DOCSLIB.ORG

Pat Stretton

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Pat Stretton STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION OH 730/33 Full transcript of interviews with PAT STRETTON on 1 March; and 5 and 19 April by Madeleine Regan Recording available on CD Access for research: Unrestricted Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the Adelaide City Council Archives. OH 730/33 PAT STRETTON NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT This transcript was donated to the State Library. It was not created by the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection and does not necessarily conform to the Somerville Collection's policies for transcription. Readers of this oral history transcript should bear in mind that it is a record of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The State Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview, nor for the views expressed therein. As with any historical source, these are for the reader to judge. This transcript had not been proofread prior to donation to the State Library and has not yet been proofread since. Researchers are cautioned not to accept the spelling of proper names and unusual words and can expect to find typographical errors as well. 2 First interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan 1 March 2013 at the North Adelaide Library for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013 Oral Historian (OH): Thanks, Pat, for agreeing to be part of the project. I’m going to start the interview by asking you some background information. Could you give me your full name? Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): Patricia Mary Stretton. OH: And your date of birth? PS: 29 October 1937. OH: And where were you born? PS: I was born in Adelaide, and when I was born my parents lived at Woodville, and when I was five they moved to Glen Osmond. OH: Pat, what about your parents, what was your mother’s name? PS: My mother was Margaret Myfanwy Thomas, and my father was Alexander Gibson, and they had a great fellow feeling because both of their fathers were alcoholics, so there was never a drop of alcohol [laughs] in the house. OH: And where had your mother been born? PS: She was born at Lockleys. She didn’t stay at school much beyond primary school I think, but she learnt shorthand and typing, and so after she left school she was a shorthand-typiste. I’m ignorant, but I’m not sure where she worked, but she wasn’t working by the time we were born. OH: And you father, his place of birth? PS: He was born in the City, right in the City, as far as I know, but anyway that’s where he lived when he was tiny. He had three older sisters and his drunken father left his family when my father was very young. My 3 grandmother ran a boarding house on South Terrace and took in lodgers. She managed to get my father educated in primary school at Christian Brothers’ College, because they took in poor boys – he was the only boy who didn’t have a uniform. When he was 12 he had to leave school and help support the family, and he went to work at a carriers in the city called Gambling’s, he was the office boy, and whenever my sister1 and I complained about not having enough money for whatever we wanted, he’d say, When I was young I got 10/- a week as a wage, and I had to give it all to my mother. OH: Do you remember your grandmother and the boarding house on South Terrace? PS: No. She died before I was born, unfortunately on the same date as my birthday, so that was a bit sad for my father, but she was dead so I never knew her. I knew my other grandmother who came to live with us when we went to live at Glen Osmond, my grandmother and my uncle who was a hunchback, he always lived with her, and they came and lived in the house we were renting at Glen Osmond. My grandmother died when I was about 10 I think. OH: And I think that you told me also that your mother died before you were ...? PS: Yes, my mother died in 1951 I think – she had cancer – and when she died her GP, Beryl Bowering, who lived in the same street, took me as a lodger and my sister went to live at St Ann’s [University of Adelaide College] because she’d gone to university already. OH: And just to finish off your biographical details, the name of your spouse? PS: Hugh, Hugh Stretton. OH: And between you and Hugh you have? PS: When I married Hugh he had two small children who I helped bring up after that, and then we had two more children, so four altogether, who are all really fond of each other. OH: That’s lovely. If we can return to your childhood and growing up, what do you remember about the City of Adelaide as you were growing up? 1 Judy 4 PS: Well the City was a big deal. If my mother had to go to town she always put on corsets. My mother was very skinny [laughs] but she couldn’t go out without wearing boned corsets [laughs] and a hat and gloves. We had to walk about three-quarters of a mile down to catch the Glen Osmond tram if we were going by tram; my father had a car but he was at work. She used to take us to