Full transcript: Carolyn Ienna and Wendy Bacon on the struggle for housing justice

#Save82WPR #FillTheseHomes

Members of the Wentworth Park Road Occupation Committee hosted a lunchtime community gathering at 82WPR on Monday 12 June featuring resident Carolyn Ienna and activist Wendy Bacon. The full video of the event is available here. The transcript below has been lightly edited for readability.

Opening remarks from Carolyn Ienna

The government should extend and defend public housing. Refurbish the properties.

Some of these properties were partly refurbished after evictions happened about two years before the announcement that 82WPR would be demolished. Why can't they just go a bit further? They replaced the gutters and downpipes about six months before the announcement. They've done fire safety upgrades.

They didn't over here. There's a leaking issue. It's been an issue since I moved in because they weren't cleaning the gutters and downpipes. Three times in 10 years is not cleaning gutters and downpipes. And they only did because I kept going to the bloody tribunal.

So the sooner that all changes, the better. It might be too late for me because I've already signed a lease to live elsewhere, where one of my neighbours was moved to. And he has now passed away because of the stress of the move. We've had three people die in the last year.

Multiple apartments were vacant way before the announcement and across the road there are a whole lot of people who are sleeping rough. One of them lived in this building, and he didn't get the support services that he should be getting. I just think it's super disgusting.

Wendy Bacon on the Victoria St occupation and housing justice struggles

First of all, I would like to thank Carolyn, not just for being an amazingly strong person and fighting for low income housing but also for the Acknowledgement of Country. We are on stolen land that was never ceded.

People lost their lives fighting for the right to be on this land and First Nations people continue to lose their lives for trying to be on this land and we should never forget that. I would like to acknowledge Barbara, who's here with us. Barbara was part of a whole group of Indigenous people that I met even before the time I'm going to tell you about. Particularly going back to 1970 when I met people like Gary Foley, Paul Coe, Gary Williams and people who were really standing up and fighting for the right to live in Redfern, for the right to services - the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service – even before 50 years ago. Before that, I remember the days when the Empress Hotel on a Saturday night would pretty well be a bloodbath with police bashing First Nations people living in Redfern.

That whole history, and it's a continuing history, is so important in terms of how we understand our place in the city. Now, I don't want to idealise the past. I don't want to say the past was the same as present. I can tell you a few things about what was happening in 1973. It makes you feel really very old when you're giving talks about what was happening 50 years ago, but at the same time I think there are continuities. It’s important to understand those continuities but not to pretend that it's all the same.

I thought I might just set the scene a little bit. For those of you who don't know, Victoria Street is at the top of the cliff behind Woolloomooloo. A whole strip of very big, beautiful houses that were built in the 19th century. And it's if you like the heart of Potts Point, Kings Cross, overlooking Woolloomooloo.

In the beginning of 1973 there were hundreds of people living in those houses. Beneath that of course was Woolloomooloo, traditionally a very working class area. But at that time developers, just like they do today – and I think this is at the heart of the problem we face – the developers were moving into Woolloomooloo and pushing people out. A lot of people were moved out of the houses before the fight even really began. There were some new residents of Woolloomooloo who were active and there were some very old residents who were living in public housing at that time. A little bit later they wanted to put the expressway through which they ultimately did, and that destroyed a whole lot more housing.

Now then you had Darlinghurst, which was again pretty working class then. On the edge of gentrification, but pretty working class. Developers had moved in there too and wanted to knock over whole streets of what we now see as lovely heritage housing. But at the time it wasn't seen like that. There were actually a lot of fights in Waterloo too. In Waterloo they wanted to knock over a lot of houses. There were fights about the sort of public housing that would be built in Woolloomooloo.

Then we've got Glebe itself. You had, again, a mixture. It was a working class area, but because of its proximity to university and the city, there were already middle class people and lots of students living here. It was still affordable for students. You could get a big share house in Glebe Point Road and not pay much rent at all.

