Andrew McCutcheon

...you are better off having a conversation with people like David Yencken or the other people there, because they’ll bring up something... “oh, yeah. I forgot all about that”, and then both of you can then...

He’s an interesting character David...

That’s good.

And it’s getting worse.

Well that’s what I think is good, because someone will suddenly mention something which sparks off your memory. And I was just thinking it is so hard to think of all the things – you can think of a few – but there were other things that were probably much more important, but you don’t necessarily think of unless someone reminds you.

Gropius.

That’s in the Richad Serle book, isn’t it?.. or Geoff Serle’s book on Robin Boyd. And it’s a picture of...

Yeah, that was the house that Oz designed in 1950, and we moved into in ’51, and ahh... BSM became 100 years old a couple of years after that, and BSM decided to hold a colloquium in Toorak College, over Christmas/New Year sort of... with the intention of getting together representative people who would have some insights into how Australia’s form should develop. And it followed on from Oz working with Chifley on the reconstruction after the war, and they got Gropius out as the chief guest. The galaxy of stars were Roy Grounds, and Robin Boyd, and Romberg, and all the architects who had contributed anything significant... including in the federal Canberra area, and Sydney, and Adelaide... so you had the galaxy of Australia’s architectural, and administrative talent. People who had been head of housing and construction... commonwealth construction and all that stuff. And Gropius was brought round to see our house, so I happened to get in on the photograph... I think Mrs. Romberg, and Romberg, and Robin Boyd, and Gropius. And when Jessie Serle was putting the book together she rang up about photographs and I said I had a few photographs, and that was one of them.

It would be early 50s... ’53 or something like that. I had Robin Boyd as my second year design tutor in ’51, and it was really one of the highlights of my time at Melbourne University... he was just such a marvellous guy.

Yeah.

No, Robin had been a regular lecturer, and this year he had a design group.

There was one person in charge of each of the years. And Ray Featherstone had been first year, Robin Boyd was second year, and then we had Ray Featherstone again in third year... and everyone got a bit cheesed-off with that. Then we had Ray Berg in fourth year, and Romberg in fifth year...

Yeah...

Nup. Ray Featherstone was Ray Featherstone, and Grant Featherstone was altogether a different person.

Yeah...

Mary. Yeah, she’s still around... and spoke at a colloquium that they held for the Robin Boyd Foundation. And she spoke at the house that Robin had built them...

Yes. But they had an initial problem. It had this light source in the roof, and there was no appropriate material when it was done by Robin, and it used to leak... and cause all sorts of problems... but eventually, twenty years later, they found a material which both insulated... kept the heat in in winter, yet let the light in. It was some sort of an acrylic sandwich... and she told that story. But she wasn’t deprecating Robin, she was really just admiring this guys vision and was ahead of technology, and... But just to finish off the Featherstone House... Race Matthews, who was secretary to Gough Whitlam, and he asked me – I was a celebrant in those days – and he asked me to marry him and Iola Hack [?], who had been writing in The Age for many years, and I said I’d do that. And they said, “Well we are going to do it in the Featherstone House”. [laughter] And Gough was coming... So all these different levels had all these amazing people hanging over the balconies...

Yes. I was the celebrant.

Ahh, well I don’t know what all the connections are, but he sure knew them. They were happy to offer their house to them for the occasion, and Gough was happy to come down and bless his secretary’s wedding.

Ahh, yeah, it probably was while he was Prime Minister.

Well, what are your questions?

I think it would be hard... although, not hard for me.

And now we should talk about the ‘Last Laugh’... [much more laughter]

...Peter Corrigan and co.

I think that... that’s a very big question, but you’d know a fair bit about it ‘cause I was a Methodist, and Methodists had a lot of social issues and ... You know Brian Howe?

Well Brian Howe has been researching Alan Walker. Who was from Sydney – a Methodist mission from the Central Mission in Sydney – because he sort of ran a mission to the nation, but it was a very, a very social justice sort of program. And I certainly came out of that era. I had as my local minister in South Yarra, in the Toorak Methodist Church, Cliff Wright. And there was a fantastic guy who had studied in America, had worked at the Iona Community, and was a cut above a sort of bumbling parson. He was a visionary in many ways, so he was an influence on me as I grew up. And he taught me a lot about Iona, and George MacLeod and the Iona Community in Scotland.

The Iona Community came out of the Depression, and George MacLeod was a Church of Scotland minister in Clyde – the ship building part of the Clyde – and he was absolutely at his wit’s end with what to do with hundreds of unemployed men who were rotting away, and there was no prospect of any employment... and he in about 1937-8 got the idea of taking these guys out the island of Iona, off Mull, where there was an abbey that was wrecked. I think the Presbetyrian... the Church of Scotland had actually rebuilt the abbey church in 1910 but all the surrounding buildings were in ruins and he thought it would be a hell of a good project to get these guys to go out there for the summer and work with tradespeople and rebuild the abbey steadily over the years. And then come back into Glasgow for the rest of the year, but having established that sort of link between people ‘cause they had been involved in a project. Give these people some feeling that they belonged somewhere...

I went there in 1958 after I had done theology in Queens. And I told the Methodist Church that I wanted to go and visit the Iona Community, and also go to the World Council of Churches in Geneva for the winter term. And I got permission to do that and I toddled up and joined the Iona Community and stayed there two years in Glasgow. I did two summers in Iona ‘cause that’s what followed on. People kept on building till the buildings were finished in about 1960. In ’58 I was attached to a guy called Ian Cramm[?], who was a stonemason from Dumfries, and he was building the cloister of the abbey, and I was his hand-me-up. So we were putting up the cloister – putting up the formwork, mixing the cement, and he was chipping out the stones, We went all the way around the cloister, set all the cloister stonework, and then the next year when we came back we started putting the oregon timbers on it. And Viv and I went back there this last October to see it after all those years.

