Authors: John Birmingham
Leviathan (38 page)
I thought, âHow terrible this is, taking ha'pennies off kids.' My mate got demoralised and he put the box down at my feet and stood on the corner. I was still on âPlay, Fiddle, Play'. I couldn't get off it. I said, âHow much is in that box?' He said, âEleven-pence ha'penny.' A small tin of Lactogen was one and six! I had only a few minutes to go until nine o'clock and my knees were still shaking. A young fellow come out of a barber's shop. He'd just had a shave and a haircut. He looked at me, put his hand in his pocket and dropped two bob in the box. I stopped playing, got into the tram, paid my tuppence fare, and I got out at Newtown Bridge as the chemist was about to close. I said, âA small tin of Lactogen, please,' and, of course, he was only too pleased to sell me something. So I come home, the big hero with a tin of Lactogen, and some change! And after we'd fed the baby we had some ourselves.
Jack and Phyllis Acland's story, which opens
Weevils in the Flour
, Wendy Lowenstein's great oral history of the Depression, is stark yet unremarkable; a trail of tears which millions walked through a decade of hunger and fear. Economists said the worst was over by 1933, but for countless victims, including the Aclands, destitution persisted until the Second World War when their services were suddenly needed again. Riggers and welders who had raised the arc of the Habour Bridge were laid off in '32 and did not see another pay packet until they set to building warships or the massive Garden Island graving dock ten years later. The Sixth Division which was to fight in North Africa and Greece, was home to thousands of hoboes and swaggies whose first regular feed in years was the salty, fat-soaked chow ladled out by army cooks at boot camp. The Aclands had no security until at least twelve months after the war started when Jack joined the air force. Nearly every day of the 1930s had been a grim scrabble for survival. Their children were born malnourished. An auntie died of starvation. Clothing often consisted of nothing more than flour sacks or corn bags cut up and sewn back together. Food was often begged for, or simply imagined. âWe'd lie in bed and say, “We'll get up and cook bacon and eggs,”' said Phyllis, âand all the time we knew there was nothing to eat in the house.' She told Lowenstein about the shame of asking the butcher for meat on credit.
âHe'd been giving some meat to this bloke for his greyhound dog, and he knocked me back. I used to get so embarrassed, to have to ask for anything I wasn't paying for. People would share clothes, but not food very often. I borrowed an egg off a girl friend one day, and we parted bad friends because I couldn't give it back to her. You had to beat it up and mix water in it. The milkman had already thinned the milk and we had to thin it again ⦠You'd get sick and you'd just have to suffer it. Get fish heads from the market and make soup.'
The most demoralising thing, according to her husband, was that âyou couldn't see the outcome. You seemed so powerless ⦠I cracked up. I couldn't see any point.' Jack spent most of his time trawling the city, looking for work, tramping through the streets with his shoes falling apart, flapping with each step. He'd cut himself cardboard soles, but it would get so there'd be no sole left, just the uppers. It was nothing to walk thirty or forty kilometres in a fruitless search for work. âYou'd be out all day, had to keep on the move,' he said. âThe
Herald
would only give you an indication. You mostly got your jobs on the hoof, [you'd] walk around everywhere. Take a bit of lunch. Frightened to take a tram because you might pass a street where there was a job. It used to wear you out.'
âHe came home this day and cried,' said Phyllis. âPut his head down and cried like a big baby'.
Tens of thousands of men like Jack, proud men â the heroes of Gallipoli and Villers Bretonneux â were similarly chewed up in the free-fire zone of the market. War correspondent Charles Bean had looked on their war as a trial of national character, with the decisions of generals and governments worked out through the âmachinery of men's nerves and muscles at the fighting edge, where nation grated against nation'. Now the same generation faced a new trial, in which the decisions of bankers and finance ministers caused desolation and poverty in a thousand bleak little streets and factories where the brute contradictions of capitalism ground up hard against each other.
