Feature / History
You can take the boy out of Brunswick …
Despite living in a different state for the past 40 years, Barry York continues to avidly chronicle the Brunswick of his youth
Mark Phillips
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Barry York returns to the front yard of the house in Shamrock Street, Brunswick West, where he spent his formative years. Photo: Mark Phillips
Mark Phillips
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
“I’VE told my family that when I die, I want them to scatter some of my ashes here,” says Barry York, pointing towards a cobblestone laneway in Brunswick West.
The unnamed laneway sits directly opposite the house where York grew up in Shamrock Street.
Even though he has been living in Canberra for three decades, Shamrock Street is one of the “sacred sites” York visits whenever he is back in the old neighbourhood.
When he passed through earlier this month, the orange brick veneer house where he spent his teenage years was vacant and being advertised for lease, allowing York to explore the backyard which remains largely the same as he remembers it, apart from a lemon tree that is now well above his head.
Whenever he returns to the old neighbourhood the memories come flooding back. But one place he has no great desire to revisit is Pentridge Prison, where he spent 44 days as a political prisoner in 1972 (more of that later).
“There’s that old saying that the first seven years of a person determines who they are,” says York, his voice at times struggling to be heard above the noise of a coffee machine in a café not far from Shamrock Street.
“Well, really, I had my first 30 years pretty much in the one street in West Brunswick.
“I’ve got mixed memories, as you’d expect.
“You know, there were things that weren’t pleasant. There were social problems and alcoholism and domestic violence. It was a bit of a struggleville back then. But I feel that it’s me, you know – I’m inseparable from this unique place that I grew up in.
“I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but it is something you reflect on, and I have such fond memories of neighbours, Italians, Greeks, Latvians, Dutch. A bit later, Lebanese. You name it. We had it in that one street. They were such good people, unpretentious, hard working, neighbourly.”
Now comfortably settled into his 70s, York continues to mine his recollections of Brunswick past from distance through a Facebook page, Memories of Living in Brunswick, Melbourne, which he began eight years ago and has amassed almost 2500 followers.
On the page, he regularly posts photos and newspaper clippings along with personal reflections on his own life and that of his parents, Loreto and Olive York, who both left their mark on the community in their own way – Loreto as a two-time Mayor of Brunswick and Olive as a long-term columnist in the defunct weekly newspaper The Brunswick Sentinel.
A renowned oral historian, York has also recorded many hours of interviews with Brunswick residents from earlier days that are now held in the archives of the National Library of Australia.
• • •
THE Brunswick that Barry York grew up in was a tough, hard scrabble neighbourhood where violence and alcoholism was commonplace and stray cats roamed the streets as if they owned them.
But there was a strong sense of community. On the York family’s street (Barry was an only child) a dozen languages were spoken but people mostly got along with each other.
In the late afternoon, the air filled with the sickly sweet smell of the tip that is now Gilpin Park and flocks of seagulls descended to scavenge amongst the rubbish.
York and his mates would roam the back alleys looking for things to do, coming across discarded bras and litters of kittens. Later, when he had a bike, he could explore further afield. Weekends were often spent at the Coburg Lake.
Born in London, York was three when he migrated to Melbourne in 1954 with his Maltese father, who had changed his surname from Meilak, and Londoner mother, who had survived the Blitz.
The family quickly settled in Brunswick West, initially living in a series of boarding houses that were a terrible experience for Olive, before buying a Californian bungalow in Shamrock Street in 1956.
A decade later, they moved two houses down the street to a smaller brand new brick veneer house Olive had fallen in love with while watching it being built. The house remained in the family’s ownership until the 1990s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an intense rivalry between Brunswick West and Brunswick East, with the former regarding the latter as its poorer cousin.
“We thought we were better than them becaused they lived in these old Victorian era terrace houses while West Brunswick had been divided up in the 1920s and the houses and the blocks were bigger,” York says. He appreciates the irony that the terraces now attract $1 million-plus prices.
This rivalry sometimes translated into confrontations on the streets, so when Barry was 13 Loreto decided he could do with some toughening up and signed him up for Harry Ivory’s famous boxing gym above an onion factory near Nicholson Street.
Ivory was a legendary boxing trainer whose proteges regularly fought bouts at Festival Hall.
The gym was like something out of film noir, York recalls.
“You’d go down a laneway and come to a small wooden door … as you climbed the steps you would smell the sweat and blood and hear the thud of guys sparring above you,” he says.
Tall for his age and with a long reach, Ivory told Loreto that young Barry had potential as a boxer. But Barry wanted none of that.
• • •
THE Brunswick that Barry York grew up in was a tough, hard scrabble neighbourhood where violence and alcoholism was commonplace and stray cats roamed the streets as if they owned them.
But there was a strong sense of community. On the York family’s street (Barry was an only child) a dozen languages were spoken but people mostly got along with each other.
In the late afternoon, the air filled with the sickly sweet smell of the tip that is now Gilpin Park and flocks of seagulls descended to scavenge amongst the rubbish.
York and his mates would roam the back alleys looking for things to do, coming across discarded bras and litters of kittens. Later, when he had a bike, he could explore further afield. Weekends were often spent at the Coburg Lake.
