IT'S NOT HEAVEN BUT IT'S HOME

There are people living in North Richmond's sprawling, soaring
Elizabeth Street public housing estate who think Rod Crisp - the
magistrate who last week reportedly described their home as something
far beyond anything Lewis Carroll could have imagined when he wrote
Alice in Wonderland - might be prone to embellishment.

There are others who think he has a point, but they will only speak of
it in whispers, as if talking aloud about the heroin problem that hit
Richmond five years ago (but by most accounts has ebbed over the past
12 months) will only serve to make their lives more difficult.

Mr Crisp had heard evidence in the Melbourne Magistrates Court about
an undercover sting operation at the flats in June last year that
erupted in violence, resulting in a police officer being injured, and
he duly concluded that the area was a nether world where heroin
dealing, paranoia and betrayal thrived. Li Lai, a City of Yarra
councillor who has lived in one of the five Leggo-like high-rise
buildings since the mid-1980s, tilts his head in frustration. "Yes,
this is not heaven, but people's perceptions are really bad ... It's
not that bad," he says.

Nearby there is a life-sized concrete cow by the name of Daisy.
Stephen Nash, from Outreach Victoria, which runs a tenancy advice
service from an office underneath one of the high-rise buildings in
Elizabeth Street, explains that a folklore has built up around Daisy
the cow over the years.

Today she is beset by pigeons, but in the past she has apparently been
found tipped upside down with her legs in the air, and another time
engulfed by flames. "But she's survived and she's cherished ... not a
bad symbol really," Mr Nash says.

He guides us around the estate, past Richmond West Primary School
where children, many of them Asian youngsters with floppy
broad-brimmed hats, big smiles and little backpacks, are being
deposited by their parents. Then there is the Community Garden where
women such as 57-year-old Georgia Tsipouros, who came from Greece more
than 20 years ago, tend tomatoes and deliver surplus vegetables from
the Richmond market for the tenants' worm farm.

A 1999 report by Jesuit Social Services shows the Richmond estate
houses many races, and a recent population growth study by KPMG found
its high-density living approached that of Manhattan's Upper West
Side. In Australia, the only urban area more densely populated is
Kings Cross.

The Jesuit study identified big Vietnamese and Chinese populations,
many of whom came to Australia on humanitarian grounds during the '80s
and '90s. (One-third of the 4101 tenants were born in Vietnam, 20 per
cent speak Chinese as a preferred language, and there is a smattering
of tenants who speak Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Lao, Polish, Spanish and
various African languages.) Recently there has been an influx of East
Timorese. About a third of the Richmond public housing tenants are
aged under 17, and 10 per cent are under four years of age.

Over the road are the more dilapidated digs. The old "walk-ups", built
during the 1950s and painted an unfortunate pale blue, are, to put it
kindly, ripe for redevelopment. Victorian Housing Minister Bronwyn
Pike has already announced that the low-rise Elizabeth Street walk-ups
will be pulled down and rebuilt at a cost of at least $6.5 million,
finishing the work begun by the previous Labor government in the early
1990s, when the flats at the western end were refurbished and their
surroundings landscaped.

Richard Wynne, the Labor MP for Richmond, says the public housing
estates were neglected during the seven years of the Kennett
government, but traces many of the problems experienced now to another
era altogether, when working-class families were moved out of their
cottages and into Ministry of Housing accommodation under the Bolte
government's slum reclamation program.

Mr Wynne calls it a "great failure of social policy. Families were
uprooted, they pulled down housing that in today's terms would be
worth a fortune ... The big difference between then and now, though,
is that people were working. It will take a whole-of-government
approach, access to education and training, and then it can become a
thriving community," he says. Still, Mr Wynne points out, the rate of
employment among tenants at the North Richmond estate is relatively
high - Mr Nash says it is about 25 per cent compared with 5 per cent
in public housing across the state.

They join Cathy Guiness, a community program coordinator with Jesuit
Social Services, in saying there are many families who have lived at
the North Richmond estate for 20 years or more and raised children
there.

They like it - the position, the ethnic welfare groups, health centres
and neighborhood houses within walking distance, the strong sense of
community, the vitality of the nearby Victoria Street strip. But
another Jesuit study produced last year suggests they would like it
even more if it were not for the drugs, which Mr Nash says gained a
foothold here, as in other parts of the inner city, about five years
ago.

"There is a subconscious curfew placed on people," said a Timorese man
in his 50s, quoted in the report. Other residents reported drug use in
the laundry that prevented them from doing their washing, drug use in
the lifts and stairwells that kept them from leaving their flats,
discarded needles in the playground, which made the area unsafe for
children.

Another man, who would not be named, said in hushed tones this week
that he still felt frightened when he stepped out of his flat,
remembering the vomit he found on his doorstep once and the drug deals
happening near the lift.

But Superintendent Ian Baker, in charge of policing the cities of
Yarra and Stonnington, says crime associated with drug use in the
North Richmond estate has dissipated to the extent that it is "almost
negligible" at the moment. "At the present time, there's no heroin
around, literally, and like any area where there's drug activity we
target our resources to address those problems," he says.

Police maintain a plain-clothes and uniform presence in the area, and
Superintendent Baker says they work closely with the local council and
the tenants to keep it safe.

Richard Wynne says the government is close to trying out a new
security system, in which a "concierge" would act as a kind of
gatekeeper for public housing flats. This could help keep out dealers
who come into the estate from outside in search of a secluded
stairwell in which to trade, bringing their drug-using clientele with
them.

Meantime, he laments the defeat of his government's plan to open
supervised injecting rooms in the area, citing a high level of public
support for a strategy that might have reduced the "public nuisance"
of drug use on the estate.

This week, the nether world magistrate Rod Crisp described was almost
deserted apart from the pigeons, Daisy the cow, a few school children
and a bunch of young men trading expletives and threatening to trade
blows outside a milk-bar with bars across its windows. Then it was
just Daisy and the pigeons, and all else was quiet.