by Louis Nowra
I had come upon his name frequently when I was researching the history of Woolloomooloo. He was now ninety-one and living in Kirribilli, but had lived in Woolloomooloo from the age of nine, when his family resided at 96 Bourke Street, just around the corner from the school. This was a time when, as he told the kids, ‘poverty was everywhere’. It was a place of factories, Italians taking their boats out at night to fish, and the wharf was a busy port with large merchant ships exporting our wool and wheat overseas. He had attended to Plunkett Street School for only two weeks, when his father decided that Sid and his brother would get a better education at Cranbrook Private School. His father worked hard to pay for the school and in return Sid worked hard, something he had done from the age of nine when he filled nail polish bottles of a weekend, earning sixpence for a nine-hour shift. When he wasn’t delivering newspapers or medicine for the local chemist, he and his brother were assembling mousetraps at his father’s factory in Judge Street. A few years later the family opened up a foundry in Junction Street where he and his brother worked after school.
After serving in the Air Force during the war, he returned to civilian life as a property developer and entrepreneur. In the late 1960s he built hotels, office blocks and shopping centres and he began to develop a grandiose scheme for Woolloomooloo, which he viewed as the culmination of his achievements as an entrepreneur.
He set out to buy up almost fifteen acres (six hectares) of land in Woolloomooloo, except for properties that the government owned. Much of the area was filled with derelict, crumbling houses and craven, defeated residents living in slum conditions. The population was under a thousand and a quarter of the houses were unoccupied or used by squatters. Of the remaining commercial firms, most were related to the car industry. He spent two years preparing his plans. It was a vision that so obsessed him that, forty years later, he proudly showed off the original drawings to the young pupils. ‘It was a vision,’ he explained to them, ‘that would have changed Sydney forever.’
No-one cared about the locals and the Housing Commission viewed the basin as the perfect site to build vast council estates. One design in 1966 envisaged a hideous configuration of enormous high-rise buildings like two Y shapes connected by a central block. It had a startling resemblance to a prison.
As usual nothing had happened and Sid saw the area as a clean slate to realise his vision. He drew up his concept without the help of architects, whom he despised: ‘They love themselves so much they can’t think what makes the thing work. They just want to design things that immortalise themselves.’
And what a vision it was. As far as he was concerned it was a renewal project on a scale never attempted before by private enterprise in Australia. There would be towers twenty to thirty storeys high, an imposing height in Sydney at that time. There would be 2000 hotel/motel rooms, 5000 car spaces, a trade centre, cinemas, restaurants and office space in the towers, which would be connected by overhead walkways linked to roof gardens and arcades. Pedestrians and motor traffic would be separated and two monorails would cross the precinct, one connecting William Street to Cowper Wharf and the other linking Kings Cross with the city.
The next step was to buy up Woolloomooloo. He managed, with the help of the corrupt Premier Sir Robert Askin, to acquire a loan of $20 million from the Moscow Narodny Bank, quite a feat given the Soviet Union was communist — and this was during the Cold War. Tenants were offered between $500 and $2000 to leave. Some who wanted to stay found themselves moving four times in the one street. Owners were constantly pestered to sell. His buying spree helped raise the price of the houses, but even at any price, some owner-occupiers were difficult to budge. He blamed the stubborn Maltese and Italians for this.
‘For sentimental reasons they just will not sell. It became apparent, very early in the negotiations, that many small groups of people of the same nationality tended to congregate in adjoining properties and if one of the group was willing to sell, the rest of the group would follow, but the first purchase involved long and frustrating negotiations.’
Over three years he bought 270 properties and acquired 8.5 hectares. He also hoped to buy redundant council roads and laneways to give his company a total area of over 11 acres (4.5 hectares). Less than 60 per cent of the houses remained standing. Over half of these were empty. Rubbish accumulated in the streets, rats reigned and residents despaired. Then there were the damn hippies, some full time, others weekend hippies, who squatted in terraces, painted the interiors in psychedelic colours and even painted the exteriors of empty houses, especially in Bourke Street.
Sid cultivated politicians, aldermen and mayors, overwhelming them with his enthusiasm, relentless persistence and his grandiose vision. Critics said that the redevelopment called for the destruction of Woolloomooloo but he took no notice.
‘People see us as destroyers, people who live outside the law; who do everything that’s wrong against the greenies; who don’t care about heritage, who are immune to public sentiment and who kick little old ladies out of their homes. I don’t think we care what the public think any more. Entrepreneurs are beyond caring.’
Even though he was brought up in Woolloomooloo, he had no nostalgic attachment to the past. In razing it to the ground he believed the new precinct would be something better and healthier and infinitely preferable to the slums of his youth. His vision would be a victory over his dismal beginnings. He was no longer the boy making thousands of mousetraps in his father’s factory, he was now the Emperor of Woolloomooloo.
At the same time, on the heights of Potts Point, another developer was buying up properties in Victoria Street in order to flatten them. Once the most charming boulevard in Australia, by the late 1960s and early 1970s the street had degenerated into rows of deteriorating terraces that barely hinted at the splendour of its fashionable past. It was now housing for working-class families, pensioners, single mums, Kings Cross identities, and a constantly shifting population of young people and students.
