In the mid-1980s, a block of Housing Commission flats in Mount Street, North Sydney, was demolished to make way for an office block. Someone thought to preserve the building’s foundation stone and take it to Stanton Library, home of a newly established Local Studies Collection.
Weighing at least 70 kilograms, the large oblong of sandstone found its way into a corner and stayed there… for 20 years! Recent research in anticipation of its display has turned up an interesting story.
The foundation stone bears the name of the Hon. Clive Evatt, Minister for Housing, in the Cahill Labor Government in 1952. Labor had established the Housing Commission in 1942 and was working hard to ameliorate the acute housing shortage in the years following World War II.
Evatt, himself a QC, knew the locality well. His family had moved to Milsons Point when he was a boy. He was also a Labor ‘maverick’, not always toeing party lines.
In 1952, Evatt mightily annoyed his leader, Joe Cahill, by inviting Lily Maria Geraghty to lay the stone of a block of 24 flats to be built in Mount Street, North Sydney. Lily was the wife of James Geraghty, who had won the seat of North Sydney for Labor in 1941 and held it ever since.
The problem for Premier Cahill was that James Geraghty had been disendorsed in 1949 after disregarding his party’s instruction in a parliamentary vote. He then recontested and won the seat of North Sydney as an ‘Independent Labor’ candidate, standing against the endorsed Labor man.
As if that was not enough, Evatt suggested naming the building ‘Geraghty Court’ – perhaps out respect for all that his erstwhile comrade had done for his constituency since 1941, and perhaps aware that Geraghty held the balance of power in Parliament.
The newspapers made much of the controversy, which added to Cahill’s irritation. The editor of the conservative building industry journal, Construction, penned a ‘humorous’ verse in response. One stanza ran:
“…The greatest honour we can ‘earn’
In this State of theocrats –
Is having named after us
A big block of Evatt’s flats…”
Clive Evatt was expelled from the Labor Party in 1956 after one transgression too many.
But his legacy, and that of James Geraghty, lived on for another 30 years in Mount Street, where dozens of families had a roof over their heads and ‘Geraghty Court’ was home.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council.