Squat History
Squatting in Australia — the Early Years
"Squatting is the oldest mode of tenure in the world, and we are all descended from squatters. This is as true of the Queen with her 176,000 acres as it is of the 54 per cent of householders in Britain who are owner-occupiers. They are all the ultimate recipients of stolen land, for to regard our planet as a commodity offends every conceivable principle of natural rights." -Colin Ward in "Squatting — The Real Story"
That we are squatters on stolen land is especially evident in Australia.
The first Europeans to settle in this country immediately set out to dispossess the original inhabitants, Aboriginal people, of their land.
Australia has a long history of squatting. In the 1800s, wealthy farmers squatted huge tracts of land, and became a ruling class of landowners. The legal and judicial system, based on the British model, explicitly served the ‘landowners’ (squatters). The legitimacy of squatting has changed radically since those days.
At certain periods in Australia’s more recent history, squatting has been tolerated as a necessary housing solution. In the depression years of the 1930s the authorities allowed unemployed people to live in shacks, which they built for themselves on unused pieces of land.
A More Recent Squatting History
Since 1930, individuals and small groups have made clandestine use of empty buildings for housing purposes, but this has never been documented.
By 1970, there was a widespread public squatting movement in Europe (particularly in Britain, Italy, Denmark and Germany), but no such visible squatting movement in Australia. Despite this fact, squatting was criminalised in NSW in 1970 with the introduction of the Askin Government’s Summary Offences Act. This act altered trespass laws in order to deal with anti-Vietnam sit-in protests and to appeal to public concerns about law and order. With the introduction of the new laws, squatters had to vacate their dwellings when directed to do so by the owner (or agents of the owner), or else face criminal charges.
The first high-profile squatting campaign in Australia emerged shortly after the introduction of the Summary Offences Act.
Woolloomooloo
Victoria Street, Woolloomooloo, was the site of the first public housing campaign in Australia. In 1971 first-time property developer Frank Theeman acquired whole rows of houses in historic Victoria Street, Woolloomooloo. Theeman developed plans to demolish the terrace houses and build massive office and apartment towers.
It wasn’t until March 1973 that Theeman gained council approval for his plans, and in the following month he began to institute a mass eviction of over 400 tenants. While some tenants left ‘voluntarily’, others defiantly stayed in their homes and the Victoria Street Residents Action Group (VRAG) was formed. Street patrols were organised to protect the remaining tenants from intimidation by Theeman’s security company, and to protect the empty houses from vandalism.
The residents quickly gained the support of the National Trust, which classified Victoria Street as an area of national importance. Most importantly, VRAG approached the communist-led Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF), who immediately placed ‘green bans’ on the threatened houses. ‘Green bans’ were work bans instituted by builders’ labourers in response to community and environmental issues. The green bans placed on the Victoria Street houses effectively prevented them from being demolished.
On 10 June 1973, the first group of squatters moved into 57 Victoria Street; over the next seven months the rest of the 22 houses in the street were occupied by a diverse collection of people. Victoria Street became one of the first publicly visible examples of an urban squatting community in NSW.
The squatters went to great lengths to live as communally as possible. They removed fences from the yards of adjoining terraces and held weekly consensus-based meetings. The residents established a food co-operative and a shared child-minding centre/ dining area, complete with a rotating cooking roster. Film nights were held in one house; another building was used as a mechanics’ workshop.
In an interesting tactical move, perhaps to counter the relative novelty of squatting at that time, the Victoria Street Squatters attempted to gain legal recognition as tenants. VRAG collected nominal ‘rents’ on the squatters’ houses (25 per cent of personal income to a maximum of $10) and deposited the total amount (approximately $200 per week) into the account of a company owned by Frank Theeman. It was hoped that if Theeman accepted the money, or at least failed to explicitly refuse it, then an implied contract or tenancy agreement would come into force, thus somewhat securing the squatters’ position. Although Theeman later claimed that no tenancy agreement could be implied by this payment, his assertion still had to be proven by law. In October 1973 Theeman ran a test case against one of the squatters, John Cox, under the Summary Offences Act. This was probably the first case that sought to determine whether squatting was a criminal offence in NSW. Cox lost both the initial case and the further appeal. He was found to be neither a legal occupier nor a tenant, but simply a criminal trespasser. Not only did this case serve to declare squatting illegal in NSW, it also severely limited the scope of potential defences for future criminal trespass cases.
