By Brian McDonald, with some input from Rodney Hammett, Bulletin 3/2025 May

Recently, the Society received an email from Brian McDonald asking for assistance in gaining information on Glebe’s history. A most interesting exchange of emails ensued, and I requested that Brian write a few words about his experiences living in Glebe in the late 1970s. He sent an amazing record of the few years he and his partner Liz and their children spent living in Derwent Street, their neighbours, the houses and photographs to show an era now gone. The area was, of course, the decrepit housing – some 700 houses – owned until 1974 by the Anglican Church. In Brian’s words and his photography …

I stepped out of the red wooden phone box. The morning traffic was rushing past on Glebe Point Road. I was digesting what Mr Jones had said on the phone, ‘We have ways of dealing with you people’. Strange words, coming from the manager of the 700+ homes on what’s called the Glebe Estate. Perhaps he had a coroner’s report sitting on his desk saying, ‘The squalid, damp and mouldy conditions that your elderly tenant was living in hastened this person’s death’. It is more likely Mr Jones was reacting to what I had said: ‘My partner Liz and I have been squatting for two days at 121 Derwent St. Glebe’. How he gets his revenge will be revealed further into my story.

Figure 1: View of the backyard and garden at 18 Derwent St

I had been back in Australia for one month, and Liz, from the Netherlands, was a first-time visitor. It was 1975. Since 1970, I had been squatting, living and working in inner-city Amsterdam, which was in a worse state of decay than Glebe. Liz and I had made a comfortable home in a second-floor flat without such luxuries as hot water or a bathroom; a tap and a sink were in one corner. We even had a lightbulb, the electricity coming from a neighbour. On the first-floor landing was a shared and curtained functioning toilet sitting on a pallet. It was flushed with a bucket, and the waste disappeared down a large cast iron pipe, destination unknown. We climbed a ladder to sleep in a loft on wafer-thin mats. The tar paper that sealed the roof dripped tar on us in the heat of summer. The suburb of Niuewmarkt had the appearance of a warzone, but it was still home to many travellers and young families willing to fix up a place to live in.

Liz and I had come across Glebe after visiting Sydney University. We had a fantasy that we could make money selling exotic sandwiches. We walked along a pleasant tree-lined street called Derwent Street and were surprised to see so many vacant houses – despite being only a short walk to the centre of Sydney. In our innocence, we had even picked out a little workers’ cottage to squat in; after all, it was getting crowded in my sister’s little Petersham semi with her husband and three kids.

I was not put off by Mr Jones’ threat. Surely, with so many vacant homes, they would rent us something. For the rest of the week, I persisted in ringing him.

The receptionist kept saying he was out – more likely avoiding talking with me. We had a plan: early Monday morning, we would go to the head office on York Street, Sydney, and ambush him. At 8 am, we sat in the receptionist’s area and said to her, ‘Would you point out Mr Jones when he comes in?’ Hard to avoid us now because we were seated facing the entrance to the lift. The lift door pinged open. ‘Here is Mr Jones’, the receptionist said. We were grudgingly ushered into his office; he went on to say, ‘You can’t rent a house from us.’ I kept persisting: ‘There are many vacant houses there, and I am willing to fix up the house because I am a carpenter’. I was lying about my skills in that area. ‘Alright, alright, I have just the house for you’.

We were given the keys to 18 Derwent Street from the estate office in Glebe. The rent was $18 a week. Even though Derwent Street is attractive, ours was the worst house in the street. It’s a typical workers’ cottage with two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a lounge room with a fireplace. Every room was square and small. The back bedroom had brown glossy paint on the bottom half of the wall, with a green stripe on top; the rest was cream in colour. Grubby little finger marks decorated the cream paint, but these could be easily cleaned off. Up some steps and out the back is a courtyard separated from the neighbour’s courtyard by a high wall – not high enough to stop the older woman living there standing on a chair then climbing onto her washing machine to knock Liz’s cherished plants off the shelf or to stop her throwing the contents of her pisspot into our courtyard (see Fig. 1).

Figure 2: This photo shows the primitive kitchen made from what looks like recycled doors. Jasper, our toddler, has found the bag of flour that was stored in the cupboard.

