Gleebooks, located on Glebe Point Road, Glebe, is one of the leading bookshops in Sydney, a temple to the literate preoccupations of the middle class professionals and semi-professionals who have come to dominate the political and social life of the inner city suburbs. Near the front door, set into the pavement, is a perspex-covered container housing a pair of bronzed boxing gloves. This memorial recognises the building’s prior use as Tom Laming’s ‘Golden Gloves Boxing Gymnasium’ and second hand goods, ‘Dealatorium’. The monument’s plaque celebrates boxing as ‘an important part of Glebe’s working class identity and pride’. However the entombed gloves also symbolise the passing of a pugilistic and conservative male politics that had once dominated the Glebe branches of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Laming’s Gym was located in the middle of the large section of rented working class housing that had become known as the Glebe Estate. Tom Laming himself had been active in the local Glebe ALP branch and a member of the Estate’s Residents’Advisory Committee (RAC) after the Whitlam Labor Government acquisition in 1974. Until the mid 1980s, the RAC was to be the focus of power among a ruling element on the Estate with close links to the Glebe ALP branches, and the ALP Right both in Leichhardt Municipality and at the NSW State level.2

Michael Hogan’s recently published history of the Labor Party in Glebe reveals that, notwithstanding its turbulent and fractious nature, Glebe Labor had, in the aftermath of World War II, become predominantly anti-communist, Catholic and conservative.3 As with NSW in general, this conservative element had chosen not to depart for the Democratic Labor Party in the great split of the 1950s. In his earlier 1970s work, sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz had described inner city ALP machines, such as that in Glebe, as tribal expressions of a ‘strong, defensive community tradition’ among the inner city working class. They had grown, he argued, out of the necessities of socioeconomic defence during the Great Depression and were reinforced by strongly established family links and affiliations to the Irish wing of the Catholic Church. They were ‘authoritarian and hierarchical’, purpose built to control local councils and jobs and had ‘a possessive unforgiving ideology’.4

In Glebe and the other suburbs of Leichhardt Municipality during the 1970s and 1980s this ethos, and the Labor Right loyalties and power structures based around it, was challenged by an encroaching middle class Left membership in the ALP branches. This was a membership asserting new values deriving from the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Glebe, the resistance of the Right to this encroachment was also linked to the perceived threat from the Left associated with the acquisition and management of the Glebe Estate under the Whitlam Government, and the later threats to the survival of the Right constituency on the Estate from the Fraser Government. This paper will seek to examine these ALP Right power relationships, and the personalities involved, as they cohered around the RAC of the Glebe Estate, during the period of federal government administration. If Mark Peel’s examination of the working class suburb of Elizabeth in South Australia sought to bring out the positive aspects of working class culture and the particular role of women in holding community networks together, then this paper seeks to shine a light on the dark side of a conservative and masculinist Labor community leadership, one that did not always operate in the best interests of its constituency.5

From Church lands to Glebe Project

The original Church lands from which Glebe takes its name, were broken up in 1828 with the Church retaining two sections, St Phillips and Bishopthorpe, at the South-Eastern end of Glebe (adjacent to Broadway and Sydney University). Both of these areas were developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under leases to private developers. In the aftermath of World War I and the 1930s Depression, Glebe as a whole, as with other suburbs in the municipality, had become solidly working class. The suburb and the Estate (particularly St Phillips), shared the reputation of many inner city suburbs as a ‘slum’.6

By the 1970s, the Church of England was landlord of over 700 houses and around 3,000 residents, an ageing population with a high per centage Australian born. Houses were structurally sound but in poor repair, most with outdoor toilets and many without running water inside the house. However rents were low and friendship and family networks, some third generation, provided mutual support. On rent-collecting visits, the Church’s agents would be asked to undertake repairs or to find a vacant house for a son or daughter, niece or nephew who was getting married, re-enforcing the Estate’s familial links.7

