It was a suitably soap-operatic beginning. On January 16, 1989, Network Ten, then owned by Frank Lowy’s Westfield, launched its new soap E Street with 200 guests in a purpose-built harbourside treehouse in Sydney’s Birchgrove. It was dismantled hours after the $100,000 soirée.
“Those days are well gone now where you’d have launches like that,” said Forrest Redlich, executive producer and creator of E Street, which transformed Balmain into gritty inner-city Westside.
Aired twice-weekly from January 25, 1989 to May 20, 1993, the iconic series made megastars of a constellation of young recruits – including Marcus Graham and Simon Baker – and appealed to older audiences with marquee performers, led by Penny Cook of A Country Practice acclaim.
But it also brought Sydney’s inner west, chiefly Balmain and surrounds, to the small screen in a way that had not been seen since the black-and-white 1960s sitcom My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? offered a slice of the suburb’s working-class life. E Street captured the grit and charm of Balmain at the close of its industrial era, before the advent of cavoodles, converted factories and reclaimed parkland.
Redlich, a writer and later producer on Seven’s A Country Practice, lived in Balmain East while working on the 1984 ABC series Sweet and Sour, before moving to Newport.
“It’s a magic place. Best location ever,” Redlich said of Balmain. “I knew everybody in that neighbourhood by the time we started E Street, so it was just a matter of … going to the green grocer and saying can we use the exteriors and all that, so it was all pretty cut and dried.
“There was this really eclectic mix of working-class people, upwardly mobile people and a lot of creative people as well.”
Cook’s Doctor Elly Fielding, around whom the show revolved in its early days, “lived” on Johnston Street in Balmain East, near what is now the Euforia café, a stone’s throw from Redlich’s former apartment on Nicholson Street.
Westside’s fresh-faced police constable Paul Berry, played by Warren Jones, had on-screen digs near the Unity Hall Hotel, while publican Ernie Patchett (the late Vic Rooney) and his son Chris (Paul Kelman) were at the Pacific Hotel, rebranded Patchett’s Pacific.
Warren Jones (Constable Paul Berry) in an E Street scene on Stephen Street, Balmain.Credit: Westside Television Productions
The hotel now houses private residences but was a working pub when the show launched, and Jones recalled “old-time Balmain regulars” coming in for a schooner in the morning during filming.
The exterior of the historic Balmain Watch House on Darling Street served as the Westside police station, Jones said.
“A lot of stuff was just done off side streets,” he said. “Darling Street is pretty noisy to shoot on.”
Kelman, who lived locally during the show’s run, remembered “gobsmacked” locals exclaiming when he visited pubs in Balmain with his on-screen father: “Isn’t that Ernie Patchett and Chris, his son?”
The late Vic Rooney (Ernie Patchett) and Paul Kelman (Chris Patchett) outside the Pacific Hotel in Balmain. The exterior of the hotel served as E Street’s Patchett’s Pacific pub.Credit: Westside Television Productions
A local bank manager would bail him up on the street, Kelman said, urging him to take out a loan for a Balmain unit.
“My biggest error and regret in life was I didn’t follow him up on that,” Kelman lamented, partly in jest.
Kelman’s Chris Patchett and his on-screen wife Megan, played by Lisbeth Kennelly, were among a trio of characters dispatched from the show in a car bomb, staged at Callan Park in Lilyfield. Dramatic exits and crime sprees were common in Westside.
Lisbeth Kennelly and Paul Kelman (Megan and Chris Patchett) on location in E Street on Balmain’s Adolphus Street.Credit: Westside Television Productions
“They had all these cameras from different angles get shots of this car exploding. It really exploded into an inferno,” Kennelly said.
Kelman said motorists on the nearby Iron Cove Bridge got the shock of their lives as the car went up in flames. “People just saw it for kilometres,” he said.
The Panetta family, who founded and until recently ran the iconic Papa Joe & Co corner shop on Darling Street, had the thrill of their shopfront appearing on-screen.
“Back then they used to come and film ... very often around here,” said the eponymous Joe (Giuseppe) Panetta.
His daughter Luisa was a teenager during the show’s run and used to stand with her sisters at the shop door watching the cast and crew at work.
“It was our first real famous people that we had contact with,” Luisa said.
“So we’d always get excited. And because we loved the show it was interesting to see the back end of how they used to make it, how many takes ... and all that sort of stuff.”
E Street’s interiors were sets, but the show is replete with location shots, including the hulking White Bay Power Station in Rozelle, decommissioned five years before the show’s debut, Gladstone Park, Balmain Hospital, Dawn Fraser Baths and Thames Street wharf.
“I think we shot some stuff around the old Colgate building [now apartments]. Most of the industrial locations were all around Balmain,” Redlich said.
But Westside’s church, led by Dr Elly’s friend and longtime love interest, the leather jacket-wearing, earring-sporting Reverend Bob Brown (Tony Martin), was, in fact, in Newtown.