With Cox’s appeal dismissed and the illegality of squatting confirmed, Theeman decided to take action against the ‘trespassers’. On 3 January 1974, less than two weeks after the failure of Cox’s appeal, scores of police and a 30-person team of security guards came to forcibly evict the Victoria Street squatters. Using sledgehammers and crowbars on the barricaded doors and windows, the guards took possession of most houses in less than 15 minutes.
Once inside, the guards identified themselves as ‘controllers’ for Victoria Point Pty Ltd and ordered the squatters to leave immediately. Those who refused were forcibly removed.
Within two hours, almost the entire street had been cleared and 44 squatters had been arrested and charged — one for assaulting police, six for ‘unseemly language’ and 37 for criminal trespass. The squatters were released on bail later that day, on the condition that they would not return to occupy their homes. By evening, all the squats had been secured and occupied by the ‘controllers’. The first squatters’ siege in New South Wales was over.
Pyrmont
In 1977 plans were announced for a project using land owned by Sydney City Council and the State Land Commission (LandCom) on the Pyrmont peninsula. The area was to become the site for a major public housing development, known as the Pyrmont Point project, comprising more than 600 residential units.
In 1978, with the initial phase of the project underway, the last of the public tenants who had been living in Council-owned housing on and around Point Street, Pyrmont, were evicted and relocated. The Council, which once had acted to preserve the buildings, was now preparing to demolish them.
In late 1978, the first squatters moved into the empty Point Street buildings. The council quickly disconnected the electricity supply to the houses, sent teams of workers to remove the roofs, and served the squatters with notices to leave or risk being charged with criminal trespass.
Luckily, this didn’t eventuate, due to Government in-fighting over money, which stalled redevelopment plans. The Council’s legal proceedings were deferred and the squatters remained in the buildings.
More people occupied the buildings and set about repairing them. By early 1981 nearly 50 people were squatting in the Point Street terraces and nearby flats. It wasn’t until March 1983, almost five years after the squatters had begun their occupation, that plans for the housing project were re-announced. By this time, private developers had become involved. What had been a major public housing project was now going to be a largely privatised development involving the multinational corporation CRI. In 1984, the developers brought a Supreme Court case against the Pyrmont squatters. With eviction likely, the squatters began a campaign to gain public support for their occupation. They drew on public concerns about the privatisation of the Pyrmont Point project and the lack of affordable housing for the traditional working class low-income inhabitants of Pyrmont.
The high court gave the squatters two months to move out, so the Pyrmont squatters tried other methods to legitimise their activities and secure their occupation. A large group of squatters addressed a City Council meeting where the Pyrmont Point project was being discussed, seeking suspension of their eviction orders on the grounds of hardship. Their requests were denied and Council reaffirmed its commitment to proceeding with the redevelopment plan.
In the local government elections of 1984 the Labor Party lost seats in Sydney City Council and became reliant upon the support of two independent communist councillors, Jack Mundey and Brian McGrahen, for political control. With a political history of defending low-income residents against property developers and the balance of power in their hands, Mundey and McGrahen passed a motion to sell Council land at Pyrmont Point to the NSW Department of Housing (DOH). They also passed a motion allowing the squatters to remain in the buildings until the negotiations with DOH were finalised and the squatters were directed to leave by Council.
The squatters were to be evicted in May 1984, but by then had garnered so much community, political and media support that any eviction attempt would have been a political and public relations disaster for the DOH. The Department was forced to negotiate quietly with the squatters to establish the Pyrmont Self-Help Housing Co-operative.
Sydney City Council quickly organised to purchase buildings in the Pyrmont-Ultimo area for the Co-operative’s use. Squatters were either rehoused into the new Co-operative’s buildings or into subsidised rental accommodation in the Pyrmont area. Glebe In the 1960s and 70s the State government, through the Department of Main Roads (DMR), developed plans to build a system of elevated roads across Darling Harbour connecting with a Western Distributor at Wentworth Park in Ultimo. These plans were dashed in 1974 when the Whitlam Federal Government, which had opposed the DMR development, purchased a large collection of houses in Glebe.
In October 1984, a well-organised group of more than 100 people occupied 40 of the empty Glebe houses. The action was the culmination of a series of public meetings organised by Squatters’ Union of NSW (no longer in existence).
