Glebe turns 150, still keeping out pigs and goats

by Dugald Jellie, The Sydney Morning Herald

"IN A city of whims and social butterflies, Iris Brennan could well be its most steadfast local.

"I was born in Forsyth Street in Glebe in 1923," she says, tucking a crocheted blanket over her knees.

And 86 years on she has never left, now living a few blocks away in an old terrace on a street that dips to the dog track.

"After school we’d get a penny’s worth of chips up on Glebe Road," she says. "It’s changed over the years. But I still love Glebe. Only way I’ll ever leave is in a box."

It is an old story from one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. The Glebe, as it is known formally, is a peninsula that was bequeathed in 1789 to the Church of England and is thick with suburban loyalties and rising damp. It has a blue-collar reputation as "one of those places where if you can’t see a pub by looking both ways down the street then you must be standing outside one" – as hard-bitten private eye Cliff Hardy says in Peter Corris’s The Dying Trade.

And it is a place that today turns 150 – proclaimed a municipality on August 1, 1859, the third in Sydney, after Randwick and Waverley. The civic milestone is to be marked by Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, burying a time capsule on Glebe Point Road, and the launch on Wednesday of an oral history project called Glebe Bytes.

‘‘All the boys worked at the wool stores in Ultimo," said Mrs Brennan, a public-housing tenant interviewed for the history project. "Back in them days we had about six butcher shops. Now we’ve got one."

The stories of Glebe, said Julia Burns, a co-ordinator of Glebe Bytes, were rich in local colour.

"We’ve been told tales of illegal bookmakers, the six o’clock swill, housing squats, timber yards on Blackwattle Bay, and the Saturday matinee at the Astor,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a community patchwork that knits together the suburb’s history."

Not that Glebe has a shared narrative. When 64 locals first signed a petition requesting municipal status, a counter-petition was signed by 265 householders.

"Glebe’s character has always been marked by a diverse social mix with divergent views," says a City of Sydney historian, Lisa Murray.

Nine Glebe councillors were duly elected in late August 1859, on a ticket of installing kerbs and signs, and keeping pigs, goats and other animals off its streets – to mixed results.

"What’s unique about Glebe is that it’s still a stratified society," said Max Solling, a local historian and author of Grandeur and Grit – A History of Glebe.

"It has a well-defined mosaic of the middle-classes living on the elevated Glebe Point, and the working classes settled on the lowlands near Grace Brothers in the Glebe Estate."

It is in these stooped streets that Mrs Brennan calls home. When asked if she has ever moved from Glebe, there is a pause and a confession.

"We did go to Newtown once," she said. ‘‘It was shocking. We were there two months.’’ "

Read the full article from the SMH here.