Col Donahee
I think the sad side to it all is, if there’d been better planning…

I was the first community worker in Minto. I was appointed by the Department of Youth and Community Services when the first residents were moving into the Department of Housing townhouses. That was in 1976.

The main part of my job was to try to integrate the Minto residents with the Minto area, and to look at what sort of services they needed and what we could do to provide those services.

At first they built around 300 houses and I came along to meet the first residents. The first residents moved in just before Christmas and there was quite a big outcry. There’s all the costs of moving, and they’re moving to an isolated area; residents were running out of food and things. That side of it was a bit of a disaster for the people.

There was anger at the Housing Commission for planning and building these isolated estates for public housing on the outskirts of Sydney. We had made representations to the Housing Minister advising them not to go further. Minto was before Claymore, and I remember we wrote this letter that went through our Managing Director to the Minister, saying Claymore should not go ahead.

Financially people didn’t have much. They’re very isolated, a long way away from their supports. Two parent families need to get work, and the work they get is a long, long way from where they live. The bus service was just a skeleton kind of service. There was a lot of family stress and women at home by themselves in an isolated area. So mental health type issues (emerged) and in those days there wasn’t much consciousness about these issues. The normal range of problems people might have, were evident in this community, usually in a more exaggerated way.

On the other hand, there were lots of residents that were very energetic. They tended to be young and quite a few wanted to get involved in things. They took pride in their community. I remember once, an article in the paper [that I had] instigated in the local Campbelltown News, something like ‘Minto Disaster Area’, [got] a lot of the residents very upset because it stigmatised their community. I learnt from that, that you have to be careful about the way you work.

I think the sad side to it all is if there’d been better planning, if there’d been better understanding of the needs of local people and addressing those needs, probably a great deal of hardship could have been avoided. Although I worked closely in that community, goodness knows some of the hardship that people experienced underneath it all.

In those days, professionals were doing their own thing a bit. We had our inter-agency meetings but somehow it was still a bit of a band-aid, reacting to this great force of people being plonked out here. The Housing Commissioner had already decided how many people, who’s going where, and that it was going to be a huge estate, [believing that] in another 5, 10, 15 or 20 years, things will be okay because the services will have come and there’ll be other private housing. Things would be more normalised. But the Housing Commission people came first and they were used a bit like guinea pigs, to provide a big enough population to make it viable to have services that would attract other private estates and developers. In that sense it was terribly bad planning. Sometimes we used to think we were just the pawns in the system. Just being used to do the Housing Commission’s dirty work.