films, especially at the York (picture theatre), because the York showed English films, so they were good films [laughs]. OH: And where was the York? PS: In what’s now Rundle Mall on the corner of – my memory is faulty, you’d have to look it up in a gazetteer – I think it was near the corner of Stephens Place, yes, because they knocked it down to ... No, that’s not right because that’s Birks, and if we went to Birks they had chairs for ladies to sit on, and I can remember her buying gloves and being seated on a chair having the gloves stretched over, down, like that. OH: So they were long gloves? PS: Yes, long gloves. OH: And Pat, Birks was a department store? PS: Birks, Charles Birks, it was a very old-fashioned department store, as was Myer’s; Birks got demolished to build David Jones, and David Jones was the latest thing. When I was a teenager, anything you’d bought from David Jones had to be posh and superior [laughs] and better than anywhere else, but it was a beautiful shop to go in. John Martin’s and Myer’s didn’t care what they looked like, and David Jones, new David Jones, did, and it was all marble and reflections, and just glamorous is what it was to us. OH: Do you remember other department stores in the City? PS: Myer’s, I remember Myer’s, Birks, and John Martin’s had a wonderful place to eat with lions. Don’t ask me but there were decorative lions around it, and that was all very exciting. And the other thing we used to do, not all that often, was go to the Theatre Royal to see musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and White Horse Inn, and especially because my mother adored Gilbert and Sullivan, so we went to all the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that ever played here, Ivan Menzies was the comic then. We didn’t ever go to plays, I suppose she thought we were too young for proper plays, though my sister, much to my chagrin, went to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in School for Scandal, and I didn’t go, so I was not happy. 5 OH: Where was the Theatre Royal? PS: Down in Hindley Street and now a car park. OH: What about cultural things, like did you visit along North Terrace? PS: Every year we went to the Children’s Library at the back of the Museum, and we used to go to the Museum, and my strong memories were the Egyptian Room – we always had to go and see the Egyptian Room – and all the things that are terribly unfashionable and wrong – everything about the Egyptian Room apparently is wrong – and I loved that, and I loved the Dioramas with the dead birds and the eagles [laughs], louring over their prey in the Museum. The best of all were the bees, they had a beehive in the window, and you could sit there for as long as you were allowed to stay, just watching the bees flying in and out, it was just magic. That was my very favourite thing on North Terrace. And we used to go to the Art Gallery. My sister and I were both transfixed by The Descent from the Cross, and we used to look at that in a horrified way because it was so gruesome, for as long as we were allowed to look at that, and I’m ashamed to say it’s the only picture that I remember from then in the Art Gallery, because it was horrible. OH: Pat, what about eating, did you have any places in the City where you would have eaten or had drinks? PS: Yes, we went to Balfours Café, and we used to have, it wasn’t fish and chips it was fish, whiting I think, and bread and butter, and then Frog Cakes.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Great White Noise
    GREAT WHITE NOISE Mark Davis For my fourteenth birthday my parents gav e me a small paperback by someone called Hugh Stretton. I’d never heard of Hugh Stretton and the book looked very enigmatic and not very exciting. It was called Ideas for Australian Cities. I opened it to find, amid the text, some maps and alternative plans for parts of Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide. Now this was more exciting. At fourteen I was very inter- ested in the ways towns were set out, and I spent my spare time drawing alternative plans for all the towns we had ever lived in on large sheets of paper my parents smuggled home from the art department at the school where they worked. When I stopped looking at the pictures and began to read, I became even more excited. It hit me that Hugh Stretton wasn’t just an isolated indi- vidual who happened to be interested in Australian cities, but 183 © Mark Davis. Deposited to the University of Melbourne ePrints Repository with permission of Melbourne University Publishing.Unauthorised reproduced prohibited. was one of a group of people who thought and wrote about such things. I knew this because in the book he entered into debates and discussed other people’s ideas as well as his own. What’s more, they seemed to do it for a living. As a lower- middle-class kid who grew up in country towns, I figured that there were people who planned towns and designed bridges and made laws and thought up ideas, but I’d never met any of them.We knew no academics, lawyers, planners or engineers.
