In 1981 the tenants of a terrace house in Erskineville, in Sydney’s inner west, went on a rent strike and used the money they had saved to buy a few barrels of supplies and sell them at a tiny profit.
“It was a fairly rudimentary co-op, selling dry goods such as grains, flours, nuts and dried fruit.” But it filled the very useful function of providing a source of good value food to the area’s poor.
Back then the co-op went by the name of the Charles Street Co-op. Soon it opened in the local Anglican Church Hall on Saturday mornings and changed its name to ‘The Erko’. In 1983 it moved again, this time to Alpha House in Newtown, which also accommodated a group of artist squatters. On the ground floor of these premises, the community food store began to take on a formal co-operative structure.
Again security of tenure became an important issue. In 1987, the New South Wales Department of Housing threw out Alpha House’s squatter artists and its food store. The Co-op moved to a corner store location on Newtown’s Enmore Road.
The following year, 13 people set out to formalise the Co-op and founded it as Alfalfa House in December 1988. It was first registered as a worker co-operative and later changed its status to a consumer co-operative. Members were obliged to work in the Co-op for the princely sum of $1 an hour.
The next decade saw the Co-op alter its rules and bring in many features associated with modern shopping – extended trading, electronic funds transfer, computerised point-of-sale – to try and keep the co-operative profitable.
It wasn’t until it began to employ staff and drop the requirement for rmembers to work a certain number of hours a month that operations began to turn the corner. More than 40 years since its rent strike, Alfalfa House had slowly grown to include upwards of 3300 members when it finally closed its doors due to lack of security of tenure.
