Leviathan (26 page)

The Astor, overlooking the Botanic Gardens, was built as a speculative venture by a former grazier turned property magnate. Described by Jahn as the ‘grande dame of elegant high rise apartment living in Sydney', the Astor's apartments sprawled over huge areas of the building's thirteen floors. They were connected by dumb waiter to a restaurant in the basement. Its classical elements muted by
moderne
restraint, the Astor was a favoured haunt of early feminists like Ruby Rich and the Geach sisters who were often to be seen tooling off up Macquarie Street, in ‘their Buick driven by a uniformed chauffeuse', to do battle with government ministers, journalists and the captains of industry on behalf of the city's women.

The Astor and the Regis were the glamorous bookends of Sydney's first serious fling with apartment living. The twenty-year hiatus between the two world wars was characterised by a cosmopolitan shift all through the city's heart and along its eastern sea front. While the rich gathered in sumptuous hotel-like accommodation, tens of thousands of middle-class couples also opted out of the first flickers of the Australian dream, choosing to live in flats rather than houses. There existed just under 2000 flats when Vaughan arrived in the city with his notebook. In 1921 they numbered 13 000, and in 1933, 36 000, an explosive rate of growth. At first most of the action was up on the ridge in Kings Cross, where the early colonists' mansions were either chopped up into units or simply knocked over and replaced by high-rise apartments. With the returns from this sort of development being much more attractive than those available for detached housing, the rugged scenery and expansive estates of the coastal suburbs soon drew the attention of builders. After Manly, Bondi and the other beach-side locales had been weighed down under a new layer of Art Deco, Spanish Mission and simple modernist blocks, the inner western suburbs, starting with Ashfield, were next in line. So thorough was the colonisation of Bondi that no trees shaded any of its thousands of little homes and apartment blocks well into the 1960s when Gavin Souter wrote that every glazed tile roof between Bondi Junction and Dover Heights glistened on a bright day as though painted with an oily suntan cream.

When the census takers totted their figures from the count of 1911 they found a third of Sydney's population still squeezed into the centre of the city and its old inner ring of terraced suburbs. Twenty years on this had fallen back to a sixth of the total. The plains of the west and south-west were increasingly covered in red tile roofs which spread along the train lines and then filled in the spaces in between. In 1920 most of the settlements within thirteen miles of the city ‘still had the appearance of villages'. At night lonesome lights from isolated villas twinkled on the dark plains surrounding them. By day farmers and market gardeners went about the business of feeding the half million souls who lived between their allotments and the sea. But as the arches of the Harbour Bridge drew closer together those lonely properties were becoming ‘less and less isolated'; the gardeners were ‘pushed towards the urban fringe and the once separate villages were being joined in an octopus-like suburban conurbation'.

Naturally, in linking the city's sundered halves, the Bridge played its own role in the early growth spurt, although not exactly as expected. It destroyed the North Shore community of Milsons Point and impoverished the small businesses of North Sydney who had hoped to profit from it. It was a big plus, however, for those wealthy North Shore types who could meet the stratospheric price of private motor transport, and not surprisingly it lined the pockets of more than a few developers. The opening on 19 March 1932 was attended by both irony and farce; the former provided by Premier Jack Lang's decision to freeze the Royals and their representative out of the ceremony in favour of his own good self, the latter by a muddle-headed fascist called Francis de Groot who took deep offence at Lang's impertinence. At least three quarters of a million people jammed into the CBD for the ceremony, leaving the rest of Sydney bare of life. A journalist who chartered a flight for the spectacle saw just a single human being outside the city centre, a lone golfer revelling in the chance to get a round in on a bright hot Sunday. He was not the only fanatic at large that day. A pack of right-wing yahoos calling themselves the New Guard had decided to disrupt the ribbon-cutting in the name of King and Country after Premier Lang so ungraciously nudged the King out of the deal. De Groot, an Irish antique dealer living in Rushcutters Bay and a former captain of the Hussars, had donned his old uniform and ridden his horse onto the Bridge behind an official mounted escort. He nearly didn't make it, his horse having slipped and fallen behind. A police officer noticed his distress, however, and held up traffic while de Groot caught up with the troopers. Nobody seemed to notice his presence near the official dais and the Governor even returned his salute as he passed by.

Lang had just finished speaking and the Minister for Works had just started when de Groot spurred his horse forward, slashed at the ribbon twice with a sword and yelled, ‘On behalf of the decent and loyal citizens of New South Wales, I declare this bridge open!' The Premier, who had been under close guard since word of a bizarre plot to throw him off the Bridge had been received from the Agent-General in London, jerked around momentarily before settling back to watch a couple of burly coppers pull the nutter from his horse and give him something to go on with. So much for the farce. The irony was that the New Guard should have been driven to its prank by the ‘communist lover' Lang at all. For it was Lang's supporters, the working class of the hitherto divided points of Sydney's opposite shores, who suffered most from the Bridge's construction while the wealthy and the bourgeoisie who formed the Guard's cheer squad benefited by it.

The Bridge project had been encouraged by North Sydney Council and its small business backers, whose assets were protected from resumption and seizure. But there was no protection for the 500 homes demolished to make way for the Bradfield Highway. Letters of protest were pointless in the face of forced evictions. The government did not look favourably on any suggestion that the dispossessed should be compensated, and in fact only five people were. Unsurprisingly with the local market destroyed, local businesses soon fell into crisis as well. Commuters could now bypass North Sydney and other commercial centres began to develop further up the line, leaving the area around the Bridge to stagnate until the latter half of the twentieth century.

