Heritage and Telling Sydney's Story
January 2024
Printed in The Fifth Estate
The current conversation about heritage in Sydney is needed. As the housing affordability debate ramps up, as we decide which parts of the city to bulldoze and develop – the words and language used when talking about heritage, may help.
Whereas most great world cities treasure heritage, Sydney is not especially famous for it. Unlike Europeans, Australians often find heritage-value difficult to gauge and its cultural relevance is rarely taught. Young people can find it hard to connect with and it's sometimes perceived as old-fashioned. It can also remind us of more hard-knock times that many Sydneysiders would rather forget.
One tool, though, which we may be able to better adopt in order bolster the case for heritage – is storytelling. Whereas heritage can carry a sense of obligation to protect buildings from the past – storytelling can seed a binding sense of custodianship, by harnessing a stepping-stone series of built-environment chapters.
Afterall, storytelling is one of our most powerful and enduring tools. The Dreamtime has been passed down through millenia, using it. The Bible and Koran shared their lessons, via it. Today – Netflix, Instagram and Linked In all seethe with the stuff. Consumer brands invest billions in it, because they understand just how much “story” can resonate.
We can consider this idea by exploring one of Sydney’s heritage conservation areas, Paddington. Heritage-wise – looking back to a point in the past – many of the terrace houses and cottages that locals still live in today were originally built to house the tradespeople, artisans and convicts building the Victoria Barracks, from 1841.
But when we peel this back a bit and understand the chapters of Paddington’s story, these same houses become more enthralling.
For instance, we’d learn that Paddington’s catalyst – Victoria Barracks – was built on South Head Road (now Oxford Street) to position troops closer the militarily-vulnerable south head of the harbour’s entrance. This street itself was built on top of an ancient Gadigal walking path, called “Maroo”.
Terrace houses and civic buildings were quickly spun-up on subdivided bushland formerly owned by three rich landowners, who also ran Sydney’s first gin distillery – based where Trumper Park is today. Horses would cart booze up a steep bush track (now Glenmore Road) to South Head Road, before it was transported down into the colony.
And once the barracks were completed, the tradies moved out and the soldiers’ families took over the Paddington homes. 535 dwellings had been built by 1862, with 2,427 built by 1883. Paddington’s population density skyrocketed and by 1901 the much needed Royal Hospital for Women moved to Glenmore Road – where it’s oft been said, half of Sydney was born at any one time – until it’s demolition in 1997.
By the 1900s though, working-class Paddington had become a slum. The Great War, Spanish Flu and the Depression were particularly vicious on its locals. Crime sprouted from poverty and Paddington became too dangerous to walk through at night. The terraces and cottages fell into disrepair and local property prices plummeted.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. These lower prices allowed post-war immigrants (mainly Italians and Greeks) to buy their first Sydney home. Throughout the 1950s, these new locals repaired Paddington’s terraces and cottages by hand, before painting them bright colours like the houses in their Mediterranean villages back home.
And with the streets now safer and rents still cheap, Sydney’s artist community moved in. In the 1960s and 70s, they were followed by art, antique and textile dealers. Art galleries began to follow too. For years, Paddington thrived as Sydney’s bohemian, cultural and party hub – until gentrification took hold in the 1990s, progressing until today.
So, if only walls could talk! Where heritage can capture something from our past, storytelling can complement this by connecting us with it today.
A deeper bond is formed by showing how the lives that we live in these “preloved” buildings – are yet another interesting chapter, in a larger story of many different lives who have yearned, suffered and thrived through Sydney’s fortunes and vicissitudes.
Excitingly too, we are a generation hungry for new stories. With a growing appetite for more local content on the streaming services we devour – such suburban tales provide endless fodder for our bright community of scriptwriters and series makers. More importantly though, such storytelling instills local pride, whilst strengthening Sydney’s brand by providing genuinely intriguing tales to show and tell our visitors.
By deleting the earlier chapters of our built-environment story, we dilute and cheapen all of this rich cultural value. By replacing the important buildings from our story with new, shiny apartment blocks – we become a city that is more homogenous, more cookie cutter, with less character. And a Sydney with less story is less able to stand out on a competitive world stage. Not to mention, less able to justify its expensive price tag for those who still call it home.
