“You want some
smoko?” asks a woman with a pram, three metres inside the Block.
“No thanks.” – “You got two dollars?” demands another. “No,
sorry.” “Liar”, she snarls and stumbles towards someone else.
“You got two dollars?”
A few paces towards the heart of the Block, on a grassy
knoll with striking views of the city skyline, the picture is quite different.
There’s a fundraiser on today, to renovate a dance space at the Elouera
“Tony Mundine” gym, and a band is playing on a makeshift stage. Kids
dance and line up for sausages: locals and community supporters picnic in small
huddles, laughing and moving to the music. Directly behind the stage is the
back wall of the gym, covered with a painting of the Aboriginal flag: yellow
for the sun, red for the earth, black for the skin.
To the right is Eveleigh
Street, the most infamous of the four narrow
roadways that frame what has become known as “the Block”, the badly
deteriorated urban hub for Aboriginal people in Sydney. About halfway along Eveleigh Street,
the last in a row of terrace houses looks like a casualty of the Blitz.
Blackened shingles hang loosely from its soot-coated roof frame.
An old yellow sign shows the crossroad is Holden Street. The name of the iconic
Australian car company is the symbol of the Australian dream: the Holden in the
driveway of the three-bedroom suburban bungalow. In the heart of Redfern, it
adorns a burnt-out building. The irony seems callous.
In 1973, Prime
Minister Gough Whitlam provided the initial grant to the Aboriginal Housing
Company (AHC) to allow the first housing purchases on this parcel of land in
Redfern and the Block became the birthplace of urban land rights in this
country. At that time, there were 102 houses in and immediately around the
Block. Now, only 19 inhabited homes remain. While some have fallen victim to
arson attacks by disgruntled tenants, others have been razed by the AHC to
prevent their use as drug houses. More than anything else, drugs have been the
scourge of this place, bringing unemployment, crime, poverty, sickness and
death.
The land itself is just under 8000 square metres. But what
the Block lacks in size, it makes up for in significance. For the people who
populate it – whether residents or visitors – it is the cornerstone of an Aboriginal
presence in our biggest capital city, a meeting place for indigenous people
from across the country and a landmark that serves as a reminder of our native
people to the other 98 per cent of the population.
Shane Phillips lives on Holden Street. He is a long-term resident
of the Block, having moved in at the age of five with his father, Dick Blair,
one of the founding members of the AHC, his mother and his eight brothers and
sisters.
His father went on to become the local pastor, a community
role model; his eldest sister died of a heroin overdose. His experience of the
Block illustrates its polarity – the way it can give hope and take it away.
“It’s been tough,” he says. “We’ve learned the hard way, that’s
for sure.”
The 41-year-old skipper of the Tribal Warrior vessels – two
historic boats that host cultural tours on Sydney harbour – is desperate to find a way
forward. “I’m passionate about change because generations of our people will
survive because of it. If we can’t have one community in Sydney – the front-line of the colony – that
can be a positive place for our people, then they might as well just shoot us
all.”
The answer, he says, is to give successful Aboriginal people
the opportunity to reshape the Block from the inside out. “Now is the time
to give us a real chance,” he says. “If you were to put working
people in here who want to raise their kids and not worry about drugs in the
street, who care about neighbourhood watch and cultural values, you’d see a
vast change coming about.”
That would be a major turnaround to what exists now. To many
Sydneysiders, the Block is a no-go zone: a drug-, alcohol- and crime-ridden
ghetto across the road from Redfern train station. Some consider it a blight on
the landscape and want it bulldozed; others suspect developers have plans to
seize it and exploit its obvious commercial potential.
Few seem to know that for the past six years, the AHC,
together with some of the city’s leading architects, has been working on a $60
million redevelopment plan to regenerate the Block into a thriving urban centre
for Aboriginal people and for visitors, including tourists. They want to
demolish the Block and replace it with 62 residential dwellings – two-thirds of
which would be sold to owner-occupiers. The Pemulwuy Project, named after the
first Aboriginal freedom fighter, would include an indigenous business college,
student hostel, gym, retail outlets and an art gallery. A communal meeting
place called Red Place
would incorporate a playground, giant television screen and a park.
