January 3, 2015 Drew Rooke
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| Six generations of history: Colin and Terry Tooher at their home in Millers Point earlier this year. Photo: Tamara Dean |
"C'mon mate. I'll show ya round," says Colin Tooher while chewing the last mouthful of a sausage and onion roll. He is wearing blue work shorts, a loose sky-blue T-shirt, and stained runners with a pair of Sydney Roosters football socks pulled to his knees. Locals know him as the Millers Point Mayor. He has lived in the same house in Windmill Street since he was born in 1950.
We've just attended a community meeting in the Abraham Mott Hall on Argyle Place to discuss what action will be taken in response to the NSW Coalition government's recent announcement that 293 public housing dwellings in the prized harbourside suburbs of Millers Point and The Rocks will be sold off. Col's house is among them.
The meeting saw impassioned speeches from the independent Member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, the City of Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, and numerous locals, who accused the government of transforming Sydney into an enclave for the rich. The speakers argued the need to protect this state heritage area, which in 2007 was described as "a priceless asset of the people of New South Wales and Australia" in Housing NSW's Conservation Management Guidelines. It's a "priceless asset" because of the extraordinary range of intact architecture that dates from the 1830s, when Millers Point was established as one of Australia's first residential suburbs by dockworkers, seaman, merchants and labourers.
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| Encroaching city: Skyscrapers loom at the edge of Millers Point. Photo: Lisa Maree Williams |
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| Sense of history: Millers Point was one of Australia's first residential suburbs, home to by dockworkers, seaman, merchants and labourers. Photo: Brett Hemmings |
The local community also has a unique degree of ancestral continuity with colonial Sydney.
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"See this black asphalt here?"
"Well, it wasn't always like this," says Col, walking along Argyle Place. He points over to a recently filled hole in the road. "Come have a look 'ere." He stands over it, inspecting it like a jeweller would a diamond and then throws his hands in the air. "They've covered them all up now, you see. These roads used to be made of wooden bricks for the horse and cart to bring the goods off the wharves up into town. You wouldn't 'av known that, would ya?' Col laughs.
We continue on through the Kent Street intersection, stopping on the corner of Argyle Lane. Rising in the distance like an urban monolith is a multistorey apartment block – the entrance to Sydney's skyscraper forest.
Col turns around and faces the row of shops between Argyle Lane and High Street. "I'll tell you something about these," he says. "On the corner there was Mrs Smith's pies. And mate, absolutely tip-top. Who knows how many of them they'd sell a day." Next to that was the newspaper shop, then the bootmaker and, at the end, the deli. Across the road was the barber and the butcher. Pants were the only thing Col had to go into town for. "It was like a kid from the bush goin' into the big smoke," he says.
Col admits that the place is different nowadays. "But it's still like an ol' country town – one of the only places of its sort left in Sydney."
Col leads the way down the narrow footpath that passes their front doors. The houses face south and are blocked from sunlight; the air here is chilly. Like most others in the area, these houses have posters reading "Save Our Homes" and "Save Our Community" stuck to the walls and windows.
Col stops at the end of the block of houses, next to the staircase that leads down to the empty Munn Street Reserve below. In the distance, at the bottom of the sandstone hill, are the restaurants and bars of Cockle Bay Wharf and the southern edge of the Barangaroo construction site, soon to be home to James Packer's new $1.3 billion casino and resort hotel, a development the state government has insisted has nothing to do with the Millers Point sell-off. "We used to get on our billy carts 'ere and race 'em all the way down there," Col says.
A barbed wire-topped fence lines Merriman Street. Col presses his head against it and wraps his fingers tightly around the links, as if he is about to rip the fence free. From here it's a 20-metre drop down into a craterlike concrete hole that is to be the car park for Barangaroo. "What a nice bloody view," Col laughs.
This is where Millers Point ends and Barangaroo begins. Across the harbour, waterfront mansions on the tip of the Balmain peninsula shimmer in the afternoon sun.
The fence rattles as Col pushes himself away from it. We walk north to the cul-de-sac at the end of Merriman Street, past the ghost of the Sydney Ports Harbour control tower, through Clyne Reserve with its lone slippery slide and ship-shaped play equipment, and follow the pathway around the headland to Dalgety Road.
Standing outside her home is Paddi O'Leary. She's been a resident here for 14 years and worked as a counsellor for the Salvation Army before a serious accident left her unable to work.
"How are ya, Paddi?" Col yells out.
Paddi gives a smile and a wave back. "Still fightin', Col. Still fightin'."
The public housing units on this street are made of the same brown brick as most others in the area. They're double storey – two units on ground level, two units above – with white-washed wooden railings on their verandahs. There is one unit that stands out though, number 33. The front window and door are boarded up. On the plywood boards is written: "Empty three years. Take 1 week to fix?" Chalked onto the bricks is another message for those in Parliament House: "This is not a dump. Some family could live here."
It is the same story for more than 40 properties in Millers Point.
"That's the government for you," says Col, taking a hard draw of his cigarette. "They say they need to sell off our homes to speed up the public housing waitin' list. What've they been doin' with all these empties, though?"
Locals say the area's slide began in 1985 when control of the public houses was transferred from the Maritime Services Board to the NSW Housing Commission (now known as Housing NSW). The houses, locals lament, were no longer maintained to the same standards and many became neglected and derelict.
Since then, there has been interest by successive state governments in selling off the public housing at Millers Point. In 2008 the Labor government sold 29 heritage-listed homes on 99-year leases to private tenants, which Col saw as the beginning of the end of Millers Point as a working-class heartland in the middle of Sydney.
The most recent sell-off announced by the Coalition government is only an acceleration of this process.
The Department of Family and Community Services says that maintenance on the Millers Point properties in just the past two years has cost the government $7 million. That is $7 million that could be added to the revenue raised by the sell-off, which, the government says, will result in several hundred million dollars to reinvest in the social housing system to help clear the backlog of families waiting for affordable housing.
"But there's been no guarantee made by anyone that this will really happen," says Col. "It's all just pollie chatter." And, Col asks, even if it does save the government money, what about the uprooting of a community of mostly elderly people, who rely on each other to survive and who feel a deep sense of belonging to the place in which they live?
The afternoon storm rolls in and the smell of fresh rain fills the air. "Comin' from the west," Col says. He walks across to Windmill Street, the street his family has lived in for six generations.
"Before I go, I'll tell you one thing," Col says to me. "My wife Terry and I got a calculator out last week and figured out that with everyone living in this community now, there's over 2500 years of combined history." That only includes, he adds, the people he and Terry could count off the top of their heads.
Despite the community's ongoing fight, the government's plan is going ahead and the first houses have already been sold for upwards of $1.9 million at secret auctions that were closed to the public. Once the remaining properties are sold, who'll be left to tell the next visitor that hidden beneath the layers of modern asphalt they're walking on are wooden bricks, laid by the ancestors of people who once called this place home?
This is an edited extract from Meanjin Volume 73, Number 4.
RESOURCED: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/remembering-millers-point-20150102-12cp8k.html