The waterfront provided a daily spectacle eerily reminiscent of Henry Mayhew's descriptions of life at the bottom of the heap in nineteenth-century London. The constant arrival and departure of ships, even during the lowest ebb of the Depression, held the faint prospect of minimal pay for painfully harsh toil, and thousands of desperate men were drawn to it. Five or six hundred would gather at the gates of a wharf where there might be work for a handful, appearing well before dawn and waiting until late in the night on the off-chance they might just scramble over their mates to earn a few shillings hauling tonnes of wool bales or chalk over the sides of the steamers. The Hungry Mile, they called it. A mournful stretch of waterfront starting at number three wharf Darling Harbour and extending to Bathurst Street.
âI've seen them there in Sydney,' [an old wharfie named Albert told Lowenstein]. âPicking up labour on the Hungry Mile. The foreman would pick up all his pink-eyes, all his plums. And he might have ten or twelve job tickets over. He'd scramble them amongst the lot. Throw them up in the air. You'd be like dogs. Your mate would become your worst enemy. You might get one on the ground and go to pick it up and somebody would stand on your hand. The foremen held you in contempt.'
Jim, a contemporary who ranged from Leichhardt as far south as Wollongong in the search for work, described, without knowing it, a modern facsimile of the scenes recounted by Mayhew in
London Labour and the London Poor
.
You line up outside the steel works at Port Kembla from about six o'clock in the morning. There was a little bit of an office and there might be a hundred, three hundred, four hundred men. Some days you might be lucky and there's only sixty. You'd be listening all the time, waiting. All of a sudden a chair would shift inside the office. Everyone would turn around, waiting, see! And then no one would come to the door. You'd settle back a bit and look around again. Somebody would shift the chair again and you'd all look up. Then the door opened and the bloke would stand up there. âYou!' âNo, you! Behind!' And there'd be forty or fifty blokes behind you. You'd watch them going up ⦠Just like an auctioneer in a sale yard. Looking for a decent sort of beast ⦠That went on for a long, long time. Once you got up to nine o'clock you'd say, âWell, the only hope of getting a job today is if some bloke gets killed.' Then you'd either stay there till lunch time or you'd get on your bike and ride to Metal Manufacturers. You had to be at Metal Manufacturers at nine. Then round about nine o'clock, the industrial officer, you'd see him walking around, only he'd walk straight to the gate and he'd say, âNo!', then you'd get on your bike and ride to the Fertiliser, then back to the steel works again. Then you'd go for the half past three, and you'd be there all night perhaps.
Modernity and the past were intimately threaded through the fabric of the city at that time. Early model cars and lorries jostled with horse-drawn transport. The roads themselves were a diverse combination of gravel and mud, asphalt, tar, concrete cubes and wooden blocks. The tarred wood blocks were greatly appreciated by the poor in the Depression as they could be stolen and burned for warmth. Describing such a scene outside her office near the Rocks, Lydia Gill incidentally revealed the solidarity by which the lower classes tried to lighten their load.
Once a gang of workmen were lifting the hard jarrah blocks just in front of our office. These blocks had a little tar on them and so made excellent burning for the home fire, but the workmen told the children they must not touch the blocks until the workmen had gone home. There was a pile of blocks outside our window, about seven feet high and about four feet at the base. My junior by a few years called my attention to these blocks at 4.30 p.m.; it seemed that every child in the neighbourhood was there with something to carry them home. They had billycarts, bags, buckets, boxes pulled by bits of rope and old school cases. When we looked again at five to five, just before we left we wondered if we had seen a mirage. There was not a child in sight, nor were there containers of any sort, no workmen and not even a broken piece of tarred timber to show what had been there.
Phyllis Acland also commented on the difficulty of heating whatever hovel she and her family found themselves in, admitting that they would burn almost anything to keep warm, the palings off a fence, furniture, rags and lumps of dried manure from the grocer's horse. But everybody, she agreed, was on to those wooden paving blocks. While their parents swallowed any lingering pride to beg for stale bread from the baker or a discarded pig's head from the butcher, the barefoot, lice-ridden children of the city's poor swarmed through back lanes and building sites scavenging for rubbish, for rough hessian sacks which might be turned into blankets, for old fragments of leather or pieces of twine which a father might use to repair his shoes. The massive demolitions by which the State and local authorities had cleared swathes of the inner city after the plague offered up scraps of wood and kindling. (Like the cavernous voids left by the property crash of the 1980s, many of these earlier forsaken holes remained empty for decades after the factories and warehouses which were meant to fill them failed to eventuate. The fabulously Orwellian Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills sits on such a plot.) When all initiative and ingenuity failed, when the house stood empty without a stick of furniture to be sold or a morsel of food to be eaten, the destitute made their way through the city to wharf number seven at Darling Harbour. There they joined thousands of others, lined up for a ticket to take to the Benevolent Society at the other end of the city near Central Station. A small parcel of food, âa tin of plum jam, a tin of condensed milk, a tin of syrup, three or four loaves of bread and a big hunk of meat cut just any way' went into a sugar bag which they then hauled home to the family. This could take all day and burn up more energy than the relief parcel itself contained. No wonder that people died of starvation in suburbs like Paddington.
