House That Was Eureka (9781922148254)
Page 22
Over the first six months of 1931, Sydney branches of the UWM mounted a strong campaign against evictions. In a number of cases throughout the metropolitan area, the organisation used petitions, deputations and street pickets to pressure landlords and real-estate agents to allow defaulting tenants to remain in their accommodation until they were able to find work. This campaign was so successful the large landowners worried that the idea of free accommodation would catch on. At first they attempted to pressure the Lang Labor government to send in the police to enforce evictions. Though the ALP saw the radical UWM as a threat, the Lang government did not want to upset its working-class electorate by directing the police to do this unpopular job. The large real-estate companies turned next to the magistrates, whose task it was to make out the eviction orders. They were quick to oblige. Given heightened class tension, the rich feared a backlash if the legal system sent in the full force of the law in defence of large property owners. And so small landlords—and in particular landladies—became pawns in the game, as the first test cases were enacted.
On 30 May 1931, in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, the UWM was taken by surprise when police, rather than bailiffs, arrived to evict a family. Moreover, the police brandished their guns and used their batons against the tenants’ UWM supporters. This was the first fight that the UWM lost. Over the next couple of weeks, the campaign rapidly escalated as both the unemployed militants and the police took stronger and stronger measures. The bloody climax took place in the inner-west suburb of Newtown. By this time, popular support for the anti-eviction fighters was enormous. The crowd that spontaneously gathered in the street to cheer on the ‘Newtown boys’ (as the anti-eviction fighters were popularly called) stretched for half a kilometre in each direction. These hundreds, if not thousands, of supporters were not Communists, but ALP voters, and even ALP members. And they were jeering at Premier Lang’s police.
It is no coincidence that a couple of hours after the Newtown battle a meeting of the New South Wales Labor Council called for legislation to protect the unemployed against eviction. Although no provision for rent was made in the relief system, the legislative changes made it harder for landlords to evict people.
Historical fiction allows writers and readers to play with hypotheticals. It lets us measure what did happen against what might have been.
In this book, the reports of the Redfern, Leichhardt and Bankstown fights are taken from the newspapers of the time. The Newtown battle was also all too real, and I have based my account on a great deal of primary research, as well as investigation of the battle site.
However, the characters living at 201 and 203 Liberty Street and the ‘mystery’ of the nineteenth picket are fictional. So is the story of the gun. Although some UWM members had access to guns, the occupation of the houses was a tactic of defence rather than offence. It was also a campaign based on principles of family and community: the UWM would not have done anything that risked injuring children and neighbours in the crossfire.
In order to bring out the fact that the UWM did not use guns, I needed give them access to one. While I wanted to find out what role a gun might have played in such a situation, I could only do this through a character such as Nobby, whose youthfulness placed him outside the discipline of the organised unemployed movement. Once the gun appeared—it immediately had to hide itself again. Yet just by being there, it provoked tragedy.
For dramatic purposes, I shifted the timing of the Newtown battle to the night after the Bankstown fight. It actually occurred at noon, two days later. Though the law stated that evictions had to be carried out between 9 am and 5 pm, a house at Glebe was stormed by police before daybreak, so my change is within the bounds of possibility. And after all, the Redfern attack happened illegally on a Saturday, and at Bankstown the police went in twenty-four hours before the warrant was due.
Despite these fictional changes, the violence done to the pickets has not been exaggerated. The account of the storming of the house is based on the statements that the eighteen pickets made to their solicitor. Newspaper photographs show police gathering up bullet shells from the street, as well as holding off the crowd with guns.
A number of the background characters are real. These include Jack Sylvester, who was National Secretary of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement; Richard Eatock, an Aboriginal activist who was shot by police at Bankstown; and Alexandra Kollantai, who was an early Russian Bolshevik, feminist, and writer...
But Evie and Noel and their problems are just as real. Sometimes it is only through fiction that we can read between the lines of history.
Nadia Wheatley, 2013
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of the epigraphs in this book were originally published anonymously in a broadsheet called The Tocsin, which was produced and distributed by the Balmain branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM) in the 1930s. Copies of this publication were kept by labour historian and union activist Issy Wyner, who as a teenage boy was a member of the Balmain UWM. In the 1970s, Issy encouraged me to include this material in my historical research and publications about unemployed workers in the Great Depression. The fragment of verse about the ‘Bankstown and Newtown boys’ was compiled from various sources. It is typical of the kind of anonymous verse that sprang up spontaneously in response to political events.
Other material used as epigraphs comes from popular songs (also anonymous) that were sung in this era.
Readers wishing to know more about the history on which this novel is based could consult my article, ‘Meeting them at the door: radicalism, militancy and the Sydney anti-eviction campaign of 1931’ in Jill Roe ed., Twentieth Century Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1980.
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