sex with a woman for 40 days after childbirth. How could a full-blooded Arab male survive that? Just then, Emad’s wife appears from the kitchen, heavily pregnant with their third child. With her husband translating, it does not seem like the best time to ask for her own views on his potential second wife. I try a few questions. The house is good, the area is bad. She likes Australia. They’ve been robbed. Emad pats his wife’s protruding stomach. ‘I am very regular’, he says proudly. I look at her, not understanding. ‘My first two sons were born on the same day, two years apart—and now number three will also come that day.’ I wonder how the maths teacher would feel if the baby—or its mother—ruined his neat equation. But she is smiling happily at her clockwork fecundity. ‘What does she want for her kids in the future?’, I ask. Just for them to stick at their studies—then they could do anything they liked. And Emad’s hopes for them? Just to know their extended family. Sure I happy because they open their eyes with the good system and everything—freedom, and democracy. But they not enjoying my family, because all my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, in Iraq.

His wife’s family are all in Campbelltown now, except for two sisters, but Emad is continually worrying about his relatives at home. Contact is difficult and dangerous: the odd heavily censored letter gets through, and an occasional phone call, which apart from being ruinously expensive, is often tapped. Emad’s father has been interrogated about his son’s departure. For fear of sparking further reprisals, both men have asked that their names be changed and their photographs not be included in the book. Their paths here have been very different. Although he is much younger, Emad has a melancholy air, whereas Hashem bristles with enthusiasm. In an excess of loyalty to his new country, he declares himself willing to defend Australia. But Emad is trying to erase his miltary past. Images of war still surface in his mind. When the war happened, fighting for example the Iranian people, I saw how to kill the people exactly behind me. Beside me, I need to save someone. I can’t save him. He die in my arms. I saw everything, you know, because I was commander and officer there . . . Sure, it affects my

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Shelter from the Storm psychological situation . . . We lived with two wars, one with Iran and one with Iraq. All the people live with war now. They need long time to forget bad things. Sure I am lucky, but I not comfortable because my friends, my group, still suffering in the camp, and all my family suffering from Saddam Hussein. And because of that I can’t be comfortable with my life . . . [In the] next five years, I hope to find good job to buy house in private area which I like. And to develop everything in my life, to renew everything. I’d like to travel round the world with my family, two or three months, to change my life, to relax. I [was] depressed from my car accident and had some problems . . . I want to break the routine here, see other friends and relatives too. See different weather! There are many, many things . . . with time everything will be all right.

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10 Daceyville Days Margaret Gleeson

My parents moved to Daceyville in 1935. Tenancies could be handed down to the next generation, so you know you can live there, your children can live there, your grandchildren can live there, and you can actually form a community. And that’s what Daceyville was—three generations, and everyone knew everyone.

The Gleesons were one of about 300 families in the Dacey Garden Suburb, a bold social experiment initiated in 1912. At that time, 50 per cent of Australians owned their own home and the rest mostly rented privately. It was with the aim of ‘bringing rents down to a fair market price’ that a Labor politician, John Rowland Dacey, proposed the construction of what would be the first purpose-built public housing project in New South Wales. Irish-born Dacey, a former butcher’s asistant and blacksmith, had campaigned for public housing from the 1890s.6 As the Colonial Treasurer in the NSW Labor Government of 1912, he pushed through a landmark Housing Bill, overcoming the strenuous opposition of real estate agents and builders. The Dacey Gardens project, he announced, would accommodate 5000 people in a model ‘garden city’, which would provide not just shelter, but an improved quality of life. The Housing Bill was passed in March 1912 and the first bricks were laid at Daceyville in south east Sydney only weeks later. By then, sadly, Dacey’s dream had become his memorial—he died suddenly on 11 April 1912.

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Shelter from the Storm Although Dacey’s grand vision was never fully realised, the project was such a success that by 1919, there were 353 applicants for the twenty houses on offer. And why not. For instead of overcrowded, disease-ridden city tenements, here tenants were promised fresh air, light and space, parks, their own garden, and a superior house made of brick or rendered cement, ‘to create a desire in the minds of the people for a better class of home’, as a speaker in the NSW Parliament put it in 1913. By the time Margaret Gleeson’s parents arrived in 1935, the estate consisted of 303 cottages, six shops, a baby health clinic, public hall and park, laid out in a radical axial design—as she recalls: You had long radiating streets with little scallopy crescents in between. At the edge of each block, there were two crescents that made it like a horseshoe, and then those went round to the next cross street, so there were two horseshoes with a little bit of grass in the middle—like a doughnut cut in half. The grass provided the boundary for gang wars—you wouldn’t play with the kids on the other side of the horseshoe. All the boulevardey sort of streets, the long ones, were to do with Cook: there was Isaac Smith Street, he was Cook’s petty officer; Astrolabe Road, that was a ship; Cook Avenue . . . then the crescents were VC winners, so there was Colonel Braun, Sergeant Larkin, Corporal Jacker . . . It was modelled on the English worker garden suburbs, so it was all nice, dinky little Federation houses, very small but nice and solid. They were basically two bedrooms, a lounge-room, a kitchen, a pantry, a back verandah which you could turn into a bedroom, and a bathroom. They had indoor toilets, which was considered very classy!

Former soldiers got priority as tenants. Margaret’s father was one of them. They moved in when Molly Gleeson was pregnant with her first child. He was born on 3 December 1935, the anniversary of the Eureka Stockade of 1854, when miners in Victoria rebelled against an unjust licensing system. That day was one of several working-class triumphs dear to the heart of Tom Gleeson. When his second son was born on 17 October, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was a double celebration. When Margaret arrived on International Labour Day, May Day, 1945, he declared his perfectly planned family complete, for they had exhausted the most auspicious Labor festivals in the calendar! Not surprisingly, politics ranked high in the Gleeson family. Margaret was inducted at a tender age.

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Daceyville Days My first election would have been the 1949 election, so I was four and a bit! My mother made a special little dress for me in Labor Party colours and my dad painted my toy table and chairs in the colours. Then they set up the tables outside for the canvassers handing out the how-to-votes, and my brother and I decorated my little toy version, and of course everyone was coming up to us ’cause we were so cute! It was a little island in Daceyville anyway. You knew everyone and you knew [later on] the three people who didn’t vote Labor! One was a Communist, then there was a Liberal and a DLP [Democratic Labor Party, the conservative Catholic group that split from Labor in 1955].

In his youth, Margaret’s father had been a member of the International Workers of the World, a radical Left-wing group known as the Wobblies. The Great War refocused his interest. The Labor Party took a stand against conscription in the First World War and he was in the trenches . . . It was the vote from the trenches that overturned the referendum to bring in conscription . . . That was probably the most significant political event of his life and that basically was what got him into the Labor Party . . . and being a stubborn man he stayed loyal.

The Irish writer, Brendan Behan, once observed that the first item on the agenda of any Irish political party was The Split. The Australian Labor Party soon lived up to its very Irish character. In 1931, the federal party expelled NSW Premier Jack Lang, when he refused to comply with the Premiers’ Plan to combat the Depression by cutting public spending while the state continued to pay off interest on overseas loans. He responded by forming his own party, Lang Labor, enthusiastically supported by families like the Gleesons. Most of the Daceyville branch split from federal Labor and went along with Lang Labor, so I suppose they were expelled, I think it was for a few years. One of the photos that used to get dragged out that we’d pore over every Christmas was taken outside the hall and everyone was in it—the entire suburb—all wearing their ‘Lang is Right!’ badges.

Jack Lang was to New South Wales a bit like what Gough Whitlam later would be to Australia—in 1932, he was dismissed from office by the NSW Governor, for witholding the state’s contributions to repayments of Australia’s overseas loans. Like Whitlam, he lost the subsequent election, his Lang Labor Party finally rejoining the ALP in 1939. By 1949, when

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Shelter from the Storm the four-year-old Margaret began canvassing for the ALP, Lang’s parliamentary career was ending, but the Gleeson house reverberated as noisily as ever with talk of politics. The evening meal would go on for about three hours. My old man would run it like a parliamentary session, you know, each’d have their turn of the floor and there’d always be lots of arguments—big, loud discussions!

Their parents’ politics coloured the children’s lives subconsciously as well. Far from feeling stigmatised because she lived in public housing, Margaret grew up feeling better off than the poor folk who had to buy their own homes. I can remember my parents saying, ‘It’s better to put your money into your children’s education than be paying rates and maintenance for a house— so long as you’ve got a house to live in’. My father’s attitude was an ideological position, very much for public ownership and against private home ownership. With my mother, it was more ‘It’s a worry to own a house’ . . . a millstone round your neck.

Because the residents could pass on their tenure to someone from the next generation, it was almost as if they did own the house. This lent postwar Daceyville an air of security and stability that was uncommon on later housing estates with their high tenant turnover. A lot of the tenants, they were there for their life, so they did all sorts of things to their houses—we glassed in the front verandah, put on a back porch, built a laundry downstairs, built a big greenhouse or shed for my mum, and that was normal. The man down the corner, they had a huge solarium-type thing. He’d made it out of big rocks and pebbles and glass and it was all fish tanks. He bred goldfish and carp and stuff. It was cool, like a garden house, a big walk-in aquarium—a monstrous structure, which, as a kid, I just thought was paradise! Everyone added on and did all sorts of things they knew were illegal. I can’t ever remember inspections or anything like that, but later, when I was a teenager, there was always this thing that you might get into trouble . . . like, I can remember when I was twelve my father decided I needed some privacy—instead of going through the kitchen my brother’d go through my bedroom to get to the back verandah which was his bedroom, and I used to get the shits—and Dad had taken the door out and put in a two-way bookcase. But he was always worried that he’d made

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Daceyville Days this change—forgetting the shed, the garage, the front verandah and all the other structures! It was a village-like community. You never had keys; Mum always used to have our front door open with a doorstop so we could come and go. As a kid you were always in and out of everyone’s house . . . We were one of two houses in our part of Daceyville that had a telephone, so everyone had to use our phone. From about 4.30 of an afternoon there’d be continual phone calls, you know, if different men had got overtime that night they’d ring us up to give a message to the wife, so there was a pooling of those sort of resources . . . there was another neighbour who had a car, no-one else had, so if it was an emergency you went down to the Lesters. Then when television came out—actually the first person who got one, Mrs Foot, she was a bit snooty, they didn’t have an aerial that anyone could see, so no-one knew—but then someone else got a television, so everyone went to their place!

In the post-war years there was a labour shortage and the men at Daceyville were in steady employment.

By the age of four, Margaret Gleeson was an experienced Labor Party campaigner. She grew up in Daceyville, the first purpose-built housing estate in New South Wales, established in 1912 as a model ‘garden suburb’. Only three people on the estate did not vote Labor. ‘One was a Communist, then there was a Liberal and a DLP [Democratic Labor Party].’

Some worked at the powerhouse at Bunnerong, some on the Council, as garbage men, one worked at the airport. Some were seasonal workers, shearers, who were away and came back. My dad worked on the wharves as a bondsman/gatekeeper and before that he’d been in the Government Printing Office. But by the time I was growing up, a lot of the people were retired or widowed. There were a lot of widows. Like, when my dad retired in our little bit of the street . . . there were just two men and all of these widows and Dad would do things to help them, like if he was going up the road in the afternoon, if anyone else wanted a paper he’d get one for them. Rent day he’d pay our rent and a whole lot of other people’s, like the little old lady two doors down. Save her the walk. She’d come up on Sunday night with a jar of jam for him.

There were other, less official, forms of employment at Daceyville, like the brothel operated by one resident for American sailors during the Second World War. ‘She was a good upright member of the Church’, Margaret observes. She chuckles now to think of the unorthodox hierarchy that governed the community.

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Shelter from the Storm The leading lights in the parish were the bookmakers and underworld figures, who weren’t into nasty stuff like prostitution, they actually just ran illegal gambling and that was okay, because you know, that’s what built the school and the church. And Labor politicians, too, these were the people you looked up to. We used to have illegal gambling every Friday night, run by the local bookmaker, who was a pillar of the church. He was considered a very good man, he ran everything and lived in a beautiful big house, not in Daceyville obviously, but in Kensington, and you know, they were the rich people, they were the leaders . . . And I can never forget hearing this North Shore woman with a plum in her mouth, it was a group gossiping about someone, and she commented in a very derisive way, ‘So-and-so behaves like a bookmaker’s daughter’—and that was a put-down! That really surprised me. Gee, they don’t think bookmakers are a very big deal!

Later, Margaret was to become much more aware of the class distinctions in society, but even in Daceyville, there were separate groupings. In those days, when the majority of Australians were still of British or Irish origin, you were accordingly either Protestant or Catholic. Your religion was shorthand for your cultural identity. The Gleesons were a classic Irish Catholic type, blending a benign Irish nationalism with fiery Labor activism, parish pump politics with the comforting rituals of Catholic life. The seamless interchange between religion and politics was graphically illustrated in the 1970s. Margaret had left home by then, but returned for a weekend visit to find Daceyville under threat and her elderly father preparing to man the barricades. The Department of Housing was going to redevelop Daceyville and I think at one stage they were going to knock down most of the houses and turn them into maisonettes and house more people there . . . but these were mostly pretty old people by this stage and they were pretty scared about moving, of course. The Department was trying to do all the right things, like taking them out to see where they would go, but there was still a core that were really digging in their heels . . . so they approached the BLF [Builders’ Labourers’ Federation] and the BLF put a green ban on it and there was going to be a demo on the Sunday. And normally, I’d go to Mass as late as possible, but Dad said ‘No, we’ve got to go to half-past eight Mass tomorrow to fit in with the demo’ . . . and at the time when the sermon would begin, the priest said, ‘Look I won’t have the sermon, and I’ll just rush through the rest . . . I promised

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Daceyville Days the local member that I’d have youse all up there in time for the demo for when the cameras come . . .’ So everyone gets shunted up from the church to the demo, about 400 people—real Rent-A-Crowd! And there was Jack Mundey and Bob Pringle and everyone fresh from church.

By that time, Margaret was working in Canberra as a public servant. The Gleesons were the first family in Daceyville whose children went to university. My oldest brother won a teachers’ college scholarship to do science at Sydney [University] and we were pretty excited. There were differing views within the Daceyville community. Some people agreed that our parents should be proud; others thought they were mugs, now that he [had left school and] could go and earn decent money. One of the neighbours who was a Mason accosted him and started abusing him for daring to aspire to teach in one of their schools!

In the 1950s, only secular state schools were free. The Catholic Church had long provided its own fee-paying schools. To non-Catholics, they were seen as divisive and even seditious institutions; to Catholics, they were a cultural and religious right. A good education was prized by working-class Catholics like the Gleesons as a way to achieve social advancement. You want your children to do better than you, to live through them. My father wanted to be educated and wasn’t, only went to fourteen, but thirsted for it . . . The priority in our family was to have decent shoes, decent food and a good education. I went to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Kensington, and they had a very academic orientation. We had photos of Old Girls, one was the youngest person ever to get a medical degree and was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh . . . We had a showpiece laboratory, but it was chemistry; they didn’t do physics because it was considered unfeminine. I was really good at maths I and II, but after the Intermediate [Certificate, equivalent to Year 9] they didn’t have those options because maths was considered unfeminine, so I did general maths, even though I didn’t want to—but still, I got to university. The only chance I had in the public system would have been competing by exam to get to Sydney High and I may or may not have because it was selective for all of Sydney. The big school building program and renaissance in education in New South Wales was in the late fifties and into the sixties

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Shelter from the Storm so I would have missed out on that. When you think of it, if it wasn’t for the Catholic education system, I wouldn’t have had an education.

But it didn’t come cheap. There were no family holidays and Tom Gleeson worked overtime five nights a week and sometimes on weekends to raise the fees. Few working-class families were able or willing to make such sacrifices, and when Margaret started at the University of New South Wales, she found she was something of a rarity. We were doing phonetics, and you have Standard English and there’s this classification called Educated Australian, which approximates Standard English, and then there’s Broad Australian . . . the teacher had written some lines on the board and he asked us to translate it into phonetic script. I can remember the word was ‘bay’ and I wrote a diphthong, ‘aI’, and everyone else had written ‘beI’, and obviously I couldn’t think in my head in Standard English. I’d used the wrong symbol . . . And I’ll never forget this woman who had this really toffee voice saying, ‘Oh I know what the problem is—Morgret (saying ‘‘Morgret’’ for Margaret!), Morgret is translating into Broad Australian, because she’s a native speaker of Broad Australian’. So then I had to speak for them, because they’d discovered I was a native speaker of Broad Australian! I really felt like I was an outsider, I shouldn’t be in this place—but I was doing better than this bloody woman on the literature side . . . I was doing very well in essays and stuff like that, probably because we were doing stuff like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I really identified with and found it very easy, and everyone was thinking how difficult it was and so I scored brilliantly!

....

Margaret’s final exams in 1966 coincided with a major event at Daceyville. For the first time in years, the houses were all to be painted, inside and out! To the initial consternation of the residents, the contract was awarded to a gang of New Australians. Kensington and Kingsford were becoming more and more Greek and you’d often hear these widows, who were English, Irish or Australian background, with all those working-class resentments of Europeans, you know, the ham and beef shop was now a delicatessen and you had to speak Greek to go to the chemist, all that sort of rubbish . . . Anyway these Greek fellows came and they couldn’t speak much English . . . but

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Daceyville Days they just won these little old ladies, because they were lonely . . . and the young Greeks were having a great old time going from one morning tea to the next and from afternoon tea to afternoon tea—every house would be wanting to feed them! This was the time of the coup, the military dictatorship of Greece, and a lot of these people had fled from that and they started talking politics with my mother. I came home from uni one day—and she’d been complaining just like everyone else about being taken over by Greeks— and she said, ‘You know they’re very Left-wing these Greeks, they’re really good people. Do you know what’s been happening in Greece??’, and she was telling me all about the dictatorship. So after that, all Greeks were good socialists as far as my mum was concerned, even the rotten bloke ripping us off at the corner shop!

Margaret’s Labor Party activism continued and she became a scrutineer at the Daceyville booth. I think it was the 1966 elections, or maybe the ’69 . . . It was a runaway Labor victory, obviously, 85 per cent of the vote or whatever, and because it was such a tiny booth they were the first figures, so I had to go up to the party at Lionel Bowen’s place. They’d all known me since I was a little girl and here I was doing my first adult thing and they said, ‘Shh, everyone, quiet, here’s Margaret with the figures from Daceyville!’. And I read them out and I thought it was really good, you know, 85 per cent, huge victory. It was always the biggest majority of any seat—and one old-timer said, ‘Oh, that’s a big swing! Lost three votes.’ I thought that was funny at the time but in a way he was right, it was a litmus test. If such a rock-solid ALP thing loses three votes, what could that mean elsewhere?

By the 1980s, Margaret’s own loyalty to the ALP had begun to waver. In 1984, she became involved with a peace group which supported the Nuclear Disarmament Party. Since the NDP was competing against the ALP in elections, she was informed by her ALP branch that she was to be expelled from the Labor Party for a breach of solidarity. I thought they’d breached solidarity by going ahead with uranium mining! But anyway, I was becoming more and more disillusioned with the Labor Party for years before that . . . I’m now a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. I’m a revolutionary communist. I think that was always the politics that I had . . . You evolve, you know. When the Labor Party sells out, there was no point in being in it!

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Shelter from the Storm Margaret believes her father would understand her position, given his original affiliation with the radical Wobblies. She remained close to both her parents; her mother died in 1977, her father two years later. A few months before her mother died, Margaret broached a thorny subject. She wanted to buy a house in Queanbeyan and was having trouble raising all the money . . . I rang my brother to get him to soften her up and give her the reasons why I would buy—you know, where I was living was zoned for flats and at some stage the landlord might sell it and a woman living alone needed a dog and it was going to be hard, wasn’t it terrible I wasn’t eligible for public housing and I was going to be forced to buy . . . I knew they had a little bit of money set aside, $3000 or something, obviously for my wedding. [But] I wasn’t going to get married . . . By the time I actually got the place Dad was hospitalised, but Mum was still at home and she was a bit reserved about it. I could tell she was still a bit worried . . . she paid to have the place carpeted and all that sort of stuff ’cause she was worried about me catching a cold . . . She wouldn’t give me the money for the deposit, but she’d make sure the place was okay.

When her parents died, and with Margaret and her two brothers not in an eligible income bracket, the cottage that had been the Gleesons’ home for over 40 years reverted to the NSW Department of Housing. Margaret returned to Daceyville many times over the next decade or so, to attend funeral after funeral of the family’s neighbours and friends. Their old home was allocated to a single mother, who lived there with one child and a dog, within easy reach of her mother’s flat down the street. Margaret was pleased at this sensible allocation and on one visit, she commented to a neighbour across the road how well the new tenant was keeping the garden. ‘Oh yeah’, said Mrs McHugh, ‘she’s a really nice woman, but I feel sorry for her in between those two houses. They won’t give her a go . . . they complain about the dog.’ Mrs McHugh said to them, ‘But the Gleesons always had dogs, did you mind if they barked?’. And she said, ‘No, because it was their house. It was the Gleesons’.’ It’s twenty years since my mother died and this poor woman’s been living there for bloody ten years—and they still call it ‘the Gleesons’ !

Now in her fifties, Margaret is renting again. She sold her house to pay off debts, have a holiday and move interstate. At the moment she’s ineligible for public housing, but she won’t be buying another place either. ‘I’m

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Daceyville Days too old to borrow money. It’s all very insecure, but then everyone else’s future is pretty insecure. Perhaps I’ll go into a co-op . . . because I can contribute to a co-op while I’m earning and then still have the security.’ It would also fit in with her ideology, which, like her parents’, is firmly behind the concept of social housing. In fact the child of this original public housing venture has worked as a community housing manager. The job utilised all her diverse skills: a degree in psychology, two decades as a public servant in social policy and immigration, and later years as a community development officer. But her personal background has also given her an essential quality not taught in any university—a deep empathy with the underdog and a practical understanding of what it’s like to have to count the pennies. People on very, very low incomes can be marooned for almost a week if they’ve spent their pension money on food and all the bills . . . I had a tenant who was supposed to come and see me, rang up and said, ‘I haven’t got any money for the train’—she lives in Ashfield, two train stops away, but she couldn’t come for three days until pension day. My role was to provide the housing, but for a tenant to fully enjoy their housing, they need to be plugged into support networks . . . not just shut in a house and paying their rent and having a rotten life!

With migrant tenants like the Vietnamese or Eastern Europeans who have fled communist regimes, Margaret had to be diplomatic about her political beliefs. She laughs as she recounts the reaction she got to a holiday she spent on a work brigade in Cuba, which she believes is about the only model communist society remaining . . . I sent back postcards and I was very careful . . . to one of the Samoans I sent just a beach, then the chairperson was Vietnamese, I sent him the cathedral in Havana . . . and they were up on the wall. The tenants were all coming to see me and the first one was Lebanese and a PLO supporter and he said, you know, ‘How was my holiday? Did you see Fidel?’ blah, blah. The Samoans just had no idea where Cuba was, they thought it must have been near Tahiti or somewhere . . . it looked very much like home and it must have been nice! But when the chairperson realised I was in Cuba, he said something about being a communist . . . ‘But it’s different in Australia, you can be a communist here.’ He might have been in the South Vietnamese airforce and all that sort of stuff (but) there was no political difference, because basically he could see I was on the side of

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Shelter from the Storm Margaret Gleeson in

the poor people and he was poor. We used to have reasonable discus-

front of the Daceyville

sions . . . he separated me out from ‘communists’ because I was a good

house where she grew

person and helping the people—not realising that’s what communism’s all

up. ‘The leading lights in

about anyway!

the parish were the bookmakers and underworld

....

figures . . . and Labor politicians too, these were the people you looked up to.’ When Margaret made it to university, she was paraded before the phonetics class as a rare find—a speaker of Broad Australian. (Mayu Kanamori)

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In June 1997, 30 years after she moved out, Margaret returned with me to Daceyville. Traffic roared along Bunnerong and Gardners Roads, the busy main streets that enclose the estate, but once you turned down one of the side streets, you could still discern some of the original garden village atmosphere. The cottages have retained their facades, with contemporary touches such as the Aboriginal flag displayed in one window. Margaret was distressed to see some of the old palm trees on Bunnerong Road had been cut down to widen the road, and taken aback to see bars on the windows of the Daceyville Primary School, but otherwise, she thought, the place looked pretty good. As we drove round, she pointed out the changes.

