Monthly Archives: September 2018

The Freedom Ride

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

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A friend recently blogged about a book for young adults titled Freedom Ride, so it seems only proper to blog myself about the Freedom Ride that it’s referring to. And given that the Freedom Ride started at Sydney University, which is located on 128 acres of the Grose Farm site, this also follows neatly from my previous blog about ‘Grose’s Hill’.

In 1854 Edmund Blackett was appointed architect for the university, with James Barnet his Clerk of Works. Work began on the main building in 1855, and lessons commenced in the unfinished building in 1857.

The two storey sandstone building features high quality carved Gothic Revival style decorative details and tracery, coats of arms and medallions. The sandstone is thought to originate from Pyrmont but it is possible that quarrying occurred in front of the east range forming the terrace. The roofs are clad with Welsh Slate. The east range largely retains its original interiors with fine carved cedar joinery (also Gothic Revival in style), massive timber staircases, marble and timber floors and plastered walls. Externally the Great Hall is crenellated with a corner turret to the north east. The eastern gable has central stained glass window with carved tracery, as does the western facade.[i]

Outside that main building 110 years later, on 12 February 1965, 29 students boarded a bus that travelled to Orange, Wellington, Dubbo, Gulargambone, Walgett, Collarenebri, Moree, Boggabilla, Goodiwindi, Warwick, Tenterfield, Inverell, back to Moree, Glen Innes, Grafton, Coffs Harbour, Bowraville, Kempsey, Taree and Newcastle. The bus had a banner along its side saying ‘Student Action for Aborigines’,[ii]and it became known as the Freedom Ride. In the two weeks of the tour the students surveyed people on the stations, reserves and shanty towns along the way about health, housing, racism, education.

Wellington was the first stop on the Freedom Ride. Ann Curthoys and others went to the settlement outside the town.

We got a tremendous shock. We really had no idea until this moment what it was we were protesting about. Here it was, the utmost poverty in our well-off First World industrialised country.[iii]

She started to write a diary. On that first night she wrote:

Interviewed about ten tin shacks of people. Most of us found the questionnaires unsuitable. Houses of tin, mud floors, very over-crowded, kids had eye diseases, had to cart water (very unhealthy) from river. People fairly easy to talk to, kids quite friendly. General picture of extreme poverty but not a great deal of social discrimination.[iv]

Despite that last statement, the combined surveys showed that:

When asked for examples of discrimination, the answers included ‘up to twelve months ago not allowed in pubs’, ‘Courthouse Hotel’, ‘hotels, shops’, ‘employment’, ‘putting them out of town’ and ‘won’t let them live in town even if can afford [it]’.[v]

They filmed an Aboriginal man going into the Courthouse Hotel – he is served, but possibly only because of the students’ presence. Then Charles Perkins is sent into the same hotel, ‘and there was some discussion between the barmaid and the publican before they served him’.[vi]

This was the pattern for the tour. Surveys, feeling out the town’s reactions, then sometimes demonstrations – outside segregated swimming pools and picture theatres, pubs and cafes. They received increasing levels of local, national and international attention and burst the bubble of apathy that surrounded the treatment of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people in many of the towns visited gained strength from the students’ visit, forming groups to maintain the momentum that had been started. Although criticised at the time for ‘just stirring up trouble’, many of the students on the bus returned to the towns again and again, to assist in particular demonstrations, forming strong bonds with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the towns.

[i]http://www.facilities.usyd.edu.au/afm/reports/heritagesection170-r01.cfm?pkID=4726003Section 170 Register Report: 4726003: MAIN QUAD / EAST RANGE AND GREAT HALL

[ii]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002.