It wasn’t like the monastic communities, but it was a community in the sense that although these people lived in different parts of Scotland, they started off living in Govern[?], but each year they would embrace more people to come into this experience...

Well, it’s still going in one sense, but what goes on there now is very different. I mean, it’s not a rebuilding program... but amongst other things that group of people made commitments to each other and shared part of their income so that they could carry people who still were unemployed. They used to meet regularly in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. So it was a pretty interesting concept of people sticking together in adversity. And the Depression went on and on and on, so it was fairly depressing for a lot of people, particularly in that sort of industry. So you asked me ‘what was the origins of me being socially involved’, so it really all comes out of that. When I was at university I got involved in the student Christian movement... that was another, and much more radical than the local parish churches. The Iona Community was above parish churches. It was looking at significant issues in society, like unemployment, and how do you mutually support people. Ahh... the ASCM... There has been a very good book written on the Student Christian Movement by Renata Howe, its history since the 1880s, and it has always been ahead of the issues. Issues like, ‘Australia should be involved in Asia’. And so members of the ASCM worked in Asia. The Volunteers Abroad movement came from those sort of people... who went and used their skills, having graduated from the university, in Indonesia and those sort of places. Hugh O’Neill went to Indonesia with that scheme...

Yeah.

Ahh, the year behind me.

Yes.

You know Hugh?

So, he went off, and he came back all enthusiastic about this marvellous architecture. Angkor Wat and all this stuff. And there were others from other faculties. I mean, Herb Feith, who was a professor of Indonesian I think at Melbourne eventually – he died some years ago – but Herb Feith went off very early on and worked on public service... Indonesian public service salaries, he and a couple of others.

No. He came back after about 15 years or something like that...

And he knew so much about the politics, and social issues of Indonesia that he had no trouble at all getting an academic position. I’m rambling though...

Melbourne University was very significant... and I guess my view of the profession was that architects were fairly limited. I’d lived with one all my life [laughs], and while I admired the man, he was someone who did the same thing from beginning to end, and I’ve done eight or ten different things depending on what the issues of the day have been.

Well it was interrupted by things like the Second World War, where he was recruited by the Americans and went into Brisbane where they actually worked up prefabricated hospitals, including all the sewerage, and the operating theatres, and packaged them... and took them in just behind the lines, and unfolded whole hospitals that could operate just behind the lines. And that was all done by a team which included people that eventually... some of them came back to Bates Smart – Doug Gardiner from Brisbane, Alan Roulton [?] who was his brother-in-law – my father’s brother-in-law...

No. My father as an individual, and Alan Roulten, both went up to Brisbane and joined this thing, and went out with the hospitals when they were being established.

Ahh... I don’t think he would be regarded then as a wildly experienced hospital expert. He’d probably done a few of the regional towns like Foster – some of those small town hospitals – but he didn’t do any bigger hospitals until after the war. Yeah.

No, he wasn’t recruited. He was too old to be called up in the Second World War. He was called up in the First World War. But the Americans, I think, wanted to pick the eyes out of the people available to do this thing of providing support for troops in the field.

It was close to the theatre. It was just outside the war zone, but near enough to be able to ship them into Leahy, and all those places.

Closer to the battle zones in the Coral Sea... Now the other interesting thing there, is that experience led to... after the war, Bates Smart started an office out in Burke Road, Camberwell with TrussSteel from England, and TrussSteel was a firm that wanted to package buildings. And that there was quite a big team out at Burke Road for two or three years. They were trying to... After the war when building materials were scarce, and you had to get permits to build anything. TrussSteel was seen as one way of pursuing that packaged hospital idea for regional centres. I’m not sure how many actually got delivered, but there was a lot of work done to try and sell to the State Government that they could in fact very quickly get basic hospitals.

Why did I veer away... I didn’t ever practice much. I did what was necessary after I graduated to get registration, and I worked at Bates Smart. I’d always done my student stuff at Yunken Freeman, like a lot of people including Evan [Walker]. [laughter] But for the first time, after I graduated, I worked at Bates Smart and I was put in a team that was doing the MLC North Sydney, which became the largest single office building that Australia had ever done. And I think it was done on the dry construction where you sheathed the steel frame in fire-proof plaster...

I don’t think it was. It was fire plaster, whatever that stuff is. And metal pans for the floor with a screed poured on top of it, and a suspended ceiling. It was a very early breakthrough of all of that sort of construction that had been going on in America, but it hadn’t been used in Australia. And we worked on that for...

Yeah.

Yes. And we had to work out how to do it all [laughter] ... under Australian conditions. And then the ICI came at the same time, and the ICI was going to break the 132 foot limit, and they basically had to convince the Fire Chief and the building regulations, and the State Government that you could actually go higher and do it safely, and that the regulations would have to be suitably adjusted.

Yeah. I did a few of the drawings on ICI. I didn’t have as much to do with that as I did with MLC North Sydney, but that was going on at the same time in... ’59. ’58?

Yeah.. I think it was ’57-’58 for me doing the drawings. Ahh, so I’d qualified so that I could be registered, and then I went off to Queens College and did two years of Theology, and I happened to land on my feet ‘cause Davis McCaughey had just arrived from the north of Ireland and became the Professor of New Testament at Ormond. And I was in Queens, and the Ormond and Queens theological halls were happy to swap students to different lectures and things... and so I persuaded my professor that I should go across to New Testament studies with Davis McCaughey.

In Melbourne.

Yes. His father.

He eventually later became master of Ormond College, and we appointed him Governor of Victoria.

Yes, that’s it.

