Charlotte Dobrovits is proud of her community at Poets Corner in Redfern, considered by some to be one of the toughest parts of Sydney. She is proud of the work that they have done together to clean up the area and make it work as a community hub, however that was not always the case.
At the age of 55 when her father threw her out of the family home, she found herself in a women’s shelter and then in the McKell building, one of four public housing blocks in Redfern.
Five years before that Charlotte had been hospitalised with anorexia nervosa brought on by grief as she watched her mother die from cancer. Her father had taken her home but when she tried to commit suicide he refused to have anything more to do with her. While Charlotte says she would never have killed herself, it was a cry for help, her father throwing her out was, she said, the best thing that ever happened to her. It made her grow up and become less self-absorbed.
It’s been a long journey from that moment 10 years ago, to where she is today, a youth drug and alcohol counsellor and a strong and active member of the community at Poets Corner.
Initially, she said, “I lived here and I hated it. I drank for two years, not to any great amount but constantly, every day, I needed that one bottle of wine to feel normal. So that is alcoholism. Because I was brought up on the North Shore, I had never lived in a place like this, I didn’t know how to handle it. So, two years I drank, and then I went into rehab and then I started looking around noticing my neighbours, noticing what was wrong here and then we had the murder.”
She had started writing letters to members of parliament telling them about how bad life was in the McKell building. People dying of drug overdoses in the stairwells, people jumping off the roof and committing suicide. She told them that elderly people nearing the end of their life “should not have to watch people being scraped off the carpark”.
Even when she started as a volunteer tenant representative for the McKell building she says that she and Laura Banning, the other rep, and reps in the other buildings too, voiced their concerns, but nothing really happened till David McNulty was murdered in the building in 2014, and Harriet Wran, the daughter of former Premier Neville Wran, was tried for her part in his murder. She said, “It wasn’t our voice that really got us help, it was the fact that the media were so intent and focused this attention on us that shamed Housing to do something.”
Because of that media coverage the building got spruced up, 24-hour security was put in and Redlink, a one-stop service provider, was set up at the bottom of the McKell building.
Charlotte says a service such as Redlink is vital in this community because the people living here have multiple issues that need to be treated by accessing multiple service providers such as drug and alcohol counselling, mental health services, anti-social behaviour services.
Charlotte works three days a week as a youth drug and alcohol counsellor and she volunteers as one of the housing reps in McKell. On Thursdays she is at the community centre to help distribute food from OzHarvest and on Fridays she cooks food for around 90 people; then she sits and talks to them about services and programs that are available and the issues that come from living in the area.
Some of the volunteers who help her on Fridays do so to pay off their fines; for every hour they work they get $35 taken off their fine.
Her biggest bugbear at the moment is finding long-term mental health care, especially for people placed into public housing without a support system and whose behaviour impacts others in the community through anti-social behaviour and bashings.
Charlotte’s commitment to the community in which she lives and the work they have done together to make the area a better place to live was honoured in 2017 when she was chosen as the Newtown Electorate Local Woman of the Year for her outstanding work in the community.
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