[iii]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p71

[iv]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p72

[v]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p72

[vi]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p73

Grose’s Hill

17 Monday Sep 2018

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‘Sydney from Paroquet Hill, Parramatta Road. From Grose’s Hill’ by Edward Charles Close (once attributed to Sophia Campbell) is a watercolour painted around 1820 showing the view from a partially fenced paddock over a landscape that appears to be recovering from bushfire – thin trunks of eucalypts with bushy remnants at their tops; low shrubs at their base; a fallen tree with blackened trunk and brown leaves. In the distance are two windmills – one on Observatory Hill, and one closer to the military barracks (now Wynyard). Sydney’s first windmill wasn’t built until 1797, Governor Hunter bringing the parts with him from England in 1795. The windmill was built where Sydney Observatory now stands, but can’t be the one in this painting as it was, by 1820, no longer in use, having lost its top and sails and left only with its stone tower. This painting probably shows the wooden windmill that was built in 1803 or 1804 on the southern side of Observatory Hill – the third mill built. The other mill in the painting is probably the Military Windmill, finished in 1802 and given over to military use in 1814.[i]How do I know so much about windmills? A few weeks after interviewing Mona Brand I found a book called Old Sydney Windmillsby her husband, Len Fox, in a second-hand shop. I bought it for the joy of the synchronicity before seeing how useful it was.

The distant straggling town, with the newly built Hyde Park Barracks and Rum Hospital dominating, is similar in two paintings by Joseph Lycett. They are painted from the same spot, but dated one year later. They show a green rolling hill with a picturesque wooden fence – bucolic, compared to Close’s more believable sparse bush. There are four windmills in one (Mitchell Library ML 55) but at least seven in the other (National Library of Australia RNK Accn. T 1631) – two at Miller’s Point, the same two as in Close’s painting, two where the Conservatorium now stands, and one at Darlinghurst.

Now when you stand on Grose’s Hill you’re standing in front of the Great Hall at the University of Sydney. When I look out and try to see Hyde Park Barracks my view is blocked by massive fig trees, and a cluster of tall buildings beyond. I have to go to the ninth floor of Fisher Library and peer through the narrow slits of windows to see where I am. I see the Anzac Bridge and Rozelle Bay and Pyrmont. The glimpse of water in Edward Close’s painting must have been Blackwattle Bay, when it came right up to Bay Street. He’s looking across the ridge of Pyrmont, the city in the centre of the painting and North Head an unexpected feature in the distance. I can see the fall of the land in front of me to the water, the ridge of the city, and the plateau of the northern suburbs that reaches to Middle Head. I can’t see North Head, but from the windows on the other side of the building I can see Botany Bay, its blue waters deep and glistening from this distance, its damaged seagrasses and degraded shoreline invisible.

 

[i]Old Sydney Windmills, Len Fox. Self-published 1978.

The Glebe

10 Monday Sep 2018

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Glebe Island, where Bill Gosling used to work, was once an island. Then it was connected to the mainland by a causeway. This was enlarged when abattoirs were constructed there in the 1850s, and the island was later further flattened for wharves and grain stores.

This was one of many different schemes that have changed the shape of the harbour foreshore. Blackwattle Bay is shown on an 1836 map as reaching up to Parramatta Road, where a small bridge crosses it – now only the street names, and some observation of topography, show us that it went that far. By 1854 Bay Street runs down to the head of the bay; by 1866 there is a bridge linking Pyrmont and Glebe about a third of the way up the bay; by 1868 the bridge is labelled as an embankment and Wattle St is a straight line marked where Black Wattle Creek used to run.

By 1885 the area that was filled in was called Wentworth Park.[i]The park provided space for the same late-19thcentury leisure activities as at the Sir Joseph Banks Pleasure Grounds, or the Como Pleasure Grounds, or the Avenue Pleasure Grounds at Hunters Hill: concerts, picnics and sports. In 1939 it became the permanent venue for a different kind of sport: greyhound racing.[ii]On the other side of Glebe, a similar story: Johnston’s Creek and Orphan School Creek met at the head of Rozelle Bay, where a little bridge now crosses a stormwater drain at the lowest point of Wigram Road.[iii]The area was reclaimed for parkland, and Harold Park Paceway – another racing venue, this one for trotting horses – established on its edge in 1902.[iv]

Glebe’s southern edge is formed by Parramatta Road, its intersection with Glebe Point Road opposite Victoria Park, filling in the angle between Parramatta Road and City Road as it has done since some of the earliest maps: behind that is Sydney University.