By June 1971 Frank Theeman, a tyro developer, had acquired all the properties between 55 and 115 Victoria Street in the expectation of building three forty-five-storey towers, a fifteen-storey office block with sixty-four stepped terrace apartments and, of course, an enormous eyesore of a car park.
What concerned the residents in Woolloomooloo was that the gigantic forty-five-storey towers would cast enormous shadows down below and they would literally be living in the shadow of Potts Point, the symbolism all too apparent. But what was happening on the heights was chaotic and violent. There were constant protests against the destruction, protestors were beaten up, and fires were deliberately lit to destroy houses and get rid of the tenants. One fire caused the death of an Aboriginal woman. Theeman, a multi-millionaire with an amoral streak, hired gangsters and thugs, plus compliant police, to do the dirty work of roughing up people and vandalising houses. One critic, Juanita Nielsen, who owned NOW, a newspaper highly critical of what was going on, was such a thorn in Theeman’s side that he paid the gangster Jim Anderson $25,000 to shut her up. Anderson succeeded too well, and Nielsen was murdered.
This sort of thuggery wasn’t Sid’s method and besides, so much attention was being paid by the media to what was happening up at the top of Butler Stairs that few noticed what was going on down in the basin. Sid’s buy-up continued until one day eighty-six-year-old Matron Olive O’Neill, a longtime resident, could take no more of the destruction of her beloved Woolloomooloo and the threats to remove her. She strung a banner across her balcony that read: Hands off! This could be your home.
This banner was the catalyst for locals to finally say they had had enough. Not long afterwards, in early October 1972, Edmund Campion, the parish priest of St Columbkille’s Church, picked up a leaflet announcing there would be a street meeting the following Sunday morning. He had worked in the area for less than a year but was intrigued, not only because some of his parishioners would probably attend, but because he was also an author, he could write about it. He was all too
aware that soon Woolloomooloo would be a ghost town. His congregation of mostly Italians and Maltese was down to about fifty people and before too long it would be much fewer than that.
On a Sunday morning the meeting was held at the corner of Forbes and Cathedral streets. The sense that the locals had been pushed around their whole lives by people in power was palpable among the hundred or so protestors who attended. Speakers stood on lemonade boxes and spoke out against the eviction of long-time residents and the systematic destruction of their neighbourhood. A Woolloomooloo Action Group was formed with Campion as secretary — it was thought that as he also worked as a journalist he could get the attention of the media — and John Mulvenna, a former Commonwealth government car driver in his fifties and resident of Rae Place, was elected president.
That same night Campion used his battered typewriter to write a brief letter to the lord mayor, Leo Port, telling him about the existence of the group and saying it was essential that ‘the acquisition of the NSW Housing Commission, City Council and Commonwealth land in Woolloomooloo [be used] as medium density housing development’. The action group wanted the area to remain residential and not to be designated commercial.
Campion managed to interest the media, and he and the locals knocked on the doors of every house and flat in Woolloomooloo, gathering 1500 signatures for their petition. They picketed demolition sites and developers’ offices, and banners were strung up at night with slogans like ‘Homes for people, not office blocks for foreign investors.’ Some appalled Catholics, siding with Sid, complained about Campion to the hierarchy at St Mary’s, who tried and failed to control their wayward young priest.
The NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF), led by the charismatic Jack Mundey, had declared a union Green Ban on Victoria Street, which meant that unions were forbidden to work on the redevelopment or the destruction of the terraces. Not long afterwards the BLF also instituted a Green Ban on Woolloomooloo. There was a growing public outcry about Sid’s failure to factor in transport infrastructure for the 50,000 people who were to commute to Woolloomooloo every day. Traffic congestion would be a colossal problem. On top of this, the week before he became prime minister in 1972, Gough Whitlam promised that Woolloomooloo would be kept residential.
Sid was irate. He called the locals’ plan sterile and prophesied that it would set Woolloomooloo back a hundred years. No developer would ever touch the place again if the protestors won. There was only one thing for Sid to do and that was to confront his critics. He was a Woolloomooloo boy and if he could just explain his vision, then the protestors would see reason. As Campion relates, the developer came to a meeting in April 1973. When he tried to speak:
The people of Woolloomooloo howled and howled and howled. The sullen, dull anger at life in Woolloomooloo, so rarely displayed, now boiled over … It cannot have been a welcome experience for the developer. Yet … this boil-over was not really directed at him personally. It was rage against all that he represented: money, power, political connections, planners, experts, advisers. It was a protest against bad housing and poor food and no jobs and bleak futures.
Finally, after a hundred and twenty years, the people of Woolloomooloo had found a united voice. They were no longer willing to be forgotten, overlooked and condescended to. They wanted new low-level housing, not high-density towers. As one said, ‘We must stop thinking solely in terms of economics and aim for human housing.’ Premier Askin was appalled. ‘They’re mere labourers, who do they think they are? Proletarian town planners?’