And Davis McCaughey was another person who had a really serious world vision, and wasn’t sort of constrained by local church... and Colin Williams, a Methodist professor but wasn’t there while I was in the Hall, unfortunately, but Colin Williams was written up... I knew Colin Williams ‘cause I had tracked my way to his church prior to this – before he went to the States – and had great admiration for his vision of things. Ah, and when I came back from Iona he sort of directed me to the inner city churches of Melbourne, and persuaded the conference that that was a good idea.

Well, theology is actually run by the Colleges, it’s not Melbourne University. Melbourne University had a constitution which didn’t allow for religious instruction. It was secular, but the individual colleges ran their own lecture programs – Trinity, Newman, Queens and Ormond.

No, I’m not. I didn’t graduate in anything in particular. I just sat out two years... [laughter]

Well, you’re really touching on a huge topic and that is the role of religion as civilization has progressed. Whether it’s upwards or downwards, it’s moved, and religion has had a huge... not just Christian religion, but religions have had a huge role in human... in satisfying human need, haven’t they? And...

Well, they’ve also buggered things up. That’s my whole beef with institutions. They ossify, and they lose the raison d’etre from which they were originally founded, and become ossified and sclerotic. And it seems to me that’s happened to so many, including most of the Christian churches, that they become bound by all these rules and regulations, and formulations, and ways of controlling people and power, and everything else. But their history is not all that bright. They’ve got some marvellous examples of things that they have done which were good, but they’ve also done some absolutely horrific things in the name of religion.

I... I think what I was looking for, even in architecture was ways in which... I suppose the question originally was regarding ways in which architects can really contribute to society in making a difference. Ahh... but I didn’t end up by saying that you do it by designing brilliant buildings. I got led to be much more interested in fairness, and in social systems, and what was wrong with them... And what’s justice?

Well I think architecture can contribute to it because it’s a marvellous basic education, and it’s one that extends your imagination and ability to imagine that this is all possible... which is unlike some disciplines. I would think the law would be quite stultifying... [laughter].

Umm... Let me go back a bit. For ten years before we got into government, through the ‘70s I chaired the Housing and Urban Affairs policy committee of the ALP in Victoria, and it had a lot of very important minds on it. John Button, Rob Carter – do you know Rob? – Michael Salvaris, Evan [Walker], and a whole lot of people were prepared to spend their time formulating policy issues in preparation for being in government. And we were very critical of the Housing Commission estates. They were ghettos. They didn’t seem to have a proper social basis. Umm.. and I’d have given..

Yeah. I’d experienced this. My wife and I lived on the Dight Street estate in Collingwood for eight years, and our kids were born while we were there. And the Housing Commision had no concept of how people are living on that estate, and what they need in the way of mutual and other forms of support to help bring up children. And when they went high-rise as well, they left people, say on the 17th floor and if their kids went down to play outside, the distance between the people looking after them was just non-existent. And the estates were just open, with no boundaries, no fences so people just felt they could just wander through. So teenage kids could go hurling through the place and if there were little kids playing there, they just got munched in the traffic. There was no sense of space that was controlled and safe and overlooked. So we started at that point, and when we got into government - Ian Cathie was the Minister for Housing - and he allowed me to chair the Housing and Urban Policy Committee for his portfolio and he gave us access to the public servants. And he had Rob Carter as his advisor. So the housing policy… Parliamentary Housing Policy Committee was able to go into the Ministry of Housing on a regular basis, and go through the budgets, and go through the sort of housing programs, and we started… we had… we said over the ten years we need to redevelop these estates and give them different characteristics. That there is protected space, and overlooked space. The safest thing - as Jane Jacobs pointed out - was public space that is overlooked is safe. But if you have this no-man’s land down below that nobody takes any responsibility for, and nobody considers theirs it is unsafe. And so we said we’ve got to go through the existing estates, and stop building all these new ones, and raise these to a different level. And so we started taking out some of the old buildings and creating enclaves where there were houses that looked over, and creating smaller spaces that would be safe for young children and changing the way the whole thing… and also changing the mix. In some of the estates you could take out housing and put in privately owned housing, and mix it up. Much more like a community. In St.Kilda here, there was a big estate between Dandenong Road and Point Nepean Road - there was a big block of land in behind all those buildings in St.Kilda Street which Roy Gilbert, the director of Housing wanted to buy - and I was the local member so I encouraged this, and it’s… now if you go wandering around in there, there are streets and the whole thing is much more part of the urban fabric.
But the point of blundering around on all this is that we started off on that process and we got Commonwealth State housing funding to redevelop part of the estate, and start the estate improvement fund…

Yeah. And eight or nine years later I became Minister for Housing, and the estate that we had lived on had now gone through that process, and I opened - on the estate that we lived on - the redevelopment. [laughter]

Ahh, that’s where the high school was. McCutcheon Lane… what’s it called… McCutcheon Way… that was a slightly different tack. That was when the Collingwood Girls High School was burnt down, and Lindsay Thompson was the Minister for Housing and he wanted… he said that “we will set up a committee, and we’ll have a look at this”. So there were all sorts of talking groups, but eventually a core group of people were asked to write a brief for an education centre that would be primary, secondary, and community. And there were all sorts of attached groups to that, and a lot of work was done. And Thompson said, “that looks a very interesting idea, and it’s not been done before. We’ve never had a complex which houses all three. Ahh, I’d like to do it”. So they started the acquiring land, and I was on the Collingwood Council and I was persuading my fellow councillors that we ought to go along with this. But it did involve removing a few houses, and we had this, “did we want to knock down houses just to get an education facility next to the high-rise estate”. And we agreed. And having put the block together there was this piece of land that was the connecting thing through to a street, and one of the councillors… who was a bit of a… he was an Olympic walker actually in the 1948 Games, said let’s call it McCutcheon’s Way. [much laughter].

