Sirius embodied a city where the poor also had harbour views. Credit:Barton Taylor Myra is the last person living in Sirius, which is perhaps the most controversial public housing complex in Australia. Anyone who has spent any time in Sydney will know Sirius: it's that hulking, soot-stained, Mayan-pyramid type structure on the west side of Circular Quay. Opened in 1980, Sirius was billed as a bold example of Brutalist architecture (the name derives from the French, béton brut, meaning "raw concrete"), a style traditionally associated with civic values and social equity. Indeed, Sirius was purpose-built to accommodate some 200 people who had been displaced by the redevelopment of The Rocks in the 1970s. But in a city as vain as Sydney, Sirius was always going to be problematic: it is, in essence, a series of grey concrete boxes stacked one atop the other, the bruising geometry of which – right angle upon right angle upon right angle – was taken by many as an insult, even a provocation. (Being flanked by the stately curves of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House certainly didn't help.) And yet there was also affection: Sirius embodied a uniquely Australian egalitarianism, whereby poor and working-class people could enjoy waterfront views, side by side with millionaires and prime ministers. In 2014, however, the state government announced it was selling the building, with the money going toward building more social housing elsewhere. There was an outcry. Marches. Protests. Public awareness campaigns. The sale was a cash grab, said Sirius supporters, which was kind of true; the government insisted that by unlocking the value of the real estate, estimated at $100 million, it could house not just hundreds but up to a thousand needy people. The government won. Soon Sirius residents were receiving eviction notices and offers of "alternative accommodation". The building began emptying out, apartment by apartment. But Myra remained, clinging on like a cat to the curtains. This was her home. She knew it inside out – where the pots and pans were, the tins of flour, the fridge, the bathroom. She still walked around the neighbourhood – her neighbourhood – where she has memorised every cracked paver and buckled gutter. Shifting to another suburb would be like moving to the moon.

Myra has lived in the building since 2008. Credit:Janie Barrett So she stayed put. Now she is the only one left, a blind woman in a hollow building. At night, beyond Myra's door, it's dark and quiet, as still as a crypt. I ask if she gets scared. "Not at all," she says. On the wall of Myra's apartment there is a reproduction of Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots. She bought it more than 30 years ago, to remind her then husband, Nick, about how he made his money. Nick was a cobbler. He was also Greek Cypriot, which is where Myra gets her surname. ("I'm not actually Greek, but everyone thinks I am.") Myra met Nick in 1954, at a ballroom dancing school in Pitt Street, which she visited partly because she loved dancing – she did ballet as a kid – and partly as a way of meeting men, who likewise came to the lessons as a way of meeting women. Nick was balding, and an inch or two shorter than Myra. He was also 11 years older. (Myra was then 28.) He'd only been in Australia a couple of years, so his English wasn't great. But he made Myra laugh, and he was smart and curious. Together they talked politics: Myra was left-wing, but Nick was a communist, which was taking it a step too far for her liking. Nick was also a "bit naughty", she says. His father, who was a stonemason, had built Nick and his siblings a house each in Cyprus. But Nick had got his maid pregnant, and had to sell his house to pay off her family. That was part of the reason he'd moved to Australia, to make a fresh start. Nick told Myra all about this, but she didn't mind.

Nick and Myra met at ballroom dancing lessons, and married in 1955. He was a “bit naughty”. Sydney Harbour was once, in a very real sense, the muscles of the city. Nowadays, it’s more like a set of fake teeth, full of shiny new apartments owned by wealth management advisers and boutique bankers. When Myra's mother, Rhoda, found out about the relationship, she went off her brain. There was the religion thing: Myra's family were strict Methodists; Nick was Greek Orthodox. More importantly, though, Nick was not Australian. Indeed, he was from Cyprus. Somewhere along the line, Rhoda remembered Shakespeare's Othello, about a Moorish general who is sent to Cyprus to fight the Turks. By some contorted feat of reality-twisting illogic, she thus concluded that Myra and Nick's children would be black. ("She was very uninformed," Myra says.) Myra's father was fine about the whole thing, but Rhoda remained so viscerally offended that she didn't come to Myra and Nick's wedding in 1955; it would be years before she and Nick finally met. Myra had a daughter, Ruth, in 1956, and a son, Jim, two years later. Then she started bleeding. And bleeding, and bleeding. She discovered she was haemophiliac, and was advised by the doctors to have a hysterectomy. It was very traumatic, not because of the operation, but because of Nick, who walked beside her as she was wheeled into theatre, crying all the way. In 1959, they rented a terrace in Erskine Street, Millers Point, from the Maritime Services Board. Nick's shop was on street level; the bedrooms were upstairs. Myra washed the kids' nappies in an old copper, which she heated on a open fire, using the wooden bricks that once paved the streets and which were being ripped up and replaced with bitumen.

