Jack Mundey

The real story of Sydney this week is the torrential rain, but I talked about the weather last time, so this week you're getting corruption, murder and three-letter acronyms.

They say you never see Venice for the first time. There are so many images of it in magazines, films and ice-cream advertisements that by the time you actually get there you’re already familiar with it. The same is true of Sydney you might think. Those helicoptered panning-shots of the bridge and the opera house, the huge beaches stretching up the coast, the boats littering the harbour (cut to a koala in the zoo). Well, unfortunately you’re wrong. My friend Karen calls the harbour the lipstick on the pig of Sydney, and I have to agree. You see, aside from the bridge and the opera house and a handful of other buildings Sydney really has one of the ugliest architectures on earth. If it wasn’t for the beaches and the weather you might as well be in Coventry.

Some areas are better than others of course and over the years activists have managed some great victories. Bondi beach, for example, is still sunny in the afternoon Not so the Gold Coast, where unchecked development has led to huge tower blocks with beautiful views along much of the seafront, their thick shadows darkening the beach from lunch-time onwards. But even Bondi is a dog, a scraggy ragtag of ice-cream parlours and a carpark overlooking the famous sands. Maroubra, a few exclusive beaches to the south, looks like a favella.

This is what happens when you build your city with dirty money. Stories of corrupt councils still abound and there’s not one good property developer who doesn’t lobby (or sit on) his local decision-making body. When signing the forms for Copa’s renovation last month, we had to declare any political contributions we’d ever made. ‘Damn’ said Oliver ‘Wish we’d thought of that’.

But there a few beautiful (i.e. old) buildings left dotted around the city, and for most of those we have to be grateful to one man. My hero, Jack Mundey.

In the early seventies Jack Mundey was the leader of the New South Wales (NSW) branch of the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) and it was from this position that he led, between 1971 and 1974, forty-two ‘green bans’. Basically, the union refused to pull down beautiful old buildings to replace them with orange-brick monstrosities. Looking today at what they saved it is horrible to thing about what they lost so let’s be grateful for what little we have: The Queen Victoria Building (QVB), a three-level arcade of twirling, carved victoriana now housing the City Business District (CBD)'s chichiest stores; The Rocks, 18^th and 19^th century terraces whose pubs contain smugglers’ tunnels down to the harbour; the Royal Botanic Gardens, rolling parkland skirting the harbour and presenting the city’s best views (once earmarked to become the carpark for the opera house). None of these would be here but for the BLF. Or rather the NSW BLF.

It was too good to last of course. Jack Mundey was incorruptible, so the developers went a little higher and in 1975 Jack and his NSW team were sacked from the BLF by its national leader, Norm Gallagher. I picture Norm Gallagher as looking like the greasy dad in Muriel’s Wedding. He'd already had the whiff of corruption around him a few times before he got rid of Jack Mundey and he was subsequently convicted of having had corrupt dealings with developers. Unfortunately, to get this conviction jurors were locked in a room for ten days and told they couldn’t come out until they’d reached a decision. Their later claims of imprisonment and coercion got the original conviction declared ‘unsafe’ (fair enough!) and after four months Norm walked out of jail.

But wait, it gets worse. One of the most famous green bans concerned Victoria Street in Kings Cross, a stretch of huge sandstone terraces. Frank Theeman, a lingerie millionaire, bought the lot in the early seventies and planned to demolish it to build a $40m apartment complex. No thanks, said the residents who worked with the NSW BLF to resist the developers. Arthur King, the head of the residents group, was persuaded to think otherwise after being bundled into a car boot and kidnapped for three days. Local journalist, Juanita King, was not so easily dissuaded and she publicised the campaign in her magazine, Wow, despite repeated threats.

On 4^th July 1973 Juanita was invited to a local nightclub to discuss the possibility of its advertising in her magazine. Most clubs in the Cross, then and now, are owned by shady figures. But this one just happened to be owned by Abe Saffron, who just happened to owe $20,000 to Frank Theeman, the developer. Juanita Nielsen was never seen again.

A coronial inquest found Juanita was likely to have been murdered but only convictions for kidnapping and harassment were ever brought. Not against the big money of course, jus the thugs that did their work. And Victoria Street, like most other streets in central Sydney, is now a traffic jam between high rise blocks.