Yeah. Yeah. Lindsay Thompson was someone you could actually talk to. Dick Hamer was someone you could actually go and talk to as a Labour municipal councillor, and so was … um … Alan Hunt. And Alan Hunt had Planning and Local Government as did Dick Hamer, and Lindsay Thompson had Education. And they were both people you could on deputation to, and they’d actually listen to and they’d actually respond to your propositions even if it wasn’t always yes, and they’d give you reasons why it was no. I learnt a lot about being a minister from those three guys. Marr[?] who was Minister for Housing was an absolute deadhead, and so was Rafferty, the transport minister. We had to deal with them on the eastern freeway and you couldn’t get a word of sense out of Rafferty. He couldn’t comprehend what you were on about when you said, “let’s build the public transport spine down the middle of the Doncaster Freeway first and have it going before you get people into cars”. He wouldn’t even understand what you were on about.

Thompson, Hamer, and Hunt they were … they taught me a lot about how to be a minister.

Yes, a parliamentary minister.

Ahh … 1969 I asked for leave of absence from the Church, and I’d come back for a Churchill Fellowship which I did with Daryl. Daryl had the …

Yeah. I had the Churchill, and Daryl had the Stramit scholarship. I had worked out this very elaborate itinerary, and I’d written hundreds of letters to people and sort of organized to go through Japan, across America, to England, then around the new towns, then up to Scandinavia and Holland, and back home via Calcutta and Singapore.

I was looking at what happens when people live in high-rise and high density, and what were the ingredients that make it humane. And out of all the sort of turmoil that we have been discussing. And Daryl was very pleased to come along. So Daryl and I did a hundred days …

Yes.

The good days?

Well, I met with Joseph Esherick in San Francisco … and another was … Who was the guy that Daryl worked for on the East Coast?

Paul Rudolph. Yeah, we went and saw Paul Rudolph, and he waxed lyrical about “the brick of the twentieth century”. This prefabricated brick about the width of a traffic lane, so you can take it along the road and put it on a building site. And you could put them on top of each other …

He called it “the brick of the twentieth century”.

Yes … [END OF THE FIRST PART OF THIS INTERVIEW]

Actually, what I learnt out of it was medium density low-rise. And we saw hundreds of them. Washington, California, and all the new towns in Britain. We went through them like a fine-toothed comb. Analysed them - Daryl and I. We had a marvellous conversation, and I’ve got notebooks full of the stuff. And took lots of slides … and we also went to Berkeley and there was an Australian doing some research on people living in high-rise and what space did they consider their own, and what spaces did they consider you had to go into but it was not terribly good? They drew maps. They got people to draw maps. So you came from the car into the lift lobby and went up in the lift, and along the corridor to your house, but there was no sense in which all those journeys were in particularly friendly space. And so people were sort of coming in and then locking the door … and I thought they were pretty interesting, but they were … I forget the woman’s name, Barkly I think it was, but she was really interested in how people react to living in that high-rise, high density environment. And then when you got into all the low-rise stuff, with outdoor space and indoor living space and some of it’s really beautiful. Some of that English housing …

I can’t remember. I can’t remember any of the architects. Daryl could I suspect. But there was the mechanized sort, you know, in precast concrete, and more like a casbar. Then there were ones more like Merchant Builders … with the cathedral roofs. Much more like the Canberra stuff that was done. So there was a real split, in the British attitude, or the architect’s view of what medium density housing was, and you got these regimented rows of stuff, and then you got this other stuff which was much more organic … But what I got out of it was … ‘cause I’d never really seen so much of that sort of stuff, and it was an eye-opener. And to go off on one little track, when I got back … David Yencken was putting together Silverton... With Silverton the … City Edge, and he asked me to be the social planning consultant, with Daryl as the design architect. So Daryl and I had this conversation while we were away and we knew exactly what each other was talking about, and so we separated the cars and carparking traffic from the pedestrian traffic around the whole complex, and gave everyone private outdoor space, and reserved an area on the site for the people who came to live there to determine how it should be used. And when we presented that to the Housing Commission ahh ... they couldn’t understand it. The Housing Commissioners were absolutely perplexed, but nevertheless the scheme won, because it offered good units, and it must have been a good price. So it won the tender …

No. It was land that was compiled by the Housing Commission. Then they decided they weren’t going to go ahead and they put it up for tender for private enterprise.

Yeah. He put the team together … for Silverton, the builders.

No, ‘70s.

Yeah.

Bank Street.

Let me tell you why they did that. In 1969, when I was in the parish still, I had an old Methodist mission and when I got into Collingwood I got together with David Herse[?] who was a presbyterian in Abbotsford, and we inveigled Church of Christ, and Anglicans to cooperate and we made a combined parish for many activities. And the Presbyterians and Methodists actually made a combined parish, combining our congregations and our finances …

Well, this was well ahead of the Uniting Church. We just said there is no way you can work in this area as little disparate communities with four or five people trying to stump up money to keep the whole thing going. We need to consolidate property, and get income from property, and not have all these barns of churches housing five or six people. So we persuaded the trustees of property to allow us to consolidate into this Presbyterian church in Wellington Street, and the Methodist Mission was pulled down and a factory was built there which gave us an income stream. And ahh … down in North Richmond the Methodist church was pulled down and became another factory - the Hardings crumpet factory on the corner of Elizabeth Street - and we used the Presbyterian church in William Street, Abbotsford.

Yes. The trustees built the factories, and leased them, and guaranteed an income to that area from property that had been built up over the years.