In the AHC offices on the top corner of the Block, between
Lawson and Caroline streets, the housing company’s CEO, Mick Mundine, speaks
passionately about the plans. “This is going to give our people a bit of
self-esteem and hope for the future,” he says. “Our people have lived
without hope but I think with this project they will be able to see a bit of
hope coming to reality.”
Part of the formula, he says, is that the plan would be entirely
self-funding, via money raised through home sales and private equity. “We
aren’t relying on any government funding,” he says with pride.
The project has some heavyweight advocates – its taskforce
is chaired by Tom Uren, former minister for urban and regional development with
the Whitlam Government, and NSW Governor Marie Bashir and Lord Mayor Clover
Moore have indicated support.
It also has some heavyweight opponents. “I’m very
sceptical,” says NSW Minister for Planning Frank Sartor in his Phillip Street
office. Sartor is also the head of the controversial Redfern-Waterloo Authority
(RWA), which was set up in 2004 to oversee redevelopment in the area and has
the ability to override local councils and heritage laws, to grant concessions
to private developers and to compulsorily acquire land. “Extremely
sceptical. But you know, the planning considerations will be on the planning
merits and if they get approval, good luck to them.”
On this, Sartor acknowledges he will have the final say. He
has already laid out the planning considerations. Under these rules, the
Pemulwuy Project – which the AHC hopes to lodge with the Planning Department in
the next couple of months – won’t be allowed in its current form. “The
challenge for the AHC,” Sartor said in August, “is to come to the
table and work with us on what we can support and back as a sustainable
solution.”
But Mundine claims the minister has said the project is
“not negotiable’. Nearly two years since talks disintegrated, he has
adopted a similar stance. “This is a privately funded project on privately
owned land,” he says. “I think the Aboriginal community has done
enough compromising on this issue.”
A battle of attrition has ensued, fuelled by bad blood on
both sides. The AHC have developed a belief that Sartor is out to hinder and
not help them. “He says, ‘It’s my way or the highway,” says Mundine.
“He won’t listen to our reasons.” Sartor denies this, saying,
“They have chosen not to take the conciliatory path; they’ve chosen the
moral highway path.”
Despite a history of
bickering and trading insults in the press, Mundine and Sartor have more in
common than they may care to admit. Both effectively want the same thing: a
development that has a strong likelihood of working, based on a mixture of
residential, commercial and cultural facilities tied to a robust social
services program.
But they remain at loggerheads over one key issue, and it is
on this issue that the project threatens to tumble. The AHC wants 62 houses.
Having already shifted from his original offer of 19 houses (to replace the
ones currently occupied), Sartor says 42 is the maximum number he would allow
if the AHC wants commercial development there as well, which they do.
Sixty-two is significant, say the AHC, because it is the
number of Aboriginal families in the Gadigal clan who occupied the land – now
known as the Block – when white settlers arrived in the 1790s, before that
population succumbed to smallpox. And, according to social planners engaged by
the AHC, 62 dwellings equates to a population of 400 – the critical mass they
say is required to make the project work. This relates to a theory that in
order to create a viable community, the residents need to be self-policing –
and 400 is the minimum needed to do it.
In a sense, then, the debate might be said to hinge on 20
houses. Phillips, who became a member of the AHC five years ago after a long
period of scepticism towards the housing company, sighs. “You know what?
In this case I can see the advantages of a compromise. It would be fantastic to
see most of those houses and also Aboriginal businesses in there but they need
to move quickly because the place is getting worse. Someone’s got to humble
themselves.”
Dennis Weatherall
rents his house – just a few terraces down from the burnt-out shell on the
corner of Holden Street
– from the AHC. “We’re ready for a change,” says the 59-yearold, who
runs the Community Development and Employment Program for the Redfern
Aboriginal Corporation. “With better housing, you’d get better tenants and
they’d feel like there was a sense of ownership there so they’d look after
their houses. That would give us the opportunity to grab the young people and
give them the opportunity to move into full-time employment.”
