Lee and Pat begin by recounting lively nights in Sydney when they were young, watching pictures at the Hippodrome in Haymarket, dances at the Empress Ballroom on a Friday night, and a burlesque night at a surf club.
Lee then takes the lead in the interview, describing life in Macleay Street, at a time when there were horses and carts and hansom cabs. She remembers the characters of the area, including a postie who walked the entire area and was given a drink by every household at Christmas time, the local doctors, and a very intelligent woman named Bea Miles who slept rough – the result they claim, of being undone by too much university study.
The hardest years for Lee and her family were throughout World War I, when her father served as a machine gunner in France. He walked out on her mother after returning, and at 14 years of age in 1923, Lee left school to find work, and throughout the Depression she worked in an office. The convent on Victoria Street provided soup to unemployed people at that time, homeless men slept in the roots of Moreton Bay figs in the Domain, while couples and families set up a shanty town called Happy Valley, on the side of the road to La Perouse.
Lee and Pat share childhood memories of visiting the lolly shop, swimming in the Domain baths, stealing potatoes and making do with the meagre things they had. They reflect on the vast technological changes they witnessed and how resourceful they were before consumerism took hold, fixing things, and wearing clothes until they were threadbare.
LL: the men used to come around to our place around about half past four in the afternoon and go to the convent and they would feed them with hot soup. That’s how a lot of them lived and many of those particular men lived in the Domain in the roots of the trees, you know the big trees, fig trees?
A5/44:22
GW: Moreton Bay figs, yeah.
LL: Yeah and they would cover themselves over with newspapers and things of that nature.
GW: Did you see much of that?
LL: Well you saw it, unheedingly I was young, it didn’t really make any impact on me. But we went one time out to La Perouse, really to see the snake charmers out there playing around with snakes and that’s where the Aboriginals were, I think they’re still there. And on the way we passed a place called Happy Valley and this was where married people finally found themselves, they had to cover their children in some way, and from the different tips and places around they’d find sheets of tin, maybe packing cases, things like that and they’d make themselves a shelter and they lived there in Happy Valley for many years, didn’t they?
PP: It was called Happy Valley.
A5/45:25
LL: Oh yes, it was a long time but there wouldn’t have been many more than about 40 families living there.
PP: It wasn’t really a legitimately built place.
LL: No, it was the side of the road.
PP: It was stray pieces of galvanised iron, bits of timber, stuff that was hocked and snaked and pinched from places. Anything that was put up, a bit of a shelter.
LL: Well see, the men that were alone, well that was all right, they managed, they survived. But when they had little children they had to put them under shelter sometimes, some way, and that’s how they did it.
PP: That was the saying in those days because there was the rock dwellers round in Bronte and they got into caves and…
A5/46:13 GW: There’s still some people living there.
LL: Is there?
GW: Yeah, there’s some very old people living there.
LL: Really? They must have been there from those days.
A5/46:18
PP: … and it looked into the north-east and just recently, a few years back, they broke off a big upper hanging rock, it was a cave, and they had to keep fossicking around for all the house bricks he could. He built a wall up that held the rock up and then he put a door on the front.
LL: That’s illegal.
PP: He fished and he lived on the fish and he ….
LL: Well you used to be able to get oysters and all sorts of things off the rocks in those days.
PP: He used to go and fossick around for bread and cigs and things down there, like a real Robinson Crusoe. Then the vandals used to come around and they’d break into his place and all that sort of thing. I can remember that very clearly.