The Methodist Church has trustees of each building, whose job it is to look after it and maintain it, but if you want to pull something, or do something, you go to the Central Conference for permission to do things. So we got permission to … [Andrew’s phone rings] … So we’d certainly got permission from the authorities, and they saw we were serious about becoming a combined parish. And at that stage talks about church union were in the air so they probably thought it might be a useful thing to let these guys go. And we were trying to tell the Church that the usual pattern of having a congregation and giving them all sorts of activities was totally irrelevant in the inner city which had migrant populations, and institutions like ‘Hamer’s freeway plan’ about to swamp the area and cauterize it, and the Housing Commission coming in and knocking down people’s houses and disrupting communities had nothing to do with being a suburban congregation. It needed a totally different structure and we wanted to get a core of people who could help give some direction to that, which would underlay a sort of political strategy to get the clout to influence all those things.

Yes. So we just got more and more politically alert, and we were engrossed in the community. I mean I was secretary of an ALP branch, and it was the first branch in Australia , I think, to actually recruit Greek-speaking members. And we had twenty-five Greeks on our books, and we had to conduct our meetings in Greek and Australian [laughter] because they were just new arrivals, but they wanted to be part of the thing. They had to learn Australian politics, and they provided an incredible energy to the thing that was very exciting.

They would have been both, I imagine.

Yeah. Yeah. We had one guy, a Greek, who had been treasurer of the branch when I first joined it, and he grew old and sort of stood to one side. His son had been one of the freedom-fighters in Greece, and he eventually became a councillor and mayor, and eventually a State member of parliament - Theo Sideropolous. … Now what was that all about?

Yeah… the political … George McLeod had said, “Politics is a dirty game, but if you leave it to everybody else you get nowhere”. And he had sort of encouraged people to be aware and the importance of politics…

Yeah. And.. ahh … I won’t go into all that. I was just convinced having lived in the Housing Commission estate and seen the bureaucracy that couldn’t care less about what the people on the ground wanted, and just administered what they thought was best for these people…

They were bureaucrats. I mean, some of them would have been responsible for the maintenance budget, and some of them would have been responsible for the budgets for mowing the lawns, and painting the windows[laughter]...

Ray Burkett[?] and Ashman, Alan Ashman[?] Three commissioners... and they were… Ray Burkett was I think Ozy Barnett’s son-in-law, and he was a nice human being, but nevertheless he was still influenced by that whole bureaucratic view. Gaskin was a rogue. I think he’d been a builder, but he was a real toughnut, Jack Gaskin. Alan Asman was a slimy weasel [all laughing].

So it was not a good trio. But the background to that is that Vivienne, my wife’s aunt Francis Pennington was a social worker, and she had been on the original slum reclamation authority that started in the ‘30s and gave a report to the Dunstan government - the Country Party government - that there should be a Housing Authority and a slum reclamation program. And when they did set up the Housing Commission she was a commissioner, and she was a social worker, and a very interesting woman whom I admire greatly. She was David Pennington’s aunt, too. My wife was a Pennington.

No, they started in her day as a commissioner ... they started down in Garden City, and they used land that was not knocking people’s houses down. And they built those houses that are still going well down there. They’ve been pretty great. But the rot set in after the war when they took the Holmesglen factory and they started building this concrete stuff. And … there was huge pressure after the war and Chifley started the Commonwealth/State housing agreement, and started funding housing, and unfortunately they’d built them in ghettos. First of all they did slum clearing, and jammed everyone into those estates that are around Melbourne. Then they went into middle and outer suburbs, like Moorabin and Broadmeadows and did huge estates, and then they came back again with high-rise. so the first concrete houses were three-storey walk-ups, which were what Viv and I lived in, and halfway through our time in the ‘60s they came into Collingwood and said, “we want to build twenty storey blocks”. They’d already done it in North Melbourne and Carlton … and I actually found that Jack Tripovich[?], who was an MLC - member of the legislative council - and he lived in the Jordan Housing Commission estates, was in bed with the Housing Commissioners and was very happy to encourage Labour areas to allow this slum reclamation. So there’s your spokesperson on housing, sort of not critical at all of what the Housing Commission is doing, and having no concept of what disruption you do cause. My parish had the little narrow streets - Charles Street, Easy Street and all those things. Vere Street, and Johnson Street. And they just came in and drew a line on the map and said, “all these houses have got to be knocked down, and those people will have to be moved out and go somewhere else”. If they owned the house they were given some money for it. But, now … if you take Collingwood it’s a very low-income, working class community. It’s becoming more and more mixed with ethnic groups, but basically the social structures of the community are the way that everybody knows everybody else, and everybody helps everybody else, and minds kids, and when they are sick and all that stuff … it was just a network … that’s all destroyed by that activity.

Don’t ask me why, but you could talk to them till the cows come home, and they didn’t see that there was anything wrong with renewing and building these things. And then they got into high-rise, and they didn’t realize that that makes the problem many times more difficult for the …

It wasn’t even on their radar! They were looking at physical building, and you know … “these are rotten physical buildings and we’ll put some good ones there, and everyone should be applauding us”.

Once they had the factory ...

