Vale Mary Drost OAM - a Political force for good

Mary Drost OAM, daughter of Henry and Alma McMahon, a woman unafraid to speak truth to power, died in her sleep in hospital on 4 January 2024. A memorial service will be held on Friday 12 January at 2pm at the East Prahran Seventh Day Adventist Church, 8 Wynnstay Road Prahran, but this is a small church so invitations have been limited.  I think Mary would have been 92 years old, because she had celebrated her 90th birthday on 13 October 2021, with a few friends, under lockdown conditions, in the open  air in Fawkner Park.  See https://candobetter.net/sheila-newman/blog/6204/mary-drost-oam-90th-birthday-and-handing-over-planning-backlash.  On 25th of November that year, she finally handed over the reins of Planning Backlash, and, in fact, the whole horse, to Kelvin Thomson, former Member of Parliament for Wills, who renamed it Planning Democracy, with Mary's approval. 

A Political force for good

Mary Drost was a remarkable politician, albeit that she never ran for election, as far as I know.  Unlike many political parties and NGOs, she actually united and led people. She thus brought together 250 plus resident groups across Melbourne and Victoria, by promoting and fostering the voices and deeds of their leaders and members.  That was no mean feat in a country atomised by commuting, overpopulation, overdevelopment, new class divisions, and political splitting. Rather than jealously guarding mailing lists and influence, she was quick to introduce people to each other, listening to their ideas and concerns, and to bring those ideas into action, on a large scale.  In 2014, she publicly challenged Lord Mayor Doyle to a debate on population numbers, and then she brought that debate to the Edge Theatre in Melbourne, where the audience filled the seats, and she publicly called for a referendum on population growth.

 
See my interview with her on the occasion here, in the video entitled, "Voices against population growth:" https://youtu.be/XcR8r1gedvk

The debate itself at 

And the public mic here:

Mary also organised and led her coalition of groups to meet again and again on the steps of Victoria's parliament, as well as in local venues.  Scroll down this page for some examples: https://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/1117. She understood the connection between [over]development and [over]population and how VCAT was becoming increasingly inaccessible to ordinary residents, and skewed towards developers and their Queens Counsels.  Among other things, at Planning Backlash and Boroondara Residents Action Group "Mad as Hell event" in Camberwell on Sunday 29th May, 2016, with BRAG, she introduced the Resident's Rights Bill. See https://candobetter.net/sheila-newman/blog/4880/residents-bill-rights-rbr-support-brilliant-initiative 

She oversaw, as a 'convener,' rather than as an elected president or serving committee secretary, since she was wary of the high risk of formal meetings and NGO proceedings sapping her considerable energy.  She was able to foster activist leaders and help them cooperate with other activists. She gave credit where credit was due. She was really quite open-minded and not easily shocked. She could stand up for herself, but she did not take herself overly seriously, helped by a great sense of humour and a lack of fear, which I heard her attribute to needing to stand up to four brothers, as the only girl. She was generous with her time. She knew how to dress in order to attract the eye, often in red or blue.

Tragic commonalites between Jakarta and Melbourne

She had learned from experience in Jakarta that there was a real risk of Australian politicians caving into big business and turning Australia into a chain of huge overpopulated cities. She saw this risk come to its malignant fruition and about to explode into a different order of magnitude.  She felt as if she was living through the tragedy of Jakarta again.

In 2017 she wrote,

"I have just come back from 2 weeks in my old home Jakarta. When we went there to live there were 3 million people and it was easy to get around and very manageable. Those were the good days. The Governor, Ali Sadikin, closed the city to more incomers on advice from UN city planning experts as they said the bigger a city gets the harder it is to manage and the mega cities are beyond human management. Immigration was reduced down to those who had work permits. (Immigrants in this case refers to people coming to the city from the countryside). The Governor himself told me the story that the President eventually forced him to open the city to immigration. Population is now maybe 10 million and growing. The city is a total polluted gridlocked nightmare." https://candobetter.net/mary-drost/blog/5225/melbourne-and-jakarta-while-we-are-subject-overcrowding

 

A life well-lived

Although she lived by herself in the large house and garden where she had been raised from age ten, with four brothers, in Camberwell, she was the antithesis of the developer- lobby's caricatures of elderly widows rattling around in their empty homes. As well as being a seriously active member of the community, she thoroughly enjoyed her 1880s home on 1,872 m²  of land (according to online realestate info), which her father, a GP, had purchased in 1940. Her house entertained visually with an exhuberant collection of oriental, Dutch Indonesian, and Australian artworks and bric-a-brac, including huge oriental wall-hangings, rococo teasets, and framed photos.  There was a large sitting room filled with mahogany tables, a whimsically decorated bathroom, garnished with ducks in the tub, and a monumental mahogany four-poster with oriental curtains billowing in her bedroom. 

A narrow staircase located near the outdoor-hat and coat cupboard, led up to the roof to a tower with a spiral staircase that went up several floors. At the age of 91, I think, Mary led me up to the  top.

She seemed to have a series of law students living in a small attached flat, mostly in return for services rendered, such as helping with her email and computer, and with legal advice.

Mary and another great unelected politician, Julianne Bell, (Royal Park Protection Group and Protectors of Public Land) coincided on many projects.  My memory is that Mary may have acquired Julianne's mailing list for Royal Park Protection Group or Protectors of Public Land Victoria (PPLVic), irritating Julianne, but the two still worked together after that, although in different styles.

There is so much more I could say about Mary, but I want to publish this in order to mark her passing and her life in a timely way.  You can find a great deal on her in these pages: https://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/582 and https://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/1117.