Archive 2:

The Turnbull family:

Zanny spoke with Redfern community activist Lyn Turnbull and her two children Ester and Alexander in their Lawson St home on August 8, 2007.

Zanny: What is your relationship to this suburb?

Alexander: I have lived here 17 years - all my life.

Lyn: I have lived here since 1980, in the same house the whole time.

Zanny: Lyn why did you choose to live here?

Lyn: Geoff bought the house when we were still students because it was somewhere where we could afford. He worked out he could still live in a shared house and pay off a mortgage.

Zanny: What is significant about this place to you?

Alexander: For about half my life I have only been aware of Redfern, of course I remember we went elsewhere but Redfern was my world. So now if I go to other places that are really suburban I start to freak out, I just don’t get how people live, it’s like standing in the middle of a desert to me everything looks the same. But the reason that I have started to get aggressively protective about my suburb is that in Year 9 we had a geography excursion to Pyrmont and the point of the trip was to appreciate how the government gentrified the area. To me it was totally despicable – it was full of casinos and apartments, and apartments, and apartments, and nothingness… so I know what I stand to lose by the process of gentrification. I am sad that when I leave home I wont be able to afford to live here I am going to have to move so far away or pack my friends into a shared house like sardines…

Zanny: What does the word community mean to you?

Alexander: That is a hard question to answer… I don’t go to school here anymore and my friends don’t live here anymore… so my local community is probably through the filter of my parents and seeing people on the street where I live. I have this idea of what Redfern’s community is like, but it is probably demographically skewed towards the traditional idea of Redfern rather than the new reality of the suburb. It’s the people around here who hit you up for change on the way to the station, it’s the people in the small pocket which is the far west of Redfern between here and Cleveland Street.

Community is something autonomous, something that’s yours, it’s about knowing who your neighbours are, it’s about placing a value (and not a monetary value) on the place where you live.

Zanny: Do you think Redfern still has a sense of community?

Alexander: I can understand the people I don’t want in my community, I hate yuppies, but I have to stop my self and say, “am I having a Cronulla moment?” Its like the cartoon says “I will decide who comes to my beach and the manner in which they come”… but I hate the people who come here and plan their whole interaction with the local community on how much money they could make to leave it, the people who buy houses here coz it’s cheap and will make a bucket later.

Ester: Can I interrupt? What do you think our parents did 20 years ago when they bought this place?

Alexander: I know but they were university students then, and I don’t judge them too harshly

Lyn: But university students are the ones who are the most upwardly mobile…

Alexander: OK it’s like I said I have a problem with gentrification, despite being a product of it. I mean I remember Pyrmont and go, ugh, it hasn’t made an interesting place to live…

Zanny: Lyn what do you think?

Lyn: The sense of community I have here revolves around an interaction with the Settlement Neighbourhood Centre, which is one of the few organisations in the area which has not been pigeon holed for the Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal community. Most services are divided along racial lines and the Settlement has been different to that. It has provided services for the whole community for over 100 years now…

Alexander: Mum, you neglected to mention the people I was talking about.

Lyn: I don’t know if that speaks about community

Alexander: but there are divisions… are you going to tell her the real story of the Settlement, or will I?

Lyn: I guess there are two stories of the Settlement. In the 80s the people who had once been the poor and dispossessed (who had been serviced by the Settlement) were nearing retirement age. They remembered how the Settlement was after the end of WWII and became increasingly resentful of the Aboriginal community who had become more of a focus of activities. Some of these longer term residents had gotten to the stage where they now owned their own houses, they were not as poor as they once were, and real estate agents were saying the Aboriginal Housing Company is pulling down houses, those people are moving out, invest in this property now, its cheap, its going to be the next Paddington and you will make a killing on the market. People over capitalised and needed to protect their assets, they felt that the Settlement was bringing “undesirable” kids into the area and was pulling down the tone of their street. So they took over the management committee and tried to sell it off. But they failed - they underestimated our stubborn desire to stay. We managed to convince the person who had tried to buy the Settlement building to back out of the contract.

