HOME ON THE ROCKS Blue Lucine on Displacement and The Eviction
‘It was a film that everybody was telling me to stop making, the whole time I was making it,’ says director Blue Lucine, referring to her documentary The Eviction, which premiered at the 2018 Antenna Documentary Film Festival. ‘People would say, “No-one’s going to watch it,” or, “The story’s already over.”’
The seed for The Eviction was sown on the evening of 19 March 2014. Lucine was having dinner with friends shortly after the New South Wales (NSW) Government had announced it would sell 293 public-housing properties in Sydney. These included the famed Sirius building, made in the brutalist style, as well as other dwellings in Millers Point, Dawes Point and The Rocks. The sale would affect 579 tenants, who received two years’ notice to relocate.1 Lucine recalls:
My friends knew elderly people who lived in Millers Point. They were distraught, wondering […] how it would impact everybody. Meanwhile, most of the media was presenting a different story: That the tenants were bludgers who lived in a rich area. That they should be kicked out, and it would be a really good thing for the rest of NSW. The simplicity of that made me question what was really happening and why.
By 22 March, Lucine had borrowed a camera from a friend and begun filming. Her first stop was a public meeting at Abraham Mott Hall, Millers Point. Convened by Alex Greenwich, the independent Member for