    [Show full text]
  • Novel, Suburb, Cosmos
    The View from Above from Below: Novel, Suburb, Cosmos Brigid Rooney HROUGH CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES OF CAMERA AND FLIGHT, THE VIEW FROM ABOVE directs the opening chapter of The Australian Ugliness (1960), Melbourne- T based Robin Boyd’s famous critique of urban and suburban aesthetic forms. By 1960, such aerial vision was nothing new, but the arrival in 1956 of the Boeing jet meant air-travel was about to eclipse the sea voyage, conquering what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey famously termed ‘the tyranny of distance’, and ushering in the era of mass tourism. This development naturalised and popularised an aesthetics of panorama that also organises the representation of suburbia. Boyd re-stages the aerial view successively. The visitor’s first approach to Australia is from the north. Moving from Darwin to Bourke, the visitor crosses over country ‘burnt brown and patchy, like a tender sunburnt skin, with sections of darker brown and blood red and blisters of lighter ochre’; his camera-eye view takes in the ‘red backland of Australia’ which ‘looks from the air satisfyingly like its own maps’ (Boyd 18). The arrival of Boyd’s hypothetical visitor, as noted, is staged twice, in the second instance tracking the plane’s approach ‘from across the Pacific’ over 1950s pre- Opera-House Sydney. From the long high view, urban Australia presents a vision of ‘continuity, unity and the promise of comfort in the mushroom roofs and the bright background of tended green’. Momentarily, suburban sprawl figures the ‘love of home’, with ‘great speckled carpets spread wide around every © Australian Humanities Review 60 (November 2016).
    [Show full text]
  • SOS – Sustaining Our Suburbs
    SOS – Sustaining our suburbs Authored by: Dr Louise Johnson School of Social and International Studies Deakin Univeristy [email protected] SOS – Sustaining our suburbs Johnson INTRODUCTION By 2030 Melbourne will be a city of 5 million. The 620 000 extra households will occupy the same area as today. If current trends continue and the Melbourne 2030 plan is realised, the city will have over 100 high density activity centres serving the needs of an older, single person and childless population living in apartments rather than houses. All this forms part of the State government’s objective of “Planning for Sustainable Growth”. But what does sustainability mean in this context and what are the assumptions which underpin the plan? This paper will locate Melbourne 2030 within a much longer and pervasive history of antipathy towards the particular suburban form which emerged at the end of the 19th century in Melbourne and Australia. It will argue that the artistic representations of suburban life and environments over the 20th century are now central to the national political and planning agenda. The transitional phase is the 1970s when artistic antagonism to the suburbs moved to sociological, economic and ecological fact. Politically the result was Gough Whitlam and DURD’s massive agenda for equalising social amenity in the suburbs. Since then the agenda to transform the suburbs has become one to create more compact, higher density cities as Better Cities joined Green Street, Vic Code, Res Code and now Melbourne 2030 to facilitate urban consolidation. After first considering this history of suburban representations, I will consider the veracity of arguments in favour of urban consolidation over suburban expansion, clarify what sustainability might mean in this context and then take a critical look at Melbourne 2030 Planning for Sustainable Growth as it relates to the eastern and western corridor of Melbourne.
    [Show full text]
  • Annual Report 2004-2005
    Annual Report 2004/2005 Governing partners Supported by Contents Report from the Chair of Trustees 4 Summary of Activities: “There is still much to be done” 6 Foundation Year in Review 10 Trustees’ Report 22 • Statement of Financial Performance 23 • Statement of Financial Position 24 • Statement of Cash Flows 25 • Notes to the Financial Statements 26 • Declaration by Trustees 35 • Independent Audit Report 36 Trustees, Board and Staff 38 Our supporters 40 The Annual Report Published March 2006 By the Don Dunstan Foundation Level 3, 10 Pulteney Street The University of Adelaide, SA 5005 http://www.dunstan.org.au ABN 71 448 549 600 Don Dunstan Foundation Annual Report 2004/2005 Page 2/40 Don Dunstan Foundation Values • Respect for fundamental human rights • Celebration of cultural and ethnic diversity • Freedom of individuals to control their lives • Just distribution of global wealth • Respect for indigenous people and protection of their rights • Democratic and inclusive forms of governance Strategic Directions • Facilitate a productive exchange between academic researchers and Government policy makers • Invigorate policy debate and responses • Consolidate and expand the Foundation’s links with the wider community • Support Chapter activities • Build and maintain the long-term viability of the Foundation Don Dunstan Foundation Annual Report 2004/2005 Page 3/40 REPORT FROM THE CHAIR The financial year 2004/2005 has been extremely productive with the Foundation continuing its drive to implement its Strategic Directions and Strategic Business Plan. The Foundation has provided an array of targeted events, pursued key projects of community benefit, enhanced its infrastructure and promoted its contribution to the wider South Australian Community.