So they had the pressure to keep on building, and they needed more sites to build these high-rise. And they had this, I suppose, quite cleverly devised system of post-tensioned construction but …

No one had the task or the responsibility to look at the social fabric, and the way the things worked. And my eight years living on that estate … When they started to build that high-rise, I was on the Council … The first thing was the Council ... I got the Council to oppose the high-rise, and they just rode over us. The Act said, “The Housing Commission must go to the Council and present their proposal”. It didn’t say anything about whether the council could accept or reject, but it was the act of presenting the proposals which was supposed to … Now Melbourne City Council had dealt with the Housing Commission in order to get more people back into the CBD shopping precincts - the retail area. So they had agreed that the rate revenue that came from putting these buildings there would be given back to the Housing Commission over thirty years. They had enough money to say we will do all that we are responsible for, but we want this Flemington and Kensington stuff so badly to keep the CBD retail going, that we will create a loan … take out a loan, and the revenue from that will repay the loan, and we’ll give you the money that’s raised by the loan. So when the Housing Commissioners came down to Collingwood they had a proposition - they were gonna build three high-rise towers and we want the Council to use the revenue for the next thirty years to raise four million dollars, and pay it to us to have this magnificent thing, and um …

Yep. And Wellington Street. So, that was their proposition.
Now the background to it was that um … I trying to get the ALP to have a very strong policy on high-rise and the conditions that should go with it, and that councils should not be obliged to pay anything for that because they needed the small revenue streams they did have to provide youth facilities, and child health clinics, and all that sort of services. And improve the library services, and so on.
If Jack Tripovich had his way, and he knew some of the other people who were my fourteen other councillors, who were all dunderheads, they would have all put their hands up and said, “Yes Mr. Gaskin, and you’re a great man”. So I had to find a way politically of changing that. So, I was a member of the Town and Country Planning Association, and I used to meet with Bob Gardiner and all that mob who’d been part of the push to get the CBD retail going. And I started to tell them what the issues on the Housing Commission estates were, and that councils needed the revenue to provide the other services that Housing Commission didn’t even think was its responsibility. And I got support from Maurie Crow - do you know Maurie, dear Maurie?

Maurie and I were a real little caucus in the Town and Country Planning Association, and we got strong support from them. And then I went to the Institute of Architects and I think Graeme [Gunn] at that stage … no, this was the Brookes Crescent one. Graeme was the convenor of the community services part of the Institute Council. So we gradually built up support from outside our area. Then I went to the ALP housing policy committee and convinced them with union support, ahh … just knocking down people’s houses and disrupting communities was a no-win game. And that Labour councils should oppose any payment to the Housing Commission for any of this sort of activity. I got that through the ALP, and then I went to the caucus of the Collingwood Council and said, “It’s ALP policy that we have to oppose.” [laughter] And they all coughed and spluttered, and probably checked up on me … But it was terrific, ‘cause when the Housing Commission came, we had a caucus beforehand and I said, “We’ve gotta tell the Housing Commissioners we are not going to go along with this business. There’s no way we’re gonna sign off money for the next thirty years, etc, etc”. And hands went up, and we went into bat. I can remember Jack Gaskin going the colour of your shirt . [laughter] I thought he was going to have a heart attack, ‘cause it was the first time any council had told him to go and jump in the lake.
So we actually stood firm, and they changed the Housing Act - the Slum Reclamation Act - to make sure that if the commission went twice to the council and got no response they could just go ahead. But our Council just never paid the sum. We just refused. They never took us to court.

Yes. We couldn’t stop the scheme, but we certainly didn’t enter into the financial arrangements. Then we started to say, “Now on this wide open space around these Corbusier towers, we would like an adventure playground, and we would like it properly secured and fenced, and we’d like kids to be able to do all sorts of things there that are part of their normal upbringing.” But in this sort of environment there is no way it is tolerated by anybody.
So we compiled a lot of documents and information about adventure playgrounds, and suggested that that would be a progressive thing for the Commission to be seen to be doing. But they wouldn’t wear that. And so the more times you sort of tried to be constructive and got knocked back, the more angry I got, and the more determined I got to find a political way of changing the thing. And that’s why you become political. You get so frustrated with people not understanding. Yet they’re not really part of it, so they don’t really know, and they think they are doing marvellous things, when they are really not. And that was how the whole process really kicked off. And the whole process really started again with the Eastern Freeway. The original Hamer freeway plan had a north-south freeway down the Merri Creek, and that would have gone through Hoddle Street. And the Eastern Freeway would have come in here. And with all the clover-leafs and things, more than a third of Collingwood was going to be mown down. Now how absurd. And cauterized. These people are cut-off from these people, and these people are cut-off from these people. And here is a traditional inner city community that has the best football team [laughter] …

Just been destroyed by some stupid freeway! And so we started on the battle. And the freeway battle really was [Andrew drawing] … Here’s Melbourne, and you get this grid thing, and Port Philip Bay in here. And they started to build all the bits that came in pointed to the city … And that’s the ones they built. Not the ones that by-passed miles out of town. So I used to rant and rave about the futility of building the bits that point traffic at the CBD and just congest the inner areas. So we won the argument about Hoddle Street - the north-south bit - that was eliminated. And we got all the councils along that route - Labour and Liberal councils, Prahan and Brighton - to oppose the north-south one. We were on our own on the Eastern Freeway. And Fitzroy and Collingwood worked very hard, and built blockades and things, and worked very hard to try and stop that. And we put up all sorts of alternatives of using the reserved land to get the public transport part of it going ahead of the cars and so on. To very little avail. But they were important campaigns, I think.

Yeah, but that was the futility of it. They all came to a certain point and then it was too expensive to do the next bit, so they just let the traffic ....

And it could have wrecked … So we went into a very detailed analysis of all our little roads, and how to stop all that traffic completely wrecking the local road system.

Yes. This is in the ‘70s.

Ohh, that was in the ‘80s when I was in State Parliament. But during the ‘70s I was chairing the Urban Affairs and Housing Policy Committee. I spent ten years with people who did have some feeling for the issues.

When he was in Peel Street [Collingwood]?

Ray Birkett might have been the closest, but he was captivated by ‘his comrades’.

Yeah.

