The House That Was Eureka (28 page)

And then when Maria and Jodie got home it’d be time for afternoon tea. Out on the front porch watching Dad and Mr Man or out the back on the trampoline where they could yell up to Nanna at her window to watch them be a circus. Or they’d run down and have it with Mrs Maria for old times’ sake, or sometimes even, on special rainy days, Nanna would let them have it in her front parlour with a silver teapot and a silver tray and the piano. Maria sometimes got annoyed because Nobby and Mrs Maria weren’t secrets any more and she couldn’t plan witch-things about the despot, but Jodie reckoned it was better because now Maria could openly earn money from everyone so she’d get her BMX bike all the faster, and then Jodie would inherit the ancient-history dinosaur.

Round about five the two mums would come back, one a bit before the other, or sometimes both together, Evie’s mum with her neat case of make-up samples, Noel’s mum maybe carrying a parcel of fish from the fish shop near the station because Nobby loved fish.

‘Knock-off time, mate,’ Nobby would yell up the ladder, and he and Ted would sit out on the step and have a beer and admire what a difference their work had made today, while Nobby would gut and scale the fish.

Then it’d be Evie and Noel, back from the music shop. Noel still went there after school to hang around and Evie liked him being there. It seemed okay to be seen with a guy who was still at school, because now she had a job (even if it was only part-time and eighty bucks a week). She could feel as if things she did were
her
choices, not something foisted on her. She could even move out if she wanted to, because Sharnda had offered her a room at her place for twenty bucks, but now that she could, she didn’t want to. Ted had built her shelves and lined her room, and the girls didn’t come in any more because they had Nobby and the despot to visit.

Besides, there was Noel next door, and something about Noel really grew on you. Evie couldn’t imagine how she’d put up with life at Campbelltown, with Roseanne’s silly giggle instead of Noel’s wild laugh. When things got one of them down, the other one would sense it, and they’d find themselves meeting in the lane and heading for the secret landscape. They’d go there other times too, just when they happened to be around the station; as they happened to be for example on Christmas Eve that year.

On Christmas Eve that year, Noel and Nobby had just bought all their presents in the last-minute late-night Coles rush and were back at the fish shop near the station buying three kilos of prawns as their present for Ted and Evie’s mum, when they spotted Evie laden down with bags from Centrepoint coming out from the station.

Noel and Nobby looked at Evie’s bags, and it was obvious she’d thought up better presents than they had, but it was too late now.

‘Let’s go down the landscape,’ Evie said to Noel without thinking.

Noel didn’t say anything. His uncle was there, and he didn’t feel like sharing it, even with Nobby.

Evie knew, and went quiet herself, wishing she hadn’t said anything, remembering that other time when she’d sort of betrayed it to Roseanne.

So they stood there, the three of them, in the bit of waste land in between Uncle George’s and the station, and Nobby was quiet too, remembering back to that other late-night-shopping night when he’d stood here, in this very spot, listening to the voice of Jack Sylvester and watching Lizzie over there on the other side of the crowd. Lizzie tense as a cat, keeping an eye out down Australia Street to the cop shop, spoiling for a fight. And then that row she’d had with him. The first row they’d ever had. That night, that had been the beginning. The beginning of the end, you might as well say. It didn’t do to dwell on it, but maybe just this once.

Nobby moved past the souvlaki stall and down through the waste land, swinging the plastic bag of prawns to remind himself that he was here, in this time, not following the fierce clatter of Lizzie there before, but here and now, with Noel and Evie close behind. ‘D’you know this place?’ Noel said as Nobby headed up the steps.

‘Do I know the back of me hand?’

Up then, on the stage, dangling their legs down over the criss-cross lights of the suburbs, they could hear the intermittent roar of the trains cutting over the sound of the Christmas carols floating down from the railway pub.

Oh Come All Ye Faithful…

Evie started to hum along without realizing, thinking of Lizzie.

Noel shifted, embarrassed somehow, the Bethlehem side of Christmas not fitting in with his opinions.

