To understand who truly owns Sydney, ignore the corporate logos on Martin Place office towers or the portfolios of commercial players such as Dexus, Mirvac and Charter Hall and look instead to the Catholic Church, one of the harbour city’s largest non-government property owners for more than two centuries.
The empire expands well beyond the extraordinarily valuable churches, schools, hospitals and aged care homes dotted around Sydney’s suburbs. Church officials recently snapped up a 15-storey office building on Elizabeth Street for $97 million, and reaped $275 million from the sale of a Liverpool Street building purchased 20 years earlier for just $33 million. Many property transactions and holdings benefit from tax-exempt charitable status.
The church is notoriously secretive about the scope of its portfolio but the value easily reaches into the billions. The asset base is so substantial the Archdiocese of Sydney has a panel of 14 experts charged with advising on property matters.
Against that backdrop, a small former school in Redfern is akin to a rounding error for the Catholic Church. But for the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) Redfern, which has provided medical services from the property for 55 years, the site represents both a missed opportunity for reconciliation and a critical piece of its future.
The Herald can reveal the Archdiocese of Sydney has rejected repeated requests to give the Turner Street building to the groundbreaking medical service, which treats thousands of the city’s sickest and most disadvantaged residents and is recognised globally as a pioneer in Indigenous healthcare.
AMS leaders have respectfully and patiently worked to seal an agreement for more than 25 years, according to a cache of files seen by the Herald, only to be rebuffed by George Pell and his successor as the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher.
The AMS tried again late last year, lodging an exhaustive 13,200-word document outlining the compelling benefits of finally owning the building it has called home for 55 years. Fisher again refused, with one of his officials delivering the verdict via a 300-word email.
Turning over the title deeds would make little difference to the church’s current status: it hasn’t occupied the building since Father Ted Kennedy, the widely loved late renegade priest of St Vincent’s Redfern, first made it available to the suburb’s booming Aboriginal population in the 1970s.
Owning the site would deliver the AMS a healthier balance sheet, certainty of tenure, operational autonomy, and better chances of obtaining capital funding. The two-storey brick building is crying out for renovation (some parts of the floor risk caving in under the weight of footsteps) and has been identified as the ideal site for an expansion of mental health services.
The bigger picture is that the property represents a practical test of the church’s commitment to reconciliation. Transferring ownership to First Nations people would constitute a powerful act of recognition and healing between two groups that once worked closely together in Redfern, but have since drifted apart as more conservative elements of the church solidified their influence. This point has been repeatedly made to Fisher, to no avail.
“The church can help us help others,” said AMS chief executive LaVerne Bellear. “The people who come here aren’t just ‘Aboriginal people’. They are the church’s people as well. There’s no difference between them and us – only that we’ve got brown skin.”
Former federal minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney argued that the church would not miss the site, and said donating it would be a powerful demonstration of its publicly stated commitment to reconciliation.
“Turn those words into action ... I just don’t think the church can really explain why they wouldn’t give the lease over – perhaps apart from the fact that they don’t trust people,” Burney said. “And that to me is not very Christian.”
Father Frank Brennan, a Jesuit priest who worked in the parish of Redfern and served as a professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, described the request as “very reasonable and proper”.
“The AMS has a proven track record. They’ve been there for more than 50 years, they’re not going to move, they own some land there already, and handing over this additional section would seem to me to make a lot of sense.”
The position of archbishops Fisher and Pell stands in contrast to the North Sydney Sisters of Mercy, who donated a school and convent they owned in Redfern to the Aboriginal Medical Service in 1978, enabling its expansion. The remainder of the site is still owned by the church hierarchy.
The gesture was seen as a pioneering act of reconciliation through Christian generosity – something modern church leaders seem unwilling to replicate.
Campaigners believe next month’s 40th anniversary of a watershed speech in Alice Springs by Pope John Paul II might give Fisher cause to reconsider. The address – which forms part of a mural inside Redfern’s St Vincent’s Church – was the first time the Catholic Church leadership truly acknowledged the suffering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia.
In an area littered with false starts, missteps and outright failures, the AMS Redfern stands out as a rare Indigenous policy success story.
In 1972, more than a dozen Aboriginal alcoholics were arrested for squatting in the terraces on Redfern’s Lawson Street and hauled before the courts. The magistrate released the men into the care of Kaye and Bob Bellear, the latter of whom would become Australia’s first Indigenous judge. He died in 2005.
Ted Kennedy, the local priest from 1971 to 2002, let the Bellears house the men in an old Turner Street school building owned by the Archdiocese of Sydney and the Sisters of Mercy. The Aboriginal Medical Service eventually moved in, with the late renowned ophthalmologist Professor Fred Hollows as a co-founder and its first medical director.
Kaye Bellear told the Herald Archbishop Fisher risked looking “mean-spirited”.
