Image: Jean Stuart in 2020. Photo: Ann Marie Calilhanna
Jean Stuart never shied away from a challenge. After flipping several fixer-uppers, the retired drama teacher set her sights on a ramshackle 100-year-old former hotel in Pyrmont.
Tattered and battered, the suburb had seen better days. In the 19th century, Pyrmont was home to an army of wharfies who worked at nearby Darling Harbour, shipping wool, coal and wheat off to Mother England.
In its heyday, the Caledonian Hotel was a popular watering hole for the neighbourhood’s working-class dock workers. At the turn of the 20th century, 30,000 people lived in Pyrmont.
When Jean started renovating the old Calie in 1990, Sydney’s maritime industry had relocated to Port Botany and the suburb’s population had dwindled to 3,000.
Squatters lived in every room when she bought the property at auction. The entire place needed to be gutted and restored from bottom to top. It took five years to renovate her Calie castle.
As it turns out, she wasn’t the only one to see potential in the derelict waterfront suburb. In 1992, the NSW government announced plans to commence a $1.5 billion urban renewal project on the Pyrmont peninsula. Like Michael Caton’s character in the Aussie classic The Castle, Jean’s dream home would sit in the middle of a major government-led development project.
Jean would not be deterred. While undertaking a five-year renovation project, she organised her new suburb. She formed a citizen action group called the Pyrmont Community Group, which ran out of her living room.
With the help of her newly mobilised neighbours, she established a community garden in the vacant lot next door to her property. She won accolades for this green space – until developers bought the lot and erected a multi-storey apartment building on the site, which had been known lovingly as Interim Park.
I first met Jean around 1996 in the community park that she established. Charismatic and always fighting the good fight, she constantly agitated against over-development in the middle of one of Sydney’s largest redevelopment zones.
Whether it was the battle to establish a waterfront park or a fight to preserve the area’s old wharves or a campaign to protect the precinct’s heritage buildings, Jean would constantly contact the City Hub with story leads, comments and clear instructions.
In 2009 she convinced me to serve with her as a co-convenor of a campaign to Save Union Square. I was the President of the Pyrmont Ultimo Chamber of Commerce. The then-Keneally government planned to demolish a charming row of 19th century terraces in the heart of Pyrmont. Small cafes and retail shops would be bulldozed to make way for a new Metro station. At Jean’s urging, the CFMEU put a Green Ban on the site.
We convened a rally in Union Square which was attended by several thousand people. The next day the State government back tracked on its Union Square plans and eventually shelved a Pyrmont Metro station for over a decade.
On June 9th this year, Jean died in hospital after a short illness, at the age of 95. She lived a long and impactful life.
Jean fought tirelessly to preserve the local community she loved, and made her home for over three decades.
Vale, Jean Stuart. Pyrmont is a sadder place for her passing.
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