Born in London, York was three when he migrated to Melbourne in 1954 with his Maltese father, who had changed his surname from Meilak, and Londoner mother, who had survived the Blitz.
The family quickly settled in Brunswick West, initially living in a series of boarding houses that were a terrible experience for Olive, before buying a Californian bungalow in Shamrock Street in 1956.
A decade later, they moved two houses down the street to a smaller brand new brick veneer house Olive had fallen in love with while watching it being built. The house remained in the family’s ownership until the 1990s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an intense rivalry between Brunswick West and Brunswick East, with the former regarding the latter as its poorer cousin.
“We thought we were better than them becaused they lived in these old Victorian era terrace houses while West Brunswick had been divided up in the 1920s and the houses and the blocks were bigger,” York says. He appreciates the irony that the terraces now attract $1 million-plus prices.
This rivalry sometimes translated into confrontations on the streets, so when Barry was 13 Loreto decided he could do with some toughening up and signed him up for Harry Ivory’s famous boxing gym above an onion factory near Nicholson Street.
Ivory was a legendary boxing trainer whose proteges regularly fought bouts at Festival Hall.
The gym was like something out of film noir, York recalls.
“You’d go down a laneway and come to a small wooden door … as you climbed the steps you would smell the sweat and blood and hear the thud of guys sparring above you,” he says.
Tall for his age and with a long reach, Ivory told Loreto that young Barry had potential as a boxer. But Barry wanted none of that.
• • •
YORK attended Moreland Primary School and then Northcote High School. Brunswick Tech was closer to home, but Loreto, who had only four years of formal education and spent his entire working life in factories, wanted his son to have a “clean” job like a school teacher, and the technical school was there mainly to churn out fodder for local factories and trades jobs.
So in 1969, Barry enrolled at La Trobe University, which had opened two years earlier to give working class kids the opportunity for higher education. When York arrived, the Vietnam War was raging and the Bundoora campus was a hotbed of anti-war and radical politics.
Through Loreto, who was a union shop steward and a member of the Labor Party but identified as a socialist, York already had a political education and he embraced left-wing politics, particularly Maoism, with a passion.
One of the targets of student protest at La Trobe was the university’s Chancellor, Sir Archibald Glenn, who was managing director of industrial conglomerate ICI, which not only had contracts with the Department of Defence, but also had business interests in apartheid South Africa.
In late 1971, York, then just 20 and a third year student, was recognised as one of the militant student leaders at La Trobe who organised blockades, rallies, sit ins, and other protests on campus not only against Glenn (who resigned before the end of that year) but over other issues as well.
Ultimately, the university took out Supreme Court injunctions to bar York and two other students from setting foot on the campus in Bundoora.
York and his two comrades, Fergus Robinson and Brian Pola, defied the injunctions and continued to attend the campus, leading to warrants being issued for their arrest for contempt of court.
Robinson was caught first, then Pola. York managed to evade the police for several more weeks and had devised elaborate escape routes if they raided his parents’ house, where he was still living.
But when they finally caught him in June, it was in his car in Plenty Road on the way home from the university campus. He was immediately taken to Pentridge for indefinite detention.
“Because we didn’t have a sentence, they assumed that we’d be long termers, which wasn’t good for the morale, so they put us in A Division where a lot of long termers, like murderers and people like that were held.
“That was an education, I’ll tell you.
“Pentridge was a brutal, barbaric place. I used to hear men being bashed and screaming in (maximum security) H Division.”
The case of the “La Trobe Three” became a cause célèbre for free speech which became increasingly embarrassing for the university administration. York was freed after 44 days (Ferguson and Pola did four months and three months respectively) when the university’s Vice-Chancellor visited all three in jail and they reached a deal where both sides agreed to refrain from conduct which was violent or disruptive.
Not surprisingly, York describes the six weeks in jail as one of the toughest periods of his life. But the support of his parents – especially his father – was unwavering.
“He supported my activism,” York says.
“When I was in jail, he wrote a very moving letter to the vice-chancellor comparing what was happening to fascism, and that he had fought fascism [in World War Two].”
• • •
THE experience was life changing for York, hardening his resolve to fight repression with resistance and leading him to become involved in the Prisoners Action Committee which sought to reform conditions in Victoria’s jails.
“Wherever there’s repression, there’s resistance, and I saw that in Pentridge.
“I don’t know how strong I would have been if I’d been there for years against the odds, but so many of the prisoners stood up and got beaten down and stood up again, and that’s why we supported them from the outside as a Prisoners Action Committee.”
But the nightmare wasn’t over for York. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education, he discovered he had been blacklisted by the Department of Education because of his political activism and was unable to find permanent work.
The struggle lasted another 18 months, culminating in a statewide strike in 1977 by all three public school teacher unions before he was finally able to win a full-time position, teaching for several years at Coburg Tech.
“It was a terrible time to be blacklisted, I tell you,” York says.
“I just wanted to have a normal life by that stage.”
York is sanguine about the changes that have taken place since Pentridge closed as a prison in the 1990s. He is pleased that the land has been redeveloped for housing, but also sympathises with ex-prisoners who would like to see the bluestone walls razed to the ground.
