Category Archives: Around Annandale

More about the plaque

Posted on 22 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment

Someone got back to me from both councils yesterday.

There’s no mystery about the plaque down by Johnston’s Creek. ‘Oh, you mean the one honouring Jack Mundey,’ the man from Leichhardt Council said.

I gleaned a little more background by searching for ‘Jack Mundey’ on the Council’s web site. A local resident Joe Mannix proposed more than 12 months ago that a plaque be erected and its unveiling be a way to honour Mundey on his 80th birthday in October last year. The proposal was approved, but evidently there was a delay, as the actual unveiling happened earlier this month, eleven months behind schedule. In a Council handout dated Thursday 16 September, Mayor Jamie Parker wrote:

Last Saturday, Council officially unveiled a plaque to remember the 1972 Builders Labourers Federation Green Ban which joined with resident action groups to stop approved expressways carving up Glebe, Annandale and Lilyfield.
ooooThese actions demonstrated the combined power of union and resident actions in effectively defending local communities. The ill fated freeway project was as much about ‘slum clearance’ as it was about building a network for container movements from the port.
ooooA national treasure, Jack Mundey is 81 years old, and we were delighted to have him attend the function at Smith & Spindlers Park on Saturday.

There was a photo:

Jamie Parker, Verity Firth, Jack Mundey and Joe Mannix officially unveil the plaque

The man on the phone mentioned, as the Mayoral message didn’t, that there were plans to screen Fig Street Fiasco, a community video about the struggle made by Tom Zubrycki. I don’t know if the screening took place, but there’s a dramatic clip at the link that makes my friends’ dreams of violence seem less bizarrely unrealistic.

The caller from the City of Sydney said they hadn’t heard of the plaque in ‘what we call the Cardigan Street Park’ until they received my email. So that leaves us with the vandalism  scenario. The City of Sydney doesn’t have a register of plaques, though it is on a To Do List somewhere. He recommended that I write to the Lord Mayor asking that the plaque be restored, and said that would lead to action of some sort. I’ll do that, and hope to report back in a while.

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History acknowledged

Posted on 21 Sep 2010 | 4 comments

In a little strip of green not far from Harold Park Raceway, near where a bridge crosses Johnson’s Creek, a new object appeared the other day: a squat, squarish thing beside the path,  looking more than anything like a cardboard carton fallen off a passing truck – or given its distance from any road, perhaps from a helicopter. On approach, it turned out to be a block of sandstone with a plaque on top.

Over the logo of Leichhardt Municipal Council, the plaque explains itself:

In the early 1970s resident groups,
including the Glebe Society, joined with the
Builders Labourers Federation,
led by Jack Mundey,
to impose a Green Ban on expressways
planned to carve through
Glebe, Annandale and Lilyfield.
This plaque commemorates all the men and women who fought this battle.

Well, I’m chuffed to be commemorated, and so I’m sure are the rest of the raggedy coalition of anarchists, Maoists (who created a poster showing a US flag as highway ploughing through tiny houses, because of course the expressway was a product of US capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit), students fresh from the Vietnam Moratorium demos, out of work actors, etc, who joined the ‘battle’ with the starchy Glebe Society and the fabulous BLF. In those heady days I remember overhearing a conversation between a Philosophy Lecturer and an Eng Lit Honours student deciding not to blow up the beginning stages of the expressway because although they had it in their hearts to do it, they lacked the practical knowledge of high explosives. Inspired by something someone had read about successful protests in San Francisco, we built an adventure playground in a little park in Darling Street, Glebe, though as far as I know very few children actually availed themselves of our crude constructions. perhaps these are the kinds of reasons why we are being commemorated rather than honoured.

But why in this park? And why now? Isn’t there already a site-appropriate plaque in Glebe that gives more detail? This morning I took the dog to visit that pleasant little park, between 77a and 79 Darling Street.

and found this:

Yes, a pale patch of rock where once a plaque had been. Was this was the work of vandals or the result of Glebe being taken over by the City of Sydney? Did the Councils talk to each other? Is the new plaque some kind of replacement for the stolen/removed one? I’ve phoned Leichhardt Council and emailed the City of Sydney Council. The latter’s web site promises a reply within 14 days.

