Ten Doors Down

by Tickner, Robert;

  It was as a fledgling University Liberal Club member that I went one day in early 1972, in the lead-up to the federal election of that year, to hear McMahon government minister Malcolm Fraser speak at the Ash Street headquarters of the New South Wales Liberal Party. That night, Mr Fraser was surrounded by doting Liberal Party followers, all rapturously applauding as he championed the school-funding rights of the very wealthiest non-government schools. I was instantly reminded of many of the residents of St Paul’s College. I guess Mr Fraser was shaping his speech for his audience, but I was more interested in what he was going to do to fund the most disadvantaged schools in Australia, including country schools, and he said nothing of that. I realised I was in the wrong place. Within a short time of hearing Mr Fraser’s speech, I had joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

  I think that even his strongest supporters would agree that Malcolm Fraser mellowed hugely in his later life. By the time of his death, I held him in the highest regard, and we shared many common values, including the support for a more independent foreign policy for Australia and an abhorrence of racism. In my role as CEO of Australian Red Cross in 2005, I had the great privilege of meeting Malcolm Fraser again. I told him the story of my first encounter with him, and we shared a laugh. A couple of years later, I was extremely fortunate to work alongside his daughter Phoebe, when she headed up international humanitarian law at Red Cross.

  I joined the ALP in Croydon, where I was then living, and, as a 21-year-old, I voted ALP for my ever first vote. It was the 1972 federal election — the election that brought Gough Whitlam’s government to power. My joining the ALP, voting for Whitlam, and becoming politically active for progressive causes mortified my father, who’d had visions of me becoming the federal member for Lyne in the strong Country Party area where I grew up.

  During these years, my cousin Robert Brown played a part in shaping my future direction in life. Robert was the son of my mum’s sister Gladys, who had passed away in the 1950s. My parents had provided strong support to Robert when he was young and living with his brother John and their widowed father in Granville, and he had often visited us in Forster. Robert was a gentle, soft-spoken soul. He was a bohemian sculptor, working out of a studio in Palmer Street in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo. His work was similar in style to the famous Robert Klippel’s, who I think Robert studied with at one time. They both used scrap metal in many of their works. Where I had grown up on a diet of chops and veggies, Robert was a vegan. He was always nattily dressed, charming, and beautifully spoken, with a strong intellectual curiosity and the most wonderful incisive sense of humour. He lived in Forbes Street, around the corner from his studio, with the celebrated weaver Mona Hessing.

  When I moved to Sydney, Robert became a special person in my life, and introduced me to a side of the city I never knew existed, taking me around in his old VW Kombi. The first time I visited his studio in Woolloomooloo, I was still living at college. I left the privileged and cloistered walls of St Paul’s one Sunday and entered a house that was an almost completely burnt-out shell. Robert’s crazy metal sculptures — made from industrial piping, old machine parts, and junk — filled the whole ground floor and extended into the open garden at the back. The rear wall of the house had been completely demolished, leaving the place exposed to the garden and the elements. The only liveable room was accessed by a rickety open staircase with grass matting on each stair. In the room was a double bed raised on a wooden platform. The toilet was in the stairwell and was flushed with a bucket. Cockroaches seemed to be overrunning the place. The contrast with the college and my own conservative background could not have been more stark. And yet, I immediately felt at home in Woolloomooloo. So much so that in 1973 I moved from my place in Croydon and took up residence in Robert’s studio. There, I instantly became an active member of the local ALP and the Woolloomooloo Resident Action Group.

  Robert mixed with an amazing group of inner-city artists and political figures, including the cartoonist Bruce Petty, who had worked on one of his mechanical sculptures in Robert’s studio in Palmer Street. The sculpture represented the complex working of the economy. With all its interlocking dependencies, it reminded me of my father’s invented pool-cleaning device. Robert and his partner, Mona, also knew Germaine Greer from their circle of friends in the arts community. At their suggestion, I read her book The Female Eunuch. I was inspired by the book, but my naivety got me into trouble when I heard she was speaking at the Sydney University campus and I went to see her. After her talk, I went up and introduced myself as a friend of Robert and Mona, blurting out, ‘I really admire your mind,’ which was something only a country kid would do. She gave me a not-so-thinly-veiled look of utter contempt, put her hand on her hip, and said dismissively, ‘And what do you think of my body?’ I was mortified. I nervously muttered something incomprehensible and scurried away.

  Even so, in less than four years, I had come a long way from my sheltered upbringing in Forster, and I was so happy living in Woolloomooloo. Every weekday morning I walked up past the Art Gallery of New South Wales, across the parkland of The Domain and towards the city’s skyscrapers and the Sydney University Law School on the corner of King and Elizabeth Streets — a quintessentially Sydney start to the day.