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Daceyville Days They’re originals, but they’ve been tarted up and extended at the back . . . this is cute, it wasn’t here before . . . Some of the places I think they’ve actually knocked down and rebuilt, but maintained facades. They’ve done a good job. It looks better than it did in some ways! There’s still the same sort of feel. It seems to be very cramped because of all the trees, we didn’t have this many. There seem to be a lot of native gardens now . . . they weren’t the thing in the fifties. You grew carnations and had grass and the only trees you grew were peach and nectarine and things you could eat. People certainly didn’t go in for leafy gardens.

Number 18, the Gleesons’ old home, still had the letter box Margaret’s father had last painted in 1977. The door was open. A man in white overalls appeared. He’d been contracted to paint the house, which had been gutted following a fire evidently started by a cigarette. Margaret was glad she hadn’t seen the blackened aftermath. Now it was just a sterile white shell. We wandered through the empty building, Margaret pointing out the once-louvred front verandah where one brother had slept, her parents’ room, her own. Her father’s Doric fireplace folly had been removed in an earlier renovation, so nothing distinguished the small lounge-room and kitchen, which had been ‘much pokier’. The front fence was gone, but some of Molly Gleeson’s plants survived. A lemon tree had replaced her tropical garden. ‘She’d naturalised a whole lot of orchids, she had ginger and pineapple and bananas growing . . . That’s the same Hill’s Hoist! God they make them well, don’t they?’ After so many funerals, Margaret has no-one left to visit in Daceyville. To the government, it’s a small-scale public housing estate under a heritage order. To would-be developers, its situation only 8 kilometres from the city makes it a prime target for gentrification. But to the Gleesons and families like them, Daceyville was a whole world.

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11 Sarajevo to City West Susie Jeftic

You know in Bosnia, if you want to get a flat like this, two-bedroom, private, you have to work 30 years—and after 30 years, you not get beautiful one, like this . . . Everything is like a dream!

Susie Jeftic’s enthusiasm is catching. Seen through her eyes, Harris Street, Ultimo, just west of Sydney’s city, does have a touch of a European boulevard, the residents observing life below from the verandahs of their modern apartment blocks, pedestrians strolling under the plane trees, or stopping for coffee in the chic new cafe on the corner. When it opened, Susie strode up to the counter and greeted the proprietor in her deep, magisterial tones: ‘Hello, I am Susie. Welcome to Harris Street. I live here and we need you. I wish you well!’ Anyone might have thought she was some local dignitary, rather than a refugee who blew in from Bosnia a mere six months before. But Susie has had no trouble fitting in. With her ebullient personality, she has already made her mark on this inner city community, mixing as easily with the labourers who’ve lived here for seven generations as with the newer, more socially and culturally diverse types who are flocking to the area. Susie, or Snezana, as she was then known, her husband, Sonny, and their seven-year-old daughter, Mia, fled Bosnia in 1992, shortly after the war started.

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Sarajevo to City West Sonny left before—for security reasons, so they don’t realise he is leaving. If they see him visit the bank, they don’t let him. But for me, woman and baby, is all right . . . the army not react. The last day, when I decide to leave Sarajevo, I walk all the way through the city where I live all my life. Really I like that city, that’s something special. Not beautiful, like Sydney, Sarajevo very ugly, very dirty, industry . . . when there is winter, everything is black snow, not white snow, very, very dirty . . . But what Sarajevo had, that’s the soul! That was something to make that city beautiful . . . the different nationalities, different cultures. Everybody loved each other and live for years there, marry each other . . . everybody different, in my family especially . . . so I see those streets empty, everybody inside the house, everybody scared, say, ‘What’s going on? Go home, don’t go down the street’, like it’s dangerous you know, nobody knows what’s going on. That was very bad feeling.

Susie’s husband, Sonny, was an Olympic athlete. In prime physical condition, he was sure to be conscripted—but to fight on what side? He was of Croatian background, while Susie was a Bosnian Serb. Susie knew lots of mixed marriages like theirs. Sonny’s sister-in-law was Muslim and the family moved easily between Orthodox (Serbian) celebrations, the Catholic Christmas and the annual Muslim feast at the end of the Ramadan fast. Neither Susie nor Sonny were regular church-goers. In fact, Susie laughs, their religious or cultural background was of such little importance to them that she only discovered Sonny was Croatian after they were married! His auntie said, ‘Are you going to do the christening for Mia in the Catholic church?’ And I said, ‘Catholic? Sonny, you are Catholic??’ I didn’t know. We never talk about—never. I think everybody was the same.

After years of harmonious co-existence, the explosion of ethnic tensions in Bosnia was a deep shock to families like Susie’s. Sonny, in particular, faced a terrible dilemma. He doesn’t know which side to go. Why war at all? If he go to the one side, he have to kill my family. Any side he chooses, he have to kill friends. There is no reason and he didn’t want to get involved in the army, so that meant he have to leave before they kill him. We had five minutes to pick up things and leave. Could you imagine, working ten years, and having five minutes to take what you want! I think, what is the most important to

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Shelter from the Storm me? . . . So I pick up the passport, the documentation, certificates from Hotel Holiday Inn where I work. I pick up the gold, what I have in the house, some cash, clothes for winter, for summer—a little bit for me, little bit for my husband, little bit for Mia. So that was one bag: one hand for bag, one hand for Mia, and I left.

At the airport, they took the first plane out, which happened to be headed for Belgrade. Susie had no idea she would never see Sarajevo again. We thought, a couple of months and we get back to normal life . . . we didn’t believe that will be war, for real. And after six months, we realise that’s not going to stop so quickly and it’s getting worse and worse. So we left Belgrade and came to Moscow. We stay there three months and get visa to be permanent in Australia—we had family in Newcastle, so Susie, then Snezana, Jeftic, as a child in Sarajevo. The war came as a terrible shock to Susie, an Orthodox Serb. Until then, religious and

they sponsored us.

Susie’s relatives ran a restaurant and disco, where she hoped to work as soon as she could speak English. Under the Community Tenancy Scheme, the family was housed in a nice flat near the beach, paying only $50 a week. So far, things were much better than Susie had expected.

ethnic differences had

I didn’t expect that this will be so beautiful country and that people will

been so unimportant, she

accept us . . . because everyone knows, refugees, they lost everything,

did not know her husband

they have no money, no food, no nothing and people scared they might

was Croatian until after

do the crime to survive. I know that feeling before . . . you are refugee and

they were married.

everyone know you are refugee so better stay away. In Australia I didn’t get that feeling. They all very friendly. Everybody like to give us advice, support . . . I was very surprised. I think, ‘God! In Bosnia, we can’t live, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic together, and here, Social Security lady is from India, CES man from Africa, the interpreters from all over the world and everybody is smiling and laughing, “Welcome to Australia, don’t worry Susie, you will be happy, this beautiful country”—because at the time I was very upset’.

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Sarajevo to City West Just as Susie was beginning to get over the difficulties of settlement, she became ill with a stress-related disease called saicroidoses. She spent the next three months in Newcastle Hospital. ‘They give me beautiful room, and flowers and fruit, as much as I like to eat. And they just said to me, “Susie, relax now, you’re safe”. And in the hospital I actually learn English.’ After she recovered, Susie became pregnant. By the time her second daughter was born, the family had been without a job for eighteen months. When Anna was barely six weeks old, they moved to Sydney, hoping for work. Susie registered with the Housing Commission, where she faced a six- or seven-year wait. In the meantime, the family paid $180 a week for a mediocre two-bedroom flat at southern BrightonLe-Sands. It was very, very dirty and uncomfortable. Everywhere cockroaches and no bath in the toilet, a very old kitchen, old bathroom, no laundry . . . one day in the week I have a chance to wash clothes and dry. Wednesday was my day, and if I’m working Wednesday or if it rain that day, I have to wait for another Wednesday!

Sonny eventually got a job as a security guard, but the years of stress and insecurity had undermined the marriage. Too much problems we had, too much stress, and just in the very hard life to survive, we lost our feelings between man and woman. They’ve just gone. We stay like the best of friends to survive, to do the things for the kids—but we lost the feeling like woman and man, love and passion.

The couple separated amicably, Sonny seeing the children frequently. With her English much improved, Susie’s chances of getting a job were better. She had studied tourism and hospitality at university in Bosnia, then worked for ten years at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, a hotel built to international standards for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. With that background, and her sunny nature, she was soon employed as a dealer at the new Sydney Casino, where she enjoyed dealing blackjack, baccarat, two-up, the big wheel and all the other games. The work was well paid and the conditions progressive. We have a beautiful childcare centre, I think it’s the best in New South Wales! We have child care 24 hours a day, seven shifts a week, so it doesn’t matter which shift we are working.

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Shelter from the Storm The casino very good company. First we had $16 an hour, for the training course, which is very good money, isn’t it? We work one hour and have fifteen minute break after every hour. And beautiful food, everything for free . . . Chinese, European, seafood, continental, the best quality from all over the world . . . even if you have a day off and you are in the city and hungry, you can come and eat in the casino!

Besides providing Susie with a good job and flexible hours, the Casino indirectly helped Susie solve her accommodation problems. Through its employee support services, she found out about a radical new type of community housing, called City West. Formed in 1994, City West is a non-profit organisation that creates quality, affordable housing in inner city areas of Sydney like Pyrmont and Ultimo, where long-term lowincome residents are often forced out by booming property prices. Funded through a range of public sector grants and private sector levies, this dynamic organisation aims to keep urban communities alive. Wealthy transient professionals pay top dollar to live in the award-winning apartment blocks, but local workers are also sought, and the less well off get subsidised rents, to give the area a good socio-economic mix and a strong residential feel. Susie qualified in several categories: she worked nearby, and as a single mother of non-English-speaking background, she was disadvantaged. She applied, without much hope, and was called for an interview, where she explained her special needs, such as not being too high up because of ongoing trouble with her legs from her old illness. Apartments were being allocated off the plan. Six months later, to her surprise and delight, Susie was informed she had a two-bedroom flat on the third floor. The day I call, shortly before Christmas, twelve-year-old Mia and her friend Amber from next door are in the bedroom getting ready for their year six farewell dance. Three-year-old Anna sings ‘Jingle Bells’. Presents are piled under the Christmas tree in the corner. Susie proudly gives me the guided tour: for communal use, there’s a large enclosed patio, where the children can safely wander, and two rooftop gardens, with stunning city views. The flat itself is bright, modern and brand new. After the previous place, Susie finds it all hard to believe. Two beautiful balconies, beautiful kitchen, beautiful bathroom, my own laundry, security building, garage—you can’t compare! And it is different price. Depends on the wages you have. We all pay 27 per cent of the money we earn. When I work, I pay $150. Now I’m on sickness benefits

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Sarajevo to City West for the legs and I’m paying $73 . . . I have no stress, like ‘What am I going to do with my kids—I can’t buy food’, so it’s very good security. I feel relaxed.

Being on her feet for eight hours a shift as a croupier has made Susie’s legs swell. It’s linked to her previous illness, about which not much is known. The Casino will try and find her another position where she can sit down, perhaps as a receptionist, where she can use her language skills. In the meantime, thanks to the income-linked rental, at least she doesn’t have to worry about being evicted. She is loud in her praise for the support she has received and impressed with the social welfare system in Australia, Susie Jeftic today. She is compared with home. In Bosnia, they were told that only the rich did well rapturous about her brandnew apartment in the inner in Western countries, but that’s not how it’s turned out. I think Australia more communist and more like a socialist than Bosnia! Here, if you’re not working, you have the social security; in Bosnia, you can’t get nothing. There is a very small per cent of social help, what they give you for one month, you can’t buy one bottle of milk and one bread . . . if you not work, that’s your problem, not government problem.

Although she’s only been living in Harris Street for six months, Susie has got to know lots of other residents.

Sydney suburb of Pyrmont, where she lives with her two children. ‘In Bosnia, if you want to get a flat like this . . . you have to work 30 years!’ (Rhys Roberts)

The kids play together and they introduce us. My next door neighbour, Liz, is a social worker, she has a daughter three years old like Anna, soI go there for coffee for Anna to play. Another neighbour has a daughter, Amber, in the same class with Mia . . . there is different age, different background, different situation—families with kids, without, single parents, single people, couples. The school, the child care, the job, shopping, the city, everything is handy and nice. Every weekend there is different shows in Darling Harbour, jugglers, parks, so the kids have everything. Or we catch the ferry to Circular Quay, or go to Manly to the beach. I like to be in the middle of everything. I used to live in the heart of the city in Sarajevo.

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Shelter from the Storm Mia, she is in the Ultimo Community Centre. They have basketball, tennis, library for free, computers and Internet for free. It’s amazing. In Bosnia we had very good education, learn about everything . . . but here the country is rich and they have the technology. Mia said to me ‘Mum, I give you the newspaper what the people read in Bosnia’. I said, ‘Are you joking ?’ Twelve years old, she knows how to find the Bosnian Internet—and technology’s for free in the community room. In the Bosnian community room you can take the ball and play with it all day every day, but you do not get the Internet—no way.

If she can raise the $4000 a year in fees, Susie hopes to send Mia to the International Grammar School nearby. She wants her to keep up her native language, partly to enhance her career prospects, and partly, Susie jokes, so that she can swear in comfort round the children when she gets old. Although she is proud of being Bosnian, Susie has no wish to see her homeland again—not as it is now. I have a homesick for the life before war. Now is not ever the same. Sarajevo is not my city any more . . . how many of my generation die, and the invalids, for stupid reasons, for nothing. All the young people, very good, educated, very smart, and they had no alternative but they still invalids, they still suffer, for who knows which reason? Nobody knows . . . I’m coming from old Yugoslavia . . . with all people live together, love each other, not the national parties and no war, no hate, no nothing. I am Orthodox, but I am not Serbian, I am Bosnian . . . the real Bosnians, they are all from mixed marriage . . . I like my kids to be Australian, to be happy, to be free . . . I think it’s a beautiful country, opportunity for everybody. If you like to be the President in Australia, or brain surgeon, engineer, you can one day, doesn’t matter where you are from—just go to school and you have a chance, they help you, give you money, computers. . . . To get the brand new flat, close to the casino, water everywhere, nice city . . . looks like Europe, this street . . . trees, people walking . . . I have no nostalgia, because Pyrmont and Ultimo and Darling Harbour is [like] part of Europe. I don’t want to go back there to be more sad. To spend $10 000 or $15 000 to get back to Bosnia and be very disappointed. No, I’m proudly Australian.

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12 A Hard Nut to Crack Kath Rogers

In 1947, Kath Rogers returned from the Balmain shops wheeling her two children in a pram, to find hundreds of people lined up outside her mother-in-law’s house. Kath and her family had been living there since her husband, Harry, went to war. As her mother-in-law cowered inside, Kath tried to gain entry. They wouldn’t let me in—told me to go to the end of the queue. I said, ‘I live here!’. So very reluctantly they let me through. I asked them what it was all about and they said, ‘You’ve got a house from the Housing Commission’ (no-one had heard of the Housing Commission until this stage) ‘and we want this house when you go’. That’s how bad the shortage was.

In 1941, when the Curtin Labor Government took office, it estimated that some 80 000 new dwellings were required. A Housing Act that same year led to the establishment of the Commonwealth Housing Commission, which declared the right of every citizen to ‘a good standard house and this should not depend on his economic position or the policy of the particular state in which he resides’. In New South Wales, the Housing Commission made its first tentative steps towards meeting this decree in June 1944, when construction started on the first of 200 dwellings at Westmead, in western Sydney. Progress was painfully slow. So dire were wartime shortages that this major

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Shelter from the Storm project was launched with only five labourers, who had trouble getting hold of basic building materials. To find half a ton of lime was considered a major achievement. After the war ended, housing moved up the national agenda and on 19 November 1945, the first ever Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement was signed. From then on, the Commonwealth would provide cheap loans to the states for the purpose of building public housing. New South Wales needed no further incentive: by February 1947, its Minister for Housing, Clive Evatt, could boast that it had provided nearly 6000 dwellings since those first foundations were laid in Westmead. It had a further 4446 houses under construction and 3672 ready to go. The homes would be awarded by ballot to eligible families, with priority given to returned soldiers—they would get 60 per cent of the homes for families with two or more children. Kath Rogers remembers hearing about the scheme. It was during the war and it came over the wireless . . . I’m not sure whether it was Curtin or Chifley, but they were right down with the men and felt for them. They gave them the best chance they could to open the area up, send the families out, trying to get people back to normal.

Kath and her two sisters-in-law immediately put their names down. An inspector investigated their circumstances and allocated a number to each eligible family. Kath was number eight in the ballot. ‘The numbers came up like a lottery, then they worked out the name and address of that number and advertised it over the radio before you even knew.’ The homeless people hoping to move into the Rogers’ Balmain home would be disappointed, for Harry’s mother was staying put. But Harry was eager to establish his family on its own. The arrangement with his mother had been sensible at the time, as Kath was pregnant with their second child. The families of the men that were away fighting went to combined houses. One of my sisters-in-law went to live with my other sister-in-law and I went to live with my mother-in-law . . . we had no men left home except my father-in-law. That’s why we had to leave our houses and go where we could get security among the women. The ones that had a young baby stayed at home and looked after the other children while the other ones went out to work. You were rationed for tea, sugar, milk, butter, all dairy products, clothes, meat, but we were lucky . . . in that we were given an extra ration for the babies so they wouldn’t get malnutrition or suffer.

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A Hard Nut to Crack Harry volunteered to fight for his country as his father had done before. All the boys in our family went in, all air force. Because he was a qualified mechanic, he went in on good pay. I couldn’t complain about the pay. While everybody else was getting five shillings a day, we were getting twelve and sixpence.

During the war, Kath was kept busy coping with her two young children. She was already a battler—her father had died when she was little, then her mother took ill and Kath was billeted with an aunt in Balmain. It was there, at St Augustine’s Catholic school, that she spotted Harry, who went to the state school across the road. Although she did well in her exams, Kath left school at thirteen, like most girls she knew. She became a dressmaking junior at David Jones department store. Her work was so good that she was secretly paid more than the others at that grade, enabling her to pay her board and fares and generally support herself at the tender age of fourteen. Two years later, she became engaged to Harry. At nineteen, Kath wed her Church of England fiance. Her sister was bridesmaid. Horrified at this ‘mixed’ marriage, the rest of her family stayed away. ....

The couple rented a one-bedroom house in Balmain, but with one child, it was already getting cramped. Then came the war. So we learned to become very strong and independent . . . I think we grew a lot in ourselves, like the pioneer women of Australia had done . . . although we were a lot more fortunate than the pioneer women because we had our regular money coming in.

Peace was the next challenge. Harry returned to a son he’d never seen and an older, worldlier wife. The innocence and intimacy of before could never be quite the same again.

Kath Rogers with her daughter Annette, c. 1950s. Her husband was dying and she had three children to support, when she was informed by the Housing Commission that the family would have to leave their Warwick Farm home. She refused point-blank. ‘They said, “But you don't have any alternative. You don't own the house.” So I said, “We'll see about that!”.’

You had your lover and your husband and your friend go away and when they came back they were a stranger. They didn’t think the same. They’d

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Shelter from the Storm seen too much. They were disillusioned. They would have liked to have gone back and changed a lot of things that you can’t. In a war there’s no winners. All of those men are somebody’s husband, somebody’s son or somebody’s brother. We were young girls in love starting off, our whole life ahead of us . . . and of course they had changed and so had you. Harry was where there was a lot of gases and things like that, so his lungs was affected . . . Before he came out, they removed one lung, and the Repatriation doctor that was checking him out said, ‘How old are you Mrs Rogers?’, and I said, ‘I’m twenty-two’. The lady doctor looked at me and she had a lot of sympathy in her eyes. ‘I’m terribly sorry for you’, she said, ‘but prepare yourself to be a widow’.

When their name came up for a house, Harry Rogers was delighted. We had to sign up and pay six weeks’ rent for something we never saw. Then they told us where we were: Warwick Farm [near Liverpool]. And I said, ‘We’re not going there!’. They were all ex-army demountables. I said, ‘No way am I going to pay that rent to go up there!’ So we came up and had a look at it, and I sat down and cried. Warwick Farm was all these old huts where the soldiers had been. I stepped out of the car and straight into a puddle, splattered all my clothes—and I was pretty fussy about my clothes. There were no gutters and all my good shoes was ruined. We were a mile from the station, there were no buses, no nothing—the whole area was owned by a couple of families and if you wasn’t one of them you were out. We weren’t on the inner, so we were on the outer. But my husband loved it! Oh, he couldn’t make out what was wrong with me. He said, ‘It’s the best house you’ll ever own’. I said, ‘Don’t be too sure of that’. There was no sewer, you had the toilet down the back, the pan, and there was no fences erected at that stage to give you any privacy—but he still loved it. He was so happy to get it, because we were all cramped in where we were and to come out on our own . . . It was like he was bringing back the family.

The rent for the house at Lot 26, 11 Bigge Street, Liverpool, was three pounds, seventeen shillings a fortnight—a lot more than the two pounds, five shillings they had paid in Balmain, but this one had three bedrooms. Kath still has the receipt for the gas connection—28 June 1947, a few days after the family moved in.

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A Hard Nut to Crack We took up a jug and a thing full of soup my mother-in-law had given me for the night we arrived. We turned the radiator upside down and made toast on that for breakfast, because the gas wasn’t connected. We had laybyed our furniture to come to the house on the day we moved in, and it did.

Both Kath and Harry had grown up in the city. It took a while to adjust to a very different community and new surroundings. My husband had always lived by the water and I had always lived by the water and coming back up here the heat got us, there was nowhere we could go, it was all bush and scrub. It was a complete different lifestyle. If you wanted anything you had to go up the road and there weren’t many shops. It was a very poor little country town. Down Balmain, being close, we could go to the markets in Sydney and buy our vegetables, it was very handy to everything. The school was here, but it seemed to be a little backward to what we’d had, the people had been here for so many years, some of them should have been retired years ago. There was definitely a stigma to it—the rest of Liverpool didn’t want to know you if you lived down there in a Housing Commission home, they looked down on you. I don’t know if it’s the same now. But we didn’t worry about that. We were thankful and once you went in the door you don’t worry about what anyone thought . . . that was their problem, not ours.

In later years, the Housing Commission launched a beautification scheme, providing trees and shrubs free to tenants and advising on their upkeep. But Harry Rogers didn’t waste any time transforming their allotment. He did a beautiful garden. We got all the extra soil, good soil. I used to help too. We had a window box, which is very easy to do . . . If we had to get any digging, any hard work done, we’d pay someone to come in and do it. Harry used to sit on a board he had with little wheels on and a hessian bag . . . and he used to sit there and just poke around. It’s very therapeutic, working with the soil, rather than sitting inside and being depressed, better to get out and do something. Then you see the plants coming up and flowers and everything. We had it looking very very nice. Actually they took a photo of our garden for the Sun newspaper.

Kath had to manage Harry’s pension carefully to meet the higher rent in their new house. Her dressmaking skills came in handy.

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Shelter from the Storm I had a sister who didn’t have any children at that stage and she was always buying material for me to make up for the kids. The other sisterin-law worked down town where they made shoes. She was always bringing up shoes, so I was very fortunate. I had a daughter and a son—then, sick and all as he was, [Harry] produced another one. A big healthy boy. He didn’t have nothing to do with the young one, because he wasn’t home much, he was in hospital all the time. He only come home for a holiday. He was That Man In The Bed that was too sick to be talked to.