With insufficient income generated from low rents, the Church’s Glebe Administration Board sought to re-develop the site but frustrated by state and local government responses, and attracting bad publicity over its uncharitable ‘slum landlord’ role, tried to off-load it. It proposed to the 1972 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Poverty that federal, state or local government take over the Estate to provide low-cost housing. The Whitlam government eventually acquired the Estate, labelled by one journalist at the time as ‘a sort of Brigadoon’,8 in August 1974. The pressure for this solution had come from a number of different quarters and the debate over the origin of the idea was itself to become an issue in the politics of Glebe and the municipality.9

The Minister for Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam government, Tom Uren, was the minister responsible for facilitating the acquisition. His attention was drawn to this possibility by post-Trotskyist, Leichhardt Mayor Nick Origlass. Origlass headed up a Left independents-controlled council which had replaced the Labor Right in 1971. In March 1973, Leichhardt Council bought a small number of houses from the Church as a low-income housing, pilot project, to encourage federal government interest. Glebe independent aldermen, David Young and Eric Sandblom, were also central to this initiative and were closely associated with the resident action group, the Glebe Society. Initially concerned with heritage issues and expressway threats, the Society was also to support the wider social goals of the acquisition. 10

The pressure to acquire the Glebe Estate then, substantially came from outside its residents, that is, outside the constituency claimed by the local ALP Right as its own. According to Glebe ALP Branch Secretary, the late Greg Johnston, the initial reserve of the Estate’s residents related to the belief that they might eventually be offered the houses at a reasonable price by the Church. RAC Secretary Vince Nash, while asserting some activity from within the local ALP Right, nonetheless felt that this leadership was inward looking and preoccupied with ‘internal power for individuals’. As a result the people of the Estate ‘didn’t know what to do. They were quite willing to follow but not willing to lead and they were waiting for the saviour to come’.11

The Estate and the ALP branches of Glebe

At the time of the Estate’s acquisition, there were three ALP branches in the Glebe ward of Leichhardt Municipality. The Glebe branch, covered most of the Estate. Its secretary, City Council employee Greg Johnston, held that position from the 1950s until his death in 2002. The membership of the branch was blue and white collar, working class, overwhelmingly Estate renters with a rising number of pensioners though there were some early intrusions of students from Sydney University. Meetings were short, of small attendance and preoccupied with local issues. Forest Lodge branch, covering an area in the south of the ward was dominated by the extended family connections of Les McMahon. An official with the Plumbers Union, McMahon had strong links to the NSW ALP Right and, from 1975 to 1983, was federal member for Sydney. The branch was small and notorious for frustrating attempts by the Left-leaning middle class members joining. Though located outside the Estate, the branch was closely connected to it. McMahon typified this personal and political connection through his wife Pat whose family had come from there.¹²

Glebe North covered the more ‘middle-classed’ area of Glebe Point. However, it included a section of the Glebe Estate and had been dominated, at the beginning of the 1970s, by medical practitioner and former Glebe alderman, Horace ‘Doc’ Foley. Foley had a turbulent history as a Langite and had built up political and social connections with the Glebe working class over a long period of time. He also was notorious in his attempts at obstructing the influx of new members. The dominant Catholicism of Glebe underpinned branch culture and inter-branch contact. For some years, the Estate-based Glebe ALP branch held its monthly meetings on Sunday morning, after mass, followed by a barbecue and as Andrew Jakubowicz has pointed out, the front steps of St James after mass on Sundays provided opportunity for discussion of Labor affairs. Also significant were the meetings of the board of the Glebe Homoeopathic Hospital on which key figures from the three branches served.¹³

Coming under early pressure from the encroaching Left, Glebe North branch saw the most protracted struggle. The new members were mostly professionals, semi-professionals and students from Sydney University. In many cases they were active in public sector unions, in resident action groups such as the Glebe Society or in social movement politics. By the beginning of the 1980s the new members were starting to get the upper hand. The Left won control of Leichhardt Municipal Council and in 1981, Left branch recruiter Peter Baldwin defeated Les McMahon in preselections for the federal seat of Sydney. The NSW ALP Right decided to stop the rot at Glebe to protect veteran NSW Labor government minister and local member, Pat Hills. Glebe North was abolished and incorporated into Forest Lodge. In all these struggles, the Glebe Estate was crucial, its politics a key factor in making Glebe the municipality’s ‘last stand’ for the Right. Future NSW Legislative Council President, Meredith Burgmann, had moved into Glebe as a student at the end of 1968. The new Left ALP members lacked credibility in the Estate, she argued, because a lot of people in the Glebe Estate, certainly a lot of those involved in the Labor Party, believed that their lovely house was theirs because of Doc Foley and Les McMahon and that machine.¹⁴

