Jim Whelan was once described as “the most destructive man in Melbourne”.
Over almost a century, the demolition firm he set up in the 1880s pulled down thousands of buildings, including some of the largest and grandest ever built in the city.
Before his death in 1938, when his sons took over the business and kept it going through a third generation right up until the early 1990s, Jim was said to have pulled down more than 1,000 buildings by his own hand.
But perhaps ironically, as the structures were pulled apart piece by the piece, the act of destruction led to some buildings being fondly remembered in a way they had never been while standing.
The firm made money from salvaging and selling off the materials from the demolition, so crews were scrupulous in taking apart the old buildings.
Inevitably, Jim’s Brunswick scrap yard became a treasure trove that told the story of Melbourne and its growing pains, with periods of rapid expansion and change tempered by protracted lulls, like the one brought about by the Second World War.
Author Robyn Annear, who researched and wrote a book about the family, said despite being associated with all the demolitions, in some ways the Whelans were “into heritage before heritage was a thing”.
The family name and the signs that boasted the firm’s work became so ubiquitous that they entered the lexicon of the city’s residents.
‘Pulling down is nothing’: How Jim built his empire
Jim was in his 20s when he made the trip to Melbourne from his western Victorian hometown of Stawell, in 1884.
By the time he reached his 60s, the small-scale operation he had started, mainly to turn a profit from selling material salvaged in demolitions, had expanded enormously, and he had developed a considerable profile and a nickname to match.
An article in the 1929 edition of the The Weekly Times described him as, “a big man with a stoop”.
“Whelan the Wrecker is the most destructive man in Melbourne,” the article read.
“Though living in continual danger from falling debris, Whelan the Wrecker never gets worried.”
The article went on to describe 11 serious accidents he survived, including being “smothered under an avalanche of bricks from a falling wall” and a brick falling from a height of 45 feet (13.7 metres) onto his head.
A few years earlier, in 1921, a member of his demolition crew had chiselled words into a stone wall that firmly stuck: ‘Whelan the Wrecker is here’.
At its height, the firm had 100 employees, all extremely skilled and often working in treacherous situations long before worksite safety standards were developed.
A 1932 article in The Herald described the firm’s work demolishing the Stewart Dawson Building to make way for the Manchester Unity Building that now stands as a celebrated art deco structure on the corner of Collins and Swanston streets in Melbourne’s centre.
A crew of 15 experienced wreckers was tasked with pulling the iron roof off the five-storey building, built in 1884, and they had 18 days to finish the rest of the job.
Jim was quoted describing his star wreckers including Jack Thorpe, whose skills earned him the moniker, The Cat.
“There was a time when I wouldn’t go 10 feet in the air myself,” Jim reportedly said.
“When you go higher, you begin to lose your nervousness.”
He downplayed the difficulty of the work he had gained recognition for.
Stoic wreckers to some, ‘glamorous archaeologists’ to others
Ms Annear said by the 1960s, watching demolitions taking place in the CBD by Whelan crews was a popular pastime, like a “free circus act”.
“They played up to that, because these were the days when you didn’t have to work with scaffolding and lots of protective gear,” she said.
The researcher, who remembers watching the crews work as a girl, said the men would be high up on top of freestanding walls knocking out bricks with sledgehammers.
“People just couldn’t get enough of that,” she said.
“They would flock at lunchtime to eat their sandwiches and watch them do their high-wire act.
“Right from their really early days, Whelans really played up to that.”
She said their antics were regularly featured in the city’s newspapers.
“I’d read about them in the papers, about the possibility of all sorts of treasures they’d uncovered … and their acrobatics and so on,” Ms Annear said.
“They just seemed like glamorous archaeologists or something to me as a child.”
Over the decades, the slogans plastered across signs at the firms job sites, ‘Whelan the Wrecker is here’ or ‘Whelan the Wrecker was here’ crept into people’s conversations.
“They had that great name that almost had a musical quality to it,” she said.
Ms Annear said the name Whelan became a colloquial term for someone or something messy, clumsy, or chaotic.
“You’d walk into your kid’s bedroom and say ‘oh Whelan the Wrecker was here!'” she said.
The building that was meant to last thousands of years
When the imposing granite Colonial Mutual Life, or Equitable Building, was opened in 1896, those who had designed and built it imagined it would define the corner of Elizabeth and Collins streets for many generations to come.
Instead, the hulking structure, wrapped around an iron frame, was brought down by Whelan the Wrecker less than 100 years later, in the early 1960s.
By this time, the next generation of Whelans was running the business and young Jim, named after his father, was said to have called the 14-month job of dismantling the Colonial Mutual Life Building as one of the toughest the firm ever faced.
Ms Annear said that the demolition of the building that “everybody said was meant to last for thousands of years” actually brought its story to life.
She said many accounts point to the building being a “fairly dark, brooding, monolithic thing” at the corner of the two major streets.
“It was a landmark, but it wasn’t especially beloved,” Ms Annear said.
“It became so again only in the act of disappearing.”
The involvement of the Whelans didn’t always mean complete demolition.
In the firm’s early days, in 1913, the Whelans were tasked with dismantling one of Melbourne’s earliest buildings so it could be put back together on a new site.
A foundation stone was laid for St James Old Cathedral in 1939, but a few decades on, a flurry of construction fuelled by the wealth the Gold Rush brought to the city meant the small church was out of place and overshadowed in its central city location
As Jim and his workers pulled the building apart, they numbered each slab of stone so the church could be put together again at a site on King Street, opposite Flagstaff Gardens, where it remains today.
The difference between a city and a museum
The last relative at the helm of the wrecking business, Myles, died in 2003, and before then he donated many materials acquired by the family over the decades for preservation.
The business itself quietly went bankrupt during the early 1990s recession, a year shy of a century, with a legacy of having left Melbourne completely transformed.
“In their promotions of the jobs they were doing, the things they were pulling down, they focused with such loving detail on how beautifully made the buildings were,” Ms Annear said.
“They treasured and respected the quality of the buildings and the fixtures, which they then went on, of course to sell — that’s how they made a lot of their money.
“But they really had an eye for history and the bricks and mortar of Melbourne that made it a special place.”
Ms Annear said rather than lamenting the loss of particular buildings, her research has led her to believe that their demolition provided an opportunity to appreciate and understand the past.
“I have this idea that nothing is ever really lost if we remember and celebrate those things,” she said.
“I don’t mean, by that, to justify the wholesale pulling down of everything and anything.
“But just that we do have to let go of some things and let the city grow and change, not necessarily for hard-edged economic reasons, but just because that’s what cities do.