In 1956, when Kath was pregnant with her third child, a Housing Commission official called. As facilities developed, Warwick Farm had become a more desirable location, on a direct train route to the city. The official informed Kath that somebody else had applied for the house. They wanted it while we were still in it! They didn’t have anything to put us out for, because we kept the place in immaculate order. They said that as I was pregnant I couldn’t clean the sump and grease trap out the back . . . So I said, ‘Well, I’ll pay someone to do it’. And they said, ‘There’s no sewer, you can’t stay here’. I said, ‘Well, there’s a place around the corner. I’ll take that one, it’s sewered.’ They said, ‘Oh you can’t do that, that’s only a two-bedroom. You have a boy and a girl, you must have a three-bedroom.’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve got a three-bedroom!’. They said, ‘No, this place is wanted by someone else because it’s a city posting’. (Most people worked in the city, there were no factories out here whatsoever.) And I had no excuse. They said, ‘You can go anywhere so long as you have a school and a post office.’ And I said, ‘No I can’t! I came up here. I wanted to stay in Sydney and I came up here and now I’m not going anywhere else. The children are at school now and I’m staying right where I am.’ So they gave me the ultimatum: buy or get moved. It was Mount Druitt where they were sending me. It was just a long hallway sort of thing, like a large garage, and the sun would have been on the front and the sun would have been on the back, and the area wasn’t what I’d call nice. I said, ‘I’m not going!’. And they said, ‘But you don’t have any alternative. You don’t own the house’. So I said, ‘We’ll see about that!’.

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A Hard Nut to Crack As the Housing Commission would say many years later when it again fell foul of her, Kath Rogers was ‘a hard nut to crack’. Pregnant, with her husband dying, two other children to rear and only his pension to live on, she resolved to do what no woman had ever done before—buy out her house from the Commission. She made an appointment with the Commonwealth Bank at Liverpool to see the manager, a Mr Taylor. Although she didn’t know it yet, she had three things in her favour. When I was in Balmain, the bank manager told me even if you only had sixpence, to make a habit of putting it in regular in the bank each week. It didn’t matter if you drew it out again. And I had this record of being able to pay so much each week. And Mr Taylor wasn’t very happy with the Housing Commission because he owned a farm at Green Valley and they resumed it off him . . . He took some particulars and asked me about my family, where I came from. And as luck had it, he’d been pretty keen on my mother in her young days! She was a redhead, a fiery little piece, very Irish. And he said, ‘Oh, your family would never ever see you go down. You’d never lose anything, with the high esteem your family have in the area.’ (They were business people.) So he put a recommendation into Sydney for it. And these men came out in a big black limousine in black coats and bowler hats, like they wear in England—it was like as if the Governor–General or the Queen was visiting, the whole street was out! There was three of those came out and one other fellow that climbed all under the house to look at everything. They never told me anything, never said anything. They looked to see how the interior was. Well at that time, I had bought all this new furniture, good furniture, and it looked nice and it suited the house. So they were quite impressed and they asked me ‘Did I owe anything on it?’, and I said, ‘No, I own it all’. The car Harry had looked after and the well-dressed, well-behaved children completed the picture. The inspectors approved the purchase.

But there was one further obstacle. That very year, 1956, the Liberal Government of Robert Menzies had renegotiated the Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement. The new policy encouraged public housing tenants to buy out the houses they rented—but Kath was not a tenant. The lease was in Harry’s name. If he died, she would have no claim on the house, even if she could raise the mortgage. It took all of

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Shelter from the Storm Kath’s considerable presence to persuade the Commission to transfer the tenancy into her name. At last they agreed. Only after I forcibly put my foot down. I said, ‘I want it in my name because he’s so sick and I don’t know how long I’m going to have him, but I want security’. And he signed the papers for that, my husband did. I don’t think they thought he was going to die as quick as he was—and I don’t think I enlightened them.

Kath took over the tenancy in August 1956. Her mortgage was approved on the 31st. On 16 October, Harry Rogers died. Less than three weeks later, 5 November 1956, Kath purchased the house they had lived in for the last eight years. She remembers every detail of the transaction. It took place in the head office of the Housing Commission in Sydney, near St Mary’s Cathedral, which had been built due to the efforts of her famous relative Cardinal Patrick Moran. Kath sat quietly in the waiting room, nursing her youngest child and reading a book. The clerk did not take this unassuming mother for a woman of substance. There was this lady next to me, all these diamonds, flash clothes, her hair done up—a whole lot of money on her. To me, that’s not substance. That’s ‘Look at me, admire me’ . . . She was only applying for her house. I was wanting to buy mine. And the boy came over and he said, ‘Mrs Rogers?’. He went straight to this lady, ignored me, gave me a drop-dead look. And she said, ‘No’, and I said, ‘Yes’. And he nearly jumped down and licked my boots then! He got a lesson in manners that morning! So I went in and the head man said, ‘Sit down . . . you’re buying this house at 11 Bigge St, Liverpool?’. And he said, ‘Well you have no problem about the finances’. So I signed for the house and the deeds came to me. And he said, ‘It’s not our policy to sell to women. Do you know you’re the first woman in New South Wales we’ve signed up?’ And I said, ‘I hope I won’t be the last!’.

Back at home Kath still had to figure out how to make the repayments, which would not be covered by her widow’s pension. Work for women was almost non-existent around Liverpool and she also had three kids to mind. But her luck held. The high school where her daughter had just started needed a part-time cleaner, one hour in the morning and two in the afternoon.

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A Hard Nut to Crack They asked me to start the same day and I said, ‘I can’t start before tomorrow!’. It was only a temporary arrangement, I was only going to do it for a while. I stayed there for 32 years and loved it! I’m not afraid of hard work.

Kath’s family rallied to help with the mortgage, their shared antipathy towards banks overcoming any earlier resentments about her marrying ‘out’. As the bank manager had noted, her forebears had done well. Some had been hanged for their role in the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, but those who got to Australia had shown a shrewd head for property, buying and selling, and lending money on their assets. All of the family owned houses. None of them owned less than two. One great-grandfather owned 26 houses and a hotel. They were very well known in the Randwick and Waverley areas, very prominent citizens there. They believed in helping their family and in teaching their family the value of not expecting everything. Very much family-orientated, we still are, all of us. And we are of the opinion that it’s no good leaving money sitting in a bank if you can help somebody with it. But don’t throw it away! You worked for what you get and if you were doing good and you just want a little bit extra, we’ll help you—but we won’t carry you. They all pooled their money, gave me what they had. And the mortgage was discharged on 12 June 1957, making a total of eight months. So there was only eight months that [the bank] needed to lend me that money for, and I was put through all those hassles. [The family] didn’t charge any interest . . . They didn’t feel a debt, but I did. They would never have taken it off me, and the world didn’t know I was still paying—but I did.

Bit by bit, Kath repaid every penny. Although her home was fairly financially secure, she still faced the difficulty of rearing three children on her own. When my husband died, I sat the children down and I said, ‘There’s just the four of us. Whatever we’ve got, troubles of a night, we talk it over here and we don’t go to bed with crankiness or animosity towards anyone. We sort it out at the table here and everyone can have their say. If we’ve only got a slice of bread, we’ll cut it in four and we’ll all have a quarter. Because this is how we are: a family.’ If you went out anywhere, it was always the mothers that took them. Very seldom did any of the fathers go, they didn’t have much time to

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Shelter from the Storm spend with their children, so you didn’t have any trouble there. So the kids sort of piled up and got to know each other and we had a lot of kids around our way the same age. They had their bikes and they went swimming and on the weekends we’d go out. Of a night, if I was that tired I’d want to flake out and go to bed, because work was hard, I’d drag myself up to the pictures. The whole four of us would go and the whole four of us would come back together. Yeah, I thought it was unfair, but then that was my lot and my destiny, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I had to make the most of what I had. I just can’t sit down and feel sorry for myself—I’ve got to get to and work out a solution. I had never been a quitter, so I wasn’t going to start then. I had to be strong for the kids, they make you strong, because they’re depending on you. And you even have to overstretch yourself and go that little bit further, find this inner strength that you didn’t know you had.

As her children grew up and went out into the world, Kath continued her cleaning. Her daughter became a secretary. Her elder son, who had his father’s mechanical mind, became a toolmaker. Her youngest, Ed, trained as a nurse and also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. ‘We’ve always had education in our family and everybody’s thought education’s more valuable than saving money. We economise a lot, but only on the things you can economise on. False economy’s no good.’ The family remains all-important to Kath. When her youngest son’s house was burgled and stripped of its possessions, Kath invited him and his family to move in with her till they got sorted out. With three adults, two children, and one and a half sets of furniture, the house got very crowded. But Kath had something up her sleeve—a block of land at nearby Cabramatta. [At Bigge Street], it was Ed and his wife in one room, me in the other, and then they’ve got a boy and a girl, so the house got too cramped . . . so we decided to build a bigger house. So we came up here. This was my father-in-law’s. He gave it to my husband. When my husband died, it came to me . . . and we built this, with five bedrooms. I didn’t have any trouble with the bank getting money for this!

With her Bigge Street house rented, Kath began paying off the new home at Cabramatta. She was over 60 when she finally retired. Kath used some of her super from her 32 years of work, to pay off the mortgage and put the rest towards a long overdue holiday—a world trip, in fact. With

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A Hard Nut to Crack her daughter, she explored family connections in Ireland and England. With her usual thoroughness, she has researched the family tree and mounted the results in a special album. Now 75, Kath is kept busy ferrying her two teenage grandchildren to and from school activities, while their father studies for his second degree, a Bachelor of Education. She believes her grandchildren are unlikely to need public housing. Kath Rogers today. In 1956, she became the first woman in New South Wales to buy out her home from the Housing Commission, cleaning schools for 32 years to pay it off. '[The manager] said, "It's not our policy to sell to women. Do you know you're the first woman we've signed up?" And I said, "I hope I won't be the last!".' (Rhys Roberts)

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Shelter from the Storm When they finish their studying, if they’re lucky enough to have a position with enough money, I don’t think they’d expect someone else to put the roof over their head. They’re independent enough, and I hope resourceful enough, to get their own property. And if God’s willing and we’ve still got a few thousand with us, we’ll all pool together and get them their house, because we don’t believe in being tied up to banks for anything if it’s possible . . . the less you have to do with them the better.

....

So where did Kath Rogers get her drive, her determination not to succumb to the difficulties life has thrown her way? She attributes part of her fighting spirit to her Irish genes. I’m just plain stubborn! I don’t know what failure is. I don’t think you can just sit down and let yourself go to seed. For the benefit of everybody, you can’t be selfish and expect everything your way, but while you’ve got breath, I don’t think you can let someone sit on you either. You’ve got to do what you feel is right. But had I not had my husband at the war and had to learn how to be stronger that time, I don’t know whether I would have been able to be as strong at the end. It’s amazing how you can turn adversity round to benefit you.

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13 High Hopes in a High-rise Jennie George

Jennie George was fourteen when her family got their first real home—a two-bedroom flat in a high-rise block in Sydney’s Surry Hills. ‘It was very exciting’, she recalls. ‘The first roof over our head that was ours.’ Jennie’s parents had fled Russia after the war and ended up in Italy, where Jennie Sinicky was born. She was three when they came to Australia in 1950, among the 170 000 or so displaced people (DP) who landed here at that time. To gain entry, all DPs had to agree to do whatever work they were allocated for two years. It was usually unskilled labour: canecutting or construction work for the men, domestic service for the women. Jennie’s father was despatched to one place as a cook, her mother, Natasha, to another as a nurse’s aide. Jennie saw little of her father, who was to die at only 39. When a job came up as kitchen hand at Burwood Migrant Hostel, Natasha was able to move her daughter and her mother in to live with her. They stayed there for the next ten years. Although most people saw the hostel as a transitory base, Jennie felt quite at home there. ‘If you know nothing else, you don’t know what the alternatives are. That was my only experience of living.’ But what seemed normal to Jennie appeared otherwise to her classmates. Burwood was a fairly affluent middle-class suburb, so the kids who came from the migrant hostel were seen to be inferior . . . There was

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Shelter from the Storm Jennie George was at high school before her family, refugees from Russia, got its first real home—a flat in a Housing Commission high-rise in inner Sydney. Her mother worked as a kitchen-hand, but encour-

always a sense you were a little bit different, not part of the mainstream. But that was fine . . .

Natasha applied to the Housing Commission when Jennie was in high school. ‘I think she decided the time had come for her to establish her own personal base.’ In the early 1960s, the family moved into the John Northcott Building in Belvoir Street, in the inner city suburb of Surry Hills.

aged Jennie to set her

I was very happy there. It was a working-class suburb, there were the local

sights high. 'I had lots of

drinking-holes, the SP bookmakers . . . and we weren’t far from the ice-

love in my family and a

skating rink down at Prince Alfred Park. It was a nice place to live.

healthy sense of self-value and self-worth, despite the objective circumstances, which were pretty poor.’

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Being used to living with lots of people at the hostel, Jennie felt comfortable in the densely populated high-rise block. ‘It was good, because there was a lot of young people my age . . . I think probably moving into a house might not have been as enjoyable . . . That sense of communality was very important.’ Natasha got another job as a kitchen hand nearby and Jennie stayed on at Burwood Girls High, making the trip by train. She was the only one in her circle of friends at Northcott to do the Leaving Certificate. At school, too, she stood out. ‘All my mates were from middle- and upper middle-class backgrounds. I would sometimes go round and have what they called “afternoon tea”—tea and scones—which I had never experienced. So I was a bit of a rarity.’ When she left school with first class honours in history and a teacher’s scholarship, Jennie Sinicky was rarer still: a working-class girl from the Housing Commission was not a common sight at Sydney University in the 1960s. ‘I don’t think I ever met anyone else that lived in public housing while I was there!’, she laughs. Sometimes she felt a bit self-conscious.

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High Hopes in a High-rise It would be little things, like not being able to invite people home because you’d be embarrassed about the situation you were living in— don’t forget I was sharing a bedroom with my grandmother! Silly things, like how you look in your clothes. I can remember saying to Mum, ‘I’ve had this brown corduroy coat for the last four years—why can’t you do something about it!’.

With three generations of women living on top of each other, tensions would occasionally erupt—as when Jennie’s grandmother ripped her treasured Beatles posters off the bedroom wall. But in general, the family was very close—a factor Jennie believes helped her enormously to succeed at university and in later life, despite her disadvantaged early background. I had lots of love in my family and a healthy sense of self-value and selfworth, despite the objective circumstances, which were pretty poor. But I think you just make the best of life in whatever situation. I had a pretty strong sense of identity about who I was and where I came from . . . So I never had a sense, other than the perception of other people towards public housing tenants, that we were second best.

Besides providing emotional security, Jennie’s mother encouraged her daughter to see education as the key to a better future. Although she worked all her life in menial jobs, Natasha had once had far loftier ambitions. She’s a very bright, intelligent woman. She wanted to be a geologist. She had started university, but the war broke out. And when she got to Australia, she had no language, no academic skills . . . it’s just a tragedy that the war prevented her from succeeding in an outward sense in life. So she always stressed the value and importance of education as a means of breaking out of the cycle.

Jennie did her mother proud, becoming first a teacher and then an increasingly prominent union figure, culminating in her election in 1995 as the first female president of the ACTU. It was an extraordinary achievement for any woman, let alone one who, as the daughter of a single mother, and a Russian one at that, had been disparaged as a ‘reffo’ and a ‘bastard’, as well as the butt of the usual ‘houso’ put-down. As she observed after her appointment: ‘Growing up in the high-rise Housing Commission flats in Surry Hills in Sydney, I never dreamed I would be a union officer, let alone reach the pinnacle.’7

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Shelter from the Storm

Although she was disparaged as a ‘reffo’ and 'houso' and grew up in a single-parent family, Jennie George has always been a high achiever. ‘I guess I had grown up in a situation believing that there wasn't much that was just in the world . . . [but] you weren't going to let that adversity determine who you were as a person . . . not blaming the circumstances, or in any way thinking that because you grew up in a Housing Commission flat, you were less worthy as a human being than others.’

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Her left-wing politics developed at university, where she joined the Eureka Youth League, which was affiliated with the Communist Party. There, to the consternation of her mother, she took up with a passionate young communist, Paddy George. ‘My parents, like most post-war migrants, were quite anti-communist, having grown up in the Stalin era’, Jennie recalls. ‘I think it was more shock than antagonism. I mean Paddy was a very admirable human being.’ Her mother came round, and at the age of twenty, Jennie married Paddy. Contrary and strong-willed, Jennie was undaunted by being labelled a spy by elements in the Russian community, although she regretted the fact that her parents also copped the hostility. In 1980, just after Jennie won her first significant union post, as Secretary of the NSW Teachers’ Federation, Paddy George died of liver cancer. He was 39. Jennie was 32. She was devastated by his loss. For a time she withdrew from politics, but eventually she took up the cudgels once more. From 1985, when she became the first woman president of the Australian Teachers’ Federation, she has set precedent after precedent in what had traditionally been a male and often macho preserve. Although she’s a skilful tactician, and as canny as any politician, power has not given her pretentions. If she’s running late for an interview, she will call ahead and apologise rather than have someone waste fifteen minutes waiting for her. Such thoughtfulness is one of her many endearing qualities: men and women alike respond to her gutsiness, her integrity, her humanity and her humour. The leader of the timber industries union has said that the hairs on his members’ arms stand up when George addresses them. ‘As long as that’s all that stands up’, Jennie laughed.8 Jennie George’s unique range of skills, strong convictions and wide popular appeal seem directly linked to her experiences growing up. At both the migrant hostel and at Northcott, she had to learn how to get on with a broad mix of people, of all ages and cultures. At school and university, she had to battle the stigma of being seen as different,

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High Hopes in a High-rise presumed inferior. At home, she learned to take responsibility for her actions and to set her sights high. And although her politics may have taken formal shape at college, her sympathy for the underdog emerged directly from her own disadvantaged background. I guess I had grown up in a situation believing that there wasn’t much that was just in the world, and the world was based on some people having the means to get ahead, and others, like my family, not. But it was always an individual thing that you weren’t going to let that adversity determine who you were as a person . . . It was trying to understand why you were in that situation, what you could do about it individually, but not blaming the circumstances, or in any way thinking that because you grew up in a Housing Commission flat, you were less worthy as a human being than others.

Indeed, upon her election as president of the ACTU, Jennie George pledged to recruit more young people, women and migrants—the groups whose difficulties she knew so well from her own experience. After visiting a clothing factory in Marrickville in Sydney where the machinists earned $380 a week before tax for their mindless, repetitive work, but were denied training opportunities because it would mean more pay, she fulminated against such oppression. ‘When I hear employer organisations and politicians trying to argue against even an $8-a-week safety-net wage increase . . . I mean how unjust, how unfair. It fires me up. It doesn’t make me despair—it makes me want to rip into them.’9 Although she has come a long way from her Northcott days, and now spends as much time in high-powered meetings as mingling with workers on the shop floor, Jennie George has not lost touch with her working-class origins. Her mother, Natasha, is still in public housing, and Jennie keeps in close contact with her. For the last 24 years, Natasha had lived on the sixteenth floor of a block at Waterloo, in south Sydney, where she enjoyed the strong sense of community. But then the environment deteriorated. She has always been very happy, except in the last few years. She actually says, ‘This is not the place that it was when I came here’ . . . I mean there are stories of a couple of Mum’s friends that were knocked over in the street. I thought, ‘Why would anyone in public housing actually vent their anger and frustration on some poor pensioner in an adjoining block??’. There is no doubt that there was drug-dealing going on . . . They had

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Shelter from the Storm to put in a new security system, and fire alarms, so she found it very difficult for friends to come and visit, and then taxis wouldn’t call at the block at night and she wouldn’t walk around at night . . . it became almost like a gaol for her . . . And how soul-less the place had become! The people were so scared, just kind of cooped up in there in their little units not venturing forth, which is a real shame. Not long ago, Mum was recounting, there was a fire in the lift on the sixteenth floor and she went out and not one other person came out into the corridor . . . People live behind their closed doors.

At the age of 73, after much soul-searching, Natasha decided to move. She managed to secure a place in a smaller block in Kings Cross, where she has a close friend, and to Jennie’s relief, she has settled in well. The atmosphere reminds Jennie of the old days at Northcott. Like, I was with Mum yesterday and her neighbour Iris was saying, ‘Well Natasha, if you get the flu or you need some shopping done you just knock on my door’. So there’s that real sense of extended family . . . there’s lots of things they do communally, which makes her really happy . . . that’s what I think was there in the early days at Waterloo.

Despite Natasha’s recent unpleasant experiences, she remains a staunch supporter of public housing. ‘She has never seen it as any stigma to live in public housing’, says Jennie. I mean, if you saw her unit at the Cross, money couldn’t afford to buy the view she’s got as a pensioner! . . . I think she really likes the sense of being with people, maybe because that’s the way we’ve always lived . . . but she is very lucky because she has moved into a block that is specifically targeted for old people . . . instead of thirteen on the floor and you don’t see a soul, she has three women her age on the same floor and they all look after each other and she doesn’t feel insecure or threatened . . . The majority are women, they tend to live longer, and I think it’s a far preferable solution to them living on their own in private housing . . . I’d certainly prefer that choice in older age.

Although she has had no personal need for it for many years now, Jennie too is a strong believer in social housing. It’s not her official area of expertise, but she has been observing it closely now for many years. I think what I would do if I was a policy-maker is ensure that public housing was scattered through different suburbs. I don’t like this idea that

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High Hopes in a High-rise Waterloo is the hub, or Mount Druitt . . . because you then exacerbate and accentuate the problems on a locality basis. I don’t recall, growing up, that there was any sense of being a ghetto . . . I think before there was a greater spread of tenants. It wasn’t just the most dispossessed that lived in public housing, whereas I think it’s becoming that now . . . it has changed as the objective social circumstances have pushed more people into poverty. You now tend to get an aggregation of people . . . most affected by the economic situation, by unemployment, by poverty: single parents, Aboriginal people . . . I think the aged, for example, are entitled to live in secure public housing without having to interface with young people whose lifestyle and interests and possible drug habits intrude on the kind of life they want to lead . . . in an ideal world, you wouldn’t be exposing older people to the attendant problems that go on in a building that’s known as the local drug centre. I don’t know what the solution is . . . If you keep giving priority to those who are most disadvantaged, what you do is build up a community of very alienated human beings. Maybe there has got to be a mix of those who are in desperate circumstances together with those who aren’t . . .

In 1997, Jennie George was voted a National Treasure, one of a hundred living Australians judged by the public to have made an outstanding contribution to society. Practical as ever, she believes that a large part of her success was due to the fact that though they might have had little else, at least she and her mother could always count on having a roof over their heads at a reasonable cost. Without the option of public housing, I think my life chances would have been far worse, because the cost of renting privately would have been prohibitive and any option of my going along to tertiary studies would have been just outside my capacity. I still identify with people living in those circumstances. I find lots of people that you meet in public housing are very honourable and good people, whose life chances have been such that sometimes they haven’t had the window open to break out of the cycle.

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14 Family Matters Tom Slockee

After I finished my time in the army, I went back to live at Batemans Bay . . . but lo and behold, when I went to the real estate agents around that town, I couldn’t get a house, even though I knew there were houses available . . . to get a house we actually used some whitefella. I started to realise then that we needed to look after our own affairs to get housing . . .

On 24 July 1998, some fifteen years after having to resort to using a white friend in order to be rented a house, Tom Slockee became Chairman of the newly gazetted Aboriginal Housing Office, set up by the New South Wales Government to develop and administer housing programs appropriate to Aboriginal people across the state. A quietly spoken man who has retained a dapper appearance from his army years, Tom Slockee is no less passionate now about providing decent housing for his people than he was as a young father back in Batemans Bay. By the time he left the town, there were 40 houses available to indigenous people, funded first through the Aboriginal Development Commission and later ATSIC, and managed by the community housing organisation Tom had founded. I am glad I done that now, looking back on it. If we hadn’t formed that and hadn’t advocated strongly for our housing needs through the different funding agencies, then a lot of our people would have been still suffering

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Family Matters a lot of hardship with trying to get their housing needs met. Because in the private rental market our people do face a lot of discrimination. When they do get housing it’s not really appropriate up to standard type housing. Sure enough, some of our families do make a lot of noise and have a lot of visitors, but people just get the wrong ideas about Aboriginal people and therefore they create perceptions and create ideas of what Aboriginal people are like living in the community.

