Living History

The Depression years, 1930s

I would not have known anything of the depression years had we not switched homes in 1934. I was born in Cooks Hill a suburb of Newcastle, my Mother had inherited a house that we were living in but my Father having come from the country had a hankering to try farming although he had a steady 8-4 job with the railway stationed at Port Waratah. So the house in Newcastle was mortgaged and leased to purchase a 14 acre rural property, at Wallsend, about ten miles from Newcastle

My Mother often referred to it as 'poverty acres' as although we had cows, pigs, chooks, goats and horses it never made any money and this forced my Father to keep up his day job, cycling 8 miles each way to and from work and working late at night with a lantern to do jobs like milking, feeding animals and even repairing fences, with weekends spent cultivating paddocks to keep up feed stock. We were never hard-up for food the surrounding area was prolific in home- grown fruit to be bought cheaply by the bucketful. A nearby Chinaman’s gardens sold lettuces the size of soccer balls for twopence each or threepence for two. People were always hawking empty kerosine tins of fish or prawns, tomatoes, for anything they could get, in the war when meat was rationed there was always the 'Rabbitto’s' selling off the back of carts and for haberdashery there was always the Pedlars selling door to door with ports full of linen and dress lengths.

I came home from school one day and with great excitement asked my mother if she would join the cue at the local school for another pair of shoes for me, she of course told me we were not eligible for this, as my Father worked. I used to wonder why so many of the children would come to school on the coldest frostiest mornings in bare feet. I also used to wonder why some children seemed to never have a lunch - bag or any money for lunch. Quite often sitting in the lunch shed there would be 2-3 children either side of me, wordlessly watching every mouthful, hopeful I would leave some for them. They often got the bread and slab of corn beef and a thick slice of my Mother’s Madeira cake as well, I was not a big eater. We had a wood stove and my Mother would often get up early and have a big fire going to put a casserole in the oven and cook cakes or biscuits while the fire was burning fiercely.

The most striking evidence I ever experienced of the desperate times people were going through occurred one day at school..We had a most obnoxious, bullying, teacher in fourth class who set out to ridicule one of our classmates over her one and only schoolbook. He made her stand up whilst he displayed the book from front to back ‘see it starts here with sums now we move on with essays, now it looks like history, now some geometry - all in one book!’

The poor girl stood stoically to attention while he sneered away at her humiliation .Then she said ‘My Father gets up at 4am every morning and walks ten miles to Newcastle to see if he can find work digging trenches or lifting bales on the wharves, He walks barefoot over rough ground as he only has one pair of boots, which he carries, as he needs them for the job. Sometimes, he gets work and works all day, and has to walk all the way home To have money for our meals he goes without lunch’. The roly- poly smug teacher subsided into silence of course, he sensed the sympathy of the class for this poor family - I don’t think he apologised though. This poor family lived on vacant land in a one-room corrugated tin and corn- bag humpy with earth for a floor. There were many of these 'humpy' settlements around Newcastle - out at the Nobby’s Breakwater, Braye Park and a large one in the bush at Jesmond nicknamed 'HOLLYWOOD' (by way of local humour.)

'Hollywood' was on a tramline in the cutting through the bush on the way to Jesmond, there seemed to be a couple of hundred people living there. I don’t know if the name was an ironic tilt at the area or at its residents. Occasionally, some of them would be waiting at the tram- stop dressed in their best finery, men in check suits and two-tone shoes, ladies in fur, on their way to the races, with resource no doubt, from the well known two-up school operating illegally there. The site had a large patronage and provoked regular police raids, with escaping culprits scattering into the bushland - much like Hollywood movies without the speeding cars but with plenty of hollering and speeding feet . From the local point of view it was very entertaining and better than the movies

However the outbreak of the second war put an end to it all but not before the 'Yank' soldier invasion. Then the fur coats on the ladies on their way to the races sported orchid corsages, courtesy no doubt, from appreciative USA khaki-clad swains hanging off their arms. These scenes, were of a very short-lived duration, perhaps due to local pressure or the oft-quoted Australian soldiers’ adage, the ‘Yanks’ were over-sexed, over-paid and over here!’ Whatever the cause, political pressure or improved economy, the place nicknamed 'HOLLYWOOD' disappeared to become just another 30’s depression memory..

Mary, Redhead, New South Wales

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