Tony Birch

So you'd spend a lot of weekends sort of going through empty houses,

collecting stuff that people left behind, you know, again, toys, furniture, smashing windows, being fairly reckless, you know, productively stripping the houses of scrap metal.

And the sort of might of a bulldozer is in some ways attractive to a young child so that when you saw a bulldozer rip through a house and demolish a double-storey terrace in about half an hour, there's something incredibly seemingly powerful about it.

On the negative side, it absolutely destroyed the social fabric of those suburbs.

So you mentioned before about the... Fitzroy always having a very strong Aboriginal community.

Well, the Aboriginal community from Fitzroy began to be dispersed very much from that period.

The social networks that women had established over decades, whether that be shared childminding, using the pawnshop economy...

money lending to each other just giving each other the support mechanisms that were needed they were completely destroyed so when you think about a suburb that had such a sense of ingenuity about it in a social and economic way so again all those illegal clubs and gambling dens they were incredibly productive economically for some migrant families and communities all of that was destroyed very quickly

I think the other thing that came with that is when you saw how easily your home could be demolished and literally obliterated overnight,

I grew up or learned to not be too welded to the home space.

So it might sound odd that I have a very strong relationship to the inner city and a very strong connection to the inner city.

I've never been precious about the actual house I live in.

Until I was 15 years old, I lived in four houses.

None of those houses exist now.

They were all demolished for government housing or freeway schemes.

Schools that I went to have been demolished.

Factories that my parents worked in have been demolished.

So not only homes but street corners and whole areas of my memory map no longer exist.

You do lose so much of the legitimation of that memory if you can't take someone back to that place.

You can't take someone to the street.