'A completely different world': the rich and resilient communities inside Melbourne's towers
When Nor Shanino was a teenager in the early 2000s and wanted company on a Saturday morning, he would go to the 20th floor of his building and start knocking on doors. Many families had six or seven kids living in three-bedroom apartments, so it didn’t take him long to find someone he knew. Then the pair would knock on another door, and another, and before long a group of 10 noisy boys would be slowly descending in the building’s shuddering lift before emerging to play in Debneys Park, the large green space that lies beside the four high-rise buildings commonly known as the Flemington housing commission flats.
No one had any money, so families didn’t have gaming consoles or multiple TVs, Nor says. Instead, all day, he and his male friends played sport. In summer it was cricket or tennis, in winter, football or soccer –“whatever was on TV at the time”. There was basketball, too, and next to the court was a bench under a big tree where people went to talk. “We called that bench the parliament. If people got into an argument, we’d say, ‘Take it to the parliament.’”
Nor Shanino lived in the Flemington housing commission estate as a boy.
In a car park at the centre of the estate boys would play cricket or stickball, a version of baseball played on the streets of US cities. Nor says: “You know in old American movies, how the kids are playing in the street, and then a car comes and everyone moves? That was my childhood. That’s how we grew up. I thought everyone grew up like that.”
It was at Northcote high school that Nor learnt his childhood was different from other children his age. Not only because his Eritrean father had brought him to Australia from Sweden when Nor was 11, but because he lived in highrise public housing. “The kids [at Northcote high] would say things like, ‘What are you doing on Saturday? Can you come over at 5 o’clock? I’ve asked my mum and she’s OK with it.’ I never heard anyone talk like that in public housing. We never made plans, we just knocked on each other’s door. There were 4,000 of us living in 300 sq m. We were never alone.”
Nor, a 34-year-old youth worker, is part of a generation of African Australians who grew up in Melbourne’s high-rise housing commission flats, or who lived in them for long periods. In May we spoke to 12 people from this group about their experiences in high-rise public housing in the inner suburbs of Flemington, North Melbourne, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carl
ton. This conversation, organised by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, and follow-up interviews with seven people who took part in it, reveal that far from sharing the largely negative community perception of the housing commission flats, these first and second generation Australians have great affection for their high-rise homes.
The view from the 141 Nicholson Street flats, towards the Lygon Street flats. All are part of the Carlton housing estate.
They are not blind to the problems of “the flats”, as everyone calls them. They speak frankly of the absent fathers in some families, the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse, the clashes with police. Nevertheless, they see their experience of public housing as rich, making them resilient and ready for life in Australia.
They also see the life they knew as endangered by social and technological change, by intergenerational tensions within families, by the growing withdrawal of many young people into online worlds – and by a sudden crisis brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
At 5pm last Saturday, Farhio Nur, 28, was returning to her Flemington highrise building from her sister’s place in Ascot Vale when she saw police cars surrounding the estate. “[The police] said that if I go in to the flat I can’t come out again for five days,” Farhio says. She returned to Ascot Vale.
Farhio and her sister and friends confront police enforcing a lockdown on the complex, preventing them from seeing their parents inside.
About the same time, Anisa Ali, 24, was visiting relatives in the northwestern suburbs when a Facebook message alerted her that the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was giving a media conference. That’s how she learnt that her North Melbourne building was under police guard. Anisa went home to the apartment she shares with her mother and younger brother, and is now unable to leave.
The abrupt lockdown of nine public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, under which 3,000 people cannot leave their homes, was the most draconian quarantine of any inflicted on Australians during the Covid-19 pandemic. Media reports of people short of food, elderly residents cut off from caregivers, parents without enough baby formula to last through the lockdown, laid bare the anxiety in the flats.
Nor Shanino no longer lives in the Flemington high-rise but with his business partner and friend, the Somaliborn community leader Ahmed Dini, who was locked down in the North Melbourne flats, and found himself in a leadership role trying to sort out the initial chaos created by the government’s decision. Together the two young men worked the phones, negotiating with community organisations and government agencies to finally distribute food to the stunned, fearful and occasionally angry residents, while at the same time passing messages to tenants that the best response to the crisis was to observe social distancing, and to get tested.
Somali-born community leader Ahmed Dini.
Nor’s sister, Hiba Shanino, 21, who lives in the Flemington flats, wrote an article in the Guardian criticising the government’s “forceful approach”, the lack of notice, and the fact that too few social and community workers were allowed on to the estates to tell residents what was going on. But, she added: “We do believe that we should be locked down … We have a lot of people here who are vulnerable, and a lot of elderly people, so now it’s good that there is an awareness of what is going on in our community, and some help.”
The lockdown brought national attention to a community few Australians know anything about. The housing commission towers that loom over Melbourne’s inner suburbs don’t have a good reputation. It’s not just occasional media stories of drug use, vandalism and violence in their public spaces, of residents living in fear. It’s the fact that the grey-and-white buildings are such a defining feature of the Melbourne skyline, yet the estates on which they stand are so closed off from their surrounding streets and suburbs, that people who don’t live in them tend to assume that the problems of one are common to all. Outsiders rarely walk through them, either out of fear or a sense that it would be disrespectful to the residents – like walking through a private garden. It all breeds certain stereotypes: the flats are “chicken coops in the sky”, degrading to human dignity, at worst dangerous to live in, and liable to send their residents a bit crazy. This week the broadcaster Neil Mitchell called them “multi-storey monstrosities”.