Jack Mundey is still alive though. He’s 91 and the head of the Historic Houses Trust where my friend Big Andrea works. I’m trying to get to meet him. I’d love to ask him about the old days, get him to sign the photo I have of him being arrested in grainy black-and-white. And, above all, to thank him for what few old buildings we have left in this ugly-beautiful city.

The sticky end of summer

Eugh.  This is the hot and / or damp end of summer.  Hot and damp generally means you’re producing the moisture yourself, so if you’re wearing a shirt to get to work, you better take another one to work in.  Hot or damp means it can be a baking harsh day in direct-sunlight then drop five or ten degrees when the rain arrives, then turn steamy and humid once the sun comes back.  All in the space of an hour.  Or just raining and hot, that happens, a warm shower on the way home.

There’s a myth over here that only pommies whinge, and whilst it’s true that complaining is less acceptable in Australia, that doesn’t seem so true when it comes to the weather.  Kurt, my gorgeous-but-vain friend, was moaning about the humidity the other day and I got a chance to do one of my favourite things.  We were in a crowded café (everyone piling in for the air-conditioning) so at an opportune moment I got to say, in a loud english accent ‘Oh stop whingeing’.  Suddenly people were backing away from Kurt as if I’d just fingered him as having the plague.  To be accused of whingeing is bad enough, but to be accused of it by an Englishman…..the shame.  Kurt, being Kurt, just gave me a withering look and carried on with his story of arriving on a blind-date with his shirt stuck visibly to his torso.  I couldn’t resist pointing out that most women would love a blind-date which involved a Kurt turning up with his shirt stuck damp to his body but he told me I was being gay and making him uncomfortable.  Then he carried on whingeing.  

OK, I’m supposed to be talking about February in Sydney here but I’m going to allow myself a slight diversion.  No one in Australia gets to read these and names have been changed to protect the innocent so I’ll tell you a little about Kurt instead.   He’s goooorgeous.  He knows it unfortunately so is a little bit arrogant about it, but once you get used to that he’s a nice bloke and we’re becoming quite good friends.  He was at school with a very good mate of mine (Zen) and the three of us – check it out dude – are learning to surf.  Guess who’s worst at it.  Anyway, Kurt is fascinating because he has four children from three different gold-diggers.  My analysis not his, but I think he’s being a little naïve.  You see Kurt is what in socio-econometrics is referred to as Seriously Fucking Loaded.  Or rather, his parents are.  He’s the friend I wrote about in an earlier post who took us out on the harbour in his boat (parent’s boat) which cost more than our house.  I think it’s called a cruiser, a giant speedboat with a deck and a cocktail fridge.  Blondes seem automatically programmed to strip down to bikinis and sunbathe on its deck.  On the day Oliver and I were on it, we parked at one point below Kurt’s parents’ house so they could come out on their balcony and wave.   Karen (cynical, hippy friend) was one of the blondes that day and she yelled up at the top of her voice ‘Adopt me, please! I can cook!’.

Anyway, back to February.  It’s humid and either raining or hot.  It’s back-to-school time but not in the British way where different schools start on different days and there are gradually less children in the way.  Monday 1^st February was the first day back at school for every child in Australia as far as I could tell.  On Tuesday 2^nd there were suddenly twice as many people in the office as I have seen for weeks (January closes Sydney in the same way August closes Paris).  I would have thought they’d be back on Monday but Monday was quieter than Christmas, half the office being of the age where they have a child starting school for the very first time.  This requires a day-off apparently (eight-hour farewells in the playground?),  followed by photograph-swaps on Tuesday.  I must have looked at pictures of seven different children I didn’t know, crying in a uniform that didn't fit them.  It was like a bad paedo-convention.

So we have one more month of summer to run, 1^st March being very officially autumn, but I’ll admit it’s useful having a humid, sticky end to the season.  It means you regret its ending less and get to think wistfully of the cooler weather before the reality of it arrives.  I’m normally planning my winter skiing about now, but the house up at Copa means I probably can’t afford it this year.  Instead, I’ll be working in the garden, moaning about the cold, longing for the languid, lazy days of summer.