First Word

Great places deserve great names, argues National Secretary Paddy Crumlin

Sydney has arguably no greater geographical, aesthetic and cultural asset than our harbour's foreshores, bays, points and headlands and their history.

The harbour pulses with an aura of that history. Who hasn't felt the resonance of our indigenous culture when walking our naturally preserved foreshore parks and reserves? Or how the New Endeavour or another of our modern tall ships sailing through the Heads can trigger a strong sense of the First Fleet?

It is easy to sense the bustling Sydney Cove commerce, community and development reaching around to Walsh Bay, down to Millers Point and on to Darling Harbour, an almost inexhaustible naturally occurring deep water interface for the lifeline of merchant shipping and trade upon which the future of our emerging nation depended: fingers of wharves jutting out to receive and welcome the goods of other nations and reciprocate with our own; a forest of masts from tall ships with furled sails gradually giving way to steamers and the pervasive thick and acrid smoke of the time and its industrial activity; sustained 24 hour, seven day a week labour everywhere on horse drawn drays, then motorised trucks, all serviced by a legion of waterfront workers, seafarers, providores, ships agents and others. It was organised chaos in a thriving, bustling crucible of interests, some common and others conflicting.

Place names in great cities add value and colour if they seek to touch in a real way all of the elements of its history. Without a doubt the area currently under debate was home for many generations to a community of working families living for and from that industry and upon which the industry itself was sustained. Consistent with the origins of the city, it was a community preoccupied with waterfront and maritime interests.

It was also a workplace where poverty, dysfunction, death and injury reflected the poor labour standards prevailing for a long time, at least in terms of the 19th and 20th century. Much has already been said about the bull system and the way individual workers were picked, because they were strong or submissive; by corruption at worst or in some arbitrary fashion at best. This was not a passing phase of labour exploitation, but a practice which left deep scars on generations of workers over the decades. It impacted greatly on the industrial and political views of those workers, and the names they gave their communities and workplaces.

The wide expanse of Hickson Road, the sheer cuts in the sandstone cliff all whisper of that rich texture of its industrial and commercial history and the great human endeavour upon which it rested. The strong labour traditions established and nurtured there led to momentous political and industrial activity and, at times, conflict, right up to the Patrick Lockout in 1998.

The politicians and city planners have, or will soon speak their mind on the matter of a label for redevelopment of the foreshore known to so many of us as "The Hungry Mile". The Sydney community will not be so easily shaken from the easy familiarity that they have had with the area under that name, if the debate over recent weeks in our media is any guide.

Many parents are often mystified by how the name of their newborn can quietly or sometimes abruptly change. The old joke is, if you come up with a short name, inevitably a 'y' or another syllable will be added and longer names are just as inevitably shortened. Nicknames often become names because they suit and reflect the personality of the wearer better than the original.

Ask any New Yorker what they call the stretch along the Hudson River Docklands - Hell's Kitchen or its formal name of Clinton? It was renamed in the fifties to attract real estate development and investment. But the old name stuck. So too the Hungry Mile.