Millers Point Public Housing to go

 Friday March 21, 2014

When Sydney grandfather Colin Tooher's uncle died, he left behind a curious document: a government certificate listing his birthplace as 'USFR'.

It took him a couple of years to realise USFR stood for the upstairs front room in the old terrace on Windmill Street, the place his family has called home for six generations.

On Wednesday, he received another piece of paper from the government: a pro forma from the NSW Community Services Department chirpily headed 'Moving to a new home'.

Tooher is one of about 400 public housing tenants whose Millers Point properties will be sold off by a state government keen to capitalise on soaring property values along Sydney's harbour foreshore.
The brutalist Sirius Tower around the corner is up for sale, too.

'I've lived here all me life,' Tooher tells AAP.

'Born here. And now, we got this.'

NSW Communities Minister Pru Goward calls it a numbers game: she cannot justify annual maintenance bills of up to $44,000 each for these ailing terraces when 57,000 low-income families are waiting for a chance at a home.

'I cannot look taxpayers in NSW in the eye, I cannot look other public housing tenants in the eye and I cannot look the 57,000 people on the waiting list in the eye when we preside over such an unfair distribution of subsidies,' Goward told reporters this week.

For every tenant in upmarket Millers Point, the government says, it could subsidise three tenants in Campbelltown, in the city's southwest, or five down the coast in Warrawong.
Yet Tooher has known no other home.

He was a kid here in the 1950s, when the wharfies and sailors ruled one of Australia's oldest suburbs.
'We played in the streets because the cars weren't around like today,' he tells AAP.

'Our first swimming lesson was down in Walsh Bay, in the harbour. No nets! Just dived straight off the wharf.'

He grew up amid the rough-and-tumble and wild drinking of this neighbourhood, where he would go on to raise three children of his own.

'We'd be playing down in Lower Fort Street and the seamen would say, 'Oh, there's a fight up the Captain Cook Hotel!'' Tooher laughs.

'Well, forget the game of marbles. We'd be straight up there to watch the fight.'

These are the streets Jack Mundey and the union green bans of the 1970s fought to protect.

But those who face eviction remember when there wasn't much love for The Hungry Mile.

Barney Gardner has spent all his 65 years on High Street.

'When the place where I live was built in 1910, they were built for the maritime workers,' he says.

'No one wanted to live here. It had a stigma about it.'

The woolsheds and the bond stores needed workers, and the cheap lodgings lured them in.

Like so many of those who have stayed through the decades, there's salt in Gardner's veins: his father worked on the wharves, his mother sold food to the dock workers, and he would go on to work on the waterfront for a spell, too.

'Our first landlord was the Foreshore Authority, then the Maritime Board of Services. We didn't get rent assistance,' he says.

'It was not a welfare area 'til the Housing Commission took over.'

If it wasn't a welfare suburb before. It is now.

For every 50 Millers Point public housing tenants, according to official figures, 47 rely on Centrelink payments as their primary source of income.

But Gardner says the long-term 'Pointers' are mostly retired blue-collar workers.

'They contributed to society. They paid their taxes. They paid the rent that was required of them,' he says.

'They're living here and now they're being told no, you're not good enough. You're not good enough to live in this area.'

Though there was shock at this week's announcement, there have been rumblings about sell-offs in this area for more than a century.

Authorities during the slum days of the early 20th century seized on a plague outbreak to resume land around the foreshore, though there were murmurs the razing of homes might have been driven less by public health concerns and more by construction plans for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

'The Bubonic Plague,' read the headline for one report in the January 25, 1900, edition of The Sydney Morning Herald.

'Suspicious Case in Sydney: A Family Quarantined. No Need for Alarm.'

The patient was one Arthur Payne of Ferry Lane, Millers Point, a 35-year-old lorry and horse driver employed by the Central Wharf Company.

Payne, his wife, three small children, a servant and a female relative were carted off to quarantine, and No.10 Ferry Lane was 'thoroughly fumigated'.

By the following year, the Sydney Harbour Trust had resumed hundreds of properties around the Rocks and Millers Point - the red-brick homes and squat terraces that would pass into Housing Commission hands in the 1980s.

Today, the mariners and the scent of lanolin are long gone.

Instead, there is the grocery store selling aged balsamic and organic polenta, and the throngs of well-heeled theatre-goers on Hickson Road.

On Wednesday, in the same park where megaphone-emboldened tenants promised to fight, a young bride in a sweeping gown posed for photographs.

Here, in the sunshine, Colin Tooher vows he will not go.

He says he cannot imagine a life in Campbelltown on Sydney's southwestern fringe.

'I can walk down here of a night and I have not got one bit of fear because I'm in me neighbourhood,' he says.

'Even if I go up to Park Street, I'm looking around, thinking, 'Is this bloke drunk? Am I going to get mugged?'

'Well, once I walk through the Argyle Cut here, I know I'm home.'

Read More: http://www.skynews.com.au/local/article.aspx?id=960023