In late 1973 the City Council and state government announced that Woolloomooloo would remain residential with plenty of low-rental housing. Politicians, as usual not wanting to be seen supporting a loser, were deserting Sid, whose money was running out as a recession hit. He refused to pay rates on his properties. His company, Regional Landholdings, went into receivership with liabilities of about $50 million and funds of only $100,000. Other smaller developers who had followed Sid’s lead also went into receivership.
As he worked with the protestors, Ed began to notice something interesting. Unlike in Potts Point, where there was an alliance of disparate groups including students, unionists, tenants, feminists and the working class, tensions began to appear in the Woolloomooloo group. Long-time residents, most of them from the older generation, mistrusted the young middle-class newcomers. The locals, said Campion, ‘fear and distrust people who handle words, because word handlers are the very people who have mucked up their lives’. And as for these young people’s ‘fanciful schemes’, perhaps they were designed to mock Woolloomooloo. ‘One by one the newcomers were silenced. They wandered off, bewildered, shaken.’ Campion noted that, although this was very sad, ‘Luckily for Woolloomooloo, it didn’t matter.’ It didn’t matter because Whitlam kept his word and in 1975 a unique partnership was formed between the federal, state and local governments to retain and restore the area.
The Housing Commission was appointed Constructing and Managing Authority for the project (the Department of Housing replaced the Commission in 1986). Sid knew there was no hope now for his visionary project and sold his land to the federal government for $17.5 million. In June 1975 the federal government signed an agreement providing $17 million to the New South Wales government for resumption of land in Woolloomooloo. Events moved fast and by July the Housing Commission had begun resuming properties.
The Green Bans were lifted in 1975 and later that year the regeneration of the area began in a unique project. John Devenish, architect and urban planner, cultivated and directed a multidisciplinary team to plan the Woolloomooloo development. One huge influence was Denis Winston, architect and town planner, whose vision was diametrically opposed to Sid’s. He saw areas such as Woolloomooloo as needing buildings that related to a human scale, with diversity of housing, landscaped spaces and sculptures, which he believed were essential to the pleasures of urban living. Added to this was the extraordinary decision to create the role of a resident’s planner. Colin James became an advocate for the residents, consulting with them and listening to their opinions regarding the plans for Woolloomooloo.
The City Council set up a shopfront in a disused storehouse at 87 Forbes Street, where the planners organised meetings and informal discussions with residents during workdays, at night and on weekends. They exhibited their plans and listened to community feedback — some of it sharp and useful, in comparison to the hippies, who demanded communes and huge pyramid-shaped buildings with no doors.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this singular approach to rebuilding an urban space through consultation. For the first time in its history, the residents of Woolloomooloo were being consulted. The planners and residents were aware that they were beginning an idealistic experiment from ground zero and anything was possible. The central idea was that 60 per cent or more of the housing would be for low-income earners. The success was such that urban planners came from across the world to visit Woolloomooloo. A suburb once notorious for crime, poverty and hopelessness had become an international yardstick for community consultation and planning.
Besides the rehabilitation of over one hundred terraces, many new houses and flats were built. The scheme involved extensive street closures, tree planting and landscaping. The project began in McElhone and Rae streets and continued for many years, with the last buildings ready for occupation in the early 1990s. Woolloomooloo now has about 800 dwellings, built on resumed land that covers more than seven acres (three hectares), of which over 573 have been retained for low-income earners. In other words, up to two-thirds of the houses in the Housing Commission project area are public housing.
Even by 1981 the transformation of the basin into something special was becoming obvious. The broadcaster Caroline Jones, who would park her car in the ’Loo and walk up Forbes Street to the ABC studios in East Sydney, remarked in an article, ‘Where I park, in Woolloomooloo, the NSW Housing Commission is making a beautiful restoration of old terrace houses. It’s a fresh
pleasure to see them each day — old Australia brought to life again.’
Compared to what happened in Victoria Street and the Rocks, where many compromises were made with developers, Woolloomooloo was arguably the most successful example of a union Green Ban. When Sylvia Hale became a Greens representative in the NSW Legislative Assembly in 2003, her first speech was about how a special coalition had saved the area:
Today when people look at Woolloomooloo … they pay tribute to the residents and unionists who were prepared to sit in, stand up and fight off Sid Londish, his developer cronies, and the police. At the time the activists were criticised and attacked on all sides. Today there can be few people who do not rejoice in the protesters’ success. It is an object lesson for us all. Those advocating social change are so often vilified and reviled at the time, only to be lauded later on. The right to protest, to say that there are alternatives, to assert that this is not the best of all possible worlds, must be encouraged and supported, not denigrated and disparaged.
Sid was still the bogeyman. Since 1975 his life has had its vicissitudes; triumphs have been followed by failures. In 1992 he had to sell his luxury home and cut his staff from 160 to fourteen. In 1994 there was a strange incident: after the suspicious death of a Japanese businessman in Tokyo with whom he was dealing, Sid received threats to his family if he didn’t pay $13.7 million to a nefarious businessman. (He didn’t pay it.) By the following year he was living in a rented flat and didn’t own a car. At the height of his problems, with the bank threatening to bankrupt him, his wife died of cancer. His personal guarantees to the banks even affected his children. They all lost their homes and one went through a marriage break-up brought about in part by the financial strain.