the kelly gang

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday March 31, 2011

Helen Pitt

Forty years ago, "13 bloody housewives" from Hunters Hill decided to take on the developers in an effort to save a patch of bush. They were shunned by neighbours and labelled communists but defied their critics to help instigate the world's first green ban. Helen Pitt meets the surviving "Battlers for Kelly's Bush".On a winter's day in 1971, a group of 13 Hunters Hill "morning-tea matrons" and a bunch of burly trade unionists met in a local park to discuss a controversial development proposal. The meeting would end with tea, lamingtons and an unlikely alliance between the women and the NSW Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). It would also bring a new term to the dictionary - "green bans" - and mark the birth of urban environmentalism in Australia.The women dubbed themselves the "Battlers for Kelly's Bush" as they fought to save the last untouched bushland on the Parramatta River. They were far from rabid left-wingers - although they were labelled communists and shunned by fellow bluebloods for uniting with the blue-singleted workmen. Rather, they simply wanted to save the five hectares of Hunters Hill land for their children and their children's children, to continue to make cubby houses and roam free.It was a revolution plotted around kitchen tables by kaftan-clad women more used to taking plates than opinions to social functions. But the homespun nature of their campaign was not the most remarkable thing about it. More notable was their joint effort with the BLF and its communist secretary, Jack Mundey. "This was the first time the enlightened working class teamed with the enlightened middle class to fight for the environment anywhere in the world," says Mundey, now 81. Forty years on, six of the 13 battlers survive and they have reunited for the(sydney)magazine to tell the story of their unlikely victory to save Kelly's Bush in a city obsessed with the march of high-rise concrete progress.Since 1892, Thomas Kelly, the proprietor of the Sydney Smelting Company on the waterfront adjoining the bush, had owned the land that stretched from Woolwich Road down to the river. Old timers remembered men carrying billies as they walked through the flannel flowers on their way to the smelting works. In 1967, Kelly sold the land to A.V. Jennings Industries. Two years later, the company's development proposal for the land was approved without any public consultation. The trees had already been marked for chopping and surveyor lines pegged when, in mid-1970, Hunters Hill resident Betty James discovered that A.V. Jennings planned to build three eight-storey tower blocks plus streets of townhouses on the waterfront site looking towards Cockatoo Island. She was outraged. In an article that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 25, 1970, she wrote how the neighbourhood children had pulled up a long line of survey pegs laid out through "their bush" as a heartfelt protest. Her article read like a love letter to Kelly's Bush, describing its deep gullies of bracken fern, its blueberry ash, lilly-pilly, tea trees and a rare stand of healthy banksias. James, who died in 2007 aged 89, also talked of it as an outdoor laboratory and living museum: there were Aboriginal middens and carvings on the sandstone. In September 1970, James and 12 other angry neighbours gathered at All Saints parish hall and christened themselves the "Battlers for Kelly's Bush". The group, which the Hunters Hill council would later dismiss as "13 bloody housewives", elected James as president, Kath Lehany as secretary and Monica Sheehan as assistant secretary. Most of the women were lifelong Liberal Party voters who had never been involved with politics but each had a different reason for joining. Miriam Cunningham, now 87, had recently been to the top of Australia Square, then the city's tallest building, and had realised Kelly's Bush was the only patch of green she could see on the Parramatta River. "It was the lungs of Sydney," she says.Austrian-born Trude Kallir's love of nature had been forged during weekend walks with her parents in the Vienna woods. Kallir, now 88, learnt that, in wild spaces, people could speak freely. After Adolf Hitler marched into her homeland in 1938, her parents had been able to voice their opinions without fear during family hikes. She wanted her children to have the same freedoms. Unwittingly, the battlers set down a blueprint for the modern-day protest movement. They wrote hundreds of letters. They organised a "phone tree" to pass on news. They invited media to "boil the billy" days in the bush and plied them with baked goods. They ran essay competitions for schoolchildren on why the bush should be saved. They made badges and banners and got their teenagers to hang them around Hunters Hill. They enlisted the local school band, which marched from Hunters Hill High to the bush, calling for "browsing not housing". They even roped in local Kylie Tennant to write protest poetry. Dinner parties became battlegrounds as the peninsula community divided over the issue. Many wanted the sewage pipes that A.V. Jennings promised for the whole area or believed local state Liberal MP Peter Coleman, who said council rates would drop when Jennings came. "Where I lived was enemy territory," recalls Monica Sheehan, 92. "They were all friends of the developers. They would ring in the middle of the night, blaming us that they had to go down the back to the outdoor loo, not to an inside flushing toilet."Over the course of several months, the battlers sent several delegations to the Liberal premier of the day, Sir Robert Askin, to argue their case. "Askin derided them as middle-class matrons," says Hunters Hill resident Phil Jenkyn, who says the women inspired him to form a group known as the Defenders of Sydney Harbour Foreshores. "These