Resourced: http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2014/millers-point/
John Arnold, Kent Street
The houses of Millers Point can give up former colours, forgotten markings and glimpses of distant lives when you strip back decades of paintwork, John Arnold says.
“While I’m standing there, I’m thinking about the fellow that was standing there before me painting this place,” says John.
“I’m thinking about the person who was actually sitting in the dining room, eating their dinner… Just people, living.”
It has been seven years since John landed in Millers Point after his most recent stint in jail - armed robberies, assaults and drink-driving among his priors; drugs and alcohol, his vices.
“I was in tears when I got the place,” he says of his small public housing studio, one of three units tucked inside what was once a grand Kent Street terrace.
A “grateful” John says his biggest fear at the time was ending up on the street. “That’s why we’re in the system, because sometimes we can’t cut the grade to fit into society so perfectly,” he says.
In the years since, John has sought to patch things up. He got his license as a painter and decorator in about 2010, and has done restoration work on some of the neighbouring Millers Point properties - some of the first former public housing sold to private buyers at about the same time.
He married this year, his wife Jun now five months pregnant.
The Garrison Church where they wed is one of the spots that can be taken in from Observatory Hill, which John says is also the best vantage point to see how village knits together with the city growing ever larger behind it.
“You’ve got the concrete jungle behind you; you’ve these buildings 30, 40, 60 floors high and then you turn around and you’ve got this place that was built hundreds of years ago by the first settlers, and prisoners and convicts,” he says.
“Some [convicts] were given freedom through it and probably lived amongst these places.”
Resourced: http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2014/millers-point/
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