    [Show full text]
  • Australian Book Review
    Interdisciplinary perspectives on cosmology & biological evolution Volume 10 Number 8 SJAEEI October 2000 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology One American survey of wannabe CoNTENTS professional economists at 4 COMMENT 24 graduate school With Morag Fraser, Peter Mares CHANGING IDENTITIES and John Ferguson. Robin Gerster in Taiwan. level showed that 8 26 just three per cent CAPITAL LETTER UN-DOING What is behind Australia's move away thought it 'very 9 from international treaties? important' to know LETTERS asks Moira Rayner. 10 27 anything about the THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC BUSH LAWYER way the ... economy With Peter Craven, June Factor and Nick Smith. 28 functioned. WE, THE PEOPLE 12 Anthony Ham on the unsatisfied stirrings -see our cover story, 'A N ew SUMMA THEOLOGIAE of democracy in the rogue states of Islam. Face of Economics', p18. 15 30 ARCHIMEDES SPRING INTO READING ; ;'J.~~ IIM~I"''b. J' With Peter Pierce, f~ 16 Jim Davidson, Andrew Hamilton, HOLDING THE KEYS Kate Llewellyn and Juliette Hughes. Mark Cully's cover story on Dan Madigan reports from Rome on Hugh Stretton has been assisted rallying youth, popes and sundry saints. 40 by the Commonwealth THEATRE Government through the Australia Council, its arts 17 Geoffrey Milne on The Importance of funding and advisory body. PLACING WOMEN Being Earnest and Peter Craven on Maryanne Confoy dissects the Australian Troilus and Cressida. bishops' response to research on the Cover design by Siobhan Jackson. participation of women in the church. 44 Photographs of Hugh Stretton (co ver and pl8) courtesy the author. FLASH IN THE PAN Cartoon p7 by Dean Moore.
    [Show full text]
  • The Paradise Tram
    Kunapipi Volume 6 Issue 3 Article 3 1984 The paradise tram Bruce Clunies Ross Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Ross, Bruce Clunies, The paradise tram, Kunapipi, 6(3), 1984. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol6/iss3/3 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] The paradise tram Abstract The Paradise tram left from the Boer War monument outside the gates of Government House in Adelaide on the long route through the northeastern suburbs to the foot of Black Hill, where the River Torrens breaks out of its gorge in the Mount Lofty Ranges into the Adelaide Plain. At the terminus the maroon drop-centre trams changed tracks and waited by a stand of gum trees, through which the sun slanted across the blue-stone walls of an early settlement and the newer brick and sandstone facades of double- fronted bungalows with scalloped verandah walls, decorative renderings of stucco or pebble-dash and tapered columns inset with river stones. Among them were gaps for houses yet to be built, where smallholders continued market-gardening on the river silt. This was Paradise. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol6/iss3/3 BRUCE CLUNIES ROSS The Paradise Tram The Paradise tram left from the Boer War monument outside the gates of Government House in Adelaide on the long route through the north- eastern suburbs to the foot of Black Hill, where the River Torrens breaks out of its gorge in the Mount Lofty Ranges into the Adelaide Plain.