The church owned most of what is now public housing at that time. That's all those streets up in Westmoreland Street, Derwent Street, were pretty much as they are today, physically anyway. Really beautiful streets. The department of main roads had a vision for a great big expressway that was going to come right through Glebe. I know people who moved into Glebe to fight and to stop houses being demolished for the expressway, and some of those people are alive today, if anyone would like to meet them. They occupied Darghan Street and other places.

That was all happening in 1973, so what happened to Victoria Street was in that context.

And ultimately that expressway was stopped. My understanding is that this block here that we're sitting on was designed to fill a block that had already been demolished or was empty. This building is a legacy of that period too.

Complete solidarity with everyone who is fighting to retain this block for public housing in this particular place. I think we can all see, and even the architect says this is a very viable building if it can get restored. And with community input. You can do a lot with community planning and cooperation.

So I came to Sydney myself in the 1960s. We were always getting evicted. Sometimes because we didn't pay rent, but the rent was very cheap. We lived in a whole building, a group of people, in Rushcutters Bay, a whole floor of one of those really great 1920s apartment blocks that are about three storeys tall. We were in a very comfortable house and I think it was for $40 a week. But you did tend to get evicted then too.

Come the beginning of 1973 I was living in a small terrace house. I was very aware of Builders Labourers Federation and the green bans. I think everyone in Sydney at that time was aware of the green bans because they were a very militant union and they stood up for their rights on building sites. Back then in the lat 60s there weren’t even changing sheds on the building sites and there was a wonderful BLF organiser, Tom Hogan. They said, okay this little lean-to is not good enough, we're putting it down a hole. And so they just threw it down the whole lot on the building site. And that, of course, was headlines in the tabloid media, you know, “vandals destroyed”, the usual sort of crap that comes out when unionists stand up. That was the background.

There was a lot of talk at the time about workers control and people having a say in their lives, in their workplaces, where they live. And so out of that sort of militancy the green bans developed. So in early 1973 the green bans were actually well underway. And I'm pretty sure there was already one on Waterloo at that stage. But by the end of 1973 there were probably 60 or 70 and a lot of them were actually about protecting low rent housing in the inner city area. There were also a few that were out in the western suburbs as well. But the main focus was here, because this traditionally was where people lived, and people were just getting shoved out.

Carolyn mentioned a couple of people have died, sadly, and people do die of stress. If you treat people in a way that causes massive anxiety, particularly older people, it can cause death. Now I’m not saying those particular ones. But I do know that because of all the evictions that did happen in Kings Cross, because I was a young journalist at that time, a doctor told me he knew of several people who were pushed out of their homes, who just were bewildered and walked on to roads, or just curled up and literally didn’t leave the house because of how disoriented they were.

So about Easter in 1973 we got a call from a friend who was living in Victoria Street who said, there’s eviction notices out. And in the street when we went down there it was like a warzone. There were people patrolling the street, some of them carrying crowbars. There were removal vans.

Back then we had a thing called protected housing. That probably seems like some bizarre dream now. But protected housing means you couldn't just be evicted from your place. Some people would hang on. Two women I knew in the middle of Kings Cross hung on when they tried to evict them for 11 years I think, just fighting it through the courts. And those rights were all taken away during that period.

Some people in these big houses lived in these little bedsits and what the employees of the developer would do is just walk into these places and just pick them up and take them into the next room so that they broke the tenancy. And then they would say, well you're moving in a week. The removal van would turn up, they didn't have much staff anyway, and they'd be given a very small amount of money or sometimes taken to a place where they could live. Hundreds of people were evicted in this way.

One woman I particularly remember. I will never forget this. Later on I visited her in a room that was behind a restaurant in MacLeay Street. It was a very small room and there was literally mould going all up the walls. Her legs had become very infected and she was quite ill just from the appalling situation in which she'd been placed. And she was one of these displaced tenants.

