I enjoyed participating with a stall in the first Millers Point Picnic on the green in Argyle Place on Sunday 14/9.
It was a great success and the crowds that attended showed that the Save Millers Point campaign has supporters all over Sydney. Well done organisers.
Thanks too to those who bought copies of Millers Point: The Urban Village. The proceeds from book sales will go to the Millers Point Community Association to assist their struggle.
When Chris Keating and I wrote it all those years ago the state had already sold off some of the commercial properties but the idea of socially cleansing the whole area was unimaginable.
Yesterday the lovely location reminded me about the person who wrote to the Herald in 1930 to say that the green was a ‘forlorn and neglected spot’, the houses were ‘mostly squalid’, and that the government should buy them – never mind that the government already owned them – and get ‘a wise architect to plan a scheme for little houses around the village green’.
The green is still there and no one got around to trashing the ‘squalid houses’ which are currently being sold off at gob smacking prices for short sighted, one-off gain to a sightless government that doesn’t understand this city and what makes a place like this valuable beyond dollars.