    [Show full text]
  • Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings Edited by Graeme Davison (Carlton: La Trobe University Press & Black Inc
    Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings edited by Graeme Davison (Carlton: La Trobe University Press & Black Inc ,. 2018), 304 pp Tim Battin University of New England Few intellectuals are recognised as having the effect that Hugh Stretton (1924–2015) exuded in the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, when one assesses his influence on generations of academics, intellectuals and practitioners in the fields of history, urban and town planning, politics, sociology, economics, political economy and the philosophy of social science, Stretton is in a league of his own. In this fine selection of Stretton’s writings, Graeme Davison, an urban and social historian, has emphasised, naturally enough, some of Stretton’s ideas on urban and housing policy. What is particularly impressive about the selection is the connection with Stretton’s more general political outlook, which was, if we are confined to one word, egalitarian. There is something here for everyone: works on social democracy, ownership and distributive justice, the questions of equality, and much more. Stretton’s first academic love was history, which he commenced at Melbourne in 1942. After having his degree interrupted by his Second World War military service, on which he insisted on undertaking, and to which he declined a commission, he completed his study of history at Oxford on a Victorian Rhodes Scholarship. His entry point to social science (sociology, politics and economics) was at Princeton in 1948 while he was waiting to take up his new fellowship at Balliol. The stint at Princeton— the experience of positivist, purportedly value-free, approaches to social science—had a big effect on Stretton (‘the most serious educational year of my life, probably’1) and laid the fundamental ideas for his philosophy 1 Hugh Stretton, interview by Rob Linn, 14 November 2006, interview no.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael LLEWELLYN-SMITH
    DON DUNSTAN FOUNDATION 1 DON DUNSTAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Michael LLEWELLYN-SMITH This is George Lewkowicz for the Don Dunstan Foundation Don Dunstan Oral History Project interviewing Mr, soon to be ‘Dr’, Michael Llewellyn-Smith. Michael was the City Planner in the early ’70s and then became City Manager later on, and has got a very good background on city planning and the importance of the City for the State. Michael has also done a PhD on that area and has interviewed a lot of people, so hopefully there will be a link between this transcript and those interviews as well. Michael, thanks very much for doing this interview for the Don Dunstan Foundation Don Dunstan Oral History Project. Can you just talk a bit about yourself: your background, some of your educational qualifications and early employment, so people have an idea of who you are? Thanks, George. I actually read Architecture at Cambridge and after qualifying as an architect worked in London, initially in the private sector. But I got quite interested in town planning, so started the part-time course in Town Planning at the University College, London. Then, in the late ’60s, I was offered a teaching fellowship at Sydney University to teach Architecture, but the advantage of being on faculty was that I was able to enrol for the Master’s degree in City Planning at the same time, which seemed an attractive way of getting another qualification to me. So I came out to Sydney in January 1970 and it was a two-year contract.
    [Show full text]
  • CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA 5. Sydney Or the Bush? Chris Baker
    CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA 5. Sydney or the Bush? Chris Baker From the Monash University National Centre for Australian Studies course, developed with Open Learning Australia In the fifth week of the course, Chris Baker argues that while Australia is the most urbanized nation on earth, the ‘bush’ has had a great influence on the national psyche. What is it like to live in the great Australian cities today and how are they changing? Why does the bush have such an influence on Australian politics, and are Australians really exiles from the empty forests and plains of the interior? Chris Baker is a lecturer at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. 5.1 Suburbia 5.2 The Great Australian Dream 5.3 Triumph of technology 5.4 The bush 5.5 Urban and bush collide 5.6 Further reading 5.1 Suburbia Sydney or the bush!, all or nothing, as in making a do or die attempt, gambling against the odds, etc. Macquarie Dictionary Book of (Australian) Slang Most Australians live in the great suburban sprawl that surrounds the cities. For the average suburban dweller a quarter acre block of land, a Victa motor mower, a brick veneer bungalow, a Hill’s clothes hoist and the family car have traditionally defined the urban lifestyle. The great expanse of suburbia has resulted in Australian cities covering vast areas making them, in geographic terms, some of the largest cities on earth. Explore the Nation Gallery at the National Museum of Australia. Overall standards of living in the suburbs are high, with per capita car ownership ranking with the United States and the provision of services such as libraries, schools shopping malls, sporting and communication facilities, water and sewerage being provided to most Australians.
    [Show full text]
  • Adelaidean 22 February 1999 Vol 8 No 1
    ADELAIDEANVol 8 No 1 N EWS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE FEBRUARY 22, 1999 Hugh Stretton on Don Designing new life for Adelaide collaborative research INSIDE 2 Dunstan 5 old bridges 6 helps rehabilitate Indian soils Dunstan Foundation enjoys good support Don Dunstan: photo courtesy of The Sunday Mail. The scene in Elder Park on 12 February as the crowd watched the Festival Theatre memorial celebration of Don Dunstan's life. Photo: Kristina Binns, Image & Copy Centre, Waite Campus. THERE HAS been a good public response towards its development. legal and industrial reform and the Pearson, Professor Hugh Stretton and to the newly-established Don Dunstan The Foundation aims to award creation of a humane and just society. the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mary Foundation, with many enquiries and scholarships and prizes, promote The Trustees of the Foundation are O’Kane. donations received. research projects, courses, lectures Mr Phillip Adams AO, AM, Ms The Foundation has been established and seminars, publish the results of Robyn Archer, Mr David Combe, the Further information is available on at the University of Adelaide, at the research and subsidise the Hon Greg Crafter, Mr Andrew 8303 3364. A web site has been set up at dissemination of educational materials request of Mr Dunstan’s family, to Dunstan, Ms Jennie George, the Hon <http://www.adelaide.edu.au/ fund research and education on issues in those areas which were of particular Barry Jones AO, the Rt Hon The Lord concern to Don Dunstan. dunstanfoun.html>; this will be updated of importance to the former Premier Mayor of Adelaide, Dr Jane Lomax- and further developed as the Foundation’s during his lifetime.
