My Family Tree

She married an Italian guy and was whisked off to Sydney. She had two children and I do have a pic of them somewhere. Not exactly sure but I think her husband’s surname was De Bondi, but I could be wrong there, I will find out.
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It is possible she died in the past two years from 2015 as that is how long I have spoken to her. I will try and find out through her son or daughter.
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Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 13, 1995

ANDREW BYRNE

A flick of red ink in Canberra, and their lives are changed forever. Now, as their neighbours' houses are demolished, local businesses collapse and the planes shake the sky, the people of the flight path struggle with life inside a nightmare. They told their stories to ANDREW BYRNE.

IN six weeks, Ada and Frank Facer will close their front door for the final time and walk slowly away from the spick-and-span bungalow that has been the only home they have known in 53 years of marriage.

As they shuffle down the scrubbed porch steps, where more than half a century ago Frank swept his young bride into his arms, the couple's four daughters will quietly begin packing up their belongings.

"I came to this street when I was 13. My grandfather owned the local shop," says Ada, of Henry Street, Sydenham. "I don't want to leave. When you are 80 you don't need very much. Our church is here, and a doctor who could not be bettered anywhere, and the local hospital up the road has saved my husband's life. I can't bear to touch anything. There are memories everywhere. The girls are going to pack it up after we are gone."

Ada is interrupted as a whistle blows over the roofs of the boarded-up houses on the opposite side of the street. From around the corner, limping heavily past a ripped old mattress and mounds of dumped refuse, comes the newspaper delivery "boy". He pauses to blow the whistle again. Bert O'Keefe, 59, pulls a cart containing copies of the daily papers.

A one-time NSW boxing champion until he was partly paralysed in a bout in 1959, Bert's paper round is suffering the same sharp decline as the local surroundings. "The few who are left cry on my shoulder and say they don't want to leave," O'Keefe says. "I used to sell 60 papers every afternoon; now I am lucky if it is 35."

He stops as the faraway rumbling sound which has been increasing steadily starts to become unbearable. It progresses to an ear-splitting roar as the shiny underbelly of a Qantas jumbo dominates the sky.

As it pulls up from the runway a little over a kilometre away, the aircraft is visibly spewing out black fumes that drift down towards us. It is falling on Sydenham, a community the Federal Government has put into terminal decline as a sacrifice for the expansion of the international airport and the opening of the third runway last November.

It is one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, with neat little federation-style homes crammed into streets with solid old traditional names such as George, Henry and Frederick. Several months ago, the Government announced a voluntary "buy-out" scheme covering 112 of these houses - the ones its experts say are worst affected by aircraft noise. The Government claims it is paying above the market price for the properties to enable owners to buy similar homes in quieter areas.

The rest of the $260 million fund is being used to insulate 4,200 homes in other parts of Sydenham and suburbs stretching north through Marrickville, Leichhardt, Drummoyne and Hunters Hill.

Theoretically, the Government's compensation plans must have seemed simple, but dealing with real people rather than dots on a map is always much harder. In practice, many of the residents whose homes are to be insulated would prefer to escape. Tearing their hair out, unable to bear the screeching noise of the planes, they are desperate and furious that the Government will not buy them out.

Meanwhile, some of those the Government would like to buy out say they want to stay. Older, maybe slightly deaf, they would rather put up with the noise than leave memories behind. And although it is meant to be a voluntary scheme, if they don't take the money and run, they won't qualify for insulation.

Maria Mazzu has lived in Sydenham almost all her life. Her parents bought the three-bedroom bungalow in George Street when she was seven and she remembers running around collecting rusty old horseshoes in the surrounding bushland. Now the Government wants to buy their home.

"We don't want to leave, but there is nothing here any more," she says. "How can we stay when it is becoming a slum, and they have already tried to start demolishing houses next door to us?"

Retired railworker Joe Fell has lived in George Street all his life. He is 77 and his front door is less than 12 metres from the Mazzus'. But although the noise from the planes skimming overhead is no different, he and his wife are trapped by the line of misery on the map.

Aircraft noise is measured using the Australian Noise Exposure Forecast (ANEF), a system that takes account of the number, noise-level and time of day flights affect a specific location. The Mazzus' side of George Street is regarded as 40 ANEF, enough to qualify for buy-out, while on the opposite footpath it is calculated to be 35 ANEF.

That is above the Australian standard, but the Government has agreed to buy out only residents covered by the higher figure.

Others residents down to 30 ANEF will have their homes insulated. As you stand outside Joe's garden gate as a British Airways jumbo roars in to land, it is impossible to note any difference as you take the few steps to Maria's side of the street.

Of course, many locals are bitter and complain they were ignored and sidelined during the vociferous debate over whether the third runway should go ahead - people such as George Sydney, a gritty little Scotsman who has lived in Sutherland Street since arriving in Australia 20 years ago.

As president of the local St Peters and Tempe neighbourhood centre, he spent hundreds of hours over the past three years at working party discussions and consultative meetings with governmentappointed officials about the runway.

The experience has left him frustrated and angry, as recommendations were not acted upon and reports that contradicted official policy were dismissed.

"Every time we thought we knew what was going to happen they moved the goalposts," he says. "The people making the decisions believed they could throw in bigger and noisier planes over our heads all the time and get away with it by saying we bought into the area knowing it was next to an airport.

"But we were lied to and deceived all the way down the line. They said the old east-west runway would not close for five years and then they did it almost straight away. They gave us reports saying we would only have 12 per cent of the take-offs over our heads, but we are getting more than twice that number.