....

The Aboriginal Housing Office has the tricky job of having to relate in a whitefella way to mainstream bodies while not alienating its Aboriginal constituency. It wasn’t an easy job . . . you are looking after low-income families, many social problems. I don’t want to generalise but many people don’t pay their rents because sometimes they’ve got this idea that they’re owed from the government for the land that was taken from them, and they don’t have an appreciation that you have to contribute so you can look after your houses, so I had to educate people about why we needed to pay rents and then manage the collection of rents, and using the collection to manage the company and pay the outgoings. I remember doing eviction orders against people who didn’t do the right thing, and they blamed me for it . . . you know, you’ve got your uncles and your aunties and sometimes your sisters and brothers who you need to educate and keep on their backs about things and sometimes they think you are intervening too closely into their private affairs. So it’s always a hard job to maintain that balance. I think I succeeded because I got people to think about not here and now, but what do we do for our children and our children’s children.

Although community housing is supposed to involve tenants in decision making, Tom discovered that giving everyone an equal say was easier said than done. Some people tended to dominate, others to avoid playing any role at all. Tom went out of his way to get everyone involved. Housing, because it’s the only asset that we can make decisions on, and because there is such a shortage of it and such a big need for housing, there is always conflict about people missing out, and that causes a lot of tension in the community. So I think it’s about trying to be as transparent as possible and making sure that information is spread across the community.

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Shelter from the Storm Tom Slockee today, Chairman of the NSW Aboriginal Housing Office. ‘A house is four walls and a roof, it's shelter and sometimes it's security. But I think with Aboriginal people . . . they might live in the middle of Sydney on the tenth floor, but they belong to a clan group and that group knows where their roots are and they always relate to that place. They might be living in a different world physically, but I think spiritually they know where they belong . . . So it doesn't matter where you live, really.’ (Mayu Kanamori)

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Sometimes people rely on community meetings, and that’s not always the best way. Family blocks seem to create themselves to look after their own affairs, which is traditional and cultural, but if you have got a dominant family group in charge, in control, then the other family groups don’t usually come to the meetings anyway. We have to create new models about how we make decisions about housing . . . we have been sucked into a white sort of culture too much. I found the best way, which is time-consuming but it’s the best way, is actually sitting down with people, going to where they are at, going to the parks, going to their places, taking the opportunity at any social gatherings like football matches or parties or birthday parties to talk about community things . . . But you need to do the written stuff too and provide people with written information.

Besides training and supporting Aboriginal housing organisations, the new Aboriginal Housing Office will liaise with non-Aboriginal bodies like the Department of Housing to ensure that the Department caters for the needs of the estimated 4000 Aboriginal people it houses. This might mean

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Family Matters simply improving communication between counter staff and tenants, or taking fundamental cultural differences into account, such as the Aboriginal tradition of living in extended families. Tom Slockee points out that the AHO’s push to have such issues taken into consideration will also benefit other groups. [Such issues] are especially important for us because that’s our lifestyle, but other cultural groups, even older Australians, still need that space and that ability to look after, when part of their families need help. I think that we’ve articulated our case fairly well to the governments and that— that they ought to reconfigure their housing stock to meet the needs of people and not just look at the asset itself. So moving away from bedsitters and one bedrooms to two bedrooms, I think we have been instrumental in changing those attitudes and changing the practice in public housing to move away from that type of accommodation to accommodation that caters for people and family. With mainstream public housing, even though there is a lot of our people in the Department of Housing, a lot of [Aboriginals] find it hard to communicate with non-Aboriginal people in the system, because nonAboriginals in the system don’t understand, and will always find it hard to understand, how Aboriginal people think and relate with one another and how they settle their differences . . . Sometimes their relationship is very good, but I think in a high percentage of cases a lot of Aboriginal people find it very hard to get their point across and . . . [they take] whatever the system serves up to them and never try to question or challenge the system. And they end up in really substandard housing and the proof is in the pudding now with the HFA houses, Houses For Aboriginals, where the Department of Housing has, over the years, really neglected the standard of those housing. There is a lot of maintenance and upgrading that needs to happen.

The historical subjugation of Aborigines has strong repercussions today. The ‘stolen children’ are the most brutal symbol of Aboriginal loss of identity and self-esteem, but the communities herded together on government-run reserves also suffer from their enforced dependency. Over time it’s become such a system that they still have that welfaredependency attitude, and therefore they have always got their hand out for help when all the systems are trying to say you are supposed to try to help yourself, right . . . We have moved now, I believe, into a system of,

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Shelter from the Storm not whitefellas educating us, but us educating ourselves and talking amongst ourselves about how we actually get the best housing and the best communities. It’s about changing your thinking, changing your mindset. Also realising that the empowerment can come from within ourselves and not always government needs to devise a program to find a solution for all this. I think them people in them situations in reserves fight very hard for resources. But the leaders in the communities are still going through a phase of learning and acquiring skills to do the best for their own people. I think over time that we will eventually make it, and those reserves will eventually be very well managed, but it might take another few decades before that happens.

Tom Slockee’s high-tech office in a corporate block in Parramatta is a long way from the humpy at Tweed Heads where he was born. In those days, finding accommodation seemed a lot simpler. I can remember a lot of our people up there at Tweed, they just used to build houses in the middle of the bush and they would build them out of corrugated iron and old bits of timber and stuff like that, and these places were the cleanest places you could ever imagine. They had dirt floors and the dirt floor was so clean. We lived in a house that was made out of props cut out of the bush and hessian bags and old bits of steel and that. Actually it was under a big Moreton Bay fig, and I can remember then my dad was a fisherman and we moved up to little place called Tin Can Bay. We must have rented an old place up there, an old wooden house, and it was a little bit different living up there right on the coast, away from a lot of people in an old house, and eventually we moved back to Tweed Heads and we lived with a few old aunties and uncles and that. I remember me dad moving in next door to these other Aboriginal people in an old fibro shack, and I remember all the Aboriginal men getting together and they actually built a house for us. I don’t think they had council approval but they might have, I don’t know, because they done a pretty good job on it. They were pretty skilled, them old fellas, with their hands. It’s just the same today. A lot of our people are pretty skilled with their hands, but don’t get a lot of opportunity for work. And they actually built that place for us and that’s the place that I lived in until I left there at seventeen and joined the army.

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Family Matters Eventually my brother took it over, that block of land that we owned, he got a loan from the ADC [Aboriginal Development Corporation] so he mortgaged his life away and now owns it. So just reflecting on my own sense of home, you know, I’ve been through different styles of home and living with families and been looked after by other families. But I come from a community where people help one another out in them sort of ways. It was good.

It’s a long way from the dream of middle white Australia to own the classic threebedroom home with picket fence on a quarter-acre block. So how important is home ownership to Aboriginal people today? This is a real good question, because it draws in the sense of ownership versus belonging, right? And it’s hard to belong to a community or a place when you are scattered throughout the community in all different blocks. It might be a bit different on a reserve where you belong to that reserve and you are distinct, away from community, but most of our people live in urban settings these days, in rural towns, so it’s hard to get people to understand that, say, if they own 40 houses, 40 blocks of land with houses on in a town, that they own it collectively, right? And therefore they should look after it collectively. In recent years, it’s almost a philosophy of ‘me first’, and I think a lot of our people have sort of drawn into that and they measure success in the sense that they own a house or a car, individually. But in another sense, owning it as a community and understanding that it’s yours and no-one else can take it away from you is a cultural concept. But the home ownership rates are fairly low for Aboriginal people, and I think in reality people want the sense of economic security in this day and age and I think we need to do more about allowing people to own their homes. I think that’s what we have heard in our consultations anyway, in the last couple of years, that people want more ability to own their own property. In whitefella’s terms it has a value. So if all our thinking is around what something’s worth, maybe we have to start thinking in them terms,

Tom Slockee (left) and his twin brother, Victor. 'I can remember a lot of our people up there at Tweed [Heads], they just used to build houses in the middle of the bush out of corrugated iron and old bits of timber and stuff like that, and these places were the cleanest places you could ever imagine. They had dirt floors and the dirt floor was so clean . . . I remember all the Aboriginal men getting together and they actually built a house for us. I don't think they had council approval but they might have . . . and that's the place that I lived in until I left there at seventeen and joined the army.'

we have an asset that we have to look after for our future generations.

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Shelter from the Storm But while they may be showing signs of economic pragmatism, Tom believes that for Aboriginal people, home will always be much, much more than mere real estate. A house is four walls and a roof, it’s shelter and sometimes it’s security. But I think with Aboriginal people, they always have this sense of belonging. Now they might live in the middle of Sydney on the tenth floor, but they belong to a clan group and that group knows where their roots are and they always relate to that place. They might be living in a different world physically, but I think spiritually they know where they belong, and I think most Aboriginal people in the city find their way back there at various points in their life and they find their country. I don’t think they think of where they live as relating to the religious belief system about where their spirituality is. So it doesn’t matter where you live, really.

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15 Kidney and Car Wanted Sharon Petrie

When Sharon Petrie was born with spina bifida, her mother was told she could never live a normal life and would probably die in childhood. That was 34 years ago. Sharon grew up in Wentworthville in Sydney’s west with her brother and sister. She had to have operation after operation for her disability, but when she wasn’t in hospital, she slipped back easily into family life. Her parents divorced and the children moved to Dubbo for a while after her mother remarried, but the family eventually returned to Sydney. Although Sharon’s parents owned their own home, her mother was keenly aware that Sharon might not have that option. As soon as she turned eighteen, her mother urged Sharon to apply for public housing. Basically she said that if I ever ended up on my own, or I couldn’t work, I’d never be able to afford to buy my own home. It took something like five or six years back then to get a Housing Commission place. So she said, ‘Put it down now and then when it comes up, if you need it, it’s there for you, and if you don’t, you give it to someone else that does need it.’

At eighteen, Sharon wasn’t too concerned wih security. She’d had a steady boyfriend since she was sixteen and was by now well used to the disability that had left her with one leg shorter than the other. Apart from the continuing operations, life wasn’t bad. She and her boyfriend got

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Shelter from the Storm married and moved into a house at Willmot. Then, out of the blue, Sharon started getting panic attacks. It’s when you don’t like being on your own, you can’t cope—you’ve got to have someone with you 24 hours a day. It just started one day and it escalated from there, got to the point where I couldn’t go to the letterbox without someone watching me. I couldn’t have a shower without all the doors being opened and my husband being there. He couldn’t even go next door without me having a panic attack. I couldn’t go on any trains or buses or shopping on my own, and when I did go with him, if he’d go to one shop while I went to another, I’d have to go and lock myself in our car until I felt safe. And the lady I lived next door to, she went through it for fifteen years, and she told me I needed to see a counsellor and I did. I worked out where it come from and why I was doing it. It never really goes away. You just learn to cope with the situations.

Although she learned to handle the panic attacks, Sharon could not repress the anxiety that had brought them on. The couple moved into a two-bedroom unit, where Sharon minded her three-year-old nephew. But Sharon believes that her anxiety merely resurfaced, with different symptoms. For the next three years, she battled obsessive-compulsive disorder. I would get up at six o’clock in the morning when my husband left for work and start cleaning this little unit, and I would still be cleaning at 7 p.m. at night. I did it every single day—walls, floors, windows, everything—and I would start and finish in the same place. My mum used to have to ring me for two hours every day and I would have to sit and talk to her so I wouldn’t be doing housework. I honestly don’t know what I found to do because every single day was the same thing.

The pattern was finally broken when Sharon became pregnant. She lost all her energy and was unable to carry out her compulsive urges. But this was no ordinary tiredness. She was suffering from kidney failure. Two days after she turned 24, Sharon gave birth to a healthy baby daughter, Amber. Soon after, she started on dialysis. Even the most strapping young mothers with ample material comforts and strong family support can find life with a new baby extraordinarily demanding. Now with a double physical disability, and barely recovered from the phobias that had plagued her, Sharon found herself a virtual

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Kidney and Car Wanted prisoner in her third-floor unit. Grateful for her mother’s foresight, she took herself off to the Department of Housing to press her case. But despite her adverse circumstances and her six years on the waiting list, things did not look good. They weren’t very helpful at that stage. They sort of said, ‘Well, you’ll just have to wait your turn’. Although there was only about a six-month wait, I was literally housebound up three flights with the baby, and if anything had gone wrong, I couldn’t get downstairs or anything. So then I had to go to my Member of Parliament and get something done that way. I ended up being put into another block of units that was Department of Housing, and that wasn’t good because I was up another flight. I complained about that and I got a house at Dundas. My daughter was about six months old when it came up.

On closer acquaintance, Sharon found the Dundas house in north west Sydney was ‘falling apart’. Finding it hard to get it fixed up, she decided to try to swap with another public housing tenant, a move permitted by the Department of Housing. I advertised in the paper and the person rang me and I went and looked at her place and she looked at mine, and if we both approved of the places and liked the areas, then we’d go and see our respective Department of Housing services officers about the paperwork. The only thing the Department do is check your house isn’t damaged or that you’re not in arrears with rent. Then they approve the swap and you take it from there. Myself and this girl I swapped with organised the move and all that sort of stuff.

Their new home was at Bonnyrigg, still in Sydney’s west. It was there, when Amber was four, that Sharon and her husband split up. Needing help with her dialysis, Sharon swapped yet again, this time south west to Minto, to be close to her sister. For the past eight years, she’s spent three days a week, seven hours a day, hooked up to the dialysis machine. At first she’d pass the hours watching television or reading a book, but then she decided to put the time to more productive use. I’ve been doing a lot of different courses and stuff through correspondence . . . I did a diploma in psychology and a diploma in child psychology and medical terminology. My aim at the beginning was to do these courses and hopefully by the time I’d finished, have a kidney, and be able to work five days a week at the Children’s Hospital.

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Shelter from the Storm Sixty-two operations, kidney failure and a divorce have not dented Sharon Petrie’s enthusiasm for life. (Rhys Roberts)

Sharon is still waiting for the kidney transplant that will liberate her from the dialysis machine, but in the meantime, she lives life to the full. Her daughter, Amber, is a talented dancer and Sharon is her biggest fan. Besides child-minding and housekeeping, she does voluntary work two days a week at the Western Sydney Regional Public Tenants’ Council, where her newly acquired psychology skills help her to understand people’s problems. Sharon came across the Council, and Jean Cinis, the tenants’ tireless advocate,10 when she needed help herself. She and Amber had been rehoused in Toongabbie, where they were happy at first.

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Kidney and Car Wanted It was a rather big and old house, and we were quite comfortable. The people next door moved and the Department of Housing moved in a man and his mother, and apparently the mother was a medicated paranoid schizophrenic, and the son was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, and he didn’t believe he had a problem. Originally when I met him, he came over to ask when the bins went out—and he then went back and told his ex-wife, who had come to visit, that I tried to poison him and he had to go to the hospital . . . He constantly became a nuisance, and then one day, his ex-wife came over and warned me to lock my daughter up and make sure she wasn’t left alone in the backyard when he was outside, because he’d been known to harm children and was rather violent, and the mother was rather violent too.

Sharon’s daughter, Amber, was already in a nervous state, after a man had tried to abduct her as she walked home alone from school. On the days when Sharon has fluid in her lungs from the dialysis, she can’t breathe properly and accompanying Amber on the 1 kilometre walk to school was out of the question. She would watch from the gate as the girl set off on the long straight road, but was powerless to intervene should something happen—as it almost did. He just stopped and grabbed her and said, ‘I’m going to take you!’, and she got away and come home. But after that, I had a lot of problems trying to get her to school because she wouldn’t walk on her own and I couldn’t take her . . . But I make her do it, because I know what I went through with my phobias, and I think if you encourage it, it makes the phobia worse.

What with the abduction attempt and fear of the strange man next door, Amber got to the stage where, in an ironic echo of her mother’s earlier condition, she would not go down to the letterbox alone. It was at this point that Sharon approached the Department of Housing for a transfer. I spoke to my tenancy manager—and he basically told me that I was neurotic. He told me that I was neurotic and that maybe the ex-wife had a problem with me, that I was sort of having it on with the husband or something. And I just explained to him that I’d done studies with psychology and that, no, I wasn’t having it on with this woman’s husband, and yes, he had a problem, and if he bothered to look it up on the computer I would have no doubts that this was the reason this man was moved from the previous address he had.

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Shelter from the Storm I then spoke to Jean, who was quite angry about the way I’d been treated. She got on to the people and it basically went from there.

Sharon was in hospital again when the Department’s first offer came up. Jean Cinis rejected it as unsuitable for someone with Sharon’s disability. The Department’s next suggestion, a new two-bedroom villa in nearby Pendle Hill, looked good, but still needed modification. The backyard sloped down and it was all very messy and the ground was uneven. The occupational therapist came out and said it would all have to be cemented or paved, even an able-bodied person would hurt themselves—and my daughter did. She fell and broke her ankle. But they’ve fixed all that up now.

Within about three weeks of her complaint, Sharon and Amber moved into their brand new villa. Amber is thriving: the school is an easy walk away, she’s got a friend the same age in the small block of nine units, and she’s still close to her dad, whom she adores. Sharon has also adjusted well. There are several single mothers in her new block, along with elderly women on their own. One recent weekend, Sharon and two other tenants were broken into. The thieves stole, of all things, her pot plants, leading Sharon to believe they were just children. Break-ins ‘happen quite a bit’ in the area. Does she ever worry that with no men around, the women might appear vulnerable? ‘Not at all’, she laughs. I don’t think we need them! I’ve been on my own for nearly six years. Prior to that, I thought, ‘How am I ever going to live without a man around?’. And now, I think, ‘Well, I don’t need one’ . . . There’s nine women here. We all get on together and sort of stick by each other and help each other when we need it. There’s one particular lady, her and I are about the same age and we get on really well. I mind her daughter and she minds mine and while I’m on the machine if there’s a problem, she’ll come down and help or make lunch for me . . . I can go to any of the neighbours here, they’re all very good. There are a couple that sort of have a bicker and a whinge about each other, but I just leave that to them. I don’t worry about their problems, I just get on with mine and talk to everybody.

Sharon pays $45 a week out of her pension for her pleasant home, the fifth public housing property she’s lived in. After ten years of dealing with the Department of Housing, she has a lot to say about them.

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Kidney and Car Wanted The good things are that they exist, because I think a lot of people like myself would either be in private housing and struggling so much, or on the streets. I’ve lived in some real dumps with Department of Housing and I’ve lived in some really nice places, and basically it’s yours to do what you like with providing you don’t destroy it. I think some of the bad things is, a lot of the people who work in there aren’t, I believe, educated in how to communicate with the public and with people that do have special problems, whether it be social problems or physical. I think they need to be more educated on specific things, like domestic violence . . . you have people like women who have been physically abused and emotionally abused and they don’t have any idea how to communicate or be sympathetic or to stop and think, ‘Well, if this happened to me, how would I feel?’. It’s sort of basically, ‘I’m at work today and this is a job and I’ll do it and tough bikkies for you if it bothers you or I’m not being sympathetic’. A lot of the Department of Housing people do get rather rude. I mean, you do have a lot of sympathetic ones that will go out of their way and do anything for you, drop everything and just do it. I guess it sort of evens up to a certain degree . . . They are pretty cooperative, I guess, when it comes to people that have physical or mental disabilities.

Now that Sharon has got the sort of home she wanted, she’s trying, through the Tenants’ Council, to help others to sort out their needs. She has organised community functions like a Good Neighbour night and a clean-up day at Toongabbie—events that try to build bridges in public housing communities and counter the insidious problem of the stigma they attract in some quarters. People look down on you when you’re in the Department of Housing. It’s like we’re scum or something, not worth the time of day. I’ve heard people say, ‘That kid’s in Department of Housing, what do you expect—that’s it, they’re a houso!’. I’ve had people say that, people that work, that own their own home, that don’t live in the Western Suburbs . . . I just feel sorry for them really, because they’re the naive ones. They’ve got no idea. It doesn’t make you a better person or any less of a person whether you own your own home or are in Department of Housing. I never thought I was better than anyone else because my parents own their own home. The only reason I’d like to buy my own home is to leave something for my daughter. Some of the adults, too, end up with low self-esteem. They end up thinking, ‘Well, why should I bother?’. Here, there’s only nine villas, we’re

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Shelter from the Storm amongst private renting or people that own their own homes, so the community seems to have more . . . more self-respect, I guess. Whereas in big estates, it’s like you don’t seem to go out of that barrier of that estate. So it’s like a snowball effect. Some people in there don’t give a damn, ‘Department of Housing owe me’—and it’s sort of like a virus, it’s catching. Before you know it, they’re all like it and they’re fighting with each other and stealing. Then their children pick it up—‘It’s all right to be like this, this is the acceptable thing’. And it’s not.

Sharon once lived at Mount Druitt, in an estate that had been converted from public housing to private. Although most of the residents were either renting privately like her, or in the process of buying their homes, she found the atmosphere was still oppressive. You could actually feel, like, a bad mood hanging over the place. I just found that the stigma and the social scene of it, that people never really change . . . The mothers—the way they speak to their children—it’s unbelievable. And it’s because they have a low self-opinion themselves . . . It just repeats itself.

A total of 62 operations, years of dialysis, phobias, divorce and the day-to-day difficulties of raising a child alone on a pension have somehow not dented Sharon’s own self-esteem. She’s started seeing a boyfriend, her first since the marriage ended, and with Amber doing well, the future’s looking bright. A kidney, and a car, would be nice, but in the meantime, Sharon’s got another goal. I’d like to go to Port Macquarie, to live. I just want to go somewhere quiet, a nice watery place with the sun. Because there’s too much violence and stuff down here. My godson and his parents live up there, so I’ve got friends there, that’s something. I’m sort of trying to talk my boyfriend into moving eventually too! I don’t really want to go off on my own. But that’s my main aim. I’d really love to live up there. There’s a lot of different things there, DOCS and stuff that you can work with . . . I’d have to wait until they get dialysis put into Port Macquarie Hospital. If a kidney comes up before that, that’d be even better!

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16 How Green Was My Valley Mark Latham

My first political experience was urban injustice. We were without many of the things that other suburbs took for granted . . . and that always left me with the feeling that there was some imbalance, some unfairness going on in society. And I suppose my work in politics has been a journey to find out the nature of that, and trying to do something about it.

Mark Latham was four when his family swapped a small terrace house in Alexandria, in inner Sydney, for a three-bedroom fibro detached house on a quarter-acre block near Liverpool. It was 1965 and the Lathams were just one of 6000 families being housed in a brand new suburb known, somewhat misleadingly, as Green Valley. The whole place had been levelled; all the trees and vegetation had been lost. Some people say the developers took the topsoil, the best soil, and sold it. So we were left with red clay. I remember I was in gum boots in the backyard after torrential rain and I sank. The only way my mother could get me out was to pull me out and the gumboots stayed there. They’d still be in the backyard at 25 Harrison Street.

Green Valley, begun in 1962 and expected to house 25 000 people, was the largest public housing estate of its time. The Lathams’ old house was being demolished to make way for an expanded school next door, and they joined the huge migration westwards without much knowledge of what lay ahead.

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Shelter from the Storm These were grand urban plans for their day. I got to see some of the publicity used in the sixties and it was really the image of a garden estate and urban paradise . . . a frontier new-world type promise. My mother made the choice without actually going there. Green Valley was on the sewer, and for that reason alone, they chose Green Valley over Seven Hills. My mother’s and my father’s family had all been inner city people, and all her friends and family and contacts would have stayed in the inner city, and it was only when she had got to the suburb’s doorstep that she realised how isolated it was and broke out crying—on Elizabeth Drive, just before you turn into Maxwells Avenue. She knows the exact spot. I suppose for other people it was all part of the post-war Australian dream . . . all of a sudden terrace housing wasn’t regarded as the social norm, people wanted a backyard and room to move. Mum had three infants: I was four, Tracy would have been two and Jodie one, so it was all a decision based on what was best for them—space to grow up in. You had young kids everywhere. You could open the door on Christmas Day and you’d see hundreds of kids riding bikes, you know, new Christmas presents. The demographics were all the same . . . Mum, Dad, (or as best they could hang that together) and three, four, five kids from nought to fifteen. The family unit was made very strong, perhaps by necessity—there weren’t many services, the area wasn’t too flash, all we had was each other. Isolation perhaps was an asset in that regard, that family became the main source of social cohesion.