“I tried to cram as much outside broadcasts [on location] as I could into the scripts,” Redlich said. “I think I managed to get it up to about 19 minutes a show. We used to do 12 minutes on A Country Practice.”
The show’s writers, meanwhile, were holed up in an industrial estate dubbed Eden Park in North Ryde and, later, in Chatswood near the train station.
“Ah, the serenity! Every five minutes a train went past,” joked scriptwriter and producer Alexa Wyatt, whose first job in the industry was on E Street as a storyliner and later a writer.
The late Penny Cook (Dr Elly Fielding) and Tony Martin (Reverend Bob Brown) on location in E Street.Credit: Westside Television Productions
“We were making two hours of drama a week. That’s a lot to get through,” she said.
Cecily Polson, who played district nurse Martha O’Dare, said the show “started off as being like A Country Practice come to town” before it changed to target a younger demographic. But the filming locations didn’t change.
“I think it was great that Balmain was seen such a lot on the show,” Polson said. “We did a lot of outside broadcasting, which was great. You’re mixing with the general public.
Cecily Polson and the late Penny Cook (nurse Martha O’Dare and Dr Elly Fielding) on location in E Street.Credit: Westside Television Productions
“Even though it’s screened off, later on when you’re going home or you’re having a cup of tea or whatever, you get chatting, and you’re just aware that you’re in a community.”
Noel Hodda, who played Dr Elly’s comically caddish ex-husband Dr David Fielding, said Balmain “felt like a community; it hadn’t been overdeveloped”.
“There were still a lot of older houses. It felt like a place where people had lived and made lives for many years, which is what the show wanted to capture.
“Remnants of industrial wharves were still there down the bottom.”
Noel Hodda (Dr David Fielding) filming E Street.Credit: Westside Television Productions
Some cast members had strong ties to the suburb. Marianne Howard, who played the plucky Alice Sullivan – daughter of Westside’s longtime Sergeant George Sullivan (the late Les Dayman) – said she was “born and bred in Balmain, Birchgrove”, although she was living outside the suburb during filming, and her character was “just like all my [friends].”
“I was in Balmain, wearing petticoats and doing all that stuff, you know, Cyndi Lauper [style] … wearing Doc Marten boots. Us cool Balmain girls, that’s what we wore,” Howard said.
Lisbeth Kennelly lived in Balmain for more than a decade after leaving the show.
“We were very lucky in terms of the richness of shooting locations,” Kennelly said.
“Balmain is ... such a mix of places. There’s some beautiful big old sandstone mansions, and then of course all the little workers’ cottages.”
Marianne Howard and the late Les Dayman (Alice Sullivan and Sergeant George Sullivan) in a scene shot in Balmain’s Elkington Park.Credit: Westside Television Productions
The show was “very well received by the locals”, Kennelly said, because “they loved their suburb, and they were proud of it”.
Singer and actor Melissa Tkautz, who joined E Street as Nikki Spencer when she was just 16 and had a platinum hit with Read My Lips while on the show, was not a local and remembers long commutes to filming locations.
Melissa Tkautz joined the cast of E Street as Nikki Spencer when she was 16.Credit: Westside Television Productions
“But it was always so lovely in Balmain,” she said. “We were always filming on the street, causing people to have to wait and stop ... and we always had such lovely, lovely people.”
Dorian Newstead, a first assistant director on the show, said fans “went crazy” over the cast in public, including Bruce Samazan (constable Max Simmons), Marcus Graham (Stanley “Wheels” Kovac) and Malcolm Kennard (Harley Kendrick).
Marcus Graham (Stanley “Wheels” Kovac) on Balmain’s Darling Street in the opening credits of E Street.Credit: Westside Television Productions
Newstead recalled being chased by a group of girls at a football game in Sydney while wearing an E Street crew t-shirt (“Where can we get one? How much do you want for it?”).
“My wife was with me, and she just couldn’t believe it,” he said.
Macquarie University Professor Michelle Arrow, historian and author of Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945, said E Street was “was different because it was set right in the heart of Sydney.”
“A lot of Australian soap operas and serial dramas are either set in country towns or in the suburbs,” Arrow said.
Balmain “was gentrifying really rapidly in the ’90s, but there were still traces ... of that post-industrial heritage”, Arrow said.
“It’s an interesting little snapshot, really, of Sydney life in the early 1990s.”
The end of Balmain’s industrial era
- 1931: Balmain Colliery at Birchgrove ceases production of coal. It ceases production of gas in 1950.
- 1958: Mort’s Dock closes. It is now the site of a park.
- 1984: White Bay Power Station in Rozelle is decommissioned. The building is undergoing restoration works.
- 1988: Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap factory closes. It is now the site of converted apartments and green space.
- 1994: The Colgate-Palmolive factory closes. It has since been converted into apartments.
Balmain had a rich Indigenous history prior to colonisation. The traditional custodians of the land are the Gadigal and Wangal peoples of the Eora Nation.
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