Living in extremes

by Ric Curnow.

Presented at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas, March 2006

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Originally when I was asked to join this panel, it was because I was one of the forty or so UN personnel who refused to leave the compound in Dili in 1999, when it had been overrun by several thousand Timorese fleeing the militias, and laid siege to by those militias and the Indonesian security forces complicit with them.

If there’s a single thing I’m proud of in my life, it’s that we stayed, ignoring discomfort, instruction from UNHQ, and threats from the militias. Those of us who stayed stayed out of a conviction that our departure would mean death for many of the Timorese sheltering with us. We stayed until the Australian government agreed to provide all four thousand of them with temporary accommodation, for want of a better word, and the Indonesian government agreed to let them go.

That two week period was pretty surreal — sleeping under my desk, operating the satellite telephone that had been abandoned to my care by departing ABC journalists, and spending most of my time just talking to the Timorese and doing my best to reassure them — I was one of few outsiders there who could speak Indonesian, a language spoken by most of the Timorese. The city was burning to the ground around us, hundreds of thousands of bullets passed over our heads, a baby was born on the floor of my office. Fortunately, the Australian and Indonesian governments caved in before the compound became more dangerous than the surrounding militias — it was a major public health risk, and increasingly so. We were all flown out to Darwin on RAAF Hercules.

More recently, I spent a year living with the Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and that too was a pretty extreme way of life.

But when I thought about it, by far the most extreme housing situation I’ve lived in was during an earlier period in my life. I spent a couple of years in the 1980s as a squatter in inner-city Sydney, and that’s the story that I’ll tell today, though I’m happy to answer questions later about those other experiences as well.

I’d like to think that my becoming a squatter was a deliberate ‘life-style’ choice, or even that I did it because I was intending to make some worthwhile ‘bottom up’ social critique from the experience, a la George Orwell and the like.

And perhaps Orwell, and others I’d read did influence me to some extent.

But roughly speaking, I’d come back to Sydney from Adelaide with no money, to find that the share house I’d left in the care of others had broken up - as had my piano, in the backyard when someone tried to remove it!

A friend suggested I might try squatting. Not long after that, someone stole pretty much everything I had, except what I had actually been carrying on that day. So I didn’t really have that much left to lose.

A friend and I conspired to occupy the old wool warehouse at Woolloomooloo, an enormous building that stood four storeys on a large block of the suburb, and had once also operated as the Navy’s storehouse. By 1987, it belonged to the NSW Housing Commission, who were planning to turn it into low cost accommodation — we gave them a bit of a hand in that respect.

We got in by climbing through an open window on the second storey. From the top of the security grille on the first floor window, I was able to press my body to the wall and push myself upward, until, I could grasp the window frame above and pull myself up and into the building. Getting out wasn’t as easy as getting in (and that hadn’t been easy either). Hanging from the windowframe, my feet just touched the grille below. But I couldn’t stretch down to the grille with one arm while the other held onto the frame above, and I was too conscious of falling out backwards to try inching my way back down the way I came up. My friend, who stood 6’5", was able to make the stretch and was waiting for me below when a police car came around the corner. They all thought it was pretty funny. He was telling me to climb down, and I was shouting back I’m not coming till they go away. Eventually they left, and in the end I did a gymnast sort of thing, jumping into space and grabbing the security grille with my hands on the way past.

I took up residence on an entire floor of the building. It had its advantages — spectacular views of the city, the Domain, the Art Gallery — ideal location. I built an indoor tennis court on the wood floor, and used one of those bright orange fences you see at construction sites for a net. It had its downside though — I eventually got a cold water shower set up by attaching a hose to a fire hydrant. Because the electricity people wouldn’t connect the building, we had to wait until a reasonably successful rock band — The Died Pretty — shot a video for their One Brilliant Eye album in the basement. They got the power on for their lights, and no-one in authority ever turned it off again. The song went to number one in Italy.

As time passed, the building filled up with other squatters. Some were semi-respectable people — you know, had a job, or were artists. Others were more or less completely ruined as people.

I got to know a group of adolescents who took up residence. With a median age of less than 15, all were heroin-addicted — one, a girl of 14, told me of how heroin was a blessing for her, since with heroin she’d managed to kick the alcoholism that had started at age 9! Most were making their income from prostitution, mostly on Sydney’s notorious wall. They’d pull a few tricks, make a few hundred dollars, and then blow it all partying.

Ultimately, too many people, and too many — um — incapable people moved into the building. The street level filled up with street people, mostly aboriginal and islander people, who made a kind of camp there, using banners stolen from the bicentennial celebrations that year to construct their dwellings. Unfortunately, there was no plumbing on the ground floor, and things down there were getting pretty ugly.

The level of violence in and around the building was increasing as well. One night, one of the more capable residents ended up in Sydney Hospital with a meat cleaver in his forehead and another resident was stabbed in the kidney, and barely lived.

While things started getting out of hand, the Housing Commission were also increasingly concerned about getting us out. Not that they were concerned about us or what we might do to the building, but they’d sold it to developers who wanted to turn it into a five star Hotel.

The commission took us to court, and our appointed lawyer, who was actually a very nice man with a great big conscience took the predicament of the residents very seriously, took on the commission, and squeezed from them as many concessions as he could — we got reasonable time to find alternative arrangements, and those of us deemed incapable of fending for ourselves were found places in state-run hostels.

From there, I went to a much nicer squat in a couple of terrace houses in Surry Hills — the houses belonged to an old lady who’d simple forgotten about them. When she died, her heirs, unfortunately, remembered them, and I moved on to another squat in a disused garage (that’s a trendy art gallery today).

One of the best people I met while I was living this life, I kid you not, was a drug dealer named Mick. Mick had started out well, been a successful businessman, and only later got himself terribly addicted to cocaine and heroin — and his world caved in. One day after I’d been at the garage for a few months, I was talking to Mick. He suggested to me in fairly blunt terms that it was time I moved on —if I didn’t I was going to find myself trapped in ‘the life’. And I did move on, left it all behind.

A couple of years later, I went back to the old squat in Woolloomooloo, by then a five star hotel, and raced in through the plate glass windows, past the foyer and up — the elevator, woah — to the floor I’d lived on for 15 months. I was strangely elated by the state of the building — carpets and paint, paintings and pot plants. Cleaning staff opened the room that was now where I’d once made my bed on a foam mattress on some broken filing cabinets. I looked around me at the splendour and laughed and laughed and laughed.

What did I learn from the experience? Mostly a whole lot about a whole way of life that’s just hidden from the public view. Apart from that, perhaps that I’m a lot less risk-averse than most people, and probably pretty lucky to be alive. Perhaps most perversely, I learned to get on with landlords!