This stands on land granted in 1792 to Lieutenant-Governor Grose who had a lease of 30 acres out of the 400 acre Crown reserve that had been set aside for Crown, church and school purposes – ‘The Glebe’. He sold his lease on when he left the colony in 1794, but the name stuck as ‘Grose Farm’. This was the edge of the city for many years, as the old boundary marker at the end of Glebe Point Road shows. Paintings of Sydney in 1818 by Sophia Campbell (1777-1833), and in 1819 by Joseph Lycett (c.1774-1828) show the growing city from its periphery.[v]

[i]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000.

[ii]http://www.wentworthparksport.com.au/history.php

[iii]Leichhardt: on the margins of the city. Max Solling and Peter Reynolds. Allen & Unwin, 1997, p10.

[iv]http://www.haroldpark.com.au/racing/history/history.html#hphistory

[v]First Views of Australia, 1788-1825. A history of early Sydney. Tim McCormick. David Ell Press, Longueville Publications, 1987.

On the waterfront

03 Monday Sep 2018

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The Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia (WWF) was a force on the wharves until 1993, when it was amalgamated into the Maritime Union of Australia. The WWF had presided over massive changes on the waterfront, always battling for improved conditions – slow battles, with reports still appearing in the 1940s commenting adversely on the huge danger to a man’s health in working on the wharves, and the lack of even basic sanitary facilities. One of its early battles was around the weight of the bags that the workers had to carry into the ships: in 1904 it asked for a weight limit of 150 lbs (68 kg) – the weight limit at the time was 240 lbs (109 kg) but this was often exceeded. In 1970 the safe limit for lifting was deemed to be 55 kg. The WWF also conducted political actions, such as the Pig Iron dispute, where waterside workers refused to load pig iron onto ships bound for Japan in 1937-38 as a protest against Japan’s aggression against China, or the embargo of 1945-49 against Dutch shipping in support of Indonesian independence from Dutch rule.

In the 1950s the WWF expanded into social and cultural areas. The Sydney branch set up a Women’s Committee and organised the first WWF sports carnival. The Sussex Street headquarters were remodelled to include a range of facilities – a canteen, a library and reading room, an art studio, and even a theatre.[i]A film production unit was established, making short films to balance depictions in the mainstream press. The heroes are the trudging men bearing loads that bend them double, working in dirty and hazardous conditions.

In 1900 the NSW state government took control of the Port of Sydney under the Harbour Trust Act, following public shock over the outbreak of plague, attributed to the rats that infested the privately-owned waterfront. It wasn’t only rats that made conditions grim on the wharves – no toilets, shelter sheds, or even water taps; 30-hour shifts; no continuity of employment, with workers being chosen on a daily basis by the foreman.

The rats persisted, despite the Act, and in 1947 the Stevedoring Industry Commission authorised the WWF ‘to cease work on rat-infested ships in the port of Sydney’.[ii] I asked Bill Gosling about the rats when I interviewed him.[iii]

The rats around the wharf, the Sydney grey rats around the wharf are fairly common. But on this one occasion, the rat catcher came in to see me and he said, ‘I might have my lunch while I’m here’, so he opened his case, there was a dead rat, in a plastic bag. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘I stored it in a plastic bag first.’ He thought nothing of eating his lunch with a dead rat alongside of him. Another occasion, this concerns the same rat catcher, he went into a shed and one of the clerks said to him, ‘Look at that scabby old cat there, why don’t you give him a shot of something and put him out of his misery.’ He turned round, he said, ‘That scabby old cat’s my chief officer.’ He turned to the clerk, ‘If you touch that cat,’ he said, ‘you’ll have me to deal with.’ He said, ‘That cat works at night when I’m home in bed.’

 

[i]Wharfies – The history of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press, 1996.

[ii]Wharfies – the History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press 1996, p133.

[iii]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.