“If I dwell on what this estate will be, I get miserable and anxious,” says Will Gwynne in one scene of Things Will Be Different. The new documentary captures the Walker Street public housing estate in Melbourne’s inner-city Northcote, where Gwynne lived for five years before it was knocked down to make way for a new mixed development, destroying his home and community.
Directed by the Melbourne film-maker Lucie McMahon, Things Will Be Different follows the dying days of Walker Street as Gwynne, a housing activist, and his neighbour Najat, a Moroccan mother of four, prepare for their forced relocation.
“The first time I saw the completed film, I just collapsed,” Gwynne tells Guardian Australia. “I was devastated when they said they were going to knock it down. I thought, ‘I just can’t move again.’”
The Walker Street estate is one of more than 40 public housing developments affected by the Victorian government’s public housing renewal program, which proposes to demolish and rebuild ageing blocks, displacing residents along the way. With a waiting list of more than 50,000 families in Victoria alone, the supply of public housing is not keeping up with the demand. Walker Street was demolished almost four years ago but reconstruction only began last year.
McMahon, who grew up in public housing, became involved with the Save Public Housing Collective five years ago. There she met Gwynne, Najat and Celeste de Clario Davis, a former Walker Street resident and film producer who had held a photography exhibition about public housing. “We were thinking about how art and creativity can be a useful way of drawing attention to the issue,” McMahon says.
McMahon and De Clario Davis decided to make an intimate slice-of-life documentary, rather than something more academic, to prompt viewers to consider the renewal’s impact on real people. “There’s already stuff that exists in terms of research, stats and figures,” McMahon says. “If you can move people on an emotional level by getting them to engage with the person and their experience, that’s another piece of the puzzle.”
The documentary begins at a point where the residents, who had been involved in campaigns to stop the demolition, have accepted their fate. Scenes show Gwynne and Najat in the quiet everyday of their lives, knowing that it’s all about to change and that their community will splinter, as Najat is moved to Reservoir, away from accessible public transport. “It was so charming and natural,” Gwynne remembers of Walker Street. “I figured when I moved there [I’d] be safe.”
Gwynne and Najat’s stories are common for public housing residents being displaced, McMahon says: they experience a loss of their community and local social services, which subsequently has adverse impacts on mental health and wellbeing. She suggests that preserving and extending public housing is a better solution not only for the residents but also environmentally and financially: a study found that refurbishing, rather than demolishing, could save the government $88m for a single estate.
Unlike many other estates, Walker Street’s residents were given deeds promising them a place in the new development when it is finished. But McMahon describes such a move as “a bit of a bluff”, backed up by a report from the RMIT Centre for Urban Research. “These deeds are given out under the assumption that once people have already had their life disrupted once and relocated, they’re probably not going to make that choice to uproot their life again and move back,” McMahon explains.
Gwynne, who was involved in the consultation committee for Walker Street until it abruptly dissolved this year, is unsure if he’ll return. But he is certain of one thing: “It would be a constant reminder of a very depressing process.” Indeed, the documentary does not have a happy ending. “All my life was here,” Najat says as she watches the towers razed by bulldozers, before the screen fades to black.
McMahon hopes the film will galvanise viewers to join local campaigns and fight to prevent more of this kind of loss. This issue affects everyone, she says: “Extending public housing would actually take pressure off the rental market or people trying to buy … Even if you don’t think you’re going to end up in public housing, there’s benefit to getting involved.”
For Gwynne, the documentary gave him back a sense of community – McMahon and others continue to be a source of support. “Were it not for me agreeing to do the film, I would still be here, but I would be really, really alone,” he says.
He thinks of his old home still, and puts it simply: “If I closed my eyes and woke up and I was back in Walker Street seven years ago, I’d go, ‘What a fucking nightmare.’”
Things Will Be Different screens in cinemas nationally throughout May