ALP politics, the RAC and management of the Glebe Project

When the Estate’s ‘saviour’ arrived in 1974 in the form of the Whitlam Government, the structures set up to manage what was now called the Glebe Project enabled the local ALP Right to develop a power base around the issues the project generated. Overseeing this novel federal initiative was a project committee of heads of key federal departments. On the ground the project was administered by a Project Manager with the assistance of a Community Development Officer, and design and rehabilitation staff. Minister Tom Uren outlined the aims of the project as to: provide housing in the inner city for low income earners; avoid displacement of the existing population and ‘disruption to existing community networks’; improve the environmental and social conditions of the residents, preserve or sympathetically rehabilitate the townscape; and to create a pilot project in urban rehabilitation.15

The RAC, as the principal means of involvement of the residents of the Estate, was to be chosen from ten single-representative ‘electorates’ with anyone over 18 years-of-age and resident for three months able to vote and run as a candidate. The first elections, in early 1975, attracted a 61 per cent turnout, higher than recent, and then non-compulsory, local government elections. The membership of the committee quickly became dominated by members of the Glebe and Glebe North ALP branches. Glebe North member Tom Whitty was elected chair of the RAC with Vince Nash, of Glebe branch, as vice-chair and later, secretary. Nash had been brought up on the Estate and returned to live there. He was a senior public servant with links through the Labor Right networks and became the key public spokesperson of the RAC. Other Glebe branch members who would hold positions on the committee included Sadie King, Tom Laming, Bob Day and Ron Simmons with Bill Corbett from Glebe North.16

Some power relationships in the Glebe branch and the RAC were also centred on Glebe Point Road pharmacist Peter Thom. Educated at Waverley College and Sydney University, Thom became president of the Glebe branch by the late 1970s, though he lived in the Eastern suburbs. Like Doc Foley, he built up a following among the locals through his business. He donated funds for after-branch meeting and Christmas party gatherings and assisted older members of the branch with their fees. Although not a member of the RAC, he attended its meetings and made media statements on behalf of the Estate’s residents. Thom and his associates were to constitute an important sub-faction within the local Right. Those on the RAC closest to Thom were Whitty, Corbett and Laming. According to Nash, this push had its power base in St Phillips among relatively recent arrivals from Pyrmont. As well as holding the position of chair of the RAC, Whitty was able to win and hold the key position as RAC representative on the Tenants Selection Committee. This committee included the RAC representative, the Project Manager and a representative of the Department of Social Security.¹⁷

The elements dominating the RAC and Estate politics soon demonstrated their ‘possessive and unforgiving ideology’ in relation to those ‘outside’ forces that had largely been responsible for the Estate’s acquisition: the independent dominated Leichhardt Council and the Whitlam Government (particularly the left-wing Tom Uren). Shortly after the Estate was acquired, the September 1974 municipal elections saw the independents defeated and the ALP Right return to power on Leichhardt Council. The struggle by the ALP Right to assert its position in relation to the Estate was reflected in the 1974 municipal campaign. The Glebe newspaper, which had supported the independents at the 1971 elections, switched to the ALP Right and remained close to the incoming council, benefiting from a disproportionate allocation of Council advertising. The Glebe asserted that incumbent independent councillors, Young and Sandblom had lied about their role, and that of the Origlass-led council, in the acquisition of the Estate. The credit, it argued, lay with the Glebe Labor Party branches, federal member Jim Cope, state member Pat Hills and the soon to be elected ALP Glebe ward aldermen, Ivor Cawley and George Millard. After the elections a hostile relationship developed between the council and federal minister Tom Uren, with council complaining that Uren was not consulting it. Controversial Leichhardt deputy mayor, Dan Casey, called for the project to be halted and The Glebe newspaper referred to the ‘mishandling’ of the project as a ‘scandal’.¹⁸