Nick's business was good, but not great. Myra, meanwhile, had secretarial skills. And so, just weeks after Jim was born, she went to work, doing publicity at the advertising firm, J. Walter Thompson. She didn't mind the job, that was fine, but she hated leaving Ruth and Jim. "In those days, there was no such thing as daycare," she tells me. "So we had a woman who lived in the suburbs who came and picked the kids up on Monday and brought them back at the end of the week." It was "just awful", she says, smiling a smile that is more like a grimace. "All I could do when I got them back was sit and nurse them and cry." It's easy to forget that Sydney is, or at least was, a port town. It had a working harbour, with shipyards, docks and factories, where people made things with their hands and did lots of heavy lifting. It was, in a very real sense, the muscles of the city. Nowadays, it's more like a set of fake teeth, full of shiny new apartments owned by wealth management advisers and boutique bankers. Myra has seen that change unfold. She has been its living embodiment. Take her dad, Ernest. A fitter and turner. Worked 60 years on the wharves, making parts for ships. During the war, he sometimes worked 24 hours a day. Then, on the weekends in Gladesville, where they were living, he dug the family's air raid shelter, or tried to. "He got three feet down and hit sandstone, and gave up," Myra laughs. When the Japanese midget submarines came into Sydney Harbour in 1942 and the sirens went off, Myra and the family – Mum, Dad and her two younger sisters – hid under the kitchen table. After the war, Myra went to Miss Hales Secretarial College, in Margaret Street. "I was great at shorthand, terrible at typing." Still, she soon found herself in the typing pool at the Health Department, and, after that, at an engineering firm, Macphersons, which had its factory in Sussex Street. The noise was out of this world: the clak clak clakedy clak of the metal typewriters, and the heavy machinery on the factory floor next door, grinding and growling through the wall behind her. Myra has always felt herself to be close to God. She still talks to Him, through prayer, twice daily. If she'd been born a Catholic, she would have become a nun. Being a Methodist, she became a deaconess. And so, at 22, she left Macphersons and moved into Leigh College, at Enfield in Sydney's inner west, where she studied theology and psychology. "It was a live-in college," she says. "My parents weren't happy about it, because I was too useful at home, looking after my sisters."

After graduating, the church sent her first to Menindee, near Broken Hill, where it was so hot she thought she'd catch fire, and then to Crookwell, in the Southern Tablelands, where it was so cold she swore she'd freeze. She took scripture at school, visited the sick, and learnt the pianola from a Catholic nun. She also met a man. He was going to be a minister. They got engaged, but before long it fell apart. "He was too bossy for me," Myra says. Not that it mattered. Soon she was back in Sydney, at a dancing lesson, where she took a spin around the boards with a man named Nick. It all begins in the middle and ends at the beginning. That's how it is with Myra, whose mind is like the road system of an ancient city, with memories laid over memories and cross streets meeting cul-de-sacs, and, here and there, when you least expect it, exit ramps that veer off into long-forgotten suburbs. And, so before I know it, we're back in Erskine Street, in Millers Point, with Nick and the children, and it's the late 1960s. Or the 1970s. The city was changing. Shipping was being redirected to the ports at Botany and Newcastle. When the ferry services that used to terminate at Millers Point were moved around the corner to Circular Quay, Nick's business lost crucial passing trade and started a precipitous decline. Their income fell to the point where they had trouble paying rent to Maritime Services, so the government moved them to a rundown Victorian terrace in Trinity Avenue, a kilometre away. The kids went to Fort Street Public School, down the road. They grew up, got jobs. Became adults. Then one morning, in 1991, Myra woke up and looked across to Nick. His eyes were frozen in terror, and he couldn't talk. He'd had a massive stroke. He was a big man by then: it took several beefy paramedics to get him down the stairs and into the ambulance. Nick lived for another 11 weeks, but was unable to eat or drink. "It was horrible," Myra says. "He just wanted to die. He kept pulling his feeding tubes out." Shortly after Nick died, Myra decided to get a computer. It would be a distraction. For months she read up on IBMs, Hewlett-Packards and what not, then went into the city to buy one. She was in the shop, reading the descriptions on the boxes, but found it difficult to make out the writing. She blinked and focused again, but it wasn't much clearer. Over the coming years, her eyes got worse. Finally she went to the doctor, who told her she had macular degeneration, and that there was no cure.

Was she scared? Absolutely. But what could you do? You gotta keep living. So she became the deaconess at the nearby Church of the Holy Trinity, which everybody called the Garrison Church; she volunteered as curator of its military and historical museum. She also became the senior vice-president of the Darling Harbour branch of the NSW Labor Party, where she often speaks about the need for social housing in the city. In time, she had grandchildren, then great-grandchildren: despite the fact she could barely see, she went into the city, now and again, to buy a thing or two for them, shuffling down the teeming pavements; if she got lost, she'd wave down a pedestrian and ask them for directions. At Sirius, where she moved in 2008, she made new friends: they would help her read letters and shop for her. There is a lovely young Iranian man who takes philosophy classes down at the local community centre, every Monday. They discuss the nature of being, the meaning of life, the idea of justice. Sometimes they just gossip. The “SOS” lights shine from Myra’s windows, illuminating the residents’ plight. Just last month, Myra agreed to move to a unit in Pyrmont, as it was the first place she had been offered that she could actually get in to: there are no steps, and no heavy security doors that slam in her face. "They finally got me out!" she says. She will move there in mid-December.

But until then she will do what she has always done. Wake at 7am when her clock radio goes on, feel her way to the kitchen. A bowl of muesli, skim milk. She might have someone over for lunch; there are two elderly gentlemen she knows who can't cook to save their lives, and she enjoys giving them a decent meal. Then, in the evening, she'll sit by her window with a glass of shiraz mixed with mineral water. She can't see the view any more, but she can hear it. The harbour, the ferries. There are some people laughing, in a pub, just around the corner. They are so happy! So full of life. Isn't it a wonderful sound?