Living History

Our house in the 1920’s

I was born in 1913 in Bourke NSW, where I lived until I was 19. My father died while I was very young, and as I was the oldest of the Children I was sent to work. Part of that work included completing our house that my father had been building before his death. It was during the depression years and no one had a lot of money. We used to collect ours and other family’s kerosene tins, flatten them out, join them (my father was a blacksmith so he had taught us how to join metal when we were very young), and use them to make the walls and roof. The structure of the house was wood that we had chopped from Gum Trees. By today’s standards, this structure would be seen as a humpy, but for us it was a perfectly functioning house.

I think my experience shows that if you have love for one another, it doesn’t matter what sort of house you live in, you’ll always get through. Needless to say things have come a long way from then, I now live in a properly built brick house, and it’s hard to believe that we were able to live in a house like our first one without feeling hardly done by. It is almost certain that no one would live in it today.

Norman, in Wentworth, NSW

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