The past year 2019 has been a bad one for anything of historical interest in our area. We lost the special architectural building on South Road to Bunnings. Not one piece kept.
Back part showing the architectural curves of the Bridgestone Building. Nothing else like this building in the southern hemisphere. Now nothing.During the 1950s there was a boom in companies and industries coming to Edwardstown and setting up their businesses. They needed workers close by, so SAHT built streets of homes for workers. Homes for those men and women who had jobs but not enough money to buy their own homes. Decent hard working families, many of whom raised children and contributed much to the area and the State.
With the many workers, bus routes were set up to assist them to get to work and then home, to get to the station and to the main road. With these came bus seats - benches, where tired workers could wait for transport to and from work.
There were a number of these seats around the streets, but had all remained in fairly good condition after more than 50 to 60 years. A couple which were damaged were reported to the council so they could be repaired. No, council doesn't repair anything like that in Edwardstown - they simply came along and took them out and with the usual - 'they can't be fixed' or 'the engineers feel they should be got rid of, not safe" - the latter is such a well used phrase with this council. The answer to anything. No checking if it was historical - don't think that even applies to our area.
Funnily enough, not only did they take away the couple of seats which had been damaged due to the tree roots undermining the brick footpath beneath the seats. Oh, the sides of the seats were fully ok - the cement type. Just old and uncleaned. Of course the slabs of wood seating needed replacement or fixing but the council cannot do that. The other seats were in a good condition. I know - I have been using them for years, especially when on long walks. Then they even pulled up an aluminium seat which was reported for historical reference only - reason supposedly another 'engineer' saying it was absolutely no good. Funny thing is that over the past 6 months I had seen a people using it - yes, actually sitting on it and they didn't have any problems. In fact the residents of the area were expecting it back - they thought it had been taken out while the footpath was being fixed.
All the seating - similar type as from similar period of time - Wrought iron ends with wooden benches. At the oval - they were all pulled out, and many residents were annoyed and angry that the seats were just chucked out. I saw them, photographed them and many could have been re-used safely . I would have taken one, as would other members of the public - something to remember their weekly footie matches or cricket games. But when questioned, it was down to 'they cannot be used - engineers say - ' all excuses, then they very quickly disappeared - after sitting in the grounds for months.
That is a council fun note. Nothing happens until someone brings it out in open, like the above mentioned footie seats - boy - then they react and so quickly one's head can turn.
Excuses they make are great - best one was a garden - new plants put in one day and next day all over the place, and someone picking the best lot up and driving away with them. They were not replanted! So new ones put in. Money wasted. I remember going around and replanting the remaining plants in the ground - with other residents - properly. Not just sitting in a hole to be blown away or picked up so easily by kids or other people. Most plants blew away, died, or were taken - because they were not planted properly.
Along Cross Rd between South and Marion Road, around 2000, there was a ceremony for the 'Boulevard' At each bus stop a new and specially designed bus shelter, each having a plaque attached giving the history were built. A couple of specially marked bus seats further down. When I found these, they were in a dirty condition. None of the shelters had been cared for. Painting them looked so haphazard, that it included spray painting the footpath and anything around, not fixing the once glass windows or caring for the 'rusted bits'. Even spray painting over some or all of the plaques with green paint - then not cleaning them. So I began to clean them, but was having difficulty due to arthritis. So just casually asked what could be done. Would someone from council give them a clean. Well, that was a stupid thing for me to do. Have a great photo of one of the so called cleaning jobs. Told that it was not council, but a graffitti artist or such!!!!
So now, what is going to happen? - the engineer says they will all be taken down and the plaques possibly going to Heritage whom I believe have very limited space for historical items and not from their area. Told, it was only a couple of decades ago so not of historical interest!
Also told, if there had been a committee for years like they have at Marion etc then maybe things could be kept or at least kept clean and looked after. Joke I think.
No one had really had any idea of the plaques around the suburbs here but the Heritage centre would love to have all the information. Cleaning them was a bit of a farcical attempt by the council. The small plaques on plinths need regular and continuous work on them to get them into an acceptable condition. Maybe if there is a volunteer who is interested in them could 'take them over' in a volunteer way to learn how to clean them properly and indeed paint and repair the plinths in a decent fashion. Not a council worker.
Other plaques I have information on, have not been cared for and indeed it depends where they are and what property they are on. Even those plaques which have been taken away from their original homes are not accepted anywhere in the council. They don't seem to have any ability to bend from their so called rigid rules of engagement!!!!!
Each thing is attached to different departments. We just can't get one person or one dept to care for us here.
Homes gone,
buildings gone, businesses gone, churches gone, rose garden gone,
railway station buildings gone, air strip gone, photographs and memorabillia gone. More to come or should I say more on what has been taken away.
History is what has been written - history is what has been, for whatever time period - whether mid century homes, 100 years plus buildings, people and their achievements, of just people living. Planting trees, removing trees.
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'Renewing' Edwardstown or whatever the word I want is, with incorrect information? Can't even get that righted. Why don't they want to know the true facts?
All I can hope for is that someone else will want to 'save' the history of their Edwardstown, Ascot Park and South Plympton streets, trees, houses and the couple of community areas.
My father worked in the abovementioned South Road factory for 18 years up until around 1975. It was known as the “Rubber Mills” then it became Uniroyal. It had a huge bitumised block across on South Road surrounded by cyclone fencing which was the workers' car park. Dad was a Polish migrant and many of his co-workers were also Eastern European migrants - people displaced from their homelands after WWII who took the offer to migrate to Australia. In many ways they built this country. There was a thriving network of factories in the Edwardstown region and adjacent suburbs along Daws and South Roads with, as mentioned in the post, bus routes to accommodate these workers whether or not they had cars. You would hear factory whistles throughout all the suburbs during these years punctuating their shifts throughout the day. I went with him to drop into his workplace several times as a child; the interior he spent so many hours doing shiftwork in was very dark. Neighbors and friends’ fathers used to work at Monroe Wileys, Chryslers and at the factories along Daws Road. This was when Australia still had a manufacturing sector.
ReplyDeleteI loved the building's exterior and it is absolutely abhorrent that they destroyed this wonderful, stylish red brick building; if it were in Melbourne it would have been valued and they would have at least kept the façade while perhaps renovating the interior, rather than the block-headed approach Marion council and state governments seem to have toward our past treasures. People don’t appear to realise, our cultural heritage doesn’t only lie in 19th century buildings but in the way people used to live in the 40s, 50s and 60s, their workplaces, leisure places, places of worship and their backyards, and our cultural heritage is being stolen from us. If we were not the people we are this activity would be decried as cultural genocide but we are and so therefore our right to our own history doesn’t matter.
I’m very grateful for the work you are doing in this blog.