Families seemed simpler then. Dad worked, Mum minded the kids, and the kids divided their time between sport and school. Mark’s father made the long trip to town each day to work at the Redfern Mail Exchange, but other men on the estate worked in the industries emerging nearby. My memory along the street was that all the dads were in work . . . The regular habits and social contacts that come out of work were very, very important. It was an era of full employment and that had a big influence . . . it was easier for families to stick together, not as much stress and social problems. Sure there were families that would break up and the legend of affairs over the back fence, and some pretty bad kids who got into strife, but the proportion was far lower . . .

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How Green Was My Valley Multiculturalism had not penetrated this far out and apart from the odd Greek or Italian migrant, the community was AngloCeltic. While the women developed networks to cope with the lack of services and shopping facilities, the men established a hierarchy in the time-honoured Australian tradition. The pub was known as ‘the slaughterhouse’. Because they would all have come from their local pub in the city where there was an established pecking order about who could hold their hands up the best, who was best at football and whatever men talk about over a beer, so they had to establish a new pecking order . . . and I remember when I was eighteen, I got a job picking up glasses and one of the old hands, a mate of my dad’s, saying, ‘You’re new here, that’s great. I hope you enjoy the show.’ And I thought,

Mark Latham and his

what’s he on about, there’s no entertainment here, just the blokes getting

sister on the back steps of

drunk, watching the footy, having a bet. Later that afternoon, as they did

their fibro home on the

every Saturday afternoon, there was a big dust-up, a big brawl. The place

Green Valley estate,

would clear, the combatants would get in the centre and off they’d go.

which housed 6000

And he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘What do you think of the

families. ‘You had young

floor show?’. So it was a settling in period for the men. They too had a big

kids everywhere. You

readjustment to make and a lot of it was handled with their fists.

could open the door on Christmas morning and

As the years passed, kikuyu lawns replaced the red clay, Green Valley grew greener and the kids got older. At sixteen, fired up by the inequities he saw between his mates in Green Valley and the North Shore toffs he played rugby against, Mark Latham joined the Labor Party. Although he still gets angry about injustice, he believes the disadvantages they shared welded the estate into a tight community. We were labelled Dodge City, we didn’t have all these facilities and the rest of Sydney picked on us to some extent . . . but that was a gal-

you’d see hundred of kids riding bikes . . . The family unit was made very strong, perhaps by necessity—there weren’t many services, the area wasn’t too flash. All we had was each other.’

vanising force. Let’s stick together and be strong, survive. We do have some assets—and good education and schooling was seen as a critical part of that. Full employment was very important but it was really

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Shelter from the Storm a base for ensuring that the next generation got even better jobs than the blue-collar manual work around at the time. Everyone knew that the key task was to get a better education for the next generation. I think every family placed a lot of weight on that and education produced a lot of amazing results. I often think of standing at the bus stop in Maxwells Avenue, Ashcroft, catching the bus to high school with my friend Glenn King, who is now Glenn King, PhD, one of Australia’s leading experts in biotechnology.

Mark and Glenn were two of four Green Valley youngsters to win a place in Hurlstone Agricultural High School. Mark describes himself as ‘a real swot’ those days, studying night and day, and gaining a place at university. This was 1979 and Gough Whitlam, later Mark’s political mentor, had abolished university fees, bringing a tertiary education within reach of the less well off. But after Mark’s first year at college, his father died. As the eldest of four, Mark prepared to leave college and start earning. But Green Valley had other ideas. Self-esteem was very important. We were a proud community and there was a cohesiveness there that mattered. And out of that pride, and the struggle they had engaged in, often with this sense of injustice, people would often do great caring things, like rally and help a family that had lost someone, and emphasise the importance of education . . . The people in the local Labor Party and the local public and a few others passed the hat around to help me. I suppose that was my scholarship— a community-based scholarship to say, ‘Don’t drop out now . . . hang in there and hopefully benefit from a university education’.

The Labor Party got a good return on its investment. Mark left Sydney University with an honours degree in politics and spent the next five years as Gough Whitlam’s research assistant, before moving to the head office of the NSW Labor Party. After failing to get preselection for the seat of Liverpool, he swapped state politics for local government, becoming Mayor of Liverpool for three pace-setting years. In 1994, aged 33, he was elected to Federal Parliament as the member for Werriwa, Campbelltown, a seat he has held since, despite Labor’s fall from power in 1996. Although the electorate on Sydney’s fringes contains middle-class private housing as well as ostentatious mansions built with ‘new’ money, it is its enormous broad-acre public housing estates that make the news.

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How Green Was My Valley It’s rarely good press. Mention Airds, Minto or especially Claymore and the average tabloid-reading Sydneysider thinks drugs, crime, bludgers. Academics use more delicate language: marginalisation, NESB, intergenerational unemployment, non-nuclear families, domestic violence, substance abuse. Either way it doesn’t make a pretty picture. Unlike many outsiders, Mark Latham is not prepared to write off the residents as wasters and victims, the unsalvageable detritus of society. His own background has given him insights into the very real problems of such estates. But although Claymore was built while he was still at school, it was and is a very different place from Green Valley. Green Valley was built to house a blue-collar workforce for the emerging industries on the urban fringe . . . these broad-acre housing estates in Campbelltown were planned during the mid-seventies and built during the late seventies and early eighties on the basis that they would also house a blue-collar workforce. I think Ford was going to build a big car plant at Ingleburn . . . but the economy restructured, Ford didn’t build its car plant and there is very little manufacturing work of the old kind available in an area like this. But the housing is still there . . . the economy could rapidly restructure, as it has over the last twenty years, but it’s not so easy to restructure housing . . . A suburb like Claymore has unemployment of 50 per cent and welfare dependency of 80 per cent . . . Grandad and the parents may well be out of work . . . and young kids think, ‘That’s what people do when they grow up’. We weren’t so much under siege, we were engaged in what we thought was still a winnable struggle to get ahead, do well, prove the rest of Sydney wrong . . . now the struggle is to get through the day. It’s not really a struggle that seems to have a possible benefit at the end. I think that’s the big difference.

Prospects for Green Valley residents in the 1960s were so much better that many of the people in private housing in Mark Latham’s electorate, including his mother and sister, started out as public housing tenants in Green Valley. A low-interest mortgage scheme helped many to buy out their homes, then move ‘up’ into Campbelltown, but Mark Latham still sees the two essential ingredients for social mobility as full employment and a good education. There is nothing more heartbreaking for me as a local Member than to see barbed wire surrounding Claymore public school. You drive past and

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Shelter from the Storm it looks more like a detention centre than a school. It’s just a tragedy . . . and public policy thus far has not provided any answers.

So what would he do, given the chance? Mark Latham is certainly not short on ideas. He’s covered over 400 pages of a book with them, in fact. Called Civilising Global Capital, it’s not exactly bedside reading, but has been acclaimed as the most energetic new manifesto for the Labor Party since Paul Keating’s time. Latham has moved a long way from the straightforward Marxist analysis he was attracted to at university. Politics is more than just capital versus labour. It’s driven by questions of nationalism versus internationalism, the old globalisation debate, the social divide between the information-rich and the information-poor . . . new sources of social division and inequality that have overlaid many of the economic debates and assumptions we might have made in the sixties and seventies. I think we’ve all got an interest in the fairness of our society . . . we are all better off not living in fear of unemployed people breaking into our house. And if you’ve made a lot of money out of property, out of owning a business or whatever, the integrity of your property will be improved if you are in a fair society where everyone has a decent threshold of access to work, earned income, the benefits of education and learning. I think all citizens have got a responsibility to make some contribution to that. One of the big problems in Australian politics is the taxpayer is expecting much more a direct return on their taxes, and we have problems of ‘downwards envy’ for people without job security . . . they are questioning why government is not doing more for them, and seemingly has got handouts available for people outside the production system— single mums, welfare recipients, all the groups Pauline Hanson tends to demonise. This is a big, big problem if you believe in a fair but also cohesive society, where everyone defines a common interest in some basic notions of decency and justice . . . you can preach social responsibility, we should all think that way, but . . . make the rules of distribution fairer . . . They’re big problems—that’s why I wrote a long book!

Although phrases like ‘downwards envy’ and his definition of mateship as ‘horizontal social capital’ show he can mix it with the best of them in terms of economic jargon, Latham’s prognosis for the dismal housing estates around Campbelltown is simple and heartfelt. First off, he would

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How Green Was My Valley abolish the controversial Radburn design, which dispenses with the usual concept of a house fronting onto a street. The Radburn scheme hasn’t worked. A lot of tenants, their first step is to feel normal. And the housing doesn’t feel normal because the backyard is the place where the car comes in, and the frontyard goes onto the open public space. There’s a mismatch. People have so little of their own space—you’ve got backyards you could throw a blanket over— and big public space that nobody uses . . . that often becomes a law

Mark Latham MP,

and order problem. The model is based on middle America, where

whose childhood

people have jobs and use open space for community purposes—well

experience of inequity on

that’s been a total misjudgement in the planning. There’s been some

the Green Valley estate

work to try and turn these places round, they’ve done a really good job

sparked his interest in

in areas like Macquarie Fields, but Minto and Claymore, there’s a fair

politics. ‘We were a

argument to say the housing has become so dysfunctional you need to

proud community ...

knock some of it down and use some of the open space to redevelop

engaged in what we

new housing.

thought was still a

And change the mix. I think it does help to have a public/private mix,

winnable struggle to get

so that people haven’t got the feeling they’re somehow abnormal, living

ahead, do well, prove the

in abnormally designed housing, disavantaged people in a disadvantaged

rest of Sydney wrong.’

place. Green Valley now would be 50 per cent public housing 50 per cent private ownership and I think that’s an important balance.

Demolishing the offending physical surroundings is drastic enough, but Latham’s next proposal would strike fear into the heart of any self-respecting bureaucrat. He wants nothing less than co-ordinated, personalised service from government bodies, rather than the current disjointed system that addresses one aspect of a tenant’s problems without reference to the others.11 I describe it as ‘place management’. You’d bundle together all the government resources that go into a place like Claymore and put it into the hands of a local authority to design the education, health, family support services as needed in Claymore, sensitive to local needs instead of

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Shelter from the Storm out of central departmental control. Look at the government departments [now]. There’s the Health Department, the big Education Department, transport initiatives, family support services . . . government organised like a series of silos. But for people facing long-term poverty, it’s a wholeof-life dilemma. So you need whole-of-government solutions. Not just pour some money down the silos and hope that somehow it co-ordinates and works out. Because it doesn’t.

That’s housing and the public service sorted out. So far the tenants are having it much their way. But not for long. Latham also advocates the transformation of the social welfare system—a position that some see admiringly as belonging to the modern President Clinton/Tony Blair school of social democracy, but which some of his Labor Party colleagues have reviled as dangerously right wing. Under his idea of ‘time sequencing’, individuals would take the initiative in working out how and when to draw on a finite amount of government support to buffer them at critical moments in their life, such as after the birth of a child, or illness, or loss of a job. People who avoided drawing social welfare because they had saved enough to provide for contingencies would be rewarded by not being taxed on their savings. And the whole notion of long-term income support would be thoroughly reworked to provide more opportunities for the recipient to break the cycle of poverty and unemployment through retraining and individual case management. In return, the beneficiary would have to display a level of community and social responsibility, for instance by maintaining public housing areas, improving their personal health habits or taking courses to enhance their parenting skills. While improved health and better parenting are economically sensible and socially desirable, it represents a potentially Big Brotherish intrusion into private lives that even the conservative parties have not dared to suggest. (One imagines fingers being inspected for nicotine stains and the unemployed being breathalysed before being issued the dole . . .) It’s an indication of just how tough Latham is that he will not shy away from presenting an unpopular idea. The work ethic instilled in him from childhood makes the thought of permanent, government-subsidised idleness, as in an unlimited, unconditional dole, anathema to Latham. While he believes strongly in helping people in need, he also promotes radical incentives like having formerly unemployed people repay some of the welfare they received once they get on their feet. This blend of

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How Green Was My Valley economic pragmatism (the state cannot be expected to subsidise healthy citizens forever) with moral passion (it will give people back their selfesteem) is typical of the man. He will take huge steps to improve life for the underdog, but he expects a lot in return. I’m a believer in the welfare functions of work . . . Passive welfare—just the transfer of a welfare cheque—is not going to be enough to get people participation in society. You’ve got people with poor labour market skills living in a place with poor access to jobs. You’ve got to do things that are intense and very different to try to improve skills as well as create jobs . . . you need government to be able to manage the suburb, its people and their problems and help them out . . . But in the end, unless people are willing to put in the effort to study and work and retrain and take proper social responsibilities, there is no way out of the disadvantage. It really does take a lot of hard work. To try and empower people is very important . . . instead of having big centralised maintenance budgets for public housing, I always thought it would be better to give people control over their own maintenance budget and if they do all their own painting and garden upkeep and the like, they can keep the cash as an incentive for making a contribution, making the effort to have their own property looking good but also contributing to the overall well-being of the community. People sort of wait for the Department of Housing to do something for them and inevitably get dissatisfied . . . and that’s a vicious circle, because disadvantaged people are also feeling disconnected from society and the things affecting their life. The answer has got to be mechanisms to empower people to take more responsibility and control, within the proper guidelines of accountability for the use of public funds.

Mark Latham is a classic example of the underprivileged kid made good. Not yet 40, he’s got power, money and status, and is regularly mentioned in the media as a Significant Figure in the Labor Party, maybe even a Future Prime Minister. His own self-esteem, not to say arrogance, was healthy enough for him to publicly denounce the Labor Party leader, Kim Beazley, for having ‘butchered’ the education policy Latham had written for the 1998 federal election. As wounded as any artist whose creativity has been infringed (‘I felt like someone whose sculpture had been taken to with a sledgehammer,12) Latham subsequently left the front bench to devote more time to developing ideas like those trampled by his leader.

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Shelter from the Storm Such behaviour may not augur well for his political future under the current leadership, but wherever he ends up, Latham is unlikely to be silenced. His intellectual ability and street-wise personality are buoyed by strong family support, from his sisters and mother, who live nearby. He and his wife, Gabrielle, have recently separated. They have no children. But for all his success, Latham remains true to his working-class beginnings. Any notions he has are reserved for politics. He shows no social pretensions, content to live in modest surrounds in the not exactly fashionable enclave of Campbelltown, still down-to-earth enough to enjoy a few beers at the pub, follow the footie and the cricket and cook his own dinner. Green Valley may not have been the most remarkable place to grow up in, but it’s given Mark Latham a strong sense of who he is and how life in Australia should be—as he says in his book, a civilised version of capitalism, led by a government that is ‘broad-based yet progressive . . . with a soft heart but a hard head’.13 He could be describing himself.

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17 Elderly Rebels Van Lang Co-op

In Vietnam, we don’t go into debt. We pay everything in cash, or gold. As we say, you be a mature person when you are capable to have a roof over your head and a tomb for when you get older, when you die: that’s the two concepts of being mature . . . You have to be checked in order to afford to pay a house by cash. For example, I can’t break away from my own family unless I prove that I am mature, I have enough money to live on, I can look after my children by myself. In that case, my parents would say, ‘Okay, you are checked, you can move away from my home’. They support their children to establish themselves. And you would believe that if a source of income is giving you enough finance to move away, they maintain a very powerful [position]. Their children owe them a a big favour. —Anh Tran

The family is paramount in Vietnam. It is a self-sufficient unit, a minicommunity governed by customs and traditions as binding for most Vietnamese as the official laws observed by the broader society. Three or four generations commonly live together, mingling freely in large, openplan houses very different from the standard Australian three-bedroom home, as Anh explains. We used to sleep in one big divan, brother, sister, when they were younger than ten years old, they tend to sleep together. Once they get

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Shelter from the Storm older, they have their own bed—but that doesn’t mean separate room. Open place, general for everybody, and we are quite comfortable and tend to be close to each other. In Australia, you stay in your own bedroom, you tend to study by your own. But in Vietnam, every kid sit round the table under the lamp and we study with each other quietly. We don’t have our separate thing at all. We live under the same roof and everything is under the one head of the household.

That head of the household is an elder, for instance a grandfather presiding over his son and daughter-in-law and their children. The middle generation has been given this roof by their parents. Now they will save and save until they can furnish their children with the wherewithal to establish their own homes when the time comes, which may be some years after they have married and had their own children. In return for this virtual dowry, the grandparents and great-grandparents can expect to be provided for in their old age. They would also be treated with respect and have their opinions on family matters deferred to. The war upset the old order. After the communists took control in 1975, many Southern Vietnamese fled the country. People started leaving by all means, by boat or by foot, and the elderly normally stayed back in order to pay the way out for their children to the safe place, which is Australia or some other countries. Around 1984 or ’85, different governments started to allow the people who settle to sponsor their close relatives, parents, spouses and children, to reunite them . . .

Under this Orderly Departure Program, thousands of Vietnamese migrated to Australia. Adult children signed maintenance guarantees, pledging to support their aged parents for ten years. But these newly extended families didn’t always work out. In 1988, in her capacity as ethnic health worker at Fairfield Community Health Centre, Anh Tran encountered several elderly Vietnamese men and women who were in conflict with their relatives. Of course when they live apart, they wish to have their own family in one place, but because they live apart for five, up to ten, years, once they come to Australia, problems arise where parents and children can’t cope with each other any more . . . They have only three-bedroom house, so they have to share the room with their grandchildren—and grandchildren in Australia are not the same as in Vietnam. They become a little bit

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Elderly Rebels selfish, they don’t want anybody come in their room without knocking on the door. In Vietnam, we don’t have that kind of privacy. Also, they don’t speak the language the grandparents speak . . . kids who go to school tend to communicate in English, they don’t speak Vietnamese with the parents because they are out at work, they watch television at home, and they tend to lose their own mother tongue.

The middle generation has its own troubles. As refugees, they have had to struggle mightily to find work and feed, clothe and house their children. In order to survive, they’ve become part-Westernised. They have had to be self-reliant, and are no longer accustomed to consulting their elders about decisions. Nor are they financially indebted to them; in fact it’s the other way round. All these factors can give rise to problems when an aged relative appears on the scene. In Vietnam, when you live under the same roof of, for example, the husband’s family, the daughter-in-law has to be under his parents—but because they live in Australia she is only under her husband and why now does she have to be under his parents as well? Also, the grandparents who come to Australia don’t have any income, they don’t bring anything with them, because the regime don’t allow anybody to bring money overseas if they leave . . . they live on the support of their son and daughter-in-law so therefore they lose power. I believe that the mentality of the daughter-in-law is now, ‘Why should I be under you any more, you bludge off my family’ . . . she might feel, ‘You have no right to interfere in my family’ . . . so the tension of both sides becomes greater and greater because of the power struggle between in-laws.

Sometimes the grandparents have not even met their daughter-in-law before, adding to the family’s difficulties. On top of the personal tensions, the elderly parents have to try to adapt to a bewilderingly different world, with a foreign language and a strange new culture. Their only link to the community is through their family: if that relationship deteriorates, they can feel intensely isolated. Take Mrs Lee, who migrated to Australia at the age of 64 to be with her son. She told Hanh Bich Nguyen, a student working with Anh Tran, of a typical day. She lived with Chun, her son, and Hun, her daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren in a flat in Fairfield. Chun worked in one factory, Hun was a sewing machinist in another, at Cabramatta. The family rose about six

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Shelter from the Storm each morning, in time to prepare breakfast and a cut lunch before leaving for school or work at 7.30. Mrs Lee stayed home alone. She cleared the table, washed the dishes and cleaned up. Although it was not her duty to do this, Mrs Lee loved her grandchildren and wanted to help her son. That done, she switched on the TV and for a while she watched programs she could not understand. Then she dusted the furniture and looked out the window at the street. After lunch, she decided to go for a walk. When she opened the door, a tall man coming up the stairs stared at her as if she was from Mars, and asked something she could not understand. Mrs Lee stepped back inside and shut the door. She did not want to go out any more. At five, the family arrived home. The children put the TV on at a loud volume, Chun was outside battling with his car engine and Hun threw herself on the bed, complaining of a headache, and fell asleep. Mrs Lee went to the kitchen and prepared dinner. Although it was not her duty to do this, she did not want her son and grandchildren having a late dinner. The same thing happened regularly. Mrs Lee felt unwanted, that she was just a housekeeper. She felt a great loneliness. Mrs Lee told her son, but he defended his wife. Mrs Lee tried to talk to her daughter-in-law and the conflict began. Mrs Lee did not want to live in the family any longer and felt sorry that she had come to Australia. She cried herself to sleep every night. Sometimes she thought of suicide.14

....

Such heartrending alienation was not uncommon among elderly Vietnamese migrants. Their choices were bleak. Saving the fare back to Vietnam was virtually impossible. If they did return, they would be subject to further financial penalties, as the government would now class them as Overseas Vietnamese. If they broke from their children in Australia, they could apply for social security, but an individual pension would not be enough to live on and rent a one-bedroom flat. After two years, Mrs Lee decided to move out. With the help of a social worker, she and another Vietnamese woman in a similar situation got a flat together at Canley Vale. But the other woman was diabetic. Mrs Lee found herself once again taking on more than her share. She had to do the shopping and cooking and organise the bills and rent. As the stress accumulated, she lost her appetite and could not sleep at night. Then she developed a stomach ulcer, which is when she came to the attention of Anh Tran at the Fairfield Community Health Centre.

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Elderly Rebels

This was 1988 and Anh was increasingly concerned at the plight of these dislocated Vietnamese pensioners. She had enrolled several on the waiting list for public housing, but as they wanted to stay in a Vietnamesespeaking area like Fairfield, the waiting period was expected to be at least six years. Anh had also investigated the possibilities of grouping the pensioners together and renting privately. The situation was unresolved when a representative from ARCH, the Association To Resource Co-operative Housing, visited the Fairfield Migrant Centre. Anh invited her to address the displaced Vietnamese pensioners on the ins and outs of forming a housing co-op. After the talk, all the group was excited! We believed the program would be suitable . . . they helped us put in application to Housing Department under the government housing program.

And so the Van Lang Housing Co-operative was born. It comprised seventeen Vietnamese men and women, most of them in their fifties and sixties. They broke down into ten family units, two of them with single adult children attached—siblings of the refugees who had arrived in Australia and sponsored the rest.

Le Thi Duc Nhan in front of the Buddhist altar in her unit at the Van Lang Co-op in Fairfield, western Sydney. The co-op was built to the specifications of its Vietnamese residents. Although each unit had its own bathroom, they insisted on the need for a separate 'wash-up' area. The bemused architect finally realised what they were saying: a 'worship' area, at which they could honour their ancestors. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm Establishing the co-op on paper was one thing, but seeing it turn into a physical reality would take four years of commitment. Unlike public housing, for which hopeful tenants passively wait to be assigned a home, the members of housing co-ops take an active part in securing and designing housing to suit their needs. Having obtained funding for a feasibility study, the co-op—with Anh Tran still actively involved—hired an architect to discuss its options. We brainstorm, really, all the ideas of the elderly. What does the house look like? What sort of things would you like to have in it? They would like to live in the Fairfield area where we have very established amenities and Vietnamese services. Also, they don’t want the house standing out, because they don’t want to be identified by the whole community, so therefore, the appearance of the whole village is like a normal house . . . but inside they set up their own little thing.