Daniel Ariel lives on Holden Street, just near Phillips. A
retired commercial fisherman, a committed Christian and the father of 14
children, he has lived here for 17 years. “Like a lot of people, I used to
believe that the AHC was brutish and that they were in it just for their own
interests,” says Ariel, who changed his view when the Tax Department
audited the AHC in 2003, revealing it was more than half a million dollars in
debt. “I said to them, ‘Why don’t you just sell a house?’ And they said,
‘We’re not selling one Aboriginal house.’ I thought, ‘This guy is willing to
stand up for what he believes in and get flogged personally for it.'”
“This guy” is Mundine. At 59, he has been around
long enough to have collected his quota of critics. But on a late-afternoon
walk around the Block, it becomes clear he is something of a legend here.
Residents come out of their homes to say hello; others call out to him from
their cars. Some ask him to fix broken fences; one wants him to “shoo some
kids out of the gym° – where Mundine trains 15 young women twice a week,
including his daughter Debra. He smiles and delegates the jobs to other people.
He’s busy, he says. He’s been busy working on the Block for 31 years.
“After the late ’70s, everything started going
bad,” he says. “One of the saddest things for me was seeing the
houses on Eveleigh Street
being demolished. Aboriginal people don’t want to stay here like this. What
we’re trying to do is bring the population back and make it sustainable.”
As we turn the corner from Eveleigh Street into Vine Street, the boxer Anthony
“Chock” Mundine emerges from his black Holden and disappears into the
gym. His father and trainer, Tony, is close behind, stopping to say hello to
his brother Mick, They leave the car’s windows open. No one is going to touch
Chock’s car.
Anthony Mundine plans to contest the seat of Marrickville
which is set to take control of Redfern under electoral boundary changes, at
the State election in March. “I would consider whatever strategy is needed
to fight for the Block,” he said earlier this year. “If that means
standing for the seat, that’s what I’ll do.”
Debra Mundine, Mick’s eldest daughter, stands outside her
sister Rachel’s dilapidated terrace on Vine Street. The 36-year-old left the
Block for Waterloo
when her two sons, now aged 14 and 15, were young. Living on Eveleigh Street, down the road from
Muraweena, the now-derelict pre-school, was dangerous, she says sadly.
“They were chucking syringes over the fence while the kids were playing
there.”
Waterloo
is where much of the overflow of welfare-dependent Aboriginal people on the
Block seems to run. But for Debra, living there is a temporary salve, not a
substitute for being on the Block, “I want to live here so I can be back
in my community where I came from.”
Social planner Angie Pitts, from the I. B. Fell Housing
Research Centre at the University
of Sydney, conducted
surveys on the AHC’s behalf to assess prospective applicants for the proposed
42 owner-occupied homes in the Pemulwuy Project. The results showed the houses
would be oversubscribed, she says.
Sartor is unconvinced. “I don’t think anyone will buy
houses there,” he says. Warren Mundine, National President of the
Australian Labor Party, RWA board member and cousin to Mick Mundine, is also
doubtful. “If I’m the type of clientele [Mick] wants to buy back in that
area, then he has to do a lot of work to convince me. I’ve got seven kids – why
haven’t I bought into that area? Well, I don’t like the drugs, the alcohol and
the violence. I’m not exposing my children to that.”
This concern, counters Mick Mundine, has been taken into
consideration. The project’s by-laws force eviction if drugs are found on any
premises. “The biggest problem with dobbing in drug users is the malice
coming from other family members,” says Ariel. “If they had the law
as a back-up to say, You’ll have to go, otherwise we’ll lose our house,’ then
the onus is on the person with the drugs. That’s what’s going to clean the
place up.”
The Government owns close to a third of the land in the area
controlled by the RWA but its commercial value is yet to be realised, thanks to
the general prevalence of high dependency housing and crime in the
Redfern-Waterloo area and, specifically, on the Block. The Planning Minister,
so one argument goes, must want to redevelop the area but he has one key
obstacle – the Block.
