Melbourne’s inner city was once a maze of slums. They were replaced by homes in the sky that would lead tens of thousands into a new multicultural Australia.
The towers, grey and brutal to some, determinedly modern to others, began piercing Melbourne’s skyline in 1962. They grew out of an old struggling Melbourne and would lead tens of thousands into a new, multicultural Australia.
In 1935, Barnett led a new premier, Albert Dunstan of the Country Party on a personal tour of the slums.Frederick Oswald Barnett In 1946, about 3000 people – many of whom had lost homes when slums were torn down – lived there in tents and makeshift shacks. The conditions were so appalling and violence was so common that Melbourne’s newspapers took to calling it “Camp Hell”.
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. 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 – “vertical chicken coops” was one of the disparaging terms – the towers kept rising using Holmesglen’s mass-produced concrete. Building in Melbourne was completed in 1976. Today, 44 public housing towers loom into Melbourne’s skyline.
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.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 – particularly Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and South Sudan.
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