History
Sydney’s first Conservation Protests – Woolloomooloo, 1957
Save St Kilda House in Cathedral St, from demolition and its residents from eviction.
In 2011 for the Green Bans Art Walk and the 40th Anniversary of Union and Community action, sought important sites and the authorities respected in communities; turning fragments from an intense 4 year fight into a monument. The campaign failed, but is not forgotten. In 1975 a new St Kilda, a seniors housing building in Cathedral Street, was named in honour of the St Kilda protest.
In 2011 the Green Bans Art Walk led by Jim Donovan remembered their important initiative. Photographer Michelle Blakeley presented scans from Isadore Brodsky’s book History of the Loo. Guide Jim Donovan, secretary of the Woolloomooloo RAG, whose family was the last to leave Rowena Place after Juanita Nielson “disappeared”, turned up with the same book. Jim showed art walkers the site where his mother organised a tenants’ resistance in the mid-1950s. The “Battle to Save St Kilda in Woolloomooloo”, a Georgian mansion divided into boarding house rooms, was the first urban heritage uprising. (Now Cross City Tunnel HQ.)
Jim Donovan became secretary of the Sydney Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation, Woolloomooloo being Sydney’s major port. (Re-located in the late 1979s.) The Wharfies work gangs had black and white, left and right, respectful of the fact that Woolloomooloo is Gadigal land and a land grant given to Aborigines.
Images: Images from Sydney's Little World of Woolloomooloo by historian Isadore Brodsky, Old Sydney Free Press, [1966]. Copied by Michele Blakeney. 2011 photos by Michele Blakeney.