Sartor dismisses the suggestion. “This is a social
initiative, not a financial initiative,” he says. “We don’t need to
develop Redfern-Waterloo for the State’s economic growth per se. When people
accuse us of wanting to get developers into Redfern-Waterloo, that is such a
lie. That is a big fat lie. Because, in fact, developers aren’t
interested.”
But in March last year, The Australian Financial Review
reported that at a Property Council of Australia meeting the council’s NSW
executive director, Ken Morrison, said: “There is no way that Redfern is
going to be that commercial mini-centre with Aboriginal housing and the Block
still in place. We need to sort that out before any private investors will be
interested.”
“We are trying to attract investors,” says Sartor,
“but it’s never been driven by developers.” According to an RWA
cabinet document leaked to The Sydney Morning Herald in November 2004,
consultants to the Government advised that a failure to redevelop the Block
would decrease property values by 30 per cent. “The estimated market value
of developments in the area is approximately $5 billion,” it says.
“In order to maximise social and economic returns, the Government must be
able to offer planning certainty to the market within a strategic planning
framework.”
Mick Mundine says the Government has an in-house word for
the Block: “the Blockage”. Warren Mundine says he’s never heard of
it. “The problem is, we have a history here,” he says. “We’ve
got 30 years of failure. I’m going to have a cold Christmas dinner, I’m sure,
with my family. But I’m not stepping away from this. Everyone needs to sit down
and win confidence between each other that they’re fair dinkum about what they
say they’re going to do is going to happen.”
If that is to unfold, there is other history to repair.
“All they’ve said is, ‘We’re going to introduce a component of housing and
we’ve got the money; you’ve got to give us what we want,'” says Sartor.
“They’re breaching the planning controls. They just say, ‘We’re
Aboriginal. If you don’t do it, you’re a raciest.’ Now I will never be cowed by
what I regard as unconscionable racist slurs or any other form of denigration
that isn’t based on the facts. Argue with me the facts because I’m not rolling
over.”
Accusations of racism have played a strong hand in this
battle. When Sartor went on Koori radio in September 2005, he infamously said,
“Get off your backside, Mick, and bring your black arse in here to talk to
me about it.” Warren Mundine called the comment “idiotic”. Sartor
apologised and Mick Mundine accepted. The pair shook hands outside the
minister’s office but the next day Mundine retracted his apology and called on
the minister to resign.
Since then, the insults have flowed unchecked from both
sides. Mundine calls Sartor “arrogant” and “racist”. Sartor
calls the AHC “an unmitigated disaster”.
A well-known local
character wanders in to the AHC offices. Coming down from drugs, numbed by
alcohol, he declines an interview. “Money talks, bullshit walks,” he
says, hurtling away and then back towards me. “Want a smiley?” he
asks, holding a cigarette lighter up to my arm. When I retract, he laughs and
burns a small hole in the side of the reception desk.
I’m reminded of Warren Mundine’s comment after our interview.
“I hope no one firebombs your house,” he said with a grin. He was
clearly joking but the throwaway line says much of the emotion, history and
politics that threaten to ignite over this topic.
But if those elements are pulled out of this equation, what’s
left seems simple: a plan for urban regeneration. So there’s really only one
question: could this plan work?
There are comparable precedents elsewhere that suggest it
could, says Peter Droege, an internationally-acclaimed urban planner, who cites
successful redevelopments in London (Brixton), Boston (Commonwealth) and San Francisco (North Beach Place). “Brixton has
undergone a locally supported renewal after many years of race riots,” he
says. “The Commonwealth and North
Beach Place developments are two of several US examples
promising deep revitalisation of notoriously problem-ridden public housing
schemes.”
But he stresses the following caveat: “The plan needs
to be embedded into a much wider area regeneration, urban design and
connectivity strategy that does not rely on a continued ‘Block’ image, i.e.
that would avoid an enclave or fortress connotation.”
