In Australia today as rents keep rising and government promises of affordable housing look like a cruel joke, more and more people are reduced to couch surfing, house sitting, sleeping on the street, living in cars or camping in parks. Fifty years ago young people faced with the same pressures found another way to live.
Free Rent: Squatting in the Lyndhurst Estate, Glebe 1973-1987 tells the stories of 19 of the 150 or so people who occupied some 30 cottages around a dilapidated colonial mansion over a 14 year period.
As well as recording a small piece of local history that would otherwise be forgotten it offers an alternative vision of affordable (albeit temporary) housing for today.
The houses were acquired by the then Department of Main Roads for an expressway and it's policy was to make these houses unliveable (cutting off power and water, smashing windows, removing doors, caving in roofs etc.). While solving their need for housing the squatters also opposed the proposed inner city expressways.
This motley group of students, single parents, musicians, low wage workers, people with disabilities both physical and mental, addicts and dealers managed to form a community and protected the houses from vandals and arsonists.
They shared tools, labour and expertise to repair the houses, built a community garden, ran occasional movie nights, concerts and street parties while their children played wall tennis, street cricket, played in the tree ouse and hung out in an adventure playground built on one of the vacant lots. Over the years the mansion (Lyndhurst) housed a printing press, music rehearsal and recording studio, a film editing suite, puppeteer's workshop and car repair garage and was home to a number of squatters.
Freed from paying rent many got an educated and went on to become professional photographers, journalists, academics, doctors, an engineer, an architect, bands, trades people and business owners.
Growing community opposition saw the expressways abandoned, although they were later resurrected to run along the route of the old goods railway line; Lyndhurst was restored and eventually sold into the private sector while the workers' cottages were rejuvenated and are still rented as public housing.
Squatting in Australia is as old as European settlement. Best known are the “squatocracy” of the1800s: the graziers who moved their sheep beyond the legal frontiers of settlement and went on to gain freehold or leasehold title to the land, make a fortune and exert political influence to the detriment of first nations people. Squatting was also a response to homelessness during the Great Depression when first renters then foreclosed homeowners set up shanty towns in parks and reserves. In the 1970s squatting was again a response to unaffordable rents.
In 2023 the Specialist Homelessness Service reported assisting 274,000 Australians who were homeless or at risk of it. In the same year work by the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that some 100,000 to 150,000 (about 1.3 percent) of all housing was empty or abandoned. (The study didn't consider, commercial, commercial/residential or industrial buildings.
Government departments, major real estate developers and shopping centres are the biggest owners of vacant properties, often acquiring them years before redevelopment and leaving them empty to be patrolled by security guards and dogs. While they have little incentive to keep the properties in a rentable condition there is an argument for “benign neglect” to allow homeless people to make use of the shelter they offer until construction begins.
