Founders reflect on 30 years of community festival

The Pyrmont Ultimo UPTown Festival has been through many incarnations since its humble beginnings in 1981.

The festival started modestly 30 years ago when it was initiated by two enterprising local residents, Debra Berryman and Olga Reader, as a simple get-together to unite the small local community.

Ms Berryman says that the origins of the festival can be traced back to the small population of the area in the early eighties. Despite an inter-neighbourhood rivalry between Ultimo and Pyrmont at the time, demographic factors meant there was much interaction between the residents of the two suburbs.

“There were not many people living here back then,” Ms Berryman recalled. “[There were] in all, maybe only a couple of hundred households in Ultimo and Pyrmont.

“But we didn’t have the Fig Street cutting in those days (which is now the thoroughfare from Wattle Street to the Harbour Bridge) and each suburb used to think they were better than the other one,” she said.

Fig Street had, and still does – albeit less symbolically – mark the boundary between the two suburbs and the demarcation was not lost upon the local residents.

Ms Berryman and Ms Reader, both Pyrmont residents, were part of a growing and very tight-knit community in their own suburb and felt compelled to organise an event which would also bring them closer to their neighbours in Ultimo.

“The community would hold get-togethers once a month,” recalled Ms Reader. “But because we were such a close-knit community, we wanted to have something more organised and expand it to include both the suburbs to bring us all closer together.”

And hence the UPTown Festival was born.

The inaugural event was, by all accounts, made possible by a true community effort.

“When it first started, we didn’t really know what to do, but it turned out to be a great success,” said Ms Reader.

“Everybody helped out,” said Ms Berryman. “The entertainment was provided by the local community, the children sang, danced and performed with musical instruments.

“The pubs were also very active in those days. The Bristol Arms, the Glasgow Arms and the Lord Wolseley all chipped in.

“The kids helped out with the clean-up,” she added. “I paid them ten cents for each bag or item they picked up.”

The early eighties was a time of great demographic change in the area. With many young families moving into the Pyrmont-Ultimo precinct, the founders felt that a family-orientated community festival would be highly beneficial in bringing the new residents into the social fabric of the suburbs.

Ms Berryman, who was at the time working at the Social Research Centre at the University of Sydney, said she had received significant encouragement from her colleagues.

Both Ms Reader and Ms Berryman singled out Michael Matthews, an academic at Sydney University and later, the University of New South Wales, for planting in their minds the idea of starting their own community festival. He would be at the forefront of organising and running the festival for many years.

Matthews was also an Alderman of the City of Sydney and used his considerable network in the local, academic and business communities to enhance the festival experience throughout the eighties.

“Michael Matthews was a great asset,” said Ms Reader. “We have never had anybody match him since. He ran it very professionally and put life into the local community.”

Ms Berryman praised the work of the UnitingCare Harris Centre in putting on the event each year and for saving it from becoming “too big and commercial.”

“They do a fantastic job,” she said. “Before they came in it was becoming an overgrown street fair like the one in Glebe, with stalls stretching down the road.”

“It is now the way we intended it to be – a total community event and not at all commercial. I support them 100 per cent.”

The Pyrmont Ultimo UPTown Festival is presented by the UnitingCare Harris Community Centre. It takes place on Saturday 19 March, from 11.00 am – 4.30 pm at Quarry Green (between Harris St and Jones St) Ultimo.