John Ross was born in Newcastle NSW in 1935 and came to live in the Walsh Bay/Millers Point area as a small child after his father sought work there as a waterside worker. In his interview he talks about the various dwellings in which his family lived; seamen; working conditions; neighbours, his parents’ work; local characters; sport; entertainment; religion; playgrounds; shops; SP bookies; boarding houses; and a mysterious tunnel. In the excerpt below he describes Playfair’s meatworks, a significant local employer, where he worked for a number of years.
This interview is part of Housing NSW’s 2005 Millers Point Oral History Project. The City of Sydney acknowledges the State Library of New South Wales as the archival custodian of the project and digital preserver of the masters.
You came into it through a great big double gate downstairs and you walked into a big yard. On the right-hand side was a big butcher’s shop, where they did all orders for the Navy and various other places. You kept going straight out the back and there was big freezers out there. On the left-hand side there was the cooper, he made all the barrels to put all the salted-down meats in and everything, that went overseas. Went up to the first level and there was another big works there, where they made all their own dripping. They had a big digester there where all the bones and things went down, they boiled down all their own bones.
On that first level when you went up there they made their own dripping and they put it into one pound bags and they sold it, it was very popular in all the butchers’ shops. Then you went up to the next level and it was the big work level, with all the sausage machines and the smallgoods machines. There was at least thirty people just worked in that little section. There was about eight to ten sausage machines and they all held two hundred pound of meat. I have never sat down and worked it out but it is a lot of sausages.
After that you’d come back and get started on the frankfurts. They had a big smoke house, they smoked all their own frankfurts. Then before I became a boner I left there and went over and got a job in the section that supplied the small goods factory with all the meat and I was salting down all the meat that went into these great big tin tubs in the room and it had to be in there so long before it was used, to let the salt get through it and cure the meat. Then I was taken over and learnt to be a slicer. After the slicing I became a boner and it took quite a few years to become good at it, I know that.
This interview is part of Housing NSW’s 2005 Millers Point Oral History Project. The City of Sydney acknowledges the State Library of New South Wales as the archival custodian of the project and digital preserver of the masters.