“The Catholic Church is absolutely not struggling on the property front in Sydney or anywhere else in the world,” she said. “The church owes the Aboriginal community an act of reconciliation and this would be a good one for the Redfern community.”
Today, the AMS treats nearly 5000 patients a year through 50,000 different visits. It offers GP consultations, immunisations, sexual health screening, mental health support, dental treatment, aged care support, and drug and alcohol services. “The waiting room is packed by 7.30am,” Bellear said. The groundbreaking Aboriginal-controlled structure has been replicated around Australia.
Marcia Ella-Duncan, the first Indigenous woman to represent Australia in international netball, has credited the service with saving her life after doctors discovered an aortic aneurysm in her abdomen during a routine health check.
The church-owned building and a small adjoining car park form the only components of the Redfern health campus not owned by the AMS.
Explaining the decision by the Sisters of Mercy to give their properties to the AMS in the 1970s, Superior General Sister Patricia Kerin invoked the words of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace: “It is not enough for the Christian community to acknowledge the injustice – the injustice must be righted.”
The sisters wrote to Bishop Peter Ingham in 1997 calling for the remaining property owned by the church at the Redfern site to be given in trust to the Aboriginal people of inner Sydney. The sisters said such a move would be a big step “towards confessing our wrongs of the past and our seriousness in seeking reconciliation”. Their plea was rejected.
The progressive Kennedy continued fighting for the cause, one of many sources of friction with the ultraconservative Pell. Kennedy was unable to secure an agreement before he died in 2005 but his good friend Danny Gilbert has been trying ever since.
Gilbert, the chairman of top-tier corporate law firm Gilbert + Tobin, has spent more than 25 years sending letters to Pell and later Fisher outlining the case for transferring ownership to the AMS.
“Ted – together with the remarkable Mum Shirl and numerous other Catholic women and men – forged a relationship between Aboriginal people and the Catholic Church in Sydney unlike anything seen before or since,” Gilbert told the Herald.
“The opportunity to honour that legacy has been staring the church in the face for more than 30 years. Gifting the old school property to the Aboriginal Medical Service would not be an act of charity – it would be an act of justice and fidelity to the church’s own spiritual and pastoral life.”
Gilbert’s latest entreaty included a lengthy report into the building’s history and potential future under Redfern’s Aboriginal custodians.
The letter was addressed to Archbishop Fisher, but he did not respond personally. Instead, Michael Digges, the executive director of administration and finance for the archdiocese, replied in January saying it was “not possible” to gift 36 Turner Street because it forms part of the “stable patrimony” of the St Vincent de Paul Church in Redfern. Stable patrimony is a term the Church uses to describe assets that provide financial security through future preservation of value.
In a 2017 letter, the then-Vicar General Gerald Gleeson said the archdiocese could not accede to the request in part because of the “parlous financial state” of the parish, which he claimed was at that point $1.1 million in debt. He also invoked “demographic changes” occurring in Redfern and claimed it was “unclear” whether the suburb would remain a suitable location for the AMS. He even said a rent-free lease would no longer be possible, although the church has since offered the property for a peppercorn annual fee.
Bellear vowed the service would go nowhere else. “This is an Aboriginal landmark in Sydney,” she said. “This will always be a health site. The issue is that we are full to the brim.”
Fisher declined the Herald’s request for an interview. A spokesperson for the archdiocese said the parish “has always and will continue to support” the AMS.
“This has never been in doubt,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the AMS proposal would require a complex subdivision of the land because the site included the heritage-listed parish church, a shared driveway, and adjoining buildings, “all together making the concept of subdivision impractical”.
However, the AMS last year engaged town planners to study the site. In contrast to the claims of the church, the lengthy examination of town planning and heritage issues confirmed a subdivision was possible to enable the AMS to own the former church building.
The archdiocese spokesperson did not address questions about whether it accepted that retaining the property limited the ability of the AMS to seek capital grants and expand services.
“As the property cannot be subdivided and gifted, the parish has not been charging any rent to AMS and offering the alternative of a 10-year lease with holding over provisions on a peppercorn rental for several years now,” the spokesperson said.
“This would provide both affordability and the security of tenure that would enable AMS to seek capital grants to extend its services. This solution can be implemented immediately and would enable the good work of AMS to continue uninterrupted.”
The Herald sought the archbishop’s response to criticism that this decision represents a missed opportunity for reconciliation. The spokesperson would not say whether the archbishop would accept an offer to tour the AMS.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek, whose federal electorate covers Redfern, told the Herald she would “love” to see the archdiocese agree to help.
“Giving the AMS certainty about its future would help protect an institution that has meant so much to so many people, and ensure it can keep delivering these services for generations to come.”
Gilbert said the church has a rare chance to do good for people who most need it. “Reconciliation demands more than words. It demands action. It is long past time for the archdiocese to make this gift.”
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