Home Made

Addi Road’s community centre is a vibrant hub seven days a week, with the Sunday markets just one of the jewels of activity it allows for. Some forty-plus civil society groups, social justice organisations and plethora of artists in their low-cost studio spaces (rents subsidised by keeping them at well below market rates) are among those who call the place home.

 

Addison Road Community Organisation does its best to keep the nine-acre site alive and functioning for everyone.

 

Apart from the Sunday markets you can find Radio Skid Row 88.9FM here, both the Hellenic (Greek) Theatre and the Flightpath Theatre, the Australian Martial Arts Academy, Addi Road’s own community-friendly Stirrup Gallery running a year-long program of exhibitions, and two other large venues, Gumbramorra Hall and the Drill Hall (otherwise known at Hut 8 or ‘the Cathedral’) where we host everything from film nights and panel talks to events like the Addi Road Writers’ Festival and last year’s inaugural and very successful day for teenage bands and artists – made for and entirely curated by young people – Addi Rock.

 

 

There’s 170 trees to attend to on the site. Many buildings, not to mention the grounds themselves, require a lot of work. Beautiful heritage-listed structures knocked together as temporary buildings to house soldiers preparing to leave during World War One do not make for easy preservation. The place has expanded ad hoc across the last century, finally returning to community ownership in the mid 1970s when Addi Road’s official origins as a centre were wedded to the birth of multiculturalism as an active vision during the Whitlam era.

 

Search the by-ways of the community centre and you will find the offices of Ethnic and Community Services; our friends in genuinely useful recycling at The Bower; the home base for The Burdekin Association (“Our Youth. Their Future.”); children’s art classes being held by Drawn to Seeing and The Assemblage Sisters; ethically sourced arts and goods for sale at The Fair Trade Emporium; Halfmoon Yoga and Autism Australia; the Addison Road Early Learning Centre for pre-schoolers; the Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre; and the Marrickville Legal Centre offering free advice to locals on everything from tenancy issues to your rights in any dispute.

 

One of Addi Road’s latest innovations over the last year has been Wednesday Night Lights. Addi Road has partnered up with Street Side Medics to provide free medical treatment for the homeless and anyone who needs advice every Wednesday night between 6pm to 8pm. Marrickville Legal Centre have joined us at a trestle table, advising people and answering questions, again for free. Hot meals, also free, are served. In the meanwhile we keep our low budget grocery store, Addi Road Food Pantry Marrickville, open till 7pm on that night. The usual week day hours for the Food Pantry are midday to 4pm – we are finding more and more people are lining up to shop here on a tight budget, as well as enjoy the bonus of free bread and a selection of free fruit and vegetables if you spend more than $5.

 

So that’s Addi Road in a snapshot, today and many other days… a venue for a community market; a space for arts and theatre; a home to organisations that deal with everything from autism to bush music to multicultural conversations and more.

 

With Addison Road Community Organisation running our own programs and events directly, not least our food justice program via our Food Pantry and evenings like Wednesday Night Lights. Somehow, in between all that, Addi Road keeps this time-worn and knocked around community centre afloat and functioning without any regular government funding. It ain’t easy but the place is thriving.

 

People come and go just for the pleasure of strolling through the rambling grounds, walking their dogs, letting their children play on the grass or shoot hoops at the basketball rings. They.ll pick up a great coffee or juice smoothie from the AMA Cafe out back of the martial arts building (look for the fluttering pennants that say they’re open) or sit down for a fine meal at Koshari Korner, our Egyptian street food cafe right beside Gumbramorra Hall and the carpark.

 

Around the city, urban planners are meanwhile searching for venues, trying to evolve new government policies for resilience, hunting out ways to stimulate community focal points that bring together social justice, multiculturalism, the arts and a basic need for useful, open green spaces.

 

We’re glad to say we’re here and still happening – and that the community is driving Addi Road forward into another active year. Not a place imposed, refitted or imagined from above; but a world growing out of its own history and ground. Grassroots, street level… essential and real to community life in Sydney’s Inner West and well beyond it.