I, I …[laughing] it’s a great piece of visual architecture. It was very funny. We walked … Ahh, no. What’s the other place? Formony …

Firminy. We went up to the Firminy one, but not the Marseilles. The Firminy one. And we are walking across the grass and people started throwing eggs at us! [much laughter]

It was pretty good, really. [laughter] But, umm, fortunately towards the end of the ‘80s the financial situation had changed. Hawke had floated the dollar, the Loan Council money had stopped so states were in a very awkward position in terms of funding infrastructure and capital works, and I think the Commonwealth State housing agreement money had been strangled. So there weren’t a lot of resources, but we did what we could. I can’t remember now which projects we did, but I was also responsible for consolidating a department of housing, planning, public works into one conglomerate. I had all those little empires fighting each other and I had Rob Carter - I brought him back from New Zealand - to head up the department, and for him to worry about all of that bloodletting and try and keep our focus on doing some sensible things.

It, ahh … It created a formula to try and compensate states that were better off, or worse off than the better off, bigger states. It had a funding formula … very interesting really because it was very hard to appeal to them that the formulas had to be changed as the circumstances had changed. And now we find that the boot’s on the other foot, and Queensland and Western Australia have got mining royalty money which they won’t share with the rest of Australia. And yet they were the mendicant states for years and years and years, and got the largesse from New South Wales and Victoria, and now it’s time that somebody stood them up. I don’t like politics these days. It gives me the creeps.

I don’t know where it came from.

Yeah.

Yeah, I could see the sense of having a distribution formula that accounts for slower development States, and poorer ones, so that everyone has a chance of a decent health system, and education system, but I don’t like it when States that have been the recipients of that then want to grab everything they can out mining boom. I mean Barnett in West Australia irks me. I’ve got a relationship with the aboriginals in Broome, and they want to put the Woodside gas hub on James Price Point, which is in the middle of the Kimberley … and what’s his name, the West Australian Premier?

Barnett. Says he’s gonna compulsorily acquire this land because he doesn’t want the royalties to go to the Northern Territory. He wants to keep the gas hub in West Australia. Now that’s all very fine, but to put it in the Kimberley where the marine area is … probably the biggest breeding ground for humpback whales. Where the pristine territory of the Kimberley becomes a gas hub, with railways and shipping … It’s just terrible.

Yeah.

No. Well the decision has got to be approved by the Federal minister for the environment, and I’ve just written a letter for the Wilderness Society.

I’ve walked with the aboriginals up through the Dampier Peninsula, including James Price Point and along the beach for 90 kilometres, and that should never be … and they don’t want it to be touched. They are happy to develop it with its own thing as a cultural heritage place, and encourage white people to understand aboriginal cultural heritage.

But I mightn’t be able to remember what’s been said though.

What was I? I was Minister for Water Resources and I was working with Evan [Walker] on the salinity problem as he was the Minister for Agriculture. And I was just going up to Yackandandah to put a bronze plaque on a sewerage treatment plant [laughter] … and I get a call from the Premier, and he says, “Andrew, I’m doing the cabinet reshuffle and I want you to be Attorney General. And I said, “You’ve gotta be joking, Premier”. [laughter] And he says, “No, I’m not joking, and I think you’ll do a very good job”. Which was very heartwarming. So I had this terrible trip up to Yackandandah worrying about being the bloody Attorney General when I got back.

Jim Kennon was the Attorney, and he wanted to put him into Transport.

Yes. Jim is a lawyer. He was. He died.

I don’t know why, but he had made a decision he was going to move Jim. Maybe he thought Jim would be able to untangle the transport, but Jim ended up with thousands of trams in Bourke Street, so … [laughter]

… and scratch tickets. [laughter] So in 1987 he made me Attorney General,and then we went and won an election in ’88. And when we came out he made me Attorney General again. So I thought that was a compliment, actually. But then in 1990 when all the trams were lined up in Bourke Street he said, “I’m sorry Andrew, but I’m going to have to do something about this. I’m going to have to take you out of that portfolio and put Jim back in there.” So I was actually quite disappointed ‘cause Attorney General does the most legislation, which was not something I was keen to do, but you came in as a non-lawyer with the ability to ask questions, and stand off and demand the logic of what you’re doing in a way that someone who is part of the furniture couldn’t do. And I enjoyed that role. And trying to find a logic in, for example, the distribution of cases between the Supreme Court, County Court, and Magistrates Court. And their jurisdictions were very unbalanced, and the Supreme Court was doing practically nothing, and the County Court was working hard and the Magistrates were absolutely overburdened. And we needed to adjust … and I was able to set up that sort of thing. I was absolutely horrified at the cost of the law, and how people just can’t afford to go to court to get justice if you’re the average person. You can if you are a wealthy person, or a big business. And they manipulate the law to protect their own position. So I was interested in alternative dispute resolution, and we set up some pilots for that. And ahh … I was being asked by the judges to appoint more judges and build more courts and I said, “Well look, with the capital works program like it is, why don’t we use the courts we’ve got better”. The Supreme Court used to go off on holiday before Christmas and come back in February. They’d all go to church on the first Monday in February, and then all go back to work. [laughter] And I said, “Why can’t we run the courts 24/7 for 12 months in the year, and you guys roster your holidays”.

It makes a difference! And the County Court needed a new building ... It was falling to bits, and we weren’t able to offer them the chance to do anything to that. And then the Children’s Court was a disgrace, down in Batman Avenue, and I persuaded the Premier to let me move the Children’s Court up to Queensbridge Road into an existing building. And that was very good because it meant that people thought about Children’s Court building, and fitting out. And I think that was given a good five or six years of hard work before they had built a complete new building. So they learnt a lot from having this much better building with some ideas worked out in the way the court was set up and so on.

