Trauma Town, part 8: What I realised over time is that the heritage vibe in council isn’t just in the local environmental plans. If you wanted to understand what the socio-economic environment was in a particular place 20-30 years ago, go work in the local council because that’s the general time lag between the socio-economic reality of the broader community and culture of the council. Monkeys always seem modern because monkey life has a timeless impulsivity to it.
Councils are places of replication, fixing things, maintaining, putting the books back on the shelf, sending out the rate notices, picking up the garbage. Municipal tasks focus on cycles and everything works better if it does not change too much. This would be a great school if it wasn’t for the students.
After the chaos of late teens and early 20s casual employment, I wanted the administrative regularity of council but part of me longed for my monkey friends. You know that feeling when you think about someone and don’t call them. Guilty longing, slow down guys I am on my way.
Maybe that type of organisation isn’t the best one to allocate local capital via its development decisions, regulate small business or be the coalface of change in our cities.
But I can also think of various reasons why councils should exist.
There was that Botany Council (now part of Bayside Council) staff Christmas party in the council chamber where they locked the doors and let it rip. I witnessed the tea lady do a full striptease, triple serves of spirits from the hands of the general manager and councillors to staff (two nips of whisky and a dash of crème monte, thanks, where’s the bucket?) and then as I left, staff pashing off and attempting to have sex on the bonnet of a lease-back vehicle. Was it a Commodore or a Camry?
The old South Sydney Council hit similar levels of abandon and was one of those places where you got good Es in the early 1990s. All those southern Sydney councils were rife with drugs; someone’s brother in the building department was a baggage handler at Mascot. A wave of disappointment went through Randwick Council when he got busted.
The first time I saw I someone “nodding off” was in a remote cubicle at the now demolished offices of South Sydney Council at Joynton Avenue in Zetland. It was about 1993. I was hunting down a building services referral for one of my development approvals. That building is now demolished, and the City of Sydney has built a public swimming pool in its place. When I go there for a swim, I think of the fallen from my old council of South Sydney and part of me still wants my building referral.
The Bundy Clock at Botany, the Labor Party’s integration over South Sydney, Randwick, Waverley and Botany councils with the local branches in the 1990s was something my monkey friends could never have coordinated. They were semi-nomadic; their tree was their council. If you were a retired bus driver with an interest in footpaths, you were councillor material. Oh, the good old days before the Greens.
The “Fat-O-gram” that humiliated the retiring rates clerk at Woollahra Municipal Council on a beautiful sandstone courtyard was thanks to his colleague’s last act of bullying. There is life, love and cruelty. And local democracy gone too far. The Twin missed a lot of this; he was in Canberra, the same monkey stuff with airfares.
The City of Sydney used to have a great Xmas party on the roof of the old Palisade Hotel in The Rocks until some prick in the building department served a fire order on them and they refused to have us back. I remember being on that roof top, wondering who paid for the drinks, looking towards the zoo, “what are my monkeys up to?”
The City of Sydney was the outlier in my council journey, it worked well, got stuff done and had some knowledgeable and expert people, most of whom left directly or soon after the Olympics and when private building certification was introduced in 1998. I walked away from that job – monkey walking straight – with a sense I got something done.
I suppose to be honest; it’s my favourite council. The depth of its institution, the real creepy feeling you get if you go into the basement of the old Town Hall and that great feeling you had when you walked into the dining room after a Central Sydney Planning Committee meeting (or CSPC for insiders), Frank Sartor the then mayor apologised that he wasn’t joining staff for dinner, and John Kass my old council boss gave me a wink and the entrée arrived. “John, what do I do if I get home and my partner has saved me dinner?”, “eat two dinners”, John advised me, as he passed the wine.
The City is a great archive. It’s the oldest democratic institution in Sydney, predating real state government, which was still in governor mode when the hammer first came down in 1842. I worked around that “sense of democracy” and it was real. There was a spider monkey in those shadows, whispering calmly. That’s unusual behaviour for my guys.
