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The towers, grey and brutal to some, determinedly modern to others, began piercing Melbourne\u2019s skyline in 1962. They grew out of an old struggling Melbourne and would lead tens of thousands into a new, multicultural Australia.<\/p>\n
The great prefabricated concrete monoliths rose above what were then working class or poverty-stricken pockets of inner-city suburbs like Richmond, Fitzroy, North Melbourne, Collingwood, Flemington, Kensington and Carlton.<\/p>\n
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Entrance to a slum pocket known as Carlow Place in Carlton in the 1930s.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Frederick Oswald Barnett<\/cite><\/p>\n Social reformers had lobbied since the 1920s to rid Melbourne of its slums, where thousands lived in overcrowded lean-tos, shacks and old cottages that were unsewered and often lacked running water. Disease, alcoholism, high child mortality and crime flourished in the meaner streets.<\/p>\n Frederick Oswald Barnett, imbued with the Christian socialist views of the Methodist Church, took a camera into Melbourne\u2019s slums.<\/p>\n Ensuring his pictures were published in the city\u2019s newspapers, principally The Herald<\/em>, he confronted the city\u2019s citizens, politicians and movers and shakers with documentary evidence of lives degraded by poverty \u2013 exacerbated by the Great Depression \u2013 and shocking housing conditions.<\/p>\n In 1935, Barnett led a new premier, Albert Dunstan of the Country Party (his government propped up by the ALP) on a personal tour of the slums.<\/p>\n An elevated view of backyards in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in the 1930s.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Frederick Oswald Barnett<\/cite><\/p>\n Barnett argued that those living in slums were not naturally inclined towards degeneracy or social dysfunction, but were simply trapped in a cycle of poverty they were unable to escape without assistance.<\/p>\n Dunstan reacted by forming a slum abolition committee.<\/p>\n The committee soon enough became the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board, which eventually pressured the government into legislating the Housing Act of 1937, which led to the formation of the Housing Commission of Victoria.<\/p>\n Slums were demolished and replaced with improved social housing, and rental subsidies were provided to help the poor make the transition.<\/p>\n Following World War II, however, there was renewed pressure on housing created by a surge of returned soldiers, their new families and a new push for immigration. Melbourne was in crisis, with many working families shoved out of the housing market.<\/p>\n Makeshift camps sprang up, the worst of which was a former military establishment in Royal Park, Parkville, known as Camp Pell.<\/p>\n In 1946, about 3000 people \u2013 many of whom had lost homes when slums were torn down \u2013 lived there in tents and makeshift shacks. The conditions were so appalling and violence was so common that Melbourne\u2019s newspapers took to calling it \u201cCamp Hell\u201d.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, a Commonwealth Housing Commission was set up to allocate funding for housing in the states and territories.<\/p>\n Frederick Oswald Barnett argued that those living in slums were trapped in a cycle of poverty they were unable to escape without assistance.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Frederick Oswald Barnett<\/cite><\/p>\n The Victorian Housing Commission used the funds to purchase a factory at Holmesglen, in south-east Melbourne, to build prefabricated housing that dramatically decreased the time to construct public homes.<\/p>\n Soon, the Holmesglen factory became a massive project, particularly after the CSIRO developed a new type of lightweight concrete.<\/p>\n Authorities became interested in what was known as international modern architecture style, which emphasised the use of lightweight, modular and mass-produced industrial materials, rejection of ornament and colour, and an obsession with flat surfaces.<\/p>\n Across the world, other nations were thrusting public housing into the sky: New York City with its \u201cprojects\u201d, the United Kingdom with its vertical housing estates, the Soviet Union with its \u201cKhruschevka\u201d apartment buildings.<\/p>\n It was a short step to trying to solve Melbourne\u2019s housing problems with internationalist-styled towers of flats, built like packs of cards from concrete panels produced in vast numbers at Holmesglen.<\/p>\n Victoria\u2019s housing commission was more enthusiastic about the high-rises than other Australian states.<\/p>\n Though many families displaced by slum clearing were less than impressed to find themselves shifted from their familiar old communities and allocated small flats high in the sky \u2013 \u201cvertical chicken coops\u201d was one of the disparaging terms \u2013 the towers kept rising using Holmesglen\u2019s mass-produced concrete. Building in Melbourne was completed in 1976. Today, 44 public housing towers loom into Melbourne\u2019s skyline.<\/p>\n It is perhaps worth reflecting that they were built principally during the Liberal era of premier Henry Bolte.<\/p>\n In short, when conservative, neoliberal ideology today is about individual effort and a suspicion of large-scale welfare, the old high-rise flats stand as reminders of a lost period when conservative administrations believed in paying to house those who had run out of other options.<\/p>\n The housing commission initially allocated most of the flats in the towers to families, and about one-third to elderly, often single people, displaced by slum clearances. But the rapid growth in immigration from the 1960s meant a new Australia began evolving within the towers.<\/p>\n Greek, Turkish and Italian people as well as new arrivals from what was then called Yugoslavia moved in, starting what was a moving wave of nationalities starting their Australian lives.<\/p>\n Over the next decades came refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South America and East Timor, followed by more from the warring former Yugoslavian states, and then those from Africa \u2013 particularly Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and South Sudan.<\/p>\n The towers became secret inner cities themselves, their residents\u2019 lives a largely shunned mystery to most of those who lived in the Melbourne that surrounded them.<\/p>\n In 1982, The Age<\/em> writer Michael Gawenda lived for 11 days on the 14th floor of a North Richmond tower to gain insight into the lives of residents after three murders caused a media panic, with headlines shouting \u201cHigh-Rise Terror\u201d.<\/p>\n Gawenda\u2019s feature \u201cGhettos in the Sky\u201d, which won a Walkley Award, portrayed a dystopian world where the lifts were unreliable, children smashed bottles in rubbish-strewn hallways that served as cold wind tunnels, and strangers, particularly single women, avoided each other\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n But his reporting also revealed neighbours who invited him in to their oppressive little flats for a cup of tea, where Indochinese grandfathers watched their grandchildren kicking soccer balls around the lawns, and how his own little daughter enjoyed visiting because there were so many other children in the playground. No \u201chigh-rise terror\u201d touched him, and in 11 days \u201cnothing exceptional had happened\u201d.<\/p>\n Melburnians got a shocking view of life in the towers in July 2020 when, at the height of panic about the spread of COVID-19, the Victorian government suddenly announced that residents of nine towers in North Melbourne and Flemington were to be locked in.<\/p>\n Subsequent reporting revealed there were just two washing machines for every eight units in one tower, and there was no access to balconies or outdoor spaces. In some cases, up to three generations of families shared, single flats.<\/p>\n Life in the towers has never been one-dimensional.<\/p>\n A series of reports written by journalists James Button and Julie Szego, commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, found across the high-rise flats a thriving community of migrants, rich with the experience of starting new lives despite the challenges of inter-generational divides, tensions with authorities and the pervasive influence of the online world.<\/p>\n It begins with the memory of a young man who had no problem finding company on a Saturday morning \u2013 he simply went to the 20th floor and knocked on doors. \u201cMany families had six or seven kids living in three-bedroom apartments, so it didn\u2019t take him long to find someone he knew,\u201d the report found.<\/p>\n It was, perhaps, an experience not far removed from the children of Melbourne\u2019s old slums, who had always had a ready-made community of friends on the mean streets. 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