To be continued …

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Not a grocer’s apostrophe in sight

Posted on 23 Aug 2010 | 3 comments

Have a look at this sign in a cake shop in Norton Street Plaza, Leichhardt. Sam Cavallaro probably feels he has crafted a memorable slogan. Clearly he has saved quite a bit of money by not employing a copy writer or an editor. What I love is the way it refuses to yield up a clear meaning. The dollar may lose its value with inflation, but these cakes are good even when they’re stale? No, that can’t be it. Perhaps: our cakes may seem expensive, but you’ll stop worrying about the cost when you actually eat them? But surely that isn’t it either. I know we’re not meant to scrutinise it like this, but honestly it’s not derision I feel but a kind of awe at its koan-ishness.

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Elegant graffiti

Posted on 20 Aug 2010 | Leave a comment

I wouldn’t have noticed this but for a young girl who read it out loud to her mother just as I was walking past. It’s on a building site just around the corner from my place.

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Local Propaganda

Posted on 17 Aug 2010 | Leave a comment

Local objection to the proposed Woolworths for Annandale has taken an artistic turn. Riffing on The Independent Weekly‘s ‘Fighting the Woolly mammoth’ headline, versions of this charmingly dynamic poster have been turning up in shop windows.

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A mighty wind

Posted on 3 Aug 2010 | Leave a comment

This morning people in my house said to each other, ‘How about that wind?’  Not all the people, mind you: even though I had a disrupted night because of a heavy cold, I didn’t hear a thing. So I was impressed when taking the dog for her afternoon walk  to encounter this proof that the wind had indeed been violent:

Apart from the blue car with the good fortune to be covered by a tarpaulin (whose tarnished bumper bar suggests that the owner might have preferred the insurance bonanza of serious damage), there’s a bright red BMW under those branches, which seems to have escaped with just a few serious dents.

I wasn’t the only one who whipped a phone out in the brief time I was there. Given the state of the light at the time, I’m impressed by how much I managed to capture.

Tomorrow night, after Book Group meets, I’ll  post about The Tree of Man.

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Sam vs Goliath

Posted on 22 Jul 2010 | 6 comments

Photo of Katia and Sam Abouchrouche by Edwin Monk, lifted from The Inner West Independent, August 2010.

It’s a wonder I haven’t blogged about Sam’s shop before now. It’s a family business in Booth Street Annandale that’s been there for almost as long as we’ve been living in this suburb. It’s not our closest shop, but we prefer the extra walk (or, let’s be honest, drive) not only because the shop can be counted on to have good quality vegetables and a huge range of everything, but also for the old-fashioned sense of community and even the occasional free Lebanese lesson. There’s Sam, his wife Kathy and their three sons, though the youngest is too young to work in the shop and the eldest has recently gone to work as a lawyer. The shop, which became an IGA and doubled in size a couple of years ago, is in the news recently as Woolworths are proposing to open a store in our suburb.

The August issue of The Independent Weekly has the story (the whole issue is downloadable as a PDF):

Associate Professor Frank Zumbo,who has studied competition  law for over 20 years, was critical of the proposal. ‘The one thing that emerges from that research over the years is that where you’ve got sectors dominated by a very small number of large and powerful companies, you find that they act as a “cosy club”,’ he said. ‘Where there is just a Coles and Woolworths, the prices there are higher than in those markets where there are strong independents – the evidence is clear from ACCC research.’

Mr Zumbo said there was a danger that if Woolworths opened in Annandale, they could engage in two major forms of price discrimination. ‘One is ‘predatory pricing’, where they can sell below cost, for extended periods of  time, to drive out the local small businesses,’ he said. ‘Once that happens, prices will go up at that Woolworths. The other thing they could  do is engage in “geographic price discrimination”, where the prices at the [Annandale] Woolworths might be lower than other Woolworths stores for a period of time, and once the local competition is gone,  those prices will go back up.

‘[Their aim] is simply to saturate the area to suffocate the local businesses. Woolworths, for example, has five supermarkets already in place within a radius of five kilometres [of the proposed Annandale site]. To put another one is designed to remove what remaining oxygen there is from the independents.’