"The first consultants' report said the buy-up area would include 500 houses, but that was whittled down to 112. And the biggest con on the local community here was calling it the 'third runway'. With the closure of the east-west, the only runway that can take the big jumbos is the new one, which means they all go over Sydenham."

Now George, whose home is not one of those in the 112-house buy-up zone, says he has probably lost more than $50,000 on the value of his home. "Lots of young couples who bought in just before the new runway opened have lost their deposits, and many old people who have lived here most, if not all, of their lives have had their nesteggs swept away."

Aware he is defending a disintegrating neighbourhood, George continues to battle to try to salvage something for the future. "We are a disposable community as far as the Government is concerned. People have lost all their civic pride, they say: 'Why should we care - no-one else does'."

The feeling of neglect and decay is tangible. Seventy-seven of the homes in the buy-up area are already empty. Planks of thick timber cover doors and windows, but through the occasional gap you catch a glimpse of an interior, dusty, sad-looking rooms with floors ripped out to prevent squatters moving in.

Many locals believe the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), the Federal agency overseeing the buy-out and insulation program, is delib- erately running down the area to chip away at morale. On Wednesday last week, officials from DAS, who had been thwarted in an earlier attempt to begin demolition work, tried again. Directing operations this time was John Mackay, the deputy secretary of the Canberra-based department, who had flown in to take charge.

When residents, including several local councillors, picketed the target house and prevented work starting, Mackay invited them to a meeting. So, on blue plastic chairs in the narrow living room of one of the recently bought-out houses due for demolition, David sat down with Goliath.

Flanked by two junior staff members, Mackay listened impassively as one by one his emotional opponents made their pleas. Tempers occasionally threatened to get out of hand as they asked him to halt the demolition on humanitarian grounds, to allow neighbours considering offers not to be intimidated. They argued for a cooling-off period until the Federal election, which might see a new government with different policies on the airport.

He listened, but Mackay was in no mood to give in. He told them: "We are part of the Government and we implement its policy. If there is a change of government we will implement a different plan." He said the houses would be demolished and the area grassed over, although no decision had been taken on its final use.

Locals fear the parkland option they have been promised will be ditched in favour of an extension of Sydenham Road and the building of an industrial park to service the airport.

A No Aircraft Noise councillor on Marrickville Council, Allan Rees, asked: "Give us a plan of what will happen; we need to have a vision. Local people have been ill-informed, misinformed and non-informed and you are hiding behind the shield of the Crown." In an admission that will not please his political masters, Mackay conceded: "There has been a lot of deception all over the place - I agree with you on that."

But that was all he gave. After announcing vaguely that the buy-up area might be enlarged, the man from Canberra walked out for a cigarette and the meeting ended in a stalemate.

Later, in an interview with the Herald, he said: "They asked if I had any empathy with local people and the stress they are under. Well, they should do my job for a day and they would learn about stress." As he spoke, Mackay, who flies to Sydney two or three times a week, stood next to a whiteboard in the site office upon which someone had drawn an aeroplane and scribbled: "Paul 'Jackboots' Keating is kickstarting the republic. This is Lorrie Bury-town."

He believes he is involved in a public relations war with the protesters. "It is like Greenpeace in its fight against Shell over the oil platform," he says. "We are Shell and we have to make sure we are not on the back foot just responding to their allegations all the time."

This unequal duel, a local residents' group and a handful of councillors versus the might of the Federal Government, will continue until the bitter end.

An insight into what the tiny bunch of teachers and professionals who lead the protesters have been up against is revealed in a number of documents obtained by the Herald. They show that as many as five years ago the then NSW Government was paying a public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, to devise a campaign to persuade Sydney people to back the second parallel runway.

The secret strategy included focusing on talk-back radio hosts, making sure they were supplied with briefing kits which rebutted all the environmental and social arguments against the runway.

Members of the Canberra press gallery were also targets. In a letter dated February 16, 1990, detailing his progress to officials in the Department of State Development, Alex Paton from Hill & Knowlton reported: "I believe most of the reporters down there (Canberra) are 'on side' and are in support of our standing. Very encouraging to hear."

Ray Smith, the vice-president of the St Peters and Tempe neighbourhood centre, is genuine when he says he believes his telephone is tapped. A New Yorker who now lectures in teacher education at the University of NSW, he has been in Sydenham for 17 years. "This is a dirty game and we are standing in the way of developments which are worth billions of dollars," he says.

Smith lives in a double-storey freestanding house in Terry Street. Shortly after the parallel runway opened he flew to Canberra and was granted a meeting with the political architect of the airport extension, Laurie Brereton. "He gave me 60 seconds," says Smith. "He looked at me and said he was only interested in the big picture because he had 80 planes an hour to land. The noise since November has been horrific. You don't realise how tense you can get until you get away from the area.

"We don't want the houses to come down because it is the thin line in the sand drawn between us and the Government's determination to expand the airport and disintegrate this neighbourhood. It will be a tangible manifestation of what the Government has set about to do. Most of the disadvantaged people here have a great deal of difficulty understanding what is going on. They do not know how to communicate their fears and questions to the authorities."

Joan Kostanti, 59, who lives a few doors down, managed to live with the increased noise for three weeks before she went to the doctor and was prescribed tranquillisers. She admits: "Now I don't know where I am most of the time but it is better than the noise. I am a prisoner in my own home. If I want to get some peace of mind I have to leave."
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Australia, Electoral Rolls, Census & Voter Lists
Name: Joan Ann Kostanti
Residence: 1963 - city, East Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Australia, Electoral Rolls, Census & Voter Lists
Name: Joan Ann Kostanti
Residence: 1963-1980 - city, Kingsford-Smith, New South Wales, Australia

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