Probably is … Well, I don’t sort of analyze me. It might be more obvious to you. There was a classic case in Geelong. The Public Works Department - this is when I’m in Public Works - they are building a new courthouse at a railway. And there’s Geelong Road, and then the side streets that go up to the station. And there’s this block of land and they wanted to build a new courthouse in Geelong. So they designed this beautiful entrance with a portico, and a driveway for the judges to be chauffeur driven and get out [laughter], and there was an old car park out the back - and that’s where all the customers are going to be - and they had to walk all the way around to come in here. It was about two hundred yards, so I said, “Why do you do that? Why don’t you allow these people to come in and access the building from where the car park is?” And that might mean you have to think of some sort of central thing where people go everywhere. Don’t tell me they have to go all the way around and bump into the chauffeur driven white cars with judge’s flowing robes, when they have to park way around the back. So, yes you can sort of … but the Public Works should never have come to me with a plan like that.

It’s awful, isn’t it.

The ‘new broom’ thing meant that they called me the Architect General, and that wrote rude letters to the Premier about the appointment, but after three and a half years, the chief judge of the County Court wrote me a really very delightful letter and said how he had enjoyed working with me, and things like that. But the chief judge of the Supreme Court was a rotten bastard - Sir John Young. I hope he’s not your uncle. [laughter] He used to wear buckled shoes, and bloody gaiters and … [laughter] And, I used to have a regular meeting with him, and for some unknown reason I would walk from my office in Bourke Street round to the Supreme Court, and I’d go up the stairs and the usher of the black rod, or whatever he was, would sit me down at a little table, and the table would be me here, and he would come eventually. And there would be a glass of water here, and a notepad and a pen. So I would sit down and wait patiently for his lordship to come in in his buckled shoes [more laughter] …

Oh yeah, we’d sort of shake hands … But this punce …

I started an enquiry into, as I said, the disposition of work of the three courts. And I went round to an executive meeting of the Supreme Court, of his henchmen … None of the sensible judges were there. No Frank Vincent on the executive. So it was all the conservatives … I guess they all had their secret wardrobes full of buckled shoes and gaiters … but I started to discuss with Elizabeth Prouse that I had appointed as head of the department. We started to discuss the importance of this study and we needed a copy of the operations of the three courts. But they were so defensive that in the end ... that I was out to disrupt their status. To undermine their status. And he said the government is out to disrupt the status of the Supreme Court judges. And by this time I was at my wits end - I had a short fuse - and a couple of other remarks he made, and I just said, “I think we will stop this meeting. you are doubting my integrity, and I don’t think there is any point in going on”. So Elizabeth Prouse and I got up and walked out. It was not a proper meeting in that it wasn’t considering the issues at all, and they were just worried about their bloody status. And eventually I get a message from the Supreme Court some weeks later inviting me to come round to his lordship, which I said I’d do. Only this time on the table there was a bottle of whisky. [more laughter] But, eventually they did join in, and it was very important the distribution of workload between the three. And they were asking for more judges, and yet their workload was miniscule and they sort off and had their holidays.

I don’t know. Probably, yeah. Anyway, we managed to get a proper consideration of the juridictions.

No. Evan [Walker] was Planning Minister when that … and that was before I was …

They weren’t legalized. They were incorporated into the Planning Scheme with conditions on where they could be located.

Not near schools, and gardens.

I don’t think prostitution has been legalized. I’m not sure what the situation is now, but at that stage there was no … it was a criminal offence, but I think politically it would have been hard, and we wouldn’t have got it through the hostile upper house. But by doing a planning thing you could actually try and contain it, and control it by writing conditions on where a brothel could operate.

Well, they had massage parlours for many years, but this really tightened up the places they could operate. They couldn’t operate in blocks of flats and things like that.

It was.

Yes, it was.

Many things don’t make total logic.

And that’s because, if you don’t do something ... and if you do nothing it’s worse, so you try and do what is achievable. It is the art of doing what is achievable. And if you don’t have the numbers you can’t do everything.

Let me tell you. I’m going away on the 7th of March.

Unfortunately I’m having a cataract operation. I can talk to you with a bung eye. So if you have an idea in mind, and I’ll tell you whether it is possible.

You can get back to me.

I’m painting in South America.

Yeah… painting paintings. Watercolours …

Probably a good idea.

I mustn’t forget to tell you about Roy Gilbert’s umm … I was appointed by Brian Dixon, when he was Housing Minister … I had been national chairman of Shelter, and we’d … Ohh, we haven’t talked about Tom Uren at all, but I did a lot of work for Tom Uren …

I’d been national chairman of Shelter, and I’d also persuaded Tom Uren to look at redevelopment plans for Berry Street, and places that were under threat by the Housing Commission Reclamation. And he gave us money to develop plans, and Robin Edmond and I did a Berry Street plan at UDPA.

Yeah, but he ended up at … I employed him at UDPA. And he also did a thing for the National Capital Development Commission from social planning … It was trying to show the transition from social planning and creating new towns. A big fat document. it was based on some of the newtown stuff that Daryl and I had seen. Like Runcorn, near Sheffield had a figure of eight road system which had a bus continuously, every five minutes or something. But it went passed all the important centres and community facility centres and linked with the rail system. and everybody was within walking distance of that bus route spine, and we wanted to do that for Holdsworthy. Tom Uren had asked us to look at Holdsworthy, as a satellite town out of Sydney - the army range that was full of explosives and things. And so we actually devised a similar idea so that people were ...the density tapered up the spine and everyone was within walking distance of public transport, and this thing also had this link into Sydney on the rail. And we did this report on trying to gather the social planning objectives and show how they could be amalgamated into an actual plan for the development of a satellite town. Tom Uren was very enthusiastic about all that, but then Gough got the chop and ...

He was terrific. A really great guy, Tom Uren. He must have been a tower of strength in the prisoner-of-war camp. He was that sort of guy … held people together.