One sector of the economy which did take off with the laying of additional railway tracks was land speculation. When thousands of British migrants arrived after the Great War needing to be housed and put to work, frenzied speculation and boom psychology took hold in the city's real-estate offices. As Peter Spearritt points out, land subdivision could be fantastically lucrative when developers were not required to provide fully made roads and had no responsibility for the provision of any services. All they really had to do was write the ad copy and bank the cheques. One shameless self-promoter who banked a lot of cheques before the Depression closed him down was Sir Arthur Rickard, ‘the outstanding land developer of his era' and the foundation president of the Millions Club, a high-tone cabal of business barons and political figures who gathered over port and cigars to thump the tub about immigration, socialism and the economy. It later evolved into the Sydney Club. A natural salesman, Rickard was one of the first developers to latch onto the awesome possibilities of modern advertising, packaging raw, untouched bushland as ‘fine residential and weekend property'. Guileless investors were ferried out to swampy river frontages in the city's remote fringes and plied with free cups of tea and a lot of high pressure guff about living rent free in healthy surrounds. Others who wished to escape the urban life altogether were pitched ‘farmlets' in areas like Bankstown where they could raise pigs which were guaranteed to return ‘enormous prices'. There was no need to worry about taking your pigs to market, according to Rickard. The market would come to you, with buyers constantly scouring the countryside desperate for porkers to purchase.

Sometimes the same area could be pitched to completely different marks, as in Rickard's
Realty Review
of February 1924, an attractively packaged magazine with a buxom, bare-legged flapper on the cover, smiling seductively at potential buyers from her river punt. ‘Arthur Rickard and Fair Dealing are Synonymous,' boasted the mag, ‘to think of one suggests the other'. In February of 1924 Fair Dealing Arthur was trying to flog the same patch of turf in Bankstown to both young home buyers looking for ‘a peerless situation' on the Georges River, and any would-be pig farmers seeking a couple of acres of well-drained farm land for their noxious pursuits. Rickard was not the most unscrupulous of the land boomers, merely the most successful. Others such as Greater Sydney Estates took his advertising techniques into the twilight zone. For instance they pushed their Narrabeen holdings on the basis of proximity to the city. Only ten miles away, screamed the adverts. Which was true, if you could fly. If you had to drive it was sixteen miles. And if you didn't have a car, like most people at that time, the trip to Narrabeen was an epic journey indeed.

The Depression did for Rickard and a lot of his buddies in the Millions Club. It also squeezed off the growth of Sydney until after the Second World War. The actual shape of the city had not changed much, even with the influx of new settlers after 1918. Use of the urbanised core had greatly intensified though and the fingers of growth which had splayed out along the train lines had thickened, especially around the ‘knuckles' of the train stations. There, writes Spearritt, were all the amenities: draper, mercer, estate agent, hairdresser, banks, tea rooms, butcher, laundry, garage (with petrol pump on the pavement), newsagent, fruiterer, boot-maker, chemist, grocer, florist, fish and chip shop, dentist, doctor, school and pub. Even the fastest growing suburb of the period, however, could still turn a primitive face to the world. In 1927 Lane Cove, which more than doubled its population in the 1920s, was mostly still rocky and precipitous bushland when journalist Charles Whitham wrote, ‘There are spots around Tambourine Bay where one can stand at night, and see no friendly house or street lamps. If it were not for the reflection in the sky, there is nothing to indicate proximity to a great city.'

It wasn't until 1938 that the building industry recovered and then only briefly, before the Second World War shut everything down again. Military installations and hospitals for the wounded were the focus of building activity in the early 1940s and when hundreds of thousands of servicemen returned from the conflict there was literally nowhere to house them or their families. The Depression and the war had left Sydney short of maybe 90 000 houses. The situation was so serious that the RSL, never a hotbed of radical activity, threw its support behind hundreds of members who illegally occupied large, deserted buildings in Kings Cross and Bondi Beach, demanding the right to stay.

The decade after the war saw countless numbers of these people transfer their dreams of home life from the older established inner city suburbs to the vast plains on the city's edge, where the Housing Commission threw up thousands of simple dwellings along river flats and over the last untrammelled estates of the nineteenth-century land barons. Golf courses were given over to rough, uncurbed streets flanked by seemingly endless tracts of identical fibro houses. The care and aesthetic refinement which had gone into the Federation cottages and Californian bungalows of the century's early decades were abandoned for the exigencies of mass production. Even so it was not enough to meet demand. Tens of thousands of young couples simply bought their own block of land somewhere out beyond the horizon and spent the next ten years raising a home on it. Just as many could not afford even that and were forced deeper into the bush, beyond even the most remote planned settlements, where they carved their futures out of brute nature. Poet and novelist Gwen Kelly found herself in such a community at Mt Colah, penning a portrait of the city's frontier which remains a beautifully realised piece of early New Journalism, published many years before the genre developed in America.

Kelly lived amongst suburban settlers who were as hardy in their own way as their forebears of the nineteenth century. They turned their skills and stamina on the Australian bush with as much determination as any of Caroline Chisholm's people. Indeed they lived amongst the more comfortable descendants of those hardy travellers; long-settled rural families whose homes ‘were usually wooden with wide verandahs and plenty of ground, or ivy-covered brick with slate roofs. Some had overgrown ancient gardens running along the edge of the creek, some were backed by the beauty of half-decayed orchards.' The houses of the soldier settlers were often no more than tents to begin with, run up on blocks of bush without a path, ‘let alone a road, to penetrate the scrub'. Husbands and wives hacked at the gum trees and lantana during months of ground clearing, in scenes which recalled the labours of the First Fleet convicts raising their own wattle and daub huts in the primordial forests of Sydney Cove. With the ground clear the pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s would often spend a few more months pushing a track through to the nearest road, up which they would then haul expensive lengths of timber, plywood and asbestos board, much of it purchased on the black market at a ridiculous mark-up. Kelly thought the homes they built unpretentious, even humble, avoiding