To this end, the RWA appears to be making contributions. Its
“Human Services” arm is developing a National Indigenous Development
Centre at the former Redfern
Public School, as well as
a Community Health Centre on the site of the old Redfern Courthouse.
Catherine Burn, the Redfern Police Commander, says the
police have committed to a number of social services under this division of the
RWA, including improvements to indigenous literacy and health. One of her key
concerns is breaking down bad perceptions of the police. “There’s always
going to be hostility but we’re trying to balance it,” says Burn, who has
seen the robbery rate in the area drop by 50 per cent in the last 12 months
under her command. “We’ve got a football team now and we play with the
Aboriginal people. Their sense of community is fantastic.”
Having walked from Caroline
Street to Eveleigh Street and around the corner to Vine Street, the
final tum around the Block takes you on to Louis Street. Just 12 terraces remain
along a lonely stretch. Of those, only seven are inhabited.
Ben Smith lives in one of them. A 45year-old self-employed
labourer and father of six, he remembers going to pre-school when it was
underneath the Tony Mundine gym. °That’s how long I’ve been around,” he
laughs. “My auntie Rita was the first dark lady to move in to the area. My
great auntie Polly, bless her soul, said to hang around – two weeks before she
passed away – to keep the spirit of the clan going.”
There’s a photograph of a young T. J. Hickey in the front
window. When Hickey was fatally impaled on a fence after a police chase in 2004
his death sparked a riot that brought black-white tensions to a head, raising
questions of whether anything had been learned from two centuries of indigenous
disadvantage. “He was my eldest son’s best mate,” says Smith quietly.
“He would have been about 20, 21 by now.”
On February 8, 2005, nearly a year after Hickey’s death,
Sartor met with the AHC to be briefed on their plan. It was on that day that
discussions broke down. “I think it is an injustice what the Government is
doing to us at the present moment,” says Mundine. “If Frank Sartor
gives us the approval, we can do it in about a year and a half.”
For his part, State Opposition leader Peter Debnam says,
should he come to power at the election in March, “we would sign off the
project straight away”. The State Government is yet to decide whether it
will endorse it. In October, the Department of Planning listed the Pemulwuy
Project on its Major Projects Register after the AHC submitted it in March to
obtain the director-general’s requirements, which will now allow the AHC to lodge
their planning application.
In the last month, there has been encouraging news to
suggest the impasse may dissolve. Sartor requested a meeting with the AHC on
November 1, the first in nearly two years. Afterwards, he said: “Some
misunderstandings were clarified. The project still needs to undergo rigorous
assessment but the meeting was informative and productive.”
“It was pretty positive,” adds Mundine. “I
won’t be happy until the dotted line is signed but it’s a big step
forward.”
“If both sides are willing to compromise, they will
come up with an answer,” says Phillips, leaning forward with an optimistic
smile. “The spirit of it is fantastic; it will be worthwhile giving it a
try. One way or another, whoever wins this battle, I just can’t wait for it to
come about.”
Photos:
Dennis Weatherall, who runs the Community Development and
Employment Program. “We’re ready for a change.”
Anthony (left) and Mick Mundine – both fighting for the
Block
Mick Mundine’s daughters. Debra (left) and Rachel. “They
were chucking syringes over the fence.”
Shane Phillips came to live at the Block when he was five
years old.
Ben Smith and his son Benjamin. A relative urged him to stay
“to keep the spirit of the clan going”.
Frank Sartor, the NSW Minister for Planning, says he is
“sceptical” about the Pemulwuy Project.
A section of the Block as it is today
Plans for Red
Place, the posed communal centre of the
redevelopment. Drawing by Innovarchi Architects.
Quotes:
“This is going to give our people a bit of self-esteem and
hope for the future.” Mick Mundinie
“I’m passionate about change because generations of our
people will survive” Shane Phillips
“They’re breaching the planning controls. They just
say, ‘We’re Aboriginal. If you don’t do it, you’re a racist.”‘ Frank
Sartor
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald the(Sydney)magazine Issue
#44 December 06 pp42-48
[This document is produced by OCR of the print article and
may contain recognition errors]