24 February, 2016 16:45
CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
“It’s certainly time for a makeover on King Street”
The pre-election promise of the New South Wales Premier, Mike Baird, rings true today, as Newtown residences celebrate the long-awaited “homeless spikes” that have appeared overnight on the area’s busiest street.
As a rapidly gentrifying Sydney suburb, Newtown has also been the centre of quite an obvious political transformation. Local craft-beer enthusiast and part-time folk band drummer, Banjo Clementé, says he is a dying-breed in the “chardonnay socialist” hot-spot.
“Once upon this was a pretty safe Greens seat,” says the jaded bisexual former-tattoo artist.
“But, as it always goes – The Greenies started opening up high-quality cafes and selling expensive beer,”
“That was shortly followed by a mass-migration of newly-married Mosman couples. All of a sudden, this area was full of four-wheel-drives and sunglasses that resemble satellite dishes,”
“This place turned into Noosa overnight,”
The obvious insensitivities of erecting the first of 18 planned strips of homeless spikes beneath the iconic Aboriginal-themed mural of Martin Luther King Jnr on King Street has barely raised an eyebrow.
“It’s about bloody [bloody] time,” says a local mother of two, Charlotte Pienaar in a confident South-African accent.
“I have lived in this area for longer than most, and I know better than most that the homeless population is nothing but an eyesore,”
“Martin Luther King had a dream yes, but so do I,”
“I dream of being able to raise my children in an area that is safe from this sort of long-haired, guitar-strumming human pollution. It’s like the league of homeless nations up there. I don’t care if they are the first people of this land, they need to go,”
Mrs Pienaar says she’s not alone when it comes to her sentiments surrounding “the Newtown makeover”.
“If you want to listen to hideous live music and stink out a community with East Asian incense, I’m sorry but you’ll have to move further west,”
“Newtown is no longer what you unemployed drunks dream about in your marijuana-fuelled haze of The Whitlams piano ballads and Adam Cullen paintings,”
“Sorry about that. I hear there’s some cheap terrace houses for rent in Campbelltown.”
