For decades, Sylvia Hrovatin and Jean Stuart worked on opposing sides of an ideological divide. Somehow, they stayed friends.
Sylvia: In the 1990s, I was in my 20s and working at City of Sydney council as a town planner. I met Jean when I had to attend a public meeting about development in [inner-city] Ultimo and Pyrmont. Jean was a leading activist there, campaigning for open space. She won me over by coming over and immediately engaging with my two young children.
She was a drama teacher with this beautiful English accent. Both my parents were migrants and I grew up in the southern suburbs. I was always attracted to people who spoke well: I tried to model myself on them. Jean was very welcoming but she was also very, very articulate about how the residents’ needs weren’t being met.
There was an overgrown block of land opposite her terrace in Pyrmont back then. It was owned by [developer] City West and surrounded by cyclone-wire fencing. They wouldn’t let anyone in. Jean went through official channels – wrote letters, organised a petition, but it all came to nothing. Then she came to me and said, “Sylvia, I’ve got the community organised. I’ve got a gardener, plants, a lawnmower and a bolt-cutter. Are you coming?”
It became known as Interim Park and she won an award for her activism. When City West sold the land a few years later, Jean cried and cried. It was the saddest day of her life.
She didn’t like it when I left the council and started working for a big property developer. We both want to make the environment better for people, but we come at it differently. Our attitude is, we’re never going to agree, so why talk about it? Instead, she has introduced me to a lot of artists. A way of saying, “OK, we’re not going to talk about development: we’re going to talk about art.”
Jean loved my first husband, George [Ikners, a criminal defence barrister]. He was the life of the party but lived life too hard. He got cirrhosis and stopped drinking, but was left with other health problems. In 2012, our family went to Uluru for Christmas. George insisted he was fine, but I knew he wasn’t: he got worse. The Royal Flying Doctor service came to take him to Alice Springs, but he had a fatal heart attack on the way. He was 62; I was 50.
I called Jean to tell her and she started crying. She told me to take it all in and then move on. I thought it was a bit harsh, but she was right. I met David [Patch, a Crown prosecutor] four weeks after George died, through my neighbour. A month later, we started going out. Other people said it was too soon, and my children found it very hard, but Jean was like, “You only have one life: live it.” She was at the wedding two years later.
When I told her I was thinking of leaving another development company after 22 years, she said, “And so you should. You’ve given enough to those people. Don’t sandwich work into your life: extricate it from your life.”
During COVID, Jean believed she was going to die and wrote me a farewell letter, instructing me not to read it until she was gone. I read it immediately, of course. Now, it has become a tangible record of a friendship that bridged ideology, age, class and circumstance. We haven’t always agreed, but we’ve connected. I’ve learnt how much a life can widen when you make room for people who don’t match your tribe.
‘If you’re friends, you’ve got to agree to disagree.’
Jean Stuart
Jean: Sylvia arrived at the public meeting with two little people, her daughter and son. I really took to her. She was very dynamic, but she also knew how to listen. Later, I could tell that when she got hold of the idea of what we were doing [with Interim Park], she was personally very sympathetic. It chimed with her own values.
Still, as community activists resisting overdevelopment, we were all horrified when she went to work for a property developer. We said, “Sylvia, how can you?” She said, “Well, it’s a very good position. I’ll be able to have quite a bit of influence there.” I said, “Hmm.” We were all too fond of her by then to hold it against her.
And, of course, she – or the companies she worked for – did things we didn’t like. If you’re friends, you’ve got to agree to disagree. How much difference you can tolerate depends on how solid the friendship is, and its initial basis. If you’ve always really listened to the other person, then you’ve got a genuine, two-way street.
Back then, she was married to George. Everybody loved George: he was very clever and a great raconteur. It was terrible when he died. Sylvia coped with it pretty well, really. She always holds things together – for everybody. She’s intuitive, very aware of what impact things can have on people. In her heart, a lot was going on, of course, but she’s a fighter.
When she told me she’d met David, my reaction was, “If you like him and he likes you, why should you worry what anybody else says? Just do your own thing. Enjoy your life.” It was extremely hard for the children early on, though. It can be hard for friends, too, when someone gets a new partner, but I’ve grown to like David a lot. I can see they’re very suited. The happiest I’ve seen her was on her wedding day – at a little boat-house in Vaucluse.
At Christmas, I always have a party and she does the catering. People always ask, “Is Sylvia doing the catering?” I say, “Don’t be so greedy – and yes.” They say, “Then we’d love to come.”
Sylvia really understands that how you communicate influences other people’s responses. She hasn’t talked to me about her latest melanoma [removed in September], but she did tell me about an earlier one. It took her a while to absorb all the emotions and clarify them in her own mind beforehand.
She’s a very positive person, so it can take some adjustment when something goes wrong. She has recently retired and that will take some adjustment, too. I was always recommending she retire or go out on her own, but she didn’t take any notice. She makes her own decisions and doesn’t seek advice. I’m like that, too. What does somebody else really know about what you should do?
Editor’s note: It is with sadness we report that Jean Stuart died in hospital after a short illness on Tuesday, June 9, aged 95.
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