  Later, I rented a very run-down house at 83 Bourke Street, around the corner from Robert and Mona. A network of friends from Forster moved in, and then their friends moved in, and soon we spread into the house next door. We formed a little community of country kids in those dilapidated houses. One winter’s night, we burnt the side fence separating the properties, and then we grew a bountiful garden joining the two houses. My friend Tim Gray played the guitar, and the house resonated with the songs of Leonard Cohen and Neil Young, and other music of the early seventies. We formed deep bonds; the friendships from those houses have lasted all my life. One of those bonds was with Christine Logan, who lived next door with her boyfriend of the time, and whom I would later marry. Diane Hudson became another close friend, who subsequently became my executive assistant and office manager when I was appointed minister.

  My Woolloomooloo days were important to my personal development in other ways, too. Growing up an only child without a lot of physical contact with my father as I grew older had given me a limited concept of masculinity. There had been no sisters and brothers to fight with, or to hug and make peace with. Until these share houses, I’d never lived with anyone except my mum and dad. I was also quite shy with girls as a young man, and not a very tactile person with friends, especially male friends. This all changed when I moved into 83 Bourke Street. It was there that I learnt how to hug, and how to open up and give more of myself to others.

  I also formed exceptionally strong friendships with some of the long-term residents of the area: waterside workers, builders, labourers, and trade-union activists. They welcomed me into their lives and supported and nurtured my political development, both inside and outside the ALP. We mixed together in local pubs, at ALP meetings, and at meetings of the Woolloomooloo Resident Action Group. We also worked together in support of the green bans implemented by the New South Wales branch of the Builders Labourers Federation to save the historic residential areas of the city of Sydney from redevelopment. The green bans were an industrial tactic by the union that empowered building workers to have a say about the consequences of their labour and gave them their right to refuse to demolish the historic buildings of Sydney — demolitions which were driving out low-income earners from the city. Both the green bans and the workers fighting for them were vilified at the time, especially in the tabloid media and on talkback radio, but now most informed people believe they saved the city. The union also stood up for housing for low-income earners, for Aboriginal rights, for the rights of same-sex couples, and against discrimination of all kinds at a time when discrimination was perfectly legal in this country.

  Around this time, I also became a volunteer at the Wayside Chapel, serving some of the most
marginalised members of the local community. There, I became friends with the late Ted Noffs, who had founded this wonderful Sydney institution, and I also met Bill Crews, who later continued his commitment to people by leading the Exodus Foundation in Ashfield in the inner west of Sydney. Working at the Wayside Chapel was a real privilege and introduced me to a very different world to the one I’d grown up in. I learnt so much about the challenges facing people who hadn’t had the opportunities I’d had — people who were struggling to survive on the streets of Kings Cross, sometimes living in very poor circumstances, and sometimes struggling with mental illness or the impact of racism on their lives.

  From the start, Mum and Dad were horrified that I’d moved to Woolloomooloo. They still saw it as a place of gangsters and razor gangs, which it had been known for before World War II. I had to work hard to give them confidence that things had changed and that I was safe there — which wasn’t helped by the heroin addict next door, who regularly injected himself in front of the window facing our kitchen, or the proximity of the brothel that backed onto our house. Over that back fence, I had observed that the dogs that guarded the brothel were fed from time to time by a prominent member of the local ALP branch. I was always intrigued by the motivation behind those little acts of animal kindness, which demonstrated a closer relationship between politics and the underworld establishment than I cared to imagine.

  The razor gangs had long gone, but Woolloomooloo was still a volatile and sometimes dangerous area. As a member of the Resident Action Group, I worked with Juanita Nielsen, an heiress of the wealthy Mark Foy’s department-store family. She seemed to me to be a strong and well-intentioned advocate for good planning in the city, and she was always well briefed on the machinations of the city development industry. She was campaigning against the redevelopment of the historic houses of Victoria Street, Kings Cross, where she lived. I worked closely with her at various times: I visited her house for campaign meetings, and she once visited my grungy little share house in Woolloomooloo.

  It is commonly known that Juanita Nielsen was murdered by those acting to thwart her campaign against the overdevelopment of Victoria Street, though her body has never been recovered. Knowing her well, as I did, I was shocked and outraged by her disappearance and apparent murder. We had lost a dedicated, high-profile crusader for the public good. Juanita Nielsen’s death was a chilling reminder of how high the stakes were in opposing the interests and plans of some big Sydney property developers at the time. Corrupt conduct by public officials and in the corporate sector in dealings with government has always sickened me. Throughout my life, I have always championed political reforms like ICAC, including at the national level, as they flush out, and hold people accountable for, corrupt conduct.

  5

  Sydney City Council

  For me, the whole experience of those years in Woolloomooloo was transformative and opened up a completely new world of left-of-centre, community, and Labor politics. I became more determined than ever that I wanted to commit my life to the struggle for a more just and peaceful world.