Some tenants wanted a window behind the stove, to remove cooking odours, but since that was a fire risk with curtains, it could not be allowed. The architect instead provided a door between kitchen and lounge room to contain the smells. She complied as far as possible with the members’ wishes, but was flummoxed by their insistence on having a special ‘wash-up area’. The bathroom-cum-laundry was already generous, so what was the problem?? The members became agitated. ‘Wash-up—we wash up the ancestors.’ The penny dropped. Like most Buddhists, the tenants practised ancestor worship, praying before photos of their dead relatives at a small altar. We said we just would like a shelf to put something on, but it has to be in front of the house and also in the lounge-room, instead of the bedroom or kitchen. They just provide an open space so we can put the shelf up ourselves, so we use that.

Eventually a site was found in Fairfield and the plans drawn up. The co-op would contain ten ground-floor units, seven with one bedroom, two with two bedrooms and one with three. The single units had an open-plan living and dining area, a small separate kitchen, a double bedroom and a bathroom/laundry. Each had a small private backyard, while all the units fronted onto a common landscaped garden with a central barbecue area. The exterior would be yellow brick, with a green tiled roof. In 1993, many meetings later, the members of the Van Lang Housing Co-operative moved in. In accordance with co-op rules, they function as

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Elderly Rebels both landlord and tenants—each pays rent to the co-op and takes a turn sitting on the board, which handles financial and maintenance issues. ‘I think that is a very good concept for all of them to still contribute their own skills when they are now old . . . their satisfaction is maintained in running the co-operative’, says Anh. Now that they have moved away from their children, the members qualify for a Social Security pension, from which they pay their rent. Social Security in turn deducts the pension from the original sponsors, until their ten-year maintenance guarantee expires. Although their adult children are still in effect supporting them, the co-op members feel they are less of a burden to them now. The families get on better as a result. ‘Of course blood is thicker than water. Once they live together the tensions rise, but once they live by their own way, I guess it would come down. They still have their relatives visit them once in a while.’ After our chat, Anh Tran took me to meet some of the Van Lang Co-operative. Ten members were gathered in the lounge of the only threebedroom unit, which is used for co-op business. I added my boots to the pairs of slip-on shoes lined up outside the door and entered in stockinged feet. ‘Chào Ông, Bà’. My cordial Vietnamese greeting brought a delighted chorus of response from the eight women and two men perched on the lounge suite or sitting at the dining table beyond. Unfortunately, that was as much as my Vietnamese permitted. The two men were keen to speak English. Dinh, from near Saigon, had been in the South Vietnamese army. Before the co-op was built, he had lived in a three-bedroom house owned by the Department of Housing at Campbelltown. The house was fine, but he found it difficult getting to Cabramatta to buy his Asian groceries, or see a Vietnamese-speaking doctor. The other man, a former primary schoolteacher, had four of his six children living in Australia and was pleased that he could now see his grandchildren often. The others communicated through Anh. One woman commented that she felt more housebound in Sydney, because she had to ask her kids for money for transport, whereas in Vietnam, she could afford to travel by cyclo, a cheap pedal-driven taxi, if she wanted to. An animated woman with a beautiful face told me how she had run a thriving electrical appliances shop at Nha Trang, a coastal resort. The war did not impinge much on her business, she said, but after 1975, things went downhill. She had only limited contact with her grandchildren: she saw them twice a year, but they had no Vietnamese and she could not speak English. A younger woman observed that it was more fun living in the co-op than on your own—and less lonely.

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Shelter from the Storm

Tran Thi Gam, a member of the Van Lang Co-op. Its sixteen elderly Vietnamese residents got together after finding they no longer fitted in with their adult children's Australianised ways. The co-op has restored their dignity and independence, and provides mutual social and cultural support. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Companionship and independence were universally valued aspects of living at Van Lang. Since moving in, Mrs Lee’s ulcer had gone and her health improved. As she told Hanh Bich Nguyen: I am very happy to live here. The most interesting thing I like is speaking Vietnamese with the neighbours. Saying, ‘Good morning’, and giving them a smile could be a good start of my day. I consider neighbourhood a very important factor. It could save my life in certain cases. Sometimes they are better than my relatives.

Ironically perhaps, this co-op, which emerged from the breakdown of traditional Vietnamese family roles, is a model of community support. Anh Tran believes that besides being good for members’ morale, this neigbourliness is cost-effective for the government. If an elderly Vietnamese person living alone in a large housing estate became ill, a professional social worker and/or interpreter would be required to organise support. But at Van Lang, a fit neighbour will cook or shop for an ailing one.

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Elderly Rebels The communal grounds are edged with flowers, and the members grow their favourite herbs and foodstuffs on their individual plots—mint, chillies, lemon grass. One woman proudly showed me her orchids. Inside, the living and the dead had their place: the ancestors’ altar carefully arranged in one spot, a framed collage of family photos on the wall nearby. As a co-op, the members can organise outings that individuals would find difficult: visits to a Buddhist temple, attendance at meetings of the Vietnamese Senior Citizen Friendship Association, occasional excursions. The year they moved in, Anh recalls, they had a great party for the New Year, the members visiting each other and celebrating until 2 or 3 a.m. Some said it was the best New Year they’d ever had. Now four years old, Van Lang Co-op is deemed a success—by those who fund it as well as those who live there. Anh is constantly besieged with requests for information from bureaucrats, academics and ethnic organisations, several of whom plan a similar venture. One person has died since Van Lang started. The remaining sixteen have coped well with the group dynamics of a co-op, despite coming to it so late in life. Anh Tran is in regular contact: I have heard of some kind of problems, but not a great deal, it can be solved within themselves. Because they’re old, and Vietnamese, they

The members of Van Lang have made huge adjustments late in life— like exchanging the typical Vietnamese extended family for co-operative living. ‘They don’t have relatives with them any more, so they have to be kind and nice in order to live together’, says Anh Tran, their facilitator, seen distributing documents to the group. (Mayu Kanamori)

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Shelter from the Storm speak the same language. Some get upset, but we have the conflict resolution team. So whenever the problem arises, the person come down and give some good reasons not to be so outrageous. Because eventually, they don’t have relatives with them any more, so they have to be kind and nice in order to live together.

The Fairfield Health Centre’s 1997 study of the co-op reported 90 per cent of the members as being ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’. Most members were in reasonably good health, although 20 per cent complained of heart or intestinal diseases. As one resident commented, ‘The most appreciation I would say is that I now have good health due to having healthy food of my choice, exercise regularly and have peace of mind.’ When I asked the group whether their lives were better in Australia than they had been in Vietnam, they insisted that even with the problems confronting a new migrant, life was much easier here. ‘In Vietnam under communism, you can’t do what you like’, said one. ‘There is more equality here, it’s more humanitarian’, said another. ‘The Social Security is good, you are not so poor’, said a third. But when I asked if they would recommend to other elderly Vietnamese to come here or stay in Vietnam, hand after hand was raised: ‘Stay. If you are old, or you have children still in Vietnam, then stay. Australia is better for young people.’ Anh Tran understands their view. For them, Vietnam may mean poverty and political repression, but it can give them one thing they can never have here—a sense of belonging. I can tell you the story I had with my own family. Back in 1983–84, I really wanted to sponsor my father to come over here, because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t. He was allowed to come. I bought the ticket. But he was very wise man. He studied and he read books and articles talking about Australia and the life here. Eventually, he turned around, said ‘No’— because he didn’t believe he would be happy in this country. He is old now, he is 97. He said to me that when he get out of house and walk about, do the shopping, people said to him, ‘Chào Ông Tu’— they greet him as ‘Ông Tu’, which means Grandpa, they talk to him, greet him in a respectful way. Everybody knows that he is Ông Tu. But he said, when I come to Australia, nobody knows me, so I would be very lonely. I would feel very sad if nobody greeted me in that way. Even though he can read a lot of English, he can’t speak it. So he feels he wouldn’t be adaptable easily to Australia.

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Elderly Rebels Therefore he wrote to the Department of Immigration . . . that he was sorry, he didn’t want to come. So all the paperwork that I have done for two years has just gone to the drain! But I really appreciated the way that he think. But a lot of children in Australia, they don’t tell the truth to their parents, and the parents, because they love the children, they want to come—but at the same time they don’t know the reality.

At 57, and close to retirement, Anh has been reconsidering the relative benefits of Australia and Vietnam. Although she has established a successful career here and is comfortably off, somewhat to her own surprise, it doesn’t seem enough. She misses a quality of life and sense of community that she finds absent from our work-oriented lives and jealously guarded privacy. In Vietnam, we know the whole village. They know who I am and I know who they are. But in Australia, I don’t even know what is the name of my neighbour, or what nationalities they are. We just say hello, that’s all. We don’t have the time to chat about life. People tend to be indifferent. I don’t know my neighbour, I don’t know how many they are in the house, because we have to work all day, all night, and by the time you go home, nobody is around you any more. In Vietnam, after dinner, we go out, go shopping, go to the neighbour’s house and watch TV, or my neighbour come to my house, and we just talk . . . about life, the weather, my family. Sometimes we offer sweet balls, what we call ‘cha’, and they return it. People bring me fruit, or an egg, or a bowl of rice or good things they cook—but in Australia they don’t cherish that kind of food. If I can’t get out, if I can’t cook for myself, maybe my neighbour would offer me something to live on. In Australia you don’t have that kind of style. You have to go to the nursing home. And in the nursing home, you don’t speak English, you would go through hell with this. You just lie down by yourself and the food, maybe, is not suitable to your diet and your state.

To avoid such a fate, Anh Tran has decided to return permanently to Vietnam. She’s lucky, in that the family home has not been lost. But for those who cannot return, or who would prefer to stay on in Australia rather than be apart from their children, Anh Tran’s work in establishing the Van Lang Co-op will be an enduring comfort. As Mrs Lee reflects: ‘I always wished to have a private world where I could do whatever I liked at any time. It gives me what I had dreamed of for years.’

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18 Rainbow’s End Nimbin Young Adults

Communities have got to have something in common. Basically, the only thing in common that most of them had around here was people needed a place to live. —Luke Hopkins

In the 1970s, Nimbin and the lush surrounding countryside of northern New South Wales were a mecca for hippies and alternative lifestylers, or as Respectable Working Folk called them, drop-outs. It all started when this undistinguished pastoral town was selected as the venue for the Aquarius Festival, Australia’s version of Woodstock. After idyllic days of communing with other turned-on, skinny-dipping, peace-loving, brown-rice enthusiasts in a naturally beautiful setting of rainforest and rocky outcrops, some concert-goers decided to stay on. Others would return later, bringing friends and fellow-travellers. And so the Rainbow Town was born. Twenty years on, once-outraged locals have grown used to health food, headbands and hippie ways, but for the participants, The Dream is somewhat tarnished. Instead of free love and shared ganja, heroin is dealt openly on the streets, creating a cycle of crime and violence, while free love has taken its toll on relationships. There are positive legacies too—environmentally effective initiatives trialled on hippie farms, a rural community that is more progressive than most in areas like education and probably more democratic, due to its well-ingrained protest tradition.

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Rainbow’s End But what of the next generation—the children of the flower children? How have they fared? How well does Nimbin cater to their needs? With no public housing of any sort available in Nimbin, and a low rental turnover, Lismore local government repeatedly identified the lack of secure, affordable, appropriate housing for the young and, indeed, the old, as a major shortcoming. In 1997, the federal and state governments were persuaded to allocate $1.6 million to North Coast Community Housing to construct accommodation for both groups. The aged got Mulgum House, ten self-contained units attended by a live-in housekeeper, while those aged between 18 and 25 could apply for one of six new dwellings set on a hill on the edge of town, where the rent would be fixed at 25 per cent of income. Fran Hopkins of North Coast Community Housing had the delicate task of assuaging community fears that the project would attract feral kids and non-stop partying, while also selecting tenants who, however unorthodox their background, would look after the property and pay the rent. They had to be able to identify very strong links with the community of Nimbin and to prove they had a need to be housed with us . . . Most came off communities outside the town that had been there for maybe twenty years . . . One young guy is about to take custody of his brother and sister and they will be living there too . . . some were still going to school and had to drop out for a year because they were in really isolated situations where they couldn’t get a local bus to school. A couple of the people were actually living in humpies—still wanting to be close to the family but wanting to make that separation . . . they’ve got to this age where they need to actually create their own identity and their own ideas and there’s no room in their sort of family home to live.

By August 1997, a mixed group of tenants had been selected. They included two families with one child each, a single mother and baby, and various individuals. Some were working, some were on social welfare, some were studying. Most had known each other since school, but were not necessarily close. They moved in on the same day, but without fanfare. Still nervous about how the townsfolk might react, North Coast Community Housing decided against an official opening. From the road, the development would bring tears to a real estate agent’s eyes: attractive weatherboard units with red roofs and timber verandahs, a neat fence around a larger house, a central paved area for

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Shelter from the Storm parking, well-maintained grounds and all, as the ads would say, in a beautiful bushland setting. Ideal for the young professional. But these were no city yuppies, but independent-minded young people whose experience of group dynamics did not include a body corporate and whose previous accommodation had not always been conventional. With its brand new laundries, tiled bathrooms and up-to-the-minute kitchens, the new housing was a world away from the low-tech alternative energy focus of the hippie communes where some had grown up. How would they adjust? Would their new surroundings seem too sterile compared with the colour and character of the communes? Six months after they moved in, I visited the group during one of their monthly tenants’ meetings. ....

Dayna Russell’s parents traded Sydney for Nimbin when she was two. She shares a two-bedroom unit with another twenty-year-old, Melody Miller. The girls met at school: although she didn’t want to do the Higher School Certificate, Dayna had gone back as a mature student to study English and ceramics. Melody was interested in history—not that she gets much chance to explore it in her current job as a sales assistant in the Nimbin Emporium. She laughs, ‘It’s only casual’. She’d been sleeping on a mattress in her brother’s lounge room, a short-term arrangement that was lasting far too long, when Dayna told her about the project. Lively and sociable, the girls are well matched: ‘We’ve pretty much the same laziness about doing stuff’, explains Melody, giggling apologetically as she negotiates items strewn about the two-storey apartment. The level of mess is about average for a young person, but beneath the clutter, the newness of everything is evident. Dayna has a proper bed, Melody is still waiting to get one. In hot weather, they wallow in a toddler-style tub on the verandah: ‘Our swimming-pool’, Melody giggles again. The ‘pool’ may be makeshift but the view is priceless—an uninterrupted vista of rolling hills and trees, with the mountains away in the distance. Nineteen-year-old Sativa lives next door. ‘We just yell out to her from the balcony all the time’, explains Melody. Sativa, a waif-like figure with a cute eight-month-old baby girl, emerges to join the half a dozen others gathering on the grass for the meeting. Her parents came to Nimbin when she was about nine, taking up shares in one of the many communes around, and committed to the hippie way of life. ‘Totally’, says Sativa wryly, ‘with a name like mine’. Her full name, Sativayanta, reflects the Eastern mysticism fashionable at the time. Her surname, Scowan, is more prosaic.

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Rainbow’s End So how different was it growing up in a commune, compared with suburban family life? ‘I wouldn’t know’, she replies, pointing out that she never had a ‘normal’ family life in the suburbs. But she does have strong views on communes. ‘My old commune was a disaster area . . . really full-on things like people coming down and burning houses and stuff.’ The others yelp with laughter. Maire, who grew up next door to Sativa in the same commune, is as tanned and blooming with health as Sativa is pale and wan. She lives with Craig, a quiet gingery bloke with a straggly goatee beard, who does ‘rust work and stuff’ on cars, likes going to the beach and, in classic Aussie male tradition, yearns for a shed of his own. As the magenta nappies on their Hills Hoist testify, Maire and Craig have a baby daughter and although Maire ran away from the commune when she was a teenager, she’s now begun to see it from a parent’s perspective. ‘It’s the ideal lifestyle for anyone to bring up kids in . . . and you have communal dinners where everyone gets together and brings a plate of food. It’s one way I’d love to spend an evening, have a whole lot of people round with lots of food and do it on a regular basis.’ Sativa allows there were some positive aspects. ‘We had heaps of space to run around in and there was a communal space all us kids could go to— that was good . . . The bad things were the people. Especially Germans.’ This elicits another cascade of laughter from the group and an animated barking of German phrases from one of the blokes. ‘We got an overflood of Germans into Moondani and they were the ones who wrecked it actually’, continues Sativa. ‘Yeah, the Woofers were mainly German as well—they really get into it, I don’t know what their problem is’, adds Maire. Woofers are casual visitors who want to Work On an Organic Farm. ‘They travel around to communes . . . and will work half a day for food and board.’ The commune registers the kind of work available at the Neighbourhood Centre, which liaises with the Woofers’ Association. It all sounds very unspontaneous for such a supposedly laid-back lifestyle. But then isn’t house burning also a bit far removed from the hippie ethic? Another general chuckle. ‘Well you get the bad with the good’, says Maire, philosophically. ‘In suburbia you’ve got a highway next to your house, and that’s probably worse for kids than a house burning down once in a lifetime would be.’ Anyway, as someone very practically points out, ‘Not every household’s going psycho at the same time. When there’s maniacs around, the kids can go to the next-door neighbour’s house. There’s always that refuge for them.’

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Shelter from the Storm

Craig and Maire at home with their twenty-monthold daughter, Zarra. Before the Young Adults Project got underway at Nimbin, New South Wales, some teenagers were living in humpies, due to a shortage of affordable accommodation in this one-time hippie paradise. (Monica Wolf)

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Another young woman joins the group, toddler and dog in tow. This is Sheree, heavily pregnant again. She and her partner have a three-bedroom house with polished floors and a fenced backyard, for which they pay only $82 a fortnight, as both are on social security. It’s a far cry from the ‘horrible little unit in Lismore’ where the family lived before. ‘It had just a little concrete at the back and nowhere for kids to play. It was just horrible. I was glad to get out.’ Sheree is twenty, a third-generation Nimbinite. ‘My grandma moved here when my dad was little.’ Her folk weren’t into alternative lifestyle activities, they just liked the bush living. Her parents tried Brisbane for a while but came back to Nimbin when Sheree was ten. She went to school there, met her boyfriend and settled into life as a teenage mum. Shy and quiet-spoken, she doesn’t socialise much with the others these days, taking it easy till she’s had the baby. But it will be different after that, she laughs. For the moment, all she wants is to be allowed to stay on in their large, comfortable house for as long as possible.

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Rainbow’s End Luke, on the other hand, doesn’t think that far ahead. An articulate, confident type, he is the last to arrive. He was born while his parents were visiting Nimbin in the early seventies. They returned to live on a ‘multiple-occupancy’ when he was seven. Growing up there has made him wary of group living. When I first came here I tended to stay out of all the social group activities just because I find it can make it too hard to keep on living, doing what you do. Personal conflicts start coming out or people might decide to have a fight or something . . . like the other day I sent Zac over here to borrow a shifter and Maire thought I didn’t bring it back from the last time I borrowed it, which I did! It ended up being a misunderstanding ’cause my neighbour’s name is Luke as well, and it was he who hadn’t returned the spanner. And that’s the sort of thing you come across when you’re living in groups of people. Whereas when I moved into Lismore to go to university, you don’t know who your neighbours are and I like it like that.

At twenty-four, Luke is the oldest of the group. He shares a unit with Daniel, who had been a year below him at school. Although Luke is ‘a musician by choice’, he now earns a living doing desktop publishing and systems administration for the Lismore newspaper, the Echo. I was studying music at university. I bailed out because they wouldn’t let me change to multimedia . . . they wanted me to do a unit I didn’t like, so I bailed out of that and bought myself a computer. And I’ve just been teaching myself that for the last three or four years and got a job doing that sort of stuff and now I just can’t seem to get away from it.

Luke had been living with his mother out of town, having broken up with his girlfriend and moving out of their shared home, when he heard about the new housing project. He was attracted not so much by the rent—because he earns a reasonable amount, he pays nearly $70 a week— but by its situation. I work from home and use the Internet a lot and I need a place where I have got reliable power and a decent phone line . . . when I was living out at Crofton Road, the phone lines were terrible because it’s going through gullies and trees . . . And it’s really good having a place so clients can actually come and see me in town, rather than walk up some old hippie trail and get lost on the dirt tracks, wondering which one it is out of these ten hippie shanties that Luke is in, ‘Where’s Luke?’

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Shelter from the Storm

Luke Hopkins in Nimbin, still a centre for alternative lifestylers. Luke’s childhood on a hippie commune has made him wary of group living: ‘personal conflicts start coming out’. But as a freelance computer buff, he enjoys the convenience of his unit at the Nimbin Young Adults Project. ‘Clients can actually see me in town, rather than walk up some old hippie trail and get lost on the dirt tracks.’

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Luke’s desktop publishing has taken off and with his drive and ability, he will probably do very well. But although he’s already relatively highpowered, he’s not exactly Jamie Packer. His idea of a work-friendly location includes a place that’s good for hitch-hiking. I don’t have transport, so if I was going to be working at the Echo, I’d have to move into Lismore, there’s no other way about it. There is no way I could hitch into Nimbin every day and then hitch into Lismore, it’s just too much. Whereas here, I just wake up, walk down the road, put my thumb out, and there’s that many people I know who work in Lismore, I just get a lift literally within five minutes every morning.

The group came to order. A representative from North Coast Community Housing is present to discuss any problems, issues or complaints. Someone raises the issue of rights to the communal area—one person had ‘hogged’ it last week to do some sandblasting, blocking access to some of the others. It’s agreed anyone wishing to use it must notify the others in advance. Someone else complains about dog shit. Sheree promises to keep the dog inside the fenced yard in future and clean up any

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Rainbow’s End offending mess. No rental arrears to report. A couple of maintenance items and that’s it. It all seems very civilised, very mature. Has their exposure to communal living made them particularly skilled at negotiation? Laughter all round. Strangely enough, many of the communes in the area had more rules than this government-sponsored initiative. ‘They’ve all had twenty years to keep their petty little debates going’, says Sativa, with some bitterness. Some had more stringent selection criteria—only friends of those already living there would be admitted, and then strictly on probation, which might last from three months to a year. If they ‘passed’, then they could buy a share and have a say in the organisation. Having witnessed a lot of conflict, Luke is fairly cynical about how some of the communes operated. Probably the only thing most of the people had in common, they wanted cheap land . . . so it’s like if you’re going for a job. You’re not going to tell them your negative points, you’re going to try and make it seem like you’re going to fit in . . . but after you get comfortable in your little community, your fascist tendencies come out and you tend to feel more relaxed about letting them out . . . We had this couple . . . they pushed really hard to get accepted before the year term. They were going around always being really nice . . . and they actually got accepted within six months, which was totally against the rules of the property, and then literally a few weeks after that, they just started being complete arseholes. And they ended up leaving, because everyone thought they were fuckwits. Our community was started as a pastoral company where we all bought shares, so it basically had a lot less paperwork because it was set up more like a rural co-op . . . They had this book in the communal kitchen where you write messages . . . you know, the conflicts were aired . . . But it was interesting because I got hold of the book when I was a bit older and I was looking back through the messages and it’s like all there is all this bitching and fighting, and it’s just like everyone was sleeping with everyone else—no wonder they all left! There is actually no-one there who originally started there, they’ve all gone on and left. No-one does anything communal out there now except work on the road basically. There’s just a lot of people who like their little nuclear lifestyles. There’s only one community in this area that I see still functions as a commune and that’s Bodhi Farm. You see, communities have got to have

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Shelter from the Storm something in common. Basically the only thing most of them had in common around here was people needed a place to live. Bodhi Farm differs from that . . . because they were into meditating regularly, they don’t like drugs on the property . . . they didn’t just need a place to live, they all had a spiritual common ground!

....

Fran Hopkins is pleased with the way the Young Adults Project is going so far. It’s wonderful. They haven’t been working together as much as a team, or a community, as I would have imagined, they were actually very independent of each other, but they kind of look out for each other a lot . . . The funding ran dry and it’s been difficult for us to complete the landscaping. We’re actually fighting the Council at the moment to get them to clear a pathway along the side for prams . . . The tenants have also got together and put in a submission to purchase a rainwater tank and erect it themselves, and hopefully a barbecue area too, and they are wanting to put in fruit trees and a bit of permaculture. So it’s going as well as can be expected.

