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.