  At age 22, I came upon what may have been another fork in the road of my life. I had been very interested in acting at school, and, while living in Woolloomooloo, I had joined an amateur theatre group led by the well-respected actor Allan Penney. The group operated in an old church hall at 228 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst. I had been cast in a play that was to be performed in Newcastle, but to accept the part I was obliged to shave off the bushy beard I’d acquired. Meanwhile, I’d been preselected to stand as an ALP candidate for the Fitzroy ward in the 1974 Sydney City Council elections — an opportunity that had arisen when the previously chosen candidate had stood down at the last moment. This was my first chance to serve my community through elected public office. Crucially, the candidate photographs had been taken and the election material had been printed with a bearded me — shaving my beard off now was not an option if I wanted to go through with the election. I chose politics, declined the acting role, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  I wasn’t elected to the council in the 1974 election, but was, by then, a very dedicated environmentalist, partly in response to the rampant development of the city and partly to the sand mining occurring near Forster.

  Although I was living in Sydney, I still had a deep love for the bush and especially for the north coast of New South Wales where I’d grown up. I established the Forster-Tuncurry Area Conservation Society, with me as president and my old friend Terry taking on the role of secretary. We campaigned on local issues for a few years, but I was travelling to Forster for various public meetings of the group, and eventually the tyranny of distance made it impossible for me to continue.

  Back in Sydney, I was passionately committed to a very different future for the city than that advocated by the aldermen and the political party who controlled the council. The party in power was called the Civic Reform Association, and it was dominated by the interests of property developers in the city. The Civic Reform Association wasn’t the Liberal Party operating in the local government arena of the Sydney City Council, although it enjoyed their support. Rather, it was a separately incorporated entity, with major corporate vested interest groups as part of its formal structure, including the Master Builders Association. These groups, and their members, were profiting from the demolition of the historic buildings of the city and the rapacious pursuit of development at all costs. I was particularly outraged by the destruction of heritage buildings and the threat to whole neighbourhoods — Woolloomooloo was at risk, and so were many other communities.

  Low-income earners and the long-term working-class residents of the city were being forced out by bad planning decisions. I wanted to be elected to the council and had a real conviction that this was my calling. I moved to Surry Hills and began to develop a political platform to drive deep changes in Sydney City government, which for a hundred years had been dominated either by big business interests or by the right wing of the ALP. I was strongly supported by two wonderful working-class mentors, Fred Miller and Len Devine, who welcomed me into their Surry Hills homes. They believed in me and actively supported my aspirations in the ALP. Len was the former federal MP for East Sydney, and Fred later became the state member for Bligh. I am forever grateful for their kindness and that of their families. At the time, I had ambitions to be the federal member for Sydney, but, as fate would have it, this was not to be. My opportunity to serve in the national parliament did arise later, although by another and somewhat unexpected pathway.

  In 1974, I also began teaching law at the New South Wales Institute of Technology. Later in the year, I worked as the manager of the New South Wales Environment Centre, which was located on Broadway near the intersection with Glebe Point Road. I was in this office when I heard the news of the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975, and, with thousands of other people, joined the big spontaneous protest march in the city streets that afternoon.

  Some months later, in August 1976, I organised a creative demonstration against Governor-General Sir John Kerr at Sydney’s Wentworth Hotel in response to Kerr’s unconstitutional dismissal of the Whitlam government and the appointment of Malcolm Fraser as prime minister. It involved a dignified but highly effective walk-out of a Sydney University Law Graduates’ Association luncheon, where the guest speakers were Sir John Kerr, Chief Justice of the High Court Sir Garfield Barwick, and Bob Ellicott QC, who was the Fraser government’s attorney-general at the time. All three men had been participants in the events surrounding and following the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Network TV cameras filmed the walk-out, and all major papers covered the story. The special branch of the New South Wales police force stood by impassively as we conducted our peaceful objection. Many of my fellow protesters went on to become prominent lawyers, judges, and state government ministers.

  There was an over-the-top Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 4 August 1976 condemning our acti
ons. The editorial asserted that ‘there is a danger that in emphasising the puerility of individual “protests” of this kind the reality of what we are witnessing in the campaign against the Governor General is obscured. It should not be. The campaign is a sinister one, mounted, co-ordinated and paid for by sinister people for sinister reasons. The purpose of the campaign is to create a climate of violence, intimidation and harassment.’ Such a ridiculously extreme response was utterly unwarranted: we had engaged in expressing our right of freedom of speech in a peaceful protest about an issue of deep concern to almost 50 per cent of the Australian people. This extreme editorial was the inspiration the very next day for Frank Hardy and Donald Horne to decide to form ‘Citizens for Democracy’, a national protest movement that organised huge rallies around Australia in support of constitutional reform and in opposition to the sacking of an elected government by the governor-general. I became part of the organising committee.

  During 1976, I moved out of Woolloomooloo and rented a house at 423 Crown Street, Surry Hills — just a few blocks from the hospital where I was born. I lived in a tiny attic at the top of the house for two years, paying for the environment group Friends of the Earth to operate in the two floors below, and participating in their work and activities. I also established a free local newspaper called The People’s Paper, funded by my own modest income and by advertising. Through this, I championed progressive environmental and social policies, and attacked what I saw as corruption in the Sydney City Council.