Let’s show you the ropes at the island auction, Cockatoo Island sell-off, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October, 1991.

This is one of the most despairing stories about Sydney I ever wrote. A lost art, beautiful black and white photography by an absolute master, Greg White, with whom I was privileged to work. These days Cockatoo Island is best known as the site for an biannual arts celebration.

https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/20bos/venues/cockatoo-island/

It’s a travesty.

This island could so easily have been the single most superb industrial museum in the country.

Set in the middle of Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island had been a centre for ship building enterprises since the  earliest days of the colony.

There were still the holes in the ground where convicts were thrown for months or years of isolation. The giant, atmospheric warehouses held the history of industrial advancement, with some of the machinery dating back to the 18th Century. Girlie posters still hung in the kitchen areas.

The Labor Party was in power at the time.

And the political party purporting to represent workers oversaw one of the worst cases of the pillaging of the industrial and working class heritage in Australia’s history.

Kim  Beazley was a senior member of the Hawke government at the time, later to be Australia’s ambassador to the US and one in the endless “congaline of assholes” to excuse Australia’s endless obeisance to America’s wars. From what I could tell, he seemed to think it was all a jolly good show.

I remember calling his office. I got nowhere. Of course.

Beyond the official line.

My respect for Beazley has been non-existent ever since.

He could have stopped the ransacking of one of Australia’s greatest, most beautiful, most historically rich and industrially tapestried pieces of architecture and landscape in the country 

These people are barbarians. They sop up public funds. They preen themselves, in front of everybody, And they have betrayed their heritage, their voters, their own ideological genealogy.

 Much of what was sold off that day was shipped straight to Beazley’s home state of W.A., on the other side of the country.

Straight to Beazley’s mates. All of these things, these jobs, are time dependent. What can be written is entirely dependent on the time available. And who picks up the phone when you ring them. How many views, how many dissenting voices, how much, in a sense, truth, can be provided in a story all depends on deadlines. I got back to the office from this job around four p.m.

I ran around the few prominent heritage architects working in the Sydney at the time. Not one of them were in their offices. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the quote that I was looking, that what we were witnessing was a travesty, an absolutely disgusting desecration of the city’s history.  

At the time, I was very close to the photographer Greg White. We had the picture, we had a kind of story, but I was a reporter, I couldn’t tell the truth unless someone else said it for me. Try as I might, on that day, on that hour, I could 

 Sometimes, decades on, I’ve mentioned to people, mostly kindly, mostly well intentioned, as their lives flow past in flash phrases, what a travesty of Sydney’s life, Sydney’s history, has been Cockatoo Island.

Most often, they look blandly beyond eye-to-eye contact. They have no idea what I am talking about.

It’s a fabulous place for Sydney’s Biennale, they will tell you. So much exhibition space. Those large warehouses. Perfect for installations.  

I was very disappointed in this story, because it could have been so much more.