Five young queer artists — the Centrepiece Collective — were evicted by Marrickville Council from the abandoned former nurses quarters at the old Marrickville hospital on May 18.
The artists set up a work and refuge space in the “nurses quarters” in the inner west in April. Sydney's rental market is prohibitive and, for artists, studio art space is an added burden. The multi-storied building had been vacant for 15 years.
As Adam Schwab, Crikey’s housing columnist, said on January 22: “Melbourne and Sydney [rental] markets between 2007 and early 2009 … have skyrocketed, in some cases, by upwards of 20% annually.”
Young people face particular accommodation discrimination.
An April 2008 report, Australia’s Homeless Youth, by the National Youth Commission, revealed that 100,000 people were homeless on any given night in Australia. One third — or 36,000 — of these homeless are young people.
If you are queer and young, you face disproportionate hardship. A 1995 report by Twenty10 Youth Service, a Sydney-based queer youth support organisation, estimated that there were between 5000 and 6250 homeless gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in Australia every night. That was 15 years ago. Things since then have only become worse.
When they decided to squat the space, the Centrepiece Collective drew inspiration from battles over squats fought by activists reclaiming unused space in Glebe in Sydney in 2000 and Melbourne university students in 2008.
The collective decided to approach Marrickville Council for permission to use the building. Marrickville Council includes five Greens councillors and has a Gay and Lesbian Community Liaison Committee.
A May 14 Marrickville Council press release said the artists were “illegally squatting” and that they had been served with a notice to quit with a deadline of noon on May 18. The council justified this with a January 2007 report that indicated asbestos at the site. The eviction was duly carried out.
The collective was given three minutes to address a May 18 council meeting. Collective member Raven Esque told 鶹ý Weekly: “We demanded from the council that they show us this report. They took 45 minutes in reply, and still did not guarantee us access to the report. We’ve since looked at the 2007 report, and while it says asbestos is in the building, it does not say it is a risk to human health.”
Greens councillor and deputy mayor, Fiona Byrne told GLW: “There is also a 2008 safety report on the premises, which says the area is a health risk. Tenants have been removed from the premises previously, because of the health risks within. I sympathise, that’s why I used my ‘Mayoral Minute’ powers, which gave the collective three minutes to address the council meeting. We have commitment to an affordable housing strategy and the council will hold a community forum on this very topic … We offered the collective housing from Metro Housing, but they knocked it back.”
Raven Esque responded: “Fiona Byrne did say they had found alternative housing with Metro Housing for us. But it is a housing co-op, has a huge waiting list. No-one in the collective has been contacted by Metro Housing, or the council, regarding this accommodation. We are still homeless, while the Council is now spending money on a security guard outside the nurses quarters — I guess to defend it against us.”
Julia Harrison, manager of Metro Housing, told GLW: “The council did contact me and we offered transitional housing — as long as the artists met the Department of Housing criteria and they had to be referred by a community based organisation — in this case Twenty10 would do. If they fulfilled the criteria, they would have had weeks, if not months to wait.”
[Email your support to the Centrepiece Collective at centrepiece.queer.arts.collective@gmail.com and register your protest at