Once inside the houses, the squatters immediately began working on necessary repairs and circulating information that explained their actions. A letter was distributed to local residents in the Glebe area to inform them about the diversity of the group — “We range in age from 2 months to 70 years … there are about a dozen children, 10 families, some pregnant mothers and some migrants” — and their reasons for squatting — “Most of us are unemployed … we were tired of waiting lists and paying rents for substandard housing … We think that housing is a right which we need to survive”.
Unfortunately, the NSW Government was able to argue that it was the squatters themselves who were preventing low-income people on waiting lists from realising their right to affordable housing. With the squatters’ occupation now firmly characterised by the government as illegitimate and lacking in community support, their eviction was far easier than they had anticipated . In February 1985, almost five months after the first of the Glebe houses had been occupied, evictions of the first 23 houses began. Squatters in each of the houses were formally requested to leave by DOH representatives; the NSW police removed squatters who refused. All of the squatters were removed in one day, 16 were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. The 23 houses were promptly gutted internally by teams of wreckers that had been hired by the State Government and boarded up to prevent re-entry.
Broadway
South Sydney City Council owned a collection of shop-top terrace houses and warehouses in Broadway, Ultimo. The Council negotiated with the Australand-Walker Corporation (owners of the Broadway Shopping Centre and Unilodge ‘student’ apartments) to demolish and redevelop the area into ‘Central Square’ — a massive urban redevelopment comprising apartments, offices and shops. The development aimed to consolidate Australand-Walker’s property empire in the area and bring considerable profits to South Sydney Council. Existing lease agreements were terminated in January 2000. In February 2000 people squatted four of the Council-owned buildings.
By August 2000, there were more than 30 people living in the Broadway squats. The squatters had diverse reasons for needing to squat but were united in that they could not afford to pay Sydney’s exorbitant rents.
Council was slow to realise that there was anybody squatting the buildings. The Council took a heavy-handed approach to evicting the squatters, using such methods as calling on the Operational Support Group police squad to have them removed, threatening fines of up to $1.1 million (each) and taking them to the Land and Environment court seeking removal on trumped-up fire safety grounds. The squatters organised a community/union picket with the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Building Trades Group of Unions to stop the council workers from making the buildings uninhabitable. Neither the police nor the Council wanted to be seen to be throwing people onto the streets during the Olympic games, so they squatters made sure that the media were there.
In collaboration with IB Fell Housing Research Centre at Sydney University, the squatters began to formulate a policy for local councils and developers to adopt. This caretaker housing policy would see people who need housing enter into caretaker lease agreements with the owners of vacant properties in the period leading up to redevelopment or demolition. This kind of legitimised occupation had been operating successfully in England for some time. The occupants look after the premises and get a place to live, making any repairs necessary to make the buildings fit for habitation. The developers save thousands of dollars on securing empty space with private guards and put something back into the communities that they are buying up and effacing. And the Council gets to develop a policy that actually helps to alleviate episodic homelessness and the loss of community space in their area. The Broadway squats were to be the first pilot study of this emergent policy in action.
In October 2000, a majority of Councillors at South Sydney decided to withdraw eviction proceedings and move toward the establishment of caretaker leases on the Broadway buildings. The Mayor and the bureaucrats on Council were still vehemently opposed to anything other than eviction and trespass charges. With the support of the majority of the Council, the Mayor obstructed the caretaker lease policy with any applicable Council regulation, such as: fire safety, public liability insurance, building classification, current official use of the buildings, the requirement to submit a development application for change of use, and the cost of repairs. The squatters complied with all these demands. Simultaneously, the Mayor and some members of Council embarked on a media smear campaign, against the squatters and took expensive measures to prevent any further use of Council-owned buildings for homes at Broadway by employing security guards in nearby buildings, ultimately reaching an expenditure of approximately a quarter of a million dollars.
The caretaker lease was signed on 4th July 2001, but the victory for the squatters was short-lived. They were evicted only a month after signing.
What happened at Broadway had implications far beyond the tenure for individual residents. The Broadway squats were a pilot project for the caretaker lease policy. It paved the way for possible wider benefits for those in need of affordable accommodation, and for assisting in reducing the criminal impacts of homelessness.
Squats and Housing Co-operatives
Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s there were many other public squatting campaigns. Several of these actions led to the establishment of housing co-operatives. Many people in the housing movement see these institutions as rigid, highly bureaucratic and counter to the philosophy behind DIY housing. Others look upon co-operatives as providers of just the thing that squatters are in need of, housing.