The Independent is nothing if not balanced, and gives the other side of the argument. A Woolworths spokesperson is quoted as denying predatory pricing practices, and the article continues:

‘Speaking generally, Woolworths brings many benefits to communities,’ said Woolworths Community  Relations Manager, Simon Berger. ‘We deliver convenience, range and value for local customers, which encourages more people to do their shopping locally, reduces the number of people shopping outside the local area, and generates opportunities for neighbouring small businesses.’

Well, maybe. But we saw Glebe Point Road turn into something very different when the Broadway Shopping Centre opened. And soon after Franklins and then Coles opened in Leichhardt, which is a lot further away than this new development, we saw three butcher’s shops wither and die in our locality.

Sam and Kathy have their moment in the Independent‘s coverage as well:

Like any good independent  retailer, Sam knows his customers personally. ‘I just want to be delivering what I can for my customers – the more you can deliver the more they appreciate,’ he says.

Surely, though, there comes a point when one must ask whether the ridiculous hours and stress are worth it. ‘It’s not easy,’ Katia concedes, ‘but I love what I’m doing. I love my customers – you see families grow, and share their problems. It’s a real community feel. You get used to working – it’s not easy for me to let it go.’

Go Sam! Go Kathy!

Added on 23 July: It took some finding, but if you’re interested you can fill out the snap poll being conducted by our state member, Verity Firth

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I know this is racist, but …*

Posted on 19 Feb 2010 | 3 comments

A little after 7 o’clock this morning I was up the street buying carrots for our breakfast juice.

‘How are you?’ I asked, as the owner weighed the carrots.

‘Good so far,’ he said.

‘Too early in the day for things to have gone too wrong?’

And we were launched into a conversation about things that can go wrong in a small supermarket like his. In particular, he said, it can be five minutes from closing time and a couple of drunks will come in and wreck the place, or steal something. But thieves are a big problem at any time of the day. (This is Annandale, remember, whose public schools’ rankings on the Sydney Morning Herald’s League Table established it as a nice middle class suburb.) Talking about ways of dealing with thieves, he said, with an apologetic shrug:

I know this is racist, but they’re mostly Australian1, and Australians think you should do things by the rules. So when I catch them they expect me to call the police. Then the police take twenty minutes to come, and the thieves just swear at me and walk away. But I don’t give a f*** about the rules, I push them to the ground and search them, then I tell them to get out of my shop and not come back.

You can’t do that with women, of course, especially if you’ve seen them put stuff down the front of their jeans, and the ‘girls’ who work behind the tills won’t do it because they shrink from violence. He does ban people from the shop if he checks the CCTV after their visit and sees that they’ve lifted something – he’ll walk up to them out in the street, tell them they’ve been sprung, and warn them off. He’ll also send a copy of their image to his brother-in-law who has a shop down the road.

(I forgot to mention, the shopkeeper is originally from Lebanon, and I expect he has an Australian passport.)

* My blog had a huge surge of hits when I gave a post a provocatively sexist-sounding title a while back, so I’m experimenting to see if racism has the same pulling power.
1 He probably would have said ‘Skips’ if we knew each other better, but we both knew who he meant by Australians.

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Pudding Lane

Posted on 12 Jan 2010 | Leave a comment

Kostas is one of the stars of Gillian Leahy’s exquisite little documentary Our Park. In the film, though not in the clips at the link, we see a little of his project of establishing a community garden along Whites Creek Lane. At one point, he says that his many plantings will stop dogs from slipping under the fence and into the canal – and is immediately given the lie by a shot of a dog doing exactly that. The laughter is good natured, but Kostas’ project comes off looking less than practical.

Eleven years later, the lane is transformed into a leafy garden, and Kostas presides over the Pudding Club, whose primary school student members spend a couple of hours each weekend watering, weeding, composting … and eating cakes cooked by Kostas. There are pomegranates, olives, stone fruit, birdbaths and dog watering holes. The plantings and edgings continue into the park to the north of the lane, and there are seedling gum trees planted across the canal. A recent application to have the lane declared a shared zone with a 10 km/h speed limit was rejected by Leichhardt Council, but by sheer hard work and personal charm Kostas has created something special.

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At the markets

Posted on 12 Dec 2009 | Leave a comment

Q: What does it mean, “Russian garlic”?

A: It’s like Maori children born in Australia.

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