As if he could read both their thoughts, Nobby said: ‘There’s nothing wrong with faithfulness, son.’ Thinking of Lizzie. I love forever. ‘You just have to pick the right thing to believe in.’

‘Yeah but...’

‘It’s a bloody damn sight better song than that answer-in-the-wind stuff
you
play. Answers in the wind! As if any old answer’ll do. You don’t get answers from the wind, son. This is what you get from wind.’ And Nobby farted. He liked to shock them sometimes. Liked to pull himself down to earth too, when these two made the old questions start biting him.

‘So there
is
an answer?’ Noel desperately wanted one.

‘Don’t you know it, son?’ Letting off a laugh through his teeth. Feeling good suddenly, joy.

Looking down on the criss-cross of the lights of the workers’ suburbs, Botany, Redfern, the backside of Newtown, Alexandria, the houses down there with people living and working and fighting and us up here too, swinging our legs. Us all in a circle that no one can reach to stop, like the mechanical clouds up there that the
thinagulla
taught me that night beside the river.

Nobby searched up, but there was too much smog, you couldn’t see them here; they were still there, but.

What he could see, what even the city couldn’t blur, was the blaze of the Southern Cross, belting its bright Eureka sign like an ad across the sky, as if up there too people were living and fighting.

‘Live and work, work and fight, live and love life…’
Nobby chanted softly.

‘What’s that?’ Evie said.

‘Something that a woman called Alexandra Kollontai once wrote.’

Evie reached in her bag to feel the silver serviette ring she always carried. She’d never told Noel or Nobby that she had it. The words fitted how she felt but couldn’t say. ‘But why’d she write it, what for?’

‘Ah...well...to end off a story she was writing.’

Noel considered. Up here on the stage. ‘It’s a good ending.’

Evie considered. It was just how she felt. ‘It’s a better beginning.’

Nobby swung his legs still with these silly damn social-worker shoes and said, ‘D’you reckon your mum and Ted would mind if we made a start on these prawns?’

Although this is a novel, the history in this book is real.

In the late 1920s Australia, like most western countries, entered a period of severe economic depression. By 1931 at least a third of the country’s workers had been given the sack—not because of their own inadequacies, but because of the failure of the system.

Unemployment relief was provided by the state governments, and both Labor and conservative parties kept it at a bare subsistence level. In those days, moreover, the dole was not given in cash. At first the unemployed had to line up with a sugar bag at the relief depot, where they would be given the actual goods: meat, bread, tea, sugar, soap etc. By 1931, a system of coupons had been introduced. Unemployed workers would go once a week to their local ‘dole dump’, where they would be given coupons for meat, groceries, and bread. They would trade these with a designated butcher, grocer and baker.

Obviously, with no cash, there was no money for fares, shoes, clothes, doctors’ bills, medicines and other essentials—let alone for a luxury such as a bottle of beer or a bar of chocolate or a bag of oranges. While this made the physical side of life very tough, it also increased the humiliation of unemployment.

Yet the most disastrous aspect of the 1930s relief system was its effect on the housing of the unemployed. With no cash, paying the rent was a weekly nightmare for the jobless. In those days, most working-class Australians rented their homes, so thousands of unemployed workers lived under the threat that they could be evicted for failing to pay their rent. In working-class suburbs it was common to see bailiffs forcing a family onto the street, together with their bits and pieces of furniture and clothing. After being evicted, some families were able to squash in with relatives, who were usually already living in overcrowded houses. Others were forced to shift to the shanty towns of bag and tin humpies that sprawled on unwanted land along the coast. Sometimes the young adult members of the family took to the track, and spent the years of the Depression moving between the country towns where they collected their weekly rations.

The sense of injustice aroused by evictions was increased because most of the rental property in working-class suburbs belonged to wealthy landlords and investment companies who owned housing on a vast scale. Many people wondered why poor families should be thrown onto the streets, when the rich lived an unchanged lifestyle in their mansions in the affluent suburbs. While the housing crisis highlighted the cruelty of capitalism, it also dramatised the stupidity of the system: in the inner suburbs of the capital cities, there were strings of terrace houses that had been boarded up because no one could afford to rent them. The real-estate companies usually preferred to have their houses untenanted to allowing the unemployed to receive a free roof over their heads.