So to cut to the chase, basically, a lot of people were displaced. The tenants who were less vulnerable or just with a little bit more means were being pushed out to Mount Druitt and other places. Now these days those places half a century later are very vibrant communities. But at that stage, for example, one woman I knew lived in Redfern, and she was just put out with her children out to Minto and that ultimately led to her demise because she was cut off from her whole community. And I know that happened to a lot of Aboriginal people in Redfern who were forced out to Campbelltown. It takes decades to recover from that sort of damage. Not to say that new communities can’t grow, but it's not the way for it to happen. There's too many casualties along the way.

Eventually there were very few people left because of this and we formed a resident action group and the BLF put a ban on the street. I won't go through all the various stages of the town planning but originally that ban was to protect the heritage of the street. And then as the BLF saw what was happening, it was not just for the heritage, but for the low income housing. Which is what we called it then, low income housing. At that moment it wasn't public, that was all private, although there was public down in Woolloomooloo. So we had green bans on but the developer, who was linked with organised crime in Kings Cross, was hiring people to go into the buildings to burn down inside the houses, to destroy the marble fireplaces, so the places were being destroyed from within.

So we made the decision – and I'm not sure what day it was, but I know it was roughly about this time 50 years ago – that we would occupy houses. And so we did that and gradually we probably had about up to 100 people in this squat in various big houses. I eventually moved in there too and I've got to say it was the best housing I’d ever lived in because it was wonderful with the back of those houses overlooking Woolloomooloo. The critical thing was that the Builders Labourers and some of the tradespeople who were in the CPA at the time – Hal Alexander is one I remember – came and put on all the electricity. Hal lived to a very old age and ended up living in the public housing in Erskineville. A wonderful person, he’d just turn up and say the electricity’s on now. We had a phone eventually, we had plumbing restored, gas. There were just a lot of people in the community on side with the green bans and didn’t want to see these buildings pulled down and wanted it still for the community. So we had very big street parties. One person I thought I should mention is called Mick Fowler. He was a jazz musician. He was a seaman and I lived in the house where Mick was a tenant. So when all this was happening and we were moving in Mick was actually at sea. I always think about Mick because he's another person I think died of stress as a result of the whole thing. Stress that lead to heart problems and a long long struggle for him. But he came back and all of his belongings were on the verandah of 115 Victoria Street.

Now, this to me has always been a story of how factionalism, which is so rife, unfortunately, in leftwing movements, can be overcome. Mick was with the seamen’s union, so he was with the Socialist Party of Australia and the green bans were backed by the more progressive and much more open minded Communist Party of Australia and various others. I was more of an anarchist. So lots of other people were about and not in any of these particular groups. But anyway, the seaman’s union at that time didn’t back the green bans. So was he going to stay loyal to the union, or was he going to back the green ban? He actually sat in a corner for a whole night with his head in his hands and in the morning he got up and said, I’m going to back the green bans. He stayed in the seamen’s union and of course all the grassroots people were behind it anyway. Some of them did music with him and, you know, I think beyond the leadership level there was never really any question about where the wharfies and seamen stood on the green bans. They had always been very solid with things like anti Vietnam war marches and all of that and with Indigenous struggles as well.

So that was sort of what was happening in Victoria Street. We ran it like a co-op, we had meetings. I don’t want to idealise that either because not everything was wonderful by any means. Nevertheless, we had a child co-op, we actually knocked down fences between houses and did some vegetable gardens, people began renovating the houses. And this all went on for months, for the rest of that year. At the time it seemed like a long time but it was really only six or seven months.

Meanwhile, the whole Woolloomooloo situation was there was a very strong action group there too, to defend the public housing. Some interesting issues came up there, because what the public housing people wanted to do was to pull down all the little terraces in Woolloomooloo and build what we now have in South Waterloo. I can’t remember what they were called, a particular sort of unit at that time. They had persuaded a number of the men that this was the best option. The women were persuaded by I think Jack Mundey and other women as well that it was possible to get into these little terrace houses and put kitchens in them, because then the kitchens were outside. Put kitchens in and put bathrooms in and they’d be really great to live in. One woman called Delly was an absolute middle warrior and eventually saved the terrace houses. That's why we now have those streets of terrace housing in Woolloomooloo and it is still a place for public tenants down there who have really good secure housing.