But he is disappointed the developers have not been held to a commitment to build a proper museum to the prison days, and he finds some parts of the development, such as wine cellars in old cells, as being in poor taste.
• • •
JUST a few weeks after York was released from Pentridge, his father was elected Mayor of Brunswick. He had been voted onto the council for the first time a couple of years earlier.
It was a history making achievement for an uneducated Maltese-speaking migrant.
“He was the first Maltese Mayor of an Australian city, and I believe he was the first – what my dad used to jokingly say – “wog” Mayor of Brunswick.
“He was very proud of that … but there were still prejudices in 1972.
“The Labor councillors met as a caucus to [to decide who would be Mayor] and can you believe one of the Labor councillors said ‘we can’t let Loreto be Mayor because if we do, the wogs will take over Brunswick’.
“The weird thing is he was like a left wing militant guy, a union guy and a good, decent person Dad always liked, but that’s what he was worried about. It was 1972. The ‘wogs’ had been coming in since the 1950s!”
Loreto was re-elected Mayor for a second term in 1976.
He was a diligent Mayor who took the job seriously. York has vivid memories of him coming home from work with his overalls covered in powder from the cosmetics factory where he worked, having a quick shower and then leaving home for a council meeting in his Mayoral robes and chain.
Meanwhile, after spending her working life in a photographic lab, Olive went back to school in the 1970s, learnt shorthand, and became a popular columnist in The Brunswick Sentinel at the age of 60.
Olive died in 2003 and Loreto in 2009. Their legacy has been recognised by a park at the corner of Holmes Street and Davies Street in Brunswick East for Loreto, and a street in Brunswick West for Olive.
JUST a few weeks after York was released from Pentridge, his father was elected Mayor of Brunswick. He had been voted onto the council for the first time a couple of years earlier.
It was a history making achievement for an uneducated Maltese-speaking migrant.
“He was the first Maltese Mayor of an Australian city, and I believe he was the first – what my dad used to jokingly say – “wog” Mayor of Brunswick.
“He was very proud of that … but there were still prejudices in 1972.
“The Labor councillors met as a caucus to [to decide who would be Mayor] and can you believe one of the Labor councillors said ‘we can’t let Loreto be Mayor because if we do, the wogs will take over Brunswick’.
“The weird thing is he was like a left wing militant guy, a union guy and a good, decent person Dad always liked, but that’s what he was worried about. It was 1972. The ‘wogs’ had been coming in since the 1950s!”
Loreto was re-elected Mayor for a second term in 1976.
He was a diligent Mayor who took the job seriously. York has vivid memories of him coming home from work with his overalls covered in powder from the cosmetics factory where he worked, having a quick shower and then leaving home for a council meeting in his Mayoral robes and chain.
Meanwhile, after spending her working life in a photographic lab, Olive went back to school in the 1970s, learnt shorthand, and became a popular columnist in The Brunswick Sentinel at the age of 60.
Olive died in 2003 and Loreto in 2009. Their legacy has been recognised by a park at the corner of Holmes Street and Davies Street in Brunswick East for Loreto, and a street in Brunswick West for Olive.
YORK left Brunswick in 1984 to pursue a PhD in Sydney. His thesis was about the history of Maltese migration in Australia and this led him into oral history for the first time.
Frustrated that the conventional approach of using print-based sources like government reports, newspaper articles and Immigration Department statistics was not yielding the human stories he desired, York began interviewing elderly Maltese people in nursing homes.
He found the process to be “almost addictive”.
“The print-based documentation told you what happened and when it happened, but with oral history you could learn why it happened and how it happened.
“I’ve got about 30 such interviews with people who came here as young adults or teenagers more than 100 years ago … I’m glad I preserved them and now they’re digitised.”
That led to more work as an oral historian, often on commission from the National Library. York estimates he has conducted more than 500 interviews, each of them two to three hours long. His work has taken him all over Australia and resulted in other histories of migrant communities.
In recent years, he began interviewing some of his friends in Brunswick about their memories and has also recorded interviews with former MPs and other well-known figures. He is keen to conduct more interviews with residents of Brunswick about life in the mid-twentieth century and earlier.
In 2005, York was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia “for service to the community through research into and recording of aspects of Australian immigration, particularly Maltese migration”.
More recently, last year he was recipient of the prestigious Hazel de Berg Award for Excellence in Oral History from Oral History Australia. The award has only been granted 10 times since 2006.
• • •
WITH a daughter now living in Brunswick West and teaching at a local school, York has plenty of excuses to make the nine-hour drive from Canberra a couple of times a year.
Each time he visits, he notices changes in Brunswick from the suburb when he was growing up in the 1960s.
The biggest change has been the demographic mix as the old migrant families have either moved out or become assimilated, but York sees some similarities between the cultural melting pot of his own youth and the diversity of younger people in Brunswick today.
Wandering through his old neighbourhood, the ghosts of a bygone Brunswick follow Barry York around.
Brunswick will continue to evolve but we are lucky that people like Barry York have chronicled some of those memories of the past for future generations to learn from.
