Sydney's "Slums": Middle Class Reformers and the Labor Response

Abstract

from one's particular view of middle class reformers and on the extent to which one subscribes to a physical determinist philosophy. I will admit my basic values in these matters at the outset?a distrust of the moral paternalism and social analysis of middle class reformers however good their aims may have been, and a distrust of that kind of entrenched physical determinism which can produce such unquestioned truths as morality is a question of square feet. I must also admit however, that attitudes to such questions have been and will probably remain intensely subjective. The influence of middle class reformers on parliamentary Labor ideology, policy and practice in Australia, has not drawn much attention from the historians and political scientists who have studied that party. This disinclination to study middle class influences on the labour movement is allied to a common failure to adequately acknowledge the main setting of the twentieth century Labor parties, the cities. Apart from some very recent union and strike studies in Labour History, which began in 1961, this journal contains virtually no articles which elucidate urban Labor politics or something as prosaic as housing after the 1930s depression.1 This, I believe, is partly a reflection of the current state of Australian social and political historiography, where the post 1935 period continues to be neglected. The present article is put forward as a tentative analysis of some urban and class dimensions of Labor attitudes in Sydney after 1935. The origins of the slum eradication and redevelopment policies of the New South Wales Labor Government and the Housing Com mission it created in the period after 1941 lie in the campaigns con ducted by middle class church and professional groups in Sydney in the 1930s. My definition of middle class has, like everyone elses, its own quirks and idiosyncracies. Its principal objective indicators are the trilogy of income, education and occupation, with two important additions of property ownership2 and place of residence. All of the Sydney middle class slum reformers discussed in this paper were members of professional, charitable or church organisations, and sometimes all three. The occupations represented include architects, senior public servants, leading writers and church organisers. Those whom I have been able to trace (around 80 per cent of the group appear in Who's Who, another indication of their class position) all