The thing that happened in Victoria Street was that ultimately the developer, with the police and with the government, decided the squatting had to end. But it is interesting that for months we were squatting. And the same thing was happening in London, and whole streets like Darghan Street here. At that time it was accepted that you could maybe move into a place. It was happening on the Lower East Side of New York too. You could actually make a home there until someone else maybe absolutely decided they wanted it. In some places in the Lower East Side, I know a woman who lived in a place where they squatted and eventually the City Council of New York gave it to them and that's a place called Bullet Space, now a cooperative art gallery if you happen to be there.

Just after Christmas in 1974 we got word that we were going to be evicted. There were 200 police gathered outside Darlinghurst police station early in the morning. The builders labourers had come down over Christmas and built very big scaffolds around the houses to try to protect them. Quite strong structures, but turned out to be not enough. We were pretty much awake all night in different houses along the street. Other people in Sydney, some of whom lived in Glebe, came to be in the houses to take a stand with us. And they got all the bouncers working in the bars in Kings Cross and just paid them I guess for a morning’s work and they were loaded on to these trucks with these great big sledgehammers backed by the police.

They came bashing, bashing into the houses. There's a friend of mine called Val Hodgson, who I’d actually edited a student paper with, she had actually helped build her structures herself and they were pretty hard to knock down. And they lasted, I think, a couple of hours. And then some people went up the chimneys and sat on the chimneys in Victoria Street for hours.

People sometimes say about these sorts of actions, well, what's the point of them, it's all rather dangerous. That particular action probably was dangerous. But it also drew people to the street, and media to the street as well. By the end of the day, it was a pretty sad scene with all the belongings. We'd all been arrested, but by then we were back on the street. And it was sort of devastation, but there was enormous attention on it.

After that, Mick Fowler, he was the only remaining tenant. And he stayed. So we're talking now early ‘74. He stayed. This again speaks to his courage. He was there in his house at night alone surrounded by people saying, we'll kill you or bash you. And I mean, I know even today, we're hearing all the time about people being threatened with rape and bashing and all this sort of thing. But he was alone in that house, but people maintained contact. You know, builders labourers and friends would go down and visit him. Nevertheless, we couldn't be there because the whole place was by then surrounded by armed guards and other sorts of guards. And a lot of violence did happen.

One thing I didn't mention is the original person who started the residents’ action group got kidnapped for three days quite early on. That frightened a lot of people. And it was organised crime that did that too. He was very frightened at the time but later he came out publicly about that.

Now, enter at this point a woman called Juanita Nielsen. Juanita Nielsen was a very upper middle class person. I actually knew her but she would have seen me as, you know, an absolute scruffy sort of bottom of the heap type of person. But we did have communication. She actually preferred the Woolloomooloo people because they were much more solid citizens than what the squatters in Victoria Street were. Nevertheless, she was there and she herself changed. Through political action, sometimes people are transformed. And that's why this sort of action you've taken is so important. If you just sit and talk about it that can be quite disempowering. However, there's always risks and consequences that follow.

Going back to Juanita, she was transformed. She actually came across to the idea of the green bans. She had this little local newspaper, called Now, which was full of advertising. But she then decided the only editorial copy would be campaigning to save Victoria Street and Woolloomooloo. So it became a bit of a threat because she had the money to print them, she wasn't making much money. And she had this little terrace house she owned, which you can see still today at the top of Victoria Street. It's got a plaque outside. So she got to know Mick and she also became very involved in the saving Woolloomooloo action group. Anyway it was a very dangerous position then because the street was pretty deserted.