The long, narrow, derelict kitchen consisted of a sink, sitting on cupboards made from recycled old doors (see Figure 2), an old table under the broken sash window, a gas stove and a coke-burning fuel stove. The bathroom had a cast iron bath and a gas-burning hot water boiler with built-in shower, a copper and a concrete tub. The bathroom had its own sash window, and the original heavy bathroom door consisted of simple timber planks, painted green.

The kitchen and bathroom were separate from the main house because of the possibility of a fire. The brick toilet at the end of the yard had a concrete cistern suspended above, and a chain to flush. The long, narrow backyard was wonderful; it allowed access to the back lane and contained a huge, ancient Frangipani tree, a sick lemon tree, and beneath the Frangipani, a large, ancient bird’s nest fern thriving in the shady courtyard.

In the front, looking up from the street over the broken picket fence, was a veranda with no roof. On either side of the original front door, with cracked panels and peeling paint, were sash windows that were impossible to open. The external brick wall facing the street was a mosaic of thick lead-based, peeling paint from different eras. The front door had not seen a coat of paint since being installed.

Inside, the front bedroom wall was water-damaged and the plaster had fallen to the floor, exposing the 100-year-old wattle laths. Some floorboards in the sitting room were missing. In the corner near the chimney, sections of water-damaged plaster had fallen from the ceiling, probably because the chimney base was missing its flashing.

We were in the process of restoring the front door (see Figure 3). Our neighbour, whom we called the Witch, had told us that the previous tenant, an alcoholic, had died in our front room. [Is this the event that inspired Brian’s earlier musings about Mr Jones’ coroner’s report?]. Maybe that would explain why there was a knock on the front door every evening as it was getting dark. No doubt he was used to the six o’clock closing of the pubs. We would open the door to find no one there. However, after we repaired and painted the door, we didn’t get any more ghost knocks

We decided to take squatting rights on the backyard next door, which had been vacant for ages. The skills of a Dutch gardener and an abundance of horse manure from the stables in Catherine Street made a thriving garden until the new owners, the Glebe Estate people, told us in a strongly-worded letter to cease and desist our gardening activities on their property (see Figure 4).

Most days, the sun had barely risen when we heard the lovely sound of horse hooves clip-clopping on the road outside our house. The horses and their sulkies travelled up Derwent Street from the nearby Catherine Street stables to train at Harold Park racetrack (see Figure 5). We would advertise at the University for students to work part-time to help us make shish kebabs for our Paddy’s Market stall. One was an Indian called Raj who was studying high-level maths for his job as a rocket scientist in India. He told us he had to ring his wife in India to ask how to make instant coffee and do other simple kitchen tasks. We had visited India in the 1970s and thought maybe he was lying about being a rocket scientist; we couldn’t imagine how the country could think about sending rockets into space when, from our experience, they hadn’t even made a biro that didn’t leak or nail clippers that actually cut your nails instead of munching them. We often invited Raj to eat with us. When he was leaving to go back home, he invited us for a meal in his tiny, sad, one-bedder facing King Street in Newtown. We sat down to a brown, tasteless, sort of paste-on-a-plate, with some lumpy objects submerged in it.

Times were changing. The Whitlam government purchased the 700+ houses from the Anglican Church in 1974, heralding much-needed repairs to the houses in the Glebe Estate.1 So, in 1975, things were transitioning to the new owners. Initially, we witnessed new fencing being built in properties around us (see Figure 6).

More about the characters Brian and Liz met and knew in the next Bulletin.

Note 1. A 2013 article on our website by Neil Macindoe, then Planning Convenor, lays out the history of the Glebe Estate. It states that the Whitlam Federal Government paid $17.5 million in 1974 ($21,000 per dwelling), and rehabilitation cost a further $18,000 per dwelling. The government initially planned to have the entire Estate rehabilitated by 1979, but the defeat of the Whitlam government in November 1975 meant that by 1984, less than a quarter of the dwellings were finished. The Federal and NSW governments signed an agreement in 1985 that transferred the entire Estate from Commonwealth Government ownership to NSW Government ownership. The NSW Department of Housing modified the Federal Government’s plans and completed the rehabilitation.