By Kristen Rowan
I first moved to Williamstown over 40 years ago, when I was 20 years old. I rented for several years before my then-partner and I managed to buy a home in Newport.
When my relationship ended I went back to renting, at much higher prices than previously, and thus they remained.
In 2011, a friend told my new husband and I that she had bought a flat at a reasonable price at Techno Park, in the old migrant hostel, where she could live and run her home business. My husband and I have a street theatre business and my husband makes all our costumes. We checked the Hobsons Bay guidelines on Techno Park’s industrial zone, and they said a home-based business was allowed without a permit. Hooray! With our savings, a small loan, and help from my parents, we purchased our home and moved in.
At Techno Park we found a lovely community of folk from all walks of life; artists, sailors, and tradies amongst them. Some had been living there for more than a decade. Over the years, the courtyard at the centre of our block of flats transformed into a lush oasis with a large communal table at its centre, where we gathered for shared meals, drinks and chats. We planted an orchard of citrus trees, herbs and vegetables, and happily lived and worked.
Then … in May 2023, everybody received a letter from Hobsons Bay Council stating that the 1988 zoning made living at Techno Park illegal, and we had to leave “immediately”. My husband and I were working overseas at the time and heard the news from a neighbour. To say we were dumbfounded is a massive understatement. Everybody was in shock.
Council followed up with a campaign of intimidation, door knocking, and more threatening letters. We had neighbours hiding in their homes in the middle of winter with lights and heating off. None had the money to move and pay exorbitant rents in the area, or elsewhere for that matter in this housing crisis.
Council offered nothing material, but suggested we could join the 50,000 other desperate Victorians on the waitlist for public housing. Neighbours’ mental health began to deteriorate.
Then an amazing thing happened. The community in Block 11, whose owners had been renting to those in need at low cost for thirty years, decided to fight back. A group of tenants, the owners, and one tenant’s amazing mother, reached out to everyone in the street to invite us to a meeting. And so our campaign to Save Techno Park was formed.
Together, our group worked tirelessly over the next two and a half years. We created a petition and attended every Council meeting, submitting questions they refused to answer (though we did have the support of one councillor, Daria Kellander, who championed us from day one).
We contacted media. We took care of struggling neighbours. We gratefully received the assistance of a planning law firm that offered their services pro bono. We ran stalls at our local markets to engage support from the local community in the form of letters and signatures on petitions to Council, our State MP and the Minister for Planning. Thousands signed the petition, and hundreds sent letters on our behalf. Still Council resisted, and was both secretive and obstructive.
In 2024, the ABC got hold of a set of internal Council documents through Freedom of Information. These documents showed that Council had known all along that Techno Park homes were entitled to ‘Existing Use Rights,’ meaning the long-term residential use of the flats made it legal to live there regardless of zoning.
Council had sent the eviction notices in order to attempt to “extinguish” these rights and force all of us out of our homes. They even had a name for this plot — ‘Operation Pegasus.’
Soon after the ABC report, and following more than 400 letters from the community urging her to intervene, the Planning Minister made a small change to the State planning scheme which meant the Council could no longer extinguish our rights. Suddenly, Council was obliged to accept applications showing that people had been living in Techno Park homes continuously for at least the past 15 years, and were therefore entitled to remain permanently.
Working together, neighbours collected a bounty of evidence for each of the five blocks: thousands of documents including statutory declarations, photos, real estate listings, pet registrations, and voter enrolments going back to the 1990s. First Council recognised Existing Use Rights for Block 11—home to those neighbours who first brought us all together to fight back—followed several months later by two more blocks of flats. Finally, on Monday 8th December, the final two blocks were approved, just in time for Christmas.
All our homes are finally safe, and everybody can relax after nearly three years of cruelty, bullying, and an unnecessary campaign of fear.
Hurrah! Long live People Power!