Jocka Burns, a radical with the Unemployed Workers Movement remembered one fellow traveller, a âgreat seller of the workers' press', staggering into a church hall at the Five Ways. âHe used to have cardboard in his boots,' said Burns. âHe came up to the rooms in Paddington one time and he just collapsed, dropped dead through hunger â¦' While the burden fell most heavily on the lower classes, none but the very wealthy were entirely spared. Tom Galvin, who was forced into the shantytown just inside the heads at Botany Bay, which was sardonically known as Happy Valley, recalled one former scion of the eastern surburbs who tumbled headlong down the social register. For such people the landing was much harder. They couldn't take the rebound, said Galvin.
âThe ordinary wage plug, he'd perhaps weather the storm, he was more hardened. [This] one chap ⦠he and his wife wheeled a pram from Paddington. He had a double-barrelled name, but he was a dill. They had nothing. People got together, gave them something to eat, tried to find them a blanket. We built a hut for them. He wouldn't have known how to do anything.'
Galvin remembered there being about 120 shacks, with sand floors and old bags hung up to keep out the wind. Maybe 300 people lived there at the end of the tramline, in the most famous of the shantytowns which mushroomed around the city. Labourers, shop assistants, clerks, anyone who couldn't get a job or pay their rent bunked down in clouds of fleas and mosquitoes. It was at least a little more civilized than sleeping rough in the caves or under the trees in the Domain or the city's other parks as many thousands of single men did. The outcasts elected their own management committee which lobbied the nearby golf course to put on water for the camp. Local fishermen let them have some of their catch and Chinese market gardeners donated the cheaper produce they could not sell. An Aboriginal man entertained them with a snake dance. Galvin said it was a perversely healthy lifestyle, all that fresh air and simple food, but self-loathing still gnawed quietly at the souls of men who thought themselves failures. And for women the arrival of a child, once a joy and a blessing, could now be the darkest of moments as the close margins of survival were shaved that much thinner. When Lowenstein asked Galvin if the prospect of a new child was a disaster, he remarked frankly, âThere was no pill. They used a crochet hook or something. There were a lot of miscarriages.'
This was life in the raw. The trappings and pretensions of late millennial Sydney were unknown. Survival was the only consideration for most. This brought out both the better angels and the crueller demons of human nature. Lydia Gill writes of middle-class girls quietly leaving little food packages around the city for the poor to find, while Jack Acland spoke bitterly of bosses who would take on a family man with a wife and a gaggle of children to feed, knowing they could drive him so much harder â so hard in Acland's case that his employer could then sack a whole crew of less frantic workers. At the very apex of society, however, it seems this economic holocaust was not as catastrophic as the depression of 1843 which all but decapitated Sydney's ruling class. Rich men did lose fortunes of course, especially with the collapse of the stock market. But the structure of the city's economy was much more complex by the 1930s, the roots of wealth much deeper. A newspaper baron like Robert Clyde Packer might have seen the worth of his shares in Associated Newspapers tumble from £200 000 (about $4 million today) to about half that, but he still had a big wad of the folding stuff in his pocket. And those who did manage to hang onto their wealth often found their purchasing power increased anyway as prices went into free-fall. Hence, as Paul Barry mischievously points out, RC, as Kerry's grandfather was known, could happily use his newspapers to demand savage cuts to wages and welfare spending âeven as he laid out several thousand pounds to buy a new racing yacht'.