Zanny: Returning to the question of gentrification today, how do you feel the changes introduced by the Redfern/Waterloo Authority are affecting Redfern?

Alexander: It seems to me it is about making money, and taking power away from local councils, and winding back public housing… sometimes I think about it as an ideologically driven thing, but it’s too stupid for that, its gentrification for the purpose of gentrification. It like they looked at public housing and saw all the problems and then decided to make it worse by reducing the number of places available so only the most desperate cases can get in… it seems like social cleansing to me, yet I guess the market does that anyway as everyone has realised that living close to the city is a good idea. It won’t solve any of the problems in Redfern – they are just moving them out west where they won’t be as obvious.

Lyn: A lot of it has to do with state debt and them not wanting to fund things like the upgrade of Redfern station…

Alexander: Wasn’t it also about increasing office space here in Redfern? At a time when there are still empty office spaces in the city?

Lyn: They claim it’s about providing employment for local people here by building offices, but it’s the wrong skill set, if these people could get those jobs they would have just walked into the city and worked building those offices…

Alexander: They just want our city to look a certain way and they don’t want poor people to be here anymore

Zanny: Can you stop gentrification?

Alexander: Probably, but I can’t see how… there is a suspension of certain democratic rights here. We live here in two very safe Labour seats and the people who decide our fate are aspirational voters who live far away in marginal swinging seats. They get to choose what happens in my suburb, not me. And the Labour Party is supposed to be the better alternative! I can’t see how you can stop it within the proscribed democratic framework. But you never know… I had a horoscope the other day and it said “you will find out something good about where you abode” and I shouted out: Hallelujah Frank Sartor [Minister for Planning and Redfern/Waterloo] is going under a bus!

Lyn: Gentrification was already happening here before the RWA, but it was happening relatively slowly and social change which happens slowly allows people to adjust to change. Now things are moving so fast. The dilemma is that with the changes in public housing criteria people are moving onto 5 year leases and there is a greater turnover. The changes in the built environment could be accommodated but Sartor is using this area as a template for how changes could happen elsewhere and that is a worry because he is eliminating contact between the local community and planning issues. The people who are going to be dislocated from this area, are the ones who most need public transport and cheap housing.

Alexander: Rather than moving more affluent people in here – you should be doing the direct opposite, because this is a place where people who can’t afford a car can live and get to work in the city…

Lyn: The dilemma is that they are using the public amenities of this area, selling off public assets and moving more people in without increasing community services. The people who lose out are Redfern residents, particularly low income residents. I mean parks were not sold off to pay for the upgrade of railways stations in any other suburb.

Alexander: What is the difference in density of housing between here and were the average tax payers live? Why do we have to increase our density then? The great Australian dream is to own your own property on a quarter acre block.

Lyn: I don’t have a problem with high density living, but there needs to be services for people, and some say over how it is organised. I mean schools are a good example of the problems in this area: 5 years ago Alexander, Erskinville, Waterloo, and Redfern Public Schools were not at capacity and were scheduled for closure, the only one which was closed was Redfern. They are now in the process of bringing in an extra 3000 residents into an area which has no local school. They say that the demographic of the people coming in won’t have kids, but this was not the experience in places like Pyrmont. People are not moving out of the inner city when they have kids anymore.

Alexander: I guess the logic is if these people can afford to move in they will have to pay for private schooling

Zanny: Well that will be a big change in Redfern as we know it… OK, so how would we run this city then if we had a real say over urban planning?

Alexander: There should be a much greater emphasis on keeping housing affordable. I think democratic planning would be pretty chaotic, and would be probably just as frustrating and hard to do, but in the end it would be more sustainable as the community would not be doing it for a profit, but for themselves.

Lyn: I would like Redfern to retain and increase the focus on the Aboriginal heritage of this area and the post-contact white heritage. I would like the Aboriginal Housing project to get built immediately, maintaining in this area a mix of housing needs – renters, buyers, and subsidised housing. It funny to think Paddington and Redfern were built about the same time, and even 40 years ago there was a student or poorer population which lived in Paddington, so its not that change wont happen, but you must involve people in this change.