When she married in 1929 Mrs Oates settled in Paddington, renting a balcony room with penny in the slot gas. Her husband worked as a builder, and she remembers queuing up with coupons to get vegetables and meat throughout the Depression. It was a friendly area, and she recalls men walking the streets selling rabbits, fruit and other goods from carts.
Wal Marshall worked as a taxi driver, and reflects on how he only served the ‘hoi polloi’, ordinary people couldn’t afford to ride in taxis, he says. Most people travelled by tram and train across the city. He describes how during the Depression, some people used to make a living busking or selling food such as hotdogs in the streets. They describe listening to music, going out for a meal, and what the city looked like during the 1930s, when there was a height limit on buildings.
Wal Marshall also spent three months working as a rigger and dogman at Bunnerong Powerhouse. When he started the job he had no money to buy meals, and a cafe gave him three meals a day on credit. Wal was a member of the militant seamans union and a communist. He shares his thoughts on the politics of the day, including why workers are drawn to communism, and the dismissal of Jack Lang.
B 32’00.
WM: The truth was never given to the people and the people were starving everywhere and people our age, perhaps a little younger, who spent a lifetime buying a house, buying land and being established or paying a house off, were being sent to the wall and sold up because they couldn’t meet their commitments. There was no mercy for people. I remember the day I got the job out at Bunnerong Powerhouse, the job was – and it was advertised as such – of only three months duration while the council employees took their long service leave, took holidays. We went out there under those conditions, quite a bunch of men. I went out, I was a little different because I went out as a rigger and dogman, I could do either job. If a dogman was off for the day, I’d take the crane over and all this. The morning I got the letter to go down and interview the doctor at the town hall or Queen Victoria building, Doctor Percy, yeah, when I got the job I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to work in the morning, lovely, but I haven’t got a feed to go with.’ I was living in a one room down at Millers Point, nothing to eat, scratching around here and there. I went into a little, old restaurant, they were just making ends meet and it was right under the bridge, approach there and I put it to the woman there, I said, “Look, I’ve got a job to go to and I’ve got nothing to eat and I’ll be a week there before I get any money. Would you so good as to stand me for a week, give me a breakfast in the morning and a cut lunch for a week and possibly tea of a night?” She looked me over, she said, “All right.” For a week that’s how I started, that’s how bad things were. I had to go to work and then when I got out there she stuck to me and as soon as I got my pay I couldn’t get there quick enough to pay her. But out at Bunnerong I walked into – it was run by the City Council – they were doing it with some letting contract – I walked into the greatest bunch of grafters you ever saw in your life; blokes that had been in the council all their life. What they were doing was nobody’s business and it’s still going on today.
B11/35:28
GW: Oh sure.
WM: That’s why I’ve got memories that I wasn’t sour, I was willing to work, I wanted to work. You couldn’t get ships, you couldn’t get the ship, ships were laid up here and there, you couldn’t get jobs at sea again anymore than you’d get them to shore, that was a time.