People had moved on, but were still involved, and she was there in this little house and Mick was his house. There were threats for sure. She met with him and Vic who was president of the FEDFA – which was a very significant union back then – who only died two weeks ago. He and Joe Owens, one of the BLFs, went down and met with Mick and Juanita was there. Vic walked her back to her house that evening and then she went off for a meeting at The Carousel club the following morning. There's a huge amount written about this so I'll just say that she was murdered, she was disappeared, and it was certainly due to her fight for Victoria Street.

There was a lot of corruption. A big organised crime boss at the time was involved. He had interests, we managed to demonstrate that with company searches and things when I was just beginning to be a journalist. So we had the most frightening people in Sydney involved, her standing in their way. She was disappeared. She was a disappeared journalist.

Just before that, about two or three weeks before she disappeared, an agreement was formed between the Whitlam government (which was later that year to be dismissed), the local government and the state government to save Woolloomooloo. So Woolloomooloo was saved for low income housing, and that was a huge victory. We didn't save Victoria Street for low income housing, we saved the houses. We wanted the federal government to buy Victoria Street too and we had a vision for cooperative housing. That didn't happen.

Recently I looked up how much one of the houses had changed hands for and I think it was $17.5 million or something obscene like that. And you know, that just reminds me that the core of this whole problem, which is the continuity that has never gone away, which actually has gotten now to a more serious crisis point than it ever has before, is that physical material property, homes, are mainly a means of making profit. That is the underlying problem. That people are looking at this land over the road, the public land where the fish markets are going to be, thinking how much money can we make, or who can buy these really expensive apartments. And maybe we'll put a little bit of what we call social housing in there too. And we can fight for a little bit more. But until we actually solve that problem that the developers run this city, I don't think we can really get a city where there's places for everyone to live in dignity, and in good community where they can support each other.

So that's what I see is happening now. Glebe of course was also saved, partly by the federal government that bought the church housing. In terms of the bigger fight, Victoria Street was symbolic, of, I think, the toughness of the fight and the violence and the fear that we had to confront there. It was certainly a frightening time for me when my friend Arthur King was kidnapped, and I'd be walking along the street and thugs would be sitting on chairs talking about rape very loudly and that sort of thing.

This will be my last point. Just to go back to the beginning, and the situation for First Nations people and the fact that so many people were pushed out of Redfern at that time. Not all the houses were occupied. And there was a young woman who was homeless and went into one of the houses. And overnight, this was while the squats were on, the house burned down and she died in it. Now, that was a terrible, terrible thing to happen. There was evidence that the police didn't properly investigate, that was for sure. I remember at the time Kay Blair said, and I think she said more recently in a documentary on Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance that if it had been one of the white middle class women who were involved in Victoria Street there would have been a bigger fuss. And I think that is true. Looking back I really reflect on that.

The more important time for now, is now. How do we continue to fight for housing in the inner city. Just as I was walking along here I met Norrie going away on her bike. And you know, I really don't think it's good enough that people living in places that are meant to be secure housing, as you said Carolyn, I don’t think it’s good enough that people don't know where they're going to be in under a year. Who thinks that is acceptable?

The politicians, and the minister in this case, have to make decisions. And what I would really like to see is Rose Jackson make a decision to come down and set up a community planning group to resolve how this particular place can be used and fixed up, and maybe even something more done with it, I don't know what the answer is, it's not for me to say.

But I'd like to see something more than just sort of, “we'll do something good in the future”.

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This occupation is supported by Action for Public Housing, the Antipoverty Centre and the Sydney University SRC. Other organisations who want to endorse this action can email actionforpublichousing@gmail.com

Our key demands are: No privatisation of 82WPR and no demolition. All empty dwellings to be immediately filled with people on the public housing waiting list. Adopt the lower cost proposal to build more public homes at the back of the existing site without knocking down existing dwellings in a housing crisis.

Action for Public Housing is a grassroots community organisation of public housing tenants and supporters. 

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