TRAUMA TOWN Part 9: The City of Sydney had always been a good location. Grimes author of Sydney’s first planning scheme, got a real sense of the place, pacing out all those tents for the 1800 LEP. The Twin worked the legal courts in the south of the city, back from Canberra and he liked the steamies (dim sim) down in Chinatown. He used to say to me, “you have to get down there before they get up to Oxford Street and realise how high the standard is in this town.”
And real things happened there. There was a pro-China rally in Sydney 2019 in the Town Hall forecourt opposite St Andrews as the mainland was closing Hong Kong’s democracy down.
Pro-democracy participants were jostled and the crowd chanted hateful messages, and they did it in the Town Hall forecourt! Where we had Slim Dusty’s funeral, peace marches and stuff like that. I remember feeling really offended, and that was it. An authoritarian regime was in this space.
It was the same wrongness of the Pro-Palestine crowd celebrating Hamas in the Opera House forecourt after the 7 October massacre and before Israel unleashed its horror. Bad city manners.
The Hong Kongers had their protest in Belmore Park the day and after with pre-COVID face masks.
The steps of Sydney Town Hall is a good place to show someone that you can kill a democracy because that is where Sydney’s grew.
It wasn’t the xenophobe in me either, as I was down there with the Tibetans, different bag of fish. The City has a real sense of place and it’s local.
And when I got to my last Council, mighty Waverley, I was council hard, RDO ready and packing 17 years of accumulated Long Service Leave. I had a leaseback vehicle; the monkeys were bound for glory. It felt like swapping a shift with the Twin. I had reached the pinnacle of regulated work.
I realise now, this was the last days of unregulated local council democracy, chez nous – no Pink Lady IHAP or Local Planning Panels yet – Council Valhalla, ruled by the branches, with a focus on council jobs for family members and local sporting has-beens, surf clubs, local groups that voted in blocks and some experiments in progressive planning policy. Before the Greens, Waverley had it all, the sleaze of Randwick, Botany and South Sydney with some planning sophistication, such as an emerging negotiated inclusionary housing policy that seemed to be working. It had to be abandoned when the Greens arrived as it involved an acknowledgement of private property.
The planning officers were innovative too, I didn’t know until I got there that the Australian Standard for hardstand car parking in front of a semi allowed for most of the car to hang over the footway. The trusty old hardstand car space in front of your semi was gold. Well, I am not game to tell her that she can’t have what they have next door. Those households loved their real estate.
It was a fun place; I had a car and could swim all year round. Sometimes I went up to Dudley Page Reserve in Dover Heights and looked toward the Zoo, thought about my guys and a little about the Twin.
If it was not for the high real estate prices, demanding rate payers, and crazy local politics, Waverley was a great council.
Fun things can and should happen at councils, I just don’t think they are very good at dealing with big metropolitan issues like housing need, sharing, change in general and answering phone calls. A spider monkey can hold a phone with its tail by the way.
Where to after Waverley, any more east, maybe the state government, Lord Howe? We looked at Byron but now that the train doesn’t go into town anymore the monkeys can’t get there.
Watch out for the next installment.