In early 1975, Uren wrote to council criticising them for their uninformed comment on the project’s costs and rents, their lack of appreciation of heritage issues and their lack of cooperation. Casey responded, declaring he was ‘dismayed, disappointed and bitterly regret[s] that Tom Uren is a member of the Australian Labor Party’. Matters worsened when two key appointments on the project were announced. Recently defeated independent alderman David Young, a qualified architect and town planner, was appointed Project Manager. Nita McCrae, a working class activist from Sydney’s Rocks area associated with the ALP Left, was appointed Community Development Officer, the position responsible for liasing with the RAC. The Glebe North Branch, in a resolution to the NSW ALP, questioned Uren’s fitness to be both a Minister and member of the ALP as a result of Young’s appointment and the unrelated appointment of NSW Builders Laborers’ Federation president, and ALP Left member, Bob Pringle to a government advisory committee.¹⁹

The first RAC was elected and met shortly after the new project appointments and any hope by the managers that they might assume a moderate ‘consultative’ role was soon dispelled. As former RAC secretary Nash explained it, ‘you cannot run an election unless it is political, particularly in an area like Glebe’ and the RAC became a vehicle for an assertion of Labor Right political power. There were however genuine issues to be taken up. Conflict between the Project Office and the RAC emerged over plans for construction of ‘infill’ housing, largely for students. This was seen as a way of increasing the project’s income and moderating rents on the Estate generally. The federal government hoped for a self-financing project with a mix of subsidised rents and market rents for commercial premises and residents who could afford it. Students, however, might also have posed a potential political threat in the branches. Confusion and discontent was also generated around rent rises and plans for rehabilitation. There were practical problems in renovation, such as rising damp, and heritage requirements. The latter would entail the dismantling of in-filled verandahs and ‘sleep-outs’; and coupled with the threat to backyards by ‘infill’ housing, caused concern among residents. There was also the problem of leaving houses empty for temporary relocation of residents during rehabilitation. The RAC also sought to assert itself through the Tenant Selection Committee in order to control new applicants and ensure that the Estate was a place for ‘friends neighbours and the people we love’.²⁰

After Whitlam: reclaiming the RAC constituency and defending the Estate

The election that saw the defeat of the Whitlam government saw Jim Cope retire and Les McMahon replace him as federal member. With the threat to the future of the Estate, McMahon emerged as one of its key champions along with local Right aldermen and the RAC, particularly Nash. However there was tension between McMahon and the grouping around Thom. With his own political ambitions, Thom had been an unsuccessful candidate against McMahon in the 1975 federal preselections. Thom’s support group was located among what Nash described as ‘Whitty and Co’, the patriarchal ‘Irish Mafia’ that dominated the RAC. Nonetheless, the forces mobilising the Estate were able to be effective, particularly in its defence during the years of the Fraser federal government.²¹

There were two major periods of threat to the Estate from sale by the federal government. The first was immediately after the defeat of the Whitlam government. Later, at the beginning of the 1980s, there was the threat from the federal government’s expenditure review ‘razor gang’. In between these times, the fear of sale remained in the background with the main focus on the lack of funds for rehabilitation and attempts to raise rents. These were argued through a succession of project managers and responsible federal departments and ministers. At different times large public meetings were called in Glebe Town Hall, usually on Sunday mornings after mass, and attendance ranged from 300 to 600. Nash, Thom, McMahon and Glebe Ward alderman Ivor Cawley were the principal speakers and the meetings achieved good publicity. Meetings were often preceded by, or followed up with, deputations to Canberra.²²

Secure in the local ALP Right’s control of the issue, Nash was willing to canvass wider support for the Estate. He joined with Alderman Ivor Cawley and the editor of The Leichhardt Local, Peter Manning, in writing to the Sydney Morning Herald in defence of the Estate in February 1976. The Local had originated in 1975 among elements of the inner city Left keen to establish an alternative to The Glebe. The paper campaigned strongly on behalf of the Estate residents during its 18 month life. Nash also praised Uren’s ‘original vision’ for the Estate and enlisted his support. Nonetheless there appeared to be concern that the issue might slip from the tribal control of the ALP Right elements. Ivor Cawley, addressing one meeting, warned of other action groups that might try to ‘get in on the act’ arguing that there were ‘people, not necessarily in this hall, who are trying to take over this struggle’. Just who he was referring to is a moot point but the comment is indicative of the possessive culture surrounding the RAC and the campaign to save the Estate.²³