    [Show full text]
  • NUMBER 18, 1990 the HISTORICAL SOCIETY of SOUTH AUSTRALIA Founded 1974
    JOURNAL of the HISTORICAL SOCIETY of SOUTH AUSTRALIA CO NUMBER 18, 1990 THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA Founded 1974 Objects: (a) to arouse interest in and to promote the study and discussion of South Australian and Australian history. (b)to promote the collection, preservation and classification of source material of all kinds relating to South Australian and Australian history. (c) to publish historical records and articles. (d)to promote the interchange of information among members of the Society by lectures, readings, discussions and exhibitions. (e)to co-operate with similar Societies throughout Australia. (f) to do all such things as are conductive or incidental to the attainment of the above objects or any of them. ********** Council 1990 Patron: Sir Walter Crocker, K.B.E. President: Dr R.P.J. Nicol Vice- President: Mr B J. Samuels Secretary: Mr M.B. Keaire Treasurer: Mrs A.A. Huckel Members: Mr A.H.F. Angas Mr R.M. Gibbs, A.M. Dr PA. Howell Ms S.E. Marsden Dr J.D. Playford, O.A.M. Mr W.S. Stacy Ms P. Sumerling Mrs E. Ulbrich All enquiries about membeship of the Society or purchase of the Journal should be directed to the Secretary. The Historical Society of South Australia. Institute Building, 122 Kintore Avenue, Adelaide, S.A. 5000. Correspondence with the Editor of the Journal should be directed to the same address. CONTENTS ARTIC:[.FS The Stretton Symposium: Social Science and Public Policy Robert Dare 5 Hugh Stretton's University of Adelaide, 1954-56 KS. Inglis 7 Committed Historians: Charles Pearson and Hugh Stretton
    [Show full text]
  • 26419 1. Brief History of Manitoba Housing Complex
    HERITAGE ASSESSMENT REPORT NAME: Manitoba Housing Complex PLACE NO.: 26419 Address: 228-256 Carrington Street, 7-29 Hume Lane & 1-32 Regent Street North, Adelaide 1. BRIEF HISTORY OF MANITOBA HOUSING COMPLEX Manitoba Housing Complex was built in 1974-75 for the South Australian Housing Trust (SAHT) as a major initiative in public housing design, ‘the first Trust new building in the City of Adelaide’ (SAHT Annual Report 1976, 4), and so was the first large-scale construction of public housing in the history of the city. (SAHT sources give the completion date as 1975, for 39 units, with a final two units finished 1976: Housing SA, Housing Statistical Services). Manitoba Housing Development (as named originally by the architect) was designed by a private architect Ian Hannaford, who identifies it as one of the earliest medium-density housing developments of this type in South Australia, and the first in central Adelaide (Hannaford, email 2014). While large-scale and modern in form Manitoba is described by Hannaford as ‘urban design’, respecting the nineteenth and early twentieth century housing of the surrounding south east quarter of the city. In preparing the design Hannaford consulted closely with SAHT Board members on the requirements of the Trust tenants, in particular with Deputy Chairman Hugh Stretton and Wendy Etherington (Sarkissian) (Hannaford email 2014; Sarkissian letter 2013). The development is known as the ‘Manitoba’ site, which originated from the name of the company that previously owned the land. Before the Trust purchased the land, it had been used as a car park for some years…The entire project … will help people seeking Trust rental accommodation to find housing in the inner city area.
    [Show full text]