Lawrie Anderson was born in Victoria in 1927. After stints in the Australian Navy and being a private driver for VIPs he bought a sandwich shop with his wife in Millers Point and lived in the area for many years. In his interview he talks about the ‘magic’ quality of life, local families, deep community networks, crime, landladies, and unwelcome demographic change. In the excerpt below he discusses men’s occupations in this waterside community.
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.
Most of the people living in the area were either waterside workers or tally clerks that were connected with the waterside workers, or customs officers or in some way connected with the maritime, like tug boat drivers and things like that. A lot of people were wharfies, but there were so many of them. Tommy Donnelly and his father, they used to live next door to us in High Street, they were all waterside workers. Craig Roberts, he used to work on the coal.
In those days they used to have the little coal boats go from Newcastle into Sydney Harbour and they used to go right up the river as far as they could get and unload their coal, that is where the ships used to go to bunker their coal for the trips. They worked on the coal. Nearly everybody in the area worked in something related to the maritime industry in one form or another.
