SYDNEYSIDEwith Janet Parr Return of terrace dweller

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32563, 24 March 1971, Page 7

SYDNEYSIDE—with Janet Parr Return of terrace dweller

When I first came to Sydney nearly 14 years ago I booked myself into a hotel and looked around for a place to live. In those days , that wasn’t particularly easy.

Decent rented places at reasonable rents were as hard to find as the proverbial hen’s teeth. In fact there was a story going round the newspaper office where I was working of the compositor who set in type an advertisement for a flat, just the thing he needed. He finished work in the small hours of the morning, went out to the address given and sat on the pavement until he thought the people inside might be up. They were, but they were sorry—the flat had been let. It had gone the night before to the clerk who had taken the advertisement over the counter of the newspaper office.

I never found out . whether that story was true but it could and should have been back in 1957. It still is to some extent, although today some of the odd deals that flourished then seem to have gone.

A colleague came in very excited one day with the news that she had the chance of a flat at Bondi, just £6 a week and a mere outlay of £3OO (key money? fixtures and fittings?) to get into it. Today unscrupulous landlords collect a bonus the other end of a letting by refusing to give back bond money, usually a month’s rent, on the pretext that the place has been left dirty or damaged. . You may actually have spent the last fortnight spring cleaning it from attic to cellar and left it in better condition than it was when you moved in. It is still hard to get your money back and some tenants with experience do not try. They exhaust the bond money by not paying the rent for the last month. Let the landlord chase them. SUITABLE AREA

However, faced with the 1957 problems I decided the best thing to do was to pick an area that looked suitable, then work at it until what I wanted turned up. Sydney is a sprawling city. It was hardly possible to criss-cross it from one address to another in the limited time I had.

Now I am, by birth and upbringing, a small-town girl. I spent my youth living on a main street of an English town of 20,000 people. The market spilled over from the market place down past our front door and, when the Lent Fair was on, the sideshows were practically on the doorstep—which probably explains why I dislike suburban living with its constant need to commute, the isolation of what, for a European, is the heart of any community—the old closeknit quarter centred round the market place, the church, the playhouse—not to mention the inn. I liked living in Manhattan.

“The trouble with Sydney,” said a San Franciscan in a moment of irritation, “is that it hasn’t got a heart.” It still hasn’t unless you count that whole area of streets—Elizabeth, Castlereagh, Pitt, George—running from the quay to the railway as some sort of sprawling city centre. And the harbour does cut the city in half. I’m not the only one with a psychological block about living on the North Shore. INEXPLICABLE Anyway there I was in 1957 with my European attitudes and my harbour hangups—both completely inexplicable to your native Syd-

neysider considering my map of Sydney. One name was as good as another— Balmain, Double Bay, Vaucluse, Redfern, Surry Hills —the map does not show you the picture, the tree-lined street or the mean one, brick or fibre, the harbour aspect (which costs money) or the back view of the blacking factory (which does not}. But it does show you how many miles it is to Babylon if Babylon is what you want. Paddington looked just what I wanted. My colleagues threw up their hands in horror. “You can’t live in Paddington,” they said. And they were right for then. But they were wrong for now. Because today I do. And I can.

Today the tourist buses run round Paddington and the visiting American executive wives coo over the iron lace verandahs, and the tangled streets, where the terrace houses, supporting each other either side, seem to lean against the hillside slightly askew.

There are sandstock brick walls, and roses, and frangipani, and from die top floors quaint little glimpses of the harbour and ships that sail into sight between chimney and chimney. You see children in the uniforms of expensive private schools, an Alfa Romeo waits in a back lane and if you take the lid off a rubbish tin you are just as likely to find a lobster shell and an empty Chablis bottle as a child’s discarded jam sandwich. COME-BACK For Paddington is one of Sydney’s inner areas that has “come back.” Over the last 10 years it has come back from being a collection lof shabby jll-kept resident-

ials synonymous with one room and gas ring, 12 to the bathroom and the lavatory out the back living and rocketed up over a hundred dazzling places in those “How does your suburb rate?” lists. Fortunes have been made in Paddington real estate in the last few years. Even with house prices down a bit since loans became harder to get and the reluctance of the financing bodies to give mortgages on property more than 40 years old you can still get $40,000 for a roomy restored terrace.

Unrestored they come cheaper initially but can still end up costing plenty in money and time. It is considerably cheaper to buy a new house in the new suburbs.

And after Paddington have come Glebe, popular with and close to the job, for the university people, Redfern and Surry Hills with a few art galleries and “in” restaurants among the small repair shops and factories, Chippendale, Darlington, Woolloomooloo was in for a time but now the viaduct for the Easter Suburbs railway is going up overhead and the ’Loo is static awaiting plans for its future development.

The Rocks is also marked for change. There have been changes in Darlinghurst too since the murder of Joe Borg who controlled a good bit of red light property there (and willed it to the R.S.P.C.A.) and increased police activity cleaned up the area. Recently houses there have been changing hands at some pretty fancy prices. WHY? Why the new urge to live close to the city in a terrace house where the backyard it is fashionable to call it a courtyard may be just big enough to hold a mediumsized car? In the first place it may just have been an impulse to be different. Then people who had been overseas had discovered that other people in other countries did not seem to need 50foot frontages and in fact got on very well with perhaps only 14 feet of pavement space. And there were better things to do on Saturday afternoons than mow the lawn. And with much that was old and unique in the city fast disappearing perhaps it might be a good thing to preserve a bit of it.

And it was convenient from where I live I can walk into the city in less than 20 minutes and even though the air may be diesel-polluted and rife with carbon monoxide it, and the exercise, are probably better for me than the germ laden bus or railway carriage.

There is also a community thing. People do like to have other people round them and these old inner areas have togetherness although that does not mean that the houses lack privacy. It would not be true of course to say that the inner suburbs have ever lacked life or people to live in them. What is happening is that they are going back to what they were, one-family houses with a fairly solid standard of living, out of the squalor of transient occupation. In the case of the blocks of home units —own-your-own flats—something like the New York pattern is being repeated. Young people move into them, move out to the wide open spaces to raise families —if they are not terrace house types that is—and are moving back to enjoy the bright lights when the kids are grown up. EASIER BUYING It would not be true to suggest that all Sydney’s two

and a quarter million people are rushing into the city to live. It is easier to buy a house in the new suburbs, many young people like to stay round where they have grown up and the supply of houses in the inner city is obviously limited. There is an inclination too to preserve them as they are rather than pull them down and build blocks of flats. Overseas there have been second thoughts as to whether these blocks really house more people to the acre and suggestions that in fact they do not, that terrace type houses and maisonettes give more economical land use and a bit of private outside space for everybody, as well—something that flat dwellers often miss.

Sydney’s experiments with new terrace type “town houses” have been successful and the houses fetch good prices.

It is not the size of the change that is interesting. It is the fact that there has been a change at all. They said, “you can’t live in Paddington,” then and meant it. Now they say, “Oh, do you live in Paddington?” and you can hear the difference. So what did I do, finally, 14 years ago? Well, first I lived in Darlington and walked to work in less than 10 minutes. Then I moved to a better, but minute, flat in Woolloomooloo, which was further to go to work for me but a pleasant stroll across Hyde Park to my husband’s office. I did my week-end shopping on Pitt Street or the city end of Oxford Street and, if I missed out on Saturday morning, up at the Cross on Saturday evening. It was not considered quite the thing but it was tolerated. Everyone knew the Poms had some funny ideas.