Neighbours
When I was studying to be a minister of the Gospel, my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
In those last years of the 1950’s and the early years of the 1960’s Melbourne was undergoing a massive change of face. More than 600 acres of inner suburban slums were marked for demolition. The old houses in places like Flemington, Kensington, Newmarket and Ascot Vale, Brunswick, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond, South Melbourne and Albert Park, were gradually bulldozed and in their place the Housing Commission of Victoria built huge concrete 20 storey blocks of flats. Some of these blocks went 28 storeys. The people who had been moved out of the old slums were the first to be moved into the new high rise buildings.
But they were grieving people, grieving for their old way of life, their old houses which they used to own and grieving because they did not understand the new sense of community that was involved in living with such intensity in the large concrete flats.
We went visiting people in every flat in each block on an estate. We door knocked every place and welcomed residents into the area. But we ran into an enormous string of personal problems all brought about because people did not know how to live with their neighbours.
When you lived in a flat on one of the estates on, say, the 14th or 18th floor there were people immediately below you, people immediately above you, people on both sides of you, people over the passageway from you and then there were people diagonally across in every direction. Many flats had 16 families all within one wall or floor’s distance. When you lived in a monstrous block of flats like that then out of those 16 families there was sure to be someone who loved to practice the trombone or bongo drums.
Apart from the old residents of the area other, newer people were shifted in, some from the migrant camps which were still full of post war refugees, and some from the run down armed forces camps.
For example there was a whole building dedicated to the wives of Australian navy personnel. Most of their husbands were away at sea at all times and this huge block of concrete flats was occupied by hundreds of lonely women each with a clutch of small children and not a man in sight – or at least there was not a man who should have been in sight. Loneliness created all sorts of problems among those women.
But then, in other blocks, there were ladies who had problems taking their washing up to the roof where the Housing Commission had supplied a lot of clothes lines, but the heavy work of dragging the wet washing into a lift, taking it up to the roof and then out to the line was not considered. There was the problem of people coming home in their best clothes when into the lift would come children bringing their bikes, snagging stockings and leaving grease against mens’ trousers. You could not blame the kids, for they had to take their bikes up into the flat for safety. And where do you leave your bike – inside the family lounge room? There were no garages or lock up areas, and thieves had a hey day stealing from the cars in the open car park.
Mothers were constantly worried when their little children would wander out into the passageway and step into an open lift and get out on a strange floor. Drunks coming home at night would push the wrong floor button and then, unable to get their key work in the door of a flat that looked identical to theirs, would bang on the door and abuse the wrong family.
The problems were not foreseen by the town planners.
Visiting the people from flat to flat we heard stories continuously about the problems faced by the people and so we joined with others in setting up a “Neighbourhood Committee” to work for change. Our first achievement was to get the Housing Commission to alter the time switches that turned off all the lights in the passages at 10.30 at night, and to leave them burning for the late night revellers to find their way home and for the early workers. We then achieved lockers being built to house bikes and toys for the children, and improved the security system for the cars, and got laundry trolleys for the ladies to carry the wet washing. These were the days before laundry driers were in use, and the trolley and the clothes line on the roof was the only practical solution. Children’s play areas were established, and safe areas, where adults who were not related to the children were forbidden to enter, were set up.
In all of this change in the flats, the church took a leading role. I remembered having published an article, which is just as relevant today as it was in those days, entitled “The House Church in the Multiple Storey Flat” where I argued thirty years ago for the establishment of house church groups, one in each housing block which would be the church’s centre of service and ministry to all the people in that community.
As an extension of this idea we went to the Housing Commission and received remarkable co operation on the basis of all that had been achieved previously, and asked and obtained a flat set within each huge estate for the church to place a minister and his family who would serve the people in the immediate area above his head and below his feet. It was a marvellous concept and the first student minister who moved into that area was Phil, a student who sat in the same desk next to me at the College of The Bible, who took his young bride with a determination to serve the people of that Housing Commission area. His determination stayed strong and he and his wife are still in that same flat serving the people of that area 45 years later.
Those Housing Commission flats were an enormous challenge to us, and we spent much of our time counselling, listening and advising people on how to get on with their neighbours.
In visiting the flat of Mr. and Mrs. Renshaw one day, an elderly church family who were not coping very well with all the other people round about them, and who were still grieving for their little old wooden house that had been bulldozed by the government, I saw that she had written a poem which was pinned to the back of their entry door. I copied it down and it read:
“Our Neighbour”The people upstairs practise ballet,
Their living room is a bowling alley,Their bedroom is full of conducted tours,
And their radio is louder than ours.
They celebrate weekends all week, and
When they take a shower, our ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By giving their guests pogo sticks!And when their orgy at last abates,
They all go to the toilet on roller skates!
I might love the people upstairs wondrous,
If instead of above us,
They just lived under us!
That brief poem expressed the feelings of those people among whom we ministered during those early student years. I must admit that I often wondered what on earth we could do after having spoken to a troubled family, I would walk out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, start my motor bike and head back towards the College of The Bible, to train as a young minister, thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
