As patrons filed into the Wollongong Town Hall on Thursday night, many walked past a small plaque that pointed out 15 years ago, the music almost stopped at the city's premier live music venue.
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There was one person, however, who knew exactly what that plaque was referring to.
As he oversaw the strings of the Australian Chamber Orchestra do their final tuning ahead of performing pieces as part of the A Clockwork Orange and Beyond, artistic director Richard Tognetti was listening to the acoustics of the room that he once saved from demolition.
Roped in at the 11th hour to an impromptu concert, Mr Tognetti was back, almost 15 years to the day to the Wollongong Town Hall he grew up performing in and was slated to be levelled for a carpark, public toilets and a potential apartment complex.
The year was 2008, and Wollongong City Council had been sacked after an ICAC inquiry found the city's government was rife with corruption.
In one of the council's final acts, councillors decided the former town hall on the corner of Kembla and Crown streets, at the time was unused, should be demolished.
For years, icons of the city had been either earmarked for demolition or bulldozed to make way for new developments, and as the then chair of the Illawarra-Shoalhaven National Trust Meredith Hutton remembered, the population was fed up with an unaccountable local government that was seen to be doing dodgy deals for well-connected figures.
"There was a lack of faith and trust in the decisions that were being made," she said.
Union boss Arthur Rorris said locals were sick of watching their city disappear before their eyes.
"The council bosses had turned Wollongong into the Wild West, anything goes."
Beyond the hall itself, which was originally built as a cinema, the building also housed a unique instrument. In the 1960s, Ms Huttons said, when the theatre was turned into a concert venue, the local community decided it needed instruments befitting its status.
First, a Steinway grand piano was trucked down Bulli Pass as the eastern seaboard was engulfed in flames during the 1968 bushfires, paid for by the community, then locals decided they needed to go one better.
"Somebody said, well, let's get a nice pipe organ like the Sydney Town Hall," Ms Hutton said.
"Then someone said, 'I've heard of somebody, his name is Ronald Sharp'."
Mr Sharp came to Wollongong and began building this organ, which got bigger and bigger, until it was completed in 1968, just at the same time as another iconic music venue was being built.
"Then he got the commission to do the Sydney Opera House," Ms Hutton said.
"It was pure, dumb luck that we ended up getting, basically, the second best organ in Australia."
Demolishing the town hall would require packing up the organ and storing it somewhere, leaving the community at the time, understandably, not quite sure they would see it again.
The final note
These factors added up to create an unlikely alliance between the National Trust members, unions and workers, and the Reclaim our City group.
The idea was hatched was to hold an 'acoustic demonstration' in the hall for the administrators who were running the ruler over the former council's decisions. The administrators were due to make a decision that night on the future of the hall.
Being unelected, the administrators were not not susceptible to community pressure in the same way councillors were, but there was a rumour that one of the administrators, Gabrielle Kibble, the daughter of former Governor General John Kerr, was a classical music aficionado.
One of the members of the committee pushing to save the hall was Irene Tognetti, and all eyes turned to her.
"Should I call Richard?" Mrs Tognetti is said to have said, referring to her son, Wollongong boy and arguably Australia's finest violinist Richard Tognetti.
"I just wanted to go surfing that day," Mr Tognetti told The Mercury last week.
But when Mum calls, you answer.
"She said, 'Look, a crowd is coming to the Town Hall, please turn up'."
Having been dormant, the Town Hall was not licensed to hold a concert, so the performance was not widely promoted, but as word began to filter out about what was about to occur, the hall soon filled up.
Knowing that Mr Tognetti was on the way, and having played Eisteddfods there as a child, a 'jury' was set up on stage of some of the community organisers.
Due to the 'no concert rule' technically audience members were not allowed to clap. As Mr Tognetti got up on stage, a hush descended on the room.
Picking up his violin, Mr Tognetti launched into a virtuosic piece by Italian composer Paganini.
"We were watching the administrators at every point, and throughout the performance it was just poker faces," Mr Rorris said.
As he completed the final stroke of the bow, the entire hall held its breath, before Ms Kibble stood out of her chair and gave the performance a standing ovation.
The jury raised cards of 10, 10 and 10 and the hall's future was secured.
The show must go on
While the hall might have been saved, in the years since Mr Tognetti has been forthright in his criticism of the city's lack of awareness of its cultural cache. While that drew much criticism at the time, Mr Tognetti says his ongoing commitment to the city is clear.
"The proof of the pudding is in the eating," he said.
"I bring my orchestra to Wollongong, so any haters out there consider that.
"It costs a lot of money."
At the time of its saving, Mr Tognetti compared the town hall's acoustics as somewhere between London's Royal Albert and the Adelaide Town Hall, but said in the years since, there has been little action to capitalise on the inherent qualities.
"The acoustics are good, they're actually really nice, but the actual building, they haven't updated it."
As concert-goers fill the foyer of the Town Hall for Mr Tognetti's latest performance, it would seem incomprehensible that such a venue would be torn down, but as Ms Hutton said, it cannot be taken for granted.
"We had good information, good principles and we behaved well," she said.
"This time it worked, but it doesn't always."
Fleix Bronneberg, who was the convenor of Reclaim Our City, said it was unique in the way that various parts of the community came together.
"The combination of groups was a very powerful force," he said, something that Mr Rorris said showed the strength of the campaign.
"Never underestimate the strength of collective action, particularly when it's in such a broad part of the community," he said.
"If something so obviously stinks to you, there's a good chance that it stinks to many, many other people."
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