‘None of us had been on an aeroplane’: Albanese’s old crew remembers

Sherie Dewstow remembers the moment Anthony Albanese took his first flight like it was yesterday.

It was 1984, and the freshly minted Sydney University economics graduate had just started working for Tom Uren, a former prisoner of war, MP and legend of Labor’s Left faction, who would go on to be a mentor to Albanese and almost a surrogate father.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, centre, and Jodie Haydon, right, with friends he grew up with in what was then the working-class suburb of Camperdown in inner Sydney.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Dewstow and seven of the prime minister’s other childhood friends – the “Campo crew” as Albanese describes his former neighbours from the Pyrmont Bridge Road housing estate – were in Canberra this week for the first sitting day of the 48th parliament.

The group reminisced about the humble origins of their old friend, but also remembered a young man with enough ambition to decide in his teens that he would one day be a politician.

Dewstow, who still lives in the Camperdown area and raised her three kids there, says no one on the estate had been on a plane before.

“I remember when he went in an aeroplane, no one had,” Dewstow says. “I went down the street and saw Anthony was getting picked up by a big black car.”

The prime minister was 21 and didn’t even have his driving licence, but already had access to the Commonwealth cars that in those days were used to ferry around staffers. They are now restricted to use by MPs.

“It was my first plane trip, my mum told everyone,” Albanese recalls. “The whole neighbourhood came out ... most of us didn’t have cars.”

“None of us had been on an aeroplane,” Dewstow adds. “My brother, he is seven years younger than me, I remember when Anthony got back, he was the local paper boy, I can remember him saying ‘what was it like being on an aeroplane?’”

Asked to reveal Albanese’s most embarrassing secret, or even just what he was like as a kid, the Campo crew laugh nervously.

Then Donna Rowe recalls the teenage Albanese heading off to Labor Party meetings in a Safari suit, a serious young insect on the rise.

“I just remember him always riding his bike, this little skinny kid, skinny legs, blonde hair, always on his push bike,” she says.

Did they ever think he would be a politician, let alone the 31st prime minister of Australia?

“You actually said that you were going to be a politician, when you were 15,” Rowe says to Albanese, “You were on your bike, we were chatting, I don’t know what we were talking about, life or whatever, and you said to me you were going to be a politician.”

Clayton Gunning, Souths scarf draped around his neck, says that when he was 15, and Albanese 16, “he took me down to Camperdown Park and to my first Labor Party meeting at the bowling club”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Jodie Haydon with the “Campo crew” on Tuesday, the opening day of the 48th parliament.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Wendy Byrnes, another former neighbour of Albanese, says: “His mum had it all organised, Mary had him trained at an early age”.

“He was always in the back room [of his house] doing his homework, our backyards met, like in England,” she adds.

Lindsay Keevers, who met Albanese in kindergarten and went to St Mary’s Cathedral High School with him, says there was a favourite economics teacher who would make his students bring copies of the Australian Financial Review to class. Albanese would go on to study economics at the University of Sydney.

Many of the other children who grew up in the neighbourhood with Albanese’s crew had harder lives.

“We went through it last night, Jodie [Haydon, who was present] was shocked ... the reality is that many of the people we grew up with went to jail,” Albanese says.

But the Campo crew, whom Albanese has made a point of including in big political moments – like the opening of the last parliament three years before and a pre-election profile with this masthead – have made good.

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