Given the extent of the economic crisis and the inequities of the relief system, it is not surprising that all over Australia a proportion of unemployed workers formed organisations to protest against their economic and social plight, and to demand improvements in their conditions. While some of these protest groups were confined to a single area or a single demand, in 1931 there was a nationwide body called the Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM), which was made up of hundreds of suburban and country groups. By mid-1931 there were about seventy UWM branches in Sydney alone, with perhaps two hundred members in each branch. Although this was a fraternal organisation of the Communist Party of Australia, in any branch there would only be a handful of Communist members. The platform of the UWM included demands for a 100 per cent increase in the value of the dole, a rent, fare and clothing allowance in cash and the end to evictions.

Over the first six months of 1931, Sydney branches of the UWM mounted a strong campaign against evictions. In a number of cases throughout the metropolitan area, the organisation used petitions, deputations and street pickets to pressure landlords and real-estate agents to allow defaulting tenants to remain in their accommodation until they were able to find work. This campaign was so successful the large landowners worried that the idea of free accommodation would catch on. At first they attempted to pressure the Lang Labor government to send in the police to enforce evictions. Though the ALP saw the radical UWM as a threat, the Lang government did not want to upset its working-class electorate by directing the police to do this unpopular job. The large real-estate companies turned next to the magistrates, whose task it was to make out the eviction orders. They were quick to oblige. Given heightened class tension, the rich feared a backlash if the legal system sent in the full force of the law in defence of large property owners. And so small landlords—and in particular landladies—became pawns in the game, as the first test cases were enacted.

On 30 May 1931, in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, the UWM was taken by surprise when police, rather than bailiffs, arrived to evict a family. Moreover, the police brandished their guns and used their batons against the tenants’ UWM supporters. This was the first fight that the UWM lost. Over the next couple of weeks, the campaign rapidly escalated as both the unemployed militants and the police took stronger and stronger measures. The bloody climax took place in the inner-west suburb of Newtown. By this time, popular support for the anti-eviction fighters was enormous. The crowd that spontaneously gathered in the street to cheer on the ‘Newtown boys’ (as the anti-eviction fighters were popularly called) stretched for half a kilometre in each direction. These hundreds, if not thousands, of supporters were not Communists, but ALP voters, and even ALP members. And they were jeering at Premier Lang’s police.

It is no coincidence that a couple of hours after the Newtown battle a meeting of the New South Wales Labor Council called for legislation to protect the unemployed against eviction. Although no provision for rent was made in the relief system, the legislative changes made it harder for landlords to evict people.

Historical fiction allows writers and readers to play with hypotheticals. It lets us measure what did happen against what might have been.

In this book, the reports of the Redfern, Leichhardt and Bankstown fights are taken from the newspapers of the time. The Newtown battle was also all too real, and I have based my account on a great deal of primary research, as well as investigation of the battle site.

However, the characters living at 201 and 203 Liberty Street and the ‘mystery’ of the nineteenth picket are fictional. So is the story of the gun. Although some UWM members had access to guns, the occupation of the houses was a tactic of defence rather than offence. It was also a campaign based on principles of family and community: the UWM would not have done anything that risked injuring children and neighbours in the crossfire.

In order to bring out the fact that the UWM did not use guns, I needed give them access to one. While I wanted to find out what role a gun might have played in such a situation, I could only do this through a character such as Nobby, whose youthfulness placed him outside the discipline of the organised unemployed movement. Once the gun appeared—it immediately had to hide itself again. Yet just by being there, it provoked tragedy.

For dramatic purposes, I shifted the timing of the Newtown battle to the night after the Bankstown fight. It actually occurred at noon, two days later. Though the law stated that evictions had to be carried out between 9 am and 5 pm, a house at Glebe was stormed by police before daybreak, so my change is within the bounds of possibility. And after all, the Redfern attack happened illegally on a Saturday, and at Bankstown the police went in twenty-four hours before the warrant was due.