There have been a few changes to the line-up in the first six months. One girl left after a personality clash with Sativa. ‘She just had no respect.’ A bloke who started each morning by hawking phlegm onto his neighbour’s lawn is also gone. ‘Grommets’, or surfie parasites, are not wanted, someone explains. So have they got the mix right now? Will the Nimbin Young Adults Project, with all its bourgeois mod cons and conventional appearance, prove to be the commune par excellence in the area? Bruised as she is by her earlier experiences, Sativa is optimistic. ‘I think we could make a better job of it—our generation. At least this one has started out right.’

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19 Running from the Rent Man Jennifer Westacott

I don’t remember anything glamorous about being in the working class . . . I remember it being hard. I remember it being embarrassing lots of times because you couldn’t go on excursions and do things you wanted to do. I remember my mother washing until two o’clock in the morning because she was doing two jobs—that’s what I remember about it. I’m not saying we had a miserable life, we did the best we could . . . but I think anyone who wants to glamorise, like ‘The Waltons’, growing up in a poor family, hasn’t grown up in a poor family. I think people want to make it trendy . . . but there is no glamour in it and if people say that then they don’t, in my view, know what it’s like to hide from the Housing Commission guy when he turns up to collect your rent because it’s not there, or to have your electricity cut off for a few days because no-one had any money to pay the bill.

Jennifer Westacott no longer has to run from the rent man. As Deputy Director-General of the NSW Department of Housing, she now controls their fate. Sweet as that turnaround is, she did not choose her career path to get revenge. But for the last five years or so, thousands of tenants have reaped the benefits of having an administrator with a unique combination of professional expertise and personal experience of public housing issues. Born in 1960, Jennifer grew up in one of about 200 houses on the Springfield Estate, near Gosford, on the NSW Central Coast.

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Shelter from the Storm My memory of it was always being embarrassed to say where you lived and never telling people your actual address, because we were branded—even in those days when the estates didn’t have the reputations they have now, people thought less of you because you were in Housing Commission properties . . . so right up to my mid-twenties, whenever anyone asked me where did I come from, I’d say, ‘East Gosford’, which was where all the wealthy people lived. I’d never say Springfield in case they knew Springfield was this housing estate.

Jennifer’s parents had started out in the Blue Mountains, then rented a two-bedroom flat in East Gosford. But with three children, plus a resident grandmother, things soon got overcrowded. The house at Springfield looked a much better option. We thought really the Department of Housing was luxury, because it was a four-bedroom house and we had this huge yard and it was actually quite nice bushland . . . It was certainly not an unneighbourly place, my memories are of a kind of a camaraderie . . . We were a long long way from town and because we were kind of struggling, we didn’t have a car [or] like most people on low incomes our car wouldn’t work for a few weeks, so it was very isolating . . . People think of us being this beach mecca, but getting to the beach was very hard, just getting to the shops was difficult for anyone who didn’t have a car. The entire time I grew up we never had buses on Sunday. My mother and another neighbour went drumming up support but only last year did they have a bus service on a Sunday! To this day it doesn’t have a kerb and guttering on the corner on the bottom road. The estate was kerbed and guttered, but not the border area. (Which I still think just says it all in terms of what local government thinks of public housing . . . ) Everyone was afraid of the Housing Commission. My mother was totally fearful of our tenancy manager and was just terrified of the time he would come to the house. He was a threatening, intimidating kind of a guy . . . and I remember as a kid feeling really frightened of this guy . . . My parents didn’t waste money, because they didn’t have any. They both always worked, so it wasn’t like we had long periods on the dole or anything, but they worked in unskilled jobs that were pretty unreliable. My mother worked at Woolworths and she got casual work most of the time, so it was a pretty unreliable kind of income.

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Running from the Rent Man I don’t remember struggling financially to be a fun thing. It’s not to say you aren’t loved, that there isn’t love in your life. It wasn’t like we were not supported—we had reasonably good family networks, my uncle used to come over and take us to Avoca for a picnic or something . . . and my mother tried to make everything work for us. I think we were probably in a much better position than lots and lots of people living in public housing now . . . My mother was determined that her daughters were not going to have the same life she had had. She made a lot of sacrifices so that we could do our HSC and get to university . . . and my grandmother, who grew up in Scotland, never had a formal education but in her thirties, forties, fifties and sixties took

Until she was in her

herself off to university and ended up writing books. She was a really avid

twenties, Jennifer

reader and I guess she encouraged me to go to university, so it was that

Westacott never admitted

influence of people really pushing us to do something a bit better than be

she came from a public

victims . . .

housing estate, for fear

When she was seventeen, Jennifer’s parents separated. Although she saw less of her father, she was very close to her uncle, with whom she would go fishing and do the ‘tomboy activities’ her brothers weren’t so keen on. Her uncle also nurtured Jennifer’s interest in politics. After toying with the idea of teaching history and English, she opted instead for political science.

of being stigmatised. She's pictured here at the family home on the Springfield estate, near Gosford.

I just started to do it as a subject and ended up getting Donald Horne as one of my tutors and formed a real admiration for him and started more and more of those subjects, and suddenly I was majoring in that and doing honours. I was always interested in being a politician . . . My uncle was a member of the Labor Party and had been in Changi and had been a wharfie, and he was always drumming into us about looking after disadvantaged people and workers’ rights . . . I remember as a kid, I don’t know if compassion’s the right word, but having a sense some things seemed unfair, and feeling very concerned about it. I remember seeing a program on TV about the Holocaust once and being tortured by it for weeks and really disturbed by what I perceived to be wrong and right. Probably now it would be about social justice . . .

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Shelter from the Storm At university it was actually quite hard because a lot of people had gone to private schools, there weren’t many who had come from public housing, that’s for sure . . . For some reason I’ve always been attracted to people who seem to be rich. I always seemed to hang around kids at school whose families were really wealthy, which was bizarre . . .

....

By the time she was 22, with an honours degree in political science under her belt, Jennifer Westacott could hold her own in any company. She was a tutor, then a lecturer, in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney, before becoming a cabinet assistant to the NSW Premier in 1985. With her increasing professional status, the urge to disguise her housing estate background diminished. Curiously enough, around the same time, Jennifer’s career path in the public service switched to housing policy. She insists the move was more by accident than design. This was a specialist program called the Women’s Housing Program and it was via some personal contacts I was working with and they said [to] apply, and that’s how I got into it, and gradually moved from running the specialist programs [into] the mainstream of the organisation, the public housing bit. I never really saw it as a career plan to end up working in the Department of Housing.

Jennifer’s job with the Women’s Housing Unit included researching women’s housing needs—something her mother could have told her a thing or two about. She acknowledges that her personal experience informed her general approach, but she was also garnering an impressive CV in housing policy and administration. By 1989, she was a divisional manager, overseeing the day-to-day functions of community and Aboriginal housing and supervising a range of other programs, from crisis accommodation to women’s housing. A year later she was managing 250 staff looking after 25 000 rental properties in ten local government areas. But though she was familiar with diverse housing needs in New South Wales, she wanted to see the bigger picture. In 1991, still only 30 years old, she was awarded a Chevening Scholarship to study the provision of housing in the United Kingdom at the London School of Economics. She returned with a new perspective on Sydney’s troubled housing estates.

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Running from the Rent Man We don’t have as many high-rise estates as they do. They have estates that just shock you a bit in terms of the size of them . . . Lots and lots of housing was vacant, just derelict, or it was boarded up or people were squatting in it. Not just the odd hundred, but thousands and thousands of units were just uninhabitable. We don’t have that problem.

By the early 1990s, Jennifer Westacott had had enough of theory. Meanwhile, Tony Vinson, a former professor of social work well-known for his work with prisoners and other disadvantaged groups, had Waterloo, Australia’s largest public housing estate, in his sights. This conglomeration of over 2000 units in inner Sydney housed almost 6000 people, threequarters of whom were on social welfare. Vinson and Westacott began a collaboration that would draw on the resources of both the Department of Housing and diverse faculties of the University of New South Wales. Social work students interviewed residents about community cohesion; architecture students suggested more sympathetic designs; and housing staff noted the practical issues. As one resident told the Sydney Morning Herald,15 ‘The main priorities were maintenance. Then getting the lifts working, followed by mediation and help with neighbours.’ Jennifer Westacott was actively involved in the study. The evidence accumulated slowly: Waterloo had disproportionate numbers of elderly folk, single-parent families, migrants and indigenous Australians, not to mention very high unemployment, above average incidence of mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse, and significantly more crime and vandalism than other Sydney suburbs. In short, Waterloo was one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia. Academics had, of course, previously denounced large public housing estates as misguided social experiments, but few studies had led to concrete changes. But at Waterloo, Jennifer Westacott took action. Inside the buildings, kitchens were redesigned and apartments cross-ventilated. There are plans to make the high-rise more tenant-friendly by restricting corridors to every three floors and gutting the interiors to create interlocking units. Most radically, one out of three poky little units would be sacrificed to improve the overall quality of life on the estate. At Waterloo there are two thirty-storey high-rise buildings with 220 bedsitters . . . people would turn up, see this tiny, tiny little room, and they would just reject it. The only people who wouldn’t reject it were people coming out of Matthew Talbot [men’s hostel] and suddenly we had this problem there, this really difficult social mix and elderly people, women

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Shelter from the Storm especially, saying I don’t want to sit in my community room any more because there were all these kind of weird guys hanging around. So we had to do a combination of changing who was living there—but if we didn’t address the physical form of those buildings we weren’t going to solve the problems long-term . . . we have been converting those bedsitters into one-bedroom flats and now we’re able to offer them to couples and a mix of people.

Two flats were created from every three bedsitters. Other initiatives recommended by the University of NSW were more simple. The sizeable Russian community in the high-rise blocks craved outdoor seating where they could get together in good weather. A surplus car park was transformed into tennis courts and a roller hockey court for kids, a giant chess board was installed and a communal garden created. The Department of Housing has spent over $9 million improving the estate. It has also set up resident representative groups to ensure the dialogue with tenants will continue about any future problems. Jennifer Westacott learned a lot from the hands-on nature of the Waterloo Community Development Project. Everything we were involved in at Waterloo was pretty basic at the end of the day. It was not very grand. But in many respects I think that’s what we need to start tackling in government. The community is a bit irritated with grand theories . . . we have to find some practical ways through some of the problems . . . get some common sense into it.

The ‘combination of technical efficiency and humanity’ delivered under Westacott’s leadership impressed even the usually sceptical Tony Vinson. ‘I’m a veteran observer of government departments. There was a time when any self-respecting professional would have been reluctant to be seen in the company of the Department of Housing. I happen to think that it is now on the cutting edge of social development in the State.’16 As far as Jennifer Westacott is concerned, Waterloo is only the beginning. She now hopes to address the troubled broad-acre estates on Sydney’s fringes by converting them to a more sympathetic design and providing a more localised, supportive staff, but also by improving tenants’ lives long-term. We are trying to see whether or not we can generate some employment programs for people—not Mickey Mouse stuff, but things that are really sustainable. So we do get that chance of changing not just who goes into

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Running from the Rent Man them, but changing the opportunity for people who are living there now. Because I think the danger is [that] we kind of forget about all those people and worry about the next vacant house and hope that the next person we put there is going to be a better role model, instead of saying, ‘Let’s give the people who are living there some opportunities and incentives to improve their circumstances’, so they become the role models for everyone else in the street. We want people to accept the housing and want to go there because if we can’t attract people off the waiting list to go there, we are just going to compound the problems in other places and make the waiting times even longer. If no-one wants to live in Waterloo or Claymore, all that does is put more and more pressure on the queues in the Eastern Suburbs, and all that means is that the people who can afford to wait the least amount of time end up on those housing estates and around we go again with the problems. The people who are the poorest people in the community, live in the poorest communities, and it just goes around and around and around. One of the things we’ve been stressing to governments of all persuasions is, [that] you don’t just manage a waiting list, you manage the assets as well. We should be reinvesting in this asset, we should be reconfiguring it. We should be getting those estates and changing them dramatically . . . if I were in the private sector, people would not blink an eye about people regenerating their stock, deciding a building didn’t suit them any more, selling it, demolishing it . . . and that’s really where we got with Villawood [Sydney]. The design, the building fabric, the social problems . . . the most sustainable solution was to stop pouring money into it, demolish it and relocate people, and try and get a housing form on that site that was a mix of mostly private and some public housing.

Sometimes the problem does not lie with the physical surroundings. Jennifer Westacott is also bent on transforming the whole culture of the Department of Housing, making staff more professional as housing managers, more service-oriented and customer-friendly. A lot of effort has gone into trying to break down that power and paternalistic relationship with our tenants and try and build partnerships with people . . . When I joined the then Housing Commission, it was very heavily focused around engineering and technical functions . . . maledominated professions, if you like. We’ve really tried to change who we recruit. We are less interested in people’s technical stuff than we are in

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Shelter from the Storm their people skills and abilities to provide services and work with other agencies . . . Our customer base is much more complex than it was ever anticipated to be . . . people with psychiatric problems and very, very high support needs . . . and we are instilling in our staff the need to be proAs a child, Jennifer

active about customer service and try and solve people’s problems . . .

Westacott used to hide

For the first time ever we have made our new recruits do six weeks of

from the Housing

training before . . . working with people on the counter . . . I think the best

Commission man

thing we can do is try and instill ethics about professionalism. You are not

because the family

there to make that judgement, you are there to provide a service . . .

couldn't pay the rent.

How would you like to feel that it was your mother or sister or

Today, as Deputy

brother? We have also provided clients for the first time with a right to

Director-General of the

complain. And that’s actually been a major cultural change.

NSW Department of

The difficulty lies in getting the balance right between those staff who

Housing, she is deter-

are insensitive to people’s needs, and those who care almost too much.

mined that tenants won't

That’s certainly a danger—that people burn out. Recently in the

experience that fear.

floods at Woollongong . . . our staff were out until three and four in the morning . . . Their own families are under a lot of pressure and there they are helping tenants out, bailing their houses out, driving people through flooding roads, risking their own safety. In all the bad weather recently, we’ve had people going into our 24-hour call centre even though it’s not their shift, taking their kids in, working all night answering phones. The lengths that people go to to provide services in our organisation really amaze me sometimes, the commitment and dedication and loyalty of staff. That never gets picked up in the media . . .

Jennifer Westacott is confident that the Department can achieve its goals, if it is not undermined by external factors. It’s frustrating when you are working in an uncertain funding environment like we are at the moment. It’s frustrating when you don’t get a lot of community support and you feel like there is this tide in our society that’s saying,

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Running from the Rent Man ‘Anyone who has got any kind of dependency is some kind of liability to the community’. That probably depresses me more than the problems of juggling social and commercial things and [running] a very complex business—that’s interesting and exciting. We have got to, as a community, value the institution of public housing . . . if everyone thinks everyone who lives in public housing is a loser, there comes this kind of ‘Oh well, we don’t need to go and fix the electricity, everyone who lives there is a drug addict or a criminal’—yet we know that the vast majority of people just want to live a quiet life and couldn’t afford private rental or to own their own home.

....

A social conscience and a dazzling career? As Deputy Director-General of the NSW Department of Housing, Jennifer Westacott is one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the state—and she’s still only 38. Glass ceilings are not part of her vocabulary. Nor are pomp and pretension. Apart from the large office, the only hint of her position comes from the quiet authority with which she speaks. Few of her colleagues—or clients— know of her personal experience in public housing. It’s not that she’s ashamed of it—quite the opposite. I never stand up in front of a pile of tenants and say, ‘I know what it’s like— I grew up in public housing’, because one, I think they’ll think it’s patronising, and two, there are people who think they’ve got a licence to do a whole lot of stuff because they had a difficult life. I think there’s another way of looking at the world.

It’s hard to imagine this capable, resolute woman as the child who trembled with fear at a knock on the door. But she has not forgotten the trauma. I have thought about a lot of things we do in terms of being afraid of the Housing Commission. When I was working with residents at Waterloo, I really did make a personal commitment to myself—it was just a private commitment, I didn’t share it with anyone—that if I could do anything it would be to try and dispel that fear that people had of us.

The hard times are over for Jennifer’s family. Her mother bought out her home from the Housing Commission under a low-interest loan scheme in the 1970s and has recently sold it to buy into a retirement village. Although her circumstances have changed, she remains close to

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Shelter from the Storm her neighbours from the Springfield Estate. Jennifer also owns her own home, in the ethnically diverse and unostentatious suburb of Dulwich Hill. Her life has not turned out quite as she imagined. My grandmother thought I’d be a bureaucrat because I was always carrying lots of pens around—but I never in my life imagined being one of the people running the Department of Housing. Never!

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20 A Place to Belong Siobhán McHugh

Writing this book, I’ve been confronted time and again with situations that reminded me of episodes in my own life. When someone else’s story is laid out in front of you, it’s easy to see the pivotal points, the crucial decisions that set them on their life path. Then you start thinking about how different your own life might have been had you gone the other way at your own crossroads. A bus strike was the excuse I used to leave home. It was 1974 and I was sixteen, marooned between school and university. Our house was on Dublin’s south side, an ordinary three-bedroom semidetached on an estate built in 1951, the year my parents married. The nine families in our culde-sac were modest middle-class stock—a nurse, a barman, a policeman, a mechanic, a public servant and some rarely seen old-age pensioners. My Leaving Certificate results entitled me to go to college but my tender age didn’t, so I got a temporary job testing the breaking point of fibres in a textile lab. It was so boring I took up smoking to while away the hours. To get there I caught the bus from our local shop right across the city to the other bus terminus, a trip that took nearly an hour. Then came the strike. This was my chance. I was desperate to leave home. My father was usually out, but when he staggered in from the pub at night, my mother would attack him about money, and we kids would crouch on the hall landing trying to gauge how violent the row would get and whether we’d have to get

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Shelter from the Storm

The author at sixteen— the age at which I got my first flat. Over the next seventeen years, I would survive everything from decrepit terraces shared with impoverished and unstable misfits, to a traditional Irish cottage complete with traditional lack of hot water. But it was only when rats jumped out of the urinesoaked couch in the house I had just bought, that I discovered the true meaning of squalor.

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the policeman next door to intervene. As a senior civil servant, his wage should have been enough to live on, but what with eating out seven nights a week and buying friends down the pub, he never had much left. Even when he wasn’t around things were difficult. The doctor’s valium cure made my mother fuzzy and distant or slurred and hopeless. One night she summonsed me to her side. She was very drunk, her eyes rolling in a face puffed with crying. She had a bottle of tablets in one hand, a glass in the other. She slowly focused on me. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t take an overdose?’ I knew she was serious. Twice the ambulance had had to come. I felt myself turning to stone. What could I say that would work? She jiggled the tablets. ‘Because we need you. We can’t get by without you’, I blurted. Satisfied, my mother waved me away. We could all sleep now. She’d wanted to leave him years before, but with six kids, where could she go? He gloated over her predicament. ‘Go. Get out of my house. Just go.’ Unless their name was on the title, wives had no claim on the marital home. There was no divorce, no women’s refuges, no child care so mothers could work, not much in the way of social welfare. One enlightened politician who had tried to institute direct child-support payments to mothers had been hounded out of office for his blasphemous notions. My mother eventually separated from my father after 29 years of marriage—and was dead from cancer within the year. I agonise about how things might have been for her— and us—had she only left him earlier. And so I admire Toni Haywood for abandoning her flat, her pride and her independence in order to escape her violent partner and look after Braithe, the child she had not even asked for. But at least Toni had a refuge to go to. At least there was a sole parent’s benefit. My mother could have separated and put her name down for a Corporation house. But they took years to come up, and where and how would we live in the meantime? Prising maintenance out of him would have been a nightmare.

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A Place to Belong Snobbery and shame probably played a part, but I think the real reason we stayed on in our miserable respectability was that, like so many others struggling against adversity, my mother saw education as our only escape. We might eat streaky rashers and wear hand-me-down clothes, but we were Going Places. Jennie George, Jennifer Westacott, Margaret Gleeson, John Alexander and Mark Latham somehow managed it, but no kids from public housing estates got to college where I came from. They left school at fourteen for factories and tech, and after a brief, swaggering interlude splurging their pay on bomber jackets and cigarettes, they moved away, resurfacing a few years later with hard faces and two or three kids. My mother had won a scholarship after coming first in Ireland in the Leaving Certificate, but what was the point of wasting a university education on a girl, who’d only go and get married? As the eldest of seven there were plenty of mouths to feed and brothers coming along who might need support. Like Jennie George’s mother, Natasha, whose ambition to be a geologist was thwarted, my mother was determined that we would have what she had been denied. The other kids on our street went to the local national school, where they aspired to be secretaries and air hostesses. But we went to a progressive private convent school, where we did drama and modern languages and even chemistry and physics in the science lab smelling of formalin, where Sister Fanny struggled to reconcile evolutionary theory and Catholic doctrine. My year caused a sensation when four of us became the first girls ever to do honours maths. ....

When the bus strike happened, I discovered a room to let within walking distance of work. I would share the flat with two receptionists who worked in the airport hotel nearby. I explained to my mother why I had to leave. Strikes could go on a long time in Ireland—the banks had been out for months and we were still under siege from my father’s bounced cheques. I had to work to save money to go to university. My mother was worried—I was much too young to fend for myself. We argued fiercely. I told her I wanted out, she said I was ungrateful. I replied I didn’t ask to be born. She let rip that she hadn’t wanted it either—she’d had to prostitute herself to my father to get him to pay an electricity bill and I was the result. I was stunned. Guilty at having said too much, she gave in. ....