were the early days of the Strata Titles Act and rampant development. Askin thought, 'If we give them a cup of tea and a pat on the bottom they'll go away' but in fact he got bitten on the bum, not just by them but by the unions."Things came to a head on June 4, 1971, when Askin called James to tell her that his local government and planning minister, Pat Morton, was going to sign a permit to allow what was once "open space" to be rezoned for residential development. Hunters Hill Council had approved it and all that was needed was a signature from Morton to obliterate the bush.Monica Sheehan was visiting Betty James when Askin called - other battlers would pop over to take calls while she had a bath or set her hair in rollers - and the two dashed to the Woolwich ferry. They ran from Circular Quay up to Parliament House, licking envelopes and folding letters as they went. They had sent Askin a telegram demanding he stop the rezoning but demanded to see him in person before his minister signed away Kelly's Bush. Crucially, they first dropped in to see opposition leader Pat Hills. He signed a letter opposing the rezoning. When the women got into the premier's office, they showed him the letter that Hills had signed. "Askin had big fat cheeks: they were red and he was furious," recalls Sheehan. "He yelled at us, 'The bulldozers will be in tomorrow!'‚€"A bulldozer did come to Hunters Hill the next day. Several battlers, including Sheehan, ran down to the bush, ready to tie themselves and their offspring to trees to halt the destruction. But the bulldozer driver announced he was meant to be at another site, not Kelly's Bush. "It was an alarm akin to the Luftwaffe being sighted over Kent in World War II," says Rodney Cavalier, who at the time was a young union rep and the president of the ALP Hunters Hill branch. Cavalier, who went on to serve as a minister in the Wran government that handed Kelly's Bush back to the public in 1983, had become friends with the women. On his suggestion, the women sent the letter signed by Pat Hills to Trades Hall. When Jack Mundey read the letter, his response was: "Where the bloody hell is Kelly's Bush?" But the NSW BLF secretary was to become the battlers' most powerful ally. BLF members did not live in Hunters Hill but a few days after the bulldozer incident, Mundey agreed to meet the women in the little park - later known as "Red Square" - on Prince Edward Parade, where many of the battlers lived. For battler Joan Croll, joining with the unions was just too much. Raised on Methodism and Menzies, she succumbed to taunts from other society ladies that she was "too well bred to be red". "I was, at the time, the proper little Liberal wife who voted as her father and husband did and was terrified of unions," says Croll, now 82. Yet when she withdrew her support from the campaign, her husband was disgusted and insisted she rejoin. "You only had to meet Jack once - to meet any of the unionists - to know that they were intelligent and articulate men," she recalls.The unions pledged to support the battlers after a rally in Hunters Hill attracted 600. A few days later, at an A.V. Jennings building site in North Sydney, Mundey asked the unionists if they were prepared to give up their wages for a piece of bush. Mundey can still recite the resolution put to the workmen, as if it were a bush ballad: "If one blade of glass or one tree is touched at Kelly's Bush, this half-completed building will stand forever half complete as a monument to Kelly's Bush." The resolution was passed unanimously and the first green ban began on June 16, 1971. Jennings threatened to bring in non-union labour to clear the bush but that never happened. The movement by then had captured the public imagination and work on A.V. Jennings sites had stopped across the city. "It altered the compass of history," says Cavalier. "All future conflicts had to be fought on the rules that gave the environment a legitimate place in the courts and planning commissions."The Kelly's Bush campaign emboldened other resident action groups to fight development and taught trade unions they could champion issues with a wider social context. "The shape of modern Sydney is a result of those green bans," says City of Sydney Labor councillor Meredith Burgmann, who wrote a book on the subject. The movement even inspired overseas activists such as Germany's Petra Kelly, who would eventually form one of the world's first green political parties. Mundey and the BLF went on to lead 42 green bans in the early '70s, holding up billions of dollars worth of construction. "Our thinking in the unions then was, 'What's the use of getting better wages and better conditions if we choke to death in unplanned, polluted cities?'‚€" he says. "I'd be living in Woollahra, not Croydon Park, if I'd taken some of the bribes I was offered during the green bans era."It took the 13 women 13 years to save Kelly's Bush. The battlers always feared the green bans would only halt construction temporarily - but they never did have to throw themselves in front of bulldozers. When the Wran government bought the land in 1983, the women celebrated with a simple bush ceremony and a pot of tea - and invited along Jack Mundey, by now their friend for life. Kath Lehany, 91, still lives on Red Square near Kelly's Bush. Kids still build cubby houses here and roam by foot, bike or in their imagination among the banksias and bracken. Several of the seven dead battlers have had their ashes scattered in the bush. "It has been my haven in difficult times," says Lehany. "And, more recently, my comfort in loss and loneliness." 10 Sydney sites placed under green bans Kelly's Bush 1971Eastlakes 1971The Rocks 1971The Botanic Gardens 1972Centennial Park/ Moore Park 1972Theatre Royal 1972Regent Theatre 1972Woolloomooloo 1973Victoria Street 1973Surry Hills 1973

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