Those vital industries that are being pushed out from the margins – they built the city – the real heart and meaning of the city.

Diversity within neighbourhoods and suburbs and parts of the city is not just a bleeding heart value to be pursued, it’s actually about making the city work better. It’s about how people having better lives. People having the right to access the best parts of the city.

With the loss of places such as Carlton Brewery from the city centre and even Millers point terraces – there’s a kind of cleansing of the city. That is in some ways a social cleansing.

We have a kind of alienation from the city forming – when people don’t have a relationship with the product they produce. They’re producing something and it belongs to somebody else and it goes off and gets sold to somebody else and all they’ve done is sold their time. Beer was never that. [laughs]

It’s not just that the brewery was a place where people had industrial working class jobs right in the middle of the city, but it’s also making a working-class product and it was — even though it stank — it was kind of acceptable and accepted in the place because of the, because of the productive value of it, because it was giving people jobs and it was helping them to pay for their housing and all of those sorts of things. It was also producing a product that was meaningful to people who were making it. Then we take that away and we build a fabulous apartment building. No one who ever worked in that brewery could have a dream of living in that apartment. I think it’s quite iconic in a sense.

SCENT

Stewing hops, malt, rich, pungent, bitter, and a bit chocolate

By

Dr. Michael Darcy