The flats’ origin story tends to confirm these views. Victoria’s then housing commission built 45 towers between 1962 and 1976 as part of what was known as “slum clearance”. Similar
programs occurred in Sydney and in cities overseas after world war two. The modernist ideology of the time favoured replacing cramped and often unsewered housing in tight streets and lanes with well-appointed apartments in the air, plain and uniform but clean. Poverty would be abolished by engineering. But attitudes changed; people came to see the towers as soulless and brutal, destroyers of community. Gentrification only reinforced these views, since the new inner-city middle class had no connection with the public housing residents, even though they sometimes lived a mere 100 metres apart.
Mailboxes at the 141 Nicholson Street flats.
But in the flats, largely out of sight, a piece of multicultural Australia was being formed. What shaped it were the very conditions that outsiders thought were so oppressive, and that are now seen as so dangerous during the Covid-19 pandemic – thousands of people thrown together in rooms, stairwells and corridors that all look the same.
In the early days, the housing commission allocated about two-thirds of the towers to mixed housing, mostly for families, and the other third to elderly, often single-person, housing. In the 1960s the first tenants came not only from Australia but from northern and southern Europe: Britain, Greece, Italy and the former Yugoslavia. In the early 1970s Turkish migrants formed a large share of new residents; after 1975 refugees came from Vietnam, Timor-Leste and South America. From the mid-1990s many newcomers were refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former USSR and the Baltic states, and from the Horn of Africa – Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea – along with Sudan and what is now South Sudan.
About half of these African migrants, who number just under 50,000, live in Melbourne. Overwhelmingly they arrived in the 1990s and 2000s through Australia’s off-shore humanitarian program, family reunion or via secondary migration from countries such as New Zealand. Thousands of African families were settled in innercity public housing. In the Carlton estates, for example, the most common birthplaces, after Australia, are China, Vietnam and Horn of Africa countries. Even these tenants can be affected by the stigma around public housing.
The secretary of Carlton Housing Estate Residents Services, Hamdi Ali.
Hamdi Ali, who lives in the Carlton commission towers, came to Australia in the early 90s as an 18-yearold, the last leg of a journey out of a rebellious Somali enclave in Ethiopia that had been devastated by war. His journey included being smuggled into Nairobi in the back of a truck transporting livestock after the outbreak of civil war forced him to flee the refugee camp where he was living in Somalia. His acculturation into the “Australian psyche” was rapid as he finished his disrupted schooling, studied at Tafe and drove taxis. He detected “some negativity” about public housing estates, and took the message on board. During the five years he spent on the housing waiting list as a single man, Hamdi would regularly visit the Office of Housing for updates. “They’d say, ‘You want to go to the high-rise, right? And I said, ‘No way!’” he recalls, chuckling.
But Hamdi’s views changed after a stint living with his brother in the highrise in Lygon Street, Carlton. “When I moved in I saw a completely different world. I so much loved it.” Carlton was a haven for migrant families trying to get ahead. While some other inner-city commission blocks required 24/7 security and a concierge to keep a watchful eye on visitors, the Carlton estate had no concierge and was only patrolled between 7pm and 3am. The place is still relatively safe, Hamdi says. In 2001 he travelled to Kenya for an arranged marriage. By 2005, after a prolonged dispute with the immigration department, Hamdi and his new wife, Fatuma Hassen, and their two children were finally on their way to Australia, and to his delight, a high-rise Carlton commission flat in his own name.
North Melbourne housing commission resident Anisa Ali.
As much as they could, new migrants settled in estates that already housed their own. Vietnamese people often moved to Richmond and Fitzroy, East Timorese to Collingwood, and Somalis and Eritreans to North Melbourne and Flemington. In North Melbourne, 24-year-old Anisa Ali’s high-rise building houses large numbers of the Majerteen, a Somali clan to which she belongs through her father, who is not in her life.
Yet while most of Anisa’s childhood friends in the flats were Somali and Eritrean, she was also close to a Vietnamese boy called James. Her mother, Kelli, an Australian of Anglo-Celtic and Indigenous background who has converted to Islam, befriended a number of Eritreans in their building. “I’ve never had a negative experience living in the flats,” Anisa says. “A lot of us come from similar circumstances in east Africa
– wartorn countries, corrupt governments, and so on. That makes us very bonded, very close.”
In the Fitzroy flats, formally known as the Atherton Gardens estate, Anab Mohamud’s story is quite different. When she moved in, few Africans lived there, and for a long time she lived alone.
Anab, a 31-year-old community worker, was born in Somalia but, like many refugees, has led a life of constant motion. In 2000, when she was 11, her family migrated from the vast and troubled Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to the western suburbs of Melbourne. At Hoppers Crossing secondary college she would take on anyone who tried to pick on the group of kids who had adopted her as one of their own. “They were the nerds, really good people,” she says. “I stood up for them. I was quite rebellious for someone from my culture.”
The Carlton housing commission complex on Lygon Street.
At 16, after one too many fights in her home, she was on the move again. She couchsurfed at friends’ places in the high-rise flats in Carlton and Fitzroy before deciding she wanted to stay. “It wasn’t normal for a 16-year old girl to get a flat on her own. But I called the Department of Housing every single day for three months, until I got one.”
Most of her Hoppers Crossing friends had been “Anglo”, but in the Fitzroy flats she mixed with people whose backgrounds were Asian, Australian and Arab, along with a few Somalis. Because she hung out with a group of boys and did not cover her hair in the Muslim way, some of the Somali elders said she had lost her way. Sometimes they used much harsher language than that.
There were a lot of drugs and alcohol in the flats, and Anab saw people, Somalis and others, turn to them, and could have done so herself, she admits. Instead, she worked in shops and hospitality, got qualified in early childhood education and pathology services, nearly joined the army but instead had a child, Aisha, who is now seven.
“I stayed strong,” Anab says. “I had to raise myself.”
• This is the first in a six-part series on life inside Melbourne’s highrise public housing. These articles were commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute as part of a series on immigration and multiculturalism in Australia. Tomorrow: growing up in the flats