The RAC and Elsie

The ‘right wing laborites obsession to “own the game”’²⁴ and the masculinist nature of their politics was manifested in the relationship between key personalities in the male-dominated RAC and the initiatives of the Elsie women’s refuge and the Estate’s Women’s group. Elsie, a house on the Estate squatted in early 1974 as a refuge for women and children escaping domestic violence, was eventually funded by the federal government and moved into another, newly renovated house on the Estate. According to Nash the issue of the refuge eventually settled down and became accepted but initially people reacted ‘fairly badly’ and it ‘frightened’ them. This was linked to concern about other ‘incursions’ such as squatters and the prisoner’s half-way house, the fact that Elsie was given one of the earlier renovated houses while others on the Estate couldn’t get maintenance done, and fears of violence and disturbance from violent husbands. There was also the ‘self-help’ tradition of the Estate’s masculinist culture which contrasted with the approach of the refuge. Glebe branch president, the late Bob Allnut, recalled an incident in which he and his wife had taken in a local woman who had been beaten by her husband. When the husband came around and abused them from the street, one of the local SP bookmaker’s collectors was called on to deal with the problem.²⁵

Meredith Burgmann, who moved from Dhargan Street to one of the small number of private houses in the middle of St Phillips, where she still lives, argued that while many on the Estate were  ‘shocked [by Elsie] because it was not nice’, mostly they were ‘live-and-let-live’, particularly if initiatives like this were ‘not politically operating’. However Carole Renwick, one of the two women on the first RAC, while expressing her support for ‘a place for women to go who get bashed by their husbands’, was concerned at the need for proper ‘policing’ of the refuge. She further argued that ‘there’s lesbians who get in there now and it’s not good for small children who come into contact with that kind of thing’. Renwick’s comments had been made to The Leichhardt Local in August 1975 after an incident where a partner of one of the women in the refuge shot and wounded a nearby resident when approaching the wrong house. The man who sustained the minor wound expressed support for Elsie, only suggesting the placing of a security guard. However the same edition of the Local carried a story of a fire that had been deliberately lit at the rear of the refuge, one of a number of harassing incidents.²⁶

In October 1975, The Glebe newspaper carried scandalous coverage of the refuge implying that it was in a filthy state and characterising it as a haven for pot-smoking lesbians. A representative of the Elsie collective, invited by the Project manager to address the RAC, was grilled intensively over these issues. In 1976 the Elsie collective wrote to the RAC complaining about an unauthorised inspection by RAC Chairman Whitty and Alderman Cawley. Whitty was drunk. In the presence of women, children and a visiting NSW Health Department officer (and to the embarrassment of Cawley), he urinated in the back toilet with the door open and declared that his intention was to get the refuge and its occupants out. He also announced that he had once managed brothels in Western Australia. The Film Australia footage of the RAC meeting at which the Elsie letter was raised makes for interesting viewing. Whitty, in the chair, blustered and threatened to sue. Members of the committee tried to deflect the criticism by pointing out that the Elsie Collective letter was unsigned (addressed from ‘the collective’) and re-kindled the earlier RAC debate concerning the nature of the refuge’s residents. Nash, visibly uneasy but unwilling to breach tribal loyalties supported this deflection by emphasising that Whitty’s visit was on an individual basis and that the committee had already discussed Elsie before. He proposed that no further visits take place without first being raised in the committee. The only RAC member to defend Elsie at these meetings was the remarkable Bessie Guthrie, Glebe branch member and feminist, who lived on the Estate and participated in the establishment of Elsie.²⁷