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Shelter from the Storm I can still recall my elation as I carried the vegetable boxes stuffed with my belongings up the cracked linoleum into the dark, dingy sitting-room. Clothes strewn around, LPs with beer rings, fag-ends floating in days-old coffee. This was Living! All that was needed to complete the picture was a Boyfriend. As it turned out, my flatmates handled that side of things. Usually in my bed—having fed him one of the chops I’d bought for my tea. They didn’t need a kitty, they blithely informed me, because they could eat at the hotel. Day after day I lugged home bread and butter and toilet rolls, which they disposed of at an extraordinary rate. But it didn’t matter. I was in My Own Place. The only trouble was it was on the wrong side of the city. One long weekend I had a party. No-one came. My friends were too young to drive and too poor to get taxis. Anyway no-one knew how to get there. Three months later I was back at home. But things were different now. I wore my independence like a badge. I worked, I got paid, I could find another flat. Having my own place to live in consumed me. Blissfully ignorant of the demoralising experiences that lay ahead, I returned to the To Let columns. Ever since English colonisers started evicting Irish peasants from their small holdings, ‘landlord’ has been a dirty word in Ireland. I soon discovered little had changed. In the mid-1970s, there was an acute shortage of accommodation for all the nurses, trainee teachers and students flocking to the expanding universities and colleges. Speculators, often big, shambling policemen from the country, bought up derelict Georgian terraces in the centre of Dublin. To gain admittance to these squalid dumps it was necessary to have ‘references’. I would get the evening paper as it rolled off the presses and head straight for the most likely option. Even though the viewing might not be for two hours, there would invariably be a queue ahead of me, Indian or African students, who tried to compensate for their colour by being extra tidy and polite and punctual. It rarely worked. I remember viewing one flat that would ‘suit three ladies’. Every room in the once-elegant house had been subdivided with sheets of chipboard, with about six inches between beds. Having dispensed with such frivolities as a sitting-room, what had once been a three-bedroom terrace could now theoretically accommodate about twelve. ‘Why don’t you install chinstraps and we could all sleep standing up’, I spat. ‘That way you could squeeze in another ten.’ I was now doing a 40-hour week of science lectures and practicals by day, and 40 hours of waitressing by night. My chance to go to college had

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A Place to Belong come, miraculously, from a cornflakes packet. I had entered a competition—and won a car. My elder sister bought it off me at a bargain price— I couldn’t even drive—but it was enough to pay my fees and have something over for emergencies. I got a job in a trendy new American-style hamburger joint, moved into a share house of retro hippies and poets and hoed into the light relief of cell division and chromatography. I never really had the right attitude to science. At 5.30 in the afternoon, watching the interminable drip, drip of a pipette and knowing I had to be lined up in my uniform with float and tray at six, I would get impatient with empirical method. Everyone knew what was going to happen. The crystals would form as they had a hundred times before. I used to write up my results before they’d happened, hop on the bike and head for the flash hotel where I dispensed drinks and cocktails to tourists and business types. Once I was serving a bunch of men seated under a spiral staircase that led to the mezzanine lounge. They’d been there since lunchtime. As I went up the stairs—the only access—they peered conspicuously up my skirt and sniggered. I felt myself blushing, but pretended not to notice. Next time they were more enthusiastic, craning their necks and commenting lasciviously on my underwear and what I’d be like in bed. They ordered another round, nudging each other and laughing. I didn’t know what to do. The odds were unequal—six of them, one of me, and the customer was always right. I knew they were out of order, but sexual harassment was an unknown concept. As I loaded their pints and chasers onto my tray and heard their guffaws, I reddened again. Not with embarrassment this time, but with rage. I approached their table and stood in front of the worst offender. He was still smirking as I tipped the entire tray in his lap. There was a tense silence. I produced my ashy cloth and started rubbing vigorously at his sodden suit. ‘I’m so sorry’, I trilled. ‘It must have been an accident. If you’d care to tell the manager what happened, I’m sure the hotel will have your suit cleaned.’ They glowered at me. Then they all got up and left. I learnt more about assertiveness, democracy and the human condition through flat-sharing and waitressing than I ever did at college. When I graduated, I got a job as a radio producer and that enabled me to rent part of an undefiled Georgian terrace. The poet Seamus Heaney drank whiskey with us there. A mutual Australian friend had invited him back. Unfortunately, one of the ‘characters’ who regularly drifted in and out of my life was crashing on the floor at the time. He fancied himself as

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Shelter from the Storm a bit of a literary man and declaimed his mystic rhymes non-stop while Seamus Heaney sipped Bushmills and nodded politely. To my eternal mortification and regret, Heaney never got to open his mouth. Even when I had a Good Job in radio, I never thought of buying a house. That required savings, which I didn’t have, and it sounded much too permanent. In 1985 I moved to Australia, landing in Sydney at Christmas time. I was taken to a friendly pub in Balmain and decided to rent a place within reach. It was only then I found the flat was unfurnished. I had arrived with a suitcase, not intending to stay very long. I did not even have sheets, let alone furniture. I got possession on a Saturday and headed to the pub to seek advice. The manager took the keys and instructed me to have lunch. I saw him moving round the bar making notes. By the time a jazz pianist arrived at 4 p.m., everything was organised. When I rolled home, the entire place had been furnished with donations from the regulars—a foam mattress, a green chair, an orange saucepan, an old table. Over the next five years, I watched rents rise, first with the flurry of the Bicentennial celebrations, then general market pressure. I had turned 30, had the first yearnings for a child, and even the once-despised notion of security. In 1990, when a book I wrote won a $15 000 award, I knew it was now or never. That was going to be my deposit on a house. After visiting several banks, dreary financial reality sank in. I was not a good bet. I had no guaranteed regular income and my impressive deposit would be eaten up by stamp duty, bank fees and the like. If I found it almost impossible to persuade supercilious bank managers to give me a mortgage then how much harder must things have been for Kath Rogers? In the dark ages of the 1950s, for a woman to aspire to owning her own home was radical enough, but for an unemployed widow on a pension to take on the entire Housing Commission—and win!—reveals an iron will that is truly remarkable. In the end, by creatively rearranging my career prospects and hinting of several (non-existent) mini-series in the offing, I found a bank that would back me to a purchase price of $100 000. For six months I trawled the Renovator’s Delights of Sydney’s Inner West. Real estate agents curled their lips when they saw me coming. I was unrealistic they told me, meaning pathetic. A unit further out was the most I could hope for. One Wednesday, a slow day for property, I saw an ad for a house in Leichhardt. Instead of using the usual Orwellian excesses of real estatespeak, it was baldly described—‘Detached brick bungalow, needs work’.

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A Place to Belong From the outside it looked appealing. Why didn’t they use that excellent buzzword, I wondered? Then the agents opened the door. ....

It looked like the Young Ones had been entertaining every last derro in Sydney there for six months. The floor was littered with rank opened tins of sardines, beans and processed meat. Everything stank of urine, especially the small handbasin in the corner of the kitchen. There was one cold tap. As I watched, a rat scuttled out from the torn sofa. Shocked, I opened a bedroom. Every inch of floorspace was covered in bottles— brown beer ones, sherry ones, the odd port and whiskey bottle. I tried the second bedroom—even fuller. Outside, the roof, walls and back garden were obliterated with creeper. The Young Ones meet Edgar Allen Poe. I offered a $100 000. The agent didn’t ring back. When I called, he sounded annoyed. He had been unable to pursue the various offers because he could not locate the owner, who, he snorted, did not have a phone, far less a mobile. Every time someone made an offer the agent had to drive around every pub and club in the locality trying to buttonhole Ted, who would probably be so drunk anyway it was useless talking to him. Now I knew why he was selling. No room for any more bottles. I drove past again and noticed a rough-looking character at the door. This must be Ted. I introduced myself. His mother had left it to him. The remnants of her lace curtains still hung in the window. He had nothing to keep him here now, was heading for the Gold Coast. I said how much I loved the house (the outside was nice) and repeated my offer, throwing in the temptation of 10 per cent in cash. Whether it was that or the personal touch, or the fact that the agent got sick of trying to smoke Ted out of bars, the auction sign was removed. I had a house! Although we had exchanged contracts, I was paranoid about being gazumped before settlement. One shrewd investor in the pub had already been trying to weasel the address out of me. One night, unable to sleep, I got up at 4 a.m. and drove over to the house, leaving a copy of my book inscribed for Ted, and a note, in the desperate hope that if he got a better offer, sentimentality might prevail. At last the day came when I took possession. Amidst the spectacular mess I spotted a half-empty bottle of sherry on the mantelpiece with an envelope propped against it. Inside was a key and a shakily written note. ‘Thanks for the book. Very nice. I hope you like it here, Ted. P.S. The wine is good.’ Although I admit I never tasted it, I treasured that sweet sherry, a blessing on my new life as a home owner.

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Shelter from the Storm ....

The author at her Sydney home today. (Mayu Kanamori)

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I used to think I’d done things fairly tough, but thinking about some of the people I’ve interviewed for this book, my life has been a breeze. I left home to escape violence—but Susie in Bosnia and Emad and Hashem in Iraq left because of the immeasurably greater violence of war. I thought my catalogue of casual work, from prawn-packing to horse show administrator, was diverse, until I met the pig-castrating, spaghetti dangling, cab-driving Annette. She didn’t get many lucky breaks—an abusive father, a hopeless husband and a conservative rural society not well disposed towards homosexuals. But she’s ended up claiming her own identity as well as rearing two fine sons who get on well with her and the rest of the world—despite the doomsaying predictions of right-wing fundamentalists in the United States who argue that single-parent families are dysfunctional units that will undermine the whole fabric of our society. I am now a single mother of two boys aged six and three, and even with my own home, finding it very hard going—the lack of company, the

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A Place to Belong endless slog, the loss of freedom. As one who is still struggling, I am flabbergasted, and not a little inspired, by the strength of the single mothers I have come across. Take Sharon Petrie, overcoming a lifethreatening disability and numerous setbacks to gain two degrees—and still finding time to help others. Or older women like Kath Rogers and Bryan Brown’s mother, Molly, who shared an ability to make the best of a situation, an uncommon capacity for hard work, and a willingness to bestow oodles of time, energy and affection on their children, so that they grew up feeling loved and secure. ....

In 1974, the year I left home, the first women’s refuge opened in Ireland. A year earlier, an Irish farmer called Johnny McColgan started abusing the first of his four children. His sickening rapes and violence continued for twenty years, despite his victims making numerous reports to the authorities about what was going on. In 1995, after McColgan was finally jailed, neighbours and relatives admitted they had suspected what was happening but had not wanted to interfere because the Sanctity of the Family Unit was paramount. Thankfully, in Australia today, other values take priority. But it’s not enough to have a society that tolerates unconventional family configurations. Affordable housing is critical to their viability. Of course people don’t always need a house entirely for survival reasons. Getting a place of your own, where you have a fundamental sense of security and don’t have to feel beholden to someone else, is enormously liberating. Grotty as it was, I was transformed by my first experience of living away from home. When you pay your own way and plant your own garden, you suddenly realise you’ve grown up. You’ve got responsibilities, but also control. You can decide how you want to live. But while it was hard enough adjusting to a new life at sixteen, how much tougher it must be at 60! The sixteen elderly Vietnamese at Van Lang were game enough to leave their homeland and the long-awaited rewards of old age and try out a new country, climate, language and culture, only to be rebuffed by their own flesh and blood. Yet instead of just giving up, they started the long and arduous process of organising a co-op. I worked in London in 1974, the summer the IRA let off bombs in England. As soon as I opened my mouth, at work, in the corner shop, in the bank, hostility engulfed me. I was verbally abused, denied service, humiliated in myriad ways and treated with contempt. But at least if I sat

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Shelter from the Storm silently on the tube, I would be left alone because I looked like everyone else. Black people cannot take respite in being white for a while. After interviewing the Aboriginal group which runs the Cooremah Housing Company in Glen Innes, I walked across a vacant block to pick up a hire car from a motel. Realising where I’d come from, the owner started pumping me for information on ‘their plans’ to build on the block. ‘It’ll ruin my business’, he complained. ‘There’ll be hordes of ’em running around everywhere, getting into the pool, creating a disturbance.’ I told him there would be two ground-floor units for disabled and the others were for elderly people. No kids. No hordes. He was visibly relieved. I wondered how, in such a small town, where presumably plans went through Council like everywhere else, it took a stranger to tell him what was happening on his doorstep. I wondered if he would ever actually talk to the people who would be living beside him, or just work himself up imagining how awful they must be. Aboriginal people may well be less concerned with the physical surrounds, the castle-building and endless home improvements in which the average white Australian engages—as if to win an award for respectability. Maybe it’s because they know that no matter how neat their gardens, how well-behaved their children, they will probably never be universally accepted as decent, ordinary citizens. But so what if they don’t want to live the way ‘we’ do? Vietnamese want space for ancestor worship, Samoans want a covered meeting space to sing in, Italians seem to want every blade of grass concreted. Old people want quiet, young people want noise, kids want other kids, parents want peace. Why shouldn’t Aborigines have what they want—room for extended family to visit and respect for the fact that they also do things their way. As Tom Slockee points out, an Aboriginal person’s sense of belonging comes from deep inside. It doesn’t come from owning the perfectly appointed home, the manicured lawn or the shining car in the driveway. A home is much more than a status symbol. As the stories in this book show, where you live shapes who you are. We can’t all own our homes, but we all have a right to feel accepted somewhere. We all need a place to belong.

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Notes

1 Australian, 30–31 May 1998, p. 21. 2 Australian, 30–31 May 1998, p. 21 and ‘The Alexander Technique’ by Pilita Clark, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 1998, p. 40. 3 George Munster Lecture delivered at University of Technology, Sydney, November 1998. 4 Australian, 30–31 May 1998, p. 21. 5 Interview with the author on ‘Connections’, ABC radio, 1985. 6 From ‘Dacey Gardern Suburb—A Study’, thesis by Rodney Kea, University of New South Wales, Kensington, 1988. 7 Interview with Brad Norington, Good Weekend Magazine, 14 December 1996. 8 ibid. 9 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August 1995, p. 1. 10 See Jean Cinis’ own story, p. 47. 11 In fact this has now started at Claymore, with a number of government services operating out of ‘Gumnut Cottage’ at Claymore Shopping Centre. 12 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Oct. 1998, p. 9. 13 Mark Latham, Civilising Global Capital, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 338. 14 Fairfield Community Health Centre, July 1997: Report on the impact of housing on the well-being of the elderly Vietnamese residents of the Van Lang Housing Co-operative. 15 Report by Paula Totaro, 27 April 1998. 16 ibid.

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Index Italics refers to illustrations and captions

Aboriginal(s), 14, 37, 39–46, 72, 118, 145, 146–52, 194, 195, 210 houses for, 149 Aboriginal Housing Office, 146, 148 ACTU (Australian Council for Trade Unions), 141 adoption, 22–8, 48, 59–63 Africans, 5, 14, 122, 204 aged, see elderly Airds, 102, 165 alcohol, abuse of, 1, 2, 3, 5, 14, 17, 42–3, 44, 45, 52–3, 195, 201–2 Alexander, John, 77–86, 203 amenities, 11, 36–7, 176, 192, 196 see also recreation Arabic, 99, 101, 102 ARCH (Association to Resource Co–operative Housing), 65, 175 Argyle Community Housing, 17, 18 see also Macarthur Community Tenancy Scheme art, 5, 67, 69, 70, 71, 76 see also singing arts, 36, 64, 66, 73, 79 assault, 5, 21, 157 see also rape; violence Assembly of God, 3 Association to Resource Co-operative Housing, see ARCH ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission), 146 attention deficit disorder, 25–6, 28 Auburn, 101

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Australian Labor Party, 37, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 115, 163, 164, 166, 169, 193 Balkans, 68, 73 Ballarat, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92 Balmain, 127, 128, 129, 130, 206 Barron, Maire, 185, 186 Batemans Bay, 146 bludgers, 15 Bosnia, 120–3, 125, 126, 208 Bradbury, 102 Brown, Bryan, 29–38 Brown, Molly, 29–38, 209 Buddhism, 93, 97, 175, 176 Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF), 112–13 Bulgarians, 68, 73 Byrne, Chris, 41–6 passim Byrne, Keith, 39–41, 42 Byrne, Marie, 40–4 passim, 46 Cabramatta, 136, 173 Campbell, Diane, 25 Campbelltown, 1–21, 99, 102, 103, 105, 164, 165, 166, 170, 177 Canberra, 14, 21 caravan, 16, 57, 90 casino, 123–4, 125 Catholic, 31, 33, 34, 37, 112–13, 121–2, 129, 203 child care, 7, 123, 125, 202 children, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 22–8, 32–4, 44, 135–6, 162

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Index see also stolen children; youth Chinese, 8 Cinis, Jean, 47–63, 156–8 City West, 124 Claymore, 1–21, 101, 102, 165, 167, 197 communes, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189 communist(s), 75, 109, 111, 115, 117–18, 142, 172, 180 community activities, 7–8, 12, 32, 78, 111, 150–1, 181 community garden, 7–8 community housing, 1–21, 24–8, 39–46, 64–76, 87–98, 117, 120–6, 147, 177–90 Community Services, Department of (DOCS), 24, 160 co–operatives, 64–76, 117, 177–81 Cooremah Housing Company, 39–46, 210 crime, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 18, 21, 102, 165, 182, 195 reduction, 3, 7, 19 Croatian(s), 121 cultural pursuits, 19, 20, 31 see also arts; singing Currey, Margot, 64–7 passim, 69, 71–6 passim custody, 24, 25, 26 Cuttmore, Flo, 43 Daceyville, 107–19 Democratic Labor Party (DLP), 109, 111 Desovski, Mishko, 66, 68–71 passim, 73, 75 disability, 153–60 DOCS, see Community Services, Department of domestic violence, 24, 57, 165, 201–2 drugs, 3, 7, 10, 17, 19, 22–4 passim, 42–4 passim, 144, 145, 165, 182, 195 Dundas, 52, 155

Ecumenical Council, NSW, 101 education, 5, 11, 110, 141, 163, 193, 203 primary, 78 secondary, 5, 34, 79, 113, 126, 140, 203 tertiary, 5, 34, 80, 85, 113–14, 118, 140, 163–4, 193–4, 204–5 elderly, 15, 144, 145, 171–81, 193, 195, 209 Emmanuel Christian Fellowship, 3, 8–9, 10, 20 Emoh Ruo Co–op, 64–76 Erskineville, 65, 69, 75–6 Evans, Kylie, 4 eviction, 17, 44, 45 extended family, 141, 149, 171–5, 177, 179 Fairbridge Farm, 49, 50 Fairfield, 172, 173, 175, 176, 180, 211 family, 9–10, 17, 32–4, 105, 135–6, 148, 150, 162, 209 see also child care; children; extended family; single parent; youth Family Law Court, 22, 24 feminism, 37, 104 Fijians, 3, 8 see also Pacific Islander(s) Fomai, Paepae (Pie), 3, 8–10 Fomai, Reverend Austin, 8 Gam, Tran Thi, 178 gambling, 17, 31, 88, 112, 123 garden, 7–8, 19, 28, 55, 118, 119, 131, 169, 179, 196 George, Jennie, 139–45, 203 Gleeson, Margaret, 107–19, 203 Glen Innes, 40, 43, 45, 210 Gosford, 191, 192 government aid, 16, 32, 85, 125, 149, 165, 166, 167–9, 183

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Shelter from the Storm see also Social Security, Department of Green Valley, 133, 161–70 Gulf War, 99–100, 105–6 Haywood, Toni, 22–8, 202 health, see ill–health; mental health high–rise, 16, 139, 140, 141, 195 see also Waterloo homeless, 16, 81, 127–8 Hopkins, Fran, 183, 190 Hopkins, Luke, 182, 187–8, 189–90 Hosie, Craig, 185, 186 hostel, 16, 17, 30, 101, 139, 195 housing community, 1–21, 24–8, 39–46, 64–76, 87–98, 117, 120–6, 147, 177–90 co–operative, 64–76, 117, 177–81 design of, 6, 26, 167, 176, 183–4, 195–7 estates, 164–5, 195–7 see also Claymore; Daceyville; Green Valley; Springfield public, 3, 6, 16, 29–38, 40, 45, 47–59, 74, 77–86, 91, 99–119, 127–45, 153–76, 191–200 stigma of, 131, 141, 145, 159–60, 183, 192, 193 purchase of, 132–5, 137, 151, 165, 199 transfer of, 54, 94, 98, 132, 155, 157 and women, 93–5, 98, 194 Housing Act, 127 Agreement, Commonwealth–State, 128, 133 Commission, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 40, 52, 77, 78, 84, 123, 127–8, 131–4 passim, 137, 140–3 passim, 191, 192, 197, 198, 199, 206 Department of, 2, 11, 16, 18, 19, 47, 53–9 passim, 112, 116, 148, 149,

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155, 157, 158, 169, 175, 177, 191, 192, 194, 196, 198 attitude to tenants, 56, 59, 132, 149, 157, 159, 197–8 waiting list, 16, 18, 93, 101, 153, 175 Hussein, Saddam, 99–100, 103, 106 ill–health, 14, 15, 51, 79, 94, 96, 102, 123, 125, 153–61, 174, 177–8, 180 Iraq, 99, 100, 106, 208 Irish, 31, 37, 39, 109, 133, 138, 201–6 Janezic, Sheree, 186, 188 Jeftic, Susie (Snezana), 120–6, 208 Labor Party, see Australian Labor Party Lang Labor, 109 Latham, Mark, 161–70, 203 Latter Day Saints, Church of the, 3, 21 Leichhardt, 87, 94, 95, 206 lesbian, 22–8, 87–98 Liberal Party, 37, 38, 109, 111, 133 Lismore, 183, 186, 188 Liverpool, 130, 134, 164 London, 47 Luke, Gary, 66, 69, 72, 73, 76 Macarthur Community Tenancy Scheme, 1, 3, 15, 16, 17, 18 see also Argyle Community Housing Macedonia, 68, 73, 75 Macquarie Fields, 167 Maitland, 25 Matthew Talbot Hostel, 16 mental health, 52–3, 157, 198 migrants, 2, 5, 10, 40, 49, 101–2, 139, 142, 195 see also multiculturalism Miller, Melody, 184 Minto, 155, 165, 167 Moore, Charles, 14–16 Mormon, 21

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Index Mount Druitt, 132, 145, 160 Mozambique, 5 multiculturalism, 8, 19, 54, 68, 73, 104–5, 114–15, 121–2, 126, 129 see also cultural pursuits Murnane, Brian, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19 Muslims, 99, 103, 104–5, 121 NESB (Non English Speaking Background), see migrants; refugees Newcastle, 21, 22 Nimbin, 182–90 North Coast Community Housing, 183, 188 Nunes, Joseph, 4 nuns, 7, 19 Pacific Islander(s), 2, 3, 12, 14 see also Fijians; Samoan(s); Tongan(s) Pacific Link Housing, 25, 28 Panania, 29, 32, 33, 35–8 passim Pendle Hill, 54, 158 Petrie, Sharon, 153–60, 209 police, 3, 9, 12, 19 Port Stephens, 25, 27, 28 prison, 14, 17, 22, 24, 44 Proctor Way, 1–21 public housing, see housing, public Pyrmont, 124, 126 Queensland, 67, 91, 92 racism, 14, 39–41, 42, 43, 45, 204, 209–10 Radburn plan, 6–7, 167 rape, 18, 104, 209 see also sexual abuse recreation, 4, 11 refuge, 14, 16, 24, 202 refugees, 99–106, 120–6, 139, 140, 141, 172–3, 208

religion, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8–10, 20, 21, 31, 33, 34, 93, 97, 103–5, 112–13, 121–2, 129, 175, 176, 179, 184 rent, 36, 43, 111, 124–5, 130 arrears, 16, 17, 18, 191, 198 repairs, 15, 19, 195 Revesby, 34 Rogers, Kath, 127–38, 209 Russell, Dayna, 184 Russia, 139, 140, 141, 142, 196 Samoan(s), 117, 210 chiefs, 1, 2, 7, 13, 20 community, 1–13 passim, 19, 20 Scowan, Sativa, 184, 189, 190 self–esteem, 33, 149, 160, 169 Serbian(s), 68, 73, 121, 122, 126 Seventh Day Adventist, 3 sexual abuse, 88 Seymour, Annette, 87–98, 208 singing, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9 single parent, 3, 5, 22–38, 49–51, 58, 66, 69–70, 88–98, 123–6, 140–1, 142, 145, 155–60, 166, 183, 184, 185, 195, 202, 208–9 Slockee, Tom, 146–52, 210 social housing, see housing, community; housing, public Social Security, Department of, 27, 32, 33, 101, 122, 177, 180, 186 social welfare, see government aid soldier settlement, 128, 130 sport, 4, 25, 33, 36, 41, 196 Springfield, 191–2, 200 stolen children, 39, 42, 149 suicide, 90, 174, 202 Surry Hills, 191–2, 200 Tanzania, 70 teenagers, see youth tenant representatives, 26, 56–9, 156, 159

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Shelter from the Storm Thi, Duc Nhan Le, 175 Tongan(s), 2, 3, 8, 94 see also Pacific Islander(s) Toongabbie, 156, 159 Tran, Anh, 171–81 passim Tuisila, Chief Maik, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 19, 20 Turramurra, 77, 84, 85 Tutu, Angelyne, 4 Tweed Heads, 150 Ultimo, 120, 124, 126 unemployment, 1, 3, 16, 17, 43, 44, 84, 145, 165, 168, 196 Van Lang Co–op, 171–81, 209 Vietnamese, 117, 171–81, 209, 210 vigilante, 2, 3 Villawood, 197 Vinson, Professor Tony, 195 violence, 1, 2, 3, 9, 24, 157, 182, 209 see also domestic violence

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war, 99–100, 105–6, 109, 120–22, 126–30 passim, 138, 139, 172, 177, 208 war widow, 134–8 Warwick Farm, 129, 130, 132 Waterloo, 93–4, 143–4, 195–6, 197 welfare, see government aid; Social Security, Department of Wendouree West, 91 Westacott, Jennifer, 18, 191–200 Western Sydney Regional Public Tenants’ Council, 56–9, 156, 159 Westmead, 127, 128 Williams, Serena, 14 Wingecaribee Community Housing, 17 Wollongong, 198 Women’s Housing Company, 92–5, 98 youth, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 43, 70, 182–90 see also children youth club, 4, 5, 14 Yugoslavia, 68, 126