Later, in early 1978, an urban intern working with the Glebe Project, Debbie Peterson, commented that the attitude of ‘not a local girl in there, all lesbians’ was prevalent among RAC members. There was also, she argued, a specific hostility from some of the males of the dominant RAC group hostile to the formation of the Glebe Estate Women’s Group, which was started around activities of ‘housie’ and organising a paper drive and playgroup. According to Peterson this group, in which Nita McCrae played a role, was referred to as ‘Nita’s clowns’. She commented that ‘the political tensions caused by a group of women forming in this “right wing” Labor community are extremely difficult to deal with’. A number of women appeared to have made a concerted attempt to contest the May 1976 RAC elections. However, the committee was to remain dominated by ‘Whitty and Co’. Only two women were elected, both unopposed. One was Sadie King, associated with the ALP Right. The other was Bessie Guthrie who was to remain on the ‘outer’ of the dominant RAC group until her death in 1977. The refuge now bears her name.²⁸

An entrenched but fading power

The 1978 RAC elections were held under a new format aimed at containing the political influence of its dominant group. There were to be nine representatives, five elected at large from St Phillips, three from Bishopthorpe, and a chair elected from the Estate as a whole. Further elections were then delayed till early 1981, and then scheduled for every two years. These changes made little impact. Whitty was able to continue to hold the position of chair and had contested the 1978 election against one of the previous year’s women candidates, Mrs A James. He presented himself, as previous RAC candidates had often done, as the ‘official Labor ticket’. NSW ALP General Secretary Graeme Richardson was forced to send Whitty a telegram demanding that he cease representing himself as such.29

As mentioned above, the Right was under pressure in the Glebe branches by the beginning of the 1980s. Nonetheless, federal member Les McMahon’s efforts in defending the Estate almost saved him His defeat by Peter Baldwin in the 1981 preselection had been a narrow one (seven votes).

While there had been a building up of the Glebe branch under Thom in the late 1970s, it is probable that a stronger effort and a more competent leadership on the Estate might have seen McMahon survive.
Tension between Thom and his ‘Whitty and Co’ support base, and McMahon, was probably a factor here. McMahon continued to represent the Estate’s interests until his parliamentary term ended with the election of the Hawke Government in 1983.30

The RAC continued to be dominated by the same personalities into the mid 1980s and the turnout of voters in its elections fell. The Fraser Government offered the Estate to the NSW Labor government in 1979 and there were protracted negotiations. With the election of the Hawke Government, the threat of possible sale eased and negotiations revitalised. The core issue had been the degree of federal and state financial input into the transfer. The Estate was finally transferred to NSW at the beginning of 1985. This occurred as the power of the ALP Right within the Glebe ALP branches was being marginalised. The expanded Forest Lodge branch finally fell to the Left in 1984 after sustained recruiting by future state member and Minister in the Carr Government, Sandra Nori and her then partner and future Labor Senate Leader, John Faulkner. When Pat Hills retired at the state elections of 1988, Nori replaced him as member for the state seat, becoming the key electoral representative of the (now state-administered) Estate’s interests.

Conclusion

At the heart of the RAC and Glebe ALP Right’s efforts to maintain leadership on the Glebe Estate was a paradox. The acquisition of the Estate by the Whitlam Government saved the Right’s constituency but threatened its political influence. This threat came through its federal administration under Left minister Uren, the possibility of students being accommodated, the pre-1974 role of the independent-dominated Leichhardt Council, the heritage ‘watchdog’ role of the Glebe Society and the involvement in the Project of Left-leaning administrators like Young and McCrae. The defeat of the Whitlam government reversed the paradox. The constituency of the Estate came under threat in the Fraser era but these circumstances enabled the Right to reassert leadership through the RAC, the local aldermen and the federal member. However the social and political changes in the municipality and its ALP branches, ultimately favoured the ALP Left. The subsuming of the Estate-based ALP Right’s power was to be aided in the long-run by old age and the dilution of the Estate’s character within the public housing policy and administration of the NSW Department of Housing.

This brief history of the politics of the Glebe Estate Resident’s Advisory Committee during the time of federal government management provides a window into that essentially masculinist ‘possessive unforgiving ideology’ that characterised many of the ALP Right wing political machines in Australia’s inner-cities in the decades after World War II and the way in which they sought to defend themselves from economic, social and political change. In Glebe, the ALP machine’s defence of the Estate between 1974 and 1985 revealed a complex mix